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I would vilify both, while individually they did not perpetrate the outrages of Marxism, the death and misery of the Communist regimes of the twentieth century is a result of the intellectual heritage they bequeathed the western world. Without them, Lenin, Stalin, Mao and innumerable others would not have had the intellectual capacity to commit such monstrous acts in the name of the PEOPLE. So yes, Hegel and Marx are indirectly responsible for the legacy of their intellectual endeavours.
It's worth pointing out that Marx was talking about the potential triumph of the working class in advanced capitalist countries where that class was in the vast majority. Lenin made a revolution in a peasant country where the working class was a tiny minority, but, in fairness, only to spread that revolution into the area originally intended. Stalin took power in a country where that working class had been destroyed/disintegrated as a result of the wars of intervention: he was going entirely against Marx, as was Mao, who was leading peasants from the start. As well blame Hegel for the doings of Hitler, surely, because he saw the Prussian State as the high point of history? And what about a statue for old Engels, while we're at it?
Yeah, to make money for the British, not the Irish. The Irish were basically British serfs. Their farms were no longer their own, Britain claimed ownership and stole them.
No farms were owned by 'Britain' obviously, but by individual landlords or - sometimes - peasant proprietors. This was the case all over the UK, and some farmers still made money, as some clearly did in Ireland too, and the Irish had the vote, on the same basis as others in the UK. Certainly the landlords' claims depended ultimately on the idea that the King of England was also King of Ireland, but that had been a Papal decision, hadn't it? It's important not to make a caricature out of the past, I think. Political conditions were different in Ireland in the 1840s from what they had been in the penal years, but it was desperately overpopulated and dependent on a single crop, and when that failed some very dim and not-at-all sympathetic English aristocrats didn't have much idea of what to do.It seems to me that the quotation from Collins comes from a different period again
The sad thing is, is that the famine was manufactured by greed. though the crop had failed, the English were still exporting out of Ireland cattle, pigs, flour, butter, eggs, poultry among other things, more then enough to stave off starvation.
Food was being exported out of Ireland to make money, surely, in quite the normal way, since it was part of the capitalist system. Were you expecting 'the English' to impose socialism all of a sudden? Could the produce of the strong farmers have been somehow confiscated? These were the days when unemployment relief in the UK was given in workhouses where conditions were deliberately made more unpleasant than those in any job, so as to prevent idleness and save on the rates - what the American governmment would, doubtless, call 'tough love'. They did their shambling best, probably: people live in their own times, not other people's.
The only 2 things that ever came out of England that were any good were 1.) America and 2.) Led Zeppelin 🙂
I couldn't possibly comment! 😉
I used "England" for simplicity because that's what we call it now and because I don't like typing "Britannia." 🙂
Well, I never use it thus, because I come from Britannia, not England, a country that does not wholly enthuse me. 'England' is the flat bit on the right. 🙂
Did Christophe Colombus really discover America. There must of been others before him the vikings or maybe the chinese from the other side of the world. ❓
Ok i am only 13 but i know it was named after Amerigo Vesspuci
Where I live it is generally held that the place was called after a Bristol Merchant called Ap Meurig, a name the Bristolians, not a well educated people, pronounced as Americ. It is also contended that amongst the fairly numerous persons who managed to bump into the Continent it was our Prince Madoc. Once you realize that the Church forced all Europeans to eat fish on Fridays, it becomes obvious that no discoverer in his right mind would pass on the news of the incredibly rich shoals off Newfoundland to anyone else. How they must have cursed that Italian clown! Madoc was half Viking, but there was, for a long time, a sort of industry devoted to looking for native Americans who spoke our language, Cymraeg, since he was said to have taken a lot of our people with him They settled finally on the Mandan tribe, who conveniently more-or-less died out and lost their language. I'd guess that, as in so many such cases, the 'discoverer' was whichever show-off wanted to make his name.
All being well, the countries of the UK will seperate out as independent members of the EU: they were united originally by outside threat (which, so we must hope, has disappeared) and the internal threat of eternal English interference in everyone else's affairs, for which there is now no necessity. There is no reason why this shouldn't be an entirely friendly process. We still have much in common, but England is too populous for us to co-exist happily in one state. There is no reason that the Six Counties should join Scotland or that Scotland should want to have them. They are part of Ireland which is distinct from the rest: in the Republic the Protestant population was reduced from 13% at Independence to 6% now, which does not fill the non-Roman-Catholic population with enthusiasm for total union, so the chances are that the North will have considerable autonomy for centuries yet.
The myth of 'King' Arthur is manifestly created long, long after the historical events concerned, whereas – as far as I know – Beowulf is not about 'real' history at all. For myself, I am interested in what is likely to have happened to cause a mercenary revolt in the eastern provinces of Britain in the fifth century and in the prolonged resistance of the west, and myths don't excite me much. We must agree to disagree, I think.
'England' didn't exist, of course, and a normal proportion of the British were Roman citizens for a very long time, the Province/provinces being perculiarly prosperous in the third century. When they ceased to be useful to the British Romans, the imperial officials were hoofed out in 410, and Britania Prima, in particular, got on very well for several generations thereafter.
There is a major difference, surely, between barbarian myth and muddled Roman recollection? There was obviously never a 'king' called Arthur anywhere, because kings were anathema to Romans. In one of the earliest poems in which he is mentioned Arthur is called, in a much more likely way, 'ameuradur', imperator – probably the very last British 'Roman' so to be hailed by victorious troops (however few). Many people fall for all this 'Celtic' guff, whereby the Romano-Britains are somehow equated with external barbarians by Germanophile racists. Twasn't so, however: the West stayed civilized for a remarkably long time.
Somebody clearly beat the Germans back – Britain was about the only area of the west, when all's said, where the barbarians didn't take over totally. For my money 'Arthur' was the 'Roman' General Ambrosius Aurelianus wearing a bearskin (arth = bear) on the battlefield as a 'signum', and known by his British-speaking troops as 'Bear'. The name does crop up all over the place in the generation after 'Arthur' was likely to have been about.
To me, the Dark Ages are dark for a fairly specific reason. We know that in 410 Roman Britain got rid of the imperial officials, and that by the end of the 'dark' period there had been major changes, especially huge linguistic ones, with Germanic and Goidelic apparently at some point replacing British and Latin over very large areas. What is especially 'dark' about the intervening period is the extraordinary racist codswallop that has been thrown in to cover the lack of documentation – codswallop that would seem to defy most of what can be known from archaeology and genetics. Somehow the Romano-British got themselves replaced by some other people called 'Celts' who (they obviously had good chauffeurs) spent their time being 'driven' to all sorts of places, all the three to four millions of them, by what looks likely to have been a few thousand Germans. I doubt , and I do not believe Bede's sources were up to much, or that Gildas was any sort of a historian.
