Power always thinks it has a great soul, and vast views, beyond the comprehension of the weak. And that it is doing God service when it is violating all His laws.
--John Adams
I went to school in a very Conservative part of the country in the 1960s, so it's highly unlikely that we were.
I don't really know anything about the funding situation you refer to, though I'm sure you're probably right. Wealthy Irish-Americans? A lot of small-ish contributions from Irish expats and their heritage-conscious descendants? Probably a bit of both, I'd guess. Americans do love a rebel or a freedom fighter...assuming he's an acceptable color, and especially if he has a charming accent and tells funny stories.
Last edited by Standing Wolf; 03-24-2017 at 12:16 AM.
“Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.” - Robert E. Howard
"Only a rank degenerate would drive 1,500 miles across Texas and not eat a chicken fried steak." - Larry McMurtry
Just to be clear about this, it wasn't the US government which was funding the IRA, but even though his friend Margaret Thatcher repeatedly asked President Reagan to do something about it (as the IRA was and is a terrorist organisation,) he refused to interfere. I don't know what he could have done, but he didn't want to know, so I suspect he sympathised with the IRA's aims.
Maybe these quotes can let you see that I am not making it up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NORAIDNORAID or the Irish Northern Aid Committee is an Irish American fundraising organization founded after the start of the Troubles in Northern Ireland in 1969, best known for raising funds for the Provisional Irish Republican Army.
NORAID was organized and directed by Michael Flannery, who in the 1920s was a member of the IRA North Tipperary Brigade.[1]
Unionist politicians and the British, Irish and United States governments have accused NORAID of being a front for the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA), and that it was involved in fundraising for IRA arms importation from North America since the early 1970s.[2][3][4][5] This accusation has always been denied by NORAID. NORAID's former leader, Martin Galvin, was banned from the United Kingdom in the 1980s.[3] The charge was also disputed by historian Ed Moloney who stated that the funds raised by NORAID went largely to the families of IRA volunteers, and that Clan na Gael was the principal financial backer of the Provisional IRA.[6]
By the late 1980s NORAID was a loose federation of local branches centred on fundraising. Sinn Féin, the political party associated with the IRA, wanted NORAID to expand its activities. At the end of 1988, NORAID agreed to try to broaden its appeal and its executive committee was expanded. Sinn Féin sent an organizer to the United States, and more time and money was devoted to lobbying and propaganda.
http://www.securitynewsdesk.com/opin...nces-over-ira/Compassionate people would agree that there is no excuse for terrorism, and by extension, there is no excuse for supporting it.
And yet thousands of Americans, including people who live in Boston, gave millions of dollars to NORAID which was used to buy guns and Semtex and support the Provisional IRA terrorist infrastructure.
Perhaps it is easy to support terrorism when the impact – explosions, deaths and life-changing injuries – isn’t on your doorstep. It’s easy to support a war when you can romanticise the conflict from a distance, telling yourself it’s all about your cultural heritage, especially when you don’t have to live with the consequences of bombs and interminable bomb scares.
However, in my view, you cannot draw a distinction between what happened on Monday and the terrorist bombs which targeted so many cities in England. They may be separated in time by 10 or 20 years, but there is no difference.
With a jury having now sentenced Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to death for his role in the bombing of the 2013 Boston Marathon, is it time for the historical misguided popular support for NORAID to, if not publicly, apologise for their actions and to question how different they are in reality to Tsarnaev?
Oh, I wish I were a glow worm,
for a glow worm's never glum,
'cause how can you be grumpy
when the sun shines out your bum!
Power always thinks it has a great soul, and vast views, beyond the comprehension of the weak. And that it is doing God service when it is violating all His laws.
--John Adams
Power always thinks it has a great soul, and vast views, beyond the comprehension of the weak. And that it is doing God service when it is violating all His laws.
--John Adams
William (03-24-2017)
Last edited by DGUtley; 03-24-2017 at 02:31 AM.
Any time you give a man something he doesn't earn, you cheapen him. Our kids earn what they get, and that includes respect. -- Woody Hayes
I wasn't doubting you in any way, William - just confessing my ignorance about that aspect of the situation.
My first thought was, "What could the federal government have done about private citizens sending their own money to those organizations?" Then I remembered all the stories currently in the news about Americans going to prison for contributing to agencies and causes that turn out to be fronts for terrorists. Again, though, the specter of ethnocentrism arises; are we quicker to label a group "terrorist" and create sanctions against their supporters if their race or religion is such that we find it more difficult to identify with them?
“Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.” - Robert E. Howard
"Only a rank degenerate would drive 1,500 miles across Texas and not eat a chicken fried steak." - Larry McMurtry
William (03-24-2017)
Wearing a mask with your nose sticking out is like wearing a condom on your testicles.
When out walking, look out for PROBlems. You know: maskless Plague Rats On Bicycles who blow past you without giving you time to get out of the way.
Ah, CONServatives, the Masters of Projection (MOPs). With CONServatives, every accusation is a confession. Weird, that.
............Oh, what fresh hell is this?
,,,........¯¯\_(ツ)_/¯¯
....... Not my circus, not my monkeys
Wearing a mask with your nose sticking out is like wearing a condom on your testicles.
When out walking, look out for PROBlems. You know: maskless Plague Rats On Bicycles who blow past you without giving you time to get out of the way.
Ah, CONServatives, the Masters of Projection (MOPs). With CONServatives, every accusation is a confession. Weird, that.
............Oh, what fresh hell is this?
,,,........¯¯\_(ツ)_/¯¯
....... Not my circus, not my monkeys
Thank you so much for this post. Includes a very nice collection of what I'm pretty sure are six Carnivore/Echelon keyword sets, all in one convenient short paragraph (keyword density is an important metric). As a registered member of this forum, it's comforting to know that if my PC ever dies, I can now contact the NSA for a backup copy of all my data.
Wearing a mask with your nose sticking out is like wearing a condom on your testicles.
When out walking, look out for PROBlems. You know: maskless Plague Rats On Bicycles who blow past you without giving you time to get out of the way.
Ah, CONServatives, the Masters of Projection (MOPs). With CONServatives, every accusation is a confession. Weird, that.
............Oh, what fresh hell is this?
,,,........¯¯\_(ツ)_/¯¯
....... Not my circus, not my monkeys