#irish oppression

Yeah it’s like people don’t even look at the context of things.

I shouldn’t really be blogging at this time of day, but I see that the Fuckwit Fairy has been scattering her cretinous pixie dust all over my dash again, so it falls to me to comment.

You see, I just saw someone trying to deny that the Irish are an oppressed group on the grounds that they don’t have it as bad as black folk in America. That’s what we in the trade call “a fucking stupid argument”. Nobody in the western world has it as bad as black people in America: they suffer from institutional racism on a level that would drive most of us Honky McCrackers mad in less than a week. Setting the bar that high for what counts as ‘oppression’ is just fucking unreasonable: it’s like saying that someone can’t be ill unless they’re actually suffering from cancer.

I don’t know how Irish people are treated in the USA today, but I do know that there probably wouldn’t be such a huge Irish community in the US in the first place if life hadn’t become intolerable in Britain for many (due to economic hardship, systemic discrimination and- oh yeah- all the fucking killing of civilians by armed forces). That’s not a brilliant starting-point for any community. If there’s a general feeling in the US-Irish community that they’re a marginalised group who still suffer from Xenophobia, then (knowing how America tends to treat immigrant communities in general, and knowing about Ireland’s tempestuous history in particular), I’m inclined to fucking believe them. What’s more, it seems like a much better reason to self-identify as an ‘oppressed’ group than some of the bullshit people come up with on this site.

Maybe I’m just tetchy because I’ve got enough Irish blood in me to still be cross at Oliver “Warty” Cromwell over fucking Drogheda, but I think a bigger part of it is the hypocrisy it takes to dismiss the historic plight of the Irish people and the ongoing situation of Irish communities in various parts of the globe. Tumblr is basically one big ‘Oppression Olympics’, and seems grossly unfair to disbar the Irish from said Oppression Olympics, when even the most rudimentary understanding of one fucking GCSE History class will tell you that they have one of the most legitimate claims to being an ‘oppressed’ group out of anyone on this naval-gazing, self-pitying, self-absorbed, witless fucking website.