Arising from the BLOG “WEBSTER’S: MOROCCO BOUND? I got thinking about
among other things the great lexicographer, Samuel Johnson.
Admirable on many counts. He deplored the extinguishing of any language, which
he described as the Pedigree of a Nation. He would have little use for the brain-dead
gobshites who think “thaw shay mahogany gaspiipe”the soul of wit. For myself I’d
hate to think of the death of a dialect. And, Hiberno-English has its own charm, including
the word “gobshite” suggesting coprophagous diets.
Johnson despises Americans he met in London who prated about liberty and owned
black slaves. His comments about us Irish, that we are a fair people, who always spoke ill
of our compatriots, (half) in jest, I imagine, for he was at the centre of a circle including
Edmund Burke and Oliver Goldsmith .
His claim that patriotism was “the last refuge of a Scoundrel” was not a a denunciation
of a healthy virtue, but of false pretensions to it,
It seems to me that the First Refuge of Scoundrels in the last century was Anti-Communism, the first of the Scoundrels being Winston Churchill, who described
in sadistic detail how chemical weapons dropped from aircraft choked Bolsheviks in
the early days of their Revolution. In 1945 he hoped to ally himself with the defeated
Nazis to attack the Soviet Union, the state which had done most to liberate Europe
from the NAZIS. 26 Million Soviet men, women and children were killed by the Nazis
and the bulk of the Nazi dead had been killed by Soviet Forces. Mussolini’s and Hitler’s
anti-Communism was predated by Churchill’s.
By mid 1940 from the North of Norway to the Franco-Spanish Border was under NAZI
control. And Britain had chemical weapons and the means of dropping them.
A Squadron in Feltwell in Norfolk held these weapons, ready to drop on Ireland if the
Germans landed North or South of the Irish border, with dire consequences for all living
persons and living things within their range.
Check it out!
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