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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   25904 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026

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I think there is much to what you say. A few minor comments occur to me:

even the farthest of the far-right would never dare to suggest that e.g. Denise Chaila is anything other than Irish, no hyphen necessary

Do you mean that they would never dare in public because they would be crucified, but secretly they believe it? Or that even the far right don't believe in an ethnic conception of Irishness?

Ireland spent centuries fighting to protect our native culture against attempts from without to destroy it – then, almost as soon as we had won, we decided our native culture wasn't really worth defending in the first place

I am reminded of the end of the Cold War. No longer having an adversary really made the West lose its mojo surprisingly fast.

Do you mean that they would never dare in public because they would be crucified, but secretly they believe it? Or that even the far right don't believe in an ethnic conception of Irishness?

Hmm, excellent question. I don't know enough far-right people to know how deep the programming goes, how thoroughly Irish people have internalised the idea that being Irish has absolutely nothing to do with one's ethnic background. I'm reminded of Orwell's staggeringly prescient essay "Notes on Nationalism" which includes a passing comment along these lines:

The old-style contemptuous attitude towards ‘natives’ has been much weakened in England, and various pseudo-scientific theories emphasizing the superiority of the white race have been abandoned. Among the intelligentsia, colour feeling only occurs in the transposed form, that is, as a belief in the innate superiority of the coloured races. This is now increasingly common among English intellectuals, probably resulting more often from masochism and sexual frustration than from contact with the Oriental and Negro nationalist movements. Even among those who do not feel strongly on the colour question, snobbery and imitation have a powerful influence. Almost any English intellectual would be scandalized by the claim that the white races are superior to the coloured, whereas the opposite claim would seem to him unexceptionable even if he disagreed with it. Nationalistic attachment to the coloured races is usually mixed up with the belief that their sex lives are superior, and there is a large underground mythology about the sexual prowess of Negroes.

I suspect that, even among the ranks of people who think that Ireland has taken in too many refugees in particular and immigrants in general, who think that our government prioritizes the needs of said immigrants over its own people and so on – even among those people, there are quite a number who would bristle at the suggestion that Denise Chaila is anything other than Irish. I'm not sure quite how they would justify such a claim: perhaps that, unlike first-generation immigrants who make their wives wear burqas, Chaila actually speaks English? But surely the entirety of Irish identity isn't reducible to a dialect and accent.

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