Ethnic left-overs

foxhoundone

just for information guy,s where i live knocknagoney{the hill of warran,s} during ww2 alot of german pow,s were held on this estate during the war, alot of them deciding there,s no point going back to there home land {particion) chosed to stay an settle in belfast.
being plenty of work at harland/wolfe,s shipyard

Pgibson

A "Pale Blue Dot"peeking out between the rings of Saturn,imaged from the Cassini spacecraft:

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap060927.html

This is what the astronomer Carl Sagan said about it:

"Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

(Sagan puts "ethnicity", and all the murderous tribal rubbish it stands for, in it's proper place.)

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Judgement Day

When I saw this thread I thought I was the one being talked about! Being of Cromwellian extraction we were left behind after the 1922 evacuation! I was born in London (by chance) but returned to Ireland in 1959 at the age of three months. Despite having grown up on the wrong side of an artificial border (ie.the Republic) I have remained a Loyalist. Not in the crude sectarian UDA/UVF/Orange type but someone who can't be accepted as Irish here or British in Britain but as someone whose heart beats faster when Jonny Wilkinson steps up to knock over another penalty. Somebody who felt that the Falklands War was Britain's finest hour since WWll. Somebody who changed his passport to a British one after Omagh. I am a throwback - even my co-religionists regard me as eccentric and I have never met anybody who marches to the same tune - and I don't mean 'The Sash'!

Any other refugees out there?? :):):)

ejmaztec

Judgement Day wrote: »

When I saw this thread I thought I was the one being talked about! Being of Cromwellian extraction we were left behind after the 1922 evacuation! I was born in London (by chance) but returned to Ireland in 1959 at the age of three months. Despite having grown up on the wrong side of an artificial border (ie.the Republic) I have remained a Loyalist. Not in the crude sectarian UDA/UVF/Orange type but someone who can't be accepted as Irish here or British in Britain but as someone whose heart beats faster when Jonny Wilkinson steps up to knock over another penalty. Somebody who felt that the Falklands War was Britain's finest hour since WWll. Somebody who changed his passport to a British one after Omagh. I am a throwback - even my co-religionists regard me as eccentric and I have never met anybody who marches to the same tune - and I don't mean 'The Sash'!

Any other refugees out there?? :):):)

Us plastic paddys are refugees as well. Religion or allegiances don't really have much to do with our status. When I lived in England, I was an Irish bastard, even though I was born and brought up there. Here, with my English accent, I'm now an English bastard. One of the natives refers to me as a "Cockney C***", even though I was born over a 100 miles from London.

Given the choice of two passports, I chose a British one, for the simple reason that it worked out cheaper. Where money is concerned, nationality means nothing to me.

Given your status, your family should be glad that the Irish government in 1922, didn't do a "Sudeten" on the people who didn't fit the De Valera profile. You might have preferred this, I don't know. Had Britain lost WW1, they would not have been able to prevent a mass eviction, were the Irish authorities to decide at the time to carry out such an action.

As it turned out, we're just one big happy family, engaged in fun-packed fun 24/7. :pac:

Judgement Day

Just had a confused few minutes there as I cheered on Ireland's boxing captain Kenny Egan to knock the c..p out of the Englishman. Where are my pills....:):):):)

fly_agaric

Pgibson wrote: »

German ..Pole...Russian.

Who cares in this age of Einstein and the Hubble Space Telescope and the Large Hadron Collider.

Humans are still killing each other like the primitive mental-microbes that most of them really are.

Be careful. You just called the majority of humans mental microbes (...because of their addiction to "tribalism"/nationalism?).
That smacks of "cockroaches", "rats" & "dogs" etc. - the dehumanising terms beloved of fundamentalists.
It suggests even you (as a human) could be vulnerable to the sort of thinking you are criticising.;)

Nationalist rivalry has been a driver of a alot of the technological progress which has made endeavours like the HST & the Cassini-Huygens mission possible so I suppose it can do some good if it doesn't end up killing us.

Pride Fighter

Judgement Day wrote: »

Just had a confused few minutes there as I cheered on Ireland's boxing captain Kenny Egan to knock the c..p out of the Englishman. Where are my pills....:):):):)

I know someone like you who supports Glasgow Celtic LOL.

gaf1983

Very interesting thread. The whole "ethnic left-over" concept is quite fascinating I think, yet its consequences can be very negative for the ethnic groups left-over or those they come into contact.

When the Berlin Wall came down, I understand that many ethnic Germans living to the east of the former Iron Curtain, some from as far afield as Kazakhstan, were given the right to live and work in Germany and of course apply for German citizenship. You'd wonder how second or third generation descendants of Turkish "guest workers" felt about this situation - here were these people, some of whose ancestors left Germany many many years ago being granted citizenship, while they (the Turks) may have lived in Germany their whole lives yet weren't entitled to this.

Before Kuwait and other countries of the Arabian/Persian Gulf got independence, after the establishment of Israel, many Palestinians emigrated to the Gulf statelets. When Kuwait and the other Gulf countries gained independence from the 1960s onwards, they generally awarded citizenship rights along tribal lines. Many of the Palestinian diaspora were allowed to remain on in the countries, however they were without any citizenship rights whatsoever. In Kuwait it seems like they were treated very much as second-class to the Kuwaiti citizens, so when Saddam Hussein was invaded and annexed by Iraq in 1990, it's no surprise that these Palestinian non-citizens supported the Iraqis against the Kuwaiti regime.

Recently I heard that there is a part of Sardinia where Catalan is spoken - I'd love to know more about how this came about.

Pgibson

gaf1983 wrote: »

When the Berlin Wall came down, I understand that many ethnic Germans living to the east of the former Iron Curtain, some from as far afield as Kazakhstan, were given the right to live and work in Germany and of course apply for German citizenship. .

Most of them were German citizens rejoining their families.

The families had fled,or were thrown out of, Eastern Europe during and after WW2.

See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_Germans_after_World_War_II
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donaghs

gaf1983 wrote: »

Recently I heard that there is a part of Sardinia where Catalan is spoken - I'd love to know more about how this came about.

Not so strange. The language/culture of Languedoc or L'Occitan was widespread across the southwestern Med in previous centuries. Catalan and Provencal are almost the same language - separated by time, geography and lack of central government support.

The (French) Corsicans have their own language which has elements of Italian in it.