Julie Burchill - Who cares what this fat slag thinks?

Hairy Homer

Anyone read this pile of crap?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,3605,744935,00.html

It was alluded to in the Sunday Indo. Is it even worth taking this sad bloated untravelled ignorant bigot seriously?

Biffa Bacon

Well you obviously do.

mike65

I would'nt take if personally or seriously, Ms Burchill has been picking fights with all sorts for at least her whole professional life
so its the Irish this week or whenever the article was penned, it'll be someone else soon enough.

Mike.

bugler

I thought Brendan O'Connor replied well enough to it in the Sunday Indo tbh. Unfortunately, the media today is saturated with opinionated idiots like her, god knows the indo has its own hatchet men/women. The best response to such shíte? Just don't read past the first couple of lines. The thing is littered with inaccuracies, refers to Eire throughout (where?), and does a great job of using certain episodes/incidents to generalise about the whole nation.

Burchill is just a grumpy fruit who needs to offend people to be interesting.

Hairy Homer

Well perhaps I should be impressed that the calm, mature, forbearing reaction of the posters here to the rantings of Ms Burchill reflects our growing self confidence as a nation and our wish to concentrate on more important topics than the tabloid trash in which she specialises.

What saddens me is that this drivel appeared in the Guardian, as opposed to the Tory tabloids where the big-nosed (and bigger-bummed) haradan used to work and whose self-important self-deluded chauvinistic Rule Brittania ethos more closely approximates to her own outlook.

So much for the mouthpiece of liberal tolerant decent pluralist Britain.

WhiteWashMan

actually i think its quite funny.

try and read between the lines.

ReefBreak

The best thing was reading about the reaction from the "eternally offended" bunch. Apparantly, the head of the Irish Immigrant centre in London wants her done for incitement to hatred.

Naturally, we (the Irish) get very uppity the moment we hear any level of criticism thrown our way. Personally, I've found we are far quicker than any other nation to criticise other countries.

Of course, if you are going to slag us, at least get the facts right.

almost compulsory child molestation by the national church,

Not really true - a small number of priests were involved. This has been a catholic issue - not an Irish one. See the USA, Australia, Poland, etc also.

total discrimination against women who wish to be priests,

Again, not true. In fact, nothing to do with Ireland whatsoever - it's a Vatican policy, not an Irish one. Unless Julie has decided that Catholic=Irish.

aiding and abetting Herr Hitler in his hour of need,

Could be true - we didn't exactly do much to stop him. We simply buried our heads in the sand while waving the "we're neutral" banner in a cowardly fashion. That's my opinion anyway.

and outlawing abortion and divorce

This should read "outlawing abortion and outlawed divorce."

I have to say, I got a kick out of reading the article, if only because of the fuss it had created. Ironically, you can be sure that one group of "highly offended" people - the extreme-nationalistic Wolfe Tone-loving, Celtic-shirt-wearing crowd - will be drunkenly singing their anti-English songs down the pub as usual this weekend.

Lemming

That article raised a smile.

A Troll if ever there was one, although I'm sure she was being genuine in her own warped little bubble-world. Nice to see that the human gene-pool can reach new depths of bigotted stupidity.

What I DO find surprising however, is that the editor of the Guardian actually allowed such a racially-inflamatory article to go to press.

BUT anyway ....

who, do you think, is going to take such a rant seriously? Really? Who do you think is gonna go "Oh god, those Irish are Nazi bast*rds. I'll bet they all were SS uniforms and are priests too and they beat up their women".

Secondly .... if she called us hitlers bosom-buddies cause were neutral, surely the US are also guilty of same, since they "allowed" the English to endure the Blitz.

YAWWWNNNNN

The Gopher

Man I loved B O Connors response that went something like
"Oh yes,Irelands such an intolerant society that one of the most popular daytime tv shows is presented by a trannie"
"If were the altar boy molesting Hitler loving Ireland than the UK is still the nation pushing 8 year old boys to work down coal mines and raping its colonies of their riches while relaxing by joining the National Front and rioting on the football terracess every weekend"
Not to word but well said Brendan.

spongebob

...and at least the Sunday InnDiPinDint wasn't rude to or about Ruth Dudley Edwards. Sure that would not be fair at all.

M

Clintons Cat

Burchills column appears in the G2 section which takes a more irreverent look at world events than the main news section.It should be probally be treated more as a satirical article on modern english culture that blithely brings out the bunting and flies the irish tricolour once a year on st patricks without really questioning or for that matter caring about the political significance beyond the commercial opportunity to sell more irish stout but finds it difficult to fly its own flag without intense navel gazing into what it means to be "british".
A bit heavy handed and poorly researched and open to misinterpretation but i am not much of a fan of her writing anyhow.

Hairy Homer

Originally posted by ReefBreak


Could be true - we didn't exactly do much to stop him[hitler]. We simply buried our heads in the sand while waving the "we're neutral" banner in a cowardly fashion. That's my opinion anyway.

And you're entitled to it. Even if it happens to be perfunctory, lazy, illogical, fashionably chic and bereft of any intelligence.

ReefBreak

Even if it happens to be perfunctory, lazy, illogical, fashionably chic and bereft of any intelligence.

Congratulations. "perfunctory, lazy, illogical, fashionably chic and bereft of any intelligence" And your reasoning for this is? Of course, I wouldn't suggest for a minute that you'd have supported Hitler during the second world war. Oh no, that'd be too obvious. Piece of advice Homer: if you're going to make a statement like that, at least back it up - otherwise you just sound like a frustated retard.

fashionably chic? To be opposed to neutrality? Oh dear...

ReefBreak

It was alluded to in the Sunday Indo. Is it even worth taking this sad bloated untravelled ignorant bigot seriously?

I had forgotten you were the one that started the thread. Hopefully, there'll be plenty more articles that are critical of Ireland. Although, let's hope more research is done next time. It's worth it just to see the shock displayed by people like Homer.

Homer, unless you can tell me that you've never slagged England or the English, I'll take it all back.

dmcc

"And replace it with something more enlightened: the Hitler-licking, altarboy-molesting, abortion-banning Irish tricolour, perhaps?"

Sheesh.. I keep forgetting england and its inhabitants (the decent white anglo-saxon protestants that is) are superior to us irish. It is good of her and her ilk to put us in our place.

I can't even bring myself to comment on what she wrote!

Hairy Homer

Originally posted by ReefBreak
I had forgotten you were the one that started the thread. Hopefully, there'll be plenty more articles that are critical of Ireland. Although, let's hope more research is done next time. It's worth it just to see the shock displayed by people like Homer.

Homer, unless you can tell me that you've never slagged England or the English, I'll take it all back.

I've come across La Burchill many times before, and her attitude is at least consistent. The Irish (and the Arabs) have long been the subjects of her bile, so I wasn't shocked in the slightest.

I was mildly dissapointed that the supposedly liberal Guardian has allowed itself to become a conduit for her bile. But then circulation is circulation, and they probably reckoned they needed some cheap thrills to drag in the readers. So they got in the journalistic equivalent of a pole dancer—a profession with whose members Burchill clearly shares a confused sense of sexuality, a persecution complex and low self esteem if not the usual physical attributes— to throw out some bilious spiel based on arguments that are perfunctory, out of date or just plain factually wrong to titillate the readers.

As for slagging off the English: I've never done it in a national newspaper and never based on such non factual rubbish as Burchill. Indeed, some of my best friends are English. But I do love it when their team loses.

That's as deep as it goes.

Hairy Homer

Originally posted by ReefBreak


Congratulations. "perfunctory, lazy, illogical, fashionably chic and bereft of any intelligence" And your reasoning for this is? Of course, I wouldn't suggest for a minute that you'd have supported Hitler during the second world war. Oh no, that'd be too obvious. Piece of advice Homer: if you're going to make a statement like that, at least back it up - otherwise you just sound like a frustated retard.

fashionably chic? To be opposed to neutrality? Oh dear...

Back 'em up? No problem.


There is great interest here at the moment (read the national papers esp the Irish Times) in trawling back through history to pull out examples of Irishmen who fought for Britain in Two World Wars. Nothing wrong with that. Facts are facts. There are also several books recently published on the same subject, as a cursory browse through any Dublin bookshop will confirm.

|t has become fashionably chic at the moment (read the likes of Eoghan Harris, Ruth Dudley Edwards, Kevin Myers—who write for different papers) to interpret these facts by denigrating those who fought for this country’s independence and instead lauding those who fought in the British Army against the Germans.

The former were aberrant terrorists; the latter were heroic, selfless virtuous warriors who are wholly undeserving of the lack of official acknowledgement from their compatriots that has been their lot. So the argument goes.

As Ireland was part of the UK in WWI it is hardly surprising that several hundred thousand Irishmen should have joined up, many of whom lost their lives. (Several of them quite close relatives of mine as it happens, but that’s beside the point).

Similarly, it was not unusual that thousands of young Irishmen should join up in 1939 to fight in the great adventure that was taking place on their doorstep.

What motivates young men to fight? Complete identification with the cause espoused by their army’s leaders? In that case, why did so many of the Irishmen who fought for Britain in 1914-1918 turn their guns on their former colleagues when they returned to fight in the War of Independence? I can cite legendary figures such as IRA ‘Generals’ Tom Barry and Emmet Dalton as merely two high-profile examples. There were many others.

Not that this is a peculiarly Irish phenomenon. History abounds with examples of colonial troops who later fought for their country’s independence against the very armies in which they had served. (Of course I can back this up, but let's not digress)

Was Ireland alone in not jumping at the chance to declare war on Hitler? No. Among those who actively declared their neutrality at the time of the outbreak of war, just to be sure, were Spain, Portugal, Norway, Denmark and Sweden. Belgium and the Netherlands were also neutral by default.

Only two European countries declared war on Hitler without being attacked themselves, namely France and Britain. So the world’s two largest empires at the time fought the Germans for the cause of freedom for other nations did they? Or because they were desperately attempting to keep their empires which were being threatened by Germany’s growing strength? Tell you what. You make up your own mind.

All other countries with the exception of Australia and New Zealand —(two little-England nations at the time) were dragged in by virtue of being attacked by Germany.

What about the Finns? Perhaps the most heroic fighters of the war, after the Poles. Did they leap at the chance to fight Hitler? Well, actually they fought with the Germans.

Having been invaded by the Soviets in 1939, and having surrendered after a heroic few months fighting against enormous odds, they grabbed the chance to hit back when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941.

Half a million Finnish troops took part in Operation Barbarossa and quickly recaptured the territory lost to them in 39/40. Do you blame them? Let’s admonish them for their failure to do their best to defeat Hitler shall we? They should have said sorry to that nice Mr Stalin, repaired Helsinki that had been bombed to rubble by the Soviets and fought Germany for reasons of moral purity.

Taking the totality of events, the Irish Free State was perfectly within its rights to stay out of the war. The tacit help it gave the British and Americans has long been a matter of record. Not to mention the thousands of Irishmen who fought in the British and American forces.

Every country who fought in that war did so for its own interests. It was not a moral crusade, and it is bottomless hypocrisy to conclude that the Irish Free State was, in your words behaving in a ‘cowardly fashion’ by ‘burying their heads in the sand and waving a neutral banner’. That is a perfunctory argument based either on lazy research or a complete lack of knowledge of the subject under discussion.

Now you go and back up your argument with some facts; as opposed to a plot line from Ealing Studios.

pertinax

I agree with you hairy homer.

you said what i would have said but better, if i could of been arsed.

bugler

What, you mean the UK/US didn't enter world war 2 to save the jews and rid Europe of fascism?!

AAAAAahh my world just fell apart.