Peadar de Burca: We'll Make Great Pets

This was Bandera’s response to Poland’s “civilisation mission,” or what some historians like to call a “genocidium atrox,” ensuring that your country never dipped its toe into the murky waters of colonialism ever again. All of this took place against the backdrop of a larger, Nazi-themed Holocaust and was therefore relegated to the attic of history. At least it’s in the public domain. What of the Tulsa massacre one hundred years ago in Oklahoma? Recently, we’ve heard Tom Hanks calling on American educators to start teaching how a white mob ran riot in the city, killing as many as 300 people and destroying Greenwood, a neighbourhood so prosperous it was nicknamed the “Black Wall Street.” Well done Tom, even if his good intentions are a long way off Marlon Brando refusing his Oscar to call attention to the genocide of Native Americans. 30 million in total by the way, yet done under the guise of a cultural belief called Manifest Destiny and eased into our collective psyches by the soft power of John Wayne westerns. Of course the Spanish ravaged the Americas too. Referring to the conquest of Hispaniola, 16th century Dominican friar Bartolome de la Casas wrote: “They erected certain gibbets so that their feet almost reached the ground, every one of which was so ordered as to bear thirteen persons in honour and reverence of our Redeemer and his Twelve Apostles, under which they made a fire to burn them to ashes whilst hanging on them.”

Are you thinking what I’m thinking? That there is just enough religion in the world, to make people truly hate each other? The counter-argument is that Hernán Cortés and Francisco Pizarro brought “a far more humanitarian system” to the empires they conquered. The Aztecs practiced human sacrifice and if any of us are familiar with this it is again because of Hollywood and Mel Gibson’s film Apocalypto depicting a Mayan civilisation as rotten to the core and in need of a Christian civilisation mission. The Spanish used bio-warfare too, willfully spread smallpox and perhaps with this in mind we can understand why there is a lab in Wuhan specialising in Gain of Function research to alter a disease in a way that increases pathogenesis and transmissibility.

We are the pestilence, from the simple, indigenous peoples with discs through their lips to Harry S. Truman, who wrote in his diary: “We have discovered the most terrible bomb in the history of the world. It may be the fire destruction prophesied in the Euphrates Valley Era, after Noah and his fabulous Ark.” We are war. We are destruction. We are the beast eating its own tail. We are the authority and justification for all our misdeeds and no nation is exempt. The Irish, so often seen through the prism of victimhood, but no, there be monsters; the IRA bombing of the La Mon Restaurant in 1978, resulting in the deaths of twelve Protestant civilian customers. IRA members shooting dead ten Protestant building workers in the Kingsmill massacre. The sustained bombing campaign in London and other parts of England killing 115 including the Warrenpoint bombing which killed two children, Tim Parry and Johnathan Ball. All of this as bad as anything Bandera did to his colonial masters or Polish rednecks inflicted on Jews.

Through time another race will come in their spaceships. They will take over and we’ll make great pets.