“Irish State Means Little To Many…” – Fintan O’Toole Is Right, But For The Wrong Reasons
by Gabriel Donohoe (Fools Crow)
In a piece in The Irish Times on Tuesday, August 7th, 2012, Fintan O’Toole bemoans the fact that the “Irish State Means Little To Many Of Its Citizens.”
It is indeed true that the Irish State continues to mean less and less to a growing majority of Irish men and women, but O’Toole doesn’t explore the reasons why, as a good journalist should. Instead, O’Toole berates Irish citizens for not embracing the institutions of the State and scolds them for their unwillingness to act in the “common good.”
In criticizing the people for not loving the State, O’Toole reminds me of Franz-Joseph, the Emperor of Austria-Hungary, who, while having one of subjects horsewhipped, screamed at the man: “But I want you to LOVE ME!”
The Irish people do not love their State (or rather the clique who run their State) because their State has ‘horsewhipped’ them, i.e., needlessly given away their sacred national sovereignty, impoverished them by seizing their money and funnelling it into mega-rich banks, and relentlessly continues to pile on household tax and other austerity mandated larcenies at the direction of a foreign Troika, a criminal cabal of financial terrorists (to use a term of Max Keiser).
The “common good” that O’Toole writes of so fondly is just another term for Collectivism, a dogma so espoused by the Nazis, Fascists, Communists, and dictators like Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, and so on. In fact, O’Toole uses the word ‘collective’ twice; he refers to the State as “a collective entity”, and again as “a collective self that goes beyond the narrow realms of family and locality”. Collectivism promotes the rights of the State over the rights of the individual. It calls for self-sacrifice by the individual for the good of the State.
According to Ayn Rand: “Collectivism means the subjugation of the individual to a group — whether to a race, class or state does not matter. Collectivism holds that man must be chained to collective action and collective thought for the sake of what is called ‘the common good’.”
R.J. Rummel, Professor Emeritus of Political Science, estimates that in the 20th Century some 262 million people were murdered by their own governments, collectivist governments allegedly acting for “the greater good”. On the other hand, governments adhering to a doctrine of Individualism murdered nobody.
And so, the collectivist Fintan O’Toole wants the Irish people to act for the “common good”, a term he uses five times. They should not question state institutions like the law and the courts and those who query the integrity of judges are “idiots”.
Returning to his current favourite bête noire, Sean Quinn, he says, “The Quinn affair shows significant numbers of Irish people are in literal contempt of the courts.” He goes on to pontificate that any talk of state conspiracy is “damn…nonsense” and that “[m]any of the most vocal Quinn supporters…grew up with contempt for the “Free State” as a given”.
For all of O’Toole’s harangue and bluster about the “common good”, how come we never see him or The Irish Times or any other mainstream journalist or newspaper address any of the real reasons why the “Irish State means little to many of its citizens”? We never read any discussion or insightful articles on how 97% of the money in this country (and Europe and the world) is created by private banking cartels, or how the International Money Power runs our country and all its institutions, or hear of practical and historical methods of issuing our own currency without interest or debt.
No, Fintan, the Irish State has so little meaning for most of us in this country because you and your ilk have sold out to the Money Power, along with so many others who have abdicated their responsibility. The more awakened among us see your bashing of Sean Quinn as a bankster-inspired red herring, another step on the way to a domineering, tyrannical, collectivist State.
2012-08-08 19:01:00
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