Tag Archives: Four Kingdoms of Ireland


The United States is currently engaged in a disgusting orgy of destruction which is going to be very difficult to recover from.  It is destruction of symbols with genocidal intent which, if successful, will destroy everything good about America.  No joke: everything.  The Confederate States of America was the last gasp of the original “Spirit of ’76” and once we destroy the symbols of the old South—it’s not long until we will be destroying all the symbols of the American Revolution—-because the two events were conceptually and strategically almost identical, and George Washington and Robert E. Lee’s father were not only neighbors along the Virginia side of the Potomac (Stafford, Mount Vernon, and Arlington) but cousins by marriage….

Destruction of Symbols sounds so very benign, when you say it unthinkingly, it sounds so sterile and academic, so far removed from physical harm.  Until you think of Leslie A. White’s definition of culture, which has pretty much become the primary accepted definition in anthropology: “Culture is Man’s extrasomatic adaptation to the Environment, DEPENDENT UPON SYMBOLLING.”

All of modern anthropology, linguistics, and social psychology focuses on the elementary nature and importance of symbols in the definition of social identity and social relations.

What the Obama administration and the wholly controlled “Mainstream Media” in the United States are doing is closely analogous to other monstrous events in Anglo-American history, the oldest of which are universally agreed to have been monstrous—although those more recent in time are still cherished by “the powers that be.”

1652—the Cromwellian “Act for the Settlement of Ireland” effectively abolished and destroyed, by outlawing its institutions and symbols (along with mass murder and slavery) all and everything that remained of traditional Ireland (medieval, primitive Christian with strong pagan syncretic elements).   Ostensibly, the reason was political conspiracy against his anti-monarchist “Commonwealth”. Cromwell attacked the (to modern American ears quite) ironically named “Confederate Royalists” of Ireland and systematically destroyed them as supporters of the late King Charles I Stuart and his sons Charles II and James II Stuart. What Cromwell did was to uproot an disperse all supporters of the “Confederate Royalists” who were the ethnic and cultural heirs the Celtic Ireland of the Four Kingdoms and the High Kingship of Tara.

This old Celtic Ireland was a land of poetic schools and wandering minstrels, in essence, the last relics and still active, vital, splendid cultural remnant of early Indo-European (etymologically Sanskrit “Aryan” = each of “Irish” and “Iranian” and [German] “Ehre” = “Noble”) Culture.  Both of my dear departed Irish-thinking friends in comparative linguistics, namely my graduate professor in that subject at Harvard, Dr. Calvert Watkins (1933-2013), and my dear friend and mentor (and fellow Harvard graduate in Anthropology from the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology), Dr. David Humiston Kelley (1924-2011), one of the greatest under-appreciated and under-published Anthropologists of the Twentieth Century, considered pre-Cromwellian Ireland a golden age of cultural purity, whose loss and destruction at Cromwell’s hands was reason enough to hate him, even if he had not been one of Europe’s earliest modern Genocidal mass murders.

SCOTLAND AFTER THE ’45—THE 1746-8 DESTRUCTION OF THE CLANS AFTER BONNIE PRINCE CHARLIE’S NEARLY SUCCESSFUL INVASION AND RECONQUEST OF BRITAIN-–almost exactly 100 years later, in a continuation of exactly the same confrontation of the Catholic Leaning Stuart Dynasty and the more “Radical Protestant” elements of the English Church, Scotland’s Gaelic (indigenous, insular Celtic) culture was laid waste in an episode of extreme symbolic genocide in the mid-18th century.

My family tree is mostly English with an admixture of French, Prussian, and Southern German [Alsatian and Austrian] heritage, and no known (insular) Celtic antecedents or traceable ancestors.  But my father was an Anglo-Catholic and a member of the Society of King Charles the Martyr, while my mother was a hopeless romantic and lover of lost causes, especially lost languages and cultural variants in Europe.  And so as their child I have always been deeply moved by the poetry of the Scots Gaelic language, the legacy of the clans and tartans of Scotland, and in particular of the story of “the Old Pretender” (James III’s) and “the Young Pretender” (Charles III’s) efforts to retake the throne of Britain for the Stuart Family in 1715 and 1745.  Bonnie Prince Charlie (aka “the Young Pretender” entombed in Rome as “Charles III King of England”) was “almost a winner.”  The voluntarily abortive story of his reconquest of England (George II was already packing to leave London for Hanover what Charles III turned back, despite being greeted by cheering crowds of Englishmen and women as far south as Derby) is strange, but irrelevant to the point here.

Marshal George Wade is hardly a household name, either in England or America, but he was the commander of the English forces who suppressed the Jacobites and destroyed the clans of Scotland.  Wade’s name was, in the 1740s, very well known because there was an extremely popular prayerful “hymn” about him, as he marched northward to Scotland to do the Hanoverian dirty work of Genocide with Cromwellian brutality and efficiency—that hymn was later rewritten to become “God Save the King” (a non-0fficial national anthem of England and pre-1965 Canada and Australia, and “My Country ’tis of Thee” in the United States.) 

Marshall Wade’s policy of Scottish Genocide focused on the destruction of the Celtic Clan system, and the destruction of the Highland Scottish nobility, just as Cromwell had focused on the extermination of the “Confederate Irish” nobility of the Emerald Isle in 1649-53.

The wearing of the kilt and tartan were among the cruelest and most tortuous aspects of the Suppression of Scotland in 1747-48.  It was made a capital offense, punishable by hanging, to wear a kilt or tartan, and these prohibitions alone were sufficient to destroy the clan system, although the confiscation of all Jacobite lands certainly would have done substantial damage. 

WITHOUT THEIR SYMBOLS, A PEOPLE CANNOT EXIST.  Just as Christianity could not survive a prohibition on the Cross, the Lord’s prayer, and Sunday Church worship, the clans, at least as socio-politicaly cohesive and viable entities with power, could not survive the abolition of their symbols.

1798—They’re Hanging Men and Women for the Wearing of the Green. A mere 50 years later (after Marshal Wade had finished with Scotland, and ten years after the ban on the wearing of Kilts and Tartans had been lifted to a population, only the oldest and feeblest of whom could even remember having worn them before 1748), the Hanoverians (this time under “Mad King George” III) were at it again, this time suppressing a French-Revolutionary inspired “Bonapartist” uprising in Ireland.

And once again the British treatment of Ireland was brutal and genocidal.  It is a tribute to the strength of the Irish people that there are any of them left speaking Gaelic or remembering St. Patrick (whose veneration was also banned in 1798). In 1798, the British banned “the wearing of the Green”, even of Shamrocks, thus giving rise to the woeful Irish Ballad “They’re Hanging Men and Women for the Wearing of the Green.”  Irish identity survived, but it was a miracle that it did.  And all remnants of traditional Irish culture, except on the farthest and rockiest Western Atlantic Coastal shore islands, have been destroyed completely.