We experience the economy in modern society as a network of market relations. I will next consider the neglected issue of private property and economic inequality.
In the European Union, attendance varies widely between West and East, North and South, often in unexpected ways: for example, only 5% of French people are active members of churches, over 50% of Germans. Church attendance in Britain and Canada is around 10%. Americans are highly religious, some 4 out of 5 believe in God and weekly church attendance has declined from 70% to 50% in the last two decades. What we have here is a combination of white racism, guns, religion, patriarchy and right-wing politics. The US has a quarter of the world’s prisoners, many of them Black. The “Black Lives Matter” movement likewise draws attention to how police kill young Black men with impunity. Why? He comes from Flint Michigan, a city with a bad race problem in an animation, he claims that the US’ history of racism is the main reason for all the killing. Canadians have as many guns, but they don’t kill people with them. Moore makes a wide-ranging investigation into American gun culture, including the National Rifle Association. Michael Moore made a documentary film, Bowling for Columbine (2002) about an incident in 1999 when two high school boys shot and killed twelve students and a teacher. Elsewhere battle-hardened Northern Irish cadres did the British Empire’s dirty work. The most famous of them was “Billy the Kid”, born Henry McCarty. Many gunslingers were of Northern Irish origin. Endless Hollywood westerns give more attention to myth than to the brutal violence and corruption that would not sell cinema seats. A mobile avant-garde of drunk, whoring desperadoes took on the Indians, served the cattle barons and then became redundant or were killed. The place had to be made safe for the farmers who followed. Union ships in the East River shelled Southern Manhattan to pacify the gangs.
But it soon turned into America’s first urban race riot, with 100 Blacks being killed by the Irish. This unleashed a class riot with Southern Manhattan’s poor invading the richer neighbourhoods. Lincoln issued a conscription order with exemption for $300. The Irish felt threatened by former slaves competing for the worst-paid jobs. At that time, the main axis of gang warfare in New York was between Irish Protestants and Catholics. It is 1863 and the coffins of Union soldiers line the dockside, while a shipload of Irish immigrants are offered a chance to serve in the Union army. Washington’s second-in-command was a 23-year-old Ulster Scot.įast-forward to the American Civil War and Martin Scorsese’s film, The Gangs of New York (2002). They were known later as “hillbillies”, “rednecks” or just “poor white trash”. They shot runaway slaves and Native Americans for sport. The “Ulster Scots” of the Appalachians certainly did. Puritan farmers from New England to Pennsylvania didn’t know much about guns. The War of American Independence against the British was led by Virginia plantation owners with George Washington heading the army. William inflicted a brutal defeat on the Irish at the Battle of the Boyne and settled some Scottish Presbyterians to keep down Catholic peasants in Ulster, before establishing constitutional monarchy in the Glorious Revolution of 1689. He married the English princess Mary and together they assumed the English throne. William of Orange was the most successful general in a seventeenth-century religious war pitting a Protestant coalition led by England and Holland against the Catholic monarchies of France and Spain. “In all my life as an American, I have never before been in a large space without a single Black person.” “I guess all those guns are to keep them out.” We didn’t stay long. Jim whispered to me, “Have you noticed anything weird about this place?” “Plenty”. We were struck by a display of 4- to 10-rifle glass-fronted cabinets on special offer for around $150. He replied that most people went to the Walmart superstore. We asked the hotel clerk where we could find entertainment on a Friday evening. From there we would go via Alabama and Mississippi to New Orleans. On the first night, we stopped in Bristol, a small town in the Appalachian Mountains on the southwest border between Virginia and Tennessee. In 2000, Jim and I decided to drive from Newark, New Jersey to New Orleans for a few days. As the last of three generations of Northern Irish Protestant descent settled in Manchester, I was brought up as a warrior in a racist theocracy, so what follows in not ancient history for me, but a matter of personal experience.