22 Comments

At least they got to enjoy some Mexican sun too.

Greetings from grey Galway. Patrick was Welsh, got kidnapped and enslaved by some Irish, escaped, musta had stockholm syndrome and came back and proceded to turn perfectly good pagans into monotheists. At least now we have a Brigids National Holiday Day too. She was much better in my estimation. 💚☘

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😮

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I knew one Irish-American woman in NYC who mourned each St Patrick's Day for this very reason. I'm so glad there's a Brigid's National Holiday.

Drunks would mistake me for Irish on 17 March because I had red hair and green eyes!

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🍀

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Brigid is hugely popular here. Her name was on everybodys lips this year.

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the more I read about American history the worse it gets! I had no idea, and thought St Patricks day was about the person mentioned in Marilyn's comment LOL. I am from Belgium originally and only had a vague idea about USA history, only knew some of native history to be honest.

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Thanks, Ingrid. For the record, I don't mean to imply that March 17 is set aside to celebrate St. Patrick's Battalion. I just see it as an ideal time to talk about another episode that is purposely hidden from the mainstream narrative.

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I don't know how many Americans know this. Do they teach this in schools? Being here, I found out all the school info about Congo is totally wrong. What I learned about America was not from school, we learned nothing at all about that, but from books I read on my own. Always been interested in Native Americans, from child on I read cartoons about a young man and his dog, and they were a lot about Indian practices etc.

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I can't speak to what's being taught now but I certainly didn't learn about this (or anything that I write about) in school!

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that is what I thought LOL. They probably teach the same crap we heard, how great our rulers were and how fantastic kings and presidents were. We never heard about king Leopold 2 giving orders to hack off the hands of africans who worked hard for close to nothing and stole food. We never heard about all the awful things in Congo, and certainly not about the involvement of the American government installing Mobutu, and the shameful death of Lumumba considered a russian associate etc. All the 'outside' seems to be show (read lies) and if you want to know what really happened, you have to dig deep! Thanks for doing that for us.

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Thank you...I love doing so.

And yes, I've written about Congo, Mobutu, Lumumba, and also the big Ali fight held there in 1974. I'll have to re-edit that and share one day soon!

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thanks already !

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If you like fiction you might enjoy Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible which is about the Congo.

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You might try Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's An Indigenous People's History of the United States; the American greed for conquering is explained very well.

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I remember interviewing Roxanne when that book first came out!

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Every time you post one of these necessary history lessons, I think of the Sand Creek Massacre. Says everything one needs to know about AmeriKKKa.

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Hmm...I may write something about the Sand Creek Massacre soon.

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I would suggest a warning about the graphic stuff. If I could use emojis, I'd have the one of barfing.

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thanks Susan ! Found it and ordered it !

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I think we did ourselves and the Mexicans in the states we liberated a big favor when we took the land that eventually became California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, etc., etc. Mexico has always been a nightmare country, and still is.

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We had some outstanding high points in American history. We also had many low points. Both need told.

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