British White Supremacy and Savagery

The relationship of British White Supremacy and their Savagery against the Irish.

The following ideas have been gleaned from George M. Fredrickson's White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History, 1981.  Fredrickson asserts that:

"white supremacy refers to the attitudes, ideologies, and policies associated with the rise of blatant forms of white or European dominance over 'nonwhite' populations. . . . It suggest systematic and self conscious efforts to make race or color a qualification for membership in the civil community."

The concept of savagery developed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries  "constituted a distorting lens through which the early colonists assessed the potential and predicted fate of non-European peoples they encountered."  English plans for colonization were first practiced and perfected against the Irish and later applied across the Atlantic.  In 1565, the British officially announced their goal to conquer and colonize Ireland.

"Between 1565 and 1576 a series of colonization enterprises were organized and promoted, involving many of the same West Country gentlemen who were to be leading figures in the earliest projects for English settlements in North America. . . . The rationale for expropriating their land and removing them from it was the the Celtic Irish were savages, so wild and rebellious that they could only be controlled by a constant and ruthless exercise of force."

Since the Christianity of the Irish was weak and superficial and could not control the Irish savage impulses, the consciences of the Protestant British did not bother them as they implemented

"virtually every kind of atrocity that would later be perpetrated against American Indians---women and children were massacred, and whole communities were uprooted and consigned to special reservations."

Once ethnic cleansing had occurred, four fifths of Northern Ireland was set aside for British and Scottish settlers.  Fredrickson states that the Puritans who settled New England were an "intensely ethnocentric English community."  So it is not surprising that the British settlers soon labeled Native American savages and started oppressing them.  The British transferred their ethnocentrism and oppression against the Irish, lock-stock-and-barrel, to American Indians.

Some scholars have asserted that Hitler picked up some of these ideas from the British and Americans and applied them in Germany.

It is true: The historical past haunts our sociological present.