History questions not worth their own thread IV

Oh, absolutely - I didn't mean to imply that it was an indication of bad character, but it was an indication of bad leadership.

 

I know next to nothing about Mr Grant, but failure to uphold the rule of law seems like a terrible failing in any government leader. It undermines the whole basis of modern Western society.

 

Corruption, political cronyism and nepotism have just as much basis in modern Western society.

 

Since when did society begin at the top and work its way down? Some sceptic you are!

 

Harding smiles upon your mercy.

You could inflate anybody's faults to make it sound like they were abysmal with this kind of rhetoric.

"Martin Luther King, Jr. was unable to avoid being assassinated, which unarguably makes him a failure as a civil rights leader since he stubbornly refused to have a realistic outlook on the political climate of his era."

 

I wonder if the emphasis on corruption is due to the fact that, for a long time, the narrative has been that reconstruction was a bad thing. Certainly, as far as post-civil war Presidents go, he was the most effective at protecting freedmen. I wonder if any revisionist historians want to take another crack at him and see if the good outweighed the bad.

 

Can anyone shed a light on the role of the Roman Catholic Church during the Troubles? Did the church support the IRA or condemn their violence, or did they take a more neutral position?

 

Tacit approval, and extremely frustrating. The priests on both sides seemed totally unwilling to do anything other than equivocate and sit on the fence, which was of course tantamount to giving support to their flocks to go out and shoot at Tommies.

 

Are there any good examples of someone speculating what the far off future would be like that are written before the adaptation of electricity for human use? Something from pre-1800s predicting what life might be like in hundreds of years, for example?

 

I know quite a few inventors predicted large-scale air travel - using airships rather than planes - prior to the harnessing of electricity, and a few predicted horseless carriages - some specifically pinpointed steam-driven vehicles - but I don't know of any across-the-board predictions.

 

Technically all members of the IRA in Ulster were already excommunicated. The Catholic Church's position vis a vis was far more complicated, but generally can be summarized as "terrified".

The Catholic Church tried strong arming the paramilitaries in the 1920s and after that, they were none to eager to make another go at that during the troubles.

 

If you'll forgive me for the tangent, but it seems Catholics are frequently held to an extreme double standard on this kind of matter. If Catholics aren't actively denouncing bad people in a bad society to the point of being firebombed or shot in public, they're "tacitly approving" of them. There's very ignorant people that still argue Pope Pius XII never denounced the Nazis despite having a sermon read in every German Catholic Church as the homily on Sunday Mass in 1937 that antagonized the Nazis in every way possible.

The IRA obviously had no approval from the Irish Catholic Church, and they themselves only deployed Catholic imagery as a subset of Irish nationalism, but they're still popularly considered "Catholic terrorists", which is bologna.

 

Except for condemning the anti-socialist and anti-labour repression, which given that was until then pretty much the point of the Nazi regime, kind of a biggie. It's not exactly like he had any fundamental objection to brutal ultra-nationalist dictators, cough cough Franco cough.

 

The Catholic Church historically has only opposed labor movements that have inherently materialist/morally relativistic manifestos, like Marxists. So the Nazi suppression of labor unions was indeed held to be a bad thing, which can be seen as in contra to Rerum Novarum. But the Nazi Party's ultra-antisemitism and militarism was a much more pertinent problem at the time though, and ultimately as everybody knows, those were much more biggies than Hitler's labor policies.

Franco was initially about an infinity better than the regime he was revolting against, keep in mind.

 

That's probably a fair assessment of their motivations, although it was harder to see it in the same way at the time!

Yes; the problem was that they all went to Church, and they all considered themselves good Catholics - people used to walk through Londonderry at night terrified that they'd be asked 'are yez Prodestant or Catholic?' - and so it seemed to us that the Church leaders exercised some level of moral authority over them, and so could perhaps have reduced their ability to recruit people and feel that they were doing a good job had they spoken out: you're right that from a purely objective standpoint they had no obligation to do so, but I don't pretend to be purely objective on the matter.

 

It's hard to claim that the Church was merely prioritising a concern for militarism and anti-Semitism over anti-socialism and anti-labourism when they had done nothing to protest those persecutions during the earlier stages of the Nazi regime. It wasn't as if they were forced to regroup and refocus, they simply didn't give a toss if Hitler butchered trade unionists and socialists. (Hell, they positively enthused when a good Catholic like Franco or a Dollfuss did the butchering, and even the Protestant Horthy got a pass on the back of his conservatism). It's one thing to argue that the Catholic Church- eventually, belated- adopted an anti-Nazi position, but don't go pretending that anti-Nazism somehow equates to humanitarianism.

...How?

 

Can we assume all white people are Nazis unless they explicitly, publicly, and with full force, denounce 'Aryanism'? Probably not. Some terrorists may have considered themselves Catholic, but that doesn't mean the default is that they were Church-supported unless thoroughly proven otherwise.

Of course, since you have freely abdicated any desire for objectivity, suit yourself.

That's because early in the Nazi regime, the Catholic Church put its full weight behind the Centre Party. When Hitler had effectively made opposition parties to be either banned or figure-heads is when that policy didn't make much sense and the direct denunciations came. It was really completely different political climate.

Sure about that? Perhaps you should check some of the objections of Clemens August Cardinal von Galen and Alois Grimm.

You certainly have quite the biased view of it all. "Positively enthused"? Can you demonstrate that for me? Not even the Italian bishops that for fear of their own lives praised Mussolini for conquering Ethiopia could be described as "positively enthused".

Because when the Spanish Civil War first began, he was not known for much beyond being a conservative officer. Most of his atrocities came after he was in Madrid and had to keep control, not the very beginning of the war.

 

Certainly he was not responsible for dragging the war longer than strictly necessary in order to purge the territory under his control.

 

You're entirely right; I was giving perhaps a primary-source view: I actually served several tours of duty in Northern Ireland throughout the Troubles, you see. The feeling among British forces on the ground was as I described, albiet not always articulated so politely. One side-effect of this was that we sometimes got abuse back home from English Catholics with no connection to Ireland or the IRA, because they thought that our operations in the Province were trying to suppress Catholicism. The fact that we originally went in to protect Catholics was conveniently ignored.

Protestant church leaders were just as bad, I should say, in the interests of fairness.

 

That's not really a "because". A "because" would tell us why the Catholic Church found itself in such a position that it could not protest the anti-leftist persecutions of the Nazi government. This just tells us what they were doing instead of protesting.

Possibly! But I can't seem to find any pertinent to my comments. Anything in particular I should be looking for.

As opposed to yourself, eh?

Why would they be? Mussolini didn't like the Church, Church didn't like Mussolini. No love lost. I'm talking about good Catholic boys like Franco and Dollfuss, who enjoyed the public support and cooperation of the Catholic hierarchy, not simply despite but because they achieved political power through the violent suppression of the left. Where is the Pope's protest against Dollfuss' suspension of parliamentary democracy, the sermons issued criticising Franco's massacres? They don't exist, because the Catholic church did not object to those practices. As I said, "anti-Nazi" does not mean "humanitarian".

Well, Franco was already known as a violent reactionary, especially after this heavy-handed suppression of the Asturias miners' strike in 1934 (which he attributed to a Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy), so that's not really true. But, either way, what about the Second Republic was so deeply, deeply objectionable that even a "moderate" military dictatorship should be preferable?