The idea of reparations to Blacks is silly

Why not reparations to the Irish or to First Nations?

California has led the parade of insanity regarding historic wrongs for which people who were not harmed who live today want reparations for harms they claim were done to their ancestors by no one who is alive today. The sins of the fathers shall be visited on the sons seems their mantra. But the cries for money for nothing seems to ignore that Black Americans were not the only group who suffered grievous wrongs at the hands of the British Empire long before United States fought for and won independence, and the wrongs of the British Empire on African blacks sold into slavery in America hardly justify levying some sort of penalty on Americans who either have no relation to the British Empire or, if they did, fought to get away from them.

As a student of History of Irish Descent, I have studied the widespread practice of slavery in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries and learned (but no one talks about it) that in 1641, almost contemporaneous with the period covered by the 1619 project (advocating revisionist history to benefit people living today who descended from slaves taken by European nations and sold to slave markets in America, the West Indies and other areas of the world) following an attempted overthrow of the British by the Irish (who had long suffered oppression at the hands of the British) some 616,000 of the Irish population of about 1,466,000 at the time were murdered by the British and another 300,000 sold as slaves. The Irish were sold as slaves not only to America but also to South America, the West Indies and Barbados.

As reported by Peter Lindebaugh and Marcus Rediker in their book “The Many-headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic” thousands of Irish slaves were sold to Sweden in 1610 and later, in the 1800 era, others were sent to Australia. But I don’t see Irishmen or people of Irish descent forming faux “charities” to collect millions under a banner similar to “Black Lives Matter”, burning buildings, looting stores, and causing general mayhem while law enforcement is incapable of maintaining order under Democratic Mayors and members of Congress who claim the civil disobedience is justified.

Why not face the facts head on? It was Britain (and France and Germany and Austria and The Netherlands and Spain and Africa, among others) who built and expanded the slave trade under a series of monarchs. England played a key role, perhaps the worst inregard to the Irish as James I sent Oliver Cromwell to try to eliminate the Irish population in its entirety. To a large extent, the British Monarchy (and not white American colonialists) were the real culprits behind slavery in what became the United States and if reparations are payable, the right target for these claims is the useless and corrupt British monarchy which exists for no good reason and has become a British Disney-like attraction for tourists while the inbred scions of past monarchs live in luxury without making a contribution to society anywhere.

United States has grown as a country of immigrants most of whom came from areas that had no role in the slave trade. By 2045, the American population will comprise almost 38% people of Hispanic, Asian, Multiracial and other ethnicities who are remote to anything to do with slavery, and of the almost 50% of the population who are Caucasion, most immigrated to America long after slavery was a thing of the past.

Harm done to people long since dead by other people long since dead is not a case for reparations by anyone to anyone. If it was, we Irish want a place in line and since Black slaves were part of the crews who assisted in the transportation of Irish slaves to various destinations, we Irish want our reparations from the American blacks.