The Irish standard., 1898-10-29
PROTEST AGAINST FLUaKEYlsm.

PROTEST AGAINST FLUNKEYlSM.
1t is sad to contemplate that the daily
press Of Ireland is not what it used to
be. 1t is rapidly degenerating into a
West British press, and is saturated with
the virus of Anglo-Saxonism. Instead
of instilling strong sentiments of nation
ality and the spirit of liberty into the
minds Of the young men of Ireland the
daily press is chronicling British events
and clarifying the tyranny and brutality
of England in India and the Soudan. We
are glad that there is one paper in Ire
land-the Peoples Advocate of Mona
ghan-which protests against the funk
eyism of the daily papers. In it's issue
Of Oct. it says:
Last week our press guides treated us
all to whole pages of description of that
disgusting and appalling slaughter
known as the battle of Omdurman. 1t
was no battle, this Omdurman affair; it
was murderous holocaust, unrelieyed
by any feature of civilized warfare. 1t
shocks humanity to think of it; and vet
its horrid and diabolical details have
been dished up in our national newspa-
pers as If it was something in which we
should take an honorable pride. The
man who planned the human battue,
Gen. Kitchener, is claimed as an Irish
man, but it is pleasure to learn that he
only had his bringing up in this country.
and that neither by birth nor blood is
he of our kith and kin. Irishmen should
shut their doors against newspapers that
laud English outrages like this of On
durham, and that fill their columns with
inflated accounts of Anglo-Saxon VIC
tories, which are only Anglo-Saxon
butcheries. The "non-sectarian and nom
political clubs" and the various other as
sociations which exist for corrupting
wholesome Irish national thought and
feeling, are doing their work stealthily
but surely. We shall wake up to the
direful effects of this evil when it is too
late, as we are now waking up to the
direful effects Of the crusade against our
national tongue when it is too late Fa-
theirs and mothers in the West and
Northwest were insidiously taught that
to encourage the Irish tongue was to
mar the prospects of their children in
life, till the canker worked. and the
sweetest language on earth became in the
eyes Of poor, ignorant people a thing
to be trampled out and extinguished. Is
this to be denied? In the same way we
have all our daily newspapers, without
an exception, and many of our weekly
ones also. examining us with London
news and London notions until our
young people are forgetting, or ashamed,
to be Irish. Our journalists are now but
an outpost of the English institute, and
the news that reaches us is all cooked,
SO to speak, in the English kitchen.
When we open the morning paper we are
sure to find lots of paragraphs about the
past and future of the Anglo Saxon; mu-
sic hall kickers; the halos that surround
the war correspondents of Fleet street;
the widening and identifying of the
Strand; the movements of the aristoc-
racy; the latest Hooleyings; Lipton's
yacht, and general clarifying of the
governing race that directs its edicts and
its expeditions from the banks Of the
Thames. Not long ago Irish newspapers
We're shocked that Irish soldiers did not
get an opportunity to cut the Threats of
the Afridis, who were only doing what
the men of '98, whose memories we have
been trying to honor, did in their strug-
gle, hundred years ago-that is, to free
themselves from the English yoke. They
clapped their editorial hands and shout
ed in journalistic Joy that the Dargai
piper was Dublin man, and were ready
to fight duels over the poor blowers ma
tionality. just as some Irishmen in Amer
lea appear ready to take the field on the
question of Lipton's. Seven mortal COL
umns of an Irish nationalist newspaper
taken up with an English news agency's
gloriication Of the murderous carnage at
Omdurnan, is too much to bear. We
protest against it. Humanity revolts at
the Omdurman slaughter, and the young
men of Ireland ought not to be taught
to regard that butchery in any but re-
pulsive and sickening light. Woe, woe,
that any of the blood spilled there should
stain Irish hands.