The Berkeley Library Should be Renamed

Introduction

Well the drunken clown’s still hanging round”

– Townes Van Zandt, ‘Fare Thee Well, Miss Carousel’

In ‘The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland’, Douglas Hyde laments that the Irish are “a nation of imitators”. Little has changed to refute the unfortunate veracity of this statement. In fact, the Irish propensity to imitate – impelled by a dearth of creativity and passive compliance – has accentuated to such a degree that its contemporary debasement is hardly conceivable.

This national pathology is evinced by the recent cries to re-name the Berkeley Library. Fueled by the miasma of moralistic Afrocentrism, Trinity’s dysgenic striver strata of shitlib cokeheads are indignant. 

Given the sheer irrelevance of West-Africans to Irish history, there is something deeply inauthentic about the left’s fetishistic attitude toward their history. Thus, it was a god-send when they discovered a connection between an “Irishman” and the trans-atlantic slave trade. “Finally, we have something to browbeat them with!”.

The whole fiasco surrounding the Berkeley Library betrays the left’s ignorance of Irish history, and, specifically, the relationship between the native Gael and the Alien Protestant Ascendancy; a people both ethnically and religiously distinct from the natives – no, Gabi Fullam, the natives aren’t pygmies.

George Berkely, like Trinity College Dublin, benefited from the colonial subjugation of a native people – the Irish Nation. The near-erasure of our language, folkways, economic standing, the persecution of our religion, and so on. And it should be on this basis, and this alone, that we agree with our ignorant friends among Trinity’s left that the Berkeley Library should be renamed.

What follows is a brief illustration of Berkely’s character; followed by a modest proposal…

Berkeley: Anti-Irish Preacher of Wage Cuckery

“Though I am in no Secret of the Court of Rome, yet I will venture to affirm, that neither Pope, nor Cardinals, will be pleased to hear, that those of their Communion are distinguished above all others, by Sloth, Dirt, and Beggary” – George Berkeley, ‘A Word to the Wise’

An indictment of Berkeley should not be predicated upon his proprietorship of Bantus; his helots were lowly Igbos, rather than noble Yorubas. His liability rests upon a far more egregious wrong-doing: exhorting the noble Gael to wage cuck.

Published in 1749, his ‘A Word to the Wise’, which I came across while perusing ‘An Cartlann’, is the proverbial smoking gun. Mired with duplicitous, quasi-ecumenical rhetoric, it was directed toward the Irish Catholic clergy; calling on the priesthood to regenerate their fallen flock through an abrogation of the Gael’s purported indolence.

Berkely claims to write with a “well meant zeal”, aiming “to lay open the Sore in order to heal it”. But his words betray different motives. It is transparent that Berkely’s remarks about the Irish go beyond mere description; ‘A Word to the Wise’ is an indulgent text, the real objects of which are twofold. Firstly, to wax lyrical about the moral blemishes of the Irish nation. Secondly, and more practically, to re-cast the Gael as an Anglo wage cuck: servile and exploitable.

For Berkeley, the “Irish are wedded to Dirt”, too lazy to even wash. Serial avoiders of strenuous labour, he notes their propensity to slack off on the job. Begging is emblematic of the Gael’s sorry state, which Berkely attributes to their most notable moral failing: “their innate hereditary Sloth”. To illustrate his point, Berkely mentions a beggar he happened across. He offered him a job, but the latter refused – his decision was likely motivated by aristocratic ancestral apparitions.

He exhorts the Clergy to induce a Protestant work ethic among their flock. Invoking the example of English workers, he comments on their commitment to labour. For the English worker, life is transfigured by work; one lives to work. Berkely states: “In England, when the Labour of the Field is over, it is usual for Men to be­take themselves to some other Labour of a different Kind”.

Berkely’s views are emblematic of the uncultured Anglo-Irish protestant ruling-caste. In many respects a pseudo-aristocracy, they would have had little sympathy with Aristotle’s views on slavery and work. The Anglo-Irish novelist Oliver Goldsmith, a contemporary of Berkeley, charged them with being more concerned with horses than books.

The destruction of the Gaelic aristocracy was considered a tragedy by Dáibhí Ó Bruadair, for it marked the destruction of a native, learned aristocracy that played an active role in the arts as a patron, and the ascension of pseudo-aristocratic philistines – the uncultured bougie wretches of England.

Yet this aristocratic spirit lingers. Its occasional instantiation punctuates the mundanity of Dublin life. When a lad collects excessive PUP. When Baldy asks you for a tenner on the red line. When a gaggle of toerags unanimously do wheelies on their bikes on the footpath; the front wheel aloft like a tarantula’s fangs, aided by scowls from dysgenic countenances. This spirit is an affront to efficiency, civility in an uncivil society, and pleasing the middling thrall.

If alive today, Berkely would undoubtedly aid and abet the ongoing oscillation of Dublin toward the post-young fella society – to cleanse it’s subaltern character. 

He’d pack scangers into anti-racist seminars. Subsequently, they’d be sentenced to 4 decades of penal servitude as wage cucks in some dingy office block for slagging off Ebun Joseph. Every Scrambler would be scrapped, and a piebald would be a scarce sight – usurped on grounds of animal safety (never heard of her). Worst of all, Finglas would be filled with Fiachras – not a dole-chad in sight.

Conclusion: A Modest Proposal

“When the Irish Nation needs explanation or apology for John Mitchel the Irish Nation will need its shroud.” – Arthur Griffith, Preface to the 1913 Edition of John Mitchel’s ‘Jail Journal’

Conservatives, inevitably, will focus on the iconoclastic angle of the Berkeley controversy. I can foresee the headlines and the pathetic arguments already – “Cancelling Historical Figures is not the Solution to Racism”. The usual hackneyed apologetics will be engaged in, to which the left will simply double-down and repeat their own clichés until everyone finds a new issue to laser in on. It’s all so tiring.

We agree with the left, George Berkely’s name should no longer denominate the library. Yet, mere caustic destruction is insufficient. It is necessary to propose a replacement. A figure worthy of emulation and respect. Not just a man of good deeds, but a writer too – after all, we’re naming a library after him!

The library ought to be named after a man who opposed the capitalist system, who never tired of struggling against the world’s largest colonial empire, and who defied this empire’s vaunted claim to superiority.

The man to whom I refer is John Mitchel, and in memory of his honourable life, I’ll pay deference and allow him the last word:“But what then? Ireland was our country. The Irish race was our flesh and blood. The alternative was, either to see a foreign enemy scourge our people from the face of their own land, by famine and pestilence, ‘law’, political economy, and red tape, or to set our backs to the wall and fight to the death.”