I don’t know about the States but it’s not all that long ago that Irish people were distinctly infra dig in the UK. I’m 46, Irish, my mother was English. We used to travel over London fairly regularly for holidays. One of my memories of the late 60’s early 70’s was seeing the following sign in the windows of hotels, bed and breakfasts, cafes:

No Irish. No Blacks. No Dogs.

Completely unimaginable to see such a sign in London or indeed any English town today.

Posted by: markfromireland | Nov 4 2006 22:49 utc | 4

Aryans and slavs managed to combine successfully in WW2 to massacre jewish semites, no doubt there is an element of anti-jewish anti semitism in New Russia to meld comfortably into the anti-islamic anti-semtism.
‘New Russia’ is creating some very strange bed-fellows, I watched a doco yesterday which featured the grandson of one of Stalin’s favoured few living in genteel poverty in his dacha set in the forest surrounding Moscow.
He had decided to put the dacha on the market as the neighborhood was no longer what it was. The Shostakoviches (yes that Shostakovich )had sold their land next door off for sub-division.
New Russia have moved in with a vengeance. Post modernist cardboard boxes crammed against pseudo Tsarist erstaz roccoco palaces, next to mediterranian villas, alongside monstrous circa 1940’s californian bungalows.
Then cut to a mid forties fellow who was expelled from the Party in the Gorbachov era because he had too much money. Something he doesn’t want to talk about now as it is so shameful.
Not so shameful that it stopped him accumulating wealth however. We tour his ‘just outside Moscow’ monstrosity which is in the bad taste of the Romanoffs, featuring more than 2000 square metres of gold leaf! Everything has been coated with gold and given it’s superb condition and the fragility of the medium one must assume that he employs a staff of gilders who repair any wear and tear.
He has a number of ‘artists’ in his employ. These technically proficient exponents of visual imagery indulge the owner’s passion for Italian art, particularly Botticelli. The walls are sag under the weight of somewhat familiar murals surrounded and highlighted by the ubiquitous gold leaf. ‘Somewhat familiar’ because the faces have been changed. Venus has the face of the owner’s wife. His own somewhat nondescript dial adorns the visage of the most dominant male in every ‘painting’.
Liberace on crystal meth with enough slaves to build a pyramid, is the closest I come to putting the overall impression into a phrase.
But the owner isn’t that attached to it. Like everything else in his life this ‘masterpiece’ is for sale. “Surely” he says only half jokingly, “the director general of The BBC could afford a home such as this. Here’s my card should he be interested.”
No doubt there has been some trickle down to ordinary russians but nothing liike what they imagined. These people want things sorted now and given their 20th century political experience is still pretty close it is difficult to imagine them turning to ‘the left’ in vast numbers which leaves the right with it’s message of genetic superiority and it’s culture of blaming others, particularly by race or nationality, for one’s predicament.
If anyone hasn’t seen Downfall or Der Untergang the compelling Oliver Hirschbiegel movie of Hitler’s last days, they should do so.
The point that raphieboy made about Hitler blaming defeat on the German people’s lack of fortitude is made time and time again in this movie which was based on the accounts by two people who survived ‘the bunker’. It wasn’t only Adolf who felt this way, the dreadful Dr Goebbels and his even more fanatic significant other, Magda, also cursed the German people for their lack of determination during their last days.
Interesting to consider that blame, especially when reading articles such as Vanity Fair’s Neo Culpa where amerika’s Prince of Darkness Richard Perle, a man who has always carried the aura of a Josef Goebbels, blames the Iraqi debacle on the weakness of everyone but himself.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Nov 5 2006 0:18 utc | 6

What’s the name of your documentary DiD?

Posted by: beq | Nov 5 2006 0:49 utc | 8

“No Irish. No Blacks. No Dogs.””No Irish. No Blacks. No Dogs.”
Funny, I’m Irish-American, and studied at Oxford from 1972 to 1974, and don’t remember seeing any such signs.

Posted by: lysias | Nov 5 2006 16:46 utc | 10

Maybe not in Oxford, dear boy/gel, but it was rife elsewhere in Blighty, especially in London, and apparently in Finsbury Park, viz. the title of the autobiography of erstwhile denizen of that manor, one John Lydon: No Irish…

Posted by: Dismal Science | Nov 5 2006 20:34 utc | 12

One theory I’ve read is that Putin allows the neo-Nazis to exist because they help to make him look good in comparison. He can make a big show of condemning racism and fascism, and the existence of “real” fascists distracts international attention away from the Kremlin’s pet youth movement, Nashi, which puports to be “anti-fascist” but has been accused of vigilantism and xenophobia.

Posted by: Gag Halfrunt | Nov 7 2006 11:37 utc | 14