They Only Need To Get Into Your Head!

The insidious lie of "white privilege' and how nations are manipulated into self hatred.

A black, dilapidated street, avoided by all decent people; where the crazy houses were seized upon, and have been since, by some bold vagrants who, after establishing their own squalid colonies there, and finding no opposition, took to letting the rooms out to other vagabonds and by degrees established the dens as lodging-houses. It is a street of misfortune and misery; inhabited by people who might otherwise be in gaol, hospital, or the grave.”

— Charles Dickens, Bleak House, Chapter 16, (1853).

The aforementioned is one of the most vivid and harrowing descriptions of tenement poverty in Charles Dickens’s work appears in his novel, Bleak House where he describes the slums of Tom-All-Alone’s, a fictional stand-in for the worst of London’s urban squalor. Today, those on the left have created one more myth upon many others that attempts to create a binary of victim and victimiser where “white” equals perpetual offender, and “black or brown”, as incessantly offended. The singular tool for achieving this and imbedding it into the public consciousness is the adoption of Marxist critical theory and in particular, the concept of ‘white privilege’.

The concept of "white privilege," emerging primarily from American racial discourse, has increasingly been projected onto European societies, including Ireland. This essay argues that such application not only lacks historical coherence but actively distorts the lived realities of Irish people, particularly under British colonialism. The suffering of the Irish, compounded by famine, war, religious persecution, and socioeconomic exploitation, undermines any simplistic narrative of inherited racial advantage. Furthermore, the same elites who inflicted hardship on the Irish people historically now promote the rhetoric of white guilt without addressing their own historical role.

In recent decades, critical race theory and associated concepts such as "white privilege" have migrated from their American origins into broader global discourse. While these frameworks were developed to address the particular legacy of slavery and racial segregation in the United States, they are increasingly applied to vastly different contexts, including postcolonial Ireland. This imposition not only demonstrates a disregard for historical specificity, but it also reconfigures narratives of victimhood and agency in ways that are intellectually dishonest and politically corrosive (Murray, 2017).

Critical theory originated with the Frankfurt School in the early 20th century and is rooted in Marxist thought. Unlike classical Marxism, which focused on economic class struggle, critical theorists such as Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and later Herbert Marcuse expanded the analysis to include culture, ideology, and power structures. Their goal was not just to interpret society but to critique and transform it by exposing systems of domination—be they economic, racial, or linguistic. At its core, critical theory maintains that all knowledge is socially constructed and that traditional institutions (law, education, media) serve to perpetuate existing hierarchies. Critical race theory is but one subset of critical theory.

Critical race theory (CRT) emerged in the United States in the late 1970s and 1980s, building on the foundations of critical theory and legal realism. Rooted in Marxist and postmodern thought, CRT argues that racism is not merely individual prejudice but a structural feature of society embedded in laws, institutions, and cultural norms. Pioneers like Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Richard Delgado emphasized that concepts like neutrality, objectivity, and meritocracy often conceal racial inequalities. CRT challenges liberal approaches to racial justice, insisting instead that systemic change is needed to dismantle the underlying power dynamics that sustain racial hierarchies.

The concept that emerged from critical race theory and gained prominence in the late 20th century, particularly through the work of Peggy McIntosh is “white privilege’. It refers to the unearned advantages that white people are said to experience in societies structured by racial inequality. Rather than focusing on overt racism, the idea emphasizes subtle, systemic benefits—such as societal trust, representation, and assumed competence—that white individuals may enjoy unconsciously. Rooted in Marxist and poststructuralist frameworks, the term is used to critique liberal individualism and to highlight how institutional structures perpetuate racial disparities, even in the absence of intentional discrimination.

The liberal left activism, with their strict gospel of equity is largely funded, ironically, by venture capitalism and billionaire ‘philanthropists’. These activists have become the dons of universities and the policy makers by extension. Their goal? To upend Christian Western civilisation. Make no mistake about it, these activists do not care about any victim, whether black nor brown, they instead will use any means to destroy the pillars of the west. These pillars of tradition, according to Antonio Gramsci, another Marxist theorist, ensured that no militaristic revolution of the proletariat would succeed whilst the pillars of the tradition remained solidly erect.

Antonio Gramsci, reflecting on the failed socialist revolutions in Western Europe—especially following World War I—concluded that classical Marxist revolution was unlikely to succeed in the West because of the enduring strength of cultural institutions like family, religion, and national identity. Unlike in Russia, where the state was brittle and civil society weak, Western societies had robust cultural and moral frameworks that bound people together. Gramsci observed that when crises came, the working class did not rally around internationalist proletarian ideals, but instead rallied behind traditional loyalties: the Church, the nation, and the family.

To explain this, Gramsci developed the theory of cultural hegemony—the idea that ruling classes maintain power not only through coercive means but by securing consent through cultural institutions that shape people’s values and worldviews. Thus, he argued that before a political revolution could occur, a cultural revolution had to take place—one that would erode the traditional moral order and replace it with a new secular, socialist consciousness. In short, Gramsci recognized that the cultural foundations of Western civilization—not just its economic structures—were the main bulwark against revolution. Consequently, Marxists decided to attack the West through culture instead of the bullet. One means of achieving this downfall of traditional Christian hegemony would be to 1) Prime and condition the population to react to certain injustices, real, perceived or wholly fictitious and 2) Frame existing traditional structures as weapons of oppression. To complete this task, history must be revised and labels attached to the past. It didn’t matter whether it was accurate, all the mattered was the masses, reduced to empty vessels who respond only to emotionalism not reason, would begin to hate itself by first hating its own history and traditions. Critical theory was one means of framing the past, and in particular a subset called critical race theory. “White privilege” is the petrol that drives the vehicle, critical race theory, and the end line is social revolution.

With the tools at their disposal, next is application to the history of the West, conveniently ignoring facts along the way. This is what is happening in Ireland today, and our faith and culture is in their crosshairs. The Irish people, and our European cousins are being reframed as monsters, in particular those who historically suffered as much as anyone else. Once the framing is complete, the self-loathing follows and then the eventual collapse as the self-hatred opens the doors to those who seek our replacement and destruction. The only ones immune of course to the collapse will be those exceptionally wealthy who are funding the academics, journalists, politicians and policy making bureaucrats. However, there is a way to prevent this and that is by being well acquainted with the truth.

Have the Irish been privileged as the critical theorists’ warrant? Well, Ireland's colonial experience under English and later British rule from the 12th century onward has been marked by violent repression, mass dispossession, and systemic underdevelopment. The 16th and 17th centuries were especially catastrophic. During the Nine Years' War (1594–1603), Oliver Cromwell's conquest (1649–1653), and the Williamite War (1688–1691), tens of thousands of Irish civilians were killed, exiled, or dispossessed. The Cromwellian campaign alone saw an estimated 40% drop in the Irish population through war, famine, disease, and forced migration, including the transportation of Irish men, women, and children into indentured servitude in the Caribbean (O’Siochrú, 2008).

Historian Micheál Ó Siochrú observes:

“Ireland in the 1650s was a devastated and broken country, its population decimated by war, disease, and famine... the sheer scale of the human catastrophe defies modern comprehension” (O’Siochrú, 2008).

The destruction of farmland, scorched earth tactics, and reprisals against civilian populations contributed to famine and depopulation on a massive scale. Historian Ciarán Brady notes that some English administrators in the 17th century even advocated famine as a tool of pacification, citing one Lord Deputy who believed

“the sword must do the work of the plough” (Brady, 1994).

Population decline was so pronounced that between 1641 and 1652, the island lost between 20% and 50% of its inhabitants, depending on the region (Lenihan, 2001).

Even outside periods of open warfare, the everyday conditions for ordinary Irish people remained harsh and dehumanizing. English travellers in the 17th and 18th centuries frequently recorded their astonishment at the living conditions of the Irish peasantry. Houses were often no more than turf huts with thatched roofs and mud floors, with no chimneys and little furniture. Writing in 1732, English observer John Bush described rural Irish homes as “wretched cabins, cold and smoky... some so low they are obliged to creep into them” and added that they were “sunk half into the earth,” often shared by livestock and families alike (Bush, 1732).

The diet of the poor consisted almost exclusively of potatoes and buttermilk, when available. There was no public health system, sanitation, or state assistance. Social support was provided, in so far as it existed, by the Catholic Church and charitable institutions such as the Vincent de Paul Society in the 19th century. Christine Kinealy notes,

“It was left to religious organizations and private philanthropy to fill the vacuum left by a disinterested state” (Kinealy, 1994).

The workhouse system, introduced under the 1838 Poor Law Act, was not a solution but a deterrent: “it was not intended to offer comfort, but to instil shame” (Kinealy, 1994).

By the 19th century, urban areas like Dublin were characterized by extreme overcrowding and structural neglect. The tenement buildings of Georgian Dublin, subdivided into one-room slum dwellings, often lacked basic sanitation. Multiple families might occupy a single floor, sharing outdoor latrines and living amidst damp, vermin, and disease. As late as 1911, census records show that over 26,000 families in Dublin lived in single-room tenements (Prunty, 1998).

Jacinta Prunty writes:

“Dublin’s slums were not only a symbol of poverty, they were environments that bred disease, despair and vice. Conditions were unfit for human habitation, yet generations were born and died within them” (Prunty, 1998).

Desperation drove many women into prostitution, not as a profession but as a last resort for survival. The collapse of traditional rural economies and the lure of city jobs that never materialized meant many women were left destitute. British reports and social reformers like William Stead noted the visibility of Irish prostitutes in both Dublin and London. In his exposé, Stead described how “the streets swarmed with Irish girls... abandoned to vice not by nature, but by hunger” (Stead, 1885).

Despite these historical realities, contemporary elites — often situated in global media, NGOs, and academia — invoke the rhetoric of “white privilege” in ways that erase Ireland’s colonial past. The same strata of society that once profited from the exploitation of the Irish working classes now deflect scrutiny by recasting guilt as a collective moral burden for all people of European descent.

As Pascal Bruckner argues, “We have become the vampires of our own past... addicted to remorse without restitution, confession without responsibility” (Bruckner, 2010).

This narrative reframes history to suggest that the Irish, as Europeans, were part of an oppressor class, despite centuries of evidence to the contrary. It facilitates policies that dissolve national identity, justify mass immigration without consent, and undermine historical memory by imposing foreign moral categories onto indigenous experience (Foster, 1988).

The claim that Irish people, by virtue of being “white,” are beneficiaries of historic privilege collapses under historical scrutiny. The Irish were victims of conquest, famine, indentured servitude, and systemic poverty. Their homes were turf hovels, their cities slums, and their women prey to both economic desperation and moral condemnation. To speak of white privilege in the Irish context is not only inaccurate, but obscene.

Historical integrity demands that we tell the truth about suffering — even when it complicates imported ideological frameworks. The people of Ireland, like many across Europe, deserve not inherited guilt, but the dignity of remembrance but that is inconvenient for those who peddle lies to disturb the truth for political gain.

While this essay has focused primarily on the Irish historical experience, it must be stressed too that the suffering of European peoples under their own elites was by no means confined to Ireland. The framing of “white privilege” as a homogeneous inheritance of advantage ignores the fact that much of Europe was governed for centuries by aristocracies, empires, and ruling classes that inflicted grievous suffering on their own people—often on a scale equal to or exceeding that of colonized societies abroad (Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1962).

The works of Charles Dickens offer a devastating portrait of industrial England, where child labor, debtor’s prisons, slum tenements, and malnutrition were endemic. In Oliver Twist and Hard Times, Dickens exposes the moral rot and institutional cruelty of 19th-century Britain, where the English poor were little more than economic fodder for an expanding capitalist machine (Dickens, Hard Times, 1854; Wilson, The Victorians, 2002). The working classes of Manchester, Birmingham, and London lived lives that were brutal, short, and dehumanized, often without representation, legal recourse, or basic sanitation (Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, 1845).

In 19th- and early 20th-century Britain, many respectable women in urban centres like London, Manchester, Glasgow, and Cardiff faced destitution when their husbands died or abandoned them. With limited access to education, no state welfare, and few employment opportunities deemed socially acceptable for women—particularly mothers or older widows—prostitution often became the only means of survival.

This descent into sex work was rarely the result of moral failing but of economic desperation. Historian Judith Walkowitz notes that many such women were

“…respectable in every sense of the word—married, church-going, and poor—until misfortune struck” (Prostitution and Victorian Society, 1980).

The death of a breadwinner could leave a woman with multiple children, no savings, and no way to pay rent or buy food. Domestic service, sewing, or laundry work were poorly paid and physically demanding, offering no security.

Many reformers and social investigators of the time, including William Acton and Henry Mayhew, documented how widows and abandoned wives were disproportionately represented among urban prostitutes, often working from their own homes or from lodging houses. As Mayhew recorded in London Labour and the London Poor (1851),

“the streets are filled with women who have turned to this life, not by vice, but by bereavement and poverty.”

In this way, prostitution was not a deviant lifestyle but a last resort for survival in a society that offered no safety net—particularly for women.

In Scotland and Wales, industrialization and the Highland Clearances devastated indigenous populations. During the 18th and 19th centuries, landlords expelled tens of thousands of Gaelic-speaking Highlanders from ancestral lands to make way for sheep farming, triggering mass emigration, homelessness, and the destruction of clan society (Richards, The Highland Clearances, 2000). In Wales, extractive industries such as coal mining subjected entire communities to dangerous labour conditions, child exploitation, and subsistence wages (Morgan, Rebirth of a Nation: Wales 1880–1980, 1981).

In France too there had been widespread famine, aristocratic excess, and feudal abuse. Spain, likewise, maintained feudal hierarchies and religious oligarchies into the modern era, with vast disparities between landlords and landless labourers. The impoverished peasantry of Andalusia and Galicia lived under quasi-medieval conditions well into the 20th century (Carr, Spain: A History, 2000).

The critical point being made here is this: the vast majority of Europeans—"white” though they may be—were not historically privileged. They were serfs, indentured labourers, child factory workers, conscripts, and expendables (Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State, 1974). The architects of their misery were not foreign powers, but internal elites, drawn from monarchy, finance, landed aristocracy, and later the industrial bourgeoisie.

Today, the descendants or inheritors of these elite classes—often ensconced in global media, universities, NGOs, and corporate platforms—propagate the concept of “white privilege”, not as a self-rebuke, but as a means of transferring guilt away from themselves and onto ordinary working- and middle-class Europeans (Murray, The Strange Death of Europe, 2017). They demand ideological submission from the descendants of those who suffered most, while paying no restitution, ceding no power, and taking no historical accountability.

To burden contemporary Europeans—many of whom still suffer under stagnant wages, post-industrial decay, and social alienation—with collective guilt for structures they never built and atrocities they never sanctioned, is not justice. It is a second dispossession—this time, of memory, dignity, and the right to historical truth.

People should be reminded too that welfare intervention is a relatively recent historical development, largely emerging in the late 19th and 20th centuries, because modern society tends to project contemporary norms backwards—what some historians call “presentism” and this ignorance shapes a distorted public consciousness. There is a general assumption that social safety nets, housing support, pensions, and public healthcare have always been part of the social order, when in fact they are the product of political struggle, industrialization, and moral reform movements, and were non-existent for most of human history. This is one reason why the Catholic Church is largely, in the historical context of providing alms and other social interventions, is recast as a villain rather than the hero it was.

Before the rise of the welfare state, life for ordinary Europeans—especially the working class and rural poor—was marked by constant precarity. Illness, injury, death of a spouse, or a failed harvest could plunge entire families into destitution. There were no unemployment benefits, child supports, or state pensions. People relied on extended family, charity, parish relief, or the Church, and when those failed, they faced the workhouse, street begging, or in many cases, death. Historian E.P. Thompson described pre-industrial English labourers as living lives “constantly on the edge of subsistence,” where hunger was a seasonal reality (The Making of the English Working Class, 1963).

The relative comfort of modern Western societies has led to a collective amnesia about this past. In addition, political narratives, especially those promoting ideas like "white privilege," often ignore the class-based suffering of European populations, reducing complex social histories to simplistic racial binaries. This distorts memory and detaches people from the reality that for centuries, most Europeans lived without protection, support, or security—surviving only through resilience, religion, and community bonds.

What should be borne in mind too is that In the 19th century, laissez-faire economics emerged as the dominant economic ideology in Britain and much of Europe. Rooted in the classical liberalism of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, it championed minimal government intervention, free markets, and the belief that economic outcomes were best left to the "invisible hand" of supply and demand. The British government, in particular, adopted a hands-off approach to poverty, refusing to interfere in the economy even during periods of famine, unemployment, or industrial crisis. This ideology justified the withdrawal of the state from social responsibility, leaving the poor to survive as best they could through charity, family, or the dreaded workhouse.

Complementing this economic philosophy was social Darwinism, a pseudo-scientific theory that applied Darwin's concept of natural selection to human societies. Figures like Francis Galton, Herbert Spencer, and Émile Gautier argued that poverty, illness, and even moral failure were hereditary and inevitable, and that society should not interfere with the "natural order" by aiding the weak. Herbert Spencer, who coined the term “survival of the fittest,” insisted that helping the poor merely prolonged the life of the unfit and weakened society as a whole, while Francis Galton, the father of eugenics, believed that intelligence and moral character were inherited, and that society should encourage the reproduction of the “fit” while discouraging that of the “unfit.”

Émile Gautier, a French writer and theorist, similarly argued that social hierarchy was biologically inevitable and warned against what he called "sentimental socialism" that tried to protect the unworthy.

Together, laissez-faire economics and social Darwinism created a powerful ideological framework that morally sanctioned inequality, depicting suffering not as a result of structural injustice but as a natural and even necessary process. These ideas were used to resist welfare reform, justify colonialism, and condemn social activism as misguided interference with evolutionary progress.

This worldview dominated elite thinking well into the 20th century, and only began to decline after the horrors of the World Wars made the moral and social costs of such doctrines impossible to ignore. In many respects it is still a favoured idea amongst certain progressives like Peter Singer, Yuval Harari and other World Economic Forum thinkers.

The bare faced truth was that life was and remains extremely hard for most people and “white” people were not immune from hardship nor were their ancestors from the workhouses, coffin famine ships, prisons, over crowded tenements, slums, rural hovels, street corners as prostitutes and killing their own offspring due to hardship. Their fate was often ameliorated thanks to Christian Churches, in particular, the Catholic Church who established hospitals for the indigent, orphanages for the bereaved, sustenance for the hungry and most of all, spiritual leadership for the hopeless.

There is an insidious enemy within the gates and most of the masses have been convinced that the walls were rotten and the gates repressive, and so, Western civilisation is vulnerable to annihilation.

To end; there is an old Gaelic sensibility we need to remember.

“There is no poison like that brewed in the hearth.”

Sources Cited (In-Text):

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Brady, Ciarán. Interrogating Ireland's Past: Essays in Honour of R. Dudley Edwards. University College Dublin Press, 1994.

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Foster, R.F. Modern Ireland: 1600–1972. Penguin, 1988.

Kinealy, Christine. This Great Calamity: The Irish Famine 1845–52. Gill & Macmillan, 1994.

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