Catholic Info
Traditional Catholic Faith => The Catholic Bunker => Topic started by: Matthew on September 08, 2009, 08:27:35 PM
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Back in the 1960's our neighborhood was like that. We actually knew very little aobut each other's private livesin any intimate sense, but the families knew who had what skills.
There was a period when the cities began burning out the neighborhoods. Only the race riots got historically recorded. All the other burnings such as the burning of North Village in Webster, Massachusetts alongside the burning of Bondsville and followed by the burning of Holyoke and many others across the country were not recorded, but we were at war for survival.
I grew up in North Village. It was such a purely Catholic village that my mother did not have to set an alarm clock for holy days since she knew she would hear the neighbors leaving for the Irish church whose services were earlier than our French, and the others in the neighborhood were either in our parish, the Irish, or the Polish.
New Year's morning, about 3 am, she thought she heard the neighbors and began to wake up to get us all up for Mass, but discovered that it was not the banging of a door, but the explosions of buildings that she heard.
We woke and the neighbors gathered as we watched the mills near our houses go up in flames, and the men organized a watch on our roofs with garden-hoses while the women gathered with the rosary in our livingroom. There were three or four rosary circles in the various tenements while the men got up on the roofs, and the fire department came through to tell us they would not try to save our houses and we must leave.
I remember my father's back blocking the door as he argued with them. I could not believe my 11-yr-old ears and I understood what the adults were saying when they turned and said "we won't leave" and the prayer ring was set up while mother and brother and I gathered some things in preparation in case we do leave. I remember picking up a statuette of John-John saluting and packing it while my little brother cried because he could not fit his racing-car set into the bag mother gave him.
The fire raged out of control for a week. Barricades were put up around our neighborhood, and we thought they were just to keep sight-seers out but when my father drove my little brother and me to Mass, leaving my mother and big brother to hold the house, and all the men were emphatic we were going to Mass although I don't remember that they met to speak, only to show each family's face...
When we were going home the police sauntered out to the middle of the street of the barricade and stopped my father and said we would not be allowed in. He showed his license and said "my wife and son are there, let me get them" and the police said "no" and my father was a gentle quiet man but I saw a look of angry disbelief on his face as he repeated and the cop laughed and repeated, and then my dad leaned around and told my brother and me to get down behind the seat and he backed up, then he sped forward through the barricade that was on North Main Street, and I poked my head over the windowsill enough to see the surprised cop jump sidways, and thought we would grab my mother and brother and keep driving, but when we got home dad said we are staying.
There were lots of meetings that week and us kids sent upstairs whenever new adults showed up, and dad and neighbors he never socialized with were standing in the yards talking like brothers, and one time after a lot of yelling with some men and my dad yelling about no violence, he then came up stairs with a shot-gun and shoved it to the back of the closet and turned to my brother and me and said "don't touch that, don't speak of it, we will not keep it long and we will not have to use it!"
My little brother and I were enrolled in new riflery classes set up in the basement of the boys' club and I got a marksmanship certificate. I don't remember when the shot-gun disappeared from the closet, but we never did use it and one day it was not there, and we never spoke of the question of why it was suddenly ok to use the rifles provided by the boys' club, because we were a pacifist family, things just seemed to be happening on their own momentum.
We survived. OUr parish made it through a bare handful more years before the betrayal of the parishes by our own church did what the flames and threats failed to do to destroy our community, but I know that you are right Matthew, today people are not prepared, yet how prepared were we, back then? We were taken completely by surprise when our own gov't began to burn down our towns.
Too many of us have held our silence about this history of surviving an all-out war against us, letting the media spin its mythology while we always believed that somehow our old world would re-appear, as waking from a bad dream.
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Sorry, I was not 11. I was 13, because when I went to school with the smell of the smoke on my clothes, it was my freshman homeroom in the public high-school and the kids all amazed that I was from "the North Village", which they considered a cult because very few of us went to public school. I had rebelled against the nuns that year. It was 1969.
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Amazing story!
:read-paper:
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That sounds like another world!
I'm new, and probably ignorant (and young-ish) so: Why on earth were they burning down the neighborhood?
Is this docuмented somewhere? I've never heard of this.
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If you go into old archives of newspapers, in libraries that carry microfiche collections, you should find the reports. "The Webster Times" and the "Worcester Telegram/Gazette" as well as the "Boston Globe" would be places to look: January 1969. There may be old television footage, too.
The National Guard used the ruins of the neighborhood for training exercises after that. My brother and I watched from the back yard while some of the less over-protected kids went down and played the role of insurgents for the guardsmen. There are probably records of that available from local military historians.
You won't find much online. Most of that type of docuмentation doesn't seem to get included when old papers are digitized..... But if you dig you will find personal histories, collections among old-news hobbyists, etc.
The fires seemed to be co-incidental with the establishment of HUD, and the "Urban Renewal" programs, because the owners of the mills all got insurance money and the natural villages that had grown around active (and unionized) factories were replaced with housing projects and some new factories, but nothing like what was destroyed.
The owners were moving the textile industry briefly into the old slave states of the South and from there quickly went overseas, leaving the new welfare culture behind them in both regions.
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That sounds like another world!
I'm new, and probably ignorant (and young-ish) so: Why on earth were they burning down the neighborhood?
Is this docuмented somewhere? I've never heard of this.
The so-called "white flight" is actually a kind of ethnic cleansing as white middle-class people have been purposefully pushed out into suburbs and exurbs leaving solid Democrat-voting bases in the inner cities. Just start a few riots, vandalize a few homes or businesses, burn a few others, stop funding the local schools adequately, stop police patrolling as frequently, and conveniently build shopping malls outside of the urban centers and freeways to get to them. Ironically after a few decades white liberals decide they want the inner cities back and start raising taxes to push the African-Americans out. This is euphemistically called "gentrification" but is just another form of ethnic cleansing, again by the very same overeducated, overpaid liberals who engineered the first ethnic cleansing of whites.
Then we wonder why the two races are so often at each others' throats.
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We need to continuously meet as individuals and side-step the political puppetmasters who want to drive us to-and-fro that way. The pupppet-masters, which includes Catholic charity groups, want us to look at categories of peole as "voiceless" and let the self-anointed leaders tell people where to live.
They are disenfranchising most of the population in the process.
One of the interesting things about the suburb mentality is that they are suffering hugely now because of their ethic of preventing bus and pedestrian-friendly development. They are growing older, finding it hard to drive, keep up with expenses, their local towns have to keep roads up, etc and I just laugh at their complaints in my heart. I don't laugh at their hardship, but I laugh at the fact that they asked for it. And the tax-ploy of "gentrification" is biting them in the butt now that they are all going to be as poor as the rest of us!
I am so glad I did not grow up in the suburbs.
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Dr. E. Michael Jones discusses this exact thing in his book The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing.
http://www.culturewars.com/books.htm
I don't really recommend much else from him as his Catholic understanding is out of whack but the above is a solid piece of scholarship.
Andy
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Dr. E. Michael Jones discusses this exact thing in his book The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing.
http://www.culturewars.com/books.htm
I don't really recommend much else from him as his Catholic understanding is out of whack but the above is a solid piece of scholarship.
Andy
why do you say he is out-of-whack?
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Here in Austin the liberals are trying to have anyone with an income of less than $25,000 annual (individual) listed as a marginal, disenfranchised person.
Most of this is an Americorps-Vista assault on the working class, in full concert with the horrific assault on poor people that goes in in the Catholic fraud called "Caritas".
Why are people too stupid to ever have done the math showing that this is about double minimum wage, and the average person who works full time in most of the local businesses won't earn much more than minimum? Liberals themselves are driving self-employed out of work with their vounteer scabs and their attacks on whites who are content to work alongside others, and their attacks on American Hispanics who have been known to block the bridges against aliens (the Catholic church has disenfranchised ALL spanish-surnamed people with its insistence on identifying them ALL as immigrants! FYI: Like us French Catholics, they were here BEFORE the Irish and Anglo slave-keepers, after all!)
An individual can in fact live very well in Austin on less than $15,000, if they avoid most of the material craziness that is going on like a medieval carnival. But such an individual is under constant actual assault in churches and other social settings.
But God forbid middle-class Catholics should know as much about their own lifetime history as they do about fifteenth century theological disputes.
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(the Catholic church has disenfranchised ALL spanish-surnamed people with its insistence on identifying them ALL as immigrants! FYI: Like us French Catholics, they were here BEFORE the Irish and Anglo slave-keepers, after all!).
he :applause:re here
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He was until very recently very much against the SSPX and traditionalist Catholics in general. He also would not post a rejoinder by Michael Hoffman against a criticism of his book. That was very slimeballish of him.
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The reason that he softened his stance against trad catholics is because they are now the only ones who will listen to him, buy his books, and have him do speaking engagements. The novus ordo establishment that he used to defend so vigorously will have nothing to do with him. Heh!
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we all change and have to realize who our allies are.......
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Agreed!
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Dr. E. Michael Jones discusses this exact thing in his book The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing.
http://www.culturewars.com/books.htm
I don't really recommend much else from him as his Catholic understanding is out of whack but the above is a solid piece of scholarship.
Andy
Thanks for the link, Andy. I'm going to order this book after Christmas. I'm from the Chicago area and I saw our neighborhoods destroyed one after the other in the 70's. It looks like Jones explores some ideas I was definitely not aware of...
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No problem! He writes how it was a concerted effort by the wasp governing elite in this country to destroy the ethnic Catholic neighborhoods.
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My Dad would agree, Sedetrad. He remembers when "Irish need not apply" signs were posted and when crosses were burnt in the yards of Catholics. In the midwest, btw.
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It is sort of poetic justice how the wasp governing elite scuм lost their power to govern this country to Jєωιѕн immigrants that took over the media and banking of this country lolololol. I grew up in CT and have no love for WASPs. They are a cold people.
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It is their residual Calvinism....a very limited and dark view of the world.......
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No problem! He writes how it was a concerted effort by the wasp governing elite in this country to destroy the ethnic Catholic neighborhoods.
Which decades does he cover? The burning of North Village that I described was simultaneous with the decision by Bishop Flanagan (which was not his, of course, but handed down) to erase the ethnic parishes. Our language programs and everything had to go.
The Irish Catholics had the advantage as semi-anglos, and controlled the politics. We French continued to live in our little bubble of private culture longer than some, I think.
The economic structure of our parishes, which was a healthy mix of private property and communal concern, scared the WASPs, I think. If you consider the Protestant ethic that God shows favor in prosperity next to the Catholic ethic that we are loved through wealth and poverty, you can see that our prosperity during the '50s must have really shook them up while we were not even thinking about it.
It is no wonder they took us by surprise. My mother took a lot of grief from people who called her "paranoid" and other names for speaking of the assasination of JFK as part of a religious war, but only lately do I see what she was talking about.
The economic engine is driven by religious culture, after all.
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He was until very recently very much against the SSPX and traditionalist Catholics in general. He also would not post a rejoinder by Michael Hoffman against a criticism of his book. That was very slimeballish of him.
Could you be a little more specific here? I'm having a hard time distinguishing who criticized whose book here.
I like both of these authors. In Hoffman's book Judaism Discovered, he devotes a couple of pages to plagerism. And mentions that one author went out of his way to find another source in order to not cite Hoffman as a source. Hoffman does not mention who it was. But, I always suspected it might be Jones. Do you have any knowledge of this?
I am also aware that Jones' publication Culture Wars gave Judaism Discovered a bad review.
I have some criticisms of Judaism Discovered too. It seems to meander all over the place even though it has a lot of great information. And I find it hard to follow since I don't know the тαℓмυd like I am assuming Hoffman expects his readers to know it.
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Dr. E. Michael Jones discusses this exact thing in his book The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing.
http://www.culturewars.com/books.htm
I don't really recommend much else from him as his Catholic understanding is out of whack but the above is a solid piece of scholarship.
Andy
Thanks for the link, Andy. I'm going to order this book after Christmas. I'm from the Chicago area and I saw our neighborhoods destroyed one after the other in the 70's. It looks like Jones explores some ideas I was definitely not aware of...
One of the things that destroyed the Polish neighborhood was the Kennedy Expressway. It cut it right in half. If you are form Chicago, you must know about St. Stanislaus Kostka. That church was scheduled for demolition. And the rectory is literally touching the shoulder of that road. It is a miracle that one survived.
I was a mere infant when we moved. But, irony of ironies, I now use that same expressway to take my family into the city to attend Mass.
Bridgeport was Mayor Daley the elder's home stomping grounds. You may or may not know that is the reason Bridgeport was not cut in half by the Expressways.
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Dr. E. Michael Jones discusses this exact thing in his book The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing.
http://www.culturewars.com/books.htm
I don't really recommend much else from him as his Catholic understanding is out of whack but the above is a solid piece of scholarship.
Andy
Thanks for the link, Andy. I'm going to order this book after Christmas. I'm from the Chicago area and I saw our neighborhoods destroyed one after the other in the 70's. It looks like Jones explores some ideas I was definitely not aware of...
One of the things that destroyed the Polish neighborhood was the Kennedy Expressway. It cut it right in half. If you are form Chicago, you must know about St. Stanislaus Kostka. That church was scheduled for demolition. And the rectory is literally touching the shoulder of that road. It is a miracle that one survived.
I was a mere infant when we moved. But, irony of ironies, I now use that same expressway to take my family into the city to attend Mass.
Bridgeport was Mayor Daley the elder's home stomping grounds. You may or may not know that is the reason Bridgeport was not cut in half by the Expressways.
That is a fascinating period of history, the "car-i-fication" of cities! There are books about the infamous city planner "Moses" in New York that really analyze the process that was being played out all across the USA, a process of completely disrupting natural village-neighborhoods.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_renewal
I remember similar material in college about the way the British Empire and later the USA perfected a system of breaking up natural tribal lands in Africa in order to have incompatible groups sharing the same governments, especially among the Arabs.
Look where that got us!
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Dr. E. Michael Jones discusses this exact thing in his book The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing.
http://www.culturewars.com/books.htm
I don't really recommend much else from him as his Catholic understanding is out of whack but the above is a solid piece of scholarship.
Andy
Thanks for the link, Andy. I'm going to order this book after Christmas. I'm from the Chicago area and I saw our neighborhoods destroyed one after the other in the 70's. It looks like Jones explores some ideas I was definitely not aware of...
One of the things that destroyed the Polish neighborhood was the Kennedy Expressway. It cut it right in half. If you are form Chicago, you must know about St. Stanislaus Kostka. That church was scheduled for demolition. And the rectory is literally touching the shoulder of that road. It is a miracle that one survived.
I was a mere infant when we moved. But, irony of ironies, I now use that same expressway to take my family into the city to attend Mass.
Bridgeport was Mayor Daley the elder's home stomping grounds. You may or may not know that is the reason Bridgeport was not cut in half by the Expressways.
That is a fascinating period of history, the "car-i-fication" of cities! There are books about the infamous city planner "Moses" in New York that really analyze the process that was being played out all across the USA, a process of completely disrupting natural village-neighborhoods.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_renewal
I remember similar material in college about the way the British Empire and later the USA perfected a system of breaking up natural tribal lands in Africa in order to have incompatible groups sharing the same governments, especially among the Arabs.
Look where that got us!
Littlerose, where is your book?
I learn something new every time I read one of your posts!
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Dr. E. Michael Jones discusses this exact thing in his book The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing.
http://www.culturewars.com/books.htm
I don't really recommend much else from him as his Catholic understanding is out of whack but the above is a solid piece of scholarship.
Andy
Thanks for the link, Andy. I'm going to order this book after Christmas. I'm from the Chicago area and I saw our neighborhoods destroyed one after the other in the 70's. It looks like Jones explores some ideas I was definitely not aware of...
One of the things that destroyed the Polish neighborhood was the Kennedy Expressway. It cut it right in half. If you are form Chicago, you must know about St. Stanislaus Kostka. That church was scheduled for demolition. And the rectory is literally touching the shoulder of that road. It is a miracle that one survived.
I was a mere infant when we moved. But, irony of ironies, I now use that same expressway to take my family into the city to attend Mass.
Bridgeport was Mayor Daley the elder's home stomping grounds. You may or may not know that is the reason Bridgeport was not cut in half by the Expressways.
That is a fascinating period of history, the "car-i-fication" of cities! There are books about the infamous city planner "Moses" in New York that really analyze the process that was being played out all across the USA, a process of completely disrupting natural village-neighborhoods.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_renewal
I remember similar material in college about the way the British Empire and later the USA perfected a system of breaking up natural tribal lands in Africa in order to have incompatible groups sharing the same governments, especially among the Arabs.
Look where that got us!
Littlerose, where is your book?
I learn something new every time I read one of your posts!
Please pray for me to finish it. "Life" keeps interfering. I finally did take two years of the story (approx) to start an autobiogrpahy, then I started ficitionalizing it to free myself of privacy-anxiety (for to tell one's own story is to tell the other stories , too) and I finally did get about 25 chapters done.
Your words are very encouraging. One begins to fight with the questions of conscience when one writes personal witness and memoir, as in "is this just self-indulgence, pride, that I should think I am the one to tell it?" complicated by "If I don't tell that part, am I lying?" etc.
Then there are the painful memories, the unfinished business. etc... that can be an occasion of sin, because you can suddenly discover that you didn't really forgive someone after all and then all the pain and anger and bitterness comes in...
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Littlerose,
Just get it all down. All of it. Do not let 'perfect' be the enemy of 'pretty danged good' or even 'just okay.'
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ok, new year'sresolution: I will pull it out and start on it first thing each day before posting anything anywhere.
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ok, new year'sresolution: I will pull it out and start on it first thing each day before posting anything anywhere.
I will say a Hail Mary each day for this intention.