Comrades and Brothers: As the last summer of this most terrible of centuries begins, I find myself thinking of a day in early summertwenty-eight years ago. On that day, having completed my last final exam and thus my last Hill High School, I walked up to my car in the parking lot on a hill beside the school. I stopped at the summit of that hill and turned, looking back at the buildings, remembering all that had occurred there over the past three years. In that moment I made a silent vow to myself that I would devote my life to ensuring that someday, no White boy or girl would ever again have to go through what I had to gothrough in that place. To my frequent amazement, this vow of mine I have kept through almost three decades of chaos and madness. The century draws to a close and it is not inappropriate, I think, for us as a group to pause for the few remaining months of it and assess where we have all been andwhat we have done. Many years ago an author named Norman Spinrad wrote a book called The Iron Dream. The book was not a very memorable one, a kind of literary joke, purporting to be what Adolf Hitler would have written had he emigrated to the United States after the Beer Hall Putsch and become a science fiction writer in New York.
Richard H. Curtiss is executive editor of The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (PO Box 53062, Washington, DC 20009). This report is reprinted from the June-July 1997 issue. When he retired from the US foreign service, Curtiss was chief inspector of the US Information Agency. He is also the author of A Changing Image: American Perspectives of the Arab-Israeli Dispute and Stealth PACs: Lobbying Congress for Control of US Middle East Policy.
My Life for Ireland (German: Mein Leben für Irland) is a NS propaganda movie from 1941 directed by Max W. Kimmich, covering a story of Irish heroism and martyrdom over two generations under the occupation of the evil British.
The film covers the story of two generations of an Irish nationalist family starting with Michael O’Brien (Werner Hinz) and following with his son, also Michael (Will Quadflieg), eighteen years later in 1921.
The film commences in Dublin in 1903. A squad of police officers break into a thatched hovel and evict the family, throwing a young child to the floor. However they are ambushed by a group of Irish Nationalists and a long fire fight ensues. Michael O’Brien is captured and is sentenced to death. While he is in jail, his pregnant fiancée Maeve visits him and they are secretly married. Afterwards, Michael hands his wife a silver cross that would always be worn by the best Irish freedom fighter. On the cross, the words My life for Ireland are engraved.
Eighteen years later, in 1921, his son Michael Jr. is expecting to pass his school leaving exams. As the son of an infamous Irish nationalist, he has been educated at St Edwards College, a school run by British teachers. This way the British government wanted to re-educate Irish pupils into „worthful“ British civilians.
