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Part IV: America's Late Stage Imperial Dementia:

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The 12th cc. Norman Invasion of Ireland, led by Strongbow, brought with it the Fitzgeralds' genetic connection to the Camelot mythology (via the marriage of Gerald of Winsor to Princess Nest). JFK brought this connection to the White House thereby challenging the Anglo/American political establishment to its roots. It has continued to haunt the establishment to this day.


America, an Empire in Twilight Series

In 2005 when a historian in Wexford Ireland discovered that President George W. Bush was a descendent of the 12thcentury Earl Richard de Clare, "Strongbow" it caused something of a commotion in the British press. Ever since John Fitzgerald Kennedy, tracing a presidential candidate's lineage to Ireland has become a common theme. But according to the Guardian having Strongbow as an ancestor, "a desperate land-grabbing warlord whose calamitous foreign adventure led to the suffering of generations" was something of an embarrassment.

As an Anglo-Norman Earl with Viking lineage from one of the most powerful Norman/French families in 12thcentury England, NOT being a land-grabbing warlord was probably a death sentence. In a world where might meant right Strongbow's real crime was his challenge to the authority of the Anglo/French King Henry II's House of Anjou and his threat to set himself up as a rival Norman King of Ireland. Also unmentioned in this Guardian article titled, "Scion of traitors and warlords: why Bush is coy about his Irish links" is Strongbow's even stronger genetic links to the Fitzgerald antecedents to JFK, who as a family of mercenary soldiers in service to numerous European royal houses, made Strongbow's English and Irish conquests possible and married directly into the de Clare family line shortly after coming to Ireland.

Chafing under the rule of the Angevin King Henry II of England, the ambitious Strongbow pictured himself on a par with the English King. His marriage to the daughter of Irish King Dermot MacMurrough was intended to seal the deal but Henry soon scuttled the plan.

Strongbow was a Crusader, served in the Holy Land and was a known to be a generous supporter of the infamous Knights Templar, the warrior monks for whom the Cistercian Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux penned De Laude Novae Militiae (In Praise of the new Knighthood) thereby redefining the very nature of murder when done in the name of Christ.

Strongbow's daughter Isabel was married off by King Richard I to William Marshall in 1189. Considered the greatest knight in Christendom, he was installed as a Knight Templar on his deathbed in 1219. Marshall stayed loyal to the Angevin king John during the baron's rebellion and was present at the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215. The Magna Carta defused a rebellion by England's powerful barons by setting limits on royal power and placing all future sovereigns under the rule of law. Alongside Habeas Corpus, it stood as an abiding principle of Western and international law until being subsumed by the events of 911.

Upon Strongbow's death in April of 1176, the equally ambitious Fitzgerald family assumed Strongbow's original mission in Ireland but their challenge to Britain's royalty had already begun a century before.

After taking part in the Norman conquest of England in 1066, the family and their extended clans had become deeply entwined in Angevin family politics as part of the Norman invasion force of South Wales. The marriage (arranged by Henry I) of the patriarch of the Fitzgerald family, Gerald FitzWalter of Windsor to Nest, daughter of Rhys Ap Tewdwr (Tudor) who is considered the last king of the Britons, cemented the Fitzgeralds to an ancient British dynasty of kings and the Arthurian legends surrounding them.

Known for their loyalty to a Catholic Rome, their embrace of Ireland's Celtic culture and their fierce desire to establish their control over Ireland, the next four hundred years found the Fitzgerald family drawn deeply into English as well as European politics with numerous Fitzgerald kin interned in the Tower of London. The coming of the Reformation to England in the 16th century turned four hundred years of border disputes and jurisdictional feuding into holy war. In 1580, the Holy See in Rome sent an army of Italians and Spaniards to help the Fitzgeralds fight Queen Elizabeth's Protestant forces under the authority drafted by the "Just War Doctrine."

Dubbed by author Richard Berleth as the "Twilight Lords" for their role as the last doomed, feudal barons of Ireland, the Fitzgeralds' struggle against the Elizabethans and the Renaissance Neoplatonism of men such as Edmund Spencer and Walter Raleigh presents a dark moment in British history. But it also offers a window into a thousand year old factional struggle of a European "deep state" that exploded openly in Ireland in the 16th century before spreading to the four corners of the earth through imperial expansion.

Allegorized as the embodiment of evil in Edmund Spencer's Faerie Queene, the Fitzgeralds were transformed into the "Other" in the English propaganda of the day, while Elizabeth and her Red Cross Templar knights followed in the tradition of King Arthur and the Round Table.

Far from being only a war over ecclesiastical principles, this "holy war" fought between the Catholic Fitzgerald clans and their Calvinist opposites was also a war against economic domination and colonization from London. From London's perspective, the war was a just war because it was a struggle to the death against the Papal forces of the Counter Reformation, which were encircling it militarily and economically and rolling back Protestant reforms. In the end, the war devastated Ireland, depopulated the Irish countryside, shifted power from local landowners to mercantilists in London and instilled a lasting fear and anger between Protestants and Catholics. Ireland set the standards of behavior that marked the beginnings of Britain's empire that live on as much today in the neighborhoods of Kabul, Kandahar and Peshawar as they do in Derry and Belfast. But it also marked a turning point in Rome's ability to manage world events through military force and a shift from the ecclesiastically sanctioned violence of "just war" to the secular/state sanctioned violence of "just war."

We have illustrated in our multi-part series An Empire in Twilight that whatever America once appeared to be, at least since World War II, it never was the country we thought.

Although once assumed to be governed by rules, democratic laws and financial regulations, today's America operates not unlike Strongbow's feudal state ruled by the private and personal agendas of a handful of individuals and the vast majority of the American public disapproves of it. Over the years, organizations such as the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg group and the Club of Rome are known to have exerted a decisive role over government policies and mass media. We have known for a century or more of the secret financial power groups that work behind the scenes. Such family lines as Rockefeller, Carnegie and Rothschild and their desire to control the world through financial manipulation are the stuff of legend. Yet, despite their monopolistic and anti-democratic efforts their power and their money continue to fuel popular allure. We have written of secret intelligence organizations such as Le Cercle, the Safari Club and the 6I which at the behest of international business cartels both legal and illegal have secretly undermined democratic elections, overthrown governments and redirected the world's economy for the benefit of a chosen few.

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Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould are the authors of Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story and Crossing Zero The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire and The Voice,a novel. Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, a husband (more...)
 

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