kontextmaschine:

I love how the Irish rebel song Come Out, Ye Black and Tans has a part that’s like “oh and as an aside the Ottomans in WWI weren’t shit, as Arabs are uncivilized savages just like black Africans!”

“Well of course even [men composing the brutish enforcement arm of British imperialism] could beat them, they’re just a bunch of uncivilized savages!” is a weird bit in context now that you think about it.

(The song is set in the late 1920s Irish Free State, the narrator’s father is drunkenly comparing neighbors with residual British alignment to auxiliary muscle brought in for the occupying police in the 1919-1921 Irish War of Independence, the song itself is written sometime over roughly the 1960s)

I mean it’s presumably by contrast with the noble Irish civilization of the Free State who had just evicted the Brits, but “haha look at those worthless losers, put down by the British” is just a weird Irish Republican sentiment.