Good News

Here. What’s so barbaric about it anyway? Colonization is what’s barbaric. More good news. Hell with this peace accord crap. Look, let’s cut the crap for just one second. There is no such thing as “Northern Ireland”. There is a place called Ireland. One place. There are no two places, one called “Northern Ireland” and another called “Ireland.” “Northern Ireland” is part and parcel of a land called Ireland. Yes, Britain maintains a British colony in the north. There is nothing unusual about this. Henry II went to Ireland over 800 years ago, and it’s been a British colony to a greater or lesser extent since. The first war of national liberation was in 1916, but not all of the land was freed. The north is still a colony of the British colonizer. As such, the Irish people of the north are an occupied people just like the Palestinians. According to the UN Charter, occupied people have the right to use armed struggle to rid themselves of occupation. If it’s right for Palestinians, it’s right for the Irish. This is why the PFLP had an alliance with the IRA for a bit. From the Bar Kokba Revolt to Pontiac’s Rebellion to the Battle of Algiers, it’s one extended tapestry, chapters in a novel with an unchanging plot. Colonialism is either right or it’s wrong. This is a progressive axiom. Not right sometimes, but wrong other times. As you may have guessed, of course this blog supports the IRA.

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7 thoughts on “Good News”

  1. Do the people living there get any say in that? The protestants have lived there for hundreds of years, and there would have been a bloodbath if there had been an attempt to deprive them of their UK nationality against their wills, especially considering that that involved transferring them to the most reactionary theocratic state in Europe, where child abuse was practically compulsory until recently (now it’s optional), and where abortion and contraception are still illegal. Are you telling me that the protestants have no right to be there? They form a coherent community in a discrete are of the island of Ireland – all the prerequisites for a ‘right to self-determination’. The problem, which your IRA fascist propaganda distracts from, is that there is an almost as large catholic community intermingled with them, who have not had their needs taken adequately into account. There are a lot of historical reasons for this not being sorted out long ago; all parties – unionists, republicans, British and Irish governments – seem to have done the wrong thing as long as possible (not least the IRA’s throwing away the propaganda victory handed to the civil rights movement by Bloody Sunday) but the Good Friday power-sharing and cross-border arrangements are a good compromise which all should concentrate on making work, rather than trying to stir up more bloodshed. The extreme Republican ‘ Protestant veto’ position you put here is one that has no support in Ireland as a whole – Sinn Fein/IRA have been consistently rejected by voters in the South. Not that the alternatives are so pleasant, by the way..

  2. My understanding is that the Irish in the South support the Republicans and want to unify the country.
    There is no such thing as “Northern Ireland.” Protestants are already 5% of Ireland, and there are no problems with them. Protestants of the north could easily be integrated.

  3. Dear Robert
    I’m totally with Lafayette on this one. The Protestants started arriving in Ulster at about the same time as the English started to settle in the US. If the Protestant presence in NI is still illegitimate after all that time, then the US is illegtimate too. In fact, your logic is backward-looking and comparable to the position of those Mexicans who insist that your California and much more of the Southwest of the US is still Mexican territory. No, it isn’t, and no, NI is not part of Ireland.
    The Brits did a lot of wrong in Ireland, but separating the 6 counties of Ulster, not all 8, was the right thing to do because it reflected the will of the majority. They made a mistake in granting autonomy to NI because the Protestants in NI behaved in the same way toward the Catholics as the Whites in the post-Reconstruction South behaved toward their Black minority. On paper there was equality, but in reality there was not. Imagine, the UK is a very centralized state, but it was in NI that they gave autonomy to a region.
    To call NI a British colony is far-fetched. The majority people in it are of the same stock as the those in the rest of the UK and they have exactly the same rights. NI was not exploited by the UK. Far from it, it was subsidized by it. After the 1960’s, NI must have been a big headache to the UK and many Brits must have regretted that they didn’t grant independence to all Ireland in 1922. Then the rivalry between Protestants and Catholics would have been an Irish and not a British problem.
    It is pointless to say that the Brits should never have conquered Ireland or created plantations in Ulster. It was done and policies should be formulated in light of circumstances as they really are and not in light of circumstances that would prevail if things that should not have been done had indeed remained undone. We can’t redo the past, only learn from it.
    Finally, I don’t know what Lafayette means by “compulsory child abuse” in Ireland.
    Regards. James

  4. Technically the Catholics became a slight majority a few years ago due to emigration and different birthrates.

  5. There is no such thing as the ‘USA’. Colonialism is either right or it’s wrong. This is a progressive axiom. Not right sometimes, but wrong other times.
    When is Lindsay moving out of his colonized land?

  6. James Schipper – by ‘compulsory child abuse’, I refer of course to abuse by priests. You must have heard of all the scandals about this, in Boston for instance. Well – it has been revealed on an even more massive scale in Ireland but, as with everywhere else, it has been covered up on an even more massive scale. To their credit, Sinn Fein, in their paper ‘ An Phobh Blacht’ (or something like that – available online, and actually worth reading) have exposed the amount of money paid by the catholic church to ‘settle out of court’ and so keep the figures down. The known scale of the abuse (not just the cases that have come to court) amount to about 1 in 3 Irish children – really, and that’s ‘known’! I live and worked with Irish people for years, and I never knew anyone to mention this. But the dam has burst now; they say the catholic church is finished in Ireland – but they still have massive power. All the young Irish people I’ve met hate the church. Incidentally, while I was living and working with Irish people, at the height of the IRA terror campaign in the early 80s, I never met anyone, or anyone who knew anyone, who had been harrassed by the police and security services – this was in London.
    But the child abuse thing was not just a phase – it’s gone on for decades, if not longer; Michael Farrell’s excellent (and very readable) novel ‘ Thy Tears Might Cease’, written in the 20s and 30s, about events around the time of the struggle for independence, has a scene of attempted boy-rape by a priest, and gives the impression that this was not unusual – and I suspect that the larger part of the book that had to be edited out to get it published ( not till the 60s) might have said a lot more.
    Of course ‘compulsory child abuse’ is hyperbole, but it’s not far wrong. Watch the excellent film ‘the Magdalen Sisters’ and reflect that the last of these schools was only closed in the 80s. James Connolly would turn in his grave.
    Robert – polls of Irish catholics, North and South of the border have shown that there is no significant support for imposing unification on the North without the consent of the protestants. That consent may well come, if the Southern Irish get the priests and the gangsters off their backs, and if the UK keeps deteriorating to the point that anyone would be glad to get out.

  7. This is correct in essence, although the last time the Republic expressed itself on the issue, there was a majority in favour of the status quo. However the Protestant Loyalist Irish majority in the North (descended from Scottish immigration under the Anglo ascendancy) do not want integration with the South, and the IRA,
    far from being a liberation army, has never had significant popular support in the South, and had majority support in the North only in certain urban Catholic ghettos (eg Derry – see War in an Irish Town, by Eamonn McCann). Its star is now well and truly set. England started to occupy Ireland in 1200AD. It has been a very successful occupation (for example the Irish language has been almost eliminated, reduced to around 30,000 first language speakers, and 100,000 who are fluent in a population of over 4 million North and South) and it is difficult to see how it can be reversed.

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