The IRA

Yeah it's more than just the local interest there's definitely something there I'd like to see well investigated

my prob blase southern view is that ulster unionists were/are a bunch that's fairly retrograde. i realise that's versus ira or whatever at the extremes, but it often felt like some of the worst people in europe were these bible basher racial hatred types. that said i've met many people from the north born in one religion or the other, and over the years they didn't care or weren't brought up in a way that gave them any major anger.

ultimately tho, i don't see deep racial hatred even in an org like sinn fein. nor homophobia, etc.

i've also been wanting to read more about 'the troubles' but jeez it's hard to sift through it all -- any thoughts on "Making Sense of the Troubles"? the copy i've got is already been updated and i feel like a sucker

it was a hard time to sift through for both sides

SIFT were a particularly nasty bunch of breakouts from the 1972 conference iirc, led away after refusing to recognise the legitimacy of a vote on mustache be full beard for the modern provo

I can't recommend any of these yet gbx cos I only looked it up earlier but...

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/feb/22/bestbooks.politics

Tim Pat Coogans "The Troubles" is very good too

Coogan is faultless, thorough and relatively impartial that I can tell by Jesus he is a chore to read

One of our fallen heroes late of the parish has brought my attn to the following:

https://www.amazon.com/Longest-War-Northern-Irelands-Troubled/dp/0192802925

thanks guys

xpost - lol @ that Amazon reviewer 'how can anyone have a book about Northern Ireland without photos' idk my feeling is anyone who lived through any of that should be pretty right for photos for the rest of their lives basically just saying

i'm like twenty minutes into the first episode of peter taylor's documentary series on the loyalists and jfc paisley is such a sleazeball

That Peter Taylor series is a great primer on the troubles. The books are actually not that great iirc, in that they don't expand sufficiently on the docs.

paisley = hall of fame for alltime punchable twats

reread the paulin-paisley essay last night: it's really good -- a deep dive into the rhetorical structure and intellectual (which are also anti-intellectual) roots of paisleyism, why/how it emerged when it did and why it was so effective (it's not *simply* bible-bashing clannishness)

the strongest stuff is maybe about the class roots of the DUP's relentless war since the 60s on official unionism (the "tyrant o'neill")

paulin is a protestant republican himself, iirc, and he's trolling a *bit* perhaps by fashioning more of a coherence than is there -- he notes several contradictory elements but deftly uses the noting to "save his theory", which is fair enough in the context of explaining rhetorical force... the force is real and the contradictions evidently don't diminish it, so don't treat them as points of weakness, bcz they're not

cf freud on the kettle joke (CW: jeet heer at this link; also trump's face)

point here not so much that paisley is like trump -- there are similarities but also important differences -- but that "kettle logic" is very effective in a particular kind of class insurgency, which the Troubles were

(tbh paulin's semi-trollish argument that the deep perhaps inadvertant logic of paisleyism and the DUP is actually ultimately also (ie like irish nationalism) a species of separatism, despite itself, probably slightly reflects his own politics and wishful thinking a wee a bit too much… he's goading paisleyites here, but he's not wrong that there's a deep ambivalence in the DUP abt the nature of their britishness)

sorry this doesn't really belong on a thread abt the IRA tho, does it?

No I think it's a good angle, thanks for bringing it in

Anyway, fault will be mind for rebooting thread purely to marvel at the unionistas

That said, tisnt the first time they done it on us wha

he's not wrong that there's a deep ambivalence in the DUP abt the nature of their britishness

That's no understatement.

by not-entirely-odd coincidence:
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/devolution/2017/03/ian-paisley-jr-northern-irish-aelection-dup-were-caught-napping

he's not wrong that there's a deep ambivalence in the DUP abt the nature of their britishness

That's no understatement.

― Return of the Flustered Bootle Native (Tom D.), Friday, March 10, 2017 4:35 AM (four hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this idea is often expressed and, i think, holds a lot of water.

having a google to find someone saying it better than i can and came across this:

The bilateral nature of Unionist British national identity, based on a contractual attitude to the state, is associated with the phenomenon of negative nationalism. Such identity is as much as symbol of Unionist resistance to Irish reunification as its s of any sense of belong to a UK 'collective conscience'. In this respect, Unionist adherence to a British national identity is an act of defiance, rather than a positive assertion of British nationalist sentiment. 'The Ulster state came into being solely because of the opposition of Northern Protestants to Irish unification: negative nationalism had its way'. Unionism, and especially its more fundamentalist brand, is loyal unto itself first. This is the real significance of the label of Loyalism. According to the Northern Ireland Attitude Survey of 1978, 85 per cent of respondents deemed that a 'loyalist is loyal to Ulster before the British Government'.

The highly symbolic nature of the Unionists' Britishness and their conditional loyalism and negative nationalism, present a paradox. Is it that the Unionist community is not British at all? Or is it that it is the most British part of the UK? Certainly Union Jack waving, noisy loyalty to Crown and fundamentalist Protestant faith, all tend to set Ireland apart from the rest of the UK. Nowhere else (sic) on the mainland of Britain are these traditional symbols of Britishness so visibly and audibly proclaimed.

I think Brighton has the union jacks and a few others that might not be mentioned there

the piece also goes on to talk about hartzian fragment theory. the idea that colonial settler societies that break off from european society do not continue to develop along the lines of the mother society. So Hartz thought Latin America a fragment of feudal Europe, the United States and Canada a fragment of Europe in the age of liberalism. So perhaps Ulster is a Hartzian fragment and this explains the archaic elements of Ulster Unionism.

15 yrs late but puzzled by:

I lost two friends when the IRA bombed Manchester. I lost two friends when the WTC was destroyed. I don't like terrorism no matter what.

― Paul Strange, Monday, 24 September 2001 00:00 (fifteen years ago)

There were no fatalities in the 96 Manchester bombing. Is he referring to a different one?

fwiw he was apparently lying about losing friends on 9/11 so he was probably lying about the Manchester one as well.

Then he changed his name to Nuttall?

Ha, years-old scandal unearthed. Was he the twee record label guy?

more talking about loyalism

http://www.secondcaptains.com/2017/03/10/episode-801-peter-geoghegan-future-unionism-price-loyalty/

(subscription podcast link)

Since the ceasefire, the UVF has been involved in rioting, organised crime, vigilantism and feuds with other loyalist groups.[11] Some members have also been found responsible for orchestrating a series of racist attacks.

And we're back

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenny_McClinton

My good god

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Wallace

Gets absolutely astonishing, trust me

the piece also goes on to talk about hartzian fragment theory. the idea that colonial settler societies that break off from european society do not continue to develop along the lines of the mother society. So Hartz thought Latin America a fragment of feudal Europe, the United States and Canada a fragment of Europe in the age of liberalism. So perhaps Ulster is a Hartzian fragment and this explains the archaic elements of Ulster Unionism.

― Islamic State of Mind (jim in vancouver), Friday, 10 March 2017 17:55 (one month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is i think correct, btw. Loyalists are loyal to the besieged Ulster of the settlers, insofar are they are loyal to the crown it is to the far distant crown that gave them their charter and writ these many centuries gone.

There are significant parallels here perhaps in nationalist loyalty to the recognised 32 county state declared in 1916 and not the 26 county republic that emerged as an unideal but realised compromise.

I'm getting the distinct impression that these guys are far more familiar in the UK than the ROI.

... familiar to people in the UK than in the Republic that is.. Colin Wallace was in Private Eye every other week. Not quite a household name.

Well he'd never crossed my radar but I've run the name past one of my politically minded friends so I'll confirm or not the theory as and when

There are significant parallels here perhaps in nationalist loyalty to the recognised 32 county state declared in 1916 and not the 26 county republic that emerged as an unideal but realised compromise.

― virginity simple (darraghmac), Monday, April 24, 2017 4:48 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i love irish republican legitimism. really batshit crazy when you think about it. like finding out who can pull a sword from a stone is a less bizarre way to determine legitimacy.

for the uninitiated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_republican_legitimism

I saw your last comment on the French thread and i was wondering whether you had any thoughts on the republican side taken in isolation as a Marxist group (of varying degrees of that, obviously).

I'm only recently getting more background on the (Trotskyite?) stickies that merged into the mainstream left in the 80s and served in Celtic tiger govts in the 90s but who spent the 70s full on beating the shit out of sinn feiners on the streets of the northside if I'm to believe what I'm told. Might look up more info on it.

my knowledge of the stickies (and subsequent schisms such as the irsp and democratic left) is scant, really just know a little about the schism between provos and officials, and that they ended up renouncing violence and being the worker's party of ireland.

would def like to change that though

If i dig anything recommended up it'll go on here

I've been wanting to read inla: deadly divisions for ages but you can't buy the book for love nor money and i don't read pdfs of books.

this looks promising regarding the stickies: http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/915 688 pages too !

I am not at all well-read on these matters but I learned a lot from this: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Lost-Revolution-Story-Official-Workers/dp/0141028459/

You just stepped up as best read, so thanks for the rec

Yes indeed, I'll be reading that sucker.

think i had a mild disagreement w/jim abt this on the brexit thread a month or two back, which i was going to return to

my memory (and what i posted) was that the Official IRA = OIRA (the stickies) were marxist (as were and the INLA) but the provos weren't -- jim found a quote which definitely had the PIRA aligning themselves, round the end of the 70s, with marxism (i was planning to push back a bit on this, and argue it was more rhetorical and geopolitically tactical than an expression of the practical philsophical core of the PIRA or of Sinn Fein, but it was so hair-splitting that in the end i never formulated it sensibly)

OIRA and PIRA were the two sides of the 1969 split in the IRA, over armed struggle (OIRA were agin it)

i'm not sure if "trots" is really the right word -- tho i did just find an essay on-line which described the Workers Party (which is what Official Sinn Fein became in the late 70s) as "leninist", but again, the result of any discussion on such definitions and distinctions is likely to end in a quagmire of split hairs

OIRA def not Trots...this passage about the estimable Eoghan Harris has stayed with me:

Harris, 'in a black leather coat and looking terribly fierce', is recalled lecturing one Galway meeting on 'our Trotskyite deviations and Social Democratic instincts which had to be purged out of us if we were to become true revolutionaries'. O'Hagan, no fan of Trotskyism himself, recalls meeting Harris and Donohue in Des Geraghty's house, where Harris started 'to rant about the Trots. I looked at him in stark raving fucking amazement...I said to Geraghty, "Is he mad?" Geraghty replied, "He just goes on like that."'

Official Sinn Féin I should have said

they identified as Stalinist through the 70s at least

haha my friend who used to be in the swp -- who the world calls trots but who call themselves leninists (occasionally neoleninists) -- used to say to me "TROTS ARE MONSTERS!"

(i think he had the gerry healy lot in mind, who his mum had had a run in with in the 50s or 60s)

The odd thing about this is, in the 1980s Bono said he was attracted to the Workers' Party.