Friday, December 18, 2009
The year the shinners died
I had been trying to work on a republican focused review of 2009, there is no point. No point looking at how the myriad of ‘dissenting’ republican groups are progressing, no point looking at how armed struggle is going, no point looking at the touts or agents, no point in examining successes or failures.
For republicanism five six words show the year that was:
“traitors to the island of Ireland” – Martin McGuinness
Thats SF judgment on republican volunteers that kill members of the British Army and police force.
With those few words SF eventually ended any connection with republicanism or revolutionary politics and finally became a full party of the British state
The only moment of the year for me.
Mark McGregor @ 07:31 PM
Didn’t he win a Slugger award for making that statement? The “island of Ireland” is of course two sovereign states: Ireland and a sovereign region of the British unitary state. Anyone who believes that British sovereignty should be removed from the “island of Ireland” is therefore a traitor to British Rule. The British state did a fine job of consolidating itself in that region and also in extending its sovereign rule into Ireland via the NSMC.
Posted by on Dec 18, 2009 @ 08:46 PMMark,
Northern Irish republicans voted in huge numbers for SF, before and after the murders. The dissidents act and speak for no one, apart from the few hundred maybe thousands of disillusioned republicans who retain the warped notion that republican objectives can be accomplished by violence.
Those who killed a member of the police service and 2 members of the British army who were not on duty in NI, but merely picking up pizzas, are, most definitely, traitors to the vast majority of people in both parts of Ireland who want a peaceful future for their children.
Posted by on Dec 18, 2009 @ 09:14 PMMark,
Thats 6 words!Posted by on Dec 18, 2009 @ 09:14 PMInasmuch as one can be a traitor to an island. Did the Birdman betray Alcatraz?
Posted by on Dec 18, 2009 @ 09:41 PMiluvni,
If there is one thing I love more than dissent, it is pedant. Correcting now. Cheers.
Posted by on Dec 18, 2009 @ 09:44 PMpinni,
Indeed, your post is a testament to the journey SF nationalists have now traveled.
As I said, the words were the only real story for republicanism this year despite some deaths via ‘traitors’.
Posted by on Dec 18, 2009 @ 09:50 PMAlias,
My opinion is those words and nothing else resulted in McGuinness being lauded by the Slugger judges panel.
Others may disagree - I can’t recall anything of note he has done to gain plaudits beyond once dismissing those who do what he did as ‘traitors’.
Posted by on Dec 18, 2009 @ 09:52 PM‘the vast majority of people in both parts of Ireland who want a peaceful future for their children. ‘
pinni,
for me, you have struck something. i remember clinton 1995 at belfast city hall. my office at the time was across from the Europa. I was so moved at the time I hung a 4 king size sheet banner out my window that said
‘Ulster Says Yo’
this was, and is, a divided society. but that evening i noticed a new divide… there were very few people in the crowd under the age of 40, and lots and lots of families with kids… a few years later i had too children. they now grow, happy and safe, and will hopefully prosper, in an area of belfast formerly seen to be a serious warzone.
the cynics may dismiss the above as hopeless sentimentality, as they did Kennedys remarks about ‘our hostages to the future’. be that as it may.
may the laughter of our children persist.
Mark McG.
I do often agree with your political analysis. (shit i don’t agree with anyones politic analysis all that often)... but I do empathise with your dilemna. below is a link that says it better than i ever could
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aN7QjW2KJkM
oiche m’haith
Posted by on Dec 18, 2009 @ 10:22 PMWT,
Love that song - the violinist demonstrates some movements I haven’t been in/expelled from (yet)
Posted by on Dec 18, 2009 @ 10:37 PMQuote:
‘With those few words SF eventually ended any connection with republicanism or revolutionary politics and finally became a full party of the British state’
I shall provide you with some advice Mr McGregor:
1)Look up the ideology republicanism
2)Look up Sinn Féin’s current electoral position
I ask you do that before you make any further comments on that issue.
Republicanism, as you seem to think is armed volunteers targeting ‘members of the British Army and police force’. That is wrong.
As you should know, before you make a statement such as the one i have just read, please read up on Sinn Féin and their current electoral strategy.
Since the PIRA ceasefire in 1994, Sinn Féin have completed a huge transition from political violence to achieve and implement their ideology, to purely electoral methods.
This is not a contradiction of Republicanism.
I believe you are correct in stating:
‘For republicanism five words show the year that was:
“traitors to the island of Ireland” – Martin McGuinness’Fortunately I have the ability to draw positive conclusions and believe the significance of that statement lies in the huge change which the north of Ireland has seen.
Sinn Féin have, to the resounding support of the Republican community, adopted a political method and have denounced the continuation of violence. They now have a political path which leads straight to a 32 county Republic.
Times have changed Sir, I suggest you change with them.Posted by on Dec 18, 2009 @ 11:01 PMMark you are so wrong it’s extremely sad. Republicanism has never been about killing Brits. If the likes of you really believe violence to be the only way forward, we really did hatch a monster.
Posted by on Dec 18, 2009 @ 11:45 PMSectarian separatists and cultural chauvinists have stolen the term ‘republican’.
They are traitors to the new Ireland that is, and that we alone have made.
These small minded thugs, economic criminals, and ethnic opportunists make Cromwell look very respectable.
Luckily, the persistence of loyalist sectarian murderers and extortionists make internment an equal opportunity for us all.
Posted by on Dec 18, 2009 @ 11:48 PM“My opinion is those words and nothing else resulted in McGuinness being lauded by the Slugger judges panel.” - Mark McGregor
I agree - and I stated as much at the time. It was the moment when the Shinners called anyone who opposed British sovereignty traitors to the Irish nation, making it explicit that it is the duty of the Irish nation to be loyal to the British state. It is not, of course, simply militant opposition to British rule that is wrong but political opposition to it too. How could it be otherwise when the words were uttered by a minister of the British state?
So they were celebrating the moment when the leadership of NI ‘republicanism’ fully endorsed the British state, making its conversion from a party that formerly promoted the right to Irish national self-determination of members of the Irish nation in that part of the United Kingdom into a party that formally renounced it complete and final.
Posted by on Dec 18, 2009 @ 11:58 PMYes Mark, all those deluded people who used to think that they could shoot and bomb their way to a united Ireland have finally realised just how wrong they were.
Posted by on Dec 19, 2009 @ 12:35 AMEoin
People got fed up with violence,all it was doing was condemning a new generation to the misery of the “long war"which would leave them either dead or in prison,they’re not great options, are they?Posted by on Dec 19, 2009 @ 12:43 AMWhat gets missed in this is a central dilemma that has confronted Irish Republicans for generations, but which Irish Republicans have seemed unwilling, or unable to find the means, to confront themselves.
It’s perfectly tricked out in Barry Flynn’s excellent book on the 1950s campaign, “Soldiers of Folly”. That is that in taking up arms against the will of a feasibly large number of your would be fellow country men, you defeat the prime governing principle of ‘uniting Irishmen’.
The reasons why this has remained unapproached (and possibly unapproachable) are too obvious (and perhaps too painful) to bear glib repetition here. But when you launch a military assault on British power in Northern Ireland the dead bodies you must crawl over to effect the liberation you want are almost all of them those of Irish men and women.
And not just ‘Protestants’. The first three victims of the border campaign were all Catholics. The Ballycastle born policeman, who died before South and O’Hanlon, is the one whom popular history has found it most convenient to forget.
That’s not an argument against armed struggle per se. But it seems to me that there is somewhere buried in McGuinness’s easy to parody or ridicule statement at the steps of Stormont Castle that day, a semi-formed, slightly inchoate recognition that killing non conformist Irishmen is not a viable way to the independence of the island.
Posted by on Dec 19, 2009 @ 12:47 AMThat’s all reasonable common sense, Mick, and it doesn’t take a historian to tell you that polarising Catholics and Protestants in an internal civil dispute is an odd way of uniting them. But then again, who was actually trying to unite Catholics and Protestants - or even trying to divide them? PIRA will tell you that they aimed their campaign at the British state, and even RIRA will tell you that since they targeted an installation of the British state and its soldiers (notwithstanding the convoluted logic that converted immigrant pizza delivery workers into a legitimate target) at Massereene Barracks rather than targeted a religious community. They will point out that the British state cannot be allowed to conflate itself with a religious community, hiding behind it and declaring that any attack on itself is actually an attack on that religious community.
But the reality is that the British state has inextricably interlinked itself with that religious community, so that religious community is in fact a British nationalist community. It has always been that way in the majority. The GFA makes that explicit since it is the British state within Northern Ireland that is legitimised along with British nationality. Likewise, it isn’t a protestant community that has gained joint-sovereignty over institutions of the Irish state but the British state itself, so this ‘parity of esteem’ is not extended to another nation but to that other nation’s state. It is, however, presented as being parity between two nations - it is parity of esteem between two nationalisms. This is the British state conflating itself with a community in order to consolidate its sovereign territory and to expand it.
The British-Irish Agreement is a treaty that imposes a legal obligation on the government in any unified entity to exercise the powers of the state with “rigorous impartiality” in regard to both British nationalism and Irish nationalism. That explicitly rules out Irish self-determination and an Irish nation-state since a government that is required to act with “rigorous impartiality” between two competing nationalisms cannot be partial to Irish nationalism, the default of the Irish nation-state (as a nationalism is the default of every state), or partial any aspect of Irish culture or national interest that conflicts with British national interests. In effect, the British nation will retain its state (Great Britain) while the Irish nation will forsake its nation-state. In reality, this would lead to a deadly civil war.
As British nationalists in Northern Ireland, they require a British state in order to exercise their right to national self-determination. The Irish nationalists in Northern Ireland also require an Irish state in order to exercise their right to national self-determination. However, they have renounced that right, declaring that another nation has the right to veto it at its sole discretion in perpetuity. Indeed, even if the other nation decides to support a united Ireland under the terms specified in, it won’t involve the attainment of the right to national self-determination for the nation in NI that has formally renounced that right but rather it will involve the Irish nation in Ireland dismantling its own nation-state and declaring its own right national self-determination void - British state remains intact while the Irish state is dismantled.
So this consolidation of the British state and of British citizenship that occurred in the GFA means that it is no longer presented that the objective is to unite two traditions of Orange and Green (but one nation) but rather it is now presented that there are two nations and that ‘parity of esteem’ between them requires the presence of the British state. The sleight of hand was to conflate a religious group with a tradition and then to conflate a tradition with a nation and then to conflate that nation with a state. Unity is not now about the extension of Irish rule into NI but about the extension of British rule into Ireland.
So all this means that the Irish nation in NI is so utterly defeated - no longer even claiming to have a right to a nation-state - that the militants are engaged in a hopeless ask in asserting their own right to national self-determination by force - or, indeed, by political means. Ideologically, the self-determination is a collective right so individuals have no right to assert it by force. It is always owned by the collective so if that collective can be manipulated into renouncing that right… well, the right to self-determination includes the right to renounce the right to self-determination.
Posted by on Dec 19, 2009 @ 03:37 AMContinued
The gameplan was to get them to endorse the sonstitutional legitimacy of Britsh sovereignty. Having been led to do that, they have accepted that the British state has a right to rule the Irish nation. And as a British minister of a British state pointed out after the British state was attacked at Massereene, any member of the Irish nation who does not accept the legitimacy of British sovereignty and who is not loyal to the British state is a traitor to the Irish nation.
Posted by on Dec 19, 2009 @ 03:37 AMAlias
It is not another nation state exercising a veto,most are at best ambivalent,but a majority in this region.
History proves that a significant minority cannot be subdued into acceptance as was shown during 50 years of Stormont rule and the troubles.What makes anyone think that Unionists would just lie down and roll over,when a majority would want to subsume them into a united Ireland .Let us start uniting our people street by street and town by town and then unity will be a realistic goal.Posted by on Dec 19, 2009 @ 03:59 AMDanny, I understand where you are coming from but if it quacks then it probably doesn’t belong in a kennel. If they were members of the Irish nation then they would not resist living in an Irish nation-state anymore than an Italian would demand that his country should be ruled by Mexico. They are British, not Irish. It is British culture and traditions that they identify with, not Irish culture and traditions, and it is a British state that they wish to live in.
They wish to live within a British state because it is controlled by a British nation who use that state to live according to their own laws, customs, values, culture and traditions, etc. As Article 1 of the UN’s ICCPR puts it: “All peoples have the right of self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.”
Living within an Irish nation-state would cancel their right to self-determination, since the state would not be ordered to in accordance with their “cultural development” but in accordance with the “cultural development” of a different nation.
A united Ireland, as it is envisaged by the British government in the GFA, involves the dismantling of the Irish nation-state and its replacement by an entity that gives parity of esteem to a different nation and its state, so is not about promoting Irish nationalism but about defeating it. Likewise, it is a not about granting the former Irish nationalists in NI the right to national self-determination that they have declared that they have no right to but it about encouraging the Irish nation to follow their British-led example and renounce their right to national self-determination too, declaring that another nation should have a veto over their “political status” and their ability to “freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.”
So, while a British minister in a British state may declare that any member of the Irish nation who is not loyal to the British state should be regarded by that nation as a traitor, the actual definition of a traitor is any member of a nation who is not loyal to his own nation’s state but who declares himself loyal to another nation’s state.
Anyway, I wish you the very best of luck as you go about the curious business of persuading members of the British nation that they should live within an Irish state and renounce their own validated right to self-determination. I suspect, however, that you will find that task a lot harder than the ease with which the British state persuaded you to renounce your own right to self-determination since you do not have the benefit of an entire political class and its media to successfully indoctrinate the other nation with the same self-defeating propaganda with which it successfully indoctrinated you.
Posted by on Dec 19, 2009 @ 05:32 AMWhile the Good Friday Agreement in itself did not give legitimacy to the words of Martin McGuinness quoted by Mark above the overwhelming endorsement given to that agreement in referenda in both jurisdictions in Ireland most certainly did.
The whole of the Irish people when asked clearly stated their desire to move forward to whatever future they might peacefully negotiate or come to accept and rejected the use of physical force as a means to further any faction’s will.
In that sense any group that rejects the will of the people and resorts to arms to further their political ends can be said in McGuinness’s words to be “traitors to the island of Ireland”.
It would seem that McGuinness’s recent popular acclaim as manifested in success in awards by the Belfast Telegraph and Slugger would support that view. Of course if you don’t like it you could always take it to the people for discussion, but then that might not prove as exciting as firing off guns and blowing things up. Much too adult.
Posted by on Dec 19, 2009 @ 09:51 AMThat’s a hell of a challenge to throw down Alias. Any other takers?
Posted by on Dec 19, 2009 @ 10:10 AMAlias you seem to portray all of the events you describe as being the work of the devious Brits.
Looking at it another way, however, the recognition of two nations in the island of Ireland is as much a consequence of the failure of Irish nationalism to come up with a convincing national narrative that makes the Prods unequivocally part of the Irish nation.
The idea, for example, that the Plantation is a great injustice against Ireland clearly leaves no room for the descendants of the Plantation to be part of the nation. I use this example because when we look at English history, as a counterexample, we do not normally find historians saying that the Norman conquest or the Danelaw were injustices against England and we do find that the descendants of the Normans and Danes are assimilated into the English nation.
Posted by on Dec 19, 2009 @ 12:57 PMAlias makes a good point but I would disagree with one point which in my view flaws the whole analysis. That is this sentence:
“But the reality is that the British state has inextricably interlinked itself with that religious community, so that religious community is in fact a British nationalist community”
The British state has not done this. We the unionist population feel and are this. I strongly suspect that on a number of occasions the British state would have happily agreed to a united Ireland (Churchill during the war being simply one example).
Alias is of course correct that such has been the IRA’s campaign of murder that very many members of the unionist community (British community /Prods / whatever one wishes to call them) will never feel Irish in the way the republican movement wish them to. Indeed as I suggested a number of years ago the republican movement has absolutely no concept of even beginning to do this. Their persistence with idiotically old fashioned and now functionally irrelevant comments like “Protestants Catholic and Dissenters” being only one example.
The fact remains that the IRA has been the most effective mechanism to make many unionists of my generation reject any manifestation of Irishness. The fact that Dr. Paisley was willing to call himself Irish, yet younger unionist politicians simply will not, is itself emblematic of this.
The simple fact is that the IRA also targeted Protestants for their being members of that community (British community if you will). I do not want this to descend to whataboutery but the simple fact is that many unionist families (especially in the border areas) personally knew people who were murdered by the IRA solely and purely for being Protestants.
Hence, not only is Adams and McGuinness’s legacy to this island the loss of thousands of its citizens but also the loss of any chance that many of my generation can see themselves as Irish and clearly my children will be brought up in an environment in which they too may well unconditionally reject Irishness.
I cannot pretend any regret about this but I suspect Adams and McGuinness have few regrets either: they have their power and money and influence to tend and my neighbours and in laws have their graves to tend.
Posted by on Dec 19, 2009 @ 01:18 PMAlias wrote:“while a British minister in a British state may declare that any member of the Irish nation who is not loyal to the British state should be regarded by that nation as a traitor…”
Distortion. M McG did not denounce all nationalists and republicans. He denounced those who commit murders. I agree with him whole-heartedly, even though my political outlook is very different from his. What we have in common is our respect for democracy and for human rights.I have no desire to live in a united nationalist republic of Ireland. I prefer to live in secular Britain, rather than in Catholic Ireland. I am also glad that Britain subsidises the NI economy and thereby enables us to have good public services and a reasonable standard of living. No doubt I lack that strong sense of national identity which others find so appealing - Irgun, the Taliban, Germans of the 1930s, etc - but it does mean that I accept democratic decisions and make a point of not murdering people that I do not agree with.
What is it about democracy that Alias and the Die-Hards cannot understand?
Posted by on Dec 19, 2009 @ 03:47 PM
