David Aaronovitch - Don't we know, for we are told it often enough, that however unjustified terrorism is, it springs from real social and political conditions? That this is the sequence: from the feeling of grievance, through a growing belief in the need for violence, finally to the subsequent act of terror? From this it follows, solve the grievance somehow - through concessions or talks or even military measures - and the terror will stop
When the guys and gals of the Real IRA sat down and discussed their plans together, rationally, how did shooting these young men and their collaborating pizza suppliers (minimum-wage Poles, armed with mozzarella and tomatoes) fit into their overall strategy? In fact, what was their overall strategy
When they sat down again in their political guise of the 32 County Sovereignty Movement - the movement that does not like to be called the political wing of the Real IRA, so that's what we'll call them - and after they had dealt with their role in defeating the Lisbon treaty in the Republic, did they consider how a poorly supported return to killing in Ulster might somehow be turned into a magnificent victory, the likes of which had eluded every physical-force republican movement before them? Did they debate just why it was they were more likely to succeed this time? Given that the “armed struggle” (a euphemism for strolling up behind someone and blasting their brains out all over their children) was partly ended through the offices of Sinn Féin, it is interesting how the warriors of the Real IRA seem to have forsworn the obvious tactic of bumping off the Adamsite traitors.
So no, it was the Massereene Barracks. And the one thing that we know about that place is that it was due to close in 2010. They only had to wait a few months, and the occupying forces and their counter-revolutionary fast-food accomplices would have been gone. The hate object would have been removed.
That's the clue. Hatred requires an object. It needs a Jew or a black or a Brit or a Papist, for your KKK man, your stormtrooper, your Gordon rioter or your green fascist to buttress the walls of their collapsing egos. As William Hazlitt put it in his 1826 essay, The Pleasure of Hating: “We have always a quantity of superfluous bile upon the stomach, and we wanted an object to let it out upon. How loath were we to give up our pious belief in ghosts and witches, because we liked to persecute the one, and frighten ourselves to death with the other!”
The shooting wasn't designed to get rid of the British Army; it was designed to bring it back. It was the first atrocity in a desired new cycle of attacks, arrests, martyrdoms, bombings, internments, hunger strikes, funerals, orations, gun-runnings and crying children, which could return us to the Seventies, the golden time of death and certainty.
What do the Real IRA actually feel the compulsion to kill for? They have the vote, the right to speak, the right to argue. There are no B-Specials, there's no more job discrimination, no more gerrymandering.
Republicans sit in government. Why does a group in the US, calling itself the Coalition of Irish Republican Women salute the attack on its website with the headline “New Group turns up the heat”? The heat which, when turned up, will burn other women? They hope. They hope.
Sometimes - often, perhaps - the grievance comes second. The desire to hate and kill comes first, and then grubs around in the shit for its excuse.
Full Article
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/david_aaronovitch/article5877219.eceSums it up perfectly for me.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(500 posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
