Wednesday, July 14, 2010
Belfast burning posted by Richard Seymour
Come on, you all know the words: #It was on the twelfth when the Pope shite himself/It was on the Shankill road...# No? You haven't heard that? My, you have lived a sheltered life, haven't you? How about this one?: #We shall be mastered by no fenian bastard/For we are the boys of the POTV [Pride of the Village - an exuberantly violent flute band from Templepatrick]...# You're joking me? You've not heard tell of that one either? Well, these are popular folk songs where I come from. I don't know about the songs on the other side. There were some Catholics in our estate, but they didn't exactly go around the place singing - or, rather, they did, but it was more likely to be 'Hey Frankie' by Sisters Sledge than the 'Soldier's Song'. I suppose I just felt like mentioning this because I caused some minor offence when, at my Marxism talk, I jokingly suggested that I have a privileged position from which to view the 'culture' wars, as Northern Ireland doesn't really have a culture. Let me tell you this, boy: Northern Ireland has culture coming out of its arse. (Or is that kultur?) Why, look, just look at it. Culture, curling out in magnificent, glossy segments. It's like cross between a bakery and a Canadian logging camp.Of course, this is rather unfair and, if I was being entirely serious, would place me right alongside the ridiculous handwringing unionist and nationalist politicians and reverends bleating about how violence has no place in a civilized society. Next, I'd be saying how disgawsted ay awm with the oitrayt vayilence n thawggery awn display. These rictus-mouthed, pious officials and holy-holy sooks look and sound ridiculous, and powerless, because in a way they are. The British state rules round these parts, and the British state has already determined what the contours of the settlement are to be. If you doubt this, ask the DUP. They were shit full of opposition to the institutions of Good Friday, and led hundreds of thousands of Protestant
Aye, as they say, right. No such thing. There has been constant sectarianism and violence since the peace accords, not to mention racist pogroms, and while one doesn't discount the existence of a minority of Republicans who can't let go of the dream, they can't be blamed for every sign of social distress and dissent. The short background is that the Orange Order, (whose role in the origins of racial supremacy was recently the subject of heated debate here), have yet to abandon their hobby of marching on nationalist communities during the bonfire season around 12th July each year. There's nothing intimidating about this, you understand: it's just a friendly hello, and an invitation to experience Orange culture up close. Most peaceful Catholic residents enjoy the opportunity to gawp at the gallons of Harp lager consumed, the tattoos, the pot bellies, the stanley knives, and the young man twirling a baton made from a stick, two tennis balls and red-white-and-blue sticky tape.
Essentially, it works like this. In the weeks before the big parades day, the 12th, loyalists in Protestant estates construct a make-shift mountain in some grassy area of the estate, from pallets, tires, furniture, planks, and consumer durables, all stolen from back yards, living rooms and industrial estates. At the top of this mountain, they pin an effigy which they invite people to believe is the Pope or some lesser papist. Then on the evening of the 11th July, they get a wee bit pissed, go round bricking Catholic windows, maybe find a 'fenian' out after curfew and give him something to think about, then head back to the mountain to set it on fire. Beholding this blazing sacrificial behemoth, like little Orange druids, they drink more lager to the sound of loyalist songs not a kick in the arse away from the childish ditties I recounted at the top of this post. Having spent all night getting sozzled in twenty-four packs and bigotry, anyone in a flute band hastily throws on a uniform and heads off with his musical implement, more lager, plenty of fags, and some mates, to march through some fortunate town centre or village. And, if tradition is duly revered, someone identified as a 'taig' will likely get his ballicks booted in, or cut off. I myself have a rather special memory of the Murray Memorial Flute Band's antics in my own home town. They got a bit lathered and apparently staggered on to an Ulsterbus where - would you believe it? - the driver was a Catholic. In a fit of inspiration, they dragged him outside and stabbed him so many times that when an old dear tried to staunch the bleeding by wrapping him in ten towels, she ended up with a mass of blood-soaked cloth and a dead man in her arms. Ah, blessed culture.
Where was I? Oh yes. A minority of recalcitrant Catholics do sometimes try to obstruct these harmless cultural festivals with their petty, resentful protests. They stage sit-down protests and block the roads, absurdly claiming that residents have rights. This being in flagrant defiance of the decisions of the Parades Commission, the residents are all too often setting themselves up against the police, who have the werewithal to remove them. And then you get 'trouble'. This year, Catholic residents of Ardoyne did just that: they staged a sit-down strike. They insisted to anyone who would listen, that they were not Republican dissidents, but residents protecting their area. Now, as Splintered Sunrise suggests, there's a lot of young unemployed men who are always up for a fight with the cops in Northern Ireland. This made up a fairly hefty proportion of loyalist rioters when I was still living there. For many of my young peers, it was recreation. In a social landscape with fuck all to do unless you've got money, the opportunity to take on the forces of authority for a few nights, and even end up in the news, is not to be missed. The more adventurous elements even found the time to hijack cars, break into factories and set up road blocks. And if the same police have been part of a machinery that is oppressing you, and has been since you were born, there's probably an added frisson in causing injury to a few of them.
The trouble is, of course, that after a few days and nights in which a slightly other-worldly atmosphere descends on the six counties, everything goes back to normal. Young people go back to being unemployed, poverty remains poverty, and the working class still gets battered by the extreme neoliberalism of a sectarian proto-state that reduces every important political question to whether it is Protestants or Catholics who are predominantly getting shafted. Sectarianism remains the life-blood of Northern Ireland politics, loyalist gangs still extort, rob and apply vigilante 'justice', and the political leadership ventilates about peace while also regularly exhaling bigotry about ethnic minorities and gays. Nothing changes. They let out a bit of steam, and it goes back to the way it was. And that's the crisis: that things stay exactly as they are.
Labels: british empire, loyalism, neoliberalism, northern ireland, republicanism, sectarianism, unionism
9:43:00 am |
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Tuesday, March 10, 2009
It's all over bar the shooting posted by Richard Seymour
The Real IRA's campaign seems to be directed as much against Sinn Fein as the British state. The latest attacks include not only the killing of a peeler, but also a (failed) pipe bomb attack on a Sinn Fein office. Gerry Adams argues that it is an outright attack on the 'peace process', and risks squandering the fruits of the Provos' struggle - which means it is an attack on the mainstream Republican leadership. There is some truth in this: the RIRA are certainly attacking the existing settlement, and do risk drawing the British Army back onto Catholic streets. That would appear to have been the aim for some time, and it has already been successful to the extent that Sir Hugh Orde took the opportunity of an alleged increase in 'dissident' Republican activity to start bringing in undercover British Army troops to crack down on said 'dissidents'. They in turn waited for three days after this policy was officially announced to start this campaign, which of course is likely to catalyse the militarisation of the hunt.Although Sinn Fein are taking the unprecedented step of backing the PSNI - still a Protestant-dominated component of the British state - in their crackdown on the RIRA, there has been a great deal of hypocritical whining about how cool and clinical his statement was. Now, Gerry Adams' response to this criticism is vain and indicative of an elitist political outlook: he claimed that it was his wisdom that had manoeuvred the Republican community to where it presently was, and that therefore he should be trusted to know how to communicate effectively with his own base. This is absolute horseshit. The Republican leadership adapted to the realities in the grassroots, not the other way around. But, nevertheless, I fail to see how he could have gone further than to say that the attacks were "wrong and counterproductive" given that it is the explicit position of Sinn Fein and the Provisional IRA that the armed struggle was until Good Friday a necessity, brought about by the British state's refusal to admit peaceful means for resistance. Moreover, the British Army remains an army of occupation that the vast majority of Catholics do not accept. The issue, then, is obviously the political context in which attacks on troops take place and what strategy is involved. Furthermore, many of the people complaining about this supported the British state's war for as long as it went on, and obviously aren't pacifists. During the course of the war, the British Army killed 105 IRA members - I doubt a single one of those was even considered 'wrong and counterproductive' by Unionists.
Another potential consequence of the RIRA campaign could be to give carte blanche to loyalist groups who - although you don't hear much about them - have not yet decommissioned and show no signs of doing so. So far, the signs are that the loyalist leadership is happy to leave the British state to deal with this. But Gusty Spence, the doyen of the Ulster Volunteer Force, has already explained that his outfit have kept their weapons on the grounds that certain unspecified "activities" could lead them to undertake renewed "resistance". Such resistance would involve the murder of Catholic taxi drivers and postmen, and the shooting up of pubs in Catholic areas. Attacks on Catholic civilians constituted the vast majority of their activities. True, they are generally absorbed in racketeering and drug-dealing these days, even though they are known to 'police' loyalist estates with a supposed anti-drugs policy. Equally true, some of their number have been drawn into the penumbra of the far right, with activists beating up Chinese and black people. But there must be some nostalgia for the old days. As for the UDA/UFF, those poetasters of death, as far as we know they no longer have a gig with British intelligence. But, as their dalliances with sociopathic neo-Nazis and their bloody internecine feuding have demonstrated, they still have a penchant for ultra-violence.
Despite such dangers, however, it is hard to see the RIRA's campaign as anything but a death rattle. They reportedly have 300 members and guns, but little else going for them. They lost the argument inside the Provos, and they aren't about to manufacture a victory now. This is because the majority of the rank and file were not as doctrinally committed to a united Ireland as advertised. The impetus behind the struggle was the desire to seize the whip from the overseer's hand, as it were. When the majority of activists decided that it was possible to obtain civil rights for Catholics within the context of a British state, they overwhelmingly supported it. The RIRA can at most create a temporary state of tension, although I also note that they are capable of certain lexical innovations. For example, pizza delivery men are heretofore reclassified as a "collaborators". But I don't see any other party ready as yet to return to war. And as the Cedar Lounge points out, there isn't in any of this a strategy to unite Protestants and Catholics, or to build any other political basis for the struggle than the simple idea of placing the north of Ireland under the sovereign control of the Republic. Does that really address the needs of the Catholic working class today, much less the majority of the people of Northern Ireland? I mentioned its lack of support recently, but the larger question is, does it even seek popular support? The manner in which it is conducting itself suggests otherwise. Eamonn McCann, speaking for the Irish SWP, puts the case well:
"we reject entirely the strategy of 'armed struggle' carried out in the name of the people but, of necessity, behind the back of the people and without sanction of the people. We rejected armed struggle when carried out by the Provisional IRA. We reiterate that position now.
"The attack comes at a time when the need for working-class unity was never clearer. Here, as in the South and across the water, we are faced with a relentless attack on jobs, wages and public services, from employers’ groups and the governments of Gordon Brown and Brian Cowan. The killings on Friday are a disruption and diversion from these urgent issues.
"We reject the hypocrisy of Brown and others who promote war in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, then profess a belief in peace when this suits their purpose. Brown was preparing to dispatch the soldiers killed at Antrim to kill or be killed in the doomed, imperialist adventure in Afghanistan."
Labels: antrim, british occupation, imperialism, ira, loyalism, northern ireland, republicanism, sinn fein, uda, uvf
7:15:00 am |
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Sunday, March 08, 2009
Shooting up squaddies. posted by Richard Seymour
Northern Irish politics is, as a rule, boring. Think about the material you have to work with. Between Martin McGuinness' lachrymose banalities and Peter Robinson's rigid bigotry (there is a great deal of both in Stormont), there is little room to be inspiring. The only occasional frisson is when one of the demented crackpots of the hard right says something unspeakably ignorant and stupid. Sammy Wilson, the environment minister, denies that there is such a thing as man-made global warming, and that ensures that his smug, dopy-eyed, reddened face gets on the news for a week. (Sammy is also, you may care to know, an Ulster Jobs for Ulster Workers guy). Likewise, when Iris Robinson MP, spouse to First Minister Peter, describes homosexuality as being "viler" than child abuse, there follows a brief uproar before the the usual run of anti-gay violence is resumed with vengeance. (Not that Nothern Ireland has a problem with exaggerated machismo - anyone who says it does will receive a boot in the ballicks.) Though I have not visited NI for years, and don't feel much connection to it, it is hard not to be embarrassed by the kinds of people who get elected in that neck of the woods. They are so obviously unfit for the job. They should be spreading mulch and spouting misanthropy out in the suburbs and farming communities.At any rate, this grotesque charade is underwritten by a neoliberal and sectarian consensus that is impoverishing an already vitiated and lacklustre social landscape. The parties compete not on the basis of class issues or even left-right ideologies as such, but strictly on the Nationalist-Unionist dichotomy. To be represented, one has to accept one or other label. Meanwhile, the only answer that any of the political parties offer to the poverty and social misery of the statelet is to turn it into a sort of corporate theme park, open up investment opportunities by privatizing and cutting business taxes. Intriguingly, this is one question on which even Ian Paisley favours a 'united Ireland', in that both he and Martin McGuinness favoured cutting corporation taxes to 12.5%, the level pertaining in the Republic of Ireland. If the name were not already taken, the place could soon be re-dubbed the Northern Marianas. No wonder people are anxious to get the hell out of the place. Emigration is at record levels, and a quarter of the permanent residents have spent more than six months abroad. People get as far away as they can for as long as they can, before family commitments or whatever else it is draws them back in. This is grim stuff, but it doesn't make good copy. It is boring.
No wonder that the newspapers are almost uniformly treating the attack on a military base in county Antrim last night as back-to-the-good-old-days. They are not the only ones to see it that way. Ian Paisley Jr., who is his father with the interesting bits removed, apparently remarked that the attacks represent a "defining moment", adding that "For the last 10 years people believed things like this happened in foreign countries, places like Basra. Unfortunately it has returned to our doorstep." How to begin to parse a thought like that? With the suggestion, from a Unionist, that the occupation of the north of Ireland in some sense recalls the occupation of Iraq? Or with the insinuation that the relative peace since Omagh was illusory, merely what "people believed"? Actually, the Unionist right has for some time been trying to increase their leverage by highlighting an alleged resurgence in 'dissident' Republicanism, first raised by Sir Hugh Orde. It would be just dandy for them if there was a plausible new terrorist threat with which to either undermine the Assembly, weaken the Republicans, or just mobilise a disheartened electoral base (the DUP were supposed to chase Sinn Fein out of Stormont, not form a coalition with them).
Are we really on the verge of a new war, as the Unionists suggest, and as so much lurid commentary in the British media implies? Hardly. Whoever carried out last night's attack doesn't have the muscle to duke it out with the British state, even supposing it isn't penetrated from top to bottom by intelligence moles. The Provos fought that war for a quarter of a century, and could only reach a stalemate. That failed guerilla strategy was precisely what resulted in the timid consensus politics of today's Sinn Fein. Groups like the 'Real IRA' and 'Continuity IRA' don't take this point, of course. Representing dissenting minorities in the Provisional IRA's leadership at the time of the Good Friday agreement and the peace process that preceded it, they still insist that a Republic can be acquired by an elite armed struggle. If it can't, then all has been in vain. As Bobby Sands' younger sister, former Provisional IRA executive member, and current 'Real IRA' member Bernadette Sands McKevitt put it: "Bobby did not die for cross-border bodies with executive powers. He did not die for nationalists to be equal British citizens within the Northern Ireland state". The blood that was shed in the course of that war is indeed hard to square with such an inglorious outcome. But ironically it was this insistence that led the 'Real IRA' to undertake their most infamous attack, the Omagh bombing, which itself was the final nail in the coffin for this kind of combat Republicanism. The idea that the armed struggle could be revived today is frankly absurd. Gerry Adams can openly call for his constituents to support the police hunt because he knows full well that the Catholic working class is sick to death of the futile armed struggle, the brutal 'discipline' that went with it and the harsh counterinsurgency of the British state. There is no popular constituency for this kind of fight.
The dull reality is that this shooting amounts to a brief, bloody intrusion on a perpetually gloomy twilight of increasing sectarianism (there are more 'peace walls' than ever before), rising poverty (the worst rates in the UK), and violent criminality (often by the husks of former combatant organisations). It is the convulsion of a movement experiencing its last gasps, one whose purpose was just but whose means were always ruinous. No one who matters need panic. Soon enough, everyone can get on with squandering and selling out yet another generation.
Labels: 'terrorism', ira, northern ireland, republicanism, sectarianism, sinn fein, socialism
3:25:00 pm |
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