On the contrary, the seethe at my stating of a basic historical fact threw you and the rest of the Provo footixes into a flaming rage of denial.
If there was no denial, none of the posts after my original post would exist.
The Provos were a failure and a disaster on every level. They oppressed their own community, killed their own community, and left a trail of destruction everywhere they went.
And at the end, as Brendan Hughes rightly said, they GFA - Got Fuck All.
You strike me as the sort that collected 12 crisp packets to get a history degree.
Ted Heath Jan 1972 “As to Londonderry, a military operation to reimpose law and order would be a major operation necesarily involving numerous civilian casualties”.
General Robert Ford Jan 1972 “I am coming to the conclusion that the minimum force necessary is to shoot selected ringleaders among the Derry young hooligans after clear warnings have been given”.
Cause and effect. British troops were never acceptable on Irish soil, the scum British government knew this and still went ahead with the inevitable outcome of Bloody Sunday and Ballymurphy.
The Claudy bombing occurred on 31 July 1972, when three car bombs exploded mid-morning, two on Main Street and one on Church Street in Claudy in County Londonderry, Northern Ireland. The attack killed nine civilians, injured thirty and became known as “Bloody Monday”.[1] Those who planted the bombs had attempted to send a warning before the explosions took place. The warning was delayed, however, because the telephones were out of order due to an earlier bomb attack.[2] The Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) issued an immediate denial of responsibility,[2][3] and later stated that “an internal court of inquiry” had found that its local unit did not carry out the attack.[4] On the thirtieth anniversary of the bombing, there was a review of the case and in December 2002 it was revealed that the IRA had been responsible for the bomb explosions.[5][6][7]
Wow. According to @Tierneevin1979, the British Government were responsible for the Enniskillen massacre, and every other massacre committed by the PIRA.
This is how genocides happen, folks. People with views like this.
Nearly all deaths in such a conflict are awful and tragic in the fullest sense. But here are a few facts:
1 The PIRA were on ceasefire when the Kingsmill attack took place. Everyone accepted, then and ongoingly, PIRA members were centrally involved in said attack.
2 The attack, a desperate and awful act, was both an immediate response to the fatal UVF attack the night before on the Reaveys and the O’Dowds and also aimed at the so called Glenanne Gang’s murderous activities in Mid Ulster, activities facilitated and aided by state collusion.
3 The Kingsmill attack, within its own awful calculus, achieved its aim. The UVF agreed shortly afterwards to end its sectarian assassination campaign. A sobering recognition but an important recognition nonetheless.
There is little worthwhile in trying to score moral points, nearly 50 years later, in discussion of one incident, however terrible, in isolation.
Firstly there was no justification whatsoever for a massacre like Kingsmills. None at all, whatever way anybody slices and dices it. The appropriate response to the murder of the Reaveys could never be the murder of 10 Protestant civilians.
This whole discussion started because people objected to the notion the British Army entered Catholic areas as peacekeepers. They did. This is a fact, and they were welcomed as such by Catholics. You do not have to be a fan of the British Army, and by christ I’m not, to recognise historical fact. The Provos formed because to them the British Army acting as protectors was a humiliation and could not continue. The Provos also formed because they were fanatics who wanted war.
At least two posters in this discussion have done their done their damnedest over the last year to introduce mendacious, lying, fake “nuance” to Russia’s genocidal war against Ukraine, which could not be more black and white in terms of blame and innocence, directly analogous as it is to Germany invading Poland. These posters have decided to act as propagandists for a genocidal regime for the “bantz”.
These two posters entirely reject nuance when it comes to the Troubles, preferring an infantile goodies v baddies narrative. This all comes to to the fact that too many people want to understand the Troubles as goodies v baddies. It was far, far more nuanced and complex than that. Some British soldiers did terrible things, and the British Army and state did terrible things. That happens when war starts. Not all British soldiers were monsters. The majority were not. Most were frightened young fellas in a place they did not understand.
Loyalists did unspeakable things. And so did the Provos. And the Provos wanted the war. Once that war started, and the British Army knew the Provos were the enemy, unspeakable things done by the British started happening. So it was understandable why young lads would then join the Provos. But this was the situation the Provos wanted. Massacres like Ballymuprhy were what they wanted, because they served as effective recruiting events.
Some things are not complex however. It is not complex to understand that fifty years of sectarian bigotry is bad. It is not complex to understand that a Protestant state for a Protestant people is bad.
It is not complex to understand that deliberately provoking a nihilistic conflict which lasted three decades and ravaged an entire society – which let’s be clear – the Provos did - is bad.
The oppression suffered by Catholic people in Northern Ireland was an abomination. The oppression suffered by black people in the US and in apartheid South Africa was far worse. And yet in both of those situations, violence did not win out, peaceful resistance did. It could have done in the North too, if it wasn’t for the Provos. The Provos killed that chance.
Recently we’ve seen polls that demonstrate that knowledge of the Troubles among younger generations is not what it should be.
In some senses, society, both north and south, has to forget that what happened happened in order to move on.
But in another sense, it’s utterly essential that people know what happened, and how it happened, who died, who killed them or murdered them, and how and why, in order to stop it happening again.
That’s why the rewriting of history by Sinn Fein and the DUP is so toxic. Real history requires brutal honesty and a willingness to face up to reality. People’s standpoints are people’s standpoints, but history is history. What Sinn Fein and the DUP do Disneyfies history. And that Disneyfied history is not real history, it’s rabble rousing bullshit.
I do not disagree with quite a lot of what you say and I will probably come back to the central points here tomorrow, because I am enjoying quality Guinness at the minute, but you need to look at the anachronism of using ‘Provos’ in the way you have. The PIRA did not exist when the British Army landed in 1969.
On Kingsmill: there was a brutal and terrible and utilitarian calculation involved. The calculation proved correct. I make that observation with no equanimity whatsoever.
Stop telling lies on the internet, the audit trail is there.
They didn’t keep the peace for anywhere near a year. They allowed Catholics be attacked, they harassed Catholics, they set curfews in Catholic areas, internment was even carried out within the first year, they reformed the Bspecials into the UDR within 6 months…
They were welcomed in but quickly lost that support through their support of the RUC in harassing and discriminating against the nationalist community. There was as much loyalist violence, if not more, during this period and they didn’t suffer half as much army brutality or coercive measures.
You’re talking pure tripe and trying to dress it up as ‘nuance’
You reckon? I’d say as likely just moronic psychopaths picking the safest and easiest target. Both sides. Any strategic outcome was as likely a coincidence.
You should read lethal allies, or any of the books on collusion. The British were far from moronic psychopaths- you can draw a straight line from the loyalist to the number 10 and it’ll pass neatly through the udr, british army, ruc, orange order, judiciary etc.
The fella loves to talk about nuance, but when it really comes down to it he relies on the filthiest insults and the dirtiest lies he can come up with…perfectly acceptable on the forum apparently
