Because I came to the view that I could not maintain the cognitive dissonance needed to a support a party that supposedly campaigns for social justice but at the same time is a front for a group that committed unspeakable atrocity after unspeakable atrocity and is still proud of it.
That the cause of Sinn Fein is not the cause of Catholics or people who identify as Irish in the North of Ireland. They are entirely separate causes.
That nationalism uber alles is dangerous, as exemplified by Trump, Brexit, the Tories, Putin, Le Pen, Salvini, Orban, Modi, Xi Jinping and all the rest.
Because I’m not a nationalist, I’m a Republican. Sinn Fein aren’t Republican, they’re nationalist.
Because the north’s only hope to create a decent society is to ditch the DUP and Sinn Fein and elect people who will actually work to improve the lives of people whichever background they’re from, rather than bickering over flegs. Be it the SDLP, People Before Profit, the Alliance, or sensible, moderate unionists like Sylvia Hermon or Mike Nesbitt.
Because electing people who will actually work to improve the lot of the people of the North, is the only way a united Ireland ever has a chance of happening.
I asked you why you did a complete 180 on The Troubles and the Provos. The war ended over 20 years ago, your views on The Troubles and the Provos has done a 180 in the past few years.
Your above doesn’t address the question that I asked. Why are your engaging in revisionism on The Troubles?
History is history and you’re delivering two different accounts of the same thing to suit your narrative at each time.
Thst exposes you as a duplicitous character and someone with very little conviction or integrity in their beliefs.
It’s trademark Eoghan Harris, I guess he grew up from Stickie days good.
I wouldn’t say I’m alone in saying thst most posters here would have found you far more rational and sensible 5 years ago from looking at your posts then what they are now.
If you want to rewrite history and do a 180 on your own account of past events and want to pretend it never happened then it draws parallel with Eoghan Harris.
I can understand why you no longer support SF. Completely.
What I can’t understand is why you have engaged in trying to rewrite history because you no longer support SF. Criticise the leadership, criticise their policies, their direction, their personell presently. You supported their past though and now because you don’t support their present, attempt to rewrite the past.
All you serve to do is undermine your own credibility.
It’s like a footballer who played for a club and said the fans of that club are the best in the world.
The footballer then moves club and says the fans of his old club were shit.
All that does is show you are a duplicitous character. The Troubles ended 20 years so nothing has changed about them or the circumstances that brought them about at the time.
The only thing that has changed has been your narrative. You’ve gone from claiming the Provos were justifed in their campaign to a few years later saying they weren’t without any of the facts changing.
That doesn’t make any sense. History doesn’t change, so why have you attempted to rewrite it?
That’s just all viewing things with the benefit of hindsight.
An organisation’s “selling point” is just whatever it claims it is, ie. marketing. The only person who says that the IRA weren’t viewed as fighting back is someone with no connection to the north whatsoever because that’s just how it was viewed, fact, and also how it sold itself. Reality has nothing to do with that one way or another.
Marching is fighting back. Civil disobedience is fighting back. Throwing stones is fighting back. A riot is (usually) the cry of the unheard. Shooting Loyalists or Brits even the RUC is fighting back, it brought immense heartache to the families of those victims, but you can at least see there might be a logic to it in terms of it being “fighting back”. You can draw a logic that it was bringing the fight directly to those who were oppressing you.
Earlier, Kingsmills was mentioned by another poster. That poster rightly said it was an indefensible atrocity. But it was accompanied by that word, “but”.
There was no “but” about Kingsmills. It was pure evil and there’s no mitigations or explanations or weasel words that can change that. And there are so many other Provo atrocities like that littered throughout 1971 to 1997. All evil.
And all serving an ideology and a campaign which had zero chance of succeeding. The Provos were formed for one major reason. To achieve a united Ireland by physical force. The same people who had been involved in previous failed IRAs tried again. “Fighting back” was merely a by product. Fighting against their own community was very often another way of summing up what they were doing.
The existence of the Provos is indivisible from that litany of atrocities. Sinn Fein say these atrocities were wrong. That’s good. And it’s great they no longer happen. And it’s great that Sinn Fein do politics now, not killing. But those atrocities happened. And the people who carried them out were all rehabilitated. And justification of the broad thrust of the Provo campaign of which those atrocities were a totally indivisible part is a prerequisite for being in Sinn Fein.
A lot of younger people are voting Sinn Fein now for bread and butter political reasons, and I can’t condemn them for that. I agree with a good deal of Sinn Fein’s ideas on bread and butter issues. But sooner or later there may come a point where a significant amount of Sinn Fein voters who genuinely believe in social and economic justice, and there are many, cannot maintain the cognitive dissonance needed to support them. Una Mullally, for instance, how can she square her belief in social and economic justice with the constant cries of “Up The Ra”, the same Ra which did Kingsmills and Enniskillen and Warrington?
Sinn Fein is a united Ireland party. First, last and everything. Not a social justice party. The social justice part is window dressing, a vehicle to advance the wider agenda, which threatens to harm social and economic justice, and indeed harm peace, because a premature border poll will seriously threaten peace. Social justice, economic justice, conciliation, respect, integration, these should be the primary aims for the North. If you have all those, does it matter what the flag is? And what is a united Ireland worth anyway if we don’t have those?
it’s 1:25am. You’ve been drafting that for about half an hour. Get a fucking life.
the first sentence, the only one I’ve read says “marching is fighting back…” that’s just your opinion and you can’t see that you opinion doesn’t matter a fuck. What happened happened, that is history. You looking back 50 odd years and saying, after one stage being a SFer yourself that you can fight back through marching doesn’t change anything or isn’t worth anything to anybody.
You can’t even remember the initial point you were arguing about here. The initial point was whether people who joined the provos after Ballymurphy or Bloody Sunday think that they were fighting back against the British army. How does your opinion in 2021 possibly conceivably change that?
You’re just fighting with yourself here and I’m not going to waste my time reading it. Man in 2021 doesn’t like the provos - holy fuck, I’d never have fucking guessed.
