‘Corbyn, gaslighting and political violence’ by John O’Neill

A visible theme of the Tory’s British general election campaign that intensified over the weekend before the Manchester Arena bombing was the attempts to associated Jeremy Corbyn with the IRA in the public’s eye. This involved hysterical allusions to him meeting the IRA (usually meaning Sinn Féin) at various times. Clearly the strategy was to ignore both facts and context as the actual purpose was to try and associate Corbyn with what is deemed as ‘terrorism’ by the British media (blissfully ignoring its own government’s long and bloody history of violence). This use of counter factual history (often dubbed ‘fake news’) is sometimes called ‘gaslighting’ – using ‘fake news’ to associate the likes of Corbyn with the exact opposite of his own views (he clearly didn’t support violent actions by the IRA, nor today supports violent actions by the likes of ISIS).

Given the attempts by ISIS to try and use violence to influence the French election and the symbolism of anniversaries in their methodology, a future inquiry will likely focus on why the Tory party HQ primed the media to gaslight Corbyn over ‘terrorism’ in the days running up to the anniversary of Lee Rigby’s murder (the day of the Manchester Arena bomb). Specifically, it may ask whether intelligence about the threat level had leaked from security officials to Tory election HQ (this is not to say they had specific foreknowledge of the attack, merely did they expect something). Expect the name Cambridge Analytica to crop up if this ever happens. Cambridge Analytica is the data mining and analytics company behind the Brexit and Trump campaigns. It is presumably supporting the Tories in the election and providing insights into how to manipulate social media to target key voting demographics. It’s hardly a conspiracy theory to wonder at how all the timings happened to coincide here.

That aside, gaslighting Corbyn over his contacts with Sinn Féin has thrown a spotlight on how little knowledge or insight into the conflict here exists within the British mainstream, both political and media. Firstly, there is the embarrassing non-issue of British authorities meetings with republicans (be that the IRA or Sinn Féin). In an interview with the US media network PBS in the 1990s, John Kelly, a senior figure in the IRA and the Defence Committees talked about how in August 1969, immediately after the deployment of British soldiers on the streets, senior IRA staff maintained communications with British Army staff with both hoping to be able resolve matters between themselves (incident centres were even set up for liaison after the 1975 ceasefire). So from the first month of deployment and ever afterwards there was a more or less permanent line of communication between republicans and the British authorities, sometimes direct, sometimes face-to-face, sometimes via intermediaries. Not much of it was particularly secret, like when republican negotiating teams were flown to London or front bench, back bench or opposition fact finding teams found themselves in Belfast or Derry before issuing brief statements or posing for photos. To quote just one example, Danny Morrison pointed out over the weekend that Douglas Hurd, then a Tory backbencher, met himself and Gerry Adams on one such trip to Belfast in 1977. Before Corbyn was even an MP.

Retrospectively, there is now a lazy tendency to represent the whole conflict in Ireland as compressed into a single monolithic episode of violence. Much of the gaslighting of Corbyn, and attempted interventions into the story by both media commentators and politicians, fall directly into this same trap. Notably, academics and historians have not been quick to step in here and attempt to place anything in context or at least attempt to reflect the complexities of how events unfolded. Not only was the post-1969 conflict repeatedly punctuated by truces, ceasefires and political initiatives, neither were the intensities or sustained nature of the violence ever pre-ordained. That, in itself, may be a significant revelation to many people raised on a strict dietary narrative of ‘men of violence’, ‘terrorists’ and ‘decent people’ slogans and propaganda.

In the 1970s a strategic decision was made to adopt an ‘Ulsterisation’ approach to the conflict, somewhat along the lines of the ‘Vietnamisation’ strategy recently adopted by the US in south-east Asia (itself modelled on the French Union’s own jaunissment project in Vietnam in the 1950s). That involved pushing security onto locally raised militias (such as the RUC and UDR) and attempting to influence heart and minds through the criminalisation of anti-state forces. This also decontextualized political violence into some form of motiveless personalised violence with the long term problems that has had both for victims who lack a contextual framework in which to at least comprehend events at the time of their loss, and, for the broader possibility of genuine conflict transformation. To many people, raised solely on that narrative, it seems antithetical that anyone met the IRA or Sinn Féin (when they clearly and repeatedly did meet them).

The sum total of the renewed awareness of the repeated meetings between the British government and political mainstream with republicans should prompt a more nuanced debate and understanding of how violence was political not criminal, as uncomfortable as people may be with that assessment. Otherwise, why did successive British governments, oppositions and officials continually meet with the IRA and Sinn Féin? Do they habitually meet ‘criminals’? Similarly, a better appreciation of the chronology of events and the influence those meetings had, both positive and negative (and the reactions they prompted), may make for a fuller realisation that some violence wasn’t inevitable, and, in other contexts such as dealing with the likes of ISIS, may not be inevitable, if proper communication takes place.

And don’t be surprised if word gets out, in future, that that communication with ISIS has already been happening. And that it involves the very people trying to damn Corbyn in the eyes of the British public.