Peace, principle and self-preservation

OK – I don’t think I can take it anymore. Everyone is entitled to his/her opinion, but if the opinion is riddled with contradictions, it’s important to note that and dismiss it.

I’m talking about those people who publicly wring their hands at the bloody way we chopped into each other here for some thirty years. Catholic v Protestant, nationalist v unionist. While British forces tried to protect and quell the two sides, often paying with their lives. How awful.

And what bollocks.

If you’re opposed to violence, better make it clear if you are totally opposed to it or if in fact you’re prepared to use it/approve of it on selected occasions. Those who talk of thirty years of senseless slaughter must know what bilge that is. It may have been slaughter but it wasn’t senseless. On the republican side, it arose from a combination of reaction to British forces’ abuse of Irish people in the North and a struggle that’s been happening on and off for 800 years. As Paul McCartney sang before the BBC banned his song Give Ireland Back  to the Irish: 

‘Tell me, how would you like it

If on your way to work

You were stopped by Irish soldiers

Would you lie down? Do nothing?

Would you give in? Or go berserk?’

The truly crazy notion that hundreds of totally ordinary young men and women suddenly took up arms, were shot, killed, imprisoned over a 30-year period – and then stopped. Three decades of blood-lust, ending as abruptly as it began. That’s a favourite take on what happened, and it’s either intentionally misleading or simply daft.

“But they had a choice!” is the routine condemnation of those who resorted to violence in response to such events as Ballymurphy, Bloody Sunday and the assassination of lawuers like Pat Finucane and Rosemary Nelson. Supposing one of those victims had been your father/brother/mother/siister/cousin/friend, would you still have had a choice?

Finally, there is one motivation I have never heard produced for being opposed to political violence, but is at the back of much pacifism. Such people hold up their non-violence  as a virtuous respect for human life. I’ve never heard any of them concede the perfectly understandable  concern for the speaker’s own life. People don’t talk about this, but at the heart of many people’s pacifism is a fear that they themselves  might be wounded/killed/imprisoned  – but that doesn’t sound as noble, does it?

Pacifism masquerading as principle when in fact it’s a simple concern for self-preservation. Come clean, guys, come clean.