I feel completely misunderstood. ibid.
I realised that the only one who has actually showed any kind of violence or aggression on the raft is me. ibid.
Stepping ashore was a very strange feeling. It was 101 days that we had been at sea. ibid. survivor
We started out them and us and became us. ibid.
No man has a right to raise a hand to a woman in anger other than in self-defence and that rarely ever occurs. And so we have to just change the culture, period. And keep punching at it, and punching at it, and punching at it. Joe Biden, Democrat debate
‘Between 1920 and 1922 Belfast is the most violent place in Ireland. It is really the epicentre of revolutionary violence. What we see again and again is violence in one part of Ireland leads to violence in another part.’ The Road to Partition s1e1, historian, BBC 2021
On 22 June 1921 King George V and Queen Mary arrived in Belfast for the first official opening of the Northern Ireland parliament. Fearful for their lives, they had come to a city scarred with sectarian division. The occasion marked the creation of the new state of Northern Ireland. ibid.
This is the story of the dramatic events that led to the partition of Ireland. A story that continues to reverberate to the present day. And dominate the relationship between the islands of Britain and Ireland. ibid.
For Britain, the loudest and most strident demands for self-determination came from very close to home, from a country that it had ruled for centuries: Ireland. Prior to the war, and in response to long-standing demands from Irish nationalists, Britain had been preparing to devolve some powers to a Dublin-based parliament, through so-called home-rule. But home-rule was fiercely resisted by Unionists, particularly in Belfast and large parts of Ulster, where for centuries the population had been impacted by migration from Scotland and England. ibid.
By the end of the nineteenth century Ulster’s distinctiveness was marked by its status as the most industrialised part of Ireland. ibid.
The outbreak of the First World War averted the threat of a violent confrontation between Ulster Unionists and the British government, and home rule was suspended. ibid.
Nine weeks after the Easter rising, on the western front the men of the 36th Division made a very different blood sacrifice. In July, during the first two days of fighting at the battle of the Somme, the Division suffered an appalling 5,500 casualties. Men fighting for Britain … ‘The battle of the Somme was absolute slaughter particularly for Ulster Unionists.’ ibid.
As Ireland went to the polls in December 1918, voters had a choice between Sinn Fein and the Irish Parliamentary Party, and between two radically different visions of Ireland’s future. ibid.
Both Unionists and Republicans would take advantage of another political force that emerged for the first time in 1918: Women. They had become more politically engaged before the War, and were voting now for the first time. They included the members of the Ulster Women’s Unionist Council. ibid.
‘Sinn Fein took matters into their own hands and formed an independent though illegal parliament in Dublin … the Dail is rapidly backed by force which is rapidly known as the IRA.’ ibid.
Republicans in favour of taking up arms had already done so. On the same day as the Dail sat in Dublin for the first time, two members of the Irish Royal Constabulary were killed in an IRA ambush in County Tipperary. The first shots of the Irish War of Independence had been fired. ibid.
Lisburn: Loyalists went on the rampage in the town, looting and burning Catholic homes and businesses. ibid.
The deployment of the Black & Tans was to backfire, and their reputation for brutality and reprisal attacks on civilians and property intensified the conflict in the south, leading to international condemnation. ibid.
Despite the war of independence raging across the island, Unionists in the north continued to lay the foundations for a new state. ibid.
1918: In Ireland, Nationalist demands for independence from Britain had already resulted in an armed rebellion in 1916, and the bloody fallout from radicalised public opinion. While Nationalists wanted to break from centuries of British rule, in the industrial north-east of the island, many Unionists feared the loss of their cultural and economic ties to Britain and the empire. The Road to Partition II
This was a royal visit like no other. The King and Queen had come to a land where a bloody war to win independence from Britain still raged, and a city ravaged by sectarian violence. ibid.
The Irish delegation succumbed to pressure and signed the Treaty. But deeply conflicted by its terms, Collins said that he had in fact signed his own death warrant. ibid.
Just two months later in August 1922 the civil war was to take a dramatic turn and claim its most high profile victim: Michael Collins. ibid.
[Isaiah] Berlin’s warning would become a prophecy. Ironically, this corruption of negative liberty would begin with the resurgence of positive liberty. In the wake of the Soviet disaster, a new and even more extreme version of positive liberty was about to rise up in the Third World. It would be a revolutionary vision of transforming individuals through violence. It would spread and begin to destabilise the balance of power in the world. In response, the followers of negative liberty in the West would decide that they had to confront and roll back this tide. Out of this would emerge a strange mutant idea. You would use violent revolutionary techniques to create a world of negative freedom. Adam Curtis: The Trap III: We Will Force You to be Free, BBC 2007
[Jean-Paul] Sartre believed … only through revolutionary violence that individuals in the west could free themselves from the controls of bourgeois society. ibid.
The chaos caused by these revolutions also began to destabilise the balance of power in the world. And this would inexorably bring them face to face with America and its global battle against communism. But what this clash was going to lead to was the rise in America of a new militant idea of freedom, and the belief that it was the United States’ duty to spread this freedom around the world by force if necessary ibid.
The Americans began to turn to violence and torture to enforce their kind of freedom. ibid.
And then in 1979 the Iranian revolution showed dramatically America’s policy of backing dictators did not work. The Iranian people rose up and toppled the Shah of Iran. The Shah had one of the largest military forces in the world given to him by the Americans. But it proved helpless in the face of the new Islamist ideology of Ayatollah Khomeini. Many in the West saw Khomeini as the resurgence of a dark almost medieval force. But this was wrong. The Iranian revolution was yet again driven by Western ideas of political freedom. ibid.
The other part of Project Democracy was to use military force in secret operations to overthrow foreign regimes that stood in the way of freedom. The main target was the government of Nicaragua, the Sandinistas. The Sandinistas were Marxist revolutionaries who had seized power in 1979; but since then they had held elections and had been democratically elected. The Reagan administration dismissed this though as a sham. And an operation was set up to enforce the right kind of democracy by overthrowing the Sandinistas if necessary. The man in charge was a leading Neo-Conservative Elliott Abrams. ibid.
The Americans started funding and training a counter-revolutionary army called the Contras. But there was enormous political opposition in the United States. And to get round it the leaders of Project Democracy set out to frighten the American public. An agency called The Office of Public Diplomacy was set up that disseminated what was called White Propaganda. It produced dossiers and fed stories to journalists that proved that Soviet fighter planes had arrived in Nicaragua to attack America. Another story from ‘intelligence sources’ said that the Soviets had given stockpiles of chemical weapons to the Sandinistas. President Reagan appeared on television with maps to show how quickly such a chemical attack could be launched on America itself. It was only a matter of time. ibid.
The Neo-Conservatives were beginning to believe that their ideal of freedom was an absolute. And that this then justified lying and exaggerating in order to enforce that vision. The end justified the means. Although they portrayed the Contras as freedom fighters, it was well known that they used murder, assassination and torture. And also were allegedly using CIA-supplied planes to smuggle cocaine back into the United States. And to finance the Contras, the Neo-Conservatives were even prepared to deal with America’s enemy – the leaders of the Iranian revolution. In 1985 those running the Nicaragua operation held a series of secret meetings with Iranian leaders in Europe. They arranged to sell the Iranians American weapons; in return the Iranians would release American hostages held in Lebanon. Then the money from these sales would be used by those running Project Democracy to fund the Contras. The only problem was that this was completely illegal. And the President knew it. ibid.
What was beginning to emerge was the problem of spreading freedom around the world. To do it those leading Project Democracy had turned not just to manipulation and violence but were beginning to undermine the ideals of democracy in America. The very thing they were trying to create abroad. It was the corruption of freedom that Isaiah Berlin had warned of. ibid.