Fin Keegan

Britain is going through such tumult at the moment–between the Iran Hostages episode and its aftermath, the prospect of Scottish nationalists effectively destroying the Union, and, almost as a footnote, ex-terrorists joining sectarian bigots to take control of a ‘home nation’–that it is beginning to seem as though a new historical phase is announcing itself.

The shift–or downshift–is all the more painful coming as it does on the twenty-fifth anniversary of their last memorable exercise of unilateral power: the retaking of the Falkland Islands.

Now Britain is characterized as the impotent partner in the transatlantic alliance: a perception verified as actual by President Ahmadinejad who has expertly demonstrated how pitiful is the UK’s friendship with continental Europe and even, to some extent, with the US (arguably the US laid low in order to keep the situation calm–but the plight of limey sailors also failed to capture the American public imagination).

Geopolitics aside, the behaviour of Faye Turney and her 14 colleagues has exposed some ugly division, none more so perhaps than in a Jan Moir piece for the Telegraph whose anger at Turney in particular for “singing like a canary” to the Press and “writing screeds of damaging propaganda” for Iran after being “lightly coerced” shades into a classist subtext.

How, one senses the traditional Tory class wondering, did this ignominy come about? Moir provides the answer: desire for ‘cash and celebrity’ among the cannon-fodder multitudes, the “low-ranking workhorse…personnel” as she calls them.

British elites have always been somewhat embarrassed by their working classes, upon whom the whole show has always depended–as Kipling knew but the world, before mass media at least, did not.

Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams sitting side by side is such an unprecedented image that it sets the mind flicking back through the mental archives for aparallel: Vaclav Havel as President of the State that had but months before assaulted and imprisoned him seems closest.

The saddest aspect of this generally happy day (apart from the fact that moderates have been so sidelined) is that it took almost forty years to get the two sides to share power in a jurisdiction that is so tiny.

In an ideal world Paisley and Adams would be provincial councillors or part-time local politicians. Instead they are known throughout the world, from Tehran to Tulsa, very often for their sectarianism and, betimes, more or less veiled approval of political violence.

Now we may be headed for a situation, once unthinkable, where Ian Paisley is in charge up North and Gerry Adams is President down South. Who’s to say now that such a thing could not happen?

We were newly-minted parents, living three miles from the World Trade Center. On September 11th, 2001 we saw, from our Brooklyn bedroom, the Twin Towers smoking black in strangely equal plumes and then, loudly, unbelievably, vanishing.

Before they fell, with the second plane having already hit, I went out to buy water and supplies. Our Polish neighbour, a refugee from the war, stood in a smock and hairnet on her stoop. Bewildered, she stared up, over the facing row of brownstones and trees, at the pair of now-chimneys and their pitch-black exhalation.
     She had been laundering in her basement all morning: her industry made of our respective yards a telling contrast. “What has happened?” she asked, both vowels and consonants still shaped by a long-swallowed-up Middle Europe.
     I told her that fires had broken out: nothing about the planes, the express intent connoted by a second strike. How to tell her, of all people, that a new and dreadful chapter of human history had just been opened before our eyes? But I should have–and also assured her of the supplies I was getting for ourselves and the baby.
     At the store Ling, the Malyasian shopkeeper, and I pooled our information. Behind me a child, standing with her mother and little brother, burst out crying: their father worked at the World Financial Center.
     We worked to persuade her that it was the adjacent World Trade Center that had been hit. We all knew, the child as much as the mother and wife, that he was, in any event, gravely endangered.
     A few days later, through smoke swirling in massive arc lights, I saw up close what the titanic forces of hatred had unleashed on our city: savage minds had twisted like pipecleaners the mighty steel and concrete–and confidence–of downtown Manhattan.
     And since? Only a poet could come closer than Peggy Noonan has:

For something like four years 9/11 was for me a bruise in my heart. Someone would refer to it or I’d see a picture in a newspaper and I’d experience it as a pressing on the bruise, and I’d hurt. My feelings were immediately accessible and immediately there. This year for the first time it is not a bruise but a scar–jagged, less open to remedy, comparatively numb. My heart has healed and is ever altered

Quote: Peggy Noonan The Storm Before the Balm Wall Street Journal, September 15, 2005

A striking aspect of the Cold War at its deepest was the phenomenon of McCarthyism, which, through Congressional committee and media hysteria, sought to extirpate elements deemed subversive. Our paranoia necessarily paled in comparison to Stalin’s purges, but both shared the impulse to “cleanse” the body politic of heterogeneous elements.

(Similarly, the defense posture of the post-war Superpowers was symmetrical, to the point of producing Mutually Assured Destruction, an acronym to savour).

Although our current struggle against Islamo-fascism is assymetrical, Pat Robertson’s ungentle suggestion that the President of Venezuela be assasinated produced another likeness worth noting. One of the few words in Arabic that Westerners know is fatwa: an opinion or injunction promulgated by a religious authority. We first heard the term when the Ayatollah Khomeni attempted to murder a peaceful man, Salman Rushdie, whose only crime was storytelling. Subsequent clerical directives have spiritually underwritten murder the world over, from New York to Bali. And now comes the moral test for us that McCarthyism once posed and which, until decency re-emerged, we failed: an influential religious authority in our own society has issued a call for murder.

In effect, the McCarthys and the Robertsons suggest to our opponents that we are, essentially, their equal in amorality. And, in forfeiting principle, they comfort the Enemy, who relishes moral weakness more than any other.

Such a proposition therefore must be roundly refuted, especially by leaders in those communities (mostly Republicans) to whom Robertson, a tele-evanglist, appeals.

There must be no equivocation: we may kill, but we don’t murder.

Backstory: Pat Robertson calls for assassination of Hugo Chavez

Posted: August 22nd, 2005

Gerry Adams on an Irish banknote: photoshop today, reality tomorrow? Stranger things have happened…

Image: 10, originally uploaded to Flickr by bartmaguire.

The bigwigs (bigbeards?) in the Provisional IRA have “formally ordered an end to the armed campaign…all units have been ordered to dump arms.” Let’s hope that, this time, they mean what they say.

It’s worth remembering, at this point, where the Provisionals came from and where they ended up. A de facto mandate was seized by them when Civil Rights were denied to Catholics in the late 1960s. But they bungled it: rather than defend their people, they succumbed to a harebrained ideological dream, which quickly devolved into death-worship and, more recently, a brutal criminality. The courage of the McCartney sisters reasserted the voice of a decent society too long silenced by shame, fear, and grief. The IRA’s decision may mean, at last, an end to the nightmare.

Link: IRA Statement

Posted: July 29th, 2005

“Anyone who isn’t paranoid in Northern Ireland has something wrong with them,” Dennis Bradley once said. And, certainly, never really knowing who to trust is the hallmark of civil conflict. Betrayal, lies, and casual violence; civilians routinely murdered on their doorsteps; security forces conspiring with sectarian assassins; religious leaders bellowing Scripture at the mob: such was life in the British-controlled portion of Ireland before the 1998 Peace Agreement brought relative calm.

For Clinton and Blair, adepts of spin and ambiguity, such conditions were perfectly suited to both the aspirations and pretensions they share. Together with local players and former Senator George Mitchell, the two overseas leaders made it their business to understand and accommodate the grassroots consensus for peace throughout the island.

Both men relished the late-night conference calls, the marathon negotiations, the legalistic contortions, and probably too the gallery of characters involved–from wannabe Ché Guevaras to fire-and-brimstone shitstirrers. The Irish Problem, you get the feeling, was something from which Clinton and Blair, Boomer Idealists bogged down in domestic governance, got a real buzz.

Not so the current President, who famously avoids the epic briefings ingested by his predecessor and has no peacemaking ambitions, at least where vital interests are uninvolved.

Why, indeed, bother with such a small, squalid, conflict? There is no strategic U.S. interest in permanent settlement, other than the removal of an occasional irritant in the “special relationship” enjoyed (or, latterly, endured) by the two largest English-speaking powers. And any number of needier countries in Africa could do with the diplomatic attention lavished on the provincial chieftains of tiny Ulster. But Ireland and America go back a long way–after all we saved civilization (Guinness; Thin Lizzy; James Joyce) and you once rescued a few million of us from starvation. We built many of your cities; you built many of our dreams: if any two countries can claim to be sister nations, they are Ireland and America.

But for all the complexities of the world beyond Crawford, Texas, the need for justice and freedom, as recent events in Beirut, Bishkek, and Belfast have shown, can be piercingly simple. In Ireland, an unexpected revolt against terror has come from the steadfast, outspoken courage of five remarkable women–sisters of a working-class Catholic called Robert McCartney, battered and sliced to death by IRA men in a crowded bar in spring of 2005.

Sinn Féin, political wing of the nominally dormant Irish Republican Army, has been caught on the back foot by the near-universal demand, even among their own supporters, for their paramilitary cohort to submit to the rule of law, release the many witnesses of the pub murder from threat of reprisal, and then “go away”.

IRA disbandment [see below] would leave the community, including an unshackled Sinn Féin, to rebuild their lives in peace. And it may surprise some to learn that the best way to achieve a reunited Ireland would be for the IRA, increasingly active in organized crime, to retire themselves into history.

In their pain, the McCartneys’ moral clarity has proved a beacon by which to guide the often-benighted ship of Irish peace. Washington’s job now is to provide a calm and prudent escort to safety, without brinksmanship or name-calling.

Update: Dropping the Armalite

Post Date: March 25th, 2005