When I heard the current US President promising to go after all those individuals and countries who support terrorism, I found myself wondering when he’ll start rounding up people in NYC and Chicago. I lived in the UK during the early Eighties, when the IRA were quite active indeed, and their activity was the murder of innocent civilians—Irish, British, they didn’t care. And their funding came from America—from idiots who believe the IRA are glorious freedom fighters, not murderous thugs.
More than once, the UK government asked US governments to act to prevent the millions of dollars pouring into IRA coffers. The response of the US government was to invite Gerry Adams over for tea. That’s not fighting terrorism, that’s abetting it.
Still, the UK fight against the IRA has served up some valuable lessons the US would do well to learn from, before they make the same mistakes.
All the retaliation by the UK, all the draconian laws and faked trials and SAS hit squads gunning people down (and sometimes even getting the guilty ones) did nothing to halt the IRA. Handing the police and security forces in the UK the power to detain indefinitely, banning from the media anything considered sympathetic to the IRA, all achieved nothing. Massive increases in the power of the police to arbitarily break up meetings achieved nothing. Nothing, that is, except the steady progress of the UK along the road to becoming a police state, a trend which continues. Oh yes, that’s another lesson: the security forces you set up to “combat terrorism” will become greedier and more rapacious.
What has given hope? Dealing with Ireland, with Northern Ireland Catholics and Protestants as though they are human beings, not goodies and baddies. Listening to their grievances. Talking to those who will talk, and trying to work with reasonable people toward reasonable outcomes. Sometimes that even means having to hold one’s nose and talk to people like Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley, to be seen to be trying to work with people one despises. The unreasonable—the terrorists and security forces—have been marginalised. Once, support for the IRA in the face of perceived oppression in Northern Ireland was so strong churchmen would preach from the pulpit in their favour, and the Irish government provided them with a haven. Constructive attempts to work with people who feel wronged has eroded that support, with reasonable people on both side beginning to see the IRA (and the Protestant paramillitaries) for what they are: nasty, brutish thugs. Undercut their support amongst the people they purport to represent.
The US President is right about one thing: it takes a long time, and it requires patience. It has been a long time to get even a semblance of progress in Nothern Ireland, and there are continual setbacks, and it is hard for the people involved not to simply fall back on the old standbys on guns and bombs. But it’s worth the effort.
I wonder if the United States can learn that lesson, or whether the next few years of my life, of everyone’s lives, are going to be marred by a new, fascistic state as it lashes out at home and abroad, randomly, incorrectly, trampling the things it strives to protect.
