And they call us terrorists

Posted by Jim on June 7, 2017

A very thoughtful but unshareable post found in another Irish group:

“A British view

I was born in England of Scottish parents. I’d like to tell you how I was brought up to view the Irish as it’s a fairly typical story.
My parents weren’t particularly prejudiced considering their era. I wasn’t directly taught that Irish (or ‘blacks’ for that matter) were inferior. There was some casual racism by my peers….. some pathetic jokes against minorities including the Irish. But nor was I aware of the tragic and at the same time magnificent story that formed Ireland’s history, or the wicked part that ‘my’* country had played in beating down that wonderful race. *My country, yes, but I had no choice where I was born – as did none of you.
As a child, I was scared of the IRA because they killed people (ordinary people, not soldiers) quite near to where we lived. As a young adult, I worked in the City of London where one was nervous in case an IRA bomb went off near one’s workplace. There were stories of someone called Bobby Sands who was exactly the same age as me. His face, in newspaper articles so full of spite and bias, looked open and noble. How could that be? I learned he had been imprisoned by my country for his evil deeds. He was on hunger strike. What was hunger strike? I tried to imagine. If I went on hunger strike for any reason I’m afraid I would give up as soon as I was really, truly hungry. If I knew I was dying, I’d most certainly crumble. I am a weakling really and I admit that. But reading about Bobby Sands who was villified all around me I thought, ‘what makes a man do that?’ I felt unable to join in the criticism of my peers. Although he was doubtless a ‘bad’ man (and of course it took me a long while to work out that in fact ‘bad’ didn’t apply) he surely must at the same time be brave, enduring such suffering for the sake of his beliefs however foolish they were?
Then I tried to understand the motives of the men who were bombing civilians in London. I felt a grudging admiration for them, together with fear and horror. Like Jeremy Corbyn, I don’t condone terrorism. But what is terrorism?
Now I’m 63. This is the age Bobby Sands would have been and deserves to be still. He deserves to be winding down with a whiskey on a summer’s evening, or playing with his grandchildren, or taking his dog for a walk in the mountains of his homeland. And I see things more clearly now. I see a history – not just of my lifetime, but the lifetimes of my parents, grandparents, gg grand parents, and centuries before that – where one of the most warm-hearted, poetic and beautiful inside and out nations had the misfortune to be geographically situated next to one of the world’s greatest bullies. They were gagged and persecuted and sneered at and tortured by their greedy, delusional and oppressive neighbours. They were tormented and murdered by a race that was too stupid to even realise their victims’ precious worth. How many a great writer, artist, philanthropist, composer, philosopher, poet, loving mother or father was smothered before they could even exist? It now, belatedly, occurs to me that long-drawn-out slow, mean cruelty is actually worse than ‘terrorism’ for a valid cause. In fact, oppression IS terrorism – it’s just more protracted and therefore even more pernicious. And it often wears the gaudy garb of hypocrisy.”