There are two articles I thought I'd bring to people's attention. The first is an African-American perspective on N. Ireland, the second compares the situation facing organized labor in N. Ireland with that facing their brothers and sisters in Israel/Palestine.
The first is here.
The second is here.
For various reasons I'm not posting this in the comments section of that post (the second one), but I thought I'd post it here.
Anyway, here are my thoughts on the second one:
1. I have supported the cease-fire from the beginning, and have been, on average, fairly hostile to organizations not on cease-fire. My thoughts on that are about 2/3 down this post. They really should be on cease-fire. (I also supported the other moves for peace by the IRA, but do not feel strongly that other republican paramilitaries need to follow them).
2. The recent republican violence was not sectarian, although I would concede that the % of republican paramilitaries who are not on cease-fire today that are sectarian is probably a little higher than it was looking at republican paramilitaries 1970-997. Also, I define "sectarian" by referring to bigotry, not the fact that republicans are overwhelmingly Catholic- if it can't be described as anti-Catholic or anti-Protestant, it isn't sectarian (sometimes I might refer to sectarian DIVISONS, but that doesn't mean that everyone involved is a bigot (earlier I was a little lazy and used the word "sectarianISM" three times which has now been changed to "sectarian divisons"- that's not quite what I'm complaining about with people saying sectarian when they don't mean bigoted, and has now been made more accurate). The thing is, although I don't have the greatest record of clarifying this, when people refer to republican violence IN GENERAL as sectarian, it intentionally or otherwise gives the mis-leading impression that it's anti-Protestant, and it almost never is. My thoughts on sectarianism among republicans are here (about 1/2 the way down that post). UPDATE 12/10/11 Some info on my ACTIONS that are against anti-Protetsant sectariansm, see this.
The current republican violence is not sectarian, possibly less sectarian than what we saw on average 1970-97. I mean, the only local member of the security forces killed was CATHOLIC, and it was more likely he'd be a Catholic than it was 1970-97, and it was ridicuously more likely he'd be a nationalist than it was 1970-97 (I'm not sure if the officer did identify as nationalist, but until about 8 years ago it would have been almost impossible a Catholic member of the police would be Nationalist).
It's stupidity, not sectarianism, that's motivating these people.
3. I'm glad to hear that comparing the IRA with Hamas is being dismissed as the nonsense that it is.
This blog is mostly about 3 themes- Irish Republicanism, Star Trek, and opposition to bigotry, primarily in America (racism, homophobia, anti-semitism, etc.). It is mostly about Northern Ireland. It will mostly be about these issues in general and past events and will only sometimes touch on current events. Feel free to comment on the earlier posts.
About My Blog
My blog is about history, popular culture, politics and current events from a democratic socialist and Irish republican perspective. The two main topics are Northern Ireland on one hand and fighting anti-Semitism, racism and homophobia on the other. The third topic is supporting the Palestinians, and there are several minor topics. The three main topics overlap quite a bit. I have to admit that it’s not going to help me get a graduate degree, especially because it’s almost always written very casually. But there are some high-quality essays, some posts that come close to being high-quality essays, political reviews of Sci-Fi TV episodes (Star Trek and Babylon 5), and a unique kind of political, progressive poetry you won't find anywhere else. (there are also reviews of episodes of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and reviews of Roseanne)
(my old blog was not showing up in Google search results AT ALL (99% of it wasn't being web-crawled or indexed or whatever) and there was another big problem with it, so this is a mirror of the old one although there will be some occassionnal editing of old posts and there will be new posts. I started this blog 12/16/20; 4/28/21 I am now done with re-doing the internal links on my blog) (the Google problem with my blog (only 1% of this new one is showing up in Google search results) is why I include a URL of my blog when commenting elsewhere, otherwise I would get almost no visitors at all)
(The "Table of Contents" offers brief descriptions of all but the most recent posts)
(I just recently realized that my definition of "disapora" was flawed- I thought it included, for example, Jews in Israel, the West Bank and the Golan Heights, and with the Irish diaspora, the Irish on that island. I'll do some work on that soon (11/21/20 I have edited the relevant paragraph in my post about Zionism))
(If you're really cool and link to my blog from your site/blog, let me know) (if you contact me, use the word "blog" in the subject line so I'll know it's not spam)
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