(UPDATE 3/12/20 Some would say it was a different USA back then, but has any American President ever apologized for the failure of the US to do something? In some bizarre alternate history where the US sat out WWII and Nazi Germany was defeated anyway and there were a whole bunch of Holocaust survivors, the US would have at some point between then and now apologized for their inaction)
After moving that update to the Famine paragraph I added a brief note to the Troubles paragraph about the mistake. I don’t know if anyone saw the post before I fixed things but I worry that they did. Although I AM worried, it also occurred to me that it’s far from total nonsense to compare N. Ireland with Nazi Germany. First, here I’ll quote or describe and evaluate three statements by political figures who are more or less mainstream in Ireland.
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1. During something called the Siege of the Short Strand, a senior politician of the moderate nationalist and Christian-/social-democratic party the Social Democratic and Labour Party (a year earlier they had gone from getting about 60% of the Nationalist vote to getting 40-47%) compared the situation to what happened with the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw, Poland during WWII. That article (it’s not the most widely respected news source, but A) at the TIME, I read about some SDLP politician making the comparison, B) I found another article online referring specifically to McDonnell, and C) I can’t find anything better) offers some info about the Siege, and I’ll provide more in a minute, but a VERY thorough description of what happened is available from a very credible, academic source here.
The Short Strand is an isolated Catholic enclave in East Belfast surrounded on three sides by Unionist areas and on the fourth side by a river. Although I believe the Short Strand might be slightly middle-class on average, as far as I can tell their most immediate neighbors and/or those about a mile away are on average working-class. The Siege lasted for about 3 months in the late Spring and early Summer of 2002. There were frequent periods where the sky was saturated by rocks and other missiles being thrown into the Short Strand. There were 1-2 incidents of of close quarters fighting, and a small number of shots were fired. According to the link right above:
As previously noted, ‘one consequence of the interface violence was the inability for people from the Short Strand to access crucial services due to a Loyalist blockade of the area’. These included the doctor’s surgery; chemist; post office; dentist; baby clinic and shopping centres. The knock-on effect was that many elderly people were unable to collect their pensions; people who were ill could not visit the surgery or collect prescriptions; and mothers could not receive baby food supplies. It emerged through further discussions that women from the area took it upon themselves to organise ‘the relief effort for the community’. They organised transport for people to collect their pensions at post offices not in East Belfast, and they facilitated the community centre as a makeshift surgery
At one point a Catholic funeral procession was attacked. There was some violence by the security forces aimed at the Short Strand and little was done to break the Siege (less than a year earlier, after the Ulster Defense Association (a loyalist paramilitary) killed a Catholic and a Protestant who was hanging out with Catholic friends, in separate attacks, the British government minister for N. Ireland said that the UDA cease-fire was intact) (In July 1996 during 5 days of loyalist rioting throughout N. Ireland, 662 plastic bullets were fired; immediately after that, during 3 days of nationalist rioting, 5,340 plastic bullets were fired, according to a report by the Pat Finucane Centre).
As I wrote elsewhere on this blog, I think that the SDLP politician went too far, but it wasn’t absolute nonsense. Especially because the Siege was, in the end, broken by the Jewish Combat Organization (the group that carried out the rebellion in the Warsaw Ghetto). … No, it wasn’t : ). But I love that clip and the movie in general.
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2. Michael Farrell is one of my top political heroes. He wrote an amazing book “Northern Ireland: The Orange State.” It’s a great book- it’s fairly introductory at the beginning and is a history of N. Ireland ending at some point in the 1970s depending on which edition you read. It’s also almost a labor history of N. Ireland, offers a lot of analysis, exposes the sectarian, brutal and near-authoritarian nature of the Northern state. It highlights the contributions made by Protestants and leftists to the struggles for justice, equality, and freedom. It exposes the role that capital played in creating and maintaining N. Ireland and the ways that capital benefited from the partition of Ireland and Orange rule in N. Ireland. Farrell was a leading member of People’s Democracy whose politics and activities I describe in the first half of this post (starting in the very early 1970s they expressed support for the Provisional IRA).
According to his wikipedia page:
After moving to Dublin and becoming a solicitor, Farrell was co-chairperson of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties from 1995 to 2001. He was appointed a member of the Irish Human Rights Commission in 2001 and reappointed in October 2006, serving until 2011. In 2005 he was appointed to the Steering Committee of the National Action Plan Against Racism [according to his ECRI page, it was 2001-2003- TS]. He is currently working for Free Legal Advice Centres, Dublin, and has brought cases to the European Court of Human Rights and the UN Human Rights Committee. In 2011 he was appointed to the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance, and in 2012 he was appointed to the Irish Council of State by President Michael D. Higgins.
I can confirm pretty much all of it (including the Council of State part), and there’s also the fact that people who were (between 1970 and 1990) very vocal and active Northern supporters of the Provisional IRA are not appointed to the Council of State (by a mainstream Labour politician) 20 years later without being (for example) a ridiculously well respected human rights/civil liberties lawyer.
In “The Orange State” he writes on page 97 that in 1936:
The NCCL [the British National Council on Civil Liberties] commission commented that the Unionists had created “under the shadow of the British constitution a permanent machine of dictatorship.” They compared Northern Ireland with the fascist dictatorships then current in Europe. In so far as the total identification of party and state was one of the hallmarks of European fascism, the comparison was apt.
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3. Mary McAleese was a two-term President of Ireland, who was returned unopposed for her second term. She had grown up and spent probably half her life in the North when she was first elected. In 2005 she compared sectarian hatred of Catholics in N. Ireland with the hatred of Jews in Nazi Germany. She was seriously criticized by Unionists and quickly walked back the comments and apologized. She shouldn’t have. The best evidence of widespread hatred of Catholics is the following:
A: The popularity of the Orange Order, whose anti-Catholic nature and centrality to the Unionist community (for decades until about 2005 they had a bloc vote in the leadership of the UUP (then the largest of the two main Unionist parties)) is described here. (Orange Order parades were often forced through Catholic areas by the security forces including the local police)
B: In 1971 Catholics were twice as likely to be unemployed as Protestants, and in 1988 they were two and a half times as likely to be unemployed as Protestants. According to the documentary OFF OUR KNEES, in 1988, 17 out of 26 local government districts refused to sign a tame “declaration of intent” that as employers they would not discriminate, and I guarantee you that the 9 who signed it had a large Nationalist majority and that their populations added up to probably less than a 1/4 of the North’s population.
C: 1969-2005 722 Catholic civilians, only about 27 of whom were identified in the Sutton Database as political activists, were killed by the loyalist paramilitaries or the locally recruited security forces. A similar scenario in America during the same years would have seen 57,000 unarmed people of color killed by cops or Nazi skinheads (etc.) (A: based on what I’ll describe at the very bottom, I would guess that the actual number for that was probably somewhere around 7,000-8,000; B: I'm not saying the racist system in this country wasn't, ideologically or programmatically, capable of killing 57,000 people of color in those years if the "rebellion" among people of color here had been as militaristic as the one among Catholics in N. Ireland; but the reality is that as bad as it was for people of color here in those years, it was, in terms of deaths, MUCH worse for Catholics in N. Ireland). It gets worse. As I more or less wrote elsewhere on this blog:
1) In the early and mid 1970s, during internment without trial, 107 loyalists were interned, 1,874 republicans (and two leftists who were not republicans) were interned, and on average the republicans were interned longer because the first 1.5 years not a single loyalist was interned. Practically all the loyalists did was kill Catholic civilians because they were Catholic (see this). As I proved here, the Provisional IRA only targeted civilian life in .3% of their operations and only .3% resulted in civilian death (when I say
“operations” that doesn’t include things like keeping loyalist mobs or (towards the beginning of the conflict) the security forces outside Catholic areas or interface incidents with loyalist paramilitaries). Therefore, the government (either the local one or the State-wide one influenced by the local Unionist leaders) was more concerned about IRA attacks that almost never resulted in civilian death than about the sectarian slaughter of Catholic civilians because they were Catholics.
2) From its formation in 1971 until 1992, the main loyalist paramilitary, the Ulster Defence Association, was considered a legal organization by the British government. In 1974, when the gov't finally got around to declaring Sinn Fein a legal organization, they "balanced that out" by declaring that the Ulster Volunteer Force, the other main loyalist paramilitary, was legal. That lasted for about 18 months, during which the UVF was blamed for about 50 murders.
3) This indicates that the Army and (crucially, in this post) the police, were sympathetic to loyalist paramilitaries. Some new information about collusion is in a new post here.
4) There was widespread and systemic collusion with loyalist paramilitaries and this definitely included the locally recruited police. And there is evidence here and there that then two main Unionist parties, who like to talk like supporting loyalist paramilitaries is a working-class thing, frequently hinted in different ways that the Unionist middle-class was into it as well. Large elements of the Unionist middle-class accepted the crucial role of the UDA in bringing down the power-sharing Sunningdale peace agreement in 1974. Middle-class Unionist leaders often shared a platform with people representing or associated with the paramilitaries. They never objected to the double standard of Internment, and they practically never called for the UDA to be banned until shortly before it was banned.
D) Between 1998 and 2018, with the exception of 2011 (when this question wasn’t asked), Northern Ireland Life and Times asked people if they prefer to live in a neighborhood entirely of their own religion, and in an average year 22% of Protestants said that they prefer a neighborhood that’s entirely Protestant. NILT also asked people (1998-2018 with the exceptions of 1999, 2000, and 2011 (when this question wasn’t asked)) if they would mind if a close relative married someone of a different religion, and in an average year 11% of Protestants said they would mind a lot and 19% said they would mind a little. And those surveys started the same year that the Good Friday Agreement was created and a year after the IRA went on cease-fire (as I prove here, in only .3% of their operations did the IRA target civilian life and probably 2/3 of that time it wasn’t aimed at Protestants who were INNOCENT civilians; but I’m sure that the now-permanent cease-fire by the IRA had a positive effect on sectarian attitudes among Protestants).
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If, in an alternate history, the Nazis had stopped at anti-Semitic propaganda, the various laws (like the ones named Nuremberg) that created a kind of Apartheid for German Jews (and stripped them of their citizenship), and periodic orgies of violence against Germany’s Jewish population like Kristalnacht (in 1938), Nazi Germany would have been only a little more anti-Semitic than N. Ireland was anti-Catholic.
People are probably shaking their heads and thinking of how the Nuremberg laws created what I would call a kind of Apartheid for German Jews and took away their citizenship. There was informal apartheid in N. Ireland (Stormont was the regional parliament and government):
1) Even in a majority-Nationalist city like Derry, in the early 1970s anti-unionist marches were banned from the city center.
2) There were laws (during almost all of the Stormont era (1920-1972)) about voting which, without mentioning Catholics, were anti-Catholic. In local elections, you had to own a house (remember the unemployment and some stuff below) to vote and certain kinds of businesspeople, who were disproportionately Northern Protestant, had MORE than one vote in local and regional elections.
3) There was clear evidence of discrimination in the allocation of public housing in the Stormont era (partly because of that it was incredibly common during the Stormont era for more than one Catholic family to be living in a small home and this may have continued to a small degree in the 70s and 80s, although apparently DISCRIMINATION stopped in the very early 70s).
4) Although it wasn’t formal, there was segregation in housing- crucially, Catholics in mixed areas were often intimidated out of their homes.
5) Although I doubt it was enforced more than 5% of the time during the conflict, until 1988 there was a law criminalizing the display of the Irish flag, and in the mid-60s twice riot police in Belfast raided a Sinn Fein election office in solidly Nationalist West Belfast and removed a tri-color that was in the window.
Were N. Ireland Catholics stripped of their citizenship during The Troubles? Yes, and they also picked cotton for master Paisley. : ) …No, they weren’t and they didn’t (Ian Paisley was between the mid-1960s and around 2005 a very visible, extremely Unionist and anti-Catholic politician). But between 1975 and 1998, with practically zero influence on law and policy beyond local government, they were ruled by a state they quite reasonably saw as both foreign and hostile. And according to this, there was a small but significant gap in pay between Catholics and Protestants who were employed. As far as I can tell (no, I don’t have a finance or economics degree) the average employed Catholic made 75% of what the average employed Protestant made.
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Criostailoíche. That’s my half-assed attempt, using Google, at translating Kristalnacht into Irish. In August 1969, in response to the growing confidence of nationalists, the RUC police and a Unionist mob launched a determined attack on the Catholic Bogside ghetto in Derry. The area was successfully defended by local youths over 2-3 days, and the "Battle of the Bogside" sparked off similar confrontations in Belfast. There, where Catholics were more vulnerable, unionist mobs (led by the RUC) unleashed a wave of terror- in one night alone, 650 Catholic families were burnt out of their homes (in general, 83% of the homes and buildings either destroyed or needing re-building were occupied by Catholics; many of the Protestant victims were attacked by the same mobs as their Catholic neighbors were attacked by; but some were forced out in retaliation by Catholics (the odds are that the Catholic-occupied homes and buildings contained more families and a LOT more people than the Protestant-occupied homes and buildings)). Around 5-6 Catholic civilians were killed. That figure for deaths is either much lower than what happened to German Jews or almost nothing compared to what happened to German Jews (adjusting for the different population sizes). But (in July, August, and September) 1,505 Catholic families fled their homes (probably something like 18% of Belfast’s Catholic population, probably something like 1.8% of the North’s Catholic population). Kristalnacht was worse/much worse but not tons worse, especially if you consider what the police and loyalists had intended in Derry, which probably would have matched Belfast in terms of deaths and property destruction and people evicted from their homes.
Also, it would have been much worse in N. Ireland if there hadn’t been militant, and intermittently ARMED, resistance. I realize that if Jews in Germany had tried that, it almost certainly wouldn’t have saved them and there MAY have been more support among Gentile Germans for what Hitler wanted to do. But, it also MAY have encouraged those Gentile Germans opposed to anti-Semitism to resist. In the medium term it might not have stopped Nazi Germany. But IF there had been massive armed resistance by Jews and non-Jewish anti-Nazi elements, at a time when the German military wasn’t as strong as it was when the war started, it may have encouraged some European countries to attack Germany and since many elements of the German officer corps. considered deposing Hitler when it looked like he was leading Germany to disaster (and when there were fewer alumni of the Hitler Youth (who adored Hitler) than there were at any point between then and the end of the war), Hitler may have been removed from power by the military. Of course if it were the Soviet Union that attacked, that would have just united everyone remotely fond of Hitler, but they were pretty far away and seemed less than totally committed to the anti-Nazi cause. But liberal democracies may have threatened Germany enough that elements of the officer corps, with few Hitler Youth alumni in their ranks or the military in general, may have deposed Hitler.
I don’t mean to criticize German Jews of that time, but I do believe that what I just wrote is accurate (that is, how things likely would have worked out if there had been resistance), and I like talking about Nazi Germany and anti-fascism.
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So, yes, there are some small differences, some big differences, and one MASSIVE difference between what happened to Germany’s Jewish population during WWII and what happened to Catholics during The Troubles.
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What makes me confident about my statement “probably somewhere around 7,000-8,000”?
1. Between 1996 and 2005 according to the FBI there were 38 racist murders. I have read that the Department of Justice officially estimates that for every hate crime reported to the FBI there might be 20-30 that aren’t reported because not all local law enforcement agencies report such crimes to the FBI. So I came up with 1,140 for those years.
2. I heard that in a 12 month period during a 2014 (apparent) surge in police murders of black people including those of Eric Garner in NY, Tamir Rice in OH, and Michael Brown in MO among other highly publicized such cases, that around 200 black people armed or unarmed, had been killed by cops in America. Although I’m very open-minded about accusations that cops plant guns, this country also has a ridiculous number of guns.
3. Bear in mind that decades ago the number of people of color and the number of cops in this country were both smaller or much smaller than they are today.
4. If it’s worth much, about 10 years ago I read a huge amount of what the Southern Poverty Law Center put on their web-site in the previous 10-15 years. I also got an Ethnic Studies degree if that’s worth much.
5. There was little or no talk about “Brown Lives Matter” so I get the impression that very few Latinos/Latinas/Chicanos/Chicanas have been killed by cops in recent years (as far as I know, even Arpaio’s sheriff’s department in AZ didn’t kill a single such person) and that might reflect the situation in earlier decades. I have practically never heard of Asian-Americans being killed by cops. And if Native Americans were being killed at a high rate in the 80s and 90s I would have heard (a massive chunk of my major was Native American Studies).
UPDATE 6/9/21 I just found a Democracy Now! story relevant to this. It's
about the last 20 years, but there's a small overlap between that and
the period I was looking at Catholics and people of color (1969-2005),
and it's possible that what I said about this comparison is off a
little. Bear in mind that the figure I refer to in item #2 above came
from organizers of a Black Lives Matter protest.
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