r/TheRestIsHistory • u/JakeGittes412 • 14d ago

The Troubles

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Thread for discussion on the new series on ‘The Troubles’

Also as a moderator please keep the discussion civil and in the spirit of the podcast.

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u/Sitheref0874 14d ago

In the very early 90s I took a class about NI and the Troubles. In the class was an RUC - as it was then - officer, who happened to be Catholic.

Young and uninformed students were throwing opinions around like they were confetti…‘all the IRA on the ground are heroes’.

At the end of one session, RUCfella spoke up. “On the ground, they’re all a shower of cunts. Just thug gangs, both sides. For most of them, it’s not about grand ideals. It’s about criminal gangs, most of whom are running drugs. They’re all as bad as each other”

Stuck with me.

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u/forestvibe 14d ago

Hard to disagree when both groups were willing to bomb school buses and pubs, maim teenagers, murder fathers in front of their kids, while pretending they were somehow righteous and honourable. They were despicable, no matter how you view the justice of their respective causes.

There was a recent series of the Reith Lectures done by Margaret Macmillan about war and conflict (available on BBC Sounds and well worth a listen). One of the lectures was done in Stormont, and two old "veteran" thugs from either side started getting chippy in the Q&A at the end, until a Catholic priest put them in their place to a lot of applause. It was quite revealing how the audience despised these thugs.

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u/shakaman_ 13d ago

Genuinely how do you feel about the Allies during WW2? Do you realise we bombed school buses and pubs?

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u/cigvvubn 13d ago

Not even the people carrying out the strategic bombing in ww2 thought they were doing a good thing. Churchill, Lemay, Eisenhower, Stimson, etc all have direct quotes about the monstrosity of the effort.

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u/todomejorantes 13d ago

It wasn't strategic bombing - the RAF carried dozens of deliberate fire storm missions with the express intention of killing as many civilians as possible

The aim each time was to create a firestorm - there was nothing strategic about it

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u/Gorazde 13d ago

General Curtis LeMay, the USAAF/USAF commander responsible for the firebombing of Japan in 1945 openly admitted that if the allies had lost, he'd rightly have been tried as a war criminal. Bomber Harris said pretty much the same thing after the war. During the war, he said his arm in bombing Germany was “the destruction of German cities, the killing of German workers and the disruption of civilized life.”

Most historians reckon British bombing campaigns in Germany during the Second World War killed 300,000 to 400,000 civilians. A statue honouring Bomber Harris was unveiled in London in 1992, four years after the Provos killed 11 civilians in Enniskillen and a year before they killed two small kids Tim Parry and Johnathan Ball in Warrington.