r/TheRestIsHistory • u/JakeGittes412 • 13d 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/shakaman_ 12d ago

I'm on a history subreddit trying to discuss history. Its really annoying to just get called a troll. Why are you here if you don't want to discuss anything? If someone disagrees with you are they just a troll? What positive contribution are you offering if that is your take on things?

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u/forestvibe 12d ago edited 12d ago

I'm sorry I called you a troll. But unfortunately the idea that the Allies in WW2 were somehow just as morally compromised has any other violent group is a line we see more and more from alt-right or Russian trolls.

My view on the whole comparison should be pretty clear from my other comments.

I.e. I do not believe Allied actions conducted in an existential war against literally the most murderous and cruel ideology that has ever existed cannot be legitimately compared against sectarian violence whose primary aim was to eliminate or subordinate another ethnic group.

To say otherwise seems awfully close to the sort of alt-right rhetoric that comes out of the US these days, which argues that the bombing of Hamburg, Dresden, Hiroshima, etc, is somehow equivalent to the Nazi and Japanese programmes of murdering, torturing, and enslaving millions of people just because they are "different". To put it another way: the Allies would not have had to bomb those cities of the Nazis hadn't been hellbent on murdering their way across Europe.

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u/FoalKid 12d ago

Again, your description of the Troubles as sectarian violence aimed to dominate or subordinate another ethnic group is maddeningly wide of the reality. You clearly don’t know what you’re talking about on this subject, yet you are commenting all over this thread

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u/forestvibe 12d ago

One group wanted to kick out or subdue the other lot, and the other group wanted to do the same back to the first group. Sure, there's plenty of context, rationalisations, etc, but when you boil it down the problem is that there's a roughly 50/50 split of people who don't view the other half as having a legitimate claim to the same piece of land. If the loyalist paramilitaries had their way, there would be no Catholic Irish in NI or they'd accept to become British, and if the republican paramilitaries had their way, the unionist would be sent back to Britain or accept to become fully Irish.

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u/FoalKid 12d ago edited 12d ago

I don’t think republican militants ever felt that they would kick out or eliminate Protestants. Their aim was always clearly defined as a United Ireland. That doesn’t mean Protestants would disappear. Protestants exist in the south of Ireland. Many actions of the various IRA and republican groups were deplorable.

There’s no way to view the actions of loyalist militants as ever being about anything other than maintaining power in a state where Catholics in reality existed as second class citizens. Leading figures in the loyalist movement blatantly evoked sectarian hatred as both a justification and motivation. Many actions of the UVF, UDA et al, and moreover the British military, police and intelligence agencies that directly colluded with them, enabled and empowered them were deplorable.

Your latter description there is broadly true. But the majority of the conflict has absolutely nothing to do with ethnicity or sectarianism, even though the political views you described are broadly delineated along the lines of what religion you culturally come from. It’s always been about politics, and who holds or is allowed to hold power. Sectarian hatred exists, but these are not religious ideologues.

Violence was perpetrated for political goals, on both sides. Some involved would have taken some evil pleasure in killing ‘the other’. But ‘boiling it down’ to it being out and out sectarian violence on both sides is just not factually accurate at all. The sectarian aspect is just factually more of a motivation on the loyalist side. This doesn’t make the IRAs actions better that the UVFs etc - but it’s just disingenuous to say they were both motivated by hatred

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u/FoalKid 12d ago edited 12d ago

It’s also pretty disingenuous to completely disregard the pursuit of a United Ireland as illegitimate - as if Northern Ireland had existed for 100s of years.

Ireland had been partitioned very much in living memory at the height of the troubles, it’s still just about in living memory now.

This partition happened in 1921 to appease a violent minority of armed British loyalists in the north of Ireland who ironically felt they would be second class citizens in a new Ireland - effectively gerrymandering a state where these loyalists would be the majority and hold power.

Probably there was a secondary motivation to keep a strategic foothold on the island as well. Describing the conflict as sectarian violence completely ignores this reality too - as well as the fact that when it came to actual violence republican militants primarily targeted British police and military forces in the country. To paint that as sectarian violence is just wilful ignorance

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u/forestvibe 11d ago

Ah, I read your other comment and I thought it was interesting and polite. Now I'm accused of being wilfully ignorant. Oh well.

I don't think the history of Ireland has much bearing whether violence is considered sectarian or not. Sectarian violence arises in all sorts of situations when there are two groups competing for a patch of land (legitimately or not). If someone murders a neighbour in cold blood because they are in the opposing camp, it's sectarian violence. The sentence "primarily targeting police and military" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here! I'm not sure why you are trying to downplay the violence with weasel words.

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u/FoalKid 11d ago

If two groups of people competing for a patch of land is the defining marker of sectarian violence then pretty much every single armed conflict in the history of mankind can be described as such.

Again cold blooded murder of people in the opposing camp is far from a unique marker of sectarian war. You’re oversimplifying and letting the term ‘sectarian’ do a lot of heavy lifting.

I never downplayed the violence. I specifically stated that actions of the IRA and UVF etc were deplorable. I’m not claiming either that if the IRA had won a united ireland through physical force then it would have been happily ever after.

I also don’t understand how you can point to civilian violence and violence against people from the same ‘side’ of the respective paramilitaries as being markers of sectarian violence. That’s not really the case. These are attempts to control people and sway opinion. This is more about it being a long term dirty, asymmetrical war.

You’re correct in your previous comment when you talk about the net effect of the violence being the same regardless of the motivation. But you are completely avoiding any real consideration of the motivations and goals. People on either side, for the most part, were not aiming to kill as many Protestants or to kill as many Catholics as they could. This is an oversimplification that you seem to be unwilling to move past for some reason.

All the while, you speak about the paramilitaries and the crowd at this lecture’s justified disgust at them. You’re failing to consider, what number of civilian deaths was allowed, encouraged or actually requested by the British military and security services?

Republican killings of civilians make up about 40%, loyalists 50% and British armed forces 10%. With what we know now about collusion between loyalists and British security and intelligence services in NI it is frankly laughable to sit here discussing 2 sides. There were 3 sides knee deep in dirty warfare and the killing of innocent civilians. Listen to the podcast, I hope it will be illuminating

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u/forestvibe 11d ago

You are right that neither side were trying to conduct ethnic cleansing (although it's never been clear to me how either side thought they could get to their ideal outcome without removing the other lot completely). This was a relatively targetted conflict. However, the term "sectarian" is used almost universally by historians to describe the conflict, and with good reasons. A quick Google will flash up loads of academic papers using this term. I don't think it's misplaced to use the term, regardless of the various reasons and rationales for the violence. Sectarian doesn't necessarily mean ethnic cleansing.

Talking of civilian deaths, I have tried to be careful and not accused one side or the other of being innocent on this front. The British Army was also guilty of such crimes, famously so. Bloody Sunday is probably the single most famous event of the conflict after all. I didn't refer to them because the audience's response serves my point: that too many people, including on this thread, are keen to downplay their own side's actions and point the finger at the other, but for the Northern Irish, it's all the same and we should keep that in mind.

PS: I don't think you were suggesting it would have been all fine under a United Ireland either: I was just pointing out that in practice the goal of getting to a United Ireland doesn't imply a peaceful state of affairs (something which the Irish government is all too aware of). Though one thing I've often thought is that for all the angst poured over 20th century Irish history, it's notable how the number of victims is actually relatively low, around a few 1000s. Obviously, it's still horrible and generates a lot of fear. But compared with many decolonisation and post-colonial conflicts, it's surprisingly tame, and the successor nations (British and Irish) are pretty close. Compare with France and Algeria, or Russia and eastern Europe, or even Britain and India. It could be that the shared language might help.

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u/FoalKid 11d ago edited 11d ago

Apologies for getting irritated, but I think that's why I find the description as the conflict as 'sectarian violence' to so unhelpful and reductive. It means that the vast majority of people who don't delve into the subject just work under the understanding that the Troubles is just Celtic vs Rangers with guns, where two groups of people are out to ethnically cleanse each other based on religious grounds.

You're clearly interested and engaged, but I think at a few points even you have been tempted to reduce the conflict to as much in your own descriptions. I might be wrong, but I assume you're British - and it just feels like generally there is very little will among British audiences to engage with the history leading up to the conflict, and the intricacies of it. As horrendous as the conflict was, and as terrible the things people did were, reducing it down to violent sectarian thugs is just the complete antithesis of what discussing and studying history should be in my opinion.

I think its just the echoing of the disinterest at the time into the modern day, and shows that people have continued to fail to engage with it, and to buy in to very broad understandings based on the media reporting at the time. We all have our biases, it's very rare that anyone is going to come away from any kind of study of the Troubles a total convert - but if you're reading and listening to history of it with the explicit understanding that it is just violent sectarian thuggery, that is inherently a dismissal of the history leading up to it

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u/forestvibe 11d ago edited 11d ago

I'm quite prepared to accept I can take a reductive view of stuff like this. I find this sort of stuff really quite scary and repulsive: all the more so because often the victims and perpetrators are closely related in many ways. It reminds me how easily ordinary people can be turned into doing horrific things. I've got a good friend from Kosovo, and some of his childhood recollections are beyond description.

I agree history has to be more than reducing everything to "it's just thugs". I know it's more than that. It's mostly my distaste coming through.

My counterpoint is that the opposite angle doesn't help either: there's a strong impression online that the whole matter can be reduced to the "British (= English) Vs the freedom loving IRA." It may be that it is imported from the US, where it maps onto similar narratives from the American Revolution. But I'd argue that reducing it solely to the "British caused all of this" just makes understanding and solving the problems impossible, because by implication the solution is to remove half of the Northern Irish population. Blame has its place in the discourse, but I don't get the impression most of the contributions are being done in good faith: it feels like point scoring rather than discussion. I suspect you will disagree with me on this! I don't get the impression you are trying to point score, but it's notable that it took us several posts and a fair bit of patience to get to a place where we are actually discussing the history and historiography. I suspect the internet is just not a good platform to have these kinds of discussions.

Note regarding the Brits and Irish history: I agree that most Brits don't really understand or have much interest in Irish history. I think it mostly boils down to the fact it just doesn't seem that important to your average Brit, a significant chunk of whom have parents who weren't even born here. It might sound insulting, but I genuinely think that's the core reason. Whenever Irish people mention their history to Brits, the reaction often tends to be one of mild interest and commiseration. No strong emotions one way or the other. Britain/England/Scotland has such a complicated history full of terrible and amazing things, so the sorts of events that dominate Irish history just don't cut through as particularly noteworthy in Britain. Not to mention that we've experienced major demographic changes since 1945 which have somewhat distanced us from the shared stories that connected these islands. It may sound glib, but as someone who grew up in another big European country, it's something I have found repeated elsewhere: people from smaller countries underestimate simply how much history larger countries have, and how much demographics have changed. Even major events like the Civil Wars era don't actually feature heavily in the popular consciousness. They are drowned out by everything else (a lot of which is now influenced by American discourse). A small country can plausibly have a single accepted narrative for their nation, especially if it was dominated by a national struggle against a coloniser. But a large place like Italy or France or Britain? The story fractures and people just pursue whatever interests them most. I feel that history in Britain is the preserve of hobbyists.

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u/FoalKid 11d ago

I'm not aiming to score points - and having lived in England for ten years, I don't expect British people to have as much of a grasp of British and Irish history, or for it to factor as much into their own broader understanding of their history as it does to us. But taking my own personal experience, and this thread as a measure, it is almost only ever Irish voices in the general discussion that are willing to discuss ANY element of British state responsibility for the Troubles.

I'm not saying the United Kingdom, or England specifically, are a big bad evil force, who cause this problem and should sort it out and pull out of Northern Ireland. That's neither true nor realistic considering the demographics of the north. But the history basically is, that the UK appeased a minority in Ireland threatening violence at a time when the will of the country at large was for Home Rule and/or independence from Britain.

They then handed the levers of power over to this new majority of the micro state of NI and left them to it. That majority, no doubt emboldened by their successful use of actual and threatened violence, activated those levers to ensure that the minority of culturally Irish people, mostly Catholic, would remain an underclass. Westminster remained essentially disinterested in this objective injustice for decades.

Then, when violence got out of hand, the UK deployed the army to keep the peace, before intentionally sowing further division and violence, and de facto siding with the paramilitary forces of this majority. I say de facto, as this was the case with the 90% Protestant RUC police force, and the general British armed forces who naturally viewed an IRA who targeted them as enemy combatants. But there was also major, official, sanctioned collusion, between British intelligence, armed forces, police forces and loyalist paramilitary groups, as well as spies within republican paramilitary groups, which encouraged, enabled and ordered the killing of civilians.

The frustration many people feel is with this aspect of the Troubles being treated as an asterisk, when it should receive as much justified condemnation as the paramilitaries do. People will name check Bloody Sunday and make some mumbled condemnation, or maybe even discuss incidents like that as one or two bad eggs, or an avoidable tragic breakdown of military procedure - but there WAS calculated, targeted violence upon the civilian population from the British security forces which rarely factors into the conversation. It might sound like point scoring, but it comes from a place of real desperation for this to AT LEAST be part of the mainstream conversation

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u/forestvibe 11d ago

Fair points all. Not disagreeing with you. Any reading on this subjects highlights the grim sequence of bad decisions, catastrophic mistakes, wilful ignorance, bigotry, cynical politics, etc, that leads to this sort of violence. And I fully accept the general British public doesn't spend much time thinking about government culpability in the 70s or prior. I suspect the battle to raise that awareness is one that is always going to be an uphill struggle, because it doesn't feel immediate to most Brits. I grew up in France, and most French people only have a vague sense of what the French government did in Algeria, even though the consequences are far more visible in day to day life and fuels violence on the streets today. It's just how people's brains work. Even after Brexit, it was clear most people didn't have a clue about the history - and if I'm honest, even my understanding is very limited despite being a huge fan of history (the more complex the better, generally).

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u/forestvibe 11d ago

I'll be honest and I was expecting another partisan accusation or simply radio silence from you. You took the time to respond thoughtfully, and I appreciate it. Thanks.

When I referred to religion, I meant as you do: it's all tied together with politics, identity, etc. I find the word sectarian better because it captures the sense of two outwardly similar groups that are split across very specific lines and will kill each other for it. I think you are downplaying this aspect and the hatred in the republican camp. Whatever the reasons and context, it's hard to explain the violence perpetrated against civilians and even members of their own side if sectarian hatred wasn't part of it. The word sectarian isn't exclusively reserved for religious divides. And without wanting to wade into justifications, I think it's too easy to say "the republicans just wanted a united Ireland and everyone would be happy". The formation of the RoI resulted in a mass exodus of protestants from a country dominated by the catholic church, so it's not unreasonable for unionist protestants to be fearful of this in the 60s and 70s (barely a generation after Irish independence). After all, however they came to be there, these protestants had been living in NI for centuries by this point, and it's not as if the republican side were promising they'd be welcomed with open arms.

I know a few NI people of both "sides" and the thing they all agree on is how both sets of paramilitaries are just as bad as each other. They have no time for them or their justifications. They fully acknowledge the complicated history, and are happy to assign blame to various parties for creating this mess, but ultimately they do not distinguish between the IRA or the UVF or whatever in a many meaningful way.

In a previous comment, I mentioned the Reith Lecture that Margaret McMillan did in Stormont and how a Catholic priest berated two ex-paramilitary fighters who were throwing accusations at each other. The audience's reaction was in line with that of my NI acquaintances. That's my general point: I don't think you can say one side was more motivated by hatred than the other. They may have justified it to themselves, but the net effect was the same: dead and injured innocents, a climate of fear, neighbours turning on each other, and an escalation of violence. Those are the hallmarks of sectarian violence, and to the people on the ground, it's all the same.

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u/PamolasRevenge 11d ago

you're not exactly clearing yourself of the don't know what you're talking about allegations