My views on America and Other countries

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Jesus

(I’m of mixed Scottish, Irish, English ancestry)

It’s ok, I’m not offended, in a way I have the same views as you in thinking violence isn’t a way to resolve such a conflict. However I think you need to learn a bit more about Northern Ireland. I will give you a (very) simplistic synopsis that will give you just a hint of the complexity but I’d suggest doing a bit of research for a more competent history.

The English are the ones at fault in colonising the northern end of the Ireland with Protestants, but that began back in Cromwells day some 400 hundred years ago. The problem is that that group still makes up the majority of Northern Irelands population, they see the place as their home and they militantly don’t want to be part of the South. When the English were rightly booted out of the Eire, the northern part remained ‘loyal’ to Britain.
The Protestant majority treated the Catholic minority badly, and in the seventies a civil rights movement grow up, modelled on the civil rights movement to gain rights for American blacks in the US, just as that movement caused a violent reaction so did the Catholics.

This is the interesting bit, the British government first sent in the army to protect the Catholics from Protestant violence (because the mainly Protestant police force wasn’t doing it).

The British army was at the time a kick arse motherfucker force using the tactics of colonial war, which taught shoot first ask questions later. So it is not surprising that we get things like the Paratroopers on Bloody Sunday. Catholics began to see the British troops as the enemy and the Protestants gorded them to act violently and matched that violence. So we had 40 years of shit.

The thing is the extremist on one side want to ethnically cleanse the Catholics into Eire and the extremists on the other want to ethically cleanse the Protestants into the sea. (Haughtily similar in many ways to the Israeli –Palestinian conflict).

As I say this doesn’t do it justice, but I hope you can see it is not as simple as just ‘Brits out’.

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My point was that some Americans seem to want to wallow in victimhood while forgetting their victims. Americans as individuals and through their governments have acted badly in the past. It has supported state and terrorist killings and torture and has celebrated the outcome.

It is better to try and work out why someone is celebrating such things rather than falling into the hypocritical trap of believing your own celebrating is justified and others is not.

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