I suppose it might come across as obvious or falsely pious to talk about The Civilians, a group that, in a sense, did not really exist in a unified way in the Belfast of the 70s, but I think I might do it anyway. Ed’s book strikes me, if you were to look for a philosophical theme, as a treatise on what people will do for power, (what men will Do, for it, what women will put up with, to stand next to it), and of course largely is documenting the effects of poison, both political and personal.

Since it has more to say about Irish nationalists/republicans than Ulster unionists, since it is “A Secret History of the IRA”, even though it is not quite For or Against anything, or any particular way to die, you know, I’ll just mention that it can be surprising how male chauvinist even ‘radical’ oppositions can be, you know, although certainly women have played a part in their own demise, (since Jane Austen?); either the men act diagnosably male, and the women fawn over them, or the men carefully draw invisible lines, and the women carefully come when they are called, and stay when they are not wanted, and stay still much of the time, soaking up ethnic prejudice like a sponge in a bucket of blood, you know.

Nasty stuff.

…. “(An especially reckless IRA Volunteer whose name I forget) was born to die.”

“The past is a different country; they do things differently there.”

They say sometimes that historians aren’t supposed to moralize; perhaps I never got that memo. Of course, it is true that the Northern Ireland conflict was a parochial conflict of old Europe and also very male—practically the only ‘important’ woman was Maggie Thatcher, who was so terrified of being found out as a woman that she decided to be not so much a Buddha as a bull among men. But it’s easy for me to judge, you know. Someone like Bono can find the sadness in the Troubles, or perhaps occasionally even a sort of black humor in people’s errors and personal foibles, but one’s father—my father, your father, the classic father, of a certain age—doesn’t care about Bono because he’s like, a too successful person who doesn’t hate himself enough who makes too youthful music, you know. The past is a different country. If the light has come, and we need not act like our forefathers, that is enough. But if we remember, we remember not to judge, or even to make fun (if that is not welcome), but simply to appreciate how people wandered through a place in their mind that was very dark and filled with an unwholesome air, you know.

…. War is strange. People remember the IRA as terrorists, but they sometimes don’t remember the UDA, the British Army’s allies, as terrorists, but sometimes Bloody Friday, a horrific IRA bombing, doesn’t sound quite as familiar as Bloody Sunday, the British Army’s massacre earlier the same year. It doesn’t matter the numbers; they were both horrific events. (Of course, neutral Wikipedia has a picture of the Bloody Sunday priest waving his white handkerchief not to get shot, while Bloody Friday has no charred remnants of flesh or even buildings—no picture at all. Wikipedia’s too crazy to figure out though; not so much no bias as /random/ bias. Chaotic bias.) Belfast in 1972 went from a Sunday death to a Friday non-resurrection, like some liturgist had forgotten his lines, you know.

…. They say that Eights are paranoid about betrayal; I guess I can kinda see that now: betrayal Can happen in war, and it’s deadly—a traitor strike is much deadlier than a “dumb bomb”, if you will.

So, what do you know: there might actually be some good in reading crap like this. I might actually expand my universe, to include Eights.

…. It is teachable how the people who in the end made the peace deal were the men whom British intelligence originally profiled as the worst radicals, the unfriendly ones, right.

Gosh, and they were all men—all except for Thatcher, who was the consummate old man’s woman, you know; and the rest of them were old men’s men, certainly.

…. I have to say though that Ed is a good journalist/historian, despite it all being such man’s business, you know. He wrote a book about the Irish radicals and a book about the British radical, and a book about one of each…. Not like that popular Troubles book where it was like British-version-of-Fox-News treatment, like it half IRA terroristas and half ‘true crime’ assumptions, you know. As though the whole conflict were the IRA vs the children, right.

…. War is scary. It’s all betrayal; spy stuff—betray your enemies, betray your friends. Lies and counter-lies.

…. (what Gerry Adams said about political disputes/rivals for the control of the IRA) “ ‘You don’t confront people,’ he would say. ‘You isolate and marginalize them and then get rid of them.’ I often heard him say that.” Easier to take away somebody’s job if they haven’t had a good job in years, you know. A sort of wily, scary intelligence. Even though he was a terrorist linked to attacks that blew up sometimes (rarely) a dozen civilians at one go, he was sometimes more intelligent than your average American journalist today. We love to confront. Somebody out there is bigoted, we ham up their importance in society, the friends and influence they have, and then we lower our horns and charge, you know.

It’s nuts….

It is kinda funny, because to be a really successful terrorist leader, you’d have to know when and in what ways Not to be violent, (after really bad attacks, it was always obvious to everyone on both sides that they’d messed up), because if you just try to bloody-bludgeon your way to victory, you’ll just isolate and alienate yourself, instead of your enemies.

Despite the fact that a metal band tour is much more entertaining than a bombing campaign, real life is not like going on tour with a metal band, you know. “Fear us! We will bomb your houses and eat your babies! We are mythological! Fear us!” (PR guy) (shaking head) No, just—no.

…. At the same time, although the body count is relatively low compared to some wars, it’s about very negative people, probably worse than many war people, you know.

As the thing goes on, they slide from federalism in the proposed united Ireland to a more real man “let’s get back at them” thing, and in internal political feuds they could shamelessly betray their friends, sometimes ending in lies and threats, you know.

People say “don’t go to the North”; they say “it’s better now”, back and forth, a little truth in both. But really, if I ever go to Ireland, I don’t think I’ll stray too far outside Dublin and Cork, basically. The whole village thing, little feuds, little people, you know. Of course, in cities you also get the whole blood-red revolution thing; but I think in most of Ireland it’s very much the leftists who grew up in little villages, and have little village minds, and that can be scary. It’s different in Africa or Indigenous communities where people aren’t settled down traditionally, but you see the same village mentality in parts of Asia. Parts of East Asia aren’t as bad, and can ameliorate some of the whole village-Buddhism thing, but in the Theravada countries, one gets the impression that it’s these little people from little villages with a little village religion, who think that sex is bad and being a real man is good, and all the rest of it—foreigners and so on, the whole nine yards. A lot of Ireland outside of Dublin and the very few cities is like that, I think.

…. It’s a very ugly story about a country or two becoming better in a very winding way. It’s not unlike one of those pop romances where it starts out as a rather nasty sexual fling and in the end becomes something very different. Of course, I guess that doesn’t mean much if you’re all into blood & order and a rather death-full life, like the stereotypical non-Irish conservative American Gael, you know, or…. Well, she had to prove that she was a Brit despite not being Darcy or Dickens, a male, so she was very very blood-and-honor, you know, whenever there were guns involved. That’s an old story, for me. Nefarious Argentina. She could be afraid of anything; they’d have ripped her limb from limb if she wasn’t, those friends of hers.

But yeah, it was a nasty thing, very un-optimistic, you know, and then, it changed, somehow.

…. I hope I don’t come off as a crazy anti-church guy, but I don’t know how well Catholic Church hierarchical culture comes off in general, even if there were individual variations among the leaders (‘overseers’ lol). On the one hand, they didn’t like IRA violence, although I don’t know if it was ever clear that they liked Protestants that much better than they liked the IRA; they were the reason the society was divided to begin with, and they didn’t lose sleep over it. They just didn’t like the whole rock and roll thing of the Provos: In Nomine Domine, Ah-mehn…. You know, like: I’m busy. I have to try to translate modern history and German philosophy into Latin, I don’t have time with the sheep herders and the bad students, you know…. I hate to say anything this exclusionary, but it’s like they didn’t belong. They belonged in their country in the sky somewhere, somewhere else. The earth as it exists can never be worth spending time in for the church overseers, you know. (sigh) I know, I know. If I were a Jew, I’d be a self-hating Jew for being alienated from my Yiddish mommy…. Although of course, I don’t know that anybody in my mother’s O’Hara family are still Catholic, you know; it’s like…. In Nomine Domine, Ah-mehn…. Thank you for coming to our Roman Empire Historical Reenactment Club….

…. (shrugs) And you know, some people like classical music. This is the internet, of course, but I wouldn’t show up to a classical music concert, and be like—The Ramones! ~ People would be like, The Ramones? Didn’t they get old and die? Bach didn’t—he got the injections.

People might disagree over whether Bach is still alive. Lol.

I mean, there’s a lot of bad in the story of the Troubles: I wouldn’t pretend that distant priests were the worst of it….

…. So really Thatcher did negotiate with “terrorists”; she wasn’t as crazy as she pretended to be. That kinda goes in line with what I read; sometimes she was crazy, of course—other times…. Just gotta give off the crazy vibes, fake people out. “Only ghoul vibes”, right….

…. …. (end-piece) But for such a negative story, it has a pretty serviceable ending, although it’s a process. Maybe one day, they’ll even be left nothing anti-British/English in the Irish consciousness, and nothing anti-Irish, anti-non-British (or very possibly non-English) in the UK consciousness. And without the trick of memory of uncritical assimilation or sticking-to-Englishness, that sticky stuff, which is a sort of false ending. (“You’re right; you Irish have been here a long time….” “Irish? Oh, you mean us. Yeah, we love green. Favorite color. Very nice. Pink goes with it good, you know.”) Not that I don’t see the value in not judiciously forgetting the parts of the past that have no tenability in the present, let alone sanity, past or present, you know. As different as war casualties in a foreign war are to civilian bombing casualties at home, I know in the 2000s even I kinda zonked out at the news of the steady trickle of corpses coming back from Iraq (let alone Afghanistan) in the Bush years…. Even terrible things happening now, even at the time, kinda zonk you out after awhile. I didn’t watch the daily COVID briefings, you know—stupid. Blood and mud and shit is always boring, at the end of the day. One naturally forgets certain things…. (Cf a ‘forgettery’ to go along with the ‘memory’. W.D.)

(end #2) It’s not really an ambiguous stance book (ie not quite a Malcolm X book), but it’s an unusually positive ‘negative’ type book (ie not quite a Hitler/random serial killer book).

…. (another end) I’m not sure who’s lost it more: the white-white Anglos who stigmatize the strange, isolated denizens of the dark Gaelic wood, or the denizens of said wood, carefully sharpening knives in the darkness, a maniac glint in the eye for the glee that’s in it, humming a tuneless song of revenge, you know.

I actually feel like I like the (USA Italian) mafia better than the IRA, you know. Enough of this tuneless cant religiously held, about the sanctity of armed struggle, any criminal civilized impulse carefully disguised, right…. If you want bad karma, just break someone’s arm, and then take his money and use it to buy pizza, right. “Leave the gun; take the cannoli.”

…. Leprechaun Shoneen come in; come in, Leprechaun Shoneen. “It’s the SAS, and the UVF—they set us up! We’ve been set up! We’ve been betrayed! (static then dead).”
I’m sorry sir. There’s nothing else.
There’s a traitor among us!

OMG, if I have to hear the IRA go through a there’s-a-traitor thing one more time. People like that are so serious; it’s always traitor this, betrayed that. Terrorists have a serious style problem, you know. They never have any fun. I mean, if you’re going to go all out trying to bomb the state into submission, and you don’t have any fun—when are you going to have fun, basically? This is what happens when Catholics and Calvinists go to war, basically. If there’s nothing in a fight but misery, guilting people, and recrimination—why go on with it? “Because recrimination, guilting people, and misery, ARE the answer, pagan Yank!”

(sunglasses) Whatever. “All the other kids with their pumped up kicks, you better run better run, outrun my gun! All the other kids with their pumped up kicks, you better run better run, faster than my bullet!”
Leprechaun Shoneen, that is not a Limerick song. The chorus is too big, too repetitive, and too long. Write seventy-four more versus and try to make the music harder to follow.
Oh, ok…. 🤫

I know that to an academic—robot, basically—that’ll come across as crap, but there has to be serious emotional feedback analysis bug when grumpy people bomb each other for thirty years and all they get out of it is a right to feel grumpy and a right to feel betrayed, you know…. And incidentally there’s not a whole lot unique to Ireland, it’s just the dust in the air, you know….

…. It’s good to know that the real story usually isn’t actually revealed by the up-to-the-minute journalism of the time; it’s revealed years later.

Breaking News Journalism: The IRA has launched an attack! Two British soldiers dead! Chaos in Ireland as republican violence drowns island in blood!

IRA headquarters: ANOTHER botched operation? If we can’t find all these informers, we’re gonna be burnt toast in a British jail!

…. (I keep forgetting to stop) It’s funny, in terms of my personal history, that I went back to reading general history (instead of the personal stuff), looking around to what I could do now that I couldn’t have done before, some time before, but not too long before, going back to a different sort of psycho-religious study that I had also left underdeveloped at an earlier time. Ie, in a way it’s not such a great thing to read—they were all such terrible people, terrible guys, even the leaders and the thinkers and the political people who weren’t just the muscle—but I’m mildly glad I read it because I finally finished something I started in high school or whenever, you know. I was an ‘Irish’ person, and a war person, back then, and I stopped reading when I saw where things were headed. I didn’t really finish books and things back then, anyway. Not that it’s a great ‘negative’ book, because it is mildly grandiose, more so than a crime book, and really, really drags its way to its negativity-exhausts-itself positive/un-negative ending, you know. I don’t know how much history I want to read in the future, maybe less than I did at one point. The diverse history is also terrible on the nerves, and it gets kinda clubby with the over-representation of recommendations based on books read, IMO, but general white man history is also quite primitive to read about and ends up being about men being ‘bad men’, you know. Violence in word and deed, and micro-aggressions, are a plague in society, among all different demographics—video games, inspecting your room for dirt and making the place sound like a WWII concentration camp, racism in public, bossism at work—it’s all part of a system of little violences, you know, and it seems like not advertising actually fucking blowing up random people seems like a good place to start defunding the bombs, you know. I say that rather regretfully as I’ve always liked the big picture, and have been ‘good’ at getting history and have sometimes been to starry eyed in my non-‘historical’ moments, but…. I mean, I’m glad I went back and gave it another look as a mature person—that ‘unfinished business’ angle—but I don’t value sinking dozens of dollars into a long history book as I once did, you know.

…. It is of interest that the authors refers to IRA personnel as “activists”—IRA activists, right. I think that’s correct. In a sense they were terrorists, and most US activists don’t use violence, but “terrorist” kinda has that connotation of, “we’re going to put a black bag over your head and spirit you off to hell; that’s how we’ll interact”; “activist” has the connotation of, “you have radical claims, which you’re naive/delusional in the extreme of you think you’ll actually get, the way that you think you will…. but nevertheless, I have to treat you with a certain amount of respect. I have to put aside the “100% me” theory, and my emotions, perhaps—and be pragmatic.”

…. At the risk of over-simplification, the British got to stay in Northern Ireland, but they had to stop acting the part of a colonial power. No more union because it was the will of London; no more denying the civil rights of Irish nationalists/northern Catholics. But the IRA couldn’t bomb Belfast into the Republic if a majority of the six counties said no.

But basically, it is a pretty sad, negative story. Even when leadership was trying to be cautiously sane, I think this story shows that when leadership has to manage or massage popular/faction opinion that is insane/militant, terrible fucking things happen—no matter how clever the managers and leaders are, basically.

…. Life is sure different in this country, at least for the Irish.

…. Republicanism in Ireland was always a very isolated movement, although most societies have some pretty isolated layers….

It is funny to watch companies brag on diversity and even get written up praise for it, when it’s like you can look at their management and not see any diversity, basically, you know. (Do they think you can’t notice that? They almost want you to, the paranoid says, right.)…. I wonder what hiring practices were like in Belfast and Tyrone during the war years, right.

Certainly very isolated stratums of most societies. Sometimes pretty mental ones too, of course. The “soldiers” on the IRA Army Council. An isolated minority of an isolated minority will just bludgeon its way to glory, like in a B-movie, right….

…. I have to try to smile about the “soldiers”, though. You gotta laugh.

(One: angry) Whenever bad things happen, it’s always because of the good things! When people commit crimes and wars, it’s because they always Want something! They won’t just commit crimes to be brave, dammit—they always want something! It’s the good things that are bad, I’m telling ya!
(Two: slowly like someone figuring something out in a cartoon) So if there were no good things on planet Earth, the whole universe would be a paradise. There would be universal peace and brotherly love on the burnt ashes of civilization….
(3: sarcastic) Well, who wouldn’t want that. I say we all sign up today, take concrete actions immediately.
(One and Two instantly get up and start walking quickly and purposely away. Three rolls his eyes.)

…. It’s so sad, how it was all kinda set, you know, from the word Go in 1969: Ireland was never going to annex the Six Counties to end one war and start another; the unionists and nationalists were just going to have to start respecting each other, is all, the “native Irish” would just have to have their rights at last, albeit within Northern Ireland.

All the battles and the bombings happened, but there was never a chance that the fundamental settlement ever would have been different. And all the people that died, died because of the “soldiers”, and their archetype—the One Soldier, outside of time and space—demanded the impossible, and would not listen to heart or reason or relent, until there had been “enough” slaughter to break through their foolishness resistance to the truth far above their mere planning and plotting, right.

…. But I do think that the non-Eights (Eights always seem so extreme) in the legal governments made the coming of peace more difficult by saying basically, “We’ll begin negotiations to stop hating you when you’re peaceful and smooth and easy to love.” It’s like they were afraid of the UK version of the classic American scenario, the Fox News update that goes: “Democrats show respect to bad people. Show up at Storm Grounds at 5:30PM sharp for details and action plans”, right…. Like, “I’ll talk to you…. When there’s peace.” “But, that’s what we were going to talk ~about~”, right.

…. And there was more death and extensive property damage in London at a time when peace could very conceivably have been wrapped up, just because they were being proud and risk-shy and irrational, basically. The government of the UK failed Londoners and their country. They could have made a deal; they wouldn’t have even lost anything except the feeling that “legal governments are always 100% right; fuck terrorists tell them they have to beg for mercy”, basically.

…. War’s good for looting, but terrible for legitimate business. War’s not legitimate business.

…. But yeah: I used to be a fan of IRA history when I was an irresponsible teenager, you know. A way of opting out of the realities of American history, basically. “And tell her how the IRA, made you run like hell away, from some micks with a clinical attitude, problem— (spoken) And some pretty corny music, might as well have a fucking banjo or something! (instrumental)”

In my next life I, I mean, life is more than growing up and all that; I could be quite withdrawn and dour too; but I don’t want to ever be THAT teenager, ever again, right…. lol.

…. I remember when I was growing up in what they call the late 1900s now, there was a rumor in our family (or at least with my dad, mom had a more distant relationship with politics, although she liked it when so sang her a republican song once), that the next door neighbor (a veritable curmudgeon-y, irritated old man I don’t think my father or brother liked) gave money to the IRA over a number of years…. Now, obviously Northern Ireland was not this beautiful, wonderful place, a bastion of democracy and light, for the minority tribe—Orangemen ‘parading’ about in those retarded little hats, sadly not orange, although they proudly wear little orange sashes so that everyone knows what kind of tribesman they are and whose side their benighted ancestors were on, back when rich men wore wigs and poor men couldn’t read, like the sort of Protestant Middle Ages, you know—but just that anybody in America, not that I encourage dissociation from the world and even from communities where people like us once had their roots, in particular, but just that anybody in America and even with a nice pad in the City—the one that never sleeps—could think that they had a dog in that fight, so to speak, and that they could so uncritically support one side: that THAT was what we as Americans had to offer the world or in this case one part of Ireland, after all the time spent, generations, in what should boggle the mind were it NOT one of the world’s great cosmopolitan countries, you know….

I mean what the fuck.

…. “Finally, as the 1990s drew to a close, the remarkable shift in the IRA blossomed. As consciousness within the organization transformed, more and more Volunteers found themselves opening up to the idea that they could achieve their goal of protecting and empowering their people by embracing the principle of consent, and respecting their enemies. One activist described his transformation in this way: “As I closed my eyes in meditation, I found that I could see a blue light descend on my crown chakra. Then, suddenly I could see myself as a seven year old Black British girl in East London, afraid that her father, un-dying of zombie infection in Ethiopia, wouldn’t be able to move to the UK in time to see Dr. I. Kant of St. Fuckoff Hospital in the West End. As my meditation ended, I felt tears rolling down my face for a long time. Then I heard a door slam downstairs and I heard voices. One of them said, ‘Hey Dennis! We’re going to the pub to get beer and pretzels! Wanna come?’ I rose from my seat, knowing that my life would never be the same.” “

Yeah. It was bullshit politics, you know. Bureaucracy…. “Because even terrorists, have bureaucracy”. 👍

…. Sometimes I wonder what I’m going to take away from my gen hist era—I mean, I might still read the odd book here and there—when I’m more of a meditator/witch, you know. But it does help, without antipathy, to know what you’re not. I mean, if people are infinite, then eventually maybe that “I’m not X” will take on a different flavor when people aren’t a mess, but still. You study consciousness, you learn it isn’t all bureaucrat consciousness, right—and it doesn’t really make sense until you read general history or whatever, or rational history, in a broader sense, and go, OH!! And you say that the world needs the feminine principle, maybe reading the odd book about angry gunmen and how they learned to negotiate with uptight white people in a world where Margaret Thatcher was their idea of the feminine principle…. You know: as close as a success story can come to a crash-and-burn fuck-up as you can imagine, right.

And certainly you don’t need to be a TikTok influencer to be a witch, you know. (Probably more of them are Christians, lol.) You’re allowed to have a little perspective; it can make your own choices seem more solid, hopefully in a totally non-antagonistic way, right.

A continuing mystery of the Northern Irish peace process is how Gerry Adams survived it. Ed Maloney’s A Secret History of the IRA, published in 2002 – only four years after the Good Friday Agreement – tells the nuanced and scrupulously researched story of Adams’ gradual abandonment of traditional Irish republican principles. One after another, Sinn Fein and the Provisional IRA compromised on abstensionism from Irish (and subsequently Northern Irish) governments, the need for a British commitment to withdrawal before ceasefire and the commencement of talks, rejection of the “unionist veto” in favour of consent in each of Ireland’s two states, the need for armed struggle, and the decommissioning of weapons and explosives.

Today, Sinn Fein is part of the Stormont establishment; and the Provisional IRA non-existent, its decaying corpse, lying in a lonely hedgerow, giving the occasional twitch in the form of low-level dissident terror. A recent BBC Spotlight poll showed only 17% of Northern Irish respondents in favour of Irish unity; suggesting that not even all current SF voters want reunification. While in 2011 Martin McGuinness, former Army Council lead and Adams sidekick, was profoundly rejected in the Republic of Ireland presidential election due to his murderous past.

Maloney doesn’t have the benefit of a decade and a half of post-GFA hindsight, but is silent on what exactly Adams expected to achieve. We are shown in early chapters that Adams is an intelligent man, and surrounded himself with other thinkers, and so from the mid-80s, nearly two decades into the Long War, he could see that the British could not be defeated militarily and that SF would always be stunted by its henchmen killing farmers and blowing up shopping centres. But Adams’ acceptance of the principle of consent and recognition of the institutions of Northern Ireland also suggest he knew that demographics could not be beaten; that the war was lost in 1922 when Ireland was divided.

Yet the book repeatedly hints at something more sinister: a series of high-level betrayals at key moments. We see in new light the 1986 capture of the Eksund carrying 150 tons of Libyan arms, the assassination of the finest of the rebellious East Tyrone brigade at Loughgall, and the scuppering of a series of London bombings in the period between the 1994 and 1997 ceasefires. Was Adams or his inner circle compromised by the British, or would they have gone to any lengths to deliver his vision of politically-led republicanism?

The most remarkable aspect of the book is not Adams’ path to peace but how he brought SF and the PIRA along with him. Watching blindfolded at the time, unionists wondered what he was telling his soldiers and grassroots, exactly what he had up his sleeve. But accordingly to Maloney, he told them exactly what they wanted to hear. When they said they disagreed with his approach, he denied his approach. He made promises and broke them the next day. When he faced overwhelming opposition he retrenched but ultimately returned. He moved the process forward inch by inch by lies and non-disclosure within his own community until the point the IRA was tired and rusty and incapable of doing anything but gasping for air above the tide washing over it. It’s a miracle he lived and a mercy he did.

A sequel covering the disbandment of PIRA and changes in republicanism in the years since would be another worthwhile project for Maloney.