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Bigotry should not be
dismissed as ‘banter’
because it’s about football
John Kelly
I feel duty bound to address the combined comments of Charles Lewis and Derek Patrick (6 September) whose responses to my previous article (30 August) are ridden with flaws, inaccuracies and untruths that cannot go unchallenged. On the surface, there appears to be some rather logical challenges to my arguments but scratching beneath this veneer reveals them to be fatally flawed rebukes.
Mr Lewis dismisses factual evidence when it does not suit his agenda whilst stretching the barest threads of ‘evidence’ to artificially provide the ‘balance’ he and other Rangers revisionists seek. Good science is evidence driven not ideologically driven by preferential desires to artificially provide balance by being imbalanced with the evidence. It is here that I must take my fellow contributors to task for their careless and misleading use of flimsy evidence to suit their agendas – or if you prefer, their way of seeing the world, their ideological biases.
We are all laden with ideological biases making any claim to be ‘objective’ null and void. However, to avoid dogmatic reductionism, we must try to be reflexive about our own biases, examine our evidence and submit it to scrutiny. Dr Patrick betrays his ideological biases when describing the actions of the British Army as ‘activities’ and the Provisional IRA’s actions as ‘atrocities’. Straight away, he exposes a latent value judgement that would be absent in scientific analysis.
Similarly, Mr Lewis frames Irish Republican ‘violence’ in contrast to the British Army’s ‘presence’ (in Iraq). The violent deaths of between 100,000 and 190,000 innocent civilians, at the hands of the British and allied forces are, therefore, ideologically transformed into ‘activities’ and a ‘presence’. Let’s deal with the facts, not the ideologically based presentation of them. Mr Lewis suggests the current ethno-religious debate is ‘languishing in an intellectual cul de sac’. I’d suggest with some of the analyses presented thus far some are barricading themselves behind walls of dogmatism.
Let’s return to the central point. One cannot support the provisional IRA actors without endorsing by proxy their killings/murders. These were Alasdair McKillop’s original points which I supported and asked to be evenly applied without ideological prejudices. Nor can one support the actors without endorsing on some level their political ideology. It is ridiculous, for instance, to support the PIRA activists but to reject their cause. For what would the supporter actually support, simply the fact that a killer/murderer is prepared to kill/murder on his/her behalf even when they don’t want them to? It is equally ridiculous to ‘support the troops’ whilst washing one’s hands of their actions.
Indeed, it may be worse to claim to ‘support the troops’ without supporting their cause, for to do so is to admit that you support someone killing/ murdering others on your behalf for a cause you do not even agree with. It is revealing that Dr Patrick describes all of this as ‘twisting another correspondent’s discussion of ideology’. The only thing being twisted is Dr Patrick’s interpretation.
If we actually untangle these issues and deal objectively with the facts, we see that when it is a cause or group to which someone views as legitimate they attain the ability to separate out the ideological cause from the actors and from the actions and outcomes of these actors’ actions. So despite the deaths of up to 190,000 innocent civilians from their bomb dropping planes, Mr Lewis tells us ‘the tradition in Britain is to support the troops while condemning the politicians who send them to war’. This is rather convenient for those who defend killing people in other people’s lands. Yet, we’re told the 1,800 killed/murdered by the PIRA cannot be separated from their actors or political cause. Some people want to have their cake and eat it based on their version of legitimacy that is always in flux and open to question, even when cloaked in the respectability of the ‘democratic will of the people’ – a people who are seldom the recipients of the bombs and bullets they have ‘willed’ on others.
There’s a further paradox here. On the one hand Mr Lewis attempts to legitimise the acts of British forces by telling us they are ‘democratically controlled’. Yet, on the other hand, our democratic right to object and challenge them is to be shorn in favour of dogmatically supporting them as part of ‘tradition’. This doesn’t sound too democratic to me. Moreover when this alleged democratic right to deviate from the dogmatic ‘support the troops’ message is expressed, we find outrage and criticism directed towards these people – I’m accused of trying to legitimise the IRA and having an agenda.
The Archbishop of Canterbury was demonised and branded a rabble-rouser attention-seeker for merely questioning the political decision to go to ‘war’. Thus, up to 190,000 civilian killings can be dismissed as ‘democratically controlled’ deaths and be neatly detached from the actors who carried them out whilst dissenters get silenced or demonised. I doubt the five-year-old child who loses her leg or her mother cares too much about whether or not the bomb and the bomber are ‘democratically accountable’ in the land from which they came.
If one accepts the premise of the right of some to kill others on one’s behalf, then one must accept others can do the same and may have alternative ideological ideas of legitimacy. Moreover, whilst you may believe it legitimate to kill on behalf of a larger community, other members of that community do not and are within their rights, nee morally obligated, to object and challenge this position.
