Bloody Sunday inquiry.
So, I've added a few people to my flist who I really should've added a while ago: Mostly people (or fic journals) which have already friended me and who, since I know them, I've been meaning to friend back for a while.
Anyway, with that done, let's get onto less light-hearted topics. Like the inquiry into Bloody Sunday that has taken Lord Saville twelve years to compile! Why has it taken twelve years? Nobody knows.
Alas, I'm horribly biased here. I feel you should take much of what I say in this post with a pinch of salt, really.
For those who don't know, Bloody Sunday (1972, as opposed to Bloody Sunday 1920) was one of the major events in the Troubles, arguably making things far worse for far longer.
I'll provide a short long and kinda biased version. On Bloody Sunday, there was a protest march with the view to protesting the lack of civil rights afforded to the Roman Catholic minority in Northern Ireland. The British Army decided to redirect them to Free Derry corner instead of the Guildhall, and a section of the protest refused, instead pushing the barrier to try to reach Guildhall. There was a riot: The protesters threw stones at the British Army, the army used rubber bullets, water guns and tear gas. There are accusations that the rioters used one or several nail bombs, but other people deny this.
Anyway, the riot culminated in the British troops shooting an unarmed seventeen year old boy as he ran away from them. The violence from the troops then escalated, despite cease fire orders. The dead numbered fourteen in total (with thirteen or fourteen injured), several of which were trying to run away at the time, at least one of which, Bernard McGuigan, was attempting to help another victim and waving a white handkerchief to indicate peaceful intentions. The youngest was 17, the oldest 59.
Lord Widgery, the Lord Chief Justice for Westminster, would later conduct a tribunal which supported the British troops' version of events, that they were dealing with a violent rebellion against armed terrorists in the correct and proper manner. This caused a great deal of outrage, and accusations of whitewashing. Later, Bernadette Devlin, a Northern Irish MP who had been present at the shooting, was refused her right to talk to Parliament about it (the rules hold that any MP who witnessed an incident under discussion has the right to speak to Parliament on the subject). She would later be suspended from Parliament after punching Reginald Maudling, the Home Secretary, after he stated that the British Army fired in self-defence.
So, the inquiry, and my opinions poorly phrased as facts. Let's go people. Go to the magical land of assertions.
Skip forward to January 1998, Tony Blair elects Lord Saville as the chair of an inquiry into Bloody Sunday. The inquiry has taken eleven or twelve years to complete, and the results will be announced on Tuesday. This is A Big Thing. A not inconsiderable amount of people are calling for the prosecution of the soldiers involved, an even larger amount of people are calling for recognition of the British Army and Westminster's wrongdoing. A result which goes against that will piss off a lot of people, but similarly, a result which admits the wrongdoing of the British Army will likely irritate said army, and probably some people in Northern Ireland: There are still some people (an extremist minority, to be sure) who hold that since these were Catholics, they could not have been entirely innocent.
It's also made more important by the fact that the Tory-Lib Dem coalition is still in its early days. If the inquiry reaches the conclusion that the British Army were blameless, it will reflect badly on the Tories (the Lib Dems too, but to a lesser extent), and it will undermine Westminster's power in the area, and likely much of the country. It will strain relations with the Republic of Ireland.
But the other side is a kettle of fish too: If the British Army is found to be at fault, they'll be disgruntled, as will a lot of British people: Let's face it, people get defensive when they're told their military is in the wrong about something. Governments even more so (hello, Israeli government after the boarding of the aid ships. Hello, American government, whenever footage of your soldiers behaving poorly in Iraq or Afghanistan is released). On the whole, the British tend to be pretty good about these things, but with the recent rise in xenophobic and very patriotic feelings amongst some sections of society due to the recession and the media's insanity, it's bound to cause a stir. There will most likely be unionists in Ireland who wouldn't be at all pleased by that result either.
Which leaves us with a compromise, which nobody wants. In a situation like this, when people have been killed and others injured to relative degrees of severity, the "well, it was everybody's fault a little," response just makes everyone angry, whether it's true or not (and I don't think it's entirely unreasonable to suggest that it may well be true). It also avoids any real consequences or certainty: To many people, it will make the twelve-year inquiry pointless.
The other thing to consider is that this will inevitably cause a surge in terrorist violence. We're coming out of the Easter-Election-Eurovision season, always an explodey time, and whatever the response is, somebody won't be pleased. Somebody will respond with violence, and the other side may well respond: The nationalists are, after all, not the only ones with terrorist paramilitaries, the unionists are more than capable of blowing stuff up as well, so a result that sides with the Catholic protesters will result in unionist violence, as surely as a result that sides with the British Army will result in nationalist violence.
We'll have to wait until Tuesday. I'm personally really biased here: My hope would be that the troops are found to be at fault, and are prosecuted, because whether or not they were provoked, fourteen unarmed people died, plenty of them shot in the back as they fled.
I have little taste for the religious and political aspects of this, I'm a little nauseated by the fact that it'll be inevitably used as an "Aha! We're wonderful people, and you are not," by one side to the other (which to which depends what happens), or as a motivation for violence.
But purely as a matter of morality, these are trained soldiers who shot unarmed men, and although I can totally accept that they were under pressure; that they were provoked; that lethal shooting was not their first response; that this was not a malicious, premeditated murder at all, and that the suggestion that it was is absurd - they still killed unarmed protesters. That kind of blocks out anything else for me.
Even if the inquiry does rule that the British troops acted unlawfully, though, I don't think any action will be taken to prosecute the people involved. Which - one part of me says "Okay, it's been over thirty years, let them be," but the other part of me says "No. The fact that it's been so long does not make it okay. Distance doesn't make what they did any less wrong." It's very confusing.
But I am, as I may have said earlier, horribly biased.
On an unrelated note, England is playing the US in football tomorrow. Is it bad that despite my standing firm that football is uninteresting, I'm kinda fascinated by what the outcome will be? Despite my fondness for seeing media reactions to people losing, I kinda want England to win, because I think a lot of people I know would be really happy.
Seriously, guys, this is a dilemma - do I hope for hilarious media fail, or happy people? Can I get both?
Anyway, with that done, let's get onto less light-hearted topics. Like the inquiry into Bloody Sunday that has taken Lord Saville twelve years to compile! Why has it taken twelve years? Nobody knows.
Alas, I'm horribly biased here. I feel you should take much of what I say in this post with a pinch of salt, really.
For those who don't know, Bloody Sunday (1972, as opposed to Bloody Sunday 1920) was one of the major events in the Troubles, arguably making things far worse for far longer.
I'll provide a short long and kinda biased version. On Bloody Sunday, there was a protest march with the view to protesting the lack of civil rights afforded to the Roman Catholic minority in Northern Ireland. The British Army decided to redirect them to Free Derry corner instead of the Guildhall, and a section of the protest refused, instead pushing the barrier to try to reach Guildhall. There was a riot: The protesters threw stones at the British Army, the army used rubber bullets, water guns and tear gas. There are accusations that the rioters used one or several nail bombs, but other people deny this.
Anyway, the riot culminated in the British troops shooting an unarmed seventeen year old boy as he ran away from them. The violence from the troops then escalated, despite cease fire orders. The dead numbered fourteen in total (with thirteen or fourteen injured), several of which were trying to run away at the time, at least one of which, Bernard McGuigan, was attempting to help another victim and waving a white handkerchief to indicate peaceful intentions. The youngest was 17, the oldest 59.
Lord Widgery, the Lord Chief Justice for Westminster, would later conduct a tribunal which supported the British troops' version of events, that they were dealing with a violent rebellion against armed terrorists in the correct and proper manner. This caused a great deal of outrage, and accusations of whitewashing. Later, Bernadette Devlin, a Northern Irish MP who had been present at the shooting, was refused her right to talk to Parliament about it (the rules hold that any MP who witnessed an incident under discussion has the right to speak to Parliament on the subject). She would later be suspended from Parliament after punching Reginald Maudling, the Home Secretary, after he stated that the British Army fired in self-defence.
So, the inquiry, and my opinions poorly phrased as facts. Let's go people. Go to the magical land of assertions.
Skip forward to January 1998, Tony Blair elects Lord Saville as the chair of an inquiry into Bloody Sunday. The inquiry has taken eleven or twelve years to complete, and the results will be announced on Tuesday. This is A Big Thing. A not inconsiderable amount of people are calling for the prosecution of the soldiers involved, an even larger amount of people are calling for recognition of the British Army and Westminster's wrongdoing. A result which goes against that will piss off a lot of people, but similarly, a result which admits the wrongdoing of the British Army will likely irritate said army, and probably some people in Northern Ireland: There are still some people (an extremist minority, to be sure) who hold that since these were Catholics, they could not have been entirely innocent.
It's also made more important by the fact that the Tory-Lib Dem coalition is still in its early days. If the inquiry reaches the conclusion that the British Army were blameless, it will reflect badly on the Tories (the Lib Dems too, but to a lesser extent), and it will undermine Westminster's power in the area, and likely much of the country. It will strain relations with the Republic of Ireland.
But the other side is a kettle of fish too: If the British Army is found to be at fault, they'll be disgruntled, as will a lot of British people: Let's face it, people get defensive when they're told their military is in the wrong about something. Governments even more so (hello, Israeli government after the boarding of the aid ships. Hello, American government, whenever footage of your soldiers behaving poorly in Iraq or Afghanistan is released). On the whole, the British tend to be pretty good about these things, but with the recent rise in xenophobic and very patriotic feelings amongst some sections of society due to the recession and the media's insanity, it's bound to cause a stir. There will most likely be unionists in Ireland who wouldn't be at all pleased by that result either.
Which leaves us with a compromise, which nobody wants. In a situation like this, when people have been killed and others injured to relative degrees of severity, the "well, it was everybody's fault a little," response just makes everyone angry, whether it's true or not (and I don't think it's entirely unreasonable to suggest that it may well be true). It also avoids any real consequences or certainty: To many people, it will make the twelve-year inquiry pointless.
The other thing to consider is that this will inevitably cause a surge in terrorist violence. We're coming out of the Easter-Election-Eurovision season, always an explodey time, and whatever the response is, somebody won't be pleased. Somebody will respond with violence, and the other side may well respond: The nationalists are, after all, not the only ones with terrorist paramilitaries, the unionists are more than capable of blowing stuff up as well, so a result that sides with the Catholic protesters will result in unionist violence, as surely as a result that sides with the British Army will result in nationalist violence.
We'll have to wait until Tuesday. I'm personally really biased here: My hope would be that the troops are found to be at fault, and are prosecuted, because whether or not they were provoked, fourteen unarmed people died, plenty of them shot in the back as they fled.
I have little taste for the religious and political aspects of this, I'm a little nauseated by the fact that it'll be inevitably used as an "Aha! We're wonderful people, and you are not," by one side to the other (which to which depends what happens), or as a motivation for violence.
But purely as a matter of morality, these are trained soldiers who shot unarmed men, and although I can totally accept that they were under pressure; that they were provoked; that lethal shooting was not their first response; that this was not a malicious, premeditated murder at all, and that the suggestion that it was is absurd - they still killed unarmed protesters. That kind of blocks out anything else for me.
Even if the inquiry does rule that the British troops acted unlawfully, though, I don't think any action will be taken to prosecute the people involved. Which - one part of me says "Okay, it's been over thirty years, let them be," but the other part of me says "No. The fact that it's been so long does not make it okay. Distance doesn't make what they did any less wrong." It's very confusing.
But I am, as I may have said earlier, horribly biased.
On an unrelated note, England is playing the US in football tomorrow. Is it bad that despite my standing firm that football is uninteresting, I'm kinda fascinated by what the outcome will be? Despite my fondness for seeing media reactions to people losing, I kinda want England to win, because I think a lot of people I know would be really happy.
Seriously, guys, this is a dilemma - do I hope for hilarious media fail, or happy people? Can I get both?