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Unionists

If unionists could only embark on a secular, liberal project to make Northern Ireland more like England, I would support them all the way. But this 17th century religious triumphalism is utterly alienating.

Unionists often complain that they have little support internationally (or even in Britain). This is because ethnic supremacy does not travel well. It plays brilliantly at home, but it does not travel. Most of the world simply is not part of the glorious chosen group, and so to them its claims of ethnic supremacy are as absurd, meaningless and unconvincing as, say, Serb claims of ethnic supremacy.

Unionists must abandon any taint of ethnic or religious supremacy, and become secular and universal - like the English. Certainly a secular, liberal case can be made for the union.

• Attacking 4 year olds going to Holy Cross primary school makes sense to the supremacist's mind, but is meaningless to everyone else. There is no awareness by the protesters that they are just followers of a made-up religion and a made-up culture (as of course are the children). That what they believe is merely an accident of where they were born. That the very philosophies they subscribe to are just adaptive, viral memes that have evolved according to historical accident.

• unionists and loyalists

• Ulster Unionist Party (and here)
  • The UUP is the party that refused to develop Northern Ireland as a liberal democracy during the 20th century, but rather developed it as a majoritarian democracy, with Catholics as second-class citizens.
  • The UUP for decades had formal links to the extremist anti-Catholic organisation, the Orange Order, though at last this now has ended.

• The failure to woo the Catholic unionist:
  • Survey, 2003: Despite 21 percent of Catholics wanting to stay in the UK, 0 percent regard themselves as "Unionist", only 1 percent voted UUP, and only 1 percent voted DUP.
  • The cause must surely be because the DUP and UUP make no effort to woo the Catholic unionist vote. Indeed, they do everything they can to alienate the Catholic unionists. But the Catholic unionists' votes (perhaps 50,000 votes in all) are there for the taking, if only the DUP and UUP wanted them.

  
  

• The Orange Order (and here and here and here)
  • The Orange Order disagrees with Catholicism (don't we all) but they go much further, looking more like a religious-hatred group. Apart from the long history of anti-Catholic violence (and even killing) linked to Orange marches, there are explicit anti-Catholic rules. Catholics are barred from membership. Members of the order face expulsion for attending any Catholic religious ceremonies - even a funeral. Members are even forbidden to marry Roman Catholics. No respectable person could be a member of this organisation.
  • Read what the Grand Master, Robert Saulters, said about Cherie Blair.
  • History of the Orange Lodges
  • How unionism respects other people's right to march
  • Garvaghy Road residents
  • Lower Ormeau residents
  • Killings for Drumcree so far.

• White and black hate groups
  • Just saying "We're not a hate group" doesn't make you not a hate group. You have to change your behaviour.

  
  

• Democratic Unionist Party (also here)
  • The DUP, led by the Rev. Ian Paisley MP, is another party that does not grasp the basic 18th-century Enlightenment idea of separation of church and state.
  • European Institute of Protestant Studies

  • Paisley quotes:
    • Paisley on the death of Pope John XXIII in 1963: "This Romish man of sin is now in hell." Note this is long before the Troubles even started.
    • Paisley on the Catholic church: "She is the seed of the serpent, the offspring of Belial, and the progeny of Hell. Her eye gleams with the serpent's light. Her clothes reek of the brimstone of the pit. Her words and opinions label her the parrot of Beelzebub. Unhesitatingly I recognise as of her father the Devil, and the works of her father she will do.".
    • Paisley to a Catholic priest: "we know your church to be the mother of harlots and the abomination of the Earth".
    • "Antichrist! I renounce you and all your cults and creeds!" - Paisley yelling at the Pope when he visited the European Parliament in 1988.
    • Denunciation of Pope John Paul II by Ian Paisley

  • Paisley disagrees with Catholicism (don't we all), but not to promote reason, but rather to promote his own brand of absurd superstition, which includes creationism.
  • Paisley has been spreading anti-Catholic and anti-Irish hatred for decades. He has been a malevolent influence on the North, encouraging it into hatred and civil war. No respectable person could be a member of any party that includes Rev. Ian Paisley.
  • Obviously, for an atheist, evolutionist, liberal and scientist like myself, Paisley pretty much defines everything that humanity should have left behind in the Middle Ages. We have tried his world, his little world full of bigotry and ignorance, and it doesn't work.

  • Paisley on the death of the Pope, 2005: "We can understand how Roman Catholics feel at the death of the Pope and we would want in no way to interfere with their expression of sorrow and grief at this time." - Incredible. This is the same pope he called the Antichrist. Incredible how the prospect of power can mature some people. At the end of his life, he has seen the prize of becoming Prime Minister of Northern Ireland. And he is interested.

  
  

• The antidote to these grim medieval parties is the Alliance Party. If the peace process works, then the UUP and DUP will eventually co-opt the Alliance Party's ideas and policies, much as Fianna Fail eventually adopted the liberal policies pioneered by Labour and the PDs in the south, having fought them for decades. When it happens, it may happen very quickly.

• The very existence of the University of Ulster is a monument to sectarianism, in the 1965 decision not to site it in Derry. Ironically, of course, that decision backfired in that nationalists took over Queen's instead. In fairness to the University of Ulster it is working hard to overcome its past, and now includes a college in Derry.

The definition of a country

The fact is there is no set of formal principles whereby one can define the borders of the countries of the earth. The principle of "self-determination" of a people is too vague. What size people? How large does the group have to be before they get self-determination? What if they live intermingled with another group that also deserves self-determination? Even if one can identify a group that deserves self-determination, how does one determine the territory? Does the group have to be a majority in all parts of the territory, or only a majority overall? If only a majority overall, there are lots of pieces around the edge of the territory that could easily be included or not included on whim. There is no way of deciding.

Consider this thought experiment (Not my idea - I heard this somewhere): If there was a land bridge between Ireland and Scotland (as there was in the past), we would have to draw the border somewhere on the land. It would probably be drawn not far from where it is, and it would be accepted. People - especially in the South - would be far more relaxed about it. It is the fact that Ireland is an island that makes one think the border should be at the sea. But this is not really logical.

What I am making are the following points:

1. There is no a priori reason why the border can't be roughly where it is, rather than at the sea. In other words, the island of Ireland is not an indivisible unit laid down by God. Partitioning the island is no more "artificial" than partitioning Europe.

2. However, we must accept that all borders on earth will be somewhat random. All countries on earth will "capture" populations that could easily be part of another country. People will for random reasons be caught on the wrong side of the border from their point of view.

3. Therefore, the only solution to this is that it should not matter what side of the border you are caught on. All countries on earth should be ultra-neutral, secular, liberal democracies where all minorities feel like first-class citizens. Countries should not try to stand for a common culture, heritage, religion or beliefs. The state should be neutral about such things. A Catholic trapped in the North - or Anglo-Irish trapped in the South - should feel only modest disappointment, but no real effect on their daily life.

   This is the point betrayed by the UUP in the North, and betrayed by de Valera in the South.

Loyalists

• loyalists
  • collusion

• The PUP (also here)
  • The UVF
  • British Intelligence and the UVF

• The UPRG
  • The UFF/UDA
  • Common Sense

• The LVF

• I don't link to the loyalist dissident websites, since their sites have a record of actually naming and threatening to kill individual Catholics.

• Like the republican paramilitaries, since the ceasefire the loyalist paramilitaries have largely gone into organised crime (also here).

• British nationalists
  • British National Party
  • It is not just a smear to link loyalism with British fascist and racist movements. The links with the National Front and Combat 18 were quite open and acknowledged - the semi-racism of the loyalists finding a natural home with those who hated other minorities.
  • Enoch Powell was for years UUP MP for South Down.
  • And the UVF and the UDA are now deeply involved in racist attacks on black and Asian immigrants in Northern Ireland.

Loyalist crimes

• Sectarian killings by loyalists - Malcolm Sutton calculates this as 78 percent of all killings by loyalists.

• McGurk's Bar, 1971
• The Top of the Hill Bar, 1972
• The Rose and Crown Bar, 1974
• The Dublin and Monaghan bombings, 1974
• The Shankill Butchers, 1975-7 (see here)
• Sean Graham Bookmakers, 1992
• Greysteel, 1993
• Loughinisland, 1994
• Killings for Drumcree so far.

• Republican crimes

The loyalist armed conflict

The loyalists did not fight according to the rules of war. They killed almost exclusively innocent civilians, and not by accident either. These were not errors. These were not "collateral damage" - they were the actual targets.

The loyalist paramilitaries were Protestant religious death squads - killing and torturing innocent, uninvolved civilians for religion. We were supposed to believe that both sides were doing this of course, but in retrospect that was unthinking politically-correct humbug, one of many such devices over the last 30 years to avoid thinking about the conflict. Anti-Catholicism has been just as real in Britain's history as anti-semitism has been in Europe's, and it could so easily have ended in the horrors of the camps (as have in fact been proposed by a number of loyalist thinkers).

The similarities of virulent fundamentalist anti-Catholicism and anti-semitism: The "Irish" problem, like the "Jewish" problem, was never a problem with the Irish. It was a problem with virulent fundamentalist anti-Catholicism, a problem that still exists in the unionist population today. Northern anti-Catholicism is the fundamental cause of 30 years of conflict.

The similarities of the loyalists and the Palestinians: Loyalists have killed and tortured almost exclusively random Catholic civilians. This is because they are motivated by a fundamental racism that their opponents do not feel. Any objective historian will be struck by the fact that, like in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the republicans generally tried to hit military targets, while the loyalist supporters would cheer the killing of any random civilian. To observe this does not mean one supports either the republicans or the Israelis. It is to observe that fundamental beliefs come out in the way one wages war.

• Discussion of terrorism and internal conflicts in general

• Anti-Catholicism v. Anti-Judaism v. Anti-Islam:
  • It is hard for an Irish person to recognise that anti-Catholicism did once have some rational origin (at least, more rational than anti-semitism).
  • In the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, England and other Protestant countries were constructing the most exciting centre of civilization and science since Ancient Greece. They were building the modern world of science, democracy and capitalism. Catholic Europe threatened to destroy their world, and put it again under the control of the Pope and his medieval church.
  • Britain was right to fear Catholic Europe, but absolutely wrong to introduce persecution of its own Catholics as a response. Irish Catholics were reduced to impoverished serfdom and regular famine, and anti-Catholicism mutated into a fantastic creed similar to anti-semitism. Indeed, if anything, persecution of Catholics got worse as England's power and security grew (e.g. the persecution of Irish Catholics after England's final and total victory in 1691).
  • It is similar to the Islamist threat to the West today. The West is the heart of human civilization and knowledge. The Islamists threaten to destroy it all and return us to medieval barbarism. We are right to fear them, but would be wrong to introduce persecution of our own Muslims.

• To a rationalist, it is absurd that Protestant religious killers should hate Catholics, who share identical beliefs, more than they hate, say, atheists. But strangely enough this is what you would expect if you view religions as competing memes.

• Orange burners of Catholic churches in Northern Ireland in 1998 quoted from Deuteronomy 7, which, they are correct in claiming, fully supports their activities: "This is what you are to do to them: Break down their altars, smash their sacred stones, cut down their Asherah poles and burn their idols in the fire."
  • For many similar quotes from this unpleasant book see here.
  • In fact, Moses would have supported burning both Protestant and Catholic churches, since he would have regarded Christianity as a heresy.
  • It is obvious that Moses would have regarded Jesus as a false prophet, and would have had him put to death. I'm sure he would have approved of the crucifixion.

I don't happen to think that Christianity (whether Protestant, Catholic, whatever) is remotely true, or has got any kind of real understanding of the nature of our universe, but is it perhaps good for society anyway? It has inspired many good things and many good people, to be sure, but it has a lot to make up for since it has also inspired great evils such as medieval witch-killing and modern day loyalism. In general, its moral superiority over the paganism it replaced or over modern day atheism must remain unproven. Northern Ireland is a place that has far, far too much Christianity.

Basically, Northern Protestants must grow up and abandon the faith of their ancestors, just as Southern Catholics have grown up and abandoned the faith of their ancestors.

But you cannot tell Northern Protestants this of course, any more than you could tell Southern Catholics in the 1980s. They will do it in their own time, when they're ready.