Finding out who started the Troubles?
Paul Evans started a bit of a fire that hasn’t really taken off yet, I think. The mapping whataboutery thread has turned into another interesting debate on the desirability or otherwise of the phenomenon of evasion. But for those who engage directly with the debategraph there is an opportunity for people to comprehensively map the problem of how the whole damned thing got started. For it to work we need people to jump into Debategraph and really have a go at not only point the finger at the other side but to provide supporting evidence for why that might be so… What’s there at the moment is only pointing the finger at loyalist paramilitaries, but I know that’s neither fair, nor balanced nor an accurate reflection of the opinion of the people who read this site… So come on people, let’s work out just who’s fault it actually was? If we do it properly, someone’s got to mention 1169 and counting… (the date not the blog fool – ed) The problem being is that, in this case, you’ve got to put the work in to actually get there…
To be fair to RS, he stopped complaining and finally took part. And, also to be scrupulously fair, he added a great deal of value (as well as a gentle piss take) in the process.
Have a look. It changes quite radically each time someone adds material (like an exceptionally good thread does on Slugger from time to time).
It would be great if others (particularly those of a different view) tried the same.
I tried it. I clicked on “The IRA started it” and it showed some mess of stuff with greta insights like “this is related to tha GAA provided support”. So I clicked on thd IRA started it again to dig deeper, and um, nothing. Call me in a month if people botger.
Most accurate one? Slugger O Toole perpetuates it > Mick Likes graphs
It was him that did it …
That’s so ‘Mike TV’ ken.
If you scrape to the bottom and find there is nothing there: then fill it yourself. Who else do you think will do it?
Mick
I don’t really care who started it, and I sinscerely doubt it’ll come up with any great insights. And the tool doesn’t seem particularly user friendly, particuarly on the crap screen on my home computer.
Stick up one in a topic I’m interested in and maybe I’ll try it. The 11+ maybe?
Ultimately, Cromwell started the Troubles.
Guys, you are throwing your pearls away by not putting it on the Debategraph… I could act as stenographer and put your stuff up there but: one, no one is paying me to do this; and two, actually registering and engaging with the map raises the possibility that you might be able to ‘fix’ problems elsewhere.
Ken,
I take your point. And I think that would be a great theme to have up and running. I’ll see if Brian or someone would like to set one up on that.
But I’m interested in people who are interested in this one first and the Irish budget next. But I’m not going to start building more and more of these things if we find the basic proposition doesn’t work for something as basic as ‘whataboutery’.
Surely if anyone is to take the credit for starting it all then it must be Austin Currie. We know this is true because he has told us so often enough.
As to who is to take the blame well, that’s a horse of a different colour and I must admit to having had a little ride upon his back meself once upon a time.
Get in there Rory… And we NEED more unionists in there, otherwise it WILL get pulled all out of shape…
Sorry Doctor Who, you can criticise those of us wishing to acknowledge history’s hand if you wish, anything else to add?
BB, it was the normans according to the map… if you only read that bit… even with just a few contributors its really coming on…
More please… There’s lots of arguments and counterpoints going a begging…
“…..who started the Troubles?”
Our parents and their parents parents and their parents parents and their parents parents and their etc….
So let’s try and put a stop to it here and now.
Well done Slugger: you’ve finally managed to unite both nationalist and unionist in common contempt for this pointless, puerile thread.
The Big Bang. Everything since then has been incidental.
Mick, why does your post at 6:37 on the debategraph appear under my name? Did I inadvertently do something?
What’s the big arguement? As someone else has already said the Troubles started when the UVF murdered an innocent Catholic in 1966; burned to death a Protestant pensioner on the Shankill believing her to be a Catholic; bombed electricity and water sub stations in the 1960′s; murdered the first RUC man Constable Arbuckle on the Shankill and when Paisley threatened to lead a Loyalist rabble on Divis St when an Irish Tricolour was flown in 1966. In reality the Troubles started when the illegitimate Frankenstein gerrymandered Northern statelet was created in a test tube in 1920. Truth be told while it exists there will ALWAYS be conflict on this island. Like South Africa and Israel it was a bastardised illegal entity founded to appease an apartheid, colonial minority at the expense of the native majority.
Lurig,
Your first sentence could be a fair description of the build up to the latest troubles (some will undoubtedly disagree) but it does go all the way back to the Norman adventurers attack and success on England in 1066.
Here in the Bunker, I was watching a documentary on the Ku Klux Klan, those other great defenders of the Protestant way of life. They have so much in common with the Ulster rabble: defenders of the faith, anti civil rights, not averse to stiffing ther Nigs.
“Dr” Paisley has his honorary PhD from the terrorist Bob Jones Uni. Hatred is bred into them.
Well Mick, it depends how you define “the Troubles”. If it means the sectarian strife, then ultimately Cromwell started that by expelling the Catholics and replacing them with British Protestants. The Israeli colonisation of Palestine is having the exact same consequences.
Ireland/South Africa/Israel unfree will never be at peace…….boke!
The 1980′s called lads – they want their cliches back……
“Here in the Bunker, I was watching a documentary on the Ku Klux Klan, those other great defenders of the Protestant way of life”
Your in no position to throw stones “Adolf” remind us again which particular religion you grew up within and whos current lead man today was one of your understudies as a lad back then…..
One more thing – why do Republicans think they hold all the keys when it comes to promising when and if there will be “peace” round these parts? There are always two parts to any such puzzle and
history has always borne out that peace is impossible without either the pacification or the total obliteration of one’s adversaries – and let’s face it neither outcome is at all likely as far as any of us are concerned……unfortunately. That’s not to say a United Ireland will never happen of course – merely that it would be a very optimistic to think it the end for all our troubles….
Democratic
As it happens, the area in Austria I came from had a lot of converts to Protestantism (though I did serve as an altar boy).
If you were around when Ben got the Papal job, you will remember what his brother George, also a priest, said about Germany in the 1930s. I had to draft them into the defence forces as I needed the bottom of the barrel. Ben deserted by the way. Not much of a soldier.
Thanks for your sectarian rant. With blinkers like yours, troubles will never end.
I too am a victim. I wanted to be an artist but the slaughter of the Somme made me into the man you like to caricature.
I blame Nixon
And by the way, the late Pope John Paul 11, the Polish Pope, got along well with Pop Ben. The sectarians are wrong, as usual.
Leave these chants to David Norris, the Daily Mail ansd other w–kers.
@Garibaldy
The immediate riposte to that is rather obvious, and since Godwin’s Law has already been broken I’ll put it this way:
What you say is rather like justifying Germany’s invasion of Czechoslovakia by saying it was to unify with the Sudetan Germans. “British rights for British citizens” was what 1974-ish? IRA stopped in what 1994?
So what was the other 20 years about? Or in the analogy “what was the invasion of the rest of Czechoslovakia about?”. What was that written in the Green Book about a “united Ireland” well before 1968 all about? Or in the analogy “what was that written in Mein Kampf about lebensraum all about?”.
Sunder,
I would have imagined the side that spawned pogroms, a one party state, discrimination against minorities, and Vanguard would run a bit shy of crappy Nazi analogies.