Monday, October 08, 2007
“a people without hatred cannot vanquish a brutal enemy..”
So Mary Lou McDonald, MEP, is launching a week of events organised by Sinn Féin to commemorate the death of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara. And the Northern Ireland Executive junior minister, and former bomber, Gerry Kelly, MLA, is to attend the last event - the Deputy First minister is obviously unavailable. But why exactly? We know that Gerry Adams is a fan of the middle-class would-be permanent revolutionary. But is it still chic to worship Che in Sinn Féin in this new ‘indigenous’ deal? [Ógra Shinn Fein I could understand - Ed] Or just a ‘loved the movie’ moment? Or just another example of a party with a Cuba fixation? Or perhaps it’s a nod to Guevara’s call to arms in his last published article in 1967
Adds Frank at the Cedar Lounge wonders whether “it’s time Gerry Adams donned a beret and fatigues again”“Our mission, in the first hour, shall be to survive; later, we shall follow the perennial example of the guerrilla, carrying out armed propaganda (in the Vietnamese sense, that is, the bullets of propaganda, of the battles won or lost — but fought — against the enemy). The great lesson of the invincibility of the guerrillas taking root in the dispossessed masses. The galvanizing of the national spirit, the preparation for harder tasks, for resisting even more violent repressions. Hatred as an element of the struggle; a relentless hatred of the enemy, impelling us over and beyond the natural limitations that man is heir to and transforming him into an effective, violent, selective and cold killing machine. Our soldiers must be thus; a people without hatred cannot vanquish a brutal enemy. ”
Adds again I’ll just add these lines from Guevara’s last published article, which follow on from the quoted paragraph above.
“We must carry the war into every corner the enemy happens to carry it: to his home, to his centers of entertainment; a total war. It is necessary to prevent him from having a moment of peace, a quiet moment outside his barracks or even inside; we must attack him wherever he may be; make him feel like a cornered beast wherever he may move. Then his moral fiber shall begin to decline. He will even become more beastly, but we shall notice how the signs of decadence begin to appear.”
Pete Baker @ 08:22 PM
And while Kinshaa may be imminently visitable at this very moment, I wouldn’t take an Antanov out of there and would steer well clear of the east where the fighting continues apace. Indeed a few months ago there were firefights in the streets of Kinshasa as Jean Pierre Bemba (the opposition) and his men were hunted down. The DRC has a looong way to go and too many european (and regional) interests are involved to ensure that all goes well.....
Posted by on Oct 08, 2007 @ 11:19 PMI’m half-considering a visit myself. I picked up a couple of CDs of tradi-modern Congolese music recently. The second had a DVD with it that showed the bands playing live in Kinshasa last year. It looks surprisingly fine, though I’m sure you’d have to have your wits about you. The music is amazing, though unfortunately the production values aren’t. It looks like a fascinating place and I’d like to get in there as early as possible, before it all falls to bits again, or alternatively becomes a tourist hotspot..
Posted by on Oct 08, 2007 @ 11:25 PMdisagree garibaldy, treat people like shit, demean and diminish them, and you produce an angry man.
Thankfully the poison in the system is changing, RUC into PSNI, and an end to one party rule.
The poison is still in the minds of many bigots, but they can’t get away with it acting upon it, so easily anymore. Sad it took so many lives for unionism/loyalism to become human beings.
Posted by on Oct 08, 2007 @ 11:28 PMThe poison is still in the minds of many bigots
Sadly true
Posted by on Oct 08, 2007 @ 11:29 PMSnakebrain,
Thanks for the speech. Inspiring stuff. Read some Kwame Nkrumah but so long ago can’t really remember the details. A lot of good philosophers and positive things came out of the African liberation struggles. Unfortunately much didn’t last. Lumumba was very articulate on the differing treatment of blacks and whites. I have to say that I think Mugabe also deserves a great deal of credit on that front in the initial stages after the change of government in Zimbabwe.
I think I read an interview with the photographer a few years ago saying he didn’t regret it. And I read one with the poster designed a few days ago saying the same.
Circles,
Revolution, as we’ve seen in our lifetime, can be non-violent. It seems to me that the extent to which a revolution is violent is dependent upon the reaction of those who have lost out from the Revolution. So in France after 1789 you got violent resistance and civil war, as was the case in Russia after 1917. But not in France after 1830 or in Portual in 1974 or in the old USSR. We are seeing revolutionary processes in Latin America, though not socialist revolutions in the full sense of the word. That is another good example. When the Americans backed the coup a few years ago, Chavez threatened to arm the poor. The plotters and their supporters panicked, and backed down. No massacres, no mass arrests, no disappearances. Even if the TV station that had supported the coup lost its licence a couple of years later. Then again, so did Thames in a process designed to ensure that result after ‘Death on the Rock’.
The opponents national liberation struggles and communists in the decades after WWII faced usually reacted extremely brutally, often with the support of foreign powers. In most cases I’m not sure that a peaceful revolution would have worked. One can look at Chile as an example. Allende was warned to safeguard against the army by the Soviets, but ignored it.Posted by on Oct 08, 2007 @ 11:32 PMyes snakebrain but last time the votes were counted McCartney was wiped, we’ll wait to see if Allister wants to raise the ugly head of bigotry again.
Good you agree with me.Turgon, we’ve had good chats.
Terrorists are not born they are created…Posted by on Oct 08, 2007 @ 11:33 PMParci,
Of course discrimination was wrong. Doesn’t make anything the Provos did right. And nor does it absolve them of the sectarian killings they commited and the sectarian worldview they continue to promote. I note these elements are missing from the poison you mention in the system.
NICRA achieved much more through peaceful protest, and involved larger numbers, than the Provos ever did.
Posted by on Oct 08, 2007 @ 11:36 PM“Terrorist are not born they are created..”
You should do some more self-reflection, parci.
“Hatred as an element of the struggle; a relentless hatred of the enemy..”
Posted by on Oct 08, 2007 @ 11:39 PMDon’t know Kwame Nkrumah but I’ll google him. It’s a great speech isn’t it? I thought it should have made that series of great speeches of the c20th the Guardian did a while back.
Posted by on Oct 08, 2007 @ 11:42 PMI thought it was interesting that in the same breath somebody could talk about the poison of sectarianism and how unionists weren’t human..
Posted by on Oct 08, 2007 @ 11:44 PMgaribaldy dunno which universe you’re in, I’m talking about civilians being shot dead on bloody sunday, interned, tortured, a state sponsored terror machine , armed to the teeth hell-bent on wiping out any resistance to the poisonous status quo.
Loyalists managed to kill 1/20 IRA man, that means 19 out of every 20 murders was innocent prods or catholics.
At least the IRA got 1/2 security/army/police.So pls don’t give me your moral equivalence crap, and pls don’t give me your liberal “ ooh it was just a bit of discrimination” crap.
It was brutal and bloody, don’t sanitize it.
Armed resistance was a legitimate response.Finally no republicanism is non-sectarian.
Orange and Green are all the same to me, all Irish all Equal, the two great traditions accommodative under the one roof, and one the flag.Posted by on Oct 08, 2007 @ 11:50 PM“Armed resistance was a legitimate response.”
“Orange and Green are all the same to me”Except when they’re not human? You’re so full of contradictions and holes…
Go and have a long hard think about this parci.
Posted by on Oct 08, 2007 @ 11:53 PMthanks for the advice peteb,
I’ll pass the mirror back though:Its the love of liberty if denied that starts wars.
And its the love of justice that makes one hate injustice. Its worth fighting and dying for.
You’ll get it one day ..
Cheerio… fer now !Posted by on Oct 09, 2007 @ 12:00 AMParci,
That stuff you’re talking about hadn’t happened when the Provos began their campaign. Bombay Street had, but then of course people like an ex-PSF Deputy Lord Mayor welcomed the soldiers onto the streets and gave them sandwiches and stuff, and for quite some time after August 1969.
And I never gave any liberal crap. I did not try and justify anything that the government or its agents did. I said that the discrimination did not justify the Provo camapign, especially when more effective techniques were being proven to work. It certainly didn’t justify Kingsmill, or blowing up and machine gunning the patrons of bars of the Shankill. Any more than the UDA firing an RPG at a bar on the Falls was justified.
You say that the British were hell bent on wiping out any opposition. I hope that’s hyperbole rather than what you seriously think. Otherwise you might have a time explaining the total absence of John Hume being shot by state forces.
Just out of curiosity - when did the justification for the Provo campaign end? When the RUC was reformed? Done in 1970 due to NICRA. When the local paramilitary force was disbanded? Done in 1970 due to NICRA. I could go on. What changed in 1994? Or had it changed before then?
As for your point that “Finally no republicanism is non-sectarianism”. I consider myself as standing within the republican tradition, from Tone to Connolly and beyond. Republicans who wanted not only an independent Ireland, but an Ireland where the men of no property would be in control of their own destiny. The republican tradition is not non-sectarian. It is anti-sectarian. It not only rejects, but challenges sectarian attitudes wherever they come from. Tone did in at Rathfriland and beyond, Connolly did it with Griffith and his ilk as well as Carson et al, and genuine republicans continue to challenge it where they find it. Let me know if you think that is what most of those who call themselves republicans in NI or Ireland today are about.
Posted by on Oct 09, 2007 @ 12:12 AM“You’ll get it one day .. “
If only..
*shakes head*
Posted by on Oct 09, 2007 @ 12:14 AMparci,
“Armed resistance was a legitimate response.”So that was what the Enniskillen bomb was then Armed resistance. I just thought it was sectarian murder.
Republicanism is non sectarian. Well not as practiced by the IRA their republicanism was stunningly sectarian. Kingsmill? Douglas Derring?
Stop trying to hide behind pseudo generalities. If armed resistance was legitimate then the above murders were legitimate. Go on explain to me how Enniskillen, Kingsmill and Derring’s murders were legitimate.
You really do not understand do you? You talk about “two great traditions” and then glory in the sectarian murder of men women and children.
Posted by on Oct 09, 2007 @ 12:15 AMGaribaldy,
Thanks for demonstrating that republicanism and a position based on rigorous thought, and a non-espousal of violent methodology, aren’t incompatible.
Well played.
Posted by on Oct 09, 2007 @ 12:17 AMIt is better to die on your feet
than live on your kneesand it became self evident the nationalist were expected to die on their knees at m’lords pleasure
Parci is not only correct that armed resistance is a legitimate response, it was made a mandatory response through the actions of the psychopaths in power
this by no means excuses all the actions of the IRA but their reaction was as natural as breathing. I hope I would have had the courage to face down what was then a world super power with a few rusty guns and a load of nerve
Posted by on Oct 09, 2007 @ 12:40 AM*A lot of good philosophers and positive things came out of the African liberation struggles.*
Yes loads of ‘em, if only Singapore or the Republic of Ireland or Hong Kong or Latvia or South Korea or other post colonial countries had followed the good philosophies and positive things that came out of the African liberation struggles they wouldn’t be such basket cases today compared to the shining beacons of Congo and Zimbabwe.
I once read somewhere that at independence in 1957 Ghana had the same GDP as New Zealand and a higher GDP than Malaysia, remind me how well independence worked out for them?
*I have to say that I think Mugabe also deserves a great deal of credit on that front in the initial stages after the change of government in Zimbabwe.*
Would that include the massacre of tens of thousands of people in Matabele in the early 1980’s?
So what went wrong with Africa? The same thing that went wrong with Cuba; one man Marxist rule, the sure way to wreck your country in one generation.
Cuba under Batista was a fairly unremarkable corrupt banana republic however it still manged to produce some of the best health and education care in Latin America, left to its own devices Batista would have gone the way of all the other Latin American “strong man” dictatorships and Cuba would now be a peaceful functioning democracy today (like, oh I don’t know, the Bahamas perhaps?) instead of a the police state private fiefdom of the Castro brotherhood with the biggest refugee problem in the western hemisphere.
But of course the whiff of cordite and the homo-eroticism of Latin American thugs like Guevara continue to blind the Left to this day. Such that even as we witness before our very eyes another hard man thug dictatorship forming in Venezuela still the Lefties cream their panties because Hugo Loco says nasty things about George Bush.
So they queue up to kiss his arse and to hell with the poor Venezuelan bastards who’ll end up being put against a wall and shot or tortured in some basement prisons by his secret policemen (if Marxism is so wonderful how come they always need so many leather jacketed thugs of policemen to impose it?) or simply doing what normal people do every time Marxists take power; grab their wife and wee’uns and flee for their lives to a western democracy, if they’re lucky the United States.
Posted by on Oct 09, 2007 @ 01:00 AMSean,
“I hope I would have had the courage to face down what was then a world super power with a few rusty guns and a load of nerve “But it was not like that Sean and you know it was not. Facing down the superpower actually meant waiting outside your neighbour who was a part time policeman’s house and emptying a gun into him as he drove his children to school. It was sneaking up behind a policeman doing traffic duty and shooting him. It was shooting an old man and his wife because he was a retired policeman. It was stopping a bus full of workers and shooting all the Prods. It was It was killing shop keepers. It was blowing up hotels, resturants and shops containing normal ordinary people. It was torturing and killing women and boys necause they might have been informers and then hiding their bodies.
Pratically none of the actions of the IRA were those of an army. In addition as even republicans like Garibaldy have pointed out the discrimination (I have no doubt real) which was used to jsutify these actions had already stopped when the overwhelming majority were committed. It just was not some heoric set of actions it was a murder campaign and a sectarian one.
Posted by on Oct 09, 2007 @ 01:08 AM“So what went wrong with Africa? The same thing that went wrong with Cuba; one man Marxist rule, the sure way to wreck your country in one generation.”
You don’t think post-colonial interference, economic protectionism and cold war games being played out across the African theatre had anything to do with it Harry?
That’s a shamefully poor bit of analysis…
Posted by on Oct 09, 2007 @ 01:09 AMHarry,
I did say much of the good stuff didn’t last. And for reasons far more complex than you describe. And often involving outside interference in backing opposition groups.
Should the Cubans under the Batista regime have just waited until he died off? I don’t believe so.
Your description of Venezuela is so far off the mark as to be caricature. And so are you saying you supported the coup against the democratically elected president?
It’s early in the morning for you I think but bedtime for me.
Posted by on Oct 09, 2007 @ 01:10 AMsnakebrain,
“Has nobody ever thought to do a Gerry Adams image in the style of
FitzsimmonsFitzpatrick Che portrait.”Your wish is my command :0)
Posted by on Oct 09, 2007 @ 01:11 AMCheers Dawkins. I’ll have nightmares now.
Posted by on Oct 09, 2007 @ 01:13 AMDawkins
Thats hilarious. I’m saving a copy if you don’t mind?
Posted by on Oct 09, 2007 @ 01:16 AM
