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 orthern
Ireland had another one of its ''historic breakthroughs'' to ''peace''
last week when the IRA promised that it would think very carefully
about ''decommissioning'' its guns and explosives at some point
in the future. Alas, Unionist hard-liners refused to accept this
olive branch. Once again, therefore, there is a ''crisis.'' Within
the next six weeks, the British government must either suspend the
Northern Ireland power-sharing assembly and the ''peace process''
or call new elections, which would probably elect the ''extremes''
in both Catholic and Protestant communities.
Or so the British
and Irish governments say. And so the U.S. government accepts. And
so the U.S. press repeats. For the umpteenth time.
On this occasion,
however, I do not need to list the many previous ''historic breakthroughs''
on which the two governments have hailed an IRA promise to surrender
its armory. Andrew
Sullivan in The New Republic
and Jenny McCartney in the Sunday
Telegraph have done so both exhaustively and effectively.
Let me quote
just one recent case from McCartney: ''Remember, in May 2000, how
— to great fanfare — the IRA opened up a few selected bunkers to
inspections by a two-man team which it had itself approved? John
Hume, the SDLP leader, said then that 'the gun has been taken out
of Irish politics forever,' and the exultant erroneous headline
in the [London] Daily Express was 'IRA give up guns at last.'''
That ''at last''
is poignant for two reasons: Even then it was the umpteenth time
that the IRA had supposedly given up its guns, and of course it
had done no such thing. Nor will it do so. The IRA — or, technically,
its consigliere wing, Sinn Fein — is in government precisely because
it possesses weapons and regularly threatens to use them if its
demands are not accepted.
The ''peace
process'' long ago lost any connection with peace as generally understood.
It is now merely a euphemism for a policy of surrender-by-installments
to IRA terrorism — in particular its threat to resume the bombing
of London. What is happening today in Ireland is very similar to
what happened in Germany in the 1920s and '30s. Fascist violence
is the main force driving politics.
Sectarian private
armies rule the streets, battling each other on occasion but principally
intimidating decent law-abiding people in ''their own'' communities.
The governments are themselves so intimidated that they now side
with the terrorists against the law-abiding. Yet however generous
and shameful the concessions, the terrorists never give up terrorism
and transform themselves into democratic politicians. They simply
demand fresh concessions — and they get them.
In practice
the two governments and the IRA are now accomplices. What the voters
vote for is secondary to what the IRA demands. So both governments,
sometimes supported by Washington, lean heavily on the Unionists
to swallow the necessary concessions. Of course, this cannot be
admitted. So lying is built into the peace process. Because it would
collapse if the IRA were to break the cease-fire, London and Dublin
have ruled that murdering certain classes of people (dissident Catholics,
informers, petty criminals) does not constitute a breach of the
cease-fire.
Reporters are
not immune to this inversion of values. ''Hard-liners'' is now used
by the American and British media to refer to those politicians
— generally Unionists and Protestants — who insist that murderers
should surrender their weapons and renounce violence permanently
before being allowed to become (or remain) government ministers.
Those who argue that terrorist-ministers should remain in office
as long as they promise to think about ''decommissioning'' weapons
and abandoning violence at some unspecified date are described in
more favorable terms such as ''moderate'' or ''peace-minded.'' When
striving especially hard to be fair-minded, the media will refer
to both groups as ''the extremes.''
The biggest
lie of all is the phrase ''peace process.'' What it means in practice
is the appeasement of the IRA, which has gone to the point where
the two governments cannot bring themselves even to consider forceful
resistance to terrorism. And while that is so, fascism rules, OK?
This originally
appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times.
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