Anthony McIntyre's Blog, page 1126
July 27, 2018
July 26, 2018
Suffer The Little Children
Michael Bader in a piece featuring in Tikkun hits out at the Trump Terror against children.
It’s worth noting that we didn’t see that same degree of passion about children who were about to lose their health insurance last year.
We certainly don’t read much about the heartbreaking lot of latchkey children raised in families headed by single mothers working for stagnant wages, barely making ends meet, or children raised by parents addicted to opiates. These kids will never appear on the cover of Time Magazine. The media doesn’t cover what Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb once called the “hidden injuries of class.” Instead, the media dotes on the latest news about Robert Mueller and Michael Cohen. And as they do so, the Left and Right inevitably settle into their own tribal tents.
Why doesn’t the plight of the 16 million children currently being raised in poverty elicit the outrage that these children at the border do? Why exactly did so many people seem to wake up to the cruelty of Trump and the Republican Party when immigrant families were broken up?
On one level, it certainly seems that the abstract facts of poverty, social injustice, and the unequal distribution of wealth don’t elicit the deep psychological reflexes that are triggered by the stories and pictures of real panicked and grief stricken individual children. The former is suffering at a distance; the latter is up close and highly personal.
These reflexes and triggers are not uniquely American, nor do they have anything at all to do with American values. Instead, I think that our moral outrage reflects the universal importance of attachment in human life – the central importance of the earliest connections between parents – especially mothers – and children. Child development experts have warned us for a long time that any disruption to such ties in the course of development results in tremendous grief and distress, and if the rupture is great enough, it causes significant trauma that indelibly damages children’s brain development and psyches. Research has shown that significant disruptions of attachment result in later life in an increase of cardiovascular disease, anxiety disorders, addiction, criminality, depression, obesity, and suicide.
I believe that we react so strongly to stories of broken attachments because all of us have experienced, even in the best of circumstances, some version, some degree, of exactly such a loss. When we see it on television, it resonates with unconscious reservoirs of grief and trauma in all of us.
Even in the best of circumstances, growing up invariably involves some degree of loss. Losses attendant on separation from our caretakers dog our tracks throughout development. For every step forward, there is a letting go, a loss that has to be mourned. We learn to walk but we also miss the lap. We assert our wills and defy our parents, but we also miss surrendering to their care and protection. We leave our parents behind when we go away to school, but we then often complain of homesickness. We further relive these separations when we become parents, as we watch our children grow up and need us less and less over time. And, of course, everyone has to deal with loss when they, or their loved ones, face the ultimate separation of death.
Loss is normal. However, since most families have at least a touch of dysfunction, these painful conflicts are often heightened. In some families, children grow up feeling guilty about leaving parents behind or doing better than their parents and thus come to experience separation as tragic. Such children might then hold on and become fearful of letting go and growing up comes to feel especially sad. Later on, such feelings are re-evoked when as parents, their own children leave them, and on and on it goes.
In many other families, parents are either physically or emotionally absent or neglectful. In these circumstances, children are forced to cope with great feelings of loss and abandonment. They feel bereft, abandoned and either cover it up with a defensive stoicism or get into dependent relationships in order to put a Band-Aid on the problem.
Each of us has within a reservoir of grief, longing and other painful effects. Such feelings trigger our defenses and we often get angry, even indignant in response. We know that anger often masks sadness. We manage these feelings more or less well. We develop coping strategies that enable us to work and love and raise families in ways that are more or less successful. Feelings of loss or grief don’t necessarily make us mentally ill. In fact, sometimes they enable us to empathize with others who are suffering similar distress. Sometimes they enable us to better comfort and protect our own children in order to avoid repeating the traumas of our childhood. But these feelings also don’t go away.
What does this have to do with the public’s reaction to the travesties resulting from Trump’s Zero Tolerance policy? Simply put: when we see children mistreated and orphaned at the border—pictures of a child wailing in response to being taken away from her mother, or being fenced off in some cold shelter—we identify with both that child’s loss of his or her parents as well as the parents’ loss of their child. We quite naturally are outraged, protest, and we want to rescue those who are suffering. The empathy might be conscious or unconscious. Even if our identifications are unconscious, they sometimes break through into consciousness and flood us with sadness and anger. Our own warded off pain is activated by the suffering of these families.
If attachment, loss, and empathy weren’t reason enough to account for the public outrage at Trump’s border separations, the fact that these children are intrinsically innocent makes the provocation into a perfect storm. We almost always view children as innocent. This is why child sexual abuse is so emotionally incendiary to most people, even hardened convicts. That little immigrant girl crying at her mother’s feet, unable to get her attention because her mother is being interrogated, the depictions of children in cages, stories of staff being forbidden to hold or touch the children for whom they are caring, accounts of parents freed from jail unable to find out where their children have been relocated or even whether or not they are alive, all impale us in especially painful ways because innocent beings—children—are being made to suffer even though they’ve done nothing “wrong.” Their intrinsic innocence enable them to make legitimate claims on us for protection and care. And we howl in protest at the injustice of it all.
Guilty people deserve punishment. Innocent people deserve love and protection. This is why, of course, that Right-wing commentators are cynically impugning the characters of parents who bring their children to the U.S., or claiming that the children are pawns of drug smugglers. If the adults are guilty, then we shouldn’t be making such a big deal about their pain. Right-wing extremists like Ann Coulter even try to tarnish our perceptions of the orphaned children by calling them “child actors.” Her real intention should be noted, namely, that the objects of our empathy are not innocent and, thus, not deserving of our indignation.
The celebration of innocence is all the more salient because in our society, based as it is on an imaginary system of meritocracy and shot through with some version of the Protestant work ethic and the ideal of the rugged Horatio Alger individualist, none of us is ever allowed to be innocent. Instead, we are made to feel responsible for whatever pain and suffering afflicts us. Even when we plainly are innocent, we have trouble accepting that and, instead, we project onto children the innocence that we, ourselves, are forbidden to feel. Most of us are burdened by painful feelings of guilt and responsibility. We look upon young children as free of such burdens in a way that we secretly, but unsuccessfully covet. We idealize and protect the innocence outside of ourselves—the innocence found in children—in part because we can’t locate and defend a sense of innocence inside ourselves.
When people do a bad thing to a child, they are exploiting the inherent vulnerability of an innocent being who can’t defend him or herself and who depends on adults for protection. As with child abuse, the very people in authority who should be looking out for the child are the ones inflicting pain. Such a betrayal not only evokes similar but long–forgotten experiences in all of our backgrounds, but it tarnishes the cherished ideal of innocence that all of us wish could remain untouched and unsullied. As a result, we react with vicarious indignation.
It therefore makes sense that forced family separations should be psychologically explosive and should have triggered widespread outrage. When deep feelings are evoked in the political arena, especially when they involve children and families, public opinion can shift rapidly. Such sentiment usually isn’t enough to fuel a political movement because raw feeling ebbs and flows and unless it is embedded in structures, in organizations that are set up to gain power, it can be ephemeral. In fact, we are already seeing some retrenchment as conservative forces seek to dishonestly spin a false counter-narrative about immigration being about crime and national security, not morality. By so doing, they hope to create a situation in which the issue appears to be another typical clash between the Left and the Right, between Democrats and Republicans, rather than a universal human tragedy perpetrated exclusively by Donald Trump and the Republican Party.
Still, the spontaneous outpouring of emotional distress, moral outrage, and political activism that resulted from Trump’s and Sessions’ nativist immigration policies remind us that the vast majority of people are capable of empathy for those who are powerless. Masses of people can stand up for the victims of a tyrannical government. Progressives should take heart from this and figure out how to elicit empathy for the millions of children—and their parents—who suffer from social and economic injustice in our country and are every bit as innocent as these families at the Border.
If our movement primarily bases its credibility on abstract values or generalizations about economic disparities, it will fail to energize people to come out of their isolated everyday lives and fight in the public arena. We have to ground our strategies in approaches that speak to people’s capacity for and longing to be cared for and to take care of each other. In so doing, we tap into universal feelings of loss and universal desires to protect others from such feelings. On their side, Trump and his Right-wing supporters already speak to deeply personal issues—namely, people’s fear of “the other”—via their fear-mongering paranoia about immigrants “infesting” America. Progressives need to figure out how to speak to people’s hearts as deeply.
In fact, when the story about these border separations first broke, people did, indeed, speak out and fight back from their hearts. This fight is fuelled by feelings that originate in the deepest recesses of our psyches and find expression in a progressive political campaign. In this way, the personal is—and should be—always political.
Elie Wiesel argued that the opposite of love, art, faith, and life, is indifference. When we lead from the heart, expressing our most fundamental longings, we are not only better for it, but we have a better chance of changing the world.
➽Michael Bader is a psychologist and psychoanalyst in the San Francisco Bay Area. He writes extensively about psychology and politics (www.michaelbader.com).
It’s worth noting that we didn’t see that same degree of passion about children who were about to lose their health insurance last year.
We certainly don’t read much about the heartbreaking lot of latchkey children raised in families headed by single mothers working for stagnant wages, barely making ends meet, or children raised by parents addicted to opiates. These kids will never appear on the cover of Time Magazine. The media doesn’t cover what Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb once called the “hidden injuries of class.” Instead, the media dotes on the latest news about Robert Mueller and Michael Cohen. And as they do so, the Left and Right inevitably settle into their own tribal tents.
Why doesn’t the plight of the 16 million children currently being raised in poverty elicit the outrage that these children at the border do? Why exactly did so many people seem to wake up to the cruelty of Trump and the Republican Party when immigrant families were broken up?
On one level, it certainly seems that the abstract facts of poverty, social injustice, and the unequal distribution of wealth don’t elicit the deep psychological reflexes that are triggered by the stories and pictures of real panicked and grief stricken individual children. The former is suffering at a distance; the latter is up close and highly personal.
These reflexes and triggers are not uniquely American, nor do they have anything at all to do with American values. Instead, I think that our moral outrage reflects the universal importance of attachment in human life – the central importance of the earliest connections between parents – especially mothers – and children. Child development experts have warned us for a long time that any disruption to such ties in the course of development results in tremendous grief and distress, and if the rupture is great enough, it causes significant trauma that indelibly damages children’s brain development and psyches. Research has shown that significant disruptions of attachment result in later life in an increase of cardiovascular disease, anxiety disorders, addiction, criminality, depression, obesity, and suicide.
I believe that we react so strongly to stories of broken attachments because all of us have experienced, even in the best of circumstances, some version, some degree, of exactly such a loss. When we see it on television, it resonates with unconscious reservoirs of grief and trauma in all of us.
Even in the best of circumstances, growing up invariably involves some degree of loss. Losses attendant on separation from our caretakers dog our tracks throughout development. For every step forward, there is a letting go, a loss that has to be mourned. We learn to walk but we also miss the lap. We assert our wills and defy our parents, but we also miss surrendering to their care and protection. We leave our parents behind when we go away to school, but we then often complain of homesickness. We further relive these separations when we become parents, as we watch our children grow up and need us less and less over time. And, of course, everyone has to deal with loss when they, or their loved ones, face the ultimate separation of death.
Loss is normal. However, since most families have at least a touch of dysfunction, these painful conflicts are often heightened. In some families, children grow up feeling guilty about leaving parents behind or doing better than their parents and thus come to experience separation as tragic. Such children might then hold on and become fearful of letting go and growing up comes to feel especially sad. Later on, such feelings are re-evoked when as parents, their own children leave them, and on and on it goes.
In many other families, parents are either physically or emotionally absent or neglectful. In these circumstances, children are forced to cope with great feelings of loss and abandonment. They feel bereft, abandoned and either cover it up with a defensive stoicism or get into dependent relationships in order to put a Band-Aid on the problem.
Each of us has within a reservoir of grief, longing and other painful effects. Such feelings trigger our defenses and we often get angry, even indignant in response. We know that anger often masks sadness. We manage these feelings more or less well. We develop coping strategies that enable us to work and love and raise families in ways that are more or less successful. Feelings of loss or grief don’t necessarily make us mentally ill. In fact, sometimes they enable us to empathize with others who are suffering similar distress. Sometimes they enable us to better comfort and protect our own children in order to avoid repeating the traumas of our childhood. But these feelings also don’t go away.
What does this have to do with the public’s reaction to the travesties resulting from Trump’s Zero Tolerance policy? Simply put: when we see children mistreated and orphaned at the border—pictures of a child wailing in response to being taken away from her mother, or being fenced off in some cold shelter—we identify with both that child’s loss of his or her parents as well as the parents’ loss of their child. We quite naturally are outraged, protest, and we want to rescue those who are suffering. The empathy might be conscious or unconscious. Even if our identifications are unconscious, they sometimes break through into consciousness and flood us with sadness and anger. Our own warded off pain is activated by the suffering of these families.
If attachment, loss, and empathy weren’t reason enough to account for the public outrage at Trump’s border separations, the fact that these children are intrinsically innocent makes the provocation into a perfect storm. We almost always view children as innocent. This is why child sexual abuse is so emotionally incendiary to most people, even hardened convicts. That little immigrant girl crying at her mother’s feet, unable to get her attention because her mother is being interrogated, the depictions of children in cages, stories of staff being forbidden to hold or touch the children for whom they are caring, accounts of parents freed from jail unable to find out where their children have been relocated or even whether or not they are alive, all impale us in especially painful ways because innocent beings—children—are being made to suffer even though they’ve done nothing “wrong.” Their intrinsic innocence enable them to make legitimate claims on us for protection and care. And we howl in protest at the injustice of it all.
Guilty people deserve punishment. Innocent people deserve love and protection. This is why, of course, that Right-wing commentators are cynically impugning the characters of parents who bring their children to the U.S., or claiming that the children are pawns of drug smugglers. If the adults are guilty, then we shouldn’t be making such a big deal about their pain. Right-wing extremists like Ann Coulter even try to tarnish our perceptions of the orphaned children by calling them “child actors.” Her real intention should be noted, namely, that the objects of our empathy are not innocent and, thus, not deserving of our indignation.
The celebration of innocence is all the more salient because in our society, based as it is on an imaginary system of meritocracy and shot through with some version of the Protestant work ethic and the ideal of the rugged Horatio Alger individualist, none of us is ever allowed to be innocent. Instead, we are made to feel responsible for whatever pain and suffering afflicts us. Even when we plainly are innocent, we have trouble accepting that and, instead, we project onto children the innocence that we, ourselves, are forbidden to feel. Most of us are burdened by painful feelings of guilt and responsibility. We look upon young children as free of such burdens in a way that we secretly, but unsuccessfully covet. We idealize and protect the innocence outside of ourselves—the innocence found in children—in part because we can’t locate and defend a sense of innocence inside ourselves.
When people do a bad thing to a child, they are exploiting the inherent vulnerability of an innocent being who can’t defend him or herself and who depends on adults for protection. As with child abuse, the very people in authority who should be looking out for the child are the ones inflicting pain. Such a betrayal not only evokes similar but long–forgotten experiences in all of our backgrounds, but it tarnishes the cherished ideal of innocence that all of us wish could remain untouched and unsullied. As a result, we react with vicarious indignation.
It therefore makes sense that forced family separations should be psychologically explosive and should have triggered widespread outrage. When deep feelings are evoked in the political arena, especially when they involve children and families, public opinion can shift rapidly. Such sentiment usually isn’t enough to fuel a political movement because raw feeling ebbs and flows and unless it is embedded in structures, in organizations that are set up to gain power, it can be ephemeral. In fact, we are already seeing some retrenchment as conservative forces seek to dishonestly spin a false counter-narrative about immigration being about crime and national security, not morality. By so doing, they hope to create a situation in which the issue appears to be another typical clash between the Left and the Right, between Democrats and Republicans, rather than a universal human tragedy perpetrated exclusively by Donald Trump and the Republican Party.
Still, the spontaneous outpouring of emotional distress, moral outrage, and political activism that resulted from Trump’s and Sessions’ nativist immigration policies remind us that the vast majority of people are capable of empathy for those who are powerless. Masses of people can stand up for the victims of a tyrannical government. Progressives should take heart from this and figure out how to elicit empathy for the millions of children—and their parents—who suffer from social and economic injustice in our country and are every bit as innocent as these families at the Border.
If our movement primarily bases its credibility on abstract values or generalizations about economic disparities, it will fail to energize people to come out of their isolated everyday lives and fight in the public arena. We have to ground our strategies in approaches that speak to people’s capacity for and longing to be cared for and to take care of each other. In so doing, we tap into universal feelings of loss and universal desires to protect others from such feelings. On their side, Trump and his Right-wing supporters already speak to deeply personal issues—namely, people’s fear of “the other”—via their fear-mongering paranoia about immigrants “infesting” America. Progressives need to figure out how to speak to people’s hearts as deeply.
In fact, when the story about these border separations first broke, people did, indeed, speak out and fight back from their hearts. This fight is fuelled by feelings that originate in the deepest recesses of our psyches and find expression in a progressive political campaign. In this way, the personal is—and should be—always political.
Elie Wiesel argued that the opposite of love, art, faith, and life, is indifference. When we lead from the heart, expressing our most fundamental longings, we are not only better for it, but we have a better chance of changing the world.
➽Michael Bader is a psychologist and psychoanalyst in the San Francisco Bay Area. He writes extensively about psychology and politics (www.michaelbader.com).
Sinn Fein Abstentionism - Time To Go
Fergus O'Farrell argues that it is time for Sinn Fein to ditch its long standing policy of abstentionism from the British parliament.
Last week, May avoided defeat in the Commons on leaving the customs union by a margin of six. Sinn Féin have seven MPs who currently do not take their seats at Westminster. If this anachronistic policy was abandoned, Sinn Féin could fight for Irish interests where the biggest decisions are being thrashed out regarding Brexit – the House of Commons.
Abstentionism – when elected representatives refuse to take their seats in parliament – is nearly as old as Sinn Féin, which was founded in 1904 by Arthur Griffith. When the fledgling party pledged to voters that their representatives wouldn’t take their seats at Westminster, it didn’t really matter, as the party only produced a tiny number of MPs. The Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) played the game of parliamentary arithmetic in its failed attempt to win Home Rule for Ireland.
However, the policy became exceedingly useful in 1918, when the tide of public opinion in Ireland turned from support for the IPP to Sinn Féin. Refusing the go to Westminster en masse, Sinn Féin’s 73 MPs stayed at home to form their own assembly. The first Dáil met in January 1919, the same day as the opening shots of the War of Independence were fired. By fighting the British army and establishing a counter state through political organisations like the Dáil Courts, Irish independence was achieved in 1922.
Those Anti-Treaty Sinn Féin TDs who refused to recognise the legitimacy of the new state abstained from the new parliament, but their numbers dwindled and the lost ground to the new state builders in Cumman na nGeadheal. De Valera was pragmatic enough to recognise that the policy was leading them nowhere; he established Fianna Fáil in 1926 and entered parliament the next year. There were purists who continued to abstain, like the rebel priest Fr Michael O’ Flanagan, who became president of Sinn Féin in 1933. Sinn Féin languished in the middle decades of the twentieth century as Fianna Fáil dominated Irish political life.
The party was rejuvenated by the onset of the troubles, reforming as Provisional Sinn Féin in 1970, though it remained very much the poorer and smaller cousin of the Provisional IRA. Abstentionism continued as a core policy of the party, but the Republican movement’s main efforts were focused on the war. However, with the election of Bobby Sands to the House of Commons in 1981, Sinn Féin began to recognise that it may become expedient for them to drop abstentionism. Sands had sidestepped the abstentionism issue by running as an ‘Anti H-Block/Armagh Political Prisoner’ candidate. Skilful manoeuvring by Gerry Adams and his allies in the Republican movement led to it being abandoned in the south in 1986. Sinn Féin performed poorly in elections, with IRA’s war producing too much bad press for its political wing, and so Adams wound down the war to focus on electoral politics.
32 years after dropping abstentionism in the south, Sinn Féin is a rising force. They are an effective opposition and may make up part of the next government. This obviously would have been impossible without the dropping of abstentionism. This brings us to its usefulness in the North.
Whether one loves or loathes the EU, Brexit presents the biggest threat to Irish stability since the troubles. Key votes have and will be happening in the Commons over the coming months. May is stumbling on with her Brexit plans in tatters. The DUP cannot be trusted to fight for issues which will affect the whole Island. This week, May passed Brexit legislation with the narrowest of margins. If Sinn Féin MPs were at Westminster, they could influence the shape of Brexit and the course of Irish history.
When questioned, Sinn Féin MPs say that they were elected on an abstentionist mandate. However, they have dropped it in the past when it became politically useful to the party. Now, surely is one of those times. One of the reasons for Sinn Féin’s continued success is its ability to adapt and remain relevant in a changing Ireland. It is time for Sinn Féin to drop this ancient symbolic protest, enter the House of Commons and fight for Ireland’s interest.
➽Fergus O'Farrell has a keen interest in Irish republicanism and has researched the life of Cathal Brugha.
Follow Fergus O'Farrell on Twitter @fergus_farrell.
Last week, May avoided defeat in the Commons on leaving the customs union by a margin of six. Sinn Féin have seven MPs who currently do not take their seats at Westminster. If this anachronistic policy was abandoned, Sinn Féin could fight for Irish interests where the biggest decisions are being thrashed out regarding Brexit – the House of Commons.
Abstentionism – when elected representatives refuse to take their seats in parliament – is nearly as old as Sinn Féin, which was founded in 1904 by Arthur Griffith. When the fledgling party pledged to voters that their representatives wouldn’t take their seats at Westminster, it didn’t really matter, as the party only produced a tiny number of MPs. The Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) played the game of parliamentary arithmetic in its failed attempt to win Home Rule for Ireland.
However, the policy became exceedingly useful in 1918, when the tide of public opinion in Ireland turned from support for the IPP to Sinn Féin. Refusing the go to Westminster en masse, Sinn Féin’s 73 MPs stayed at home to form their own assembly. The first Dáil met in January 1919, the same day as the opening shots of the War of Independence were fired. By fighting the British army and establishing a counter state through political organisations like the Dáil Courts, Irish independence was achieved in 1922.
Those Anti-Treaty Sinn Féin TDs who refused to recognise the legitimacy of the new state abstained from the new parliament, but their numbers dwindled and the lost ground to the new state builders in Cumman na nGeadheal. De Valera was pragmatic enough to recognise that the policy was leading them nowhere; he established Fianna Fáil in 1926 and entered parliament the next year. There were purists who continued to abstain, like the rebel priest Fr Michael O’ Flanagan, who became president of Sinn Féin in 1933. Sinn Féin languished in the middle decades of the twentieth century as Fianna Fáil dominated Irish political life.
The party was rejuvenated by the onset of the troubles, reforming as Provisional Sinn Féin in 1970, though it remained very much the poorer and smaller cousin of the Provisional IRA. Abstentionism continued as a core policy of the party, but the Republican movement’s main efforts were focused on the war. However, with the election of Bobby Sands to the House of Commons in 1981, Sinn Féin began to recognise that it may become expedient for them to drop abstentionism. Sands had sidestepped the abstentionism issue by running as an ‘Anti H-Block/Armagh Political Prisoner’ candidate. Skilful manoeuvring by Gerry Adams and his allies in the Republican movement led to it being abandoned in the south in 1986. Sinn Féin performed poorly in elections, with IRA’s war producing too much bad press for its political wing, and so Adams wound down the war to focus on electoral politics.
32 years after dropping abstentionism in the south, Sinn Féin is a rising force. They are an effective opposition and may make up part of the next government. This obviously would have been impossible without the dropping of abstentionism. This brings us to its usefulness in the North.
Whether one loves or loathes the EU, Brexit presents the biggest threat to Irish stability since the troubles. Key votes have and will be happening in the Commons over the coming months. May is stumbling on with her Brexit plans in tatters. The DUP cannot be trusted to fight for issues which will affect the whole Island. This week, May passed Brexit legislation with the narrowest of margins. If Sinn Féin MPs were at Westminster, they could influence the shape of Brexit and the course of Irish history.
When questioned, Sinn Féin MPs say that they were elected on an abstentionist mandate. However, they have dropped it in the past when it became politically useful to the party. Now, surely is one of those times. One of the reasons for Sinn Féin’s continued success is its ability to adapt and remain relevant in a changing Ireland. It is time for Sinn Féin to drop this ancient symbolic protest, enter the House of Commons and fight for Ireland’s interest.
➽Fergus O'Farrell has a keen interest in Irish republicanism and has researched the life of Cathal Brugha.
Follow Fergus O'Farrell on Twitter @fergus_farrell.
July 25, 2018
Failed Entity
Anthony McIntyre writing in the Belfast Telegraph about recent attacks on the homes of two Belfast nationalists.
Low-level yes, but attacks break acceptable level of violence test
Whether the weekend attacks on the Belfast homes of two former IRA leaders were as serious or as ominous as to merit the amount of news coverage they have received, is a moot point. They were clearly lacking in the level of fatal intent which took the life of Real IRA figure Jo O’Connor in West Belfast, 18 years ago.
Neither O’Connor’s Provisional IRA assassins nor their political representatives have yet approached the dead man’s relatives to explain the rationale behind his killing. Presumably, like the weekend attacks on homes, there was no logic that can be explained, just a self-serving, self-referential one that cannot be explained.
Whether the work of organised physical force republicanism or the hatching of some lone wolf plan, the attacks were certainly without a semblance of political justification or strategic nous.
They occur at a time when there has been an upsurge in politically violent activity by republicans. While there may be no link between sustained rioting in Derry and attacks on the cenotaph in Newry, insert the volatility of Brexit into the incendiary marching and bonfire season and the North reveals its susceptibility to cyclical downturns, from which it will recover until the next one.
Decades ago the level of threat posed would have satisfied the yearning of many British politicians for what was termed an acceptable level of violence. Today, aided by the coercion poachers having become consent gamekeepers, expectations are higher and the threshold for acceptability has been considerably recalibrated.
There is a lesson to be drawn from the men who were attacked rather than the attack itself. They are now the most robust defenders of the consent principle, having failed absolutely to usurp it. In their day they stormed the walls of consent only to be repelled and ultimately transformed by it. The current republican activity is like a mild breeze compared against that storm. Like the Provisional IRA, their inheritors too will implode on the rock of consent, their activity as transformatively plausible as a rain dance during the recent heat wave. If they follow reason rather than tradition, the attackers might yet come to understand that the men they targeted embody a logic: “the failed political entity” is republicanism, not the Northern state.
Anthony McIntyre blogs @ The Pensive Quill.
Follow Anthony McIntyre on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre
Low-level yes, but attacks break acceptable level of violence test
Whether the weekend attacks on the Belfast homes of two former IRA leaders were as serious or as ominous as to merit the amount of news coverage they have received, is a moot point. They were clearly lacking in the level of fatal intent which took the life of Real IRA figure Jo O’Connor in West Belfast, 18 years ago.
Neither O’Connor’s Provisional IRA assassins nor their political representatives have yet approached the dead man’s relatives to explain the rationale behind his killing. Presumably, like the weekend attacks on homes, there was no logic that can be explained, just a self-serving, self-referential one that cannot be explained.
Whether the work of organised physical force republicanism or the hatching of some lone wolf plan, the attacks were certainly without a semblance of political justification or strategic nous.
They occur at a time when there has been an upsurge in politically violent activity by republicans. While there may be no link between sustained rioting in Derry and attacks on the cenotaph in Newry, insert the volatility of Brexit into the incendiary marching and bonfire season and the North reveals its susceptibility to cyclical downturns, from which it will recover until the next one.
Decades ago the level of threat posed would have satisfied the yearning of many British politicians for what was termed an acceptable level of violence. Today, aided by the coercion poachers having become consent gamekeepers, expectations are higher and the threshold for acceptability has been considerably recalibrated.
There is a lesson to be drawn from the men who were attacked rather than the attack itself. They are now the most robust defenders of the consent principle, having failed absolutely to usurp it. In their day they stormed the walls of consent only to be repelled and ultimately transformed by it. The current republican activity is like a mild breeze compared against that storm. Like the Provisional IRA, their inheritors too will implode on the rock of consent, their activity as transformatively plausible as a rain dance during the recent heat wave. If they follow reason rather than tradition, the attackers might yet come to understand that the men they targeted embody a logic: “the failed political entity” is republicanism, not the Northern state.
Anthony McIntyre blogs @ The Pensive Quill.Follow Anthony McIntyre on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre
July 24, 2018
Heathrow: Jobs Vs Climate Action” Is A False Choice. Reject It
Gabriel Levy sees no merit in building a new runway at Heathrow Airport.
More than 115 Labour MPs – well over half the parliamentary party – voted for Heathrow expansion on Monday, ignoring a warning in the debate by the Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell, that it posed “a threat to the planet”.
McDonnell, a long-standing opponent of Heathrow expansion, said that, if a legal challenge by local councils and Greenpeace failed, an “iconic, totemic” battle would be unleashed to stop the project. The Vote No Heathrow group is already gearing up for such a battle.
Before the vote, Len McCluskey, leader of the Unite union – a big financial donor to Labour and supporter of Jeremy Corbyn in internal political battles – wrote to MPs urging them to support Heathrow expansion.
It is the false choice that McCluskey hinted at in his letter – that if the workers’ movement participates in action against global warming, it will be sacrificing well-paid, unionised jobs – that needs to be nailed. It is disarming. And it is deceitful.
The letter, signed by McCluskey and Back Heathrow representative Parmjit Dhanda, said that supporting the third runway would “make a historic and positive difference to the lives of Unite members, their sons and daughters, and generations to come”. MPs could “ensure our country remains a world leader in aviation and aerospace, industries containing high-quality, unionised jobs.”
These claims are obviously dodgy.
What sort of lives are the children and grandchildren of Heathrow workers, and “generations to come”, going to have, if global warming continues unchecked? They will grow up in an increasingly violent and unstable world, in which political and economic elites are forced all the more desperately to push most people into poverty.
Demonstrators outside parliament before Monday’s vote. Photo: Vote No Heathrow
The rich will try to protect themselves from rising sea levels, stormier weather and the consequences of agriculture failure, at the expense of the majority.
Is this really the best future the trade unions can aspire to? Is there no other way of achieving “high-quality, unionised jobs”? Of course there are other ways. Organised labour does not have to mortgage the future of its own descendants, and others’, for these gains. An economy structured for people’s needs, and not for profit – surely the most basic aim of the workers’ movement – would open up much wider vistas of possibility, for people to live better.
The choice for the labour movement is not between good jobs and action on climate change. It is between a narrow perspective, tied to the wealthy elites that will benefit from airport expansion, and a wider vision that gives hope for future generations – the sort of vision that has been at the labour movement’s heart since it began.
These issues are addressed in a thoughtful way in a submission to Labour’s policy consultation by the Red Green Study Group, a small group of socialists who have been thinking about these issues for a long time. I’ve blogged about that here.
If anyone in the Labour party – or anywhere else – really means to address the crisis between human society and nature, together with social injustice, then they need an integrated approach. You can not start a deep-going shift in the relationship between people and their natural surroundings – as well as between people – by tinkering with problems at the edges. GL, 28 June 2018.
■ Red Green Study Group submission to Labour policy consultation
■ “Til they have built a third runway” – Richard Seymour
■ “Heathrow: step up the campaign” – Alan Thornett, with links to other information at the end
■ People and Nature site contents
⏩Gabriel Levy blogs @ People And Nature.
Follow on Twitter @Pe0pleAndNature
More than 115 Labour MPs – well over half the parliamentary party – voted for Heathrow expansion on Monday, ignoring a warning in the debate by the Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell, that it posed “a threat to the planet”.
McDonnell, a long-standing opponent of Heathrow expansion, said that, if a legal challenge by local councils and Greenpeace failed, an “iconic, totemic” battle would be unleashed to stop the project. The Vote No Heathrow group is already gearing up for such a battle.
Before the vote, Len McCluskey, leader of the Unite union – a big financial donor to Labour and supporter of Jeremy Corbyn in internal political battles – wrote to MPs urging them to support Heathrow expansion.
It is the false choice that McCluskey hinted at in his letter – that if the workers’ movement participates in action against global warming, it will be sacrificing well-paid, unionised jobs – that needs to be nailed. It is disarming. And it is deceitful.
The letter, signed by McCluskey and Back Heathrow representative Parmjit Dhanda, said that supporting the third runway would “make a historic and positive difference to the lives of Unite members, their sons and daughters, and generations to come”. MPs could “ensure our country remains a world leader in aviation and aerospace, industries containing high-quality, unionised jobs.”
These claims are obviously dodgy.
What sort of lives are the children and grandchildren of Heathrow workers, and “generations to come”, going to have, if global warming continues unchecked? They will grow up in an increasingly violent and unstable world, in which political and economic elites are forced all the more desperately to push most people into poverty.
Demonstrators outside parliament before Monday’s vote. Photo: Vote No Heathrow The rich will try to protect themselves from rising sea levels, stormier weather and the consequences of agriculture failure, at the expense of the majority.
Is this really the best future the trade unions can aspire to? Is there no other way of achieving “high-quality, unionised jobs”? Of course there are other ways. Organised labour does not have to mortgage the future of its own descendants, and others’, for these gains. An economy structured for people’s needs, and not for profit – surely the most basic aim of the workers’ movement – would open up much wider vistas of possibility, for people to live better.
The choice for the labour movement is not between good jobs and action on climate change. It is between a narrow perspective, tied to the wealthy elites that will benefit from airport expansion, and a wider vision that gives hope for future generations – the sort of vision that has been at the labour movement’s heart since it began.
These issues are addressed in a thoughtful way in a submission to Labour’s policy consultation by the Red Green Study Group, a small group of socialists who have been thinking about these issues for a long time. I’ve blogged about that here.
If anyone in the Labour party – or anywhere else – really means to address the crisis between human society and nature, together with social injustice, then they need an integrated approach. You can not start a deep-going shift in the relationship between people and their natural surroundings – as well as between people – by tinkering with problems at the edges. GL, 28 June 2018.
■ Red Green Study Group submission to Labour policy consultation
■ “Til they have built a third runway” – Richard Seymour
■ “Heathrow: step up the campaign” – Alan Thornett, with links to other information at the end
■ People and Nature site contents
⏩Gabriel Levy blogs @ People And Nature.
Follow on Twitter @Pe0pleAndNature
Coulter For President
Radical Unionist and conservative evangelical Christian commentator, Dr John Coulter, uses his Fearless Flying Column today to outline why he, as a Unionist, he wants his name in the running to be the next Irish President.
Get Ireland Working Again ! That’s my Irish Presidential campaign slogan.
With current President Michael D Higgins wanting a second term and Sinn Fein entering the Aras race, it’s time to unveil Coulter’s Covenant for the Irish Nation.
The Celtic Tiger may be skinned financially, but I want to unleash the power of Shamrock Strength.
It’s simple. I want 32 of the world’s richest multinational companies and multibillionaires to each sponsor an Irish county.
Each global firm or rich person will be responsible for pouring billions of their profits into that county – and in return, the county will carry their names in the titles.
Bring on Tesco Galway, Panasonic Cork, and Allianz Donegal! Arab royalty, Russian oligarchs and Chinese billionaires are more than welcome, too.
Those billions will be used to fund road schemes, the health service, new schools and thousands of jobs.
I will implement a kick-ass security policy with a massive crackdown on crime. The death penalty will be restored for convicted murderers and drug barons.
Given that we are an island nation with plenty of coastal harbour locations, and given the excellent skills base in Ireland, the major nuclear powers will be given the chance to have their nuclear submarines and ships serviced by Irish workers - for a handsome fee, of course.
An Irish nuclear power industry will be developed which will guarantee cheaper electric bills for all households and businesses as well as provide work for many Irish citizens.
There will be no English-style yob riots in my Ireland. An Garda Siochana will be armed with machine-guns and every citizen will do at least two years National Service in the Defence Forces, with pay of course.
And during that two-year paid National Service, Irish citizens will also learn a vocational trade which they can put to good use once their National Service is completed.
The defence budget will be substantially enhanced with considerable pay scales for anyone who serves the nation in any of the security forces, police, and emergency services - particularly, nurses, doctors, paramedics, fire and rescue services, and ambulance crews.
The assets of all criminals – from joy riders to drug dealers – will be seized and ploughed back into the health service and schools.
The birch will be used to combat anti-social thugs and the cane re-introduced in all schools. Lawless brats will be dumped in borstals, and their parents heavily fined or jailed.
Jails will not become holiday homes, but will convert into hard labour camps. Chain gangs will be used to keep Ireland’s roads spotless. Indeed, such will be the severity of the new prison regimes, that Ireland will have the staff and resources to house some of the globe’s worst criminals.
Coulter’s Covenant will be simple - send us your convicted scum, we will guard them and you pay us for the privilege. Again, cash generated will be channeled into inward investment, health and education.
And the Irish judiciary will be given tough new powers to impose lengthy jail terms and fines on convicted drink or drug drivers, or those who cause death by dangerous driving.
Child killers will face the hangman’s noose, with sex offenders and rapists chemically castrated to ensure they no longer pose a danger to communities.
With billionaire firms and individuals sponsoring the counties, the European Union will be told to clear off. Irish profits will not be thrown away paying off the multibillion euro bailout.
Ireland will dump the eurozone, leave the EU, rejoin the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association, and re-introduce the beloved and once proud punt.
As for the Catholic Church, every single diocese will face a rigorous Cloyne-style probe to root out alleged pervert priests.
The Orange Order will be given designated non-contentious marching routes. All Protestant Orders and bands will follow these routes, or be formally disbanded.
Catholic bishops, cardinals and senior clerics will have to seek re-election by the people.
The Vatican will not have authority to interfere in these elections. The Catholic people will choose the clerics they want in their parishes.
Irish people living outside the Emerald Isle will have the right to vote in all elections. Biblical Christianity will become the State faith, and every school will have a Christian morning assembly before classes.
Each Irish province will have its own nuclear power station. The cancer of fuel poverty, especially among the elderly and low income families, will be eradicated. No longer will families have to face the choice of ‘heat or eat’.
The billionaire county sponsors must sign a pledge to encourage tourists to flock to their respective regions. All Irish embassies and consulates throughout the globe will be encouraged to trace anyone with Irish ancestral roots, persuading them to make at least one journey to Ireland inter lifetime.
The ‘brain drain’ of our talented young people and skilled adults having to leave Ireland for study and work will be reversed as county sponsors must contribute significantly to job creation and training.
Those who cannot find work will be drafted into an armed forces reserve organisation and learn a trade.
Free education and health provision, especially university and nursing home places, will be a human right, not a privilege for the rich.
Volunteers will also be strongly sponsored to travel to starvation-torn nations, especially in Africa.
Implement Coulter’s Covenant, and Ireland will become a real global nation, not the threatened bankrupt banana island it will unfortunately become if a Hard Brexit is implemented next March.
If this is the type of free and democratic Ireland which puts people, patients, pupils and pensioners first, then I’m Yer Man for the Aras, so get those nomination papers submitted.
Dr John Coulter is a former Religious Affairs Correspondent at the Belfast News Letter, a former Director of Operations at Christian Communication Network Television.
Follow Dr John Coulter on Twitter. @JohnAHCoulter
Get Ireland Working Again ! That’s my Irish Presidential campaign slogan.
With current President Michael D Higgins wanting a second term and Sinn Fein entering the Aras race, it’s time to unveil Coulter’s Covenant for the Irish Nation.
The Celtic Tiger may be skinned financially, but I want to unleash the power of Shamrock Strength.
It’s simple. I want 32 of the world’s richest multinational companies and multibillionaires to each sponsor an Irish county.
Each global firm or rich person will be responsible for pouring billions of their profits into that county – and in return, the county will carry their names in the titles.
Bring on Tesco Galway, Panasonic Cork, and Allianz Donegal! Arab royalty, Russian oligarchs and Chinese billionaires are more than welcome, too.
Those billions will be used to fund road schemes, the health service, new schools and thousands of jobs.
I will implement a kick-ass security policy with a massive crackdown on crime. The death penalty will be restored for convicted murderers and drug barons.
Given that we are an island nation with plenty of coastal harbour locations, and given the excellent skills base in Ireland, the major nuclear powers will be given the chance to have their nuclear submarines and ships serviced by Irish workers - for a handsome fee, of course.
An Irish nuclear power industry will be developed which will guarantee cheaper electric bills for all households and businesses as well as provide work for many Irish citizens.
There will be no English-style yob riots in my Ireland. An Garda Siochana will be armed with machine-guns and every citizen will do at least two years National Service in the Defence Forces, with pay of course.
And during that two-year paid National Service, Irish citizens will also learn a vocational trade which they can put to good use once their National Service is completed.
The defence budget will be substantially enhanced with considerable pay scales for anyone who serves the nation in any of the security forces, police, and emergency services - particularly, nurses, doctors, paramedics, fire and rescue services, and ambulance crews.
The assets of all criminals – from joy riders to drug dealers – will be seized and ploughed back into the health service and schools.
The birch will be used to combat anti-social thugs and the cane re-introduced in all schools. Lawless brats will be dumped in borstals, and their parents heavily fined or jailed.
Jails will not become holiday homes, but will convert into hard labour camps. Chain gangs will be used to keep Ireland’s roads spotless. Indeed, such will be the severity of the new prison regimes, that Ireland will have the staff and resources to house some of the globe’s worst criminals.
Coulter’s Covenant will be simple - send us your convicted scum, we will guard them and you pay us for the privilege. Again, cash generated will be channeled into inward investment, health and education.
And the Irish judiciary will be given tough new powers to impose lengthy jail terms and fines on convicted drink or drug drivers, or those who cause death by dangerous driving.
Child killers will face the hangman’s noose, with sex offenders and rapists chemically castrated to ensure they no longer pose a danger to communities.
With billionaire firms and individuals sponsoring the counties, the European Union will be told to clear off. Irish profits will not be thrown away paying off the multibillion euro bailout.
Ireland will dump the eurozone, leave the EU, rejoin the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association, and re-introduce the beloved and once proud punt.
As for the Catholic Church, every single diocese will face a rigorous Cloyne-style probe to root out alleged pervert priests.
The Orange Order will be given designated non-contentious marching routes. All Protestant Orders and bands will follow these routes, or be formally disbanded.
Catholic bishops, cardinals and senior clerics will have to seek re-election by the people.
The Vatican will not have authority to interfere in these elections. The Catholic people will choose the clerics they want in their parishes.
Irish people living outside the Emerald Isle will have the right to vote in all elections. Biblical Christianity will become the State faith, and every school will have a Christian morning assembly before classes.
Each Irish province will have its own nuclear power station. The cancer of fuel poverty, especially among the elderly and low income families, will be eradicated. No longer will families have to face the choice of ‘heat or eat’.
The billionaire county sponsors must sign a pledge to encourage tourists to flock to their respective regions. All Irish embassies and consulates throughout the globe will be encouraged to trace anyone with Irish ancestral roots, persuading them to make at least one journey to Ireland inter lifetime.
The ‘brain drain’ of our talented young people and skilled adults having to leave Ireland for study and work will be reversed as county sponsors must contribute significantly to job creation and training.
Those who cannot find work will be drafted into an armed forces reserve organisation and learn a trade.
Free education and health provision, especially university and nursing home places, will be a human right, not a privilege for the rich.
Volunteers will also be strongly sponsored to travel to starvation-torn nations, especially in Africa.
Implement Coulter’s Covenant, and Ireland will become a real global nation, not the threatened bankrupt banana island it will unfortunately become if a Hard Brexit is implemented next March.
If this is the type of free and democratic Ireland which puts people, patients, pupils and pensioners first, then I’m Yer Man for the Aras, so get those nomination papers submitted.
Dr John Coulter is a former Religious Affairs Correspondent at the Belfast News Letter, a former Director of Operations at Christian Communication Network Television. Follow Dr John Coulter on Twitter. @JohnAHCoulter
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