Back to The Troubles?

I suppose this could have gone on the Brexit, politics or even religion threads. But it feels like it deserves its own.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-56664868

It’s weird to think back on watching the nightly news as a child of the 80s and thinking about how normalized the terrorism was. The last couple of years I’ve wondered if this isn’t what America is drifting towards, with politics replacing religion as the sectarian spark.

 

I am shocked to learn that the UDA and Ulster Volunteers started it. The UDA, which is more like organized crime than noble freedom fighters, has withdrawn its official support for the Good Friday agreement.

 

My wife and I took a day trip to Northern Ireland when we were in Ireland in July, 2019. Included a fascinating black cab tour of Belfast, was amazing to walk the streets of a place I saw on TV back in the 1980s as one of the most dangerous cities on the planet.

 

Speaking of, there's a new police procedural recently dropped on Prime called Bloodlands about a murder investigation in Belfast and damn is it good; there's a twist about halfway through that's the most gut-punching I've seen on TV in ages.

 

Why would they destroy their own neighborhoods?

 

I had a friend who worked overseas in Derry/Londonderry* in the 1990s, and he was shocked at how normalized the violence, and the evidence of the violence, was in that city. And he understood that the worst of it was well before he lived there.

* - it says a lot that they can't even agree on this city's name.

 

I was on a cruise of the British Isles about 15 years ago and one of the stops was Belfast
We went down the streets where the graffiti still is on the houses
A guy I worked with who was from Boston told me he knew plenty of bars back in the day where there was a pot above the cash register for contributions to the IRA

 

I hope the legal and criminal response to our insurrection is enough to keep that from being a "trial balloon" for extremist groups to think we can return to the days of lynch mobs and vigilantes. Sadly, half of the elected officials who hold seats in Congress would be more than happy to see such violence continue (as long as their skins are safe).

 

the Rightwing terrorists in America are conflating religion and politics.
Where else would raging lunatics say that the unmitigated right to carry and own firearms is God Given? And it’s the same people, apparently fucktard is too offensive for the lowest form of human, who used the same religion to justify chattel slavery in America. Politics is religion and religion is political in the USA

 

Busting up the Good Friday accords was a not entirely unforeseen aftereffect of Brexit.

And not entirely unconnected with the right wing screech machine's pom pom shaking for secession in the USA.

 

All it would take is a couple of bombings or assassinations. If someone puts a bullet into Merrick Garland or Clarence Thomas and kills them, I can't help but think that a tit for tat response would be likely. Once that ball starts rolling there's no telling where it stops.

 

As an atheist, its with wonderment that I read about the history of the conflicts between Catholics and Protestants in Ireland/Northern Ireland. I literally channel Rodney King and say "can't you just get along?"