IRA Atrocities and hypocrisy
The IRA bombing in 'London on July 20 is not justified for the following reasons:
* the degree of oppression in Northern Ireland does not ju stify killing.
* the circumstances in which the bombings were underrtaken involved reckless disregard for innocent civilian life.
* politically, it is entirely wrong to believe that Northern Ireland can be "liberated" by military campaigns that innvolve no mass involvement or support.
For these reasons we condemn the London bombings as we do all killings in Northern Ireland. In voicing this condemnation, however, we wish to distance ourselves as far as possible from the chorus of outrage which the Lonndon bombings evoked.
It is quite fantastic that people who rejoiced at British atrocities in the South Atlantic wac should now dare to mouth any moral utterance of any kind. The sinking of the Belgrano, outside the total exclusion zone, involving the loss of more than 400 lives was a far worse atrocity than the IRA has ever perpetrated. We haven't yet been told the gory stories of Goose Green and the other "incidents" in the "liberation" of the Falklands but we know enough to be aware that over 100 Argentinian soldiers were slaughhtered after they had surrendered. We also know that the innfamous Ghurkas slit the throats of several Argentinian solldiers in their sleep.
Those who have any complicity either directly through their support or indirectly through their silence for these atrocities, should have the good grace to remain silent when admittedly horrible but far less heinous acts are committed by the IRA.
There is another point of special relevance to the morrally indignant on this island. How is it that atrocity after atrocity - very often perpetrated by the same IRA - can go by day after day in Northern Ireland, without evoking more than a token rebuke now and again, and when a bomb goes off in London all the outraged trumpets blare? Is the killing of a human being living in London somehow worse than the ki1lingof a human being living in Belfast?
Several of the Irish commentators on the London bombbings expressed themselves ashamed to be Irish - most of these live in London. Ashamed vis-a-vis whom are they ¸the British? After all that has gone on in the South Atlanntic in the past few months? Given British ultimate responnsibility for the establishment and maintenance of the secctarian state of Northern Ireland which has been the root cause of all this violence?
Much of the protestation about such bombings and IRA atrocities has much more to do with humbug, and national self-debasement than with any purported concern for human life. Many in Fine Gael who most loudly condemn the IRA, quite gratuitously give retrospective approbation to the murders of the Z? republican prisoners in 1922 and 1923 and the atrocities of the Free State. soldiers at the time. Very many of those who speak with loathing for IRA "cowards", "murderers", "thugs" etc. happily sit down to dinner tables, or would wish to do so, with the likes of Henry Kissinger, who is guilty of mass murder in Cambodia, Margaret Thatcher and her crew who are guilty of the South Atlantic atrocities, and other senior British statessmen, such as Roy Mason, who were guilty of torture in Northern Ireland.
The IRA bombers, abominable though they- be, don't hold a candle (fuse?) to the likes of these when it comes to atrocity.
And come to think of it, don't we have diplomatic relaations with the state of Israel at the moment? What about the atrocity of the genocide of thousands of Palestinian civilians by this state with whom we harbour such genteel relations?
No doubt, this will be interpreted by some as somehow a justification of the London bombings. Let us be quite clear; the claim that one is no more morally debased than any of the above gives one no claim to moral probity. What was done in London was wrong and was morally unjustiifiable. The cynicism and hypocrisy of the shrillest oppoonents don't make that fact any different.