I already had a word about this article by Gareth Peirce here and I am going to have another one now. She says,
Before Bloody Sunday, when British soldiers shot and killed 13 unarmed Catholic demonstrators who were marching to demand not a united Ireland but equal rights in employment, education and housing (as well as an end to internment), the IRA was a diminished organisation, unable to recruit. After Bloody Sunday volunteers from every part of Ireland and every background came forward. Over the years of the conflict, every lawless action on the part of the British state provoked a similar reaction: internment, ‘shoot to kill’, the use of torture (hooding, extreme stress positions, mock executions), brutally obtained false confessions and fabricated evidence.
The first part of this quote, about Bloody Sunday and its effect on the popularity of the Provos, is generally held to be true. She then goes on to say that a variety of other repressive measures – mainly illegal – taken by the British government over the years all led to an increase in the number of people seeking to join the IRA and, one might reasonably extrapolate, an increase in support for them generally.
Her main idea seems to be that illegal measures taken against armed revolutionary organizations inevitably tend to increase support for them. I think that is false and the very example of Northern Ireland shows this to be the case because if years of counter terrorist measures of dubious or null legality inevitably increase support for the organization they are aimed at suppressing then it’s pretty hard to explain what Sinn Féin is now doing cheerfully administering the statelet it spent so much effort trying to destroy. And let no one tell me that they are now the most popular nationalist party in Northern Ireland; indeed they are but the rise of their political popularity has everything to do with their gradual abandonment of violence and accommodation with the British state.
On a more general level, it’s the indiscriminate application of violence by the state that tends to increase the popularity of insurgents because it opens up a role for them as defender of the people. The trick for governments engaged in suppressing violent insurgencies is to keep within the law as far as possible and if they stray beyond it to be sure not to do so in such a way as to lose the support, or at the very least the acquiescence, of a critical mass of the public.
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