On how to view the past
Jun. 15th, 2010 11:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pecuniumDavid Cameron has just pissed off some friends of mine. I may be doing the same with this post (should they ever read it).
Today was the release of The Saville Report which is the result of 12 years, thousands of interviews and £195 million, of inquiry into the events of, Bloody Sunday (for those who have not the time, nor the inclination to read through 5,000 pages of detail there are the principal conclusions which only run to 60 pages).
How did David Cameron, who was five when it happened (just as I was), piss them off? He apolgised. More, he did not promise immunity to those implicated in the report.
That report says the dead were innocent. Guilty of nothing; that the soldiers had no legitimate targets, and were not acting out of fear for their lives, or the lives of others (it does say that of the 14 dead, 3 were shot by soldiers acting in "fear and panic" and 11 were not).
David Cameron said, ""Mr Speaker, I am deeply patriotic.
I never want to believe anything bad about our country.
I never want to call into question the behaviour of our soldiers and our Army who I believe to be the finest in the world.
And I have seen for myself the very difficult and dangerous circumstances in which we ask our soldiers to serve.
But the conclusions of this report are absolutely clear.
There is no doubt. There is nothing equivocal. There are no ambiguities.
What happened on Bloody Sunday was both unjustified and unjustifiable.
It was wrong."
I have friends in the British Army. Friends who, because of the price they, and their mates, had to pay in N. Ireland, have a bone deep antipathy to the Irish. The dislike of the French, is mostly teasing (they have a thousand years of genial hostility between them). Not so the way they feel about the Irish Republicans.
I understand it (though as someone of Irish descent I can't quite share it even to the point of being more than more than merely quiet when they are being angry, and not playing, "rebel tunes" when they are in earshot).
Unjustified, and unjustifiable.
I am not, actually, trying to lay blame on 1 Para (I don't think, as one person said, they need to be stripped of all awards. It was a single act, by a singular group, and; while 1 Para must, sadly, carry the shame of those people's actions; and that days deeds, it doesn't diminish the rest of their record). No, I am more interested in the response Cameron made to a MP who was trying to make an equivalence between "terrorists" (a term which is often problematic, one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, and while I think the Provos, esp. in the '70s and '80s were well beyond the realm of fair insurgency (bombs in London, no. Soldiers are legitimate targets; it's what we are paid for. The various supporting elements [e.g in this case, The Orangemen] are probably fair game, but random people, far from the actual area being contested... I don't think so).
The MP wanted to know why, if the soldiers were facing prosecution why the IRA members (some of whom are known; one of whom is an MP in N. Ireland), aren't in the same spot.
He said he didn't want to draw equivalence between soldiers and terrorists, because soldiers act under the rule of law.
This is where this touches home. Bloody Sunday made The Troubles worse. It strengthened the IRA. It's why the "help the Irish" jars in US bars were always full. The cover up, the assertion that the dead were bomb-throwers, the lack of accountability, all of that gave people a grievance; one they couldn't get redress for in other ways.
We are doing the same thing in Iraq, and Afghanistan.
I have personal knowledge of it. A guy we had in the pen was arrested in the plain sight of his brother. US MPs took him away. When his brother when to the Coalition Provisional Authority to ask why, he was lied to. Spun a tale of all the groups which might have done it, but no... No Way was is the US.
Only it was. The brother saw it. I know about this because the guy was a Big Deal in South Baghdad, and it made the papers. I got to read about it, and I compared the brother's account to what I'd been told when I talked to the guy, and they were the same (inside the variability of eyewitness accounts, it was the same story).
If he'd just disappeared, instead of being taken home... how many people would have lost all faith in the honest intentions of the US?
How many similar stories are there?
Soldiers act under the rule of law. Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, Khandahar... places the Gov't says the law has run out.
Bloody Sunday, as much as anything else; in the 400 years of struggle to reclaim independence, made The Troubles as bad as they were (and it's an interesting thing that the families of the victims are looking to the Crown Prosecution to give them redress... they don't want jail for the soldiers, just trials, and [they hope, even expect, convictions] that will be enough for them to say justice was done).
What troubles could we avoid, were we to take a good hard look at what we are doing, and treat the people who have legitimate complaint as if they had legitimate complaint?
Today was the release of The Saville Report which is the result of 12 years, thousands of interviews and £195 million, of inquiry into the events of, Bloody Sunday (for those who have not the time, nor the inclination to read through 5,000 pages of detail there are the principal conclusions which only run to 60 pages).
How did David Cameron, who was five when it happened (just as I was), piss them off? He apolgised. More, he did not promise immunity to those implicated in the report.
That report says the dead were innocent. Guilty of nothing; that the soldiers had no legitimate targets, and were not acting out of fear for their lives, or the lives of others (it does say that of the 14 dead, 3 were shot by soldiers acting in "fear and panic" and 11 were not).
David Cameron said, ""Mr Speaker, I am deeply patriotic.
I never want to believe anything bad about our country.
I never want to call into question the behaviour of our soldiers and our Army who I believe to be the finest in the world.
And I have seen for myself the very difficult and dangerous circumstances in which we ask our soldiers to serve.
But the conclusions of this report are absolutely clear.
There is no doubt. There is nothing equivocal. There are no ambiguities.
What happened on Bloody Sunday was both unjustified and unjustifiable.
It was wrong."
I have friends in the British Army. Friends who, because of the price they, and their mates, had to pay in N. Ireland, have a bone deep antipathy to the Irish. The dislike of the French, is mostly teasing (they have a thousand years of genial hostility between them). Not so the way they feel about the Irish Republicans.
I understand it (though as someone of Irish descent I can't quite share it even to the point of being more than more than merely quiet when they are being angry, and not playing, "rebel tunes" when they are in earshot).
Unjustified, and unjustifiable.
I am not, actually, trying to lay blame on 1 Para (I don't think, as one person said, they need to be stripped of all awards. It was a single act, by a singular group, and; while 1 Para must, sadly, carry the shame of those people's actions; and that days deeds, it doesn't diminish the rest of their record). No, I am more interested in the response Cameron made to a MP who was trying to make an equivalence between "terrorists" (a term which is often problematic, one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, and while I think the Provos, esp. in the '70s and '80s were well beyond the realm of fair insurgency (bombs in London, no. Soldiers are legitimate targets; it's what we are paid for. The various supporting elements [e.g in this case, The Orangemen] are probably fair game, but random people, far from the actual area being contested... I don't think so).
The MP wanted to know why, if the soldiers were facing prosecution why the IRA members (some of whom are known; one of whom is an MP in N. Ireland), aren't in the same spot.
He said he didn't want to draw equivalence between soldiers and terrorists, because soldiers act under the rule of law.
This is where this touches home. Bloody Sunday made The Troubles worse. It strengthened the IRA. It's why the "help the Irish" jars in US bars were always full. The cover up, the assertion that the dead were bomb-throwers, the lack of accountability, all of that gave people a grievance; one they couldn't get redress for in other ways.
We are doing the same thing in Iraq, and Afghanistan.
I have personal knowledge of it. A guy we had in the pen was arrested in the plain sight of his brother. US MPs took him away. When his brother when to the Coalition Provisional Authority to ask why, he was lied to. Spun a tale of all the groups which might have done it, but no... No Way was is the US.
Only it was. The brother saw it. I know about this because the guy was a Big Deal in South Baghdad, and it made the papers. I got to read about it, and I compared the brother's account to what I'd been told when I talked to the guy, and they were the same (inside the variability of eyewitness accounts, it was the same story).
If he'd just disappeared, instead of being taken home... how many people would have lost all faith in the honest intentions of the US?
How many similar stories are there?
Soldiers act under the rule of law. Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, Khandahar... places the Gov't says the law has run out.
Bloody Sunday, as much as anything else; in the 400 years of struggle to reclaim independence, made The Troubles as bad as they were (and it's an interesting thing that the families of the victims are looking to the Crown Prosecution to give them redress... they don't want jail for the soldiers, just trials, and [they hope, even expect, convictions] that will be enough for them to say justice was done).
What troubles could we avoid, were we to take a good hard look at what we are doing, and treat the people who have legitimate complaint as if they had legitimate complaint?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-06-16 02:10 pm (UTC)But it's not like this was the first march (which was illegal), and there was precedence for them turning violent. It's also not like it wasn't coming at the tail end (although not the end itself) of a year or two of bombings, riots, and general terrorism in that area, if I'm reading right.
These Soldiers were angry, and they should have controlled it better, but I can and do understand and get frustrated with the fact that people white-knight the IRA terrorists (because you can wrap them up in a pretty flag and sing rousing ditties about them) and don't seem to get that there was a pattern there, that the soldiers reacted (badly) to.
Personally, it's also a sterling example of why the army shouldn't be used as police, or to police a country. We're not good at it.
What the Soldiers did was wrong. Firing into an unarmed crowd was wrong. However, again, I'm not sure I agree with prosecutorial proceedings being opened at this point. Also, I'm not *really* sure this inquiry is going to do anything to help the past and soothe still angry feelings.
I'm not terribly astute when it comes to these things, and quite frankly, a great deal of it is beyond my grasp.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-16 02:49 pm (UTC)IRA terrorism was never particularly strong. "Violence" in this context mostly meant stones, not guns. Much of the violence was Protestant on Catholic (much as "race riots" in 1918 were white on black).
One of the great ironies of the UK military presence in Northern Ireland was that they had gone there to protect the rights of the Catholics against the Protestants. Many of the riots took place in this context, and the march took place in the context of internment without trial.
You'll find a decent summary of the situation here (http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/recent/troubles/the_troubles_article_02.shtml).
no subject
Date: 2010-06-16 03:01 pm (UTC)And I do know they abducted and killed off-duty British Soldiers in 1971, and routinely sniped British Soldiers. They bombed an armory, and a soldier was killed trying to shield civilians from the blast. After the Bloody Friday bombings, there is NO way to say they weren't terrorists, and really whether a terrorist organization goes for blood in a big way or small, they're still terrorists.
Like I said, this is a textbook example of why soldiers should NEVER be police, beyond policing our own.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-16 03:08 pm (UTC)Re whether they were terrorists or not, that rather depends on whether you agree that partition was legal, An awful lot of Irish people thought that it was not. It deliberately created a Catholic minority out of a country with a Catholic majority.
And in the meantime, and before Bloody Sunday, the UK governent imposed detention without trial. Something that Magna Carta specifically forbids, and it was for years, not months.
(I am Jewish by the way, with no Irish connections other than friends.)
no subject
Date: 2010-06-16 03:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-16 03:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-16 03:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-17 02:42 am (UTC)http://report.bloody-sunday-inquiry.org/volume01/chapter003/
And as far as the "violence" goes you should perhaps read this section -- http://report.bloody-sunday-inquiry.org/volume02/chapter015/ on the rioting at Barrier 14 or familiarise yourself with previous rioting including maybe the violence surrounding the Falls Road Curfew.
BTW the marches began long before internment did, and there had been much violence long before internment began. Sadly no nations ever learn from history and the repressive knee-jerk reaction to terrorist violence has only got more impressively OTT with the passage of time.
The devil is always in the details.
*In 1971, the year before Bloody Sunday, the Provos had already declared British soldiers to be targets, and the first soldier was shot dead in February -- they also killed 5 civilians that same month because they mistook their landrover for an army vehicle. In May they killed another soldier injuring 2 more along with 7 policemen and 18 civilians.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-16 02:57 pm (UTC)We did that in Sweden in 1931. It resulted in a labour demonstration approaching a machine gun nest, and a young captain freaking out. Also in quite a number of dead people, many of whom were not actually in the demonstration.
The similarities are striking - the Captain in Ådalen also thought he saw weapons and heard gunshots. The gunshots turned out to be from a cavalry patrol from his own forces; and no proof of weaponry could actually be found afterwards.
Since this point, there was a very strong prohibition in Sweden on the use of military forces for policiary tasks, only counteracted in 2006 as part of the anti-terrorism hysteria.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%85dalen_riots
no subject
Date: 2010-06-16 05:05 pm (UTC)That's exactly the point I was thinking of too. It's not just when we're in foreign countries either. The release of the report immediately made me think of Kent State and its aftermath, and it caused me to look up what happened to the Guardsmen who opened fire there.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-16 05:13 pm (UTC)I don't think Kent State is parallel. I've done a lot of research on it (being in the Guard, where dealing with that sort of thing is part of the job description; and getting a lot of riot/crowd control training, as a direct result of Kent State had a lot to do with it).
Quick summation.
1: The Guard should never have been there. The Governor's decision to send them was probably criminally negligent.
2: They were not adequately trained.
3:They should not have been given rifles. They never should have been allowed to load (certainly not one and all).
4: They were, actually, very restrained. They let the crowd push them back until they were cornered, and being pelted with stones; absent any body protection.
5: The shooting was one, ragged, volley. It seems to have been the result of an accidental discharge by one of the troops.
6: An officer (I want to say a retired general, but I forget) corralled them, got them back into order and removed them from the area.
It was horrid, tragic, and awful. It never should have been able to come to pass, but the circumstances were really different.
Which is all I want to say about it.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-16 08:57 pm (UTC)However, I can very much see what you don't want to go into it, and I respect that.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-17 03:10 pm (UTC)Without arguing about alleged rocks, how far can you throw a rock?
no subject
Date: 2010-06-17 03:36 pm (UTC)A lot less far than a bullet travels, though, depending on the rock, quite a ways. I have been hit, so that my scalp was torn open, from 100 feet. A baseball weighs 5 ounces, and can be thrown accurately about 200 feet.
I have seen grenade throwing competitions (and grenades weigh more than a lb.) where the winner managed to throw one almost 75 yards, and landed in a limited area (bounded left to right, 25 feet across).
I can throw one, to within a selected 10 meter circle at 35 yards.
One of the side effects of panic fire, it's not always aimed at the threat, so it's not that surprising to me that people well away from the troops were hit.
The critical event seems to have been the accidental discharge; soldiers know where shots come from, and someone shooting outbound, esp. when one is feeling endangered, almost always causes sympathetic fire.
Taking a quote out of context...
Date: 2010-06-16 04:44 pm (UTC)For that moment. If he's armed he can turn around again or survive to fight another day.
Which means that to me, it depends on the circumstances. In an armed conflict there's a place for shooting in the back. When it's military v civilians, no room.
Re: Taking a quote out of context...
Date: 2010-06-16 04:48 pm (UTC)However, I still disagree that shooting people in the back is acceptable military practice. And for what it's worth, none of the marchers were armed, that day.
Gah. Am I making sense?
ETA- I think I may have mentioned this before, and it's apropos of nothing, but your username reminds me of one of my favorite books.
And now the rest of this post
Date: 2010-06-16 04:49 pm (UTC)Especially as soldiers are few and have guns, while crowds are many and often have sticks and rocks. How do you *think* soldiers are going to respond? Really, responding in that circumstance is hard and takes plenty of training to deal with.
As a sidenote, until I'm faced with a crowd of uncertain intentions, I'm not going to offer opinion about how to tell if a crowd is armed or not. How many crowd members being armed does it take to call a crowd armed?
no subject
Date: 2010-06-16 05:19 pm (UTC)The March was illegal because all such marches were illegal. It was, like Selma and Birmingham, and Tiananmen, an act of civil disobedience. It wasn't like the Boston Massacre (in which I think the soldiers didn't really do anything culpable).
One of the more telling moments, from reports at the time, was a journalist who approached a group of soldiers, at a barricade, and asked to cross. They told him, "No, you go back and take what's coming to you." A couple of minutes later, as he; and a lot of other people were leaving, the person next to him was shot.
That implies (unless he is lying outright) a certain level of deliberation.
I don't doubt the soldiers were amped and upset. I don't argue that they probably ought not have been so used (though it is traditional in Britain, and it's not the first time it's led to mass shootings of peaceful protest. I forget the details, but sometime (the 1830s?) there were a number of cases of the Army breaking up demonstrations by firing into the crowds).
One of the thing the Saville report stresses is the presence of the IRA was minimal, and nothing they did that day, justified the shooting, because the soldiers who did fire, were firing into areas they knew to be free of threat, or they were firing with a careless disregard for the people in the area.
I have to say the way the British Army trains today makes another Bloody Sunday less likely, because the training they get on keeping the area behind the target clear is endemic to all training with rifles.
I'd really like to incorporate some of the drills they do.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-16 05:32 pm (UTC)I guess part of my dilemma is because I've been that angry Soldier with a firearm, and a screaming need to hurt someone, anyone, for the damages done to my friends and my comrades in arms and so, my sympathy is very much with the soldiers.
I'm sure I didn't really care if the people in front of me where actually the reason my friends were dead, or I'd been shot at or blown up...they were there, they were part of that culture, and they were fair game for loosing my rage and bloodlust on.
I was lucky and, I like to think a little strong, for never firing in anger, and never shooting at anyone I *knew* didn't have it coming, but I'm only lucky by the grace of God, and having a Chaplain who understood why I was screaming and beating my hands bloody on the walls in anger and frustration.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-17 05:06 am (UTC)I've been that angry soldier too (and tempted to more horrid things than shooting in anger, though I've been tempted to that too). If I am ever guilty of such a thing as the soldiers of 1 Para seem to be, or the people I know to have committed tortures, rapes and what I can only call murder, I want to be prosecuted.
Not because I want to go to prison, not because I want to be a felon, and shamed, disgraced and out of company with my fellows, but because the Army, and the Nation need to know that such things, while understandable, and forgivable, are not really excusable.
There is a case in Canada right now, which I am terribly conflicted about; a Captain who shot a desperately wounded person because the Afghani officer leading the patrol said they weren't stopping, and he wasn't going to arrange for any sort of medical help.
I don't know how I feel about it, because I wasn't there, but I do know I could never be on a jury for such a case, because I am far too sympathetic to the accused, and am likely to acquit, even if what he did was legally wrong, because I would be very likely to find it morally right.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-17 03:08 pm (UTC)There is a problem in discussions like this: people often assume, sometimes unconsciously, sometimes without self-control, that saying faction A did something bad is really saying side B is good.
I have given up trying to converse with my mother: "OK, look, Israel did this and this, which I disagree with." "I agree." And Israel has been doing this and this, which I think is a mistake." "Yes, I agree." "And Israel has this policy and this policy, which I think is disastrously counter-productive." "Yes, I agree." "So I really wish some things in Israel would change." "How can you side with the Palestinians* and hate Israel so much?!"
(*Note the absence of the word "Palestinians" anywhere in the dialog.)
no subject
Date: 2010-06-17 03:18 pm (UTC)Neither side was in the right when it comes to that period of history. The Troubles continue to be troubling and probably always will be.