Tony Blair's damp-eyed, husky-voiced eulogy for the Butcher of Bogside would have made a goat puke. Repulsive pieces of shït both.
Tony Blair's damp-eyed, husky-voiced eulogy for the Butcher of Bogside would have made a goat puke. Repulsive pieces of shït both.
McGuinness did a lot for good, for both sides of the population in the North, in recent times so for that alone I won’t rush to completely dismiss him as many others will. That is not to say he should in any way be portrayed as some kind of saint as he was very clearly not.
The troubles were an unfortunate time in Ireland’s history with no parties involved emerging without blame.
Bullshït. He was a torturer and a mass murderer who only came to the table because he knew the IRA was beaten and the Peace Process was the best deal they were going to get.
Plenty of people lived through the same period in the same place and never murdered anyone. Fück him. I hope his death was as painful as that of his victims.
They were riddled with informers to the highest levels of the Army Council. Equally, electronic surveillance had come on in leaps and bounds, so British security forces knew about most of their operations before they happened. They were reduced to attacking soft targets in NI and the British mainland involving either rogue units (like the Real IRA) or cells who weren't reporting directly up the chain of command. Problem with that was that it led to appalling publicity from catastrophic events like Omagh, which lost them funding from American dipshîts. Once 9/11 happened, of course, the game was up completely, since their funding simply stopped overnight and they were rendered pretty much impotent.
That, of course, is the thing: it would be basically impossible for the IRA to resume a sustained campaign of violence now even if it wanted to. It hasn't got the money, it no longer has the arms and it hasn't got the personnel.
It's the onset of middle-age, innit. Those practical arguments chaps would've roundly dismissed only a short time before suddenly begin to ring true and make sense. I've seen it all over the world.
There always seems to come a point when a chap wants to just cash out, grab his girl and go off and live a quiet life. Very few want to keep running and fighting forever. The ones that *do* want to carry on quickly end up dead :-\
Incorrect. They did want to win militarily. They failed utterly in that objective. Effective peace terms along the lines of the Good Friday Agreement were on the table in 1974, but the IRA and Protestant paramilitaries kiboshed them. The IRA then went on to pursue war for nearly a quarter of a century more because they didn't want civil rights, equality and peace, they wanted the Brits out and they believed they could achieve that by violence. They couldn't. Ergo, they lost.
Of course it's always necessary to make deals with the devil for peace. There's no such thing as unconditional surrender in conflicts like Northern Ireland, since the resentment such a conclusion would engender would only breed more conflict. So I don't condemn our politicians for ending the conflict by the means they did (although allowing murderers out of jail and general amnesties stick in the craw). However, I refuse to tolerate these airbrushed fond farewells of a man who has that much blood on his hands.
British troops left NI 10 years ago so I would say the Brits are out. The leading figures of the enemy were then invited to the table and afforded positions of power in the democratic apparatus which hardly equates to military defeat. Be rather like offering Heydrich a seat in the The Cabinet.
Businesslike formalities are one thing, but we've got arseholes like Cambell and Blair calling him 'a great guy' and 'very tender'. Corbyn said he was 'a great family man'.
Number 10's statement got it about right. Never calls him a total shïtbag, but by not saying he's not makes it clear he probably was.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/p...tin-mcguinness
You're conflating 'Brits Out' with 'Troops Out'. The troops were only there because of IRA violence. Once that stopped, there was no need for them. They left because they'd won, not because they IRA had beaten them.
They were offered seats at the table in a power-sharing government as a devolved part of the United Kingdom in return for abandoning the armed struggle, handing over their weapons and operating purely by democratic means. That was a million miles from their stated war aims of fighting the British until they gave up and left Northern Ireland to unite with the Republic and, as I said, was basically the same deal that had been on the table in 1974.
Let me ask you something: in a war, which side usually has to hand over their arms? Is it the winners?
I wonder what sort of funeral it will be? He was always IRA first imo. He was proud of the IRA. They can't go with any IRA type funeral after him being the Deputy First Minister, can they?