I consider reading Moore's stolid prose on Thatcher a form of self flagellation, like watching a German documentary on sea turtles sex life. Are you trying to find out why you didn't like her? I think your instincts were right back then: she looks good only by comparison with the dismal characters that followed her as PM.
I appreciate him too as one of the best political columnists out there, but I haven't read a one thousand page book since I finished 'War and Peace'. And he's no Tolstoi.
While we are at it, here's Maggie legacy in less than five hundred words:
Was privatisation so wonderful? The privatisation of electricity, and the resulting dissipation of our nuclear skills, is one of the reasons we will soon be having power cuts. The hurried and mistaken closure of the coal mines is another. Lady Thatcher’s early embrace of Green dogma (repudiated too late) is another.
At least the old nationalised industries actually dug coal, forged steel and built ships. And at least the old industries provided proper jobs for men, and allowed them to support their families. Young mothers didn’t need to go out to work.
As for council house sales, that policy was in the end a huge tax-funded subsidy to the private housing industry, a vast release of money into the housing market that pushed prices up permanently and – once again – broke up settled communities.
She was a passive, defeatist liberal when it came to education, morality and the family. In 11 years she – who owed everything to a grammar education – didn’t reopen a single one of the grammar schools she had allowed to be closed as Ted Heath’s Education Secretary.
She did nothing significant to reverse or slow the advance of the permissive society – especially the State attack on marriage through absurdly easy divorce, and the deliberate subsidies to fatherless households.
She loaded paperwork on to the police, and brought the curse of ambulance-chasing lawyers (and so ‘health and safety’) to this country. She introduced the catastrophic GCSE exam into schools.
In foreign policy, she made a lot of noise, but did little good. It was her diplomacy, and her determination to slash the Royal Navy, that made the Argentinians think they could grab the Falklands.
She realised, a few months before she was deposed, how great the European danger was. That, I think, was why she was overthrown by the ‘Conservative’ Party. But for most of her time in office she allowed the EU to seize more and more power over this country and its laws. Had she been as great as she is held to be, we would not be in the terrible mess we are now in, deindustrialised, drugged en masse by dope and antidepressants, demoralised, de-Christianised, bankrupted by deregulated spivs, our criminal justice system an even bigger joke than our State schools...
I will always like her for her deep, proud Englishness, her fighting spirit and her refusal to follow the bleating flock. I despise the snobs and woman-haters who sneered at her and sometimes made me ashamed of my class and my sex. I am proud to be able to say that I actually met her and spoke to her.
Let's remember Maggie for what she really was... a tragic failure By PETER HITCHENS
Musk reached out to us before he polled his followers about Twitter's commitment to free speech. He wanted to confirm that we had, in fact, been suspended. He even mused on that call that he might need to buy Twitter.
Paul Marks: Mr Begin was a hard man to like - for example when he was being interrogated by the NKVD they complained about him, rather than begging for mercy (as they were used to) he mocked them with what they described as incredibly insulting and abusive language. Essentially trying to provoke them into killing him. Of course that would have ended his suffering - so they did not. After his experiences with both the Nazis and the Soviets, and with fellow Jews (for example the Labour Party used machine guns and artillery on "right wing" Jews who trying to leave a ship) he had a rather grim view of human beings and the world.
Old post but I’m dipping my toe into the cesspool that is the internet (esp. social media) less and less these days, so I’ve only just noticed it.
Begin ‘a hard man to like’—so I should hope, given that after arriving in Palestine in 1942, rather than continue the fight against the Nazis, he elected to fight the British instead, joining the IZL, an extremist terrorist organisation that had broken away from the Haganah paramilitaries in 1931. As early as February 1944, before the Allies had even began their campaign to liberate Europe, the IZL resumed its campaign of violence against the British—the only silver lining to that being the Haganah’s cooperation with the British in suppressing the IZL and fellow terrorists, the Stern Gang, after the latter’s murder of Lord Moyne (a man who had served with distinction in both Boer and First World Wars) in November 1944 (see here for an account of the ‘Hunting Season’ from the Jewish Virtual Library).
Also, with Israel under Begin’s premiership selling arms to Argentina during Falklands conflict (see Daily Telegraph and Haaretz articles), disliking Begin only a sensible f***ing idea (channelling opening scene of Pulp Fiction).
wrt Begin’s criticism of the Western allies (that’ll be those lads whose British component he had been attacking as an IZL terrorist) for their not bombing ‘the railways leading to Auschwitz’: recommended is William D. Rubinstein’s The Myth of Rescue: Why the democracies could not have saved more Jews from the Nazis (Routledge, 1997), specifically its chapter 4 ‘The Myth of Bombing Auschwitz’. 1. For most of war, camps, including Auschwitz, were not in range of W. Allies. 2. Which railway line would you bomb? 3. Bombing railway lines to one camp out of ‘about 42,500 camps and ghettoes’ would accomplish what? The SS are just going to let the prisoners go? Or more likely: a. Leave the Jews in the cattle-trucks until railway repaired; b. Have them repair the railway, shoot any slackers; c. Just shoot them all on spot; d. Divert them to other camps; e. Any combination of above. 3. The W. Allies did not have unlimited resources—there were not squadrons of aircraft with their pilots sitting idle. We were throwing everything we had at Jerry with the sole goal of bring the war and its attendant slaughter to an end; every plane diverted from that goal delays its attainment; every plane and pilot lost on a mission not furthering that goal delays it even more. 4. Blaming the W. Allies is only what one would expect from a man who, writing on 8 May 1940, declared, ‘This war is not ours. In what way is it ours? Just because the other side hates Jews?’ before going on to take up arms against those W. Allies. Notoriously, the IZL’s sister terrorist organisation, the Stern Gang (Lehi), even proposed an alliance with Hitler to fight Britain. (Ref. Sofer, Sasson. Zionism and the Foundations of Israeli Diplomacy. Translated by Dorothea Shefet-Vanson, Cambridge University Press, 1998. 239, 253–254.)
If there is a Heaven and Hell, we can be sure that Begin is suffering Hell’s endless torments in its lowest circles.
Churchill said the grass grows on the battlefield but never on the scaffold. Even so I wish we had hanged him and Shamir - and George Washington too, come to that. But I am not sure England's enemy's deserve damnation. He was fighting for his people as he thought right, just as the Germans and most other people were - only the British and French were stupid enough t declare war on Germany voluntarily and without any national interest clearly at stake.
[#1] Begin’s people weren’t Poles or Russians? This is why some distrust Jews (and, historically, Roman Catholics—with justice, e.g. the Batallón de San Patricio (St. Patrick’s Battalion), Irish deserters from the US army who placed loyalty to their denomination ahead of loyalty to their adopted homeland to fight for Mexico against their former comrades—still celebrated in Mexico today and at least as recently as 1997 in the Republic of Ireland). Give me such as Roy Welensky any day: last prime minister of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, he described himself as ‘half-Jewish, half-Afrikaner, 100% British’.
And Begin deemed the British a greater enemy to the Jews than Adolf? The guys who opened the gates of Belsen were a greater enemy than the guys who built the place?
My contempt for Begin stems not from him fighting us—if he had joined the Haganah/Palmach, my attitude would be, ‘He chose a side, they won (avoided losing anyway), but fighting’s long over so we can be friends?’ But he joined the terrorist s**ts that were the IZL. In a war where we were fighting actual persecutors of his people (Jewish, Polish, & Russian), he chose to war against us, effectively aiding the persecutors of his people, which makes him imbecilic or evil or both. Also, a rank hypocrite, expecting us to fight for his cause when he was fighting against ours; and how does chummying up to a nun-murdering military junta (doing his bit to deny the wishes of the Falklanders and consign them to oppression by that junta) further the cause of either the Jewish people or the Israeli state? Begin’s life is but grist to the anti-Semitic mill.
[#2] Britain went to war in 1939 in accordance with a foreign policy that went back to at least Henry VIII, and described by Winston in a 1936 speech (reproduced in his The Gathering Storm, first volume of his six-volume The Second World War (1949), pp.186–190): ‘For four hundred years the foreign policy of England has been to oppose the strongest, most aggressive, most dominating power on the Continent, and particularly to prevent the Low Countries falling into the hands of such a Power. … Observe that the policy of England takes no account of which nation it is that seeks the overlordship of Europe. The question is not whether it is Spain, or the French Monarchy, or the French Empire, or the German Empire, or the Hitler régime. It has nothing to do with rulers or nations; it is concerned solely with whoever is the strongest or the potentially dominating tyrant. Therefore, we should not be afraid of being accused of being pro-French or anti-German. If the circumstances were reversed, we could equally be pro-German and anti-French.’
There was our national interest. We didn’t go to war for Poland (whose expansionism 1918–21 we had opposed, and who were right sods when they were fighting for Buonaparte, murdering wounded and surrendering British soldiers in the Peninsula); the announcement of the Polish Guarantee was just a line in the sand.
We ain’t the Bad Guys here. We should have stamped on Onkel Adi’s bollocks the first time he openly breached the Versailles treaty in 1935 when it would have been easy; we then watched him break treaty after promise before finally having enough and saying ‘Thus far and no further’ with the Polish Guarantee. His choice to ignore it and invade Poland. Even then we did not declare war but issued an ultimatum demanding the cessation of hostilities. His choice to ignore that as well.
If anyone is stupid, it’s those who got their country turned into rubble in less than six years over inane bs like the ‘Danzig Question’ (answered by becoming Polish Gdańsk), the Polish Corridor (not an issue now with East Prussia no longer existing), or being restricted to an army of 100,000 (Heer currently 60,000 strong without any treaty or external pressure)—and as for reparations, a fully referenced video here shows how baseless their complaints here were.
o/t, wrt Winston’s line, which he wrote in reference to our post-rebellion executions in Ireland: an est. 1,200 IRA rebelled, causing 450 deaths, mostly civilian, and injuring over 2,600; we arrested 3,509 people, sentencing 90 to death but executing only 16 identified as rebel leaders. Even Constance Markievicz, a sociopath who ‘gloated over her killing of unarmed policemen … She even kissed her Mauser gun and bandolier when she surrendered’, known to British intelligence as an Irish republican activist since at least 1910, was sentenced to death but with mercy recommended (the verdict read: ‘Guilty. Death by being shot. The Court recommend the prisoner to mercy solely and only on account of her sex.’(*)—a more blatant example of the ‘Pussy Pass’ will be hard to find but feminists will still bleat how oppwethed women were by the nasty men); and she was released but 13 months later. (* Barton, Brian. From Behind a Closed Door: Secret Court Martial Records of the 1916 Easter Rising. Blackstaff Press, 2002. 77,79,81.)
Could we be any more merciful—is that even possible?(*) Has any other nation exhibited such clemency after a rebellion, esp. one in the midst of a major war? Yet still Irish republicans hate us, and ally with and support anyone opposing us—collaborating with Hitler in WW2 and cheering on Galtieri and Saddam (wrt latter, was PIRA’s mortar attack on Downing Street on 7 February ’91 an attempt to open up a ‘second front’ or just hitting us whilst we were distracted, ‘England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity’ as they have long said). (* Too much mercy by half: arrests started on 1 May and of the 79 women arrested, all but twelve had been released by 8 May ‘without prejudice, cautioning them as to good behaviour’; Markievicz said of them that they ‘must have played a very deep game, for all those who mattered were released a day or two after they were arrested’. (Barton, 57.))
Perhaps executing such a small number provided a focal point: 16 people they can list, read of their lives, and write mawkish songs about; whereas executing 116 would have made that more difficult—as Uncle Joe said ‘One death is a tragedy, one million a statistic’.
But perhaps it is only like black activists who say nothing about the ongoing slaughter of blacks by other blacks but if a white kills a single black in circumstances however justified, they’ll burn their host nation to the ground.
That there is comparatively little fuss made over the post-independence South’s execution of 81 IRA men after courts martial, along with extrajudicial executions and massacres like Ballyseedy where the Irish National Army tied IRA prisoners to a mine and detonated it—is that because Irish are ‘allowed’ to slaughter Irish? Or that some people need a firm boot on their necks? Similarly with Indian nationalists who have no word to say about the near-genocidal Muslim conquest of India but endlessly whine about our rule—Indians (or Arabs) allowed to slaughter Indians, or them needing to be ruled with a firm hand?
But it is galling to be hated despite or because of our mercy while others are loved despite or because of their cruelty.
Would bombing railways leading to Auschwitz be terrorism?
ReplyDeleteDoing penance?
ReplyDeleteSorry. I don't understand you.
DeleteI consider reading Moore's stolid prose on Thatcher a form of self flagellation, like watching a German documentary on sea turtles sex life. Are you trying to find out why you didn't like her? I think your instincts were right back then: she looks good only by comparison with the dismal characters that followed her as PM.
DeleteHe writes very good prose - who wrote that?
DeleteI didn't say that his writing is bad, just insipid, tedious and bland.
DeleteIf you describe someone as stolid, you mean that they do not show much emotion or are not very exciting or interesting.
Deletehttps://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/stolid
He is very interesting indeed and writes very well. I turn to him first.
DeleteI appreciate him too as one of the best political columnists out there, but I haven't read a one thousand page book since I finished 'War and Peace'. And he's no Tolstoi.
DeleteWhile we are at it, here's Maggie legacy in less than five hundred words:
DeleteWas privatisation so wonderful? The privatisation of electricity, and the resulting dissipation of our nuclear skills, is one of the reasons we will soon be having power cuts. The hurried and mistaken closure of the coal mines is another. Lady Thatcher’s early embrace of Green dogma (repudiated too late) is another.
At least the old nationalised industries actually dug coal, forged steel and built ships. And at least the old industries provided proper jobs for men, and allowed them to support their families. Young mothers didn’t need to go out to work.
As for council house sales, that policy was in the end a huge tax-funded subsidy to the private housing industry, a vast release of money into the housing market that pushed prices up permanently and – once again – broke up settled communities.
She was a passive, defeatist liberal when it came to education, morality and the family. In 11 years she – who owed everything to a grammar education – didn’t reopen a single one of the grammar schools she had allowed to be closed as Ted Heath’s Education Secretary.
She did nothing significant to reverse or slow the advance of the permissive society – especially the State attack on marriage through absurdly easy divorce, and the deliberate subsidies to fatherless households.
She loaded paperwork on to the police, and brought the curse of ambulance-chasing lawyers (and so ‘health and safety’) to this country. She introduced the catastrophic GCSE exam into schools.
In foreign policy, she made a lot of noise, but did little good. It was her diplomacy, and her determination to slash the Royal Navy, that made the Argentinians think they could grab the Falklands.
She realised, a few months before she was deposed, how great the European danger was. That, I think, was why she was overthrown by the ‘Conservative’ Party. But for most of her time in office she allowed the EU to seize more and more power over this country and its laws. Had she been as great as she is held to be, we would not be in the terrible mess we are now in, deindustrialised, drugged en masse by dope and antidepressants, demoralised, de-Christianised, bankrupted by deregulated spivs, our criminal justice system an even bigger joke than our State schools...
I will always like her for her deep, proud Englishness, her fighting spirit and her refusal to follow the bleating flock. I despise the snobs and woman-haters who sneered at her and sometimes made me ashamed of my class and my sex. I am proud to be able to say that I actually met her and spoke to her.
Let's remember Maggie for what she really was... a tragic failure
By PETER HITCHENS
There is hope:
ReplyDeleteAlma Deutscher - plea for Harmony at the European Culture Prize ceremony in Vienna
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPGkN-Ravig
Merry Anti-Russia Video
ReplyDeletehttps://rumble.com/v22ehx2-merry-anti-russia-video.html
Study Finds 100% Of Men Would Eat Any Fruit Given To Them By A Naked Woman
ReplyDeletehttps://babylonbee.com/news/study-finds-100-of-men-would-eat-any-fruit-given-to-them-by-a-naked-woman
Ha ha ha. I saw that. Unlike the Onion, Babylon Bee is very funny. They got banned from Twitter for calling U.S. Admiral Levine Man Of The Year.
ReplyDeleteTheir bannig was the reason Musk bought Twitter.
DeleteThey're back on:
https://twitter.com/TheBabylonBee
I knew they were back but not that they were the straw that broke his back. Was it really? There were so many, many scandalous expulsions.
DeleteSeth Dillon (@SethDillon)
DeleteApril 5, 2022
Musk reached out to us before he polled his followers about Twitter's commitment to free speech. He wanted to confirm that we had, in fact, been suspended. He even mused on that call that he might need to buy Twitter.
https://twitter.com/SethDillon/status/1511325246967660547?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
Musk is a vocal fan of The Babylon Bee and a former guest on the outlet’s podcast.
DeleteAccording to Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon, Musk consulted with the company’s leadership before launching his bid to acquire Twitter.
“Musk reached out to us before he polled his followers about Twitter’s commitment to free speech,” Dillon reported.
“He wanted to confirm that we had, in fact, been suspended."
“He even mused on that call that he might need to buy Twitter."
https://slaynews.com/
Interesting. Thanks.
DeletePaul Marks: Mr Begin was a hard man to like - for example when he was being interrogated by the NKVD they complained about him, rather than begging for mercy (as they were used to) he mocked them with what they described as incredibly insulting and abusive language. Essentially trying to provoke them into killing him. Of course that would have ended his suffering - so they did not. After his experiences with both the Nazis and the Soviets, and with fellow Jews (for example the Labour Party used machine guns and artillery on "right wing" Jews who trying to leave a ship) he had a rather grim view of human beings and the world.
ReplyDeleteOld post but I’m dipping my toe into the cesspool that is the internet (esp. social media) less and less these days, so I’ve only just noticed it.
DeleteBegin ‘a hard man to like’—so I should hope, given that after arriving in Palestine in 1942, rather than continue the fight against the Nazis, he elected to fight the British instead, joining the IZL, an extremist terrorist organisation that had broken away from the Haganah paramilitaries in 1931. As early as February 1944, before the Allies had even began their campaign to liberate Europe, the IZL resumed its campaign of violence against the British—the only silver lining to that being the Haganah’s cooperation with the British in suppressing the IZL and fellow terrorists, the Stern Gang, after the latter’s murder of Lord Moyne (a man who had served with distinction in both Boer and First World Wars) in November 1944 (see here for an account of the ‘Hunting Season’ from the Jewish Virtual Library).
Also, with Israel under Begin’s premiership selling arms to Argentina during Falklands conflict (see Daily Telegraph and Haaretz articles), disliking Begin only a sensible f***ing idea (channelling opening scene of Pulp Fiction).
wrt Begin’s criticism of the Western allies (that’ll be those lads whose British component he had been attacking as an IZL terrorist) for their not bombing ‘the railways leading to Auschwitz’: recommended is William D. Rubinstein’s The Myth of Rescue: Why the democracies could not have saved more Jews from the Nazis (Routledge, 1997), specifically its chapter 4 ‘The Myth of Bombing Auschwitz’.
1. For most of war, camps, including Auschwitz, were not in range of W. Allies.
2. Which railway line would you bomb?
3. Bombing railway lines to one camp out of ‘about 42,500 camps and ghettoes’ would accomplish what? The SS are just going to let the prisoners go? Or more likely:
a. Leave the Jews in the cattle-trucks until railway repaired;
b. Have them repair the railway, shoot any slackers;
c. Just shoot them all on spot;
d. Divert them to other camps;
e. Any combination of above.
3. The W. Allies did not have unlimited resources—there were not squadrons of aircraft with their pilots sitting idle. We were throwing everything we had at Jerry with the sole goal of bring the war and its attendant slaughter to an end; every plane diverted from that goal delays its attainment; every plane and pilot lost on a mission not furthering that goal delays it even more.
4. Blaming the W. Allies is only what one would expect from a man who, writing on 8 May 1940, declared, ‘This war is not ours. In what way is it ours? Just because the other side hates Jews?’ before going on to take up arms against those W. Allies. Notoriously, the IZL’s sister terrorist organisation, the Stern Gang (Lehi), even proposed an alliance with Hitler to fight Britain. (Ref. Sofer, Sasson. Zionism and the Foundations of Israeli Diplomacy. Translated by Dorothea Shefet-Vanson, Cambridge University Press, 1998. 239, 253–254.)
If there is a Heaven and Hell, we can be sure that Begin is suffering Hell’s endless torments in its lowest circles.
Churchill said the grass grows on the battlefield but never on the scaffold. Even so I wish we had hanged him and Shamir - and George Washington too, come to that. But I am not sure England's enemy's deserve damnation. He was fighting for his people as he thought right, just as the Germans and most other people were - only the British and French were stupid enough t declare war on Germany voluntarily and without any national interest clearly at stake.
Delete[#1] Begin’s people weren’t Poles or Russians? This is why some distrust Jews (and, historically, Roman Catholics—with justice, e.g. the Batallón de San Patricio (St. Patrick’s Battalion), Irish deserters from the US army who placed loyalty to their denomination ahead of loyalty to their adopted homeland to fight for Mexico against their former comrades—still celebrated in Mexico today and at least as recently as 1997 in the Republic of Ireland). Give me such as Roy Welensky any day: last prime minister of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, he described himself as ‘half-Jewish, half-Afrikaner, 100% British’.
DeleteAnd Begin deemed the British a greater enemy to the Jews than Adolf? The guys who opened the gates of Belsen were a greater enemy than the guys who built the place?
My contempt for Begin stems not from him fighting us—if he had joined the Haganah/Palmach, my attitude would be, ‘He chose a side, they won (avoided losing anyway), but fighting’s long over so we can be friends?’ But he joined the terrorist s**ts that were the IZL. In a war where we were fighting actual persecutors of his people (Jewish, Polish, & Russian), he chose to war against us, effectively aiding the persecutors of his people, which makes him imbecilic or evil or both. Also, a rank hypocrite, expecting us to fight for his cause when he was fighting against ours; and how does chummying up to a nun-murdering military junta (doing his bit to deny the wishes of the Falklanders and consign them to oppression by that junta) further the cause of either the Jewish people or the Israeli state? Begin’s life is but grist to the anti-Semitic mill.
[#2] Britain went to war in 1939 in accordance with a foreign policy that went back to at least Henry VIII, and described by Winston in a 1936 speech (reproduced in his The Gathering Storm, first volume of his six-volume The Second World War (1949), pp.186–190):
Delete‘For four hundred years the foreign policy of England has been to oppose the strongest, most aggressive, most dominating power on the Continent, and particularly to prevent the Low Countries falling into the hands of such a Power. … Observe that the policy of England takes no account of which nation it is that seeks the overlordship of Europe. The question is not whether it is Spain, or the French Monarchy, or the French Empire, or the German Empire, or the Hitler régime. It has nothing to do with rulers or nations; it is concerned solely with whoever is the strongest or the potentially dominating tyrant. Therefore, we should not be afraid of being accused of being pro-French or anti-German. If the circumstances were reversed, we could equally be pro-German and anti-French.’
There was our national interest. We didn’t go to war for Poland (whose expansionism 1918–21 we had opposed, and who were right sods when they were fighting for Buonaparte, murdering wounded and surrendering British soldiers in the Peninsula); the announcement of the Polish Guarantee was just a line in the sand.
We ain’t the Bad Guys here. We should have stamped on Onkel Adi’s bollocks the first time he openly breached the Versailles treaty in 1935 when it would have been easy; we then watched him break treaty after promise before finally having enough and saying ‘Thus far and no further’ with the Polish Guarantee. His choice to ignore it and invade Poland. Even then we did not declare war but issued an ultimatum demanding the cessation of hostilities. His choice to ignore that as well.
If anyone is stupid, it’s those who got their country turned into rubble in less than six years over inane bs like the ‘Danzig Question’ (answered by becoming Polish Gdańsk), the Polish Corridor (not an issue now with East Prussia no longer existing), or being restricted to an army of 100,000 (Heer currently 60,000 strong without any treaty or external pressure)—and as for reparations, a fully referenced video here shows how baseless their complaints here were.
o/t, wrt Winston’s line, which he wrote in reference to our post-rebellion executions in Ireland: an est. 1,200 IRA rebelled, causing 450 deaths, mostly civilian, and injuring over 2,600; we arrested 3,509 people, sentencing 90 to death but executing only 16 identified as rebel leaders. Even Constance Markievicz, a sociopath who ‘gloated over her killing of unarmed policemen … She even kissed her Mauser gun and bandolier when she surrendered’, known to British intelligence as an Irish republican activist since at least 1910, was sentenced to death but with mercy recommended (the verdict read: ‘Guilty. Death by being shot. The Court recommend the prisoner to mercy solely and only on account of her sex.’(*)—a more blatant example of the ‘Pussy Pass’ will be hard to find but feminists will still bleat how oppwethed women were by the nasty men); and she was released but 13 months later.
Delete(* Barton, Brian. From Behind a Closed Door: Secret Court Martial Records of the 1916 Easter Rising. Blackstaff Press, 2002. 77,79,81.)
Could we be any more merciful—is that even possible?(*) Has any other nation exhibited such clemency after a rebellion, esp. one in the midst of a major war? Yet still Irish republicans hate us, and ally with and support anyone opposing us—collaborating with Hitler in WW2 and cheering on Galtieri and Saddam (wrt latter, was PIRA’s mortar attack on Downing Street on 7 February ’91 an attempt to open up a ‘second front’ or just hitting us whilst we were distracted, ‘England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity’ as they have long said).
(* Too much mercy by half: arrests started on 1 May and of the 79 women arrested, all but twelve had been released by 8 May ‘without prejudice, cautioning them as to good behaviour’; Markievicz said of them that they ‘must have played a very deep game, for all those who mattered were released a day or two after they were arrested’. (Barton, 57.))
Perhaps executing such a small number provided a focal point: 16 people they can list, read of their lives, and write mawkish songs about; whereas executing 116 would have made that more difficult—as Uncle Joe said ‘One death is a tragedy, one million a statistic’.
But perhaps it is only like black activists who say nothing about the ongoing slaughter of blacks by other blacks but if a white kills a single black in circumstances however justified, they’ll burn their host nation to the ground.
That there is comparatively little fuss made over the post-independence South’s execution of 81 IRA men after courts martial, along with extrajudicial executions and massacres like Ballyseedy where the Irish National Army tied IRA prisoners to a mine and detonated it—is that because Irish are ‘allowed’ to slaughter Irish? Or that some people need a firm boot on their necks? Similarly with Indian nationalists who have no word to say about the near-genocidal Muslim conquest of India but endlessly whine about our rule—Indians (or Arabs) allowed to slaughter Indians, or them needing to be ruled with a firm hand?
But it is galling to be hated despite or because of our mercy while others are loved despite or because of their cruelty.