I don’t claim to understand much of anything about Northern Ireland, but this depressing story is worth a read:
The president of Sinn Fein, Gerry Adams, was arrested and questioned Wednesday night about the 1972 abduction and murder of a widowed mother of 10, whose body was found on a beach in the Irish Republic in 2003, according to the Sinn Fein website and the police in Northern Ireland.
[….]In the tapes, two former members of the I.R.A., now dead, detailed their involvement in bombings as well as executions and kidnappings, including that of Mrs. McConville. The two, Brendan Hughes and Dolours Price, the former wife of the actor Stephen Rea, also accused Mr. Adams of authorizing the abduction, a claim Mr. Adams has repeatedly and strongly denied.
And Peter King, Mr. Anti-terrorism!
There’s little doubt, in other words, that King knowingly provided resources to the IRA. And through his close association with Sinn Fein’s Gerry Adams, the leader of the IRA’s political wing, he may have even provided coordinated advocacy: Congressman-elect King lobbied for Adams to be a guest at Bill Clinton’s inauguration.
CONGRATULATIONS!
I expect Representative King will probably be taking a nice long vacation, leaving at about 4pm or so today. No phone or internet access, sorry.
The Very Reverend Crimson Fire of Compassion
And let’s not overlook the fact that the U.S. security apparatus violated academic integrity by forcing the researchers who were collecting an oral history of the IRA to open their files to British intelligence, after they had vowed to their subject that the data would not be made public until after the subjects’ deaths.
srv
Depressing because you like Peter King or you liked Gerry Adams, who everybody knew was a Belfast commander?
People get killed in civil wars.
BGinCHI
What’s the difference between a terrorist and a patriot?
DougJ
@srv:
Depressing that a mother of ten was murdered.
Schlemizel
@BGinCHI:
My guys are patriots, your’s are filthy terrorists
Mnemosyne
FWIW, apparently Adams turned himself in for questioning once the story broke rather than waiting to be arrested.
drkrick
@The Very Reverend Crimson Fire of Compassion:
“Violated academic integrity” is one way of looking at it. Another is to consider that the academics should have looked a little deeper into the idea that they were able to grant immunity from prosecution in both the US and the UK and make it stick before they started gathering a treasure trove of criminal evidence. If (and it’s a big if – I notice this investigation isn’t digging into old Unionist crimes) Gerry Adams was really involved in ordering the execution of Mrs. McConnville (who, as it turns out, wasn’t really an informer. Oops), it’s a good thing it’s catching up with him.
drkrick
@Mnemosyne: As I read the story yesterday, they arrested him after he turned himself in.
Trollhattan
Your future dream is a sharpie’s scheme
rustynailer
Weird connection to Stephen Rea, too, especially considering the back story to The Crying Game.
kindness
Of course Adams knew about the ugly stuff. He was head of the party. But he did try to maintain plausible deniability by not knowing the details. The British should let it go at this point though. Now King….he didn’t just give the IRA money. He funneled them guns.
If there is a hell King will surely end up there. Me, I don’t believe in hell. I believe in karma.
Villago Delenda Est
Exqueeze me, but Gerry Adams cannot be a terrorist. He is not swarthy, he is not Muslim. Just as the guys who blew up the Federal Building in OKC could not POSSIBLY be terrorists.
shortstop
Terrorists aren’t white, Celtic and Christian. Where do you guys get this stuff?
300baud
Huh. I look forward to King being denounced by the right for palling around with terrorists.
japa21
@kindness: Are you saying that there might have been a real “Fast and Furious” operation involving King. Someone call Issa.
Villago Delenda Est
@BGinCHI: If this were 1773, and Faux Noise existed, the Boston Tea Party would be reported by Faux as an act of terrorism against the Crown.
shortstop
I simply could not believe it when King started floating obvious trial balloons about running for president a few months back. 1) his record of getting cash and guns to terrorists is double-plus unsecret, b) He’s Peter King. Do these people have no self-awareness at all?
BGinCHI
@japa21: Under King it was called “Lumbering & Apoplectic.”
Yurpean
@kindness: How about the victims parents, who last saw their mother when a gang of thugs forcibly removed her from their home, should they ‘let it go’?
Villago Delenda Est
@shortstop:
Yes, they have no self-awareness.
SATSQ.
shortstop
@BGinCHI: Ha!
BGinCHI
@Villago Delenda Est: Don’t forget pro-slavery and pro-Confederacy.
shortstop
I am in no way blaming the victim, but TEN CHILDREN at age 37! I feel tired just typing that.
BGinCHI
@shortstop: Get that for me, will you Deirdre?
japa21
@BGinCHI: Well done.
Villago Delenda Est
@shortstop: That’s a lot of labor, fer sure.
Goblue72
@Yurpean: Occupations suck. And the Brits and their Unionist douches should have left Ireland at the beginning of the last century. This is why I don’t shed a tear. I also think the PLO are too soft.
Tiocfadh ar la.
Schlemizel
@BGinCHI:
“THAT’S why I’m a Protestant!”
Yurpean
For more information on Jean McConville, this London Review of Books article is good:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n24/susan-mckay/diary
An interview with one of Jean McConville’s children from this morning:
https://audioboo.fm/boos/2121179-the-ira-put-this-fear-in-to-us-jean-mcconville-s-son-michael-on-radio-4-today-programme-this-morning
BGinCHI
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/steve-hickey-anal-sex-letter-south-dakota
No anal for Hickey, they cried.
What a country….
ETA: His letter is titled “A One Way Alley for the Garbage Truck”
Mart
Esquire’s Charlie Pierce has been following this for awhile. This is a complicated story with the athorities on both sides of the Atlantic over stepping legal boundaries as usual. He has a post up today – “Vox Writes About The Northern Irish Conflict And Fails”.
CONGRATULATIONS!
@drkrick: We have pretty good shield laws in the US, but they surely do not grant criminal immunity, and they only apply to reporters. Academics don’t have that ability. If the law shows up and says “give us all your records”, well, you will give them all your records unless you can somehow assert a 5th Amendment right over them. Which then could put you in a pretty awkward position.
BGinCHI
@Schlemizel: My long time ex-girlfriend married a man named John Thomas.
Just saying.
Anoniminous
@shortstop:
One assumes she was a devotee of Our Lady of Perpetual Pregnancy.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@shortstop:
LOL! That’s my mom’s side of the family. I’ve got…65? 67?…first cousins. I don’t have the math skills to figure out how many first cousins my mom has.
Villago Delenda Est
@BGinCHI: They’d be denouncing the radical socialist property rights ignoring Lincoln fellow, too.
Calouste
@Villago Delenda Est:
He’s Irish, that’s good enough for the powers that be in the UK.
Tidbit: during the 80s and part of the 90s Adams was voiced over whenever he was on TV in the UK. He was still on screen, his words were still being spoken, just not in his own voice because apparently that was too much. If Maggie thought that was a good idea, she was going senile a lot earlier than we’ve been told.
Tommy
I just got back the DNA test I gave my father for X-mas. I knew this, but in the results it confirmed it. We’re Scottish. I was always told that the movie Brave Heart was not true :). But we didn’t like others to tell us what to do, and we fought. Often with a sword in our hands. Not a fan of the British. Best I can tell, my family members lined up against them and said “lets get it on.” DNA shows I might be right here ….
Then in like 1862 my family came to the United States. The best thing ever. My family wrote a lot of letters. I have them. They are amazing to read. They should make Republicans feel like pussies.
1890. 1900. 1910. 1920. Well I could go all the way too maybe 2000. This nation has been wonderful to my family, Funny thing, I want that for other immigrants that might not look like me nor speak the same langguage.
Come one come all. My family did.
Schlemizel
@BGinCHI:
Was part of an international student get together (I have told the story of being asked by a girl to ‘knock me up in the morning’). Well one of my friends from school’s name was Randy & that seemed to affect the brits in about the say way – they thought that was a hilarious name
Yurpean
@Goblue72: I’m no fan of what was done in Ireland, but the evidence that Jean McConville was a ‘Unionist douche’ as you so empathically put it is murky at best, and as one of here daughters is quoted as saying in the lrb piece, ‘what could she have even known?’.
BGinCHI
@Schlemizel: Don’t even get me started on Roger and rogering.
CONGRATULATIONS!
@BGinCHI: Sounds reasonable and sane.
Oh wait, that was something a friend of mine wrote on Facebook. Hickey…well, I think I have a pretty good idea of what we will inevitably find out State Representative Hickey’s hobby is, and it’s not model airplanes.
ETA: the detail. Good God, the detail. You can tell he is thinking about man-on-man gay sex 24/7.
Yurpean
@Mart: I read that Vox piece this morning, it was embarrassingly bad. Must check out Mr Pierce’s article – I presume he was his usual caustic self?
Schlemizel
@BGinCHI:
Oh, I don’t know, every guy likes a good roger once in a while :)
Mnemosyne
@shortstop:
Every sperm is sacred, don’t’cha know.
Barbara
@The Very Reverend Crimson Fire of Compassion: Just to make it clear, the U.S. security apparatus did not make this commitment, the researchers did. The researchers did not really have the power to make this commitment, U.S. law does not recognize such a broad academic protection, but my understanding is that Price (at least) is now deceased so that her “testimony” is being used according to the commitment that was made to her.
I have very mixed feelings about this. We are not talking about petty crimes, but of allowing people to get away with murder. Nothing stopped Price from creating her own written record and keeping it private. I seriously doubt if anyone can really be convicted on the strength of her memories alone.
shortstop
OT, because I think you lot will appreciate it: For weeks, I’ve been getting daily calls on my office phone from a SMITH, ALEX. I ignore them because who the hell? And he/she never leaves a message. Today I finally found out it’s fundraisers for this person. “Are you jackasses ever barking up the wrong tree,” I informed them. “I’m perimenopausal and left of Marx.” My caller seemed stunned, not sure by which piece of info.
shortstop
@Schlemizel: Sounds jolly to me.
Mnemosyne
So here’s my question about British law: could Adams be convicted on the basis of a tape recording made by two people who are now dead and can no longer be cross-examined?
That seems a little unfair, to say the least. It would be different if they had living witnesses who could testify that Adams had ordered the killings, but how do you defend yourself against the word of dead people?
Barbara
@CONGRATULATIONS!: The law isn’t that stark. First, everyone has a protection against unreasonable requests for records, and second, in fact, most courts in the U.S. have recognized an academic freedom exemption that is similar to that given to journalists, which is only a limited privilege against providing testimony. The difficulty with this particular request is that it truly shadowed an academic inquiry, but the prosecutor probably had no problem asserting that there was no other way to get the testimony.
Marc
@DougJ: Yes, that part is depressing. So is the part where the shitheel who ordered it gets treated as some kind of legitimate political leader for decades afterward.
The part where he gets arrested? Not so much.
Mnemosyne
@Barbara:
Right, but there’s also no way for Adams to defend himself against the allegations, because both of the people who claimed that they acted on his orders are dead. It’s his word against theirs, and they can no longer be questioned about it.
I think that’s pretty much the definition of “hearsay.”
catclub
@Mnemosyne: Murder trials usually go off the rails if the witnesses “die”. See The Wire, year 1.
Mnemosyne
@Marc:
Kind of like this guy, who was also known to have participated in terrorist acts including murders?
japa21
@shortstop: I was just scanning down the photos of all the officers and something struck me, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. At least there was some gender diversity.
David Hunt
@Mnemosyne: Probably didn’t want to be assassinated by his old comrades before he could rat on them and mitigate his sentence.
Josie
The saddest part is in the interview of the woman’s son, who was eleven years old when his mother was dragged out of their home to be murdered. He admits that he would not even now name the men who did it for fear that they would retaliate by shooting him or one of his family. This is evidently not over for a lot of people.
CONGRATULATIONS!
@Mnemosyne: You can add to that list: Mahatma Ghandi, George Washington, Ariel Sharon. And so many others. Winners call the shots and their bad acts are consigned to the dustbin of history. You don’t have to like it – and I don’t think anyone does – to acknowledge that this is how it works.
JGabriel
BGinCHI:
What’s absolutely hilarious about Hickey’s anti-gay marriage because anal is bad for you screed is how entirely and utterly irrelevant the premise is.
SCOTUS has already made anal legal throughout the nation, via Lawrence v. Texas:
So, Mr. SD State Senator Steve Hickey, anal is already legal in South Dakota. Whether or not gay marriage is permitted will have exactly zero impact on the frequency of South Dakotans committing sodomy.
Calouste
@CONGRATULATIONS!:
State Representative Hickey sure is talking a lot about male-on-male anal sex in reaction to a lesbian couple from his state getting married.
goblue72
@Yurpean: If I was Irish in Ireland during the Troubles, I’d dump every British or Unionist baby into the sea until the occupiers left my country.
Roger Moore
@BGinCHI:
A terrorist concentrates their attention on civilian targets.
BGinCHI
@Roger Moore: And they don’t consider themselves patriots while doing so?
Citizen_X
@goblue72: So you’re in favor of ethnic cleansing? Fucking lovely.
Sloane Ranger
No lover of the IRA or Gerry Adams but this is probably politically driven. A case against an IRA member collapsed in February because the Government had issued him with a letter assuring him they had no evidence to prosecute him with. As a result he returned to the UK where he was arrested. The Judge stopped the trial due to the letter. Cue outrage, especially among Protestants. There is a Commons Select committee investigation into the whole thing. Adams’ arrest is probably the UK’s government trying to reassure Protestants they are still committed to prosecuting terrorists ahead of the forthcoming European elections.
Nothing said above should detract from the fact that Gerry Adams was a supporter of, and apologist for, terrorists.
The Other Chuck
@Calouste:
“These people think about gay sex more than I do!” — Dan Savage
Svensker
@300baud:
Denounced? If these were Mooselmen Turrists, Mr. King’s ass would be in jail and the Right would be howling that he should be waterboarded and sent to Gitmo.
But since they’re Christians turrists, no biggie. Water under the bridge. Etc.
Robert Sneddon
@Sloane Ranger: Actually Gerry Adams along with his fellow Sinn Fein member Martin McGuinness was the one of the officers commanding the Belfast brigade of the Provisional IRA in the early 70s. He didn’t just support terrorists, he was in fact a senior terrorist leader, an “Al-Queda number 2” if you like. He was in direct charge of the people who dragged this Irish woman out of her home in front of her children, tortured her and murdered her and then hid the body for thirty years. He probably issued the orders to have this execution carried out, it’s not something the rank and file IRA members would do off their own bat.
She’s not the only Irish person they did this too, of course and not all of the bodies of the Disappeared have been found. Gerry, like all the IRA terrorists in power today will not talk about the Disappeared. They are non-persons.
Goblue72
@Citizen_X: its not ethnic cleansing when the other side INVADED YOUR COUNTRY.
scav
@Citizen_X: Targeting the ones that he’s most likely (well, 50-50 odds) to be able to take out in a fair fight too. Real he-man patriots take out neonates.
Mnemosyne
@Sloane Ranger:
As others have pointed out, there doesn’t seem to be the same effort to round up Unionists who were operating in the same time period. So, yes, this looks very politics-driven.
And this is the kind of crime that happens once you decide to use terrorism as a tactic: Mrs. McConville was a Catholic suspected of being an informer to the British government, which is why she was murdered. She was killed by people on “her own side,” which is why her children are still terrified of saying who did it.
Barbara
@Mnemosyne: So I agree. I think it will be very difficult, as a I said, to convict Adams on the strength solely of the tape. Typically, this sort of thing could come in if it was an admission against the person who made it (if Price had implicated herself). Not all hearsay is excluded, but it would be very tough to use this testimony without some corroborating evidence that tied Adams more directly to McConville’s disappearance, rather than, simply, evidence that he did not condemn people when he knew that they had participated in killings, or made general statements about what should be done with informants (if that’s what he did).
Citizen_X
when the other side INVADED YOUR COUNTRY
…over three centuries ago, and have been living there ever since.
That situation applies to much of the human race.
I have no problem with fighting the British Army, and fighting for a united Ireland. But wanting to drive all Protestants into the sea? Yes, that’s ethnic fucking cleansing.
Robert Sneddon
@Goblue72: So if Native Americans launched “terrorist” attacks across America in an attempt to ethnically cleanse their nation and drive out the immigrants who have been invading their shores for the past four hundred years you’d be copacetic with that?
Barbara
McConville was in her own special hell — a protestant married to a Catholic man who had also served in the British army. She was not Catholic, but her children were.
Mnemosyne
@Robert Sneddon:
And Ian Paisley‘s hands are lily-white? He freely talks about the people his paramilitaries murdered?
Let’s not pretend the Troubles were one-sided. The Protestants have more than enough blood on their own hands that they should probably not point fingers.
bluefoot
@Svensker: Yeah, exactly. I was almost beat up opening my big mouth in Boston some time in the first years after 9/11. Some asshat was going off on how he approved of people being jailed (without due process) for giving to charities whose money, unbeknownst to them, was eventually funneled to terrorists. Apparently all those brown people were de facto guilty, and all needed to be locked up or killed. I asked, what about those donation jars that used to sit in Irish bars in our fair city? That’s *direct* material support to terrorists.
Luckily, I had some smarter friends with me who hustled me out of there quick.
Cacti
@Roger Moore:
A terrorist concentrates their attention on civilian targets.
Like say, letting 1 million of your colonial subjects die for want of food during a 7-year period?
scav
@Citizen_X: Especially since there’s no bright line between catholics being all native since time immemorial and all protestants being uniquely immigrant invaders. this is also just a family brawl.
Omnes Omnibus
@Goblue72: By that logic, it would be okay for Native Americans to drop every white baby into the sea until we leave?
Chyron HR
@Goblue72:
You and Peter King should make a club, and murder a widowed mother of 10 with it.
drkrick
@BGinCHI:
Operationally, it’s very similar to the difference between a religion and a cult. One you approve of and one you don’t.
CONGRATULATIONS!
@Roger Moore: God, read some history. At least American history if nothing else. The civilians always get it the worst. The difference between a patriot and a terrorist is that the patriot won and the terrorist lost.
@drkrick: Better than my definition. Nicely done.
@Robert Sneddon: Since this will never happen, I can say this: they’d have a point. I’d probably agree with it, even. But I’d shoot back.
Francis
@BGinCHI: Which side wins.
Anoniminous
The History of Ireland since Cromwell in a nutshell:
Remember the atrocity they committed which excuses the atrocities we committed and the atrocity we are about to commit!
HURRAY!
scav
@Omnes Omnibus: Hey, the Celts get to go after both the Saxon and Norman babies. Jutes and Angles for dessert. Or, do the rules insist that the Saxons, Jutes and Angles team up with the Celts and go for the Normans before the half and they they’re up for the smiting in the second? Romans need to worked in somehow too. Celts going to be busy for a good while.
We’d be in real trouble if the Neanderthals hadn’t checked out. Turns out they seem not as unintelligent as once made out too.
Citizen_X
@Mnemosyne:
Exactly. That’s why I say: stay the fuck out of it.
Same with Israel/Palestine, too. Oh, my tax dollars don’t stay out? Crap.
Robert Sneddon
@Mnemosyne: The Unionists were a bunch of incompetents, possibly because they were led by ignorant loudmouths like Paisley. The UVF, the major terrorist wing of the Unionists was a much less capable force than the Provisional IRA and were responsible for many fewer deaths and maimings of Irish people than the IRA over the decades.
Paisley was always a politician, Gerry Adams was a hands-on gunman and military commander like McGuinness in direct charge of killers and torturers through the early part of the Troubles. He only moved into the political sphere later and has never talked about exactly what he had been doing in the 60s and 70s as a senior enforcer in Belfast, especially in the financial extortion side of things within the local Nationalist community. Think of him as a Mafia gunman who made it to Don Corleone’s big desk eventually with a nice suit and the local movers and shakers willing to make deals with him. Unfortunately for him, even in Ireland there is no statute of limitations on murder.
Nothing will come of this, the evidence that could be presented in court is not substantial and any real witnesses know what would happen to them and their families if they did testify against Adams, after all they’ve got the example of Mrs. McConville to look back on. The IRA is still operational in Ireland today after all, raising money by extortion and crime and keeping the folks in line with threats.
Cacti
@scav:
We’d be in real trouble if the Neanderthals hadn’t checked out. Turns out they seem not as unintelligent as once made out too.
Well if they’re so smart, how come they’re all dead?
Huh?
Mnemosyne
@Robert Sneddon:
Ah, so since the UVF killed fewer people and were less good at it, that makes them the good guys!
Look: it was a civil war. Both sides — both sides — did horrible things and murdered people who didn’t deserve it. Continuing to insist that the opposite side is worse and revenge will be yours someday will put you all right back to 1982. Is that what you want?
Cacti
@Robert Sneddon:
The IRA is still operational in Ireland today after all, raising money by extortion and crime and keeping the folks in line with threats.
Thank goodness for the British government and its clean hands, and the unvarnished good that their occupying forces have been for Ireland throughout the centuries.
It’s a real mystery why the Republic of Ireland was officially neutral during WWII.
scav
@Cacti: Only the good die young.
Also, thank GSD for research still needing to be done. Climate change with their physiognomy, other biological problems, too small, isolated pops, bad luck . . . Don’t be holding up this tribe of Arc B refugees as winning through sheer intellect.
kindness
@goblue72:
You don’t seem to get it. The Protestants/Unionists held very large majorities in those 6 counties. Those people and their families had lived there for hundreds of years. You swinging your dick like you are something bad is just silly or stupid. Take your pick.
muddy
@Cacti: We’re not.
celticdragonchick
@Goblue72:
Pretty much.
If Gerry Adams is a monster…then centuries of British occupation, British policies and British atrocities created him and his followers.
By the by, the British paratroopers who slaughtered unarmed civilians on Bloody Sunday have never been arrested.
Cacti
@celticdragonchick:
By the by, the British paratroopers who slaughtered unarmed civilians on Bloody Sunday have never been arrested.
But 40 short years later, the British government did apologize for it.
Seriously, how effective did the UVF need to be when they had uniformed British Army regulars willing to gun down protesters in plain sight of the press?
LanceThruster
Guard: Volunteers comin’ in!
Faudron: [kneels] William Wallace, we’ve come to fight and to die for you.
William Wallace: Stand up, man, I’m not the Pope.
Faudron: [smiles and stands] My name is Faudron. My sword is yours. I brought you this.
[reaches for something, Hamish tries to stop him]
Guard: We checked ’em for arms.
Faudron: I brought you this.
[pulls out a sash]
Faudron: My wife made it for you.
William Wallace: Thank you.
Stephen: [starts laughing] Him? That can’t be William Wallace. I’m *prettier* than this man!
[to the sky]
Stephen: Alright, Father, I’ll ask him.
[to William]
Stephen: If I risk my neck for you, will I get a chance to kill Englishmen?
Hamish: Is your father a ghost, or do you converse with the Almighty?
Stephen: In order to find his equal, an Irishman is forced to talk to God.
[to the sky]
Stephen: Yes, Father!
[to Hamish]
Stephen: The Almight says, “Don’t change the subject, just answer the fuckin’ question.”
Hamish: Mind your tongue.
Campbell: Insane Irish.
Stephen: [draws a dagger on Campbell; everyone draws weapons] Smart enough to get a dagger past your guards, old man.
William Wallace: That’s my friend, Irishman. And the answer to your question is “yes”. You fight for me, you get to kill the English.
Stephen: [grins] Excellent!
[removes his dagger]
Stephen: Stephen is my name. I the most wanted man on my island, except I’m not on my island, of course. More’s the pity.
Hamish: “Your island”? You mean Ireland?
Stephen: Yeah. It’s mine.
Hamish: You’re a madman.
Stephen: [nods and starts laughing, then Hamish does as well] I’ve come to the right place, then.
AnonPhenom
@drkrick:
Fuckin’ Fools.
Rule #1 when dealing with the ‘cops’; They’re allowed to lie to you. Legally. Keep your mouth shut and let your lawyer do the talking.
MomSense
@Cacti:
They weren’t as good at running.
kindness
Who else here has English & Irish ancestors? In my family line it’s even dodgier as I have both Northern & Republican Irish going. Thank god my people came over here early so they could piss off the Puritains.
Higgs Boson's Mate
@celticdragonchick:
Oh for fuck’s sake. He’s a monster because he’s a monster by nature. Yes, the Brits’ treatment of the Irish was terrible back at least to the Penal Laws of 1690. Not all of the Irish became monsters, or killers, or kidnappers as a result.
Marc
@Mnemosyne: If you want to insinuate that Mandela was a murderer, you should probably choose a link that actually supports that. Good luck finding one that doesn’t come from Dick Cheney or Victoria Jackson.
JGabriel
Cacti:
As muddy says, we’re not. If you’re of European descent, as I am, then you’re still about 1/25th (4%) Neanderthal. If you’re from Oceania or SE Asia, then you’re about 1/16 (6%) Denisovan, a close relative of Neanderthal. And overall, Neanderthals and Sapiens have about 99.88% identical DNA.
And since homo sapiens, homo neanderthalensis, and homo denisova could all apparently produce fertile offspring while interbreeding with each other, that makes us all the same species by the only stringent definition we have for species: the largest group of organisms capable of interbreeding and producing fertile offspring.
So, Neanderthals? We’re still here.
Marc
@goblue72: Nice to know that any mention of the IRA or the Troubles can still bring out the inner mass murderer in a certain subset of white people. But hey, it’s not terrorism (or genocide) if you approve, right?
These are the same moral blinders we routinely mock Peter King for. Cognitive dissonance, how does it work?
celticdragonchick
@Cacti:
yeah. Christ on a crutch…40 years and they can say “Oops! Sorry about killing 14 people and wounding a bunch of others during a civil rights march!”
No fucking wonder the PIRA was able to go on a bombing campaign in England the following year. When you butcher unarmed civilians…on TV no less…and nothing is done about it, bullets and bombs start looking like legitimate alternatives to street marches. If the paras are going to shoot you, you might as well shoot back.
I don’t live in Ireland and I am not Catholic. That being said…after Bloody Sunday, I understand why people starting shooting back. When you look at just how nasty the Revolutionary War was right here in North Carolina where I am at, I don’t figure we have much room to talk.
Gerry Adams would have been feted as a hero in 1781, and plenty of American fighters of that period would have done something nasty to silence a woman supplying intel to the other side. The very least she could have expected was to be stripped and whipped. Tarring and feathering would have been more likely, and that was often fatal (hot tar leaves 2nd and 3rd degree burns).
Also, the term “lynch law” comes from a Whig militia leader and “judge” named Lynch in Virginia who had a habit of capturing and hanging British loyalists after a kangaroo court hearing. Of course, he was never denounced as a terrorist who murdered hapless civilians because…he was on the winning side.
Robert Sneddon
@celticdragonchick: They did manage to arrest someone for the Crossmaglen bombing though which is quite an achievement so long after the event when the IRA killed 29 civilians in a bombing in Ireland. They killed hundreds of other civilians and maimed thousands on the mainland and even managed to off a couple of Australian tourists in Germany once thinking they were off-duty British soldiers. The Active Service Unit that did that is believed to have been decommissioned with a bullet in the head each as they might have killed Americans by mistake and that was a severe no-no.
JGabriel
@kindness:
I have Irish and UK ancestors, but the UK ancestors are Welsh. Not sure if that counts.
ETA: Of course, when my Irish ancestors left Ireland, that was still part of the UK too.
celticdragonchick
@Higgs Boson’s Mate:
Monster by nature??
wtf?
His nature as a person is no different from any other human. He decided to act in certain ways in response to actions of British and Unionist authorities. You may reasonably disagree with and condemn his actions, but they did not occur in a vacuum.
Robert Sneddon
@celticdragonchick: What happened to the National Guard soldiers who shot up Ohio State campus, killed what was it, four people back in the late 60s? And of course there’s Lieutenant Calley during Vietnam and more recently the US navy captain that blew a civilian airliner out of the sky over the Persian Gulf and got a medal for doing so. And…
Villago Delenda Est
@JGabriel: Oook!
celticdragonchick
@kindness:
Scottish here.
I see an awful lot of support for Scotland dissolving the UK at the various Highland Games and festivals I go to. I tend to stay out of that. As much as the idea emotionally appeals to me of an independent Scotland, I’m not sure it makes any economic sense.
AnonPhenom
@kindness:
iIRC, back then they only had a popular majority in 4 of them (6 counties were deemed the minimum needed for a politically viable entity) and even those were gerrymandered to a point that would give today’s GOP a 40 hour woody. Remember the whole Bloody Sunday thing started as a civil rights movement, that included one person/one vote.
Robert Sneddon
@celticdragonchick: You could say the same thing about Osama bin Laden…
“His nature as a person is no different from any other human. He decided to act in certain ways in response to actions of the American authorities. You may reasonably disagree with and condemn his actions, but they did not occur in a vacuum.” Of course the British government didn’t get the SAS to put a bullet in Gerry Adams head without a trial unlike the US did with bin Laden. But that’s different, I suppose…
Basically by the early 1980s the Irish Republic government had made it totally clear that despite its Constitutional claim to the Six Counties that they wanted no part of Ulster and had no real interest in a united Ireland as it was obvious the Unionist majority in the North would burn the country to the ground before allowing it to happen, North and South. At that point the “protectors” of the Nationalist community in the North (actually the mob thugs ruling the locals through extortion and fear) had no political aims that could be realistically achieved, just maintaning control of their fiefdoms and funding this in most part from British government attempts to kickstart the economy there via violent extortion, fraud and bank robberies. It was during this time they cozied up to Qaddafi and started making connections to the Maoist Shining Path guerillas in Colombia in search of more funding since even the Boston Oirish were starting to wise up.
Cacti
@Robert Sneddon:
And of course there’s Lieutenant Calley during Vietnam
Calley was charged, tried, and convicted.
How many of the Bloody Sunday shooters can we say that about?
Robert Sneddon
@celticdragonchick: When you say “Scottish” does that mean you’re from Scotland, still living here, maybe even born here? Or is this like being Oirish in Boston, solidly American three generations and more from the Auld Green Sod?
I’m Scottish, born in Scotland of Scottish parents and living in Scotland. My grandparents were Scottish too. (My great-grandparents on my father’s side were Irish though, the surname “Sneddon” is a bit of a giveaway there. Don’t know about my mother’s lineage but I think it might have some Irish in it too a couple of generations back but her maiden name was Stirling.) I don’t yet know how I’ll vote in the referendum but all the polls suggest the vote for independence will be “No”. I’m sure the William Wallace contingent at Highland Games and the like in America are all for it but most folks in Scotland live in the Central Belt well away from the baby-eating teuchters to the north and the thieving sheepshaggers in the Borders and there just isn’t a big groundswell of support for it around here. The best Wee Eck can reasonably expect is DevoMax plus maybe one or two of his bete noires getting scratched like redeployment of the V-force from Faslane.
Cacti
Of course the British government didn’t get the SAS to put a bullet in Gerry Adams head without a trial unlike the US did with bin Laden.
Could we ask the family of Jean Charles de Menezes about the counterterrorism activities of the British government?
How many have been disciplined for executing a Brazilian man for the crime of running while brown?
Robert Sneddon
@Cacti: Was he executed for committing a major war crime? Maybe he just got life without parole for killing a few hundred gooks, is he safely locked away in some military Supermax somewhere?
opiejeanne
@Cacti: Well, mainly because they were still broke. A lot of the men went to England and volunteered, but the Irish Republic didn’t really have the funds to create an army.
celticdragonchick
@Robert Sneddon:
What happened indeed? I’m not sure we have any room to point fingers at the IRA when we have bloody stumps pointing back at us.
Of course, atrocities on one side do not excuse them on the other. But…they certainly do invite a like response. One example would be the activities of Banastre Tarlton, the Tory dragoon in the Carolinas who had the unlovely habit of slaughtering Americans who tried to surrender. American fighters quickly retaliated with the phrase “Tarleton’s Quarters!” and took to butchering British captives.
Our figurative closet is a fucking graveyard over the last 200 years…and the Brits are no better (If you really want nightmares…read up on what the British Army did in Kanya during the Mau Mau uprising.)
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/apr/23/british-empire-crimes-ignore-atrocities
celticdragonchick
A bit longer then three generations, I must say. I had at least two documented direct ancestors who fought in the Revolution, including at King’s Mountain where certain, ah…liberties where taken with the corpse of the British commander, a certain Major Ferguson (his remains were stripped and urinated upon as a retort to statements he made concerning what he would do to Americans he captured)
Again, I don’t take sides on the Scottish Independence issue. I don’t feel it’s really my place.
Mnemosyne
@Robert Sneddon:
Dude. You realize you’re not really making a good case here for the Unionists being the good guys, right? We’ll burn the fucking country to the ground if we don’t get our way isn’t really a way forward for anyone.
Here’s a thought: maybe if the British government hadn’t taken the side of the Unionists in 1969, you wouldn’t be having all of these troubles.
In the US civil rights struggle, the US government sent troops in to enforce civil rights. In Northern Ireland, the UK sent in troops to enforce discrimination. And Northern Ireland has been dealing with the blowback ever since.
Cacti
@celticdragonchick:
(If you really want nightmares…read up on what the British Army did in Kanya during the Mau Mau uprising.)
Or the 20 million or so who starved to death in various famines during the British rule of India.
Starvation was a favorite tool of control for subject peoples during the British Empire.
Robert Sneddon
@Cacti: Trail of tears, anyone?
Mnemosyne
@Higgs Boson’s Mate:
Yes, I’m sure that being imprisoned by the UK government for the crime of demanding civil rights did absolutely nothing to make Adams what he is. No one ever became radicalized by unjust imprisonment.
Mnemosyne
@Robert Sneddon:
Not for lack of trying, of course. And it was the UDA, not the SAS.
But I guess unsuccessful assassination attempts don’t count, either.
Cacti
@Robert Sneddon:
And those plastic paddys of Boston, how did they end up there?
Hmmm…something about a famine from 1845-1852?
Funny how any time an occupied territory had a famine, none of the occupiers ever perished for want of food.
celticdragonchick
@Cacti:
It only took a century and half to apologize for the Irish famine.
Fun fact: Ireland produced crops for England the entire time the famine was going on. Hundreds of thousands of people were dropping dead…and food was still leaving the country for Protestant breakfast tables.
I am finishing a class right now on Elizabethan history and as Americans, we cannot really grasp the sheer depth of hatred for Catholicism that has been British institutional policy for centuries. Hell, I can’t say I’m a fan of a lot of the BS that comes out of the Vatican…but the hatred and fear in England from the 16th to 19th centuries are utterly amazing to an outsider.
celticdragonchick
@Mnemosyne:
So hey Cardinal Daley, what have you got?
Another poor boy in a wooden box
And you really didn’t care about him
No brother, no priest, no politician friend
He wasn’t anyone that you would know
He took a hundred bullets on a lonely road
So save your condemnations, save your breath
You use it for excuses for the SAS
Cacti
@celticdragonchick:
Fun fact: Ireland produced crops for England the entire time the famine was going on. Hundreds of thousands of people were dropping dead…and food was still leaving the country for Protestant breakfast tables.
Another fun fact: The condition of the Irish peasant class during the famine was so pitiful, even the Seminole and Choctaw tribes took up collections on their behalf.
Robert Sneddon
@Mnemosyne: I never ever said the stupid incompetent Unionists were good guys. Ever. A plague on both their houses is a good start where I’m concerned. The two factions been killing and maiming each other for three hundred years going on four and they always blame it on someone else, Cromwell usually. And they can’t stop. And they get stupid credulous nth-generation Americans who paint their face green and get drunk on St. Patrick’s Day to think they are actually One of Them. Jeez.
All the smart ones got out decades ago, what’s left now politically in the north is rats in a sack. Of course the Free State as was hasn’t covered itself with glory in the intervening period, what with its subservience to the medievalist Roman Catholic Church and its mind-boggling corruption in political circles which made union even more unlikely. The powers in Dublin were well aware that after any union they would be the next on the chopping block, not from the Unionists but from the IRA and its political wing Sinn Fein.
celticdragonchick
@Cacti:
Damn. Just…damn.
I do know that Frederick Douglas took up the issue of Irish liberation…and that was even before the damned Civil War.
Robert Sneddon
@Mnemosyne: I did say the UDA and the UVF and the dozen other unionist splinter groups were a bunch of incompetents, didn’t I? The best one I remember was the couple of UVF bombers who tried to throw a blast-bomb through a shop window in a county town somewhere. They didn’t know that the glass was reinforced, the bomb bounced off and exploded in their face killing them both. That about sums up the Unionist version of the “armed struggle”, pretty much. The IRA were much better at killing Irish people.
celticdragonchick
@Robert Sneddon:
One upping atrocities never works…and especially when you have 350 years to work with.
As has been said before, however…England could have avoided a lot of this shit if they had protected civil rights back in the late 60’s and early 70’s rather then shooting the shit out of civil rights protestors and locking up others for years without charge or trial.
Blowback can be really fucking horrible, and it often hurts people who had nothing to do with the original problem.
Mnemosyne
@Robert Sneddon:
Which leaves the people who actually have to live in Belfast where, exactly?
Like it or not, a political solution has been hammered out, and Gerry Adams is active in that political solution. The remaining remnants of the “IRA” are basically freelance drug runners and gangsters.
So exactly how much of that political solution are you willing to sacrifice in order to “get” Gerry Adams? How far back are you willing to turn the clock just so you can get a sufficient amount of revenge?
opiejeanne
@kindness: I do; my family probably came from Edgeworthtown, in County Longford. While I have both Catholics and Protestants in my family, and the Edgeworths were English in origin. They were not absentee landlords.
My husband’s family is from Killyleagh, near Belfast.He came through Cobh, like most of them did during the famines. His family was Catholic in the 1860s but all the ones with his family name still living there are Protestants now.
We visited the Republic of Ireland 4 years ago but hesitated to visit the North because there was some trouble starting up again. Now that we have discovered that Killyleagh was the starting point, we would like to go to the north but haven’t quite managed to put the trip together.
Robert Sneddon
@Mnemosyne: What’s revenge got to do with it? This is justice, for the family and community of a woman abducted, tortured and murdered and her body disposed of forty years ago by the Belfast contingent of the Provisional IRA, Gerry Adams commanding. Mr. Adams has never denied being involved in the multiple torture/executions carried out by people under his orders at the time, he simply refuses to discuss it under any circumstances as a US Mafia boss would plead the Fifth. This is no Truth and Reconciliation process, it is a criminal investigation into a serious crime. I thought the same thing applied in the US, there was no statute of limitations in cases of homicide.
Margaret Nolan
Calley is a free man, has been since Nixon reduced his sentence to house arrest, which last about 3+ years. That’s all he endured. Now lives down South with his son.
opiejeanne
@Villago Delenda Est: Librarian? Is that you?
Mnemosyne
@Robert Sneddon:
So your answer is, you are willing to reverse any progress made so far in Belfast so you can “get” Gerry Adams for crimes he has consistently denied committing based on a tape recording by two dead people.
Good to know.
celticdragonchick
@Robert Sneddon:
If anybody was concerned about justice, charges would have been brought in dozens of other cases that have far greater likelihood of getting an actual conviction
Delours Price is dead from substance abuse and her statements amount to hearsay. Same goes for the other alleged witness. Dead witnesses don’t help a prosecution. Delours’ sister is unlikely to testify against Addams even though she is a hardcore type who thinks he isn’t ardent enough for Irish independence. She isn’t going to say anything to help a Crown prosecution and anything she might say can be easily impeached at trial.
You want to start somewhere? How about the guys in the paratrooper regiment who shot unarmed civil rights protesters on live television.
Cacti
@Mnemosyne:
So your answer is, you are willing to reverse any progress made so far in Belfast so you can “get” Gerry Adams for crimes he has consistently denied committing based on a tape recording by two dead people.
Which raises the troublesome issue:
How does one cross-examine a dead accuser?
Mnemosyne
Also, for the record, I think the best possible thing for Northern Ireland would be a South Africa-style Truth and Reconciliation Committee that would let all of the affected people on both sides at least find out the truth about what happened to their vanished or murdered friends and family.
But the government of Great Britain would never, ever allow that to happen because their actions would have to be examined as part of any such committee.
qwerty42
@Mnemosyne:
As the saying goes “Parliament can make it against the law to smoke a cigarette on the streets of Paris”. As a practical matter, though, probably not.
TheColourfield
@Robert Sneddon:
The Unionists are pretty good at getting ignorant Scots to march on the 12th and blather on about 1690 endlessly at football matches so it’s not all about America.
celticdragonchick
@Cacti:
You can always try this technique from Rashomon:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVapqPu9guU
celticdragonchick
@TheColourfield:
Get out the lambeg drums, get pissed drunk and sing “Billy Boys”
Hullo, Hullo
We are the Billy Boys
Hullo, Hullo
You’ll know us by our noise
We’re up to our knees in fenian blood
Surrender or you’ll die
For we are
The Brigton Derry Boys
…before finding some hapless geezer on the way home from Mass and beating the shit out of him.
TheColourfield
@celticdragonchick:
Ah the glories of the “marching season”
tybee
@Roger Moore:
yeah, ask curtis lemay about how patriotic it was to firebomb hundreds of square miles of civilians and then explain that difference to me again.
tybee
@Citizen_X:
lol
see many american indians around your neck of the woods?
celticdragonchick
@TheColourfield:
Nothing says “Class!” like your Orange Order band playing the “Famine Song” in front of a church…like this…and then threatening Catholic onlookers with violence. In 2012.
celticdragonchick
@tybee:
Bingo!
tybee
@Omnes Omnibus:
just think of it as karma.
jefft452
@Yurpean: “How about the victims parents, who last saw their mother when a gang of thugs forcibly removed her from their home, should they ‘let it go’?”
Yes?
When 2 sides agree to give up the cycle of atrocity answered by bloody reprisal, followed by reprisal for the reprisal, rinse and repeat. – and instead settle their differences with boring political ads and going to the voting booth – it is a good thing, full stop
You cant have that if you are looking for just one last reprisal, revenge for just this one particularly heinous act, even if the prick deserves it
goblue72
@Citizen_X: Your casual flippance at people invaded by another country, dispossessed of their ancestral lands, forced into famine while their occupiers got fat, and when they had the nerve to demand their country back were treated like animals, is telling.
goblue72
@Omnes Omnibus: Sure. They’d lose at this point since we have 100 times as many people and nukes. As a practical matter, only.
But I sure as shit wouldn’t blame ’em. This country has never offered up even 1% of the the blood it should to render back to the Native Americans what we took in genocide. Read Lincoln’s Second Inagural. He got it.
goblue72
@Mnemosyne: Agreed on both counts. There needs to be reckoning. And the Brits would never agree to it – because the Brits have never owned up in their souls to the scope and scale of the injustice they committed.
Donalbain
@Mnemosyne:
No. Not like Mandela. Mandela did not have access to the ballot box. Adams did, but he was not able to convince a majority of the people of Northern Ireland that they should join the Republic so he decided to kill them. That is very very different.
Donalbain
@Mnemosyne:
No. Not like Mandela. Mandela did not have access to the ballot box. Adams did, but he was not able to convince a majority of the people of Northern Ireland that they should join the Republic so he decided to kill them. That is very very different.
Donalbain
@Cacti:
Good point. Lets arrest everyone who was involved in setting policy in the 19th century!
Donalbain
@Cacti:
Good point. Lets arrest everyone who was involved in setting policy in the 19th century!