Corporate responsibility, Dawn and Gerry.
Yesterday evening the BBC aired the most entertaining Winter Olympic event to date. Ski cross features four downhill skiers, hurtling down a snowboard track, together. They hurdle jumps, perform hair-raising manoeuvres in order to overtake opponents and the inevitable tangled skis cause all manner of spectacular crashes. It was the second most compelling sport on TV last night, the first being Gerry Adams’ moral contortionism on Channel 4. The Sinn Féin President’s meditations on ‘the Jesus story’ were predictably noxious. Predicated on a monstrous blend of moral relativism and abstraction, Adams’ gospel of the Troubles implies that the killers were no more culpable than the victims. And at the bottom of all our problems, original sin, exclusive to the English, to ‘the Brits‘, absolving Gerry and his comrades of any responsibility.
“Stupid operation” rather than barbarous mass murder, “political activist” rather than terror chief. Adams’ Orwellian lexicon is littered with euphemism. His favourite, last night, was ‘corporate responsibility’. We’ve heard it before, of course. Jeffrey Donaldson wasn’t interested in IRA members’ involvement in Paul Quinn’s murder, so long as the killing wasn’t ‘corporate’.
This morning Dawn Purvis, PUP leader, is quoted in the Belfast Telegraph, arguing that responsibility for Northern Ireland’s past should be allotted ‘organisationally’ rather than ‘individually’. She echoes UDA godfather, Jackie McDonald, who last week called for the Historical Enquiries Team to be shut down.
The logic that everyone is to blame, and that individuals cannot be held responsible for their actions during a ‘conflict’, might be seductive for paramilitaries and their representatives, but it is also a dangerous, immoral, unacceptable notion. Not one of the ‘actions’ carried out by paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland were justified or justifiable. Not one terrorist, no matter how young, no matter how benighted his / her personal circumstances, had ‘no other option’.
However clamorous the revisionists and apologists become, we should always remember that the vast majority of people in Northern Ireland neither supported nor participated in terrorist activities. They were not a privileged elite, they were not immune from communal pressures and political forces. The people who did murder and maim cannot wheedle out of responsibility for their actions by claiming special dispensation. It wasn’t the fault of the state, it wasn't due to their youth or naivety, it wasn’t the fault of ‘the Brits’. The blame lies squarely with them.
Comments
Under that definition, most modern industrial states owe their title deeds to terrorism. And, indeed, they sustain their continued existence on the application of, or at least the threat of, coercive violence (in the western world this takes the form of a 'police'). The modern British state is a creation of the Revolution of 1688 - while peaceful in England, in Ireland, like the Scottish Highlands, it took the form of a brutal military conquest. The Republic of Ireland owes, at least indirectly, its existence to a War that cost the lives of thousands caught up in guerilla warfare. The American and French Revolutions were both illegal, under the codes of the ancien régime, and yet the legitimacy of the sovereignty creditionals of their successor states are never in dispute. Had the IRA militarily acheived their political aims, it would doubtless be the same. Nothing succeeds like success.
The British state has rarely exhibited much moral scruple in the application of political violence; consider Iraq, where a liberal secular state was violently overthrown. And illegally too!...at least under the laws of the constitutionally established Iraqi state. If violence for political aims is never legitimate, then revolution and war are both morally illict. But Britain has never functioned on those principles. And it can hardly expect others to either.