Today we were unlucky

I do not usually read serious important books in anything remotely resembling a timely manner, but I managed to eke out an exception. Patrick Radden Keefe's Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland has been making the press rounds, and the author -- a writer for the New Yorker who also wrote the excellent article "The Family that Built an Empire of Pain" -- went on Chris Hayes' Why Is This Happening? podcast twice, once to talk about the Sacklers and the other to talk about this book and political violence. 

 

So when I had an awkward amount of time to kill before a meeting and I found myself in Porter Square Books, and came upon a stack of Say Nothing copies on the floor underneath the politics table, Dolours Price's eyes looking up at me from above her mask, I had to get it. I devoured it that weekend. 

 

Say Nothing tells the story of one of the most notorious war crimes of the Troubles, the disappearance of Jean McConville. But it also tells the story of basically the entire Troubles, mostly from the perspective of some of the key IRA men and women who are implicated in McConville's disappearance. At 400 pages, it can cover a lot more ground than just one murder, and so we get a lot more than just one murder -- we get the full sociological context of Jean McConville's life, her death, and the lives of her ten children; we also get nearly the full life stories of two notorious IRA guerrillas, Dolours Price and Brendan Hughes. 

 

Another strain of the story is the Boston College Belfast Project, which I had known a little bit about from an episode of the Irish History Podcast. This project mostly features in the second half of the book, as the project wasn't conceived until 2001 or so. But it was a pleasant surprise to me when, sitting by the dedication plaque in bustling Boston Common on a gorgeous sunny Saturday, to open up this book about something that happened thousands of miles away and be greeted by the opening sentence "The John J. Burns library occupies a grand neo-Gothic building on the leafy campus of Boston College" and be like, hey, that's right here! I think I applied to a job at that library once; didn't hear back, though. 

 

But that was just the prologue. From then we go back to the '70s and then the '60s, chronicling the outbreak of the Troubles largely from the point of view of Dolours Price, starting with her ill-fated short stint in the nonviolent Catholic civil rights movement in 1968.

 

I found this period just before the Troubles proper broke out to be both fascinating and terrifying. It is the part where the lines between good and bad are the most clearly drawn, very deliberately; the march from Belfast to Derry was consciously modeled after the Selma march, and the Orangemen reliably behaved just as atrociously as the now-infamous screaming white mobs of the American South. The violent, semi-fascistic siege mentality of settler colonialism was on full display; the protestors' peaceful requests for an end to housing discrimination were met with beatings, stonings, and even attempts to drown the marchers in the river. The time-honored tradition of Kops and Klan going hand in hand was observed in a pattern that should be recognizable to anyone even a little bit versed in American anti-police-brutality activism. It is this moment, deliberately modeled off a (now absurdly whitewashed) moment in American history, a moment that seems to have come around again in the last couple years, that scares me the most, because it hits the closest to home. And if this was the moment before the Troubles broke out, what is right now the moment before?

 

One thing about Irish republicanism as a tradition that is not necessarily shared by every other liberatory movement is that it is, at every turn, escalatory. This becomes more clear later on when hunger striking becomes a high-profile tactic; hunger striking is, in essence, an escalatory measure -- Keefe uses the word "brinksmanship" more than once -- and the Irish hunger strikers were willing to employ this measure and stick to it over very modest demands: things like getting transferred to a different prison. A different prison! Not even to be let out of prison! But blowing it up into a whole big thing, featuring half-dead twentysomethings and the torture of force-feeding, is fairly par for the course for a tradition whose most celebrated historical moment involved a single tiny militia taking over a post office and a biscuit factory for a single weekend in a single city -- objectively an insane thing to do, but one which set in motion a series of events that did, somehow, wind up freeing most of Ireland.

 

Anyway, the hunger striking comes later. After the protesters maintain their commitment to nonviolence in the face of the Orangemen colluding with the cops to literally try to beat a bunch of college kids to death in the river, the loyalist gangs grew more fascistic, scouring the streets of Ulster and targeting Catholic families for beatings, forced evacuations, and all sorts of general Brownshirt behavior, egged on by U.S.-trained Protestant fundamentalist Ian Paisley. The Irish did the only thing it made sense to do, and counterorganized, reviving a long-dead IRA (and, in another time-honored tradition, immediately splitting into two rival IRAs), arming the populace, and generally fighting back.

 

For all the critiques one can make of the IRA's actions, especially as concerns the war crime at the heart of this book, I admit I find it impossible to imagine how anyone could fail to sympathize with the circumstances that led them to re-forming. I know that I'm biased due to my own ethnicity and upbringing, and while I can sort of understand the fear of change, economic considerations, and general inertia of identity that could animate a sort of general default Unionism, I can in no way get myself into the head of anyone who thinks the Loyalist paramilitaries are anything but fascists, and their sense of victimization anything other than whiny settler colonialist bullshit. Wah, wah, the natives whose land we stole tried to stop us stealing their land! Woe is us, the people we've displace and ghettoized aren't happy about being constantly discriminated against! All we did was march right into their destitute neighborhood and throw things at them while openly gloating about stealing their land, and they were so mean about it, we're the real victims here! Seriously, I would have joined the IRA too; I have no patience for this "You hit my fist with your face" sort of bullshit. 

 

I am not kidding about the marching into their neighborhoods and throwing things. These were yearly events; in Derry, every summer, an Orange order had a march to commemorate shutting the Catholics out of the city, which ended at the city walls, where the marchers threw things down into the Catholic ghetto from the top of the walls. The Orangemen apparently genuinely think that this is an important part of their culture and it would be sad and cultural genocide if they knocked it off, since apparently they have no shame about having a "culture" that consists entirely of brutalizing other people? I guess they don't have art or a language or anything? Anyway, most other shitty imperial cultures that I'm familiar with tend to try and pretend they never did that stuff so they can front like they're civilized people, but apparently Orangemen don't. I'm trying to think of a U.S. equivalent to this sort of activity and all I can think of is that, like, if the Columbus Day march in Boston didn't have the decency to stay in the North End and pretend to be about Italian heritage, but instead marched from the North End to the North American Indian Center of Boston and egged it. Every year.

 

Once Ulster became an undeclared war zone, however, things start to get a little murkier, and objectively more interesting, even if they perhaps don't scare me personally quite the same way. The IRA, explicitly a left-wing organization but historically of a somewhat authoritarian brocialist bent, inducted its first two female members as full combatants (in the past, women had joined Cumann na mBan, an extremely cool and important but nonetheless separate organization): Dolours and Marian Price, two young sisters from a legendarily militant republican family. Due to the illegitimate nature of radical political violence (as opposed to the legitimized nature of mainstream political violence), pretty young ladies becoming terrorists caused much consternation and weird rebel-chic fetishization and the raising of awkward questions about feminism in mainstream society in a way that, say, women becoming cops or Prime Ministers or the head of the CIA doesn't (except sometimes among those weirdo leftists). Personally, as one of those weirdo leftists, I have cheerfully and even proudly voted for too many women for positions of power within the United States federal government to wring my hands about the Price sisters joining a liberation army, even if they did end up committing war crimes. At least they started somewhere defensible. 

 

Somewhat more broadly, the moral murkiness of the IRA's campaign, especially as it dragged on and escalated, is the usual dilemma for the revolutionary left: revolution might be justified, or even the only option, but an armed rebellion is still, broadly speaking, a war, and war, no matter how justified, is terrible, and the people in it tend to do terrible things. Urban guerrilla wars especially take place entirely within places where people live, and civilian casualties in the Troubles were very, very high. Since the two main sides were both "paramilitaries" rather than regular militaries, and when the British Army got involved it was also starting to really get into the whole counterintelligence/anti-terrorism thing, it took huge amount of intel work to figure out who the enemy combatants even were -- and all the relevant entities, including the IRA, got it wrong with some frequency. Even if you figured out who was a legitimate target and who was some poor schmuck desperately attempting to live their life in a concrete wasteland like Divis Flats, carrying out operations to take out the former but not the latter was also a difficult task, and one alarmingly prone to errors -- sometimes big errors. And in war, even justified war, "big errors" means lots of people die.

 

The IRA was essentially a civilian army, a bunch of private citizens trying to skill-share stuff like bomb-making knowledge. I'm a big supporter of non-professional skill-sharing among comrades, but stuff tends to go imperfectly, and the consequences of a Robert's Rules debate going slightly awry are much less severe than those of a bomb-making operation going slightly awry. As the war dragged on, the casualties mounted, and the IRA responded to every setback by looking for ways to mount larger and larger campaigns, popular support predictably began to erode. For a group that depended on community solidarity for safety, this was a problem. For a group that depended on community solidarity for safety and had previously gotten it because it was supposed to be community defense, its penchant for blowing up civilians and its own members was also a problem -- one which they always managed to blame the British for. When they set bombs, they would warn the cops so they could clear civilians out; if any civilians weren't cleared out, it was the cops' fault. The logic is tortured but psychologically fascinating to watch -- I kind of wanted to reach back in time and shake these folks and tell them "Comrades, if you're going for a bloodless demonstration of power, don't use a fucking car bomb; this is extremely poor direct action planning." It's not that I have any answers for how to pull off an armed revolution without hurting regular people, but man, people pull themselves into some embarrassing mental contortions to pretend they do. 

 

Attempting to turn off my Paranoid About Activism brain (it's hard; it's been quite a bad news week), there's also a lot of spycraft stuff, with double agents and triple agents and all that jazz, so if you like reading about intelligence shenanigans (and who doesn't?), this is certainly the book for you. It's really disturbing to see how a lot of the precursors to the Bush administration torture scandals were being worked out by the British in the decades prior, and also a bit disturbing to see how successful the flipping operations were considering that the penalty for informing was death. In addition to McConville, who was suspected of being an informant but almost certainly wasn't, some of the most difficult, harrowing killings the IRA carried out were against fellow IRA members who had double or triple agented. There is a twist in the IRA's mole problem that made me want to throw popcorn at the screen of reality and go "really?" but which also has some very serious implications for how incapable the British state will ever be of fully investigating what happened.

 

One of my favorite moments in the book, although also perhaps a major sign that the IRA had sort of gone off the rails, is when Brendan Hughes, one of the legendary blanketmen and part of the IRA top brass throughout most of the conflict, came to the U.S. to raise money for NORAID (much of the IRAs fundraising was done via bank robberies, but it's always useful to work their U.S. connections as well) and was disturbed to run into a lot of right-wing support from conservative Irish-Americans who apparently a) had no idea the IRA was full of revolutionary socialists or b) were just really, really bloodthirsty? Given my experience with said demographic I'm going to go with "both." There's a brilliant bit where some neocon suit with a head full of romantic visions of warmongering tells Hughes that the IRA should widen its target range and start shooting all U.K. state employees, including mail carriers. Hughes invites the guy to come to Belfast and shoot postmen himself if he thinks that's such a great idea; the American, like all chickenhawks, is offended -- he was there to donate money and tell other people what to do, not to do things himself. (I may be editorializing a bit.)

 

While Dolours Price and Brendan Hughes are the most-covered IRA members in this book, it is impossible to talk about them and about the Troubles in general without talking about Gerry Adams. Much of the discussion around Adams revolves around attempting to figure out whether he is a political genius or a sociopath or both, with many of his former comrades leaning toward "both." I found it really interesting to read the perspectives of the people who felt he threw them under the bus during the peace process, and their case is pretty convincing. I came away with the impression that Adams is both a strategic mastermind and probably a fairly damaged person; more recent scandals about his family make it sound to me like he's developed the sort of impeccably opportunistic survival instincts and ability to compartmentalize that most people don't ever have to develop. Anyway, Irish culture is infamous for consisting entirely of papered-over dysfunction, so it's not like he's much of an outlier except for being better at it than anyone else. But the real sticking point with Adams for a lot of people is his ridiculous claim that he was never in the IRA, an absolutely ingenious bit of political kayfabe that he's kept up for just about my entire lifetime. This outrageous act of stonewalling -- cleverly foreshadowed by an anecdote about a time when he waited out an entire three-day interrogation by the British Army by refusing to admit that he was Gerry Adams -- has pissed his former IRA comrades off right good, but also probably allowed for entities like the U.S. to set aside their We Don't Negotiate With Terrists posturing and work toward actually ending the conflict. It also seems necessary for people to be able to vote for him while pretending they're not voting for a war criminal, which, again, as a U.S. leftist, I find kind of unnecessary -- there's a line that's like "even a lot of Sinn Fein voters think he was a terrorist and they vote for him anyway" and I'm like, yes, and? Electoral politics is like that? Do you know how many U.S. politicians turn out to be, like, child molesters and shit? Did you know the airport in my nation's capital is named after the guy who illegally funded right-wing death squads in South America while he was in office? But apparently Irish voters are supposed to not be willing to vote for Gerry Adams if he was in the IRA. Anyway, I'm impressed at the brazenness of the lie, and that it apparently worked.

 

(I saw Gerry Adams give a speech at Arbour Hill Cemetery in Dublin on Easter Weekend 2016; it was great.)

 

I'm not quite sure how to wrap up this review since I think it was pretty all over the place; I just had a lot of thoughts and feelings (and paranoid fantasies). I do think anyone interested in political change should read it if only as a case study in how badly things can go, how little progress can be made at how much human cost, and how deep the human capacity for denial and forgetting is.

P.S. Margaret Thatcher was terrible, fuck her.