Brisfimid Maggie Thatcher
Dec. 6th, 2023 10:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileI don’t remember exactly how this book first came into my view but sometime in the last two months, when I’ve been thinking a lot about political violence and strategies for change and intractable conflicts that are popularly miscast as solely sectarian violence, I became aware that there was a recently released new book about the Troubles, titled There Will Be Fire: Margaret Thatcher, the IRA, and the Two Minutes that Changed History, by Guardian columnist Rory Carroll.
This book is structured similarly to Say Nothing in that it focuses on one event of the Troubles, and tries to build the fullest possible picture of that event–before, during, after, context, interviews with the major players (except Gerry Adams, who refuses to ever be interviewed for these things because he still maintains he was never in the IRA), the occasional photo. This one is weighted a bit less on the “history of the entire Troubles” end, probably because the actual operation of the Brighton bombing and the subsequent manhunt for Patrick Magee was somewhat more complex than the murder of Jean McConville. It situates the England Department within the rest of the IRA and the discussions about strategy and resource allocation that were going on in the IRA and its political wing, Sinn Fein.
After having just finished Let This Radicalize You and If We Burn, I found the strategy talk to be some of the most interesting stuff in the book–despite pearl-clutching from the respectable media there’s actually an enormous difference between organizing strategies that don’t involve armed struggle (known in the official literature as “nonviolent resistance,” although in popular parlance the designation of nonviolence can be revoked for any reason whatsoever) and organizing strategies in which shootings, bombings, and arson are the main tools one’s repertoire of resistance. But at the same time, it would appear that questions about burnout, opsec, training, not talking to cops, PR, public sympathy, the limits and contradictions of any given strategy, internal diplomacy, and resource allocation are fairly constant across any organization that is trying to effect political change. I find myself once again impressed by the IRA’s creative strategic thinking–combining the hunger strikes, which had gotten easy to ignore, with election campaigns, which necessarily force attention upon the candidate as an individual, was a stroke of genius that saved what seems like would have been an otherwise ineffective act of self-destruction; I also think Sinn Fein’s policy of abstentionism is the only way I’ve ever seen of disrupting or signaling illegitimacy in an elected government that isn’t self-defeating at worst or irrelevant at best. (Not contesting elections is a perfectly fine strategy for groups that aren’t interested in the electoral sphere or don’t have the resources to stand elections, but it certainly doesn’t exert any power within the electoral sphere, no matter what goofy shit you tell yourself about “not legitimizing” or “boycotting” or whatever. Standing an election, winning it, and then refusing to take the oath of fealty to the Crown or haul your ass to Westminster at least keeps the seat out of the hands of your political enemies, and allows you to do constituent services.)
Anyway, back to the bombing. This was a meticulously planned operation, and Carroll gets us inside the heads of both the IRA operatives involved with carrying it out, several of the Conservative Party targets and victims (not always quite the same thing–Thatcher was really the target, although I don’t think the republicans would have been upset if the execrable Norman Tebbit had got got), and a whole slew of police detectives, bomb disposal technicians, fingerprint experts, and other law enforcement and anti-terrorism personnel across at least a dozen different jurisdictions and departments, with working relationships to each other in varying degrees of functionality. The investigative work on display in this book is both riveting to read and an interesting look into what solving public safety threats can look like when the cops don’t have endless guns and free reign to just bust anyone’s heads that they feel like. A key quality on display was patience, in this case necessitated by political realities rather than any personal virtues of the cops in question: Magee spent quite a while on the lam at Ballymun Towers outside of Dublin, in the Republic where the English police didn’t have jurisdiction. England, for various reasons, wasn’t in a hurry to start another full-blown war with the Republic, and as such, simply airstriking Ballymun Towers to rubble wasn’t on the table. So instead they waited. This, as a quick look at the news will tell you, is not the only possible response of governments to terrorism; the political conditions have to make it not just the sensible and humane thing to do, but the only course of action that’s not suicidally costly.
Anyway, political analysis aside (it’s so hard for me to set it aside right now though!), this is a ripping good read. We get cameos from well-known shady characters in the IRA weapons pipeline, like Whitey Bulger and Muammar Gaddafi; we learn about bomb technology, Victorian engineering, and the art of fingerprint analysis; no detail is spared in the grisly account of the explosion and its aftermath. Carroll manages to mostly keep his own opinions out of the picture, but does a very good job with both dry, understated humor and in humanizing–not necessarily sympathizing with, but definitely humanizing–all parties involved. The actual historical events do more or less follow a conventional story structure–the plot is hatched, planned, and carried out, then the investigation is conducted and the perpetrators are caught and imprisoned. In the epilogue, to the degree that real life has epilogues, they are let out early as a result of the Good Friday Agreement. As we leave off, the Conservative Party’s paranoia and meanness had led to Brexit, opening up the tantalizing possibility that Ireland might, at some point in the near future, actually be reunited–democratically, by referendum. This is not to say that the Brighton bombing didn’t accomplish anything or that Violence Doesn’t Work or anything that simplistic–indeed, the psychological damage it inflicted upon Thatcher’s party may well have been part of what got Britain to this point. History is a funny old thing like that.
This book is structured similarly to Say Nothing in that it focuses on one event of the Troubles, and tries to build the fullest possible picture of that event–before, during, after, context, interviews with the major players (except Gerry Adams, who refuses to ever be interviewed for these things because he still maintains he was never in the IRA), the occasional photo. This one is weighted a bit less on the “history of the entire Troubles” end, probably because the actual operation of the Brighton bombing and the subsequent manhunt for Patrick Magee was somewhat more complex than the murder of Jean McConville. It situates the England Department within the rest of the IRA and the discussions about strategy and resource allocation that were going on in the IRA and its political wing, Sinn Fein.
After having just finished Let This Radicalize You and If We Burn, I found the strategy talk to be some of the most interesting stuff in the book–despite pearl-clutching from the respectable media there’s actually an enormous difference between organizing strategies that don’t involve armed struggle (known in the official literature as “nonviolent resistance,” although in popular parlance the designation of nonviolence can be revoked for any reason whatsoever) and organizing strategies in which shootings, bombings, and arson are the main tools one’s repertoire of resistance. But at the same time, it would appear that questions about burnout, opsec, training, not talking to cops, PR, public sympathy, the limits and contradictions of any given strategy, internal diplomacy, and resource allocation are fairly constant across any organization that is trying to effect political change. I find myself once again impressed by the IRA’s creative strategic thinking–combining the hunger strikes, which had gotten easy to ignore, with election campaigns, which necessarily force attention upon the candidate as an individual, was a stroke of genius that saved what seems like would have been an otherwise ineffective act of self-destruction; I also think Sinn Fein’s policy of abstentionism is the only way I’ve ever seen of disrupting or signaling illegitimacy in an elected government that isn’t self-defeating at worst or irrelevant at best. (Not contesting elections is a perfectly fine strategy for groups that aren’t interested in the electoral sphere or don’t have the resources to stand elections, but it certainly doesn’t exert any power within the electoral sphere, no matter what goofy shit you tell yourself about “not legitimizing” or “boycotting” or whatever. Standing an election, winning it, and then refusing to take the oath of fealty to the Crown or haul your ass to Westminster at least keeps the seat out of the hands of your political enemies, and allows you to do constituent services.)
Anyway, back to the bombing. This was a meticulously planned operation, and Carroll gets us inside the heads of both the IRA operatives involved with carrying it out, several of the Conservative Party targets and victims (not always quite the same thing–Thatcher was really the target, although I don’t think the republicans would have been upset if the execrable Norman Tebbit had got got), and a whole slew of police detectives, bomb disposal technicians, fingerprint experts, and other law enforcement and anti-terrorism personnel across at least a dozen different jurisdictions and departments, with working relationships to each other in varying degrees of functionality. The investigative work on display in this book is both riveting to read and an interesting look into what solving public safety threats can look like when the cops don’t have endless guns and free reign to just bust anyone’s heads that they feel like. A key quality on display was patience, in this case necessitated by political realities rather than any personal virtues of the cops in question: Magee spent quite a while on the lam at Ballymun Towers outside of Dublin, in the Republic where the English police didn’t have jurisdiction. England, for various reasons, wasn’t in a hurry to start another full-blown war with the Republic, and as such, simply airstriking Ballymun Towers to rubble wasn’t on the table. So instead they waited. This, as a quick look at the news will tell you, is not the only possible response of governments to terrorism; the political conditions have to make it not just the sensible and humane thing to do, but the only course of action that’s not suicidally costly.
Anyway, political analysis aside (it’s so hard for me to set it aside right now though!), this is a ripping good read. We get cameos from well-known shady characters in the IRA weapons pipeline, like Whitey Bulger and Muammar Gaddafi; we learn about bomb technology, Victorian engineering, and the art of fingerprint analysis; no detail is spared in the grisly account of the explosion and its aftermath. Carroll manages to mostly keep his own opinions out of the picture, but does a very good job with both dry, understated humor and in humanizing–not necessarily sympathizing with, but definitely humanizing–all parties involved. The actual historical events do more or less follow a conventional story structure–the plot is hatched, planned, and carried out, then the investigation is conducted and the perpetrators are caught and imprisoned. In the epilogue, to the degree that real life has epilogues, they are let out early as a result of the Good Friday Agreement. As we leave off, the Conservative Party’s paranoia and meanness had led to Brexit, opening up the tantalizing possibility that Ireland might, at some point in the near future, actually be reunited–democratically, by referendum. This is not to say that the Brighton bombing didn’t accomplish anything or that Violence Doesn’t Work or anything that simplistic–indeed, the psychological damage it inflicted upon Thatcher’s party may well have been part of what got Britain to this point. History is a funny old thing like that.