What Does the Last Half-Century in Northern Ireland Portend for the Next Stop in U.S. History?
Gary Tulie writes something I thought I’d share, with a few brief words of my own at the bottom:
In the early 1970’s Northern Ireland was a tense place with widespread sectarian tensions, and a broadly justifiable perception by the predominantly Catholic Nationalist community that they were not being given equal respect and opportunity to their Protestant Unionist counterparts resulting in a number of incidents of sectarian attacks which left unchecked could have resulted in ethnic cleansing. British troops were brought in to try to keep the two groups apart.
On Sunday 30th January 1972 in Londonderry (Derry to the Nationalist community) 10,000 Catholic civil rights demonstrators confronted British soldiers of the Parachute regiment.
The demonstration started out as illegal but peaceful but as it went on some of the demonstrators threw stones and other projectiles. The soldiers responded with rubber bullets and water cannon, then attempted to move in and make mass arrests.
At this point, what happened next is contested with different accounts from the demonstrators and the soldiers. Whatever the exact details, whether someone took a shot at one of the soldiers or whether perhaps a loud noise led a soldier to believe they were under firearms attack, the Paratroopers opened fire shooting 26 people 13 of whom died immediately at the scene with one more dying of wounds some time later.
This triggered the most bloody phase of the Northern Ireland troubles which in total killed more than 3,500 people over a 30 year period.
Armed demonstrations at state capitals and similar planned for next week in my view run a very high risk that a rogue individual, or nervous national guard troops might start a firefight with an outcome similar to or worse than the Bloody Sunday incident – possibly up to and including one or more militia groups going into full open conflict with national guard troops on the streets of any one of the 50 state capitals!
Oh, trust me, I’m completely terrified. There are ~54 million voters who think the election was stolen, almost all them with educations from hell, armed to the teeth, believing that it’s their duty to overthrow the new government that “usurped” the presidency. If this doesn’t erupt into deadly violence, it will be a miracle.
