Editor:
I had the honor of meeting prominent English journalist John Ware when he spoke some years ago in Washington, D.C. about the Troubles in Northern Ireland. He’s a nice man and an excellent journalist.
So, I read with great interest his recent two-part series in the Irish News, Belfast, “How the justice system shields Britain’s secrets."
As I read, I nodded approvingly with most of it, including his praise for Chief Constable Jon Boutcher. And then the jarring note. Uncalled for, unnecessary, and disappointing.
Even John Ware reveals his fear of “the bridge too far”—the fear of most English journalists that in criticizing His/Her Majesty’s Forces in Northern Ireland, they may be seen as having gone soft on the IRA, and they, therefore, have to scream from the rooftops their loyalty to the Crown Forces.
So, John Ware, Pavlovian-like, declares, to protect his flank: “Inevitably this has led to the legacy spotlight being trained much more on the role of the state than the IRA, whose leaders have sought to spin the yarn that it was the British state that was murderous.
Those of us who lived and worked in Belfast through the 70s and 80s know the comparison is as risible as it is offensive.”
Well, dear John, if you want to maintain that the history of Irish resistance to England’s cruel 856 years of domination of Ireland is actually worse than England’s genocidal violence (not only in Ireland, but throughout its racist, sectarian, and terrorist Empire), then you are perpetuating the Big Lie.
You should read the classic "Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire," by Harvard professor Caroline Elkins. She is neither Catholic nor Fenian, as far as I know.
No matter how much one personally favors non-violence, one cannot pretend to ignore the logic, justice, and truth of Liberation Theology’s analysis of the root of violence: violence number one is the violence of oppression/denial of national self-determination and independence; violence number two is when the oppressed demand justice, the oppressor, responds with increased repressive violence; and violence number three is the almost inevitable violence of revolution—for as John F. Kennedy said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
Time for England to give up the Big Lie. Allow journalists to speak the truth without having to cravenly prove their loyalty to the Crown. Make reparations for its Legacy of Violence in Ireland for 856 years, and counting.
Fr. Sean McManus
Washington, D.C. The writer is founder and president of the Irish National Caucus
