Hang On —-
This website is all about protecting children and vulnerable people in the Focus Group in Ireland in the 21st Century! And what has rambling on about our attitudes to the Old IRA and the New IRA to do with that?
Actually – it is particularly relevant because it is about power, about who controls the present and future, how our opinions are formed, and what classes of society the Pillars want us to look up to and look down on.
And my polemic is written to illustrate the awesome (and I don’t use that word lightly) power of the Pillars.
In Easter 2016 they were able to get hundreds of thousands of us to participate in, and millions of us to view a stunning, celebratory parade full of triumphalism and pageantry, and beam it all over the world to commemorate a violent event that caused the deaths of hundreds of men, women and children (more civilians than combatants as I said in the previous post) that could have been avoided had those who organised the Rising gone down the non-violent resistance route. (Remember, the Rising led to the War of Independence and Civil War [1] that cost the lives of thousands).
At the same time, the Pillars have also managed to get us to denigrate, belittle and deny the legitimacy of other violent events at a later date which took place for the exact same reason, just because they were led by people who weren’t part of the Pillars.
And (I really hope people get this) the long term and wide ranging impact of that attitude is to continually deny the rights of people who are in the Focus Group to be uppity (to quote Paul Robeson again) when it comes to demanding their rights – while revering those within the Pillars who are uppity!
I will focus on this in a lot more detail in the next Chapter – Power and Control in Society.
And as I will argue in that Chapter, Pillars thinking is prevalent all over the world, reaches into all our lives, and perpetuates the group-think that:
~ Keeps us from appraising courses of action honestly and thinking critically about important matters.
~ Dis-esteems the opinions and judgements of people who are closest to the issues if they are not formally educated.
~ Harshly and unforgivingly judges what people of no importance [2] should or shouldn’t do – if it diverges from Pillars thinking.
~ Decides how very hurt people should behave, but always from a safe distance – of course!
[1]. Of course, many of the Volunteers who joined the Old IRA and IRB were ordinary men (and women) but the leaders were of the Pillars of the time. The leaders of the New (Provisional) IRA sprung mainly from far more humble backgrounds.
[2]. I was reading historical material on our War of Independence, and in the book I was reading it was stated that the Royal Irish Constabulary, in or around 1913, said that the Irish Volunteers would come to nothing because there were not led by people of importance. And it was probably true in 1913! I found it interesting that, at that time, in the UK, the Pillars were, mostly, the gentry and the Church of England. That is, almost all the top jobs in UK were filled by men from the upper classes who had come through the public school system and Oxbridge. This is interesting in that the Pillars are different in different countries at different times. For example, in Iran, the Pillars nowadays are dominated by Muslim clerics, like they were dominated by Catholic clerics up to 50 years ago in Ireland.