THE SICILIAN CONNECTION
Herb Greer says the IRA's
refusal to disarm is to do with crime, not politics
THAT 'process' in Ulster has little or nothing to with 'peace'. Announcements of this admirable aim are like the wiggling fingers of a magician's right hand, held high to distract attention from the ace of spades he is slipping out of his lower-left jacket pocket. Beginning with the name, the whole scaffolding of the 'process' has been constructed of broken promises and lies, cobbled together with the traditional British stupidity when dealing with any- thing on John Bull's Other Island.
In a fine sample of the mendacity which has coloured his Ulster policy, Tony Blair claimed that an 'imperfect' peace was bet- ter than no peace at all. In fact there is no peace at all in Ulster. The low-intensity civil war there continues unabated, as it has since the Good Friday Agreement, marked by (mostly IRA) murders, may- hem, bombs, riots and the continued threat of more of the same. In pretending otherwise, Blair and the egregious Mo Mowlam have treated the British public like idiots and simpletons, and the British public has shrugged.
But what is really going on? Why is this insulting farce being played to an indifferent electorate? The Americans are involved because they harbour the only significant constituency for Sinn Fein/IRA (which helps to explain the obvious sympathy for the Republicans expressed in Senator Mitchell's misleadingly titled memoir, Making Peace). What is the rationale of a 'peace process' that involves no peace at all?
Put simply, all this lying and pseudo- impartial tomfoolery is meant to create in Ulster a sort of political limbo, neither British nor Irish, in which — Tony and Bertie and the Senator clearly hope Loyalist resistance to a United Ireland will quietly erode and in time allow Ulster to slip into a United Ireland. This purpose shines through all the emetic courting of Gerry Adams, through the treatment of his terrorist cabal as a legitimate political party, and makes sense out of an otherwise incredible blend of lying and stupidity on the British side, plus the untruths and (I fear) typical disingenuousness on the Irish side. (For practical purposes the Americans may be counted with the Irish in this respect.) As for the Loyalists, successfully demonised by a government and media which have swallowed and regurgitated every gobbet of Sinn Fein/IRA propagan- da about them, they are simply not to be considered in this. They are seen as a pro tern annoyance, and nothing more.
So much for the intention. The actual accomplishment is something quite differ- ent, with a certain historical analogy with the Sicilian Mafia. Like the IRA, the Mafia began as a popular movement which rejected the authority of rulers they saw as oppressive. Over the centuries the resis- tance character of the movement began to fade, and it became a purely criminal enterprise, living by the code of omerta a silence which demanded humility before the leaders and in no circumstances per- mitted any recourse to legal authorities for the righting of wrongs.
The 19th and early 20th centuries saw the Mafia firmly embedded in Sicilian and then in Italian society and politics. The organisa- tion, primarily rural in its base, was almost destroyed by Mussolini in the 1920s, but survived, and was transplanted to American soil, where it came to dominate organised crime. Its recovery in Italy was strengthened by the American authorities during the sec- ond world war in exchange for help during their military campaigns. It flourished in urban areas after the war, moving into industry, construction, business and — of course — politics.
It is one of the quirks of contemporary history that as the Mafia's influence fades in America and Italy, a similar organisation is taking root in the British Isles. Like the Mafia, the violent Republican movement faded for a while, recovering after a suc- cessful infiltration of the Ulster civil rights movement in the late Sixties, adorned with the name 'Provisional IRA'. Despite a nom- inally Marxist tinge, the Provos (later with Sinn Fein as a front) displayed typically fas- cist traits: virulent irredentism based on his- torical and racial myth (there is no Celtic race, and the 'Ancient Irish nation' never existed); dehumanising of opponents, both British and Ulster Protestants; use of con- spiracy and intimidation, with mutilation and death for punishing dissenters; exploita- tion of Jacobin rhetoric about human rights, while wholly flouting those rights; and the insistent and stubborn use of lies.
As the Troubles developed, successive British governments developed a certain wariness towards Ulster. With New Labour this has developed into a clear intention to be rid of the dangerous and expensive province — which fits nicely into a policy (barely adumbrated so far) of breaking up the United Kingdom into Euro-regions. The 'peace process' has thus gradually dulled the political edge and rationale of Republican irredentism.
Meanwhile the heavily armed terrorists have begun, as the Mafia did, a transfor- mation into a purely criminal organisa- tion, with Sinn Fein as its 'respectable' political front. Like the Mafia, they are into business, construction, protection rackets and, latterly, drugs, with unautho- rised dealers and other 'social undesir- ables' given the treatment formerly reserved for dissenters. Anyone who is familiar with the patterns and atmosphere of New York's Little Italy in the 1930s will find much that is familiar today in the Sinn Fein-dominated parishes of Ulster. Clearly none of this would be possible if Sinn Fein/IRA were to give up any signifi- cant quantity of its weaponry. It is, prima facie, that transition into a British Isles Mafia, and not an increasingly pointless irredentism, that explains Sinn Fein/IRA's tenacious hold on its arsenal.
The most amusing — not to say staggering — aspect of this development is its encour- agement by the British, Irish and American governments. The craven cowardice of British authorities in the face of a domestic terrorism which they have never properly confronted, plus the deviousness of the Irish government, plus the rather more despica- ble US courting of the ignorant, the vicious, the blockheaded among their shanty Irish and radical chic (in short, their vicarious ter- rorists who, alas, have votes), all of this has combined — with an evident disdain of sovereignty among the British themselves — to build a sound underpinning and a façade of political respectability for the only fascist criminal cabal in Europe that is actually (and successfully) confronting a legitimate democratic state.
If this were happening behind the scenes it would be bad enough. But it is taking place in full view of the electorate on this island — and they seem not to give a damn. What that says about the British, I hesitate to put into words. But it is nothing good.
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