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Thread: Martin McGuinness is dead.

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    Quote Originally Posted by William View Post
    Excellent post (as always), but were you told at school that the IRA was almost totally supported and funded by Americans?

    I still don't know why.
    Because many Americans were sympathetic to the anti-imperialist spirit of the insurgency and because many Americans are of Irish descent. Sometimes I wonder if rebelliousness has a genetic component.
    Power always thinks it has a great soul, and vast views, beyond the comprehension of the weak. And that it is doing God service when it is violating all His laws.
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    Quote Originally Posted by William View Post
    Excellent post (as always), but were you told at school that the IRA was almost totally supported and funded by Americans?
    I went to school in a very Conservative part of the country in the 1960s, so it's highly unlikely that we were.

    I don't really know anything about the funding situation you refer to, though I'm sure you're probably right. Wealthy Irish-Americans? A lot of small-ish contributions from Irish expats and their heritage-conscious descendants? Probably a bit of both, I'd guess. Americans do love a rebel or a freedom fighter...assuming he's an acceptable color, and especially if he has a charming accent and tells funny stories.
    Last edited by Standing Wolf; 03-24-2017 at 12:16 AM.
    Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.” - Robert E. Howard

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    Quote Originally Posted by Standing Wolf View Post
    I went to school in a very Conservative part of the country in the 1960s, so it's highly unlikely that we were.

    I don't really know anything about the funding situation you refer to, though I'm sure you're probably right. Wealthy Irish-Americans? A lot of small-ish contributions from Irish expats and their heritage-conscious descendants? Probably a bit of both, I'd guess. Americans do love a rebel or a freedom fighter...assuming he's an acceptable color, and especially if he has a charming accent and tells funny stories.
    Just to be clear about this, it wasn't the US government which was funding the IRA, but even though his friend Margaret Thatcher repeatedly asked President Reagan to do something about it (as the IRA was and is a terrorist organisation,) he refused to interfere. I don't know what he could have done, but he didn't want to know, so I suspect he sympathised with the IRA's aims.

    Maybe these quotes can let you see that I am not making it up.

    NORAID or the Irish Northern Aid Committee is an Irish American fundraising organization founded after the start of the Troubles in Northern Ireland in 1969, best known for raising funds for the Provisional Irish Republican Army.

    NORAID was organized and directed by Michael Flannery, who in the 1920s was a member of the IRA North Tipperary Brigade.[1]

    Unionist politicians and the British, Irish and United States governments have accused NORAID of being a front for the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA), and that it was involved in fundraising for IRA arms importation from North America since the early 1970s.[2][3][4][5] This accusation has always been denied by NORAID. NORAID's former leader, Martin Galvin, was banned from the United Kingdom in the 1980s.[3] The charge was also disputed by historian Ed Moloney who stated that the funds raised by NORAID went largely to the families of IRA volunteers, and that Clan na Gael was the principal financial backer of the Provisional IRA.[6]

    By the late 1980s NORAID was a loose federation of local branches centred on fundraising. Sinn Féin, the political party associated with the IRA, wanted NORAID to expand its activities. At the end of 1988, NORAID agreed to try to broaden its appeal and its executive committee was expanded. Sinn Féin sent an organizer to the United States, and more time and money was devoted to lobbying and propaganda.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NORAID

    Compassionate people would agree that there is no excuse for terrorism, and by extension, there is no excuse for supporting it.

    And yet thousands of Americans, including people who live in Boston, gave millions of dollars to NORAID which was used to buy guns and Semtex and support the Provisional IRA terrorist infrastructure.

    Perhaps it is easy to support terrorism when the impact – explosions, deaths and life-changing injuries – isn’t on your doorstep. It’s easy to support a war when you can romanticise the conflict from a distance, telling yourself it’s all about your cultural heritage, especially when you don’t have to live with the consequences of bombs and interminable bomb scares.

    However, in my view, you cannot draw a distinction between what happened on Monday and the terrorist bombs which targeted so many cities in England. They may be separated in time by 10 or 20 years, but there is no difference.

    With a jury having now sentenced Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to death for his role in the bombing of the 2013 Boston Marathon, is it time for the historical misguided popular support for NORAID to, if not publicly, apologise for their actions and to question how different they are in reality to Tsarnaev?
    http://www.securitynewsdesk.com/opin...nces-over-ira/
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    Quote Originally Posted by Standing Wolf View Post
    I went to school in a very Conservative part of the country in the 1960s, so it's highly unlikely that we were.

    I don't really know anything about the funding situation you refer to, though I'm sure you're probably right. Wealthy Irish-Americans? A lot of small-ish contributions from Irish expats and their heritage-conscious descendants? Probably a bit of both, I'd guess. Americans do love a rebel or a freedom fighter...assuming he's an acceptable color, and especially if he has a charming accent and tells funny stories.
    Irish-Americans provided lots of funding towards Irish independence and the various insurgencies that emerged within that context.
    Power always thinks it has a great soul, and vast views, beyond the comprehension of the weak. And that it is doing God service when it is violating all His laws.
    --John Adams

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    Quote Originally Posted by William View Post
    I don't know what he could have done, but he didn't want to know, so I suspect he sympathised with the IRA's aims.
    It was probably related to the domestic political minefield he would have encountered had he tried to do something. Irish-Americans are a large and influential political bloc within America.
    Power always thinks it has a great soul, and vast views, beyond the comprehension of the weak. And that it is doing God service when it is violating all His laws.
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    Quote Originally Posted by del View Post
    i said i ignore your opinions, zippy, and it's really easy to do. your real life cliff claven is amusing, though, and i have no intention of depriving myself of it. carry on
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    Last edited by DGUtley; 03-24-2017 at 02:31 AM.
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    I wasn't doubting you in any way, William - just confessing my ignorance about that aspect of the situation.

    My first thought was, "What could the federal government have done about private citizens sending their own money to those organizations?" Then I remembered all the stories currently in the news about Americans going to prison for contributing to agencies and causes that turn out to be fronts for terrorists. Again, though, the specter of ethnocentrism arises; are we quicker to label a group "terrorist" and create sanctions against their supporters if their race or religion is such that we find it more difficult to identify with them?
    Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.” - Robert E. Howard

    "Only a rank degenerate would drive 1,500 miles across Texas and not eat a chicken fried steak." - Larry McMurtry

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    Quote Originally Posted by midcan5 View Post
    Don't know enough except that it was bad time for all.

    "The difference between political terror and ordinary crime becomes clear during the change of regimes, in which former terrorists become well-regarded representatives of their country." Jurgen Habermas

    http://www.irishtimes.com/business/m...eath-1.3020092

    https://www.theguardian.com/politics...talks-continue
    And "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter."

    News is written or massaged by the current, always-embattled, power structure; history is written by the victors in the struggle.
    Wearing a mask with your nose sticking out is like wearing a condom on your testicles.

    When out walking, look out for PROBlems. You know: maskless Plague Rats On Bicycles who blow past you without giving you time to get out of the way.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Bethere View Post
    Terrorism is seldom viewed the same way on both sides of the street. My country's founding fathers/hero patriots would now be viewed as economic terrorists by many of my Republican friends.

    One man's tea party is another man's terrorist act. It's a matter of perspective and it's a matter of ethnocentrism.

    Consider this. I drop a bomb on a house from 40,000 feet. Am I somehow more righteous than a suicide car bomber who achieves the same result at street level?

    Consider this as well, the last time parliament saw an attack that resulted in a death was no doubt that sein fein car bomb.

    One is sanctioned by the established alpha male global hierarchy. The other by the upstart cubs who challenge it with local temper tantrums.

    And God is always on your side.
    Wearing a mask with your nose sticking out is like wearing a condom on your testicles.

    When out walking, look out for PROBlems. You know: maskless Plague Rats On Bicycles who blow past you without giving you time to get out of the way.

    Ah, CONServatives, the Masters of Projection (MOPs). With CONServatives, every accusation is a confession. Weird, that.

    ............Oh, what fresh hell is this?
    ,,,........¯¯\_(ツ)_/¯¯
    ....... Not my circus, not my monkeys

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    Quote Originally Posted by Standing Wolf View Post
    I've made similar arguments in the past, and have had people tell me that it's not terrorism if its a military action approved by a legitimate sovereign government. Then, of course, the caveats commence... It usually ends up with it "not being terrorism" if it's an action approved by the U.S. government or that of one of our allies.

    A scenario I've often conjured is that of a drone-launched missile strike on the suburban Virginia home of a senior Pentagon planner that kills the military official, his family and several of his neighbors. Terrorist attack or military action?

    Thank you so much for this post. Includes a very nice collection of what I'm pretty sure are six Carnivore/Echelon keyword sets, all in one convenient short paragraph (keyword density is an important metric). As a registered member of this forum, it's comforting to know that if my PC ever dies, I can now contact the NSA for a backup copy of all my data.
    Wearing a mask with your nose sticking out is like wearing a condom on your testicles.

    When out walking, look out for PROBlems. You know: maskless Plague Rats On Bicycles who blow past you without giving you time to get out of the way.

    Ah, CONServatives, the Masters of Projection (MOPs). With CONServatives, every accusation is a confession. Weird, that.

    ............Oh, what fresh hell is this?
    ,,,........¯¯\_(ツ)_/¯¯
    ....... Not my circus, not my monkeys

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