From: Charlie Stross <charlie@antipope.org>
>I'm not "pretending" anything; I'm just highly pissed off with a
>common American reaction -- to blame one side for a civil war,
>when both sides are pretty much evenly to blame (judging by the
>number of murders).
Lets skip this one for the moment.
>The hard men with the guns are all a bunch of bloodthirsty clowns,
>and we'd all be better off without them. But arguing that the
>problem is "British imperialism" is to reduce it to an absurd
>proposition. Sure, the original invasion of Ireland in the 17th
>century was reprehensible. Sure, the actions of the settlers'
>descendants since then were also bad. But pulling the British
>government out of the North right now isn't going to fix that;
>it's just going to make the UVF start on a rampage of ethnic
>cleansing, and make the pIRA or the cIRA or whatever they call
>themselves this week retaliate in kind.
We agree that this needs to end, we still seem to disagree on the
methods.
The first step should be to remove all British troops. This will be
unpopular for obvious reasons. I have written both the president
and the U.N. secretary general and proposed this.
>There seems to be a cultural assumption ingrained in a lot of
>Americans that in any conflict, there must be a bunch of goodies
>and a bunch of baddies, and all that is necessary is to identify
>the good guys and side with them. This is one struggle where the
>bad guys are distributed evenly on all sides -- if you want to
>root for someone, root for the peace process and the politicians
>sitting around the negotiating table and _talking_ to each other
>about how to get _all_ the guns and bombs off the street. Those
>guys understand that any peace settlement has to be multilateral;
>even the British government has accepted that proposition (since
>Margaret Thatcher was forced to quit).
There are tens of millions of people of Irish decent here in
America that maintain close ties with "Home", in one of my favorite
hangouts Gaelic is the majority tongue.
Clearly those wishing to retain British ties will require dual
citizenship.
But anything other than a unified Ireland will be unacceptable to
most everyone I know.
From: Charlie Stross <charlie@antipope.org>
>Who is this "you" you're talking about, white man? I'm a Jewish
>Brit of Polish descent who lives in Scotland and votes for
>Scottish independence at every opportunity.
I'm Welsh, English, Scotish, Irish on my fathers side, and Polish
on Moms. Our people came to America in 1642 (Georgia now).
>And if you'd bothered reading up on the field you might have come
>across the interesting statistic that something like 85% of the GB
>population favours pulling the GB out of NI and letting the
>buggers kill each other ... stereotyping people by attributing the
>foreign policy of their government to them as personal opinion
>isn't exactly a good way of figuring out what's going on anywhere,
>is it? Or would you like me to blame you for Janet Reno's actions
>on the grounds that, being American, you must logically support
>her?
It's good to know 85% of the GB population agrees with me.
So I guess my comments should be amended to read "British
Government" instead. Please consider them amended as such.
Brian
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