I am as disgusted as everyone else (exhibits A, B and C) at what has occurred but have to say that on the basis of the evidence so far I remain completely unconvinced that it necessarily represents a sudden resurgence of Irish Republican terrorism.
Forty years ago nobody would have doubted it for a moment; but that was then, and this is now.
Now we are accustomed to being threatened with all kinds of imaginary bogeymen in order to scare us into allowing our rotten governments to do as they like with us.
Sinn Fein, who used to speak for the IRA, were reported a few minutes ago as having said that the murders were ‘wrong, and counterproductive’. It sounds to me as though they have no idea themselves who did what, but were so embarrassed by remarks made upon their earlier silence that they felt that they had to come up with something.
Bloggers, including me, have been banging on for some time now about how ‘Al-Quaeda’, represented as it is solely by blurry lookalikes on VHS, is hardly as convincing a ‘terrorist organisation’ as was PIRA.
The cynicism and ruthlessness of our own government is quite sufficient for it to see the deaths of a couple of soldiers (who, as it might reason, are paid for this sort of thing) as being justified by the need to convince the public that it must now accept ID cards, total surveillance, laser-branding, subcutaneous soma dispensers or whatever else is featured on the cover of this months’s issue of Government for Fun and Profit [Partwork; ACPO Publications Ltd; each issue contains part of kit which builds into complete model police state; binders extra].
Even if it really was PIRA (who must all be rather elderly by now), or the Real IRA, or the Continuity IRA, or the I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-the-IRA, or whoever, why should we do anything about it at all? Are we not by now already equipped to deal with a ‘terrorist threat’ that is all the more scarey because so much of it is left to the imagination?
I’m struck by the reticence of the media to describe the attack as ‘terrorist’.
Barbaric? Yes
Evil? Yes.
Terrorist? There seems to be an unwillingness to do so. If the protagonists had been chanting ‘Allah akbar’ would that still be the case?
Whether this is an attempt to persuade us that we need ID cards or a genuine sign of a resurgence of the troubles in Northern Ireland it seems pretty poor compared to the suicide attack on the police station in Iraq that wounded or killed over 80 people.
Indeed. However, Occam’s razor does not require the postulation of a vast, omniscient and omnipotent terrorist organisation, led from beyond the grave by a CIA asset, to explain the outrage of people whose country has been invaded.