Real Peace

The President of Ireland Michael D. Higgins made a speech to the United Nations General Assembly a few days ago in New York.

It was a quietly brilliant speech.

The United Nations like the old League of Nations was born out of war, war is in its system. If that were not so it would never have contemplated giving major powers of decision-making, or of hindering decision-making, to their members who were biggest, potentially the richest and militarily the most powerful. But that is what they did. Being born out of war the UN was concerned with opposing aggression, and "aggression" was often defined by its most powerful members, not its weakest; with stabilising fragile ceasefires, creeping gradually towards the idea that, as one of those great powers' leaders Mr Trump says, The answer to a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun; trying to stabilise power between  nations who have nuclear weapons rather than courageously and effectively working to ban  nuclear weapons altogether; supporting commercial sanctions in full knowledge that trade and loss of trade are two important causes of war not of stopping it.........

The strength of President Higgins' speech to the UN this week was that he looked above and beyond the idea of trying to beat war-makers at their own game, that is, condoning or encouraging the international arms race in the inhumane hope that the "good guy" will always have a bigger nuclear button than anyone else. He or she may well have a smaller range of moral responsibility.

Michael D Higgins did what real peace makers do,  proclaimed the difference between stopping wars and making peace. Wars are stopped when one side is defeated and we human beings are never content to stay beaten, so ending wars by defeating enemies will be a game to last forever. The United Nations has presided over  international  destruction of peace by permanent war, international tragi-comedy of powerful leaders behaving like children and  arms manufacturers forcing children to behave like soldiers. The United Nations needs, and never has had, an ideal of making peace. Managing wars, or even managing cease-fires is a tactic not an ideal.

From time to time a ray of light appears in this gloomy Nursery of Nations. Perhaps we have become too easily satisfied. It is reasonable to suggest then that if the United Nations really wanted to make peace, or knew about making peace as distinct from letting people taunt and torture each other into war and then pretending to stop  the unstoppable, it would constantly engage its members in the practical tasks of international good behaviour and sanction their members for refusing to do carry them out.  Providing enough water for the world population is a do-able task and in many places could be done for thousands of people for the price of a single missile.  So which government  will instruct its  representatives at the UN to say this, and keep saying it until even the United Nations listens and shouts with rage to the scientists and the merchants and the powerful not just to get our people out of poverty but to help our people advance into prosperity, to stop using your genius to make profits out of death, start making life out of your profits.

"The young of the world are appalled by any suggestion... that the strut of the powerful and the wielders of power can prevail in the UN Security Council........... It is an affront to humanity that, in these first decades of the twenty-first century with all its promise, at a time when we have the capacity to abolish all forms of human poverty, we share a planet with hundreds of millions who are, even as we speak here today, deprived of their most fundamental rights...........It is not nothing less than a moral outrage that our boundless capacity for creativity and innovation, and the fruits of new science and technology, are turned, not to the promotion and preservation of peace, but to the pursuit and prosecution of war"  (President of Ireland Michael D Higgins, April 24th 2018).

The war-makers have shown the United Nations how powerful they are.

The small nations of the world can be powerful too and now they must show it.

President Higgins needs our support.

GAS ATTACK WITNESS

On the day USA, French and British governments were preparing their unauthorised response to an unproven gas attack on civilians in Syria a Belfast man Jim Mc Cann was preparing to launch a book about a real gas attack on prisoners in N.Ireland that was  authorised by the British government.  Survivors of  this attack have spent nearly a half a century trying to make governments admit that the weapon was CR gas. and accept the consequences of what they did.

The survivors' account of the attack has  never been refuted and  the British government has not yet seriously tried to refute it.  But the prisoners' history of it is clear and could not be more damning:

It was in October 1974. Helicopters flew over Long Kesh/Maze prison camp a few miles from Belfast  and dropped clusters of gas-carrying devices containing the highly toxic CR gas. The British Government developed this gas in the late 1950s and early 1960s.  In March 1974 it was issued to the Long Kesh prison guards, 200 hand held spray devices were put in store there, although it is said that they failed to sell the gas to the USA. as highly dangerous, with likely cancerous and mutagenic effects. Members of the British Army, SAS, were trained to use it as a weapon from helicopters with safety to themselves. The effects of CR gas are different from the CS gas often used in N.Ireland streets. CS gas attacks eyes and lungs and people devised some protection against it. CR gas however is very different. In the Long Kesh attack of October 1974 prisoners had "the sensation of drowning", the same effect as that produced by water-boarding which was also authorised by the British Government and used from the early nineteen seventies. Water-boarding was used - and approved- in Sing Sing ,USA, prison until prison reform there about 1920 revised their normal torture procedures . It is still used by USA, British and other military.  

Jim Mc Cann and others have been working since that October 1974 to make Government admit  CR gas was indeed the weapon used in that attack. It has been a long task, not helped by government agencies. 12 to 15 % of the prisoners attacked have since  been diagnosed with cancer including leukaemia and various lung diseases. The British MOD ( Ministry of Defence, the title replacing that of Ministry of War in the governmental campaigns to make all their military attacks abroad appear  "necessary for national security").

After the October 1974 attack prisoners were blood-tested from samples taken by the MOD . But the  former prisoners have found, not surprisingly, that their " medical records have disappeared" especially those for 1974. And no-one is now admitting they were the persons even taking the blood samples, let alone analysing them!

Jim's book is available in bookshops including that of Irish Republican History Museum Conway Street  Belfast BT 13 2DE., Springhill Community House and  local shops.

Meanwhile somebody somewhere will certainly see those one hundred and five  missiles fired against Syria as partly - perhaps mostly - a commercial operation to show what percentage of the manufacturers' interceptors will actually bring missiles down. Expensive demo, unethical, yes, but the arms business is not short of a few dollars, pounds and euros for advertising.

Including our money.

Undiplomatic ?

 

Recently the government in Dublin decided to expel one Russian Diplomat. Mr Varadkar the Taoiseach authorised the expulsion. This, like the expulsion of Russian diplomats from other countries was in solidarity with other members of the European Union and the USA following the attack on  two people in an English city.  It was a show of solidarity rarely seen in international affairs, done with speed and confidence. Not however with sufficient evidence that it should have been done.

It might have been expected that a government in Dublin would have demanded sufficient evidence of Russian involvement in the attack , evidence it could present publicly to the Dáil and to the people.  Now the injured people have been taken away to some place where security and secrecy are assured.

Those of us with long memories recall how on some historic occasions government in Dublin was not so cooperative to requests which were really demands. When Mr De Valera was creating a new Constitution for the state he came under pressure from interests in Continental Europe to grant in the  Constitution a special position for the R. Catholic Church as the approved church in the state. He refused. Instead he gave the Church a rather grudging place in it as the religion of the majority of the population. It was a bit like saying Irish people had a special position in Ireland because most of the inhabitants were Irish.

Later  in 1944   Mr de Valera came under severe pressure from the USA and Britain to expel German and Japanese diplomats . He refused.

He came under severe pressure also  to give up control of ports which London had kept after conceding limited independence to Ireland.  He  refused.

There are arguments for and against what he did and why he did it. But there can be little argument about the determination and assuredness with which he did it. He believed that, having achieved some independence, that independence had to be maintained in face of pressures from outside. It was different however in 1932 when, in response to pressure from within, Mr de Valera's  party  succeeded in expelling - illegally - an Irishman Jim Gralton, inflicting on him the  added  inconvenience of Jim having to pay his own fare out of the country. What would have happened had Mr De Valera given in to the demands for expulsion of German and Japanese diplomats? Or to demands to make the R. Catholic  Church a state church?  Or if his party had not given in to internal pressure to expel Jim Gralton, whose offence against Ireland was real - he had built a community hall for independent education after all?

Or what would happen if Mr. Varadkar said No to people who insisted on solidarity with them , rather than evidence from everybody else ?

There has always been a fear that the  European Union may  become a United States Of Europe, highly centralised decision making, including ethical decisions, highly centralised military, highly centralised standards of behaviour - solidarity with accusers rather than demands for evidence  against  presumed offenders. That need not be allowed to happen - membership of a community means not just obeying  other members , it means also shaping the way we are going, so at times firm refusals are required. The European Union seems to be stumbling along towards the theory that the only way to get peace is to wage war and that war can be prepared for only by creating a  highly visible enemy. The need for war overcomes the need for evidence that we have any enemies to war with.

Already the principle of " innocent unless and until proved guilty ( beyond reasonable doubt) " is being eroded in our ideas about  courts,crime and punishment.  Possibly  it is being eroded  in international affairs too.

Is Mr Varadkar's decision to expel Russian diplomats  then simply a gesture of  solidarity rather than a result of evidence?  Perhaps a bit more of Mr De Valera's  firmness (stubbornness, national self interest ?) might be useful at least until we are sure.  

HEAR HEAR

 

Picture a small corrugated Mission Hall just off  the Donegal  Road Belfast.  Crowded.  Two clerics on the stage,  a senior Methodist and a junior Catholic. September 1970.

The  nineteen sixties had been a hopeful time  when nearly everybody seemed to  be  talking to nearly everybody.  We old folk remember it well.

 In the Felons Club, Falls Road whose name was a quiet  defiance of the worst  label governments put on  their opponents, a  Catholic priest was invited to talk about whether or how the Catholic church could change. He asked, Who is invited to talk with you next week ? He  was not surprised  to hear it was a prominent Ulster Unionist politician.

And we remember also The Rev Donald Gillies , a Scots Presbyterian. He  was one of the most insistent  speakers against  his church cooperating with Catholics, but became one of the most ardent supporters of friendly trusting relations with them and other Christian bodies.  An honourable man,  he said what he believed  and if he changed his mind he said so.  He respected people and   talked with  them, all of them, as generous,  friendly and cooperative neighbours would.

But  the nineteen sixties were also the time of the great scare, "The Romeward Trend".  This was  a fear  cultivated among our Presbyterian and Methodist friends, fright that  their churches  were "moving towards Rome".   The very word "Rome" was made to strike fear into the hearts of one and all. Even the Treaty of Rome which had nothing to do with religion or even morality was condemned  by  a small and powerful   brotherhood  of religious and political preachers.  For Catholics, Presbyterians and Methodists to talk to each other in public was condemned as dragging the churches ever more Romewards. These were times when it was easy to make enemies, sometimes hard to keep friends.

But friendships made in those  optimistic days are still alive today.

So picture the small  Mission Hall just off  the Donegal Road, Belfast.   Crowded. Two clerics  on the  stage,   a senior Methodist and a junior Catholic. September 1970.

The Catholic priest was listened to with sceptical courtesy, but  the Methodist clergyman was having  a hard time. Much harder than the Catholic. He was giving the audience the same message of neighbourly cooperation as Donald Gillies the Presbyterian had given. As the evening  wore on, tension increased,  the audience, disturbed by the fear and unconvinced by the message, became restless. Our Methodist friend  remained  calm although  he was in trouble. People's fear of being besieged by enemies and let down by friends could easily turn to panic.

The front door of the Hall opened. Some police came in.  The door  opened again and some British soldiers came in. Soon  there was a line of soldiers and police standing along each wall. Armed.  The speakers on the stage went on speaking. Tension increased.

However, as one might expect in a religious hall with religious people saying  religious things  someone in the audience had an inspiration. Not  a religious one but it changed the  situation dramatically.  However inspired he was, the  inspired one stood up and intoned the first line of  "God Save the Queen ........."

Everyone stood up, soldiers and police stood to attention. The audience  was either quiet or singing. Officially, definitely and  in all politeness the function was over and everybody must go off home.  When the anthem  has been  sung that is the  protocol..........

Those were the days when UTV, a young organisation at the time, created what it called a programme of reconciliation -  "reconciliation" was still a gentle, graceful word  then, before it too was injected with menace  - bringing people together in studios to talk about what people did not usually talk about in mixed  company, religion.  The Mission Hall off the  Donegal Road, The  TV studio off the Ormeau Road, The Republican Felons Club on the Falls Road  .......a long time ago.... but  there were  people willing to listen to each other then, however much they differed in beliefs, even if it cost them. Still are. Some day they will get their way and ideas rather than threats will win.

Political talks are still going on in Belfast ;  we need not always be pessimistic as long as  people are talking and listening to each other .  We have  done it before,  people are  willing to do it now.  If we really want  politicians to do it they probably will.  So should we abuse them for not talking or encourage them to talk? There are  always some wise souls  to give the lead.  Are they  there?   Listening to us ?  Knowing how to call halt when talking becomes, not a help but  a weapon, knowing exactly what to do,  so that we can stop now just  to  start again fresh tomorrow?

When courtesy will win over cunning ?