Review

Bill Meulemans worked in Belfast for eleven years  as Professor of Political Science in Queen’s University. Coming from the United States of America , he was , naturally as an academic and a decent person, curious about how an outrageous  political and religious situation had formed around people in Belfast who were also decent and intelligent, including scholars and church people. He set out  and sent his students out to find what it had done to them and why.  What he found is full of interest and contradiction.

Years ago the Department of Political Science in Queen’s was very different. One academic year might be spent by students studying the political philosophy and systems of ancient Greece, the next perhaps a segment of European, American or world social history. Now it was involved , through teachers like Bill Meulemans, in studying what history, religion, politics  do to ordinary human souls and human behaviour at home . For him and for his students and for those who read the results of their studies it proved a fascinating and sometimes frustrating adventure.

For one thing, one had to read the codes correctly, understanding the meaning of words and phrases which could be as tricky in Belfast as learning what words  to use talking to people in the United States or the Middle East where names , titles and even modes of address of the people to whom you are talking can mean the difference between being courteously helped or sedulously avoided.

Bill and his students had to find their way through this cultural fog in Belfast and did so successfully. This present study is not  the result just of graphs studied, numbers assessed, official reports scanned, it is the result of many, many conversations with many people some of whose occupations the reader may learn and some not. But although the conversations and exchanges are with people of so many kinds there still remains in the book an atmosphere of wonderment and such a preoccupation with the sad fact of communal distrust that one could get the impression that this distrust is the only problem. But this is because we are sharing in  a courteous exchange between people who are unsure, hurt, often angry,  struggling with the contradictions in  their  lives, and who most often  say what they feel  but  are afraid to engage with the real reasons why they feel it.  It is as much a study of people’s reaction to distress and manipulation   as a  description of  the aftermath of a   political crisis in a modern European country . How far is the distress caused by selfish government, how far by people’s unwillingness to live together in peace ?  

The author responds : “This book is about what is inside the heads of Catholics and Protestants since the bombs and bullets no longer dominate the headlines. It is about the reason why they are still haunted by their conflicted memories . It is about why many of them are stuck living in the past.”(p.23). One might think this means  Bill Meuleman’s study would be more at home in the Department of Psychology but the history and present situation of the Belfast people he writes about have too often been  a matter of possession of power, wealth, military bases and in the struggle either for or against this too many people have been hurt. Historians often deal with facts other than  real people suffering the real pain of being pitted against each other whether they  want it or not. In N.Ireland there are   people of perhaps sixty different religious groups and yet they have been successfully corralled by politicians  into two groups Catholic and Protestant, as if the disparate Christian groups did not exist, nor did the Jews, Muslims Humanists and others in N.Irish society.

This book by Bill Meulemans will help  readers to understand the effect this has had on the people who have never been allowed to experience the richness of a fully free community.

BELFAST – BOTH SIDES NOW , Bill Meulemans, (Create Space, Charleston, SC. 2013)

Shadows

It is probably the most intense, best researched and  most revelatory book about how governments do the subversive things they want nobody to know about.  

It’s the book Understanding Shadows,The Corrupt Use of Intelligence”  by Michael Quilligan (Clarity Press Inc. Atlanta,Georgia, 2013.

Michael Quilligan is a journalist born in Dublin, long time resident in Holland, expert and much published writer on what governments do with information and what lessons they consistently refuse to learn. And what decencies they violate.

Readers will first  turn to those parts of it that satisfy their particular interests  or curiosity - what really  happened in Ireland, whose interests were served by Kennedy’s assassination, what  lies were told by the Blair administration in its frantic determination to have its very own war, and by what alliances was it ensured that it would be very difficult to have any  war now without the  United States administration either causing or  manipulating it?

To answer these questions, or rather in our  intellectually polluted world , to see more clearly with  the real problems lie Michael Quilligan has devoted years of research in which he shows that intrigue is a matter of everyday governance, not a sudden outbreak of a few people,s bravado, or villainy. Dishonest use of nearly everything is a normal method of government. Dishonest , cynical or cruel use of knowledge is among governments’ greatest sins.

Some might think in such a  world where politicians like Mr Blair are  not politely refused admission to membership of a  Church but rather are welcomed , arms and all, by a Pope, many people would be aghast and would say so, but the success of governmental dishonesty is made possible by the silence of others which implies consent. The pollution of knowledge , or as here , the Corruption of Intelligence, is consented to and therefore thrives in all the countries which have most influence on our lives, the United States of America, Britain, France for example. What Michael Quilligan is doing is revealing the mechanics of where how and by whom it is done.

In Ireland it took a long time to convince even those who were sceptical of British government intentions that the war being waged there was as dirty as it really was. Even yet many people either do not believe it or refuse to discuss whether it was or not. Our world may seem to fall apart when we learn that the  assassin  paid or given immunity for assassinating is really an “unofficial” branch of one’s  own police force through whose falsely labelled activities  governments can claim it was not involved in killing its enemies or even its fellow citizens. But that  is only part of what the corrupt use of intelligence has been about. This book deals  with the rest of it as well in so far as the diligent and honest researcher can manage it. 

For those who want to know in detail how governments create, foster and fight both sides in crises , Understanding Shadows should be read and we should be thankful for it. There are many crimes but one of the greatest is the corruption of knowledge, a sin which some enlightened theologians believe is the only sin named by Jesus Christ as the unforgiveable.

Readers who like sampling a chapter or two to find out whether the author is thorough and informed would do well to select  the chapter Without Grace or Favour . In it they will meet the enigma of people who being good do  what is bad, and how an institution can hang  much materialistic policy on the twin spikes of hidden information and false information and how political and financial interests may be served thereby.

Having done that,  readers will probably peruse  the rest of the book with increasing determination to start their every study of government with the presumption they may well be  telling lies.

No Brainer

The release of 1984  official papers in London shows that an Irish politician said , presumably to somebody who seemed to matter, that I “was the brains behind the republican movement”.

I was flattered by anyone thinking I had either the brains or the ability to be any such thing, but  the statement is nonsense.

If I had received an invitation  to write speeches for Gerry Adams as this politician asserted, I would have been flattered by that request also, and would have responded with the same courtesy as Gerry Adams has always shown  me. But being aware of both the literary and the political abilities of Gerry Adams I  know  that my contribution would have been not only pedestrian and unhelpful but unnecessary.

However, a serious aspect of this assertion is that it is one of many  made to governments in Dublin and London through the years some of which were  nonsense. We know of some of them, there must have been many we don’t know about. The result of such stuff must be that these governments are willingly fed with misinformation which can only hinder those who are looking for rational solutions to problems. The damage done if this means a war is lengthened, must be considered when one is considering the contribution, responsible or otherwise, of those who made the assertions. And their motive for doing it. Another important aspect of the matter is that a simple phone call could have shown how nonsensical and false the statement about the brains was.

Interestingly, a statement of much the same kind was made at, I believe, much the same time by another person, this time a journalist whose sympathies would be rather different from those of the Irish politician  mentioned above. The fact that Dublin and government officials and such people accepted statements of such a character is one of the most frightening things about what they did during the years when people were suffering in Ireland’s northeast. The responsibility  of Irish and British officials both here and abroad for  the lengthening of the conflict in Ireland has yet to be examined , probably because no-one is willing to take the risk of showing what really happened. The idea that nothing good can come from a certain class, or a certain person or party is very much alive in politics , so the official line has to be  that if a good speech is produced it must be a ghost writer who wrote it and if  votes are obtained in elections, it is all due to  impersonation. It used to be said that until poets and other writers took an interest in modern republicanism it would be second class. Then the poets and writers and  artists  did , and suddenly it did not matter any more. It was an interesting reminder that the tactic is as old as the hills – remember the question in the Christian Gospel, can any good thing come from Nazareth?