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11 March 2009
Edmund Burke on the miseries mankind brings on itself
The "Real IRA" were obviously miffed that the Islamic terrorists were getting all the media attention, first in Mumbai, and then in Lahore. They couldn't have that, could they? A little action was necessary. So three of their brave lads rolled up to the local army barracks in Northern Ireland and calmly shot dead two young British soldiers who came out unarmed to collect the pizzas they had ordered. Well done, chaps. Very impressive.
Despite the IRA and their off-shoots like the Real IRA always couching their campaign in nationalist/independence terms and never in religious terms, there will be the usual shaking of heads over lattes (at lunch) and Chardonnays (in the evening) deploring another act of sectarian religious violence.
If it's about religion, I wonder why the IRA called themselves the Irish Republican Army and not the Catholic Army for True Belief or the Vatican Army Against Protestantism or the Glorious Micks against the disgusting Prodos...? Could it be that the title of their group actually indicates what they are about?
Just as the Spanish Republicans - their cause recognised by Leninist-Marxists the world over - indicated their political objectives through their name, I think we can safely conclude that the evil men of the IRA were carrying out their terror under the political banner of nationalism.
Edmund Burke saw all too clearly what motivated the actors in the revolution in Paris in 1789:
...History consists, for the greater part, of the miseries brought upon the world by pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal, and all the train of appetites, which shake the public with the same
-troublous storms that toss
The private state, and render life unsweet
(Spenser, Faerie Queene, II. c.7, st. 14)
These vices are the causes of those storms. Religion, morals, laws, prerogatives, privileges, liberties, rights of men, are the pretexts. The pretexts are always found in some specious appearance of some real good.
You would not secure men from tyranny and sedition, by rooting out of the mind the principles to which these fraudulent pretexts apply? If you did, you would root out every thing that is valuable in the human breast. As these are the pretexts, so the ordinary actors and instruments in great public evils are kings, priests, magistrates, senates, parliaments, national assemblies, judges and captains. You would not cure the evil by resolving, that there should be no more monarchs, nor ministers of state, nor of the gospel; no interpreters of law; no general officers; no public councils. You might change the names. The things in some shape must remain.
A certain amount of power must always exist in the community, in
some hands, and under some appellation. Wise men will apply their remedies
to vices, not to names: to causes of evil which are permanent, not to the
occasional organs by which they act, and the transitory modes in which they
appear. Otherwise you will be wise historically, a fool in practice.
(Reflections
on the Revolution in France, Penguin Edition, pp. 247/48)
Comment: gerard@gerardcharleswilson.com
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