III

Macdara will never accept that the massive violence of colonisation can be equalled by any violence perpetrated by an anti-colonial movement. In fact this seems to him to be a matter where clarity may be gained from taking a quantitative approach: compare the victims of any single anti-colonial movement with the numbers of dead at the hands of their coloniser over generations. Those who decry anti-colonial violence because they oppose violence in general are either radical pacifists—who should spend most of their time criticising colonial violence according to a strict formula, based on the results of quantitative historical research—or they straightforwardly choose to disregard colonial violence because they support it, have gained from it, or have come to replace it and therefore identify with it.

It is this latter class of vile character that is particularly familiar in the postcolonial context, whereby those who owe their position to anticolonial violence oppose violence because they have come to occupy the position of Government, and therefore decry any act that might threaten private property, including the immense private property to be gained from public office. These gombeen charlatans are especially sensitive to anything that reflects badly on us, that might make us seem uncivilised, that might embarrass representatives of the new State when they are permitted to dine with the imperialist Powers. This is cringe, shame, that feeling of being subject to a gaze that was once fixed upon us and is therefore imagined to be permanent even when the attentions of the Master are clearly now elsewhere.

Let us be specific: if it was right for the Irish people to fight colonisation during the revolutionary decade, not to mention for centuries beforehand, then it must be right that we have fought in the hundred years since then. In the most deeply colonised part of our country, war was waged on our terrorised people, and some of them fought back. And for this they have been anathematised by those who owe their comfort to historic violence, as well as other forms of resistance. Furthermore, it is clear that there would have been no need to fight had the Occupiers dispersed. This being the case, it must be argued that all violence is by their hand, even that small share of violence that is directed against them. 

Your correspondent acknowledges that anti-imperialists can never have free reign, and he does not wish to deny them their agency as they decide in particular circumstances on their tactics and actions. It is therefore entirely reasonable to criticise the PIRA for certain decisions, but it is not possible to criticise them for use of violence as such, without rerouting condemnation towards the constant violence of the Occupation forces: the English Government, its settler supremacists, its paramilitary proxies. It seems to your correspondent that an ethical subject might find plenty to criticise in the behaviour of the Republican Movement without making an assertion as simple, essentially unserious and ultimately meaningless as violence is bad. Let us have some dialectics please.

IV

Of course observers of politics in the Twenty-Six County State will have noticed that the Partionist Party is perfectly aware that the violence in the north-east of our country has continued from that which won us our State. But the imperative amongst the comprador bourgeois class to signal abhorrence of anti-state violence is so strong that they all know exactly what they must do, for they now say collectively that the violence of the independence movement was itself wrong!

Yes, the Republican and Leftist women and men who gained freedom for most of Ireland were utterly mistaken in their actions; worse, they were murderers. This despite the fact that these people were not only the founders of the parties that came to form the Partionist Party, but were in many cases the literal biological ancestors of the political elite, their parents, grandparents, now great-grandparents. But they should have known better! As Pearse might have said:

The fools, the fools, the fools, they have left us a Revisionist State!

We might ask whether the solution to removing an imperial power peacefully has ever been found, but to ask this question is already to show an openness to violence that renders the question Void. For why would the lucky imperial subject ever wish to achieve independence? Separatism is by definition Antisocial and therefore not only Illogical but Inhumane.

The independence movement is assumed to have been a project to facilitate bloodshed and nothing more; it is evidence of the atavism and incivility of us natives. The only permissible campaigns for independence are, of course, those that can have no possible effect. Polite letters written to Unionist papers, for example, or speeches in the Imperial Parliament directed at a handful of yawning Unionist politicians on otherwise empty benches. Anything else, anything active, constitutes violence.

V

It is striking to this observer the extent to which the settler community in the north-east of our country seems to wish violence upon itself. From their language, one would assume that they want a pogrom: evidence of the usual colonial phantasy that the natives will do to us what we have done to them. 

Macdara has many more words to come on this subject, he will move on for now, noting only that settlers exhibit a kind of polymorphous perversity, taking pleasure not only in Conquest, but also in Victimhood.