Surrender, aka peace

“We shall never surrender,” thundered Churchill as Luftwaffe bombs, most of them incidentally made in the USSR, were raining down on London. And he was telling the truth: Britain stood firm.

However, having resisted those bombs with steadfast courage, 58 years later Britain meekly surrendered to other, smaller bombs planted by Irish gangsters in residential buildings, school buses and public transport.

Most of those bombs (or their components) were also made in the USSR or its satellites, as were the small arms with which those same gangsters murdered or kneecapped anyone they didn’t like. Admittedly, the electric drills used to torture victims were made by Western firms, Black & Decker being the preferred mark.

The gang was financed, armed and trained by various Marxist dictatorships, Muslim terrorists and of course directly by Russia. Some financing came from the traditional pursuits of organised crime: gun running, drugs, prostitution, gambling. Yet this was worse than any criminal activity pursued purely for fiscal gains.

For the whole monstrosity was couched in the faddish bien pensant language of national liberation, freedom and sovereignty. Mass murder was thereby justified and sanctified. Dupes around the world, in places like Boston, Mass., didn’t realise that the only real purpose of mass murder is to murder masses. All else is PR, including allusions to religious strife, pathetic when coming from a predominantly Marxist group.

It’s to this lot that Britain surrendered on Good Friday, 1998. It’s appropriate that the submission to this revolting gang was brokered by the most revolting character ever to disgrace 10 Downing Street, Tony Blair.

To be fair, successive US administrations had a role to play too, that of applying pressure on British governments to yield to the gangsters’ blackmail for the sake of ‘peace’. Sentimentally, which is to say stupidly, the Clintons of this world identified the IRA with their own Continental Congress. Politically, which is to say cynically, they were desperate to mollify the Irish vote.

The Good Friday ignominy was, and still is, hailed as a great success of British diplomacy. None dare call it surrender, none dare call it defeat.

Yet that’s exactly what it was. The butchers of Omagh formed the government of Northern Ireland, which entitled them to seats in Westminster Parliament. To their credit they turned the honour down.

Terrorism proceeded apace, if on a smaller scale. The Provos continued to kill and mutilate supposed informers, using the false flag of Real IRA. Their fanatical supporters were still refusing to cooperate with police. Even people who weren’t fanatical supporters also refused to cooperate, attached as they were to their kneecaps, lives and families.

Murderers serving time in prison received early releases. Those on the run and escaped prisoners were amnestied. The few not amnestied were still finding safe havens with IRA supporters. Their caches of weapons and explosives, supposed to have been ‘put beyond use’, still fired and blew up – no one was serious about verifying the terms of the agreement.

The gang won, and now the second-in-command victor, Martin McGuinness has died, to the deafening din of obituary panegyrics. The BBC obit mentions that “he was working as a butcher’s assistant when Northern Ireland’s Troubles erupted in the late 1960s” – without mentioning in so many words that he then graduated to full-fledged butcher in the IRA.

Yes, “…when soldiers from the Parachute Regiment killed 14 people in his hometown,… McGuinness was second in command of the IRA in the city.” However, “The Saville Inquiry concluded he had probably been armed with a sub-machine-gun on the day, but had not done anything that would have justified the soldiers opening fire.”

For fairness sake, the obituary mentions that McGuinness organised “one of the IRA’s most high-profile attacks… the attempt to kill Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher at the Grand Hotel in Brighton in 1984”. But then it smoothly segues into praising McGuinness’s role in graciously agreeing to accept Britain’s surrender and shake Her Majesty’s hand (how she must have cringed inside).

“My war is over,” he famously declared then. Of course it was. He had won. And now his awful life is over too.

“Where they make a desert, they call it peace,” wrote Tacitus. He didn’t add that sometimes surrender is called peace too. The great historian wasn’t that prescient.