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The
State of Society
Part I
"Better, though difficult, the right way to go,
Than wrong, though
easy, where the end is woe"
‘Pilgrims Progress’, John Bunyan
The right
way to go?
The “right way to go” is undoubtedly difficult, and
many as a result choose the wrong path because it is the path of least
resistance. This is, however, a choice that many make of their own volition, be
it in spiritual, personal or political matters. For the Loyalist people,
however, there has been no real choice. The path was constructed by others and
the Loyalist people were dragged and deceived to where the “end is woe”. The
very structure of society is now configured against the interests of the
Loyalist people. Injustice has been institutionalised within civil society and
the labour market or economy. All around you all you can see are fierce faces,
Irish Nationalist thugs with hurley sticks in their hands and the project in
their minds. The Loyalist people turn to the state, to the security forces, and
experience ever increasing alienation as Loyalists come into contact with this
antagonistic set of institutions. In the time the young Loyalist ‘thug’
comes to know the police as ‘black bastards’, the stirrings of
consciousness, albeit a crude and simple consciousness of what is a complex
social configuration. There is, however, hope for the hopeless as the material
conditions that will eventually lead to a new ordering of society and state are
being engendered by the enemies of the Loyalist people. Those that work moves
against the Loyalist people: - the hidden hands, the state power elites and
those who are of the tendency paradoxically work moves against their own
project.
The state elites, the state
system, the hidden hands and those who are of the tendency sow the seeds of
their own destruction, and of the social order that they have created, or are in
the process of creating (their project). They wish for the Loyalist people to be
made wretched, to live in a state of alienation, and ultimately for them to
cease to exist as an ethnic grouping in the full sense of the term. What they
wish to create is a Republic of Ireland scenario with the Protestant community
constituting barely 3% of the total population. They wish to create an ethnic
grouping that is a tourist attraction, something that can be controlled,
sanitized and exploited. Something to show the obtuse American supporter of
Irish Nationalism just in case they should think that those “Republican
Freedom Fighters” had wiped out all the Protestant people. Already we are
beginning to see this scenario with Irish Nationalists holding up certain
cultural parades and event (those that they have approved and have been
sanitized) as shining examples of what can be achieved and with local Irish
Nationalists enthusing about the tourists and trade that will be attracted. You
can exist, but only so it would seem, under their terms, never able to freely
express your culture or transient emotional state as given expression through
the medium of your culture.
The present arrangement of our
societal structure cannot endure, indeed it should not be allowed to endure and
all sections of Loyalism should strive to ensure that it does not endure by
whatever means necessary. Ironically the material conditions that engender armed
resistance are being put in place by the very structures that would seek to
write the obituary of those they dismiss as dinosaurs. Even the most obtuse
Loyalist is beginning to deconstruct the lies, the ambiguous systems of
discourse, and the project of those who work moves against the Loyalist people.
You may protest, remonstrates the state elites, but only on their terms, behind
and between police lines and through the “correct channels”. They wish to
institutionalise the Loyalist struggle, that is, to make it solely peaceful, or
as they would term it, “political”. They fail to grasp, or perhaps more
accurately admit, that in virtually every society at some time violence or the
threat of violence will play a role in the political process. What Loyalist
would deny that the embryo of a united Ireland, the manner in which the Belfast
Agreement was implemented, was not to some extent brought about by the violence
of Irish Nationalism? It is a sad fact that violence, or the threat of violence,
is a part of the political process but it is, however, a fact that must
nevertheless be contemplated by Loyalists.
The liberal-democratic
projection of the democratic process, of the role of the state system, is one
grounded upon the principle of the state as neutral arbitrator, taking into
account the interests of different sections of society. We are inculcated with
the belief that our present representative system of democracy is the best
system, one that ensures fairness, and that one section of society does not get
its own way all of the time. The state is also projected as standing between
those on the one hand who would seek to influence the state, and therefore
society, through violence and those who seek to change society through
‘politics’. For decades this was the role that the British state, and before
that Stormont, fulfilled to varying degrees of success. If violence can now,
however, get results and the state is prepared to socially engineer society in
accordance with these goals, then it will only be a matter of time before the
Loyalist people as a totality realise the futility of a struggle confined to the
‘political sphere’. What is at the moment the armed will of the people, the
Loyalist paramilitary, will become the people as a collective force. By
appeasing those within Irish Nationalism who use violence the state elites have
undermined the very ideological basis of democracy itself, a set of beliefs that
does much to maintain the existence of the state system, and thereby the state
elites.
The hidden hands, and the state
elites, whose respective projects have converged, create the material conditions
that give rise to armed struggle by making the Loyalist people wretched. To make
a people wretched is to make them lowly and demoralised, filled with
hopelessness, frustration and a perception of powerlessness. Already there are
predominantly Protestant housing estates in which the majority, or a very
substantial minority of households do not have one household member who is in
full time employment. Such households are also increasingly matriarchal in
structure, that is, a single mother heads them. The kids run ragged and wretched
in the street, a low onto themselves, children born into nothing and with no
future to look forward to. The trades and industries that afforded working-class
Protestants employment, the social cohesion of the community, were either blown
to pieces, blown away by the fear engendered by violence to the expansion of
capital, or have been shifted to periphery economies. The young Loyalist thug
oblivious to wider social trends and processes and structures lifts a brick and
aims at the first target that comes into their sightline. They have little or no
respect for authority, especially for the authority of the state. They know,
however, very little else and have little systematic understanding of the
processes and structures that they come into relation with. It should be the
role of Loyalists to give them the ideational strength, and ideological
framework, that their education system never afforded.
The Loyalist-Unionist community
finds itself in this situation in part because of their own attitudes, which
have been fostered by the education system of the tendency. The deteriorating
position of the Loyalist people within society is also, however, due in large
part to increasing sectarian discrimination. Increasingly the Loyalist people
find that it is they who are discriminated against, it is they who do not get
the jobs which, if they were allocated on the basis of merit they would obtain.
The hegemonic belief within the state system, and the agency concerned with
employment: the Fair Employment Commission, is that Catholics are a
disadvantaged grouping within society. Academics have composed reams upon reams
regarding the inequalities that are said to exist between Catholics and
Protestants within Northern Ireland. They buttress their arguments with
statistic after statistic, but their research is fundamentally ideological,
their statistical research provides only partial distorted truths. Their
research conveys more as to their own beliefs and values than they reflect
social reality as experienced by the Loyalist people.
The Loyalist people see the
positions and offices of the occupational hierarchy, at the highest levels, and
in both public and private sectors of the economy, increasingly occupied by
those of an Irish Nationalist or Republican background who appear to gain
promotion more easily and frequently than their Protestant-Unionist
counterparts. Mealy-mouthed politicians proclaim meritocracy as the goal, as
does the state system, and sections of the media system, yet meritocracy is
stifled at every turn. The most educated, and the most gifted, amongst the
Protestant-Unionist community find themselves in the situation that either they
depart for mainland Britain, as many choose to do, or they face the very real
prospect of staying behind only to get left behind. Those that stay behind
cannot help but be moved to anger by what the Irish Nationalist thug or state
goon squad, come to blind our children with their rubber bullets, do to some of
the best of the Loyalist people. The injustice of the orientation of action
adopted by the state is becoming ever more blatant and concomitant with that is
the anger of many Loyalists.
The state elites have in effect
made a tacit agreement with the hidden hands, with Irish Nationalism. The
agreement is in essence simple; if you do not bomb us you will eventually get
what you want. In the long term this means the withdrawal of all spheres of
British involvement Northern Ireland, and in the short term it means increased
wretchedness for the Loyalist-Unionist-Protestant community. The ‘historic’
agreement is but a stage in the process, a step along what is the wrong way to
go. If there is to be a United Ireland by stages then
Protestants-Unionists-Loyalists are to be an underclass within it, and each
successive stage will bring them closer to this state of existence. The
Loyalist-Unionist-Protestant people are to be denied the rights that come with
British citizenship, denied equal access to employment, denied a state that acts
as an honest broker and protector of the innocent and the relatively powerless.
Increasingly the Loyalist people perceive themselves to have nothing. They have
nothing to lose but their freedom to gain. Of course, representatives of the
tendency will retort that our living standards are higher than ever, but this is
only true in absolute terms. What you have is not assessed in absolute terms but
in relative terms. You may well have some bread and cheese, and this may do an
adequate job of preventing you from starving, but if the person relative to you
has milk and honey you cannot help but feel that you have nothing, for compared
to them you do have nothing. In our increasingly commodity orientated society
what you have is judged upon what the “other” has and in Northern Ireland
the other is the opposite political-ethnic grouping. The
Loyalist-Unionist-Protestant people look to their
Republican-Nationalist-Catholic counterparts, taking in many cases what they are
not entitled to from the state and getting what they in many cases do not merit
and they look at themselves, and their people who have suffered so much, and
they are angry.
There is little that the
republican movement, in all its various guises, has contributed to society but
it has given the Loyalist people one single gift, if it can be called such, that
of anger. Those who are of the tendency know that there is a burning anger, a
rage within fuelled and perpetuated by the sense of injustice, and so they seek
to channel it. Anger fuelled not just by the injustices of the past, or the
present, but the future injustices that are no doubt perceived as certainty.
Many people burn with rage to think that sons, grandsons, brothers etc. who
joined the U.D.R. in order to protect society (and in return got little
financial reward in comparison to those that now serve in the security forces,
particularly the police) are dead long years. The families who lost their sons
now find that the enduring monument is the field that was once a farm. The
representatives of the tendency do their best to push such anger in peaceful
manifestations, though ‘democratic’ politics, through peaceful protest. They
do this because deep down they fear the Loyalist people, they fear the potential
of their collective power to change society in a way that they do not accord
with, and because they believe that it will not be in the “national
interests” or more accurately their own interests. They tirade those who take
up arms to defend their fellow human beings from the very worst within our
society and point to the state as the sole legitimate claim to the use of
physical force. The state, however, increasingly can be perceived as only
serving to confuse the conflict, taking support away from the armed expression
of the will of the Loyalist people. Yet even with regard to this matter those
who work moves against the Loyalist people create the material conditions that
will lead to their own negation.
The state system has slowly but
seemingly surely been evolving through three transitional states that whilst
overlapping are defined enough for theoretical definition, they are as follows: