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lakecake's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
sad
medium-paced
4.25
peebee's review against another edition
2.0
There is no such thing as history, only historiography.
It's impossible to tell *everything* that happened during an important event. No one present was aware of everything, and after the fact, many are dead, their memories are imperfect, their stories are bent to justify or excuse their actions or those of their side.
The best an author can do is gather the facts he thinks are most relevant, and arrange them in a narrative form that best fits the interpretation he's trying to advocate for.
In this book, we learn that:
1. Catholics were excluded from all meaningful employment, subject to attacks, beatings, and full on pogroms in which their neighborhoods were overrun, their homes were burned, and any resistors put to death. Peaceful protests modeled off MLK, Jr.'s were ambushed with deadly force with the complicity of the local police.
2. The British Crown had military units patrolling its own territory, without visible insignia, committing executions without due process by means of drive-by shooting on suspected militants. Often, those suspected were innocent, and innocent bystanders were often hurt or killed. The British government covered this up for years, telling the families of the slain lies about how their loved ones were killed by the IRA, and only recently has the truth come out.
3. The British Crown instituted an archipelago of black sites and organized program of illegal rendition and torture that, having been ignored by the international community in the 70s, gave George W Bush and his band of criminals the blueprints and legal precedent and justifications for America's continuing Global Forever War on Islam.
4. The British Crown instituted a program by which military spies operating on home soil under the guise of small business people gained access under false pretense to civilians' homes and personal effects, which were rifled through, innocent and guilty alike, for evidence of sedition. This was *also* attempted by W in 2002, but was considered to evil even for a terrified, angry, racist America to swallow.
5. A Protestant woman named Jean McConville was burned out of her home by protestants because she had married a Catholic man, and her protestant parents refused to help her, or their ten-odd half-catholic grandchildren on principle. She sought, and found, safety in a tower block in a Catholic ghetto. The IRA said she was warned twice about hiding a radio in her house, and circumstantial evidence points to her meeting with government spies and possessing a radio which matched the description given by the IRA, and matching that used by Prot spies. Her children say she was targeted because she comforted a wounded soldier during a gun battle. There are no records of this gun battle or any soldiers being wounded at that time in the project. Her children's timeline of her persecution by the IRA also doesn't hold up, she was given more time between her warning and execution than the story we are told in the first chapter.
You may have missed all this since, again, what this book is is a story, and that story is about a group of bloodthirsty IRA soldiers and sickening crimes they sunk to.
The cruelty of Jean McConville's own people to her and her children is stated once and not examined. The hard evidence that she crossed over from non-combatant to active spy, and was given warning once before being executed, is stuck in the back of the book, since it doesn't help the thesis. What we return to again and again are the stories of her children, which you find out after processing hundreds of pages of them are at least partly wrong.
Why in the world would any nine year old have a clear memory at 50 whether his mom was committing secret spy shit she would have been trying to keep from them in any case?
We open a chapter like a damn Tom Clancy novel with two aw-shucks friendly employees of a local laundromat doing their rounds in peaceful suburbia, who over the course of ten pages and one fateful morning find themselves on the wrong end of a Provo's gun. Then in the much more narratively restrained 40 pages that follow we learn that they were active duty military spies doing Stasi shit that in a democracy worth the name would be considered a human rights violation, and were thus *eminently* viable targets for attack by the provos, or honestly even civilians who have a right to privacy of their homes and property and their own conscience.
We spend pages and pages leading up to a bombing in London. It's a real heart pounder. "... and then a bus load of innocent, tow headed SCHOOL CHILDREN let out to learn all about the wonders of architecture." Ripped straight from rightwing torture porn like 24. Tick TOCK. Tick TOCK. But of course, the cops were given plenty of time and warning, just like every time, but were so incompetent reporters beat them to the scenes and found themselves waiting around for the bombs to explode. All of the SCHOOL CHILDREN that you are hanging on the edge of your seat because you expect these monstrous Catholics are going to turn them into a tattered, burned shoe bouncing into the gutter, like you've seen in too many tv shows and movies by now, they were fine. Yea, they were warned in plenty of time, walked around a corner and were fine when the blast happened. Only injuries were assholes gawking in front of plate glass windows in explicit defiance of the orders of cops and common sense of people for whom The Blitz was living memory. And one guy who gave himself a stress heart attack.
The Provos committed atrocities, no doubt. They committed them on the scale of a bunch of isolated teenagers with guns doing their best to fight a first world empire with infinite resources and the plausible deniability of squads of paramilitary ethnic mobs they could liase with. They did them in almost every case (attacking civilians and planting of timebombs were Orangemen innovations) *after* that empire committed them, they did them on a smaller scale, and accepted responsibility then and now, while the crimes committed by the Brits and Prots are still coming to light in dribs and drabs. Which side you find least sympathetic says a lot about you.
As we learn in the book, the British government applied lessons learned from its brutal suppression of African rebellions that no reasonable American liberal would countenance. But here's the rub. I posit, and I'm *sure* the Patrick Radden Keefes of the world would disagree, that it's because the Mau Mau WON that he wouldn't make a history about the Uprising that was framed around a single woman who died in the Lari massacre. To argue against them, and to 'Well, Actually...' the actual history is to affirmatively argue for a reversion to white dominance and exploitation of a black populace. That's a bridge too far for your average liberal, not because it's cruel and evil, but because it goes against the status quo. But to write some just-so-story where things are the way they are because they HAD to be, because the losers were bad, bad people who MURDERED, a LADY and therefore (something something domestic military death squads) AHEM, justice was done!
The Mau Mau committed massacres against civilians, same as the provos, and probably worse. But Kenya is an independent country, to focus on the war crimes committed by the smaller, weaker resistance that eventually won out, rather than the crimes overpowering forces of the British Empire is to obviously place a marker on the side of racism and white supremacy. That's why you won't ever read someone writing a narrative about some poor pretty white lady working as a spy getting chased by mau mau soldiers the way you hear about the 'Laundry workers' getting shot up.
If the IRA had won, no one would dare even speak the kind of takes that Keefe wrote a 300 page book about aloud. But because a neolib war machine was able to pulp resistance, looking too hard at it and questioning whether it had to go that way leads to some very uncomfortable questions about how we live now. Keefe directly makes the connection himself when he describes how Bush's excuse to The Hague for his torture gulag was "The Brits did this in the 70s and you didn't say shit then, so shut up now", but somehow that direct line from his topic to the present bears no dwelling upon.
Jean McConville very probably did spy, Keefe knew about this, and still wrote his book so that someone who didn't know this spent 70% of the time reading it believing that the IRA killed an innocent woman, instead of an incorrigible protestant informer who turned on the people who took her in to aid the people who burned her out and was furthermore given a fair warning to cut the shit. There hasn't been an armed conflict anywhere in the world, at any point in history where someone like that doesn't end up dead.
Instead of, say, the innocent woman who was walking down the street who got splattered into a stain on the wall with no warning by British soldiers, in a case of whoopsie-daisy mistaken identity whose family also spent years not knowing who was responsible for their loved one's death.
People die in wars. That's what wars are. We in America wage wars because we hate muslims and prefer driving to walking, and we don't particularly care which places we hit or if we have an actual reason to do so. Sudan, Iran, Yemen, Afghanistan, Iraq, whatever who cares, what else is on. The IRA waged a war based on hundreds of years of legitimate greivances - discrimination, rape and murder, that continued to the start of their resistance and intensified once they began standing up. There will always, always, ALWAYS be people like Keefe to zero the focus in on one single sympathetic victim, leaving thousands of victims on the other side just out of frame, or just out of focus. And any inconvenient facts about that victim can always be stashed in the back of the book, but not the very back, because people tend to remember those last few pages.
Better to leave them with a vague sense that they were given a 'fair and balanced' accounting, even if they cant remember any specific details, beyond an emotional feeling of the injustice done to the Mcconville family.
Also, to present yourself as a trustworthy interlocutor because for most of your life, despite being from an ethnic group, despite being surrounded by people who cared deeply about their struggles, you were too self involved and ignorant to be arsed one way or the other to form an opinion? That somehow an opinion formed with THAT background is more meaningful or informed?
Also Fuck Gerry Adams, but also more generally every chickenshit Baby Boomer fake fucking revolutionary hustler turned real-estate mogul from the late 60's/early 70's. And every Gen-X humanities studies major who turned to licking imperial boots to pay the rent. That's right, Keefe is as big a shit as Yglesias.
It's impossible to tell *everything* that happened during an important event. No one present was aware of everything, and after the fact, many are dead, their memories are imperfect, their stories are bent to justify or excuse their actions or those of their side.
The best an author can do is gather the facts he thinks are most relevant, and arrange them in a narrative form that best fits the interpretation he's trying to advocate for.
In this book, we learn that:
1. Catholics were excluded from all meaningful employment, subject to attacks, beatings, and full on pogroms in which their neighborhoods were overrun, their homes were burned, and any resistors put to death. Peaceful protests modeled off MLK, Jr.'s were ambushed with deadly force with the complicity of the local police.
2. The British Crown had military units patrolling its own territory, without visible insignia, committing executions without due process by means of drive-by shooting on suspected militants. Often, those suspected were innocent, and innocent bystanders were often hurt or killed. The British government covered this up for years, telling the families of the slain lies about how their loved ones were killed by the IRA, and only recently has the truth come out.
3. The British Crown instituted an archipelago of black sites and organized program of illegal rendition and torture that, having been ignored by the international community in the 70s, gave George W Bush and his band of criminals the blueprints and legal precedent and justifications for America's continuing Global Forever War on Islam.
4. The British Crown instituted a program by which military spies operating on home soil under the guise of small business people gained access under false pretense to civilians' homes and personal effects, which were rifled through, innocent and guilty alike, for evidence of sedition. This was *also* attempted by W in 2002, but was considered to evil even for a terrified, angry, racist America to swallow.
5. A Protestant woman named Jean McConville was burned out of her home by protestants because she had married a Catholic man, and her protestant parents refused to help her, or their ten-odd half-catholic grandchildren on principle. She sought, and found, safety in a tower block in a Catholic ghetto. The IRA said she was warned twice about hiding a radio in her house, and circumstantial evidence points to her meeting with government spies and possessing a radio which matched the description given by the IRA, and matching that used by Prot spies. Her children say she was targeted because she comforted a wounded soldier during a gun battle. There are no records of this gun battle or any soldiers being wounded at that time in the project. Her children's timeline of her persecution by the IRA also doesn't hold up, she was given more time between her warning and execution than the story we are told in the first chapter.
You may have missed all this since, again, what this book is is a story, and that story is about a group of bloodthirsty IRA soldiers and sickening crimes they sunk to.
The cruelty of Jean McConville's own people to her and her children is stated once and not examined. The hard evidence that she crossed over from non-combatant to active spy, and was given warning once before being executed, is stuck in the back of the book, since it doesn't help the thesis. What we return to again and again are the stories of her children, which you find out after processing hundreds of pages of them are at least partly wrong.
Why in the world would any nine year old have a clear memory at 50 whether his mom was committing secret spy shit she would have been trying to keep from them in any case?
We open a chapter like a damn Tom Clancy novel with two aw-shucks friendly employees of a local laundromat doing their rounds in peaceful suburbia, who over the course of ten pages and one fateful morning find themselves on the wrong end of a Provo's gun. Then in the much more narratively restrained 40 pages that follow we learn that they were active duty military spies doing Stasi shit that in a democracy worth the name would be considered a human rights violation, and were thus *eminently* viable targets for attack by the provos, or honestly even civilians who have a right to privacy of their homes and property and their own conscience.
We spend pages and pages leading up to a bombing in London. It's a real heart pounder. "... and then a bus load of innocent, tow headed SCHOOL CHILDREN let out to learn all about the wonders of architecture." Ripped straight from rightwing torture porn like 24. Tick TOCK. Tick TOCK. But of course, the cops were given plenty of time and warning, just like every time, but were so incompetent reporters beat them to the scenes and found themselves waiting around for the bombs to explode. All of the SCHOOL CHILDREN that you are hanging on the edge of your seat because you expect these monstrous Catholics are going to turn them into a tattered, burned shoe bouncing into the gutter, like you've seen in too many tv shows and movies by now, they were fine. Yea, they were warned in plenty of time, walked around a corner and were fine when the blast happened. Only injuries were assholes gawking in front of plate glass windows in explicit defiance of the orders of cops and common sense of people for whom The Blitz was living memory. And one guy who gave himself a stress heart attack.
The Provos committed atrocities, no doubt. They committed them on the scale of a bunch of isolated teenagers with guns doing their best to fight a first world empire with infinite resources and the plausible deniability of squads of paramilitary ethnic mobs they could liase with. They did them in almost every case (attacking civilians and planting of timebombs were Orangemen innovations) *after* that empire committed them, they did them on a smaller scale, and accepted responsibility then and now, while the crimes committed by the Brits and Prots are still coming to light in dribs and drabs. Which side you find least sympathetic says a lot about you.
As we learn in the book, the British government applied lessons learned from its brutal suppression of African rebellions that no reasonable American liberal would countenance. But here's the rub. I posit, and I'm *sure* the Patrick Radden Keefes of the world would disagree, that it's because the Mau Mau WON that he wouldn't make a history about the Uprising that was framed around a single woman who died in the Lari massacre. To argue against them, and to 'Well, Actually...' the actual history is to affirmatively argue for a reversion to white dominance and exploitation of a black populace. That's a bridge too far for your average liberal, not because it's cruel and evil, but because it goes against the status quo. But to write some just-so-story where things are the way they are because they HAD to be, because the losers were bad, bad people who MURDERED, a LADY and therefore (something something domestic military death squads) AHEM, justice was done!
The Mau Mau committed massacres against civilians, same as the provos, and probably worse. But Kenya is an independent country, to focus on the war crimes committed by the smaller, weaker resistance that eventually won out, rather than the crimes overpowering forces of the British Empire is to obviously place a marker on the side of racism and white supremacy. That's why you won't ever read someone writing a narrative about some poor pretty white lady working as a spy getting chased by mau mau soldiers the way you hear about the 'Laundry workers' getting shot up.
If the IRA had won, no one would dare even speak the kind of takes that Keefe wrote a 300 page book about aloud. But because a neolib war machine was able to pulp resistance, looking too hard at it and questioning whether it had to go that way leads to some very uncomfortable questions about how we live now. Keefe directly makes the connection himself when he describes how Bush's excuse to The Hague for his torture gulag was "The Brits did this in the 70s and you didn't say shit then, so shut up now", but somehow that direct line from his topic to the present bears no dwelling upon.
Jean McConville very probably did spy, Keefe knew about this, and still wrote his book so that someone who didn't know this spent 70% of the time reading it believing that the IRA killed an innocent woman, instead of an incorrigible protestant informer who turned on the people who took her in to aid the people who burned her out and was furthermore given a fair warning to cut the shit. There hasn't been an armed conflict anywhere in the world, at any point in history where someone like that doesn't end up dead.
Instead of, say, the innocent woman who was walking down the street who got splattered into a stain on the wall with no warning by British soldiers, in a case of whoopsie-daisy mistaken identity whose family also spent years not knowing who was responsible for their loved one's death.
People die in wars. That's what wars are. We in America wage wars because we hate muslims and prefer driving to walking, and we don't particularly care which places we hit or if we have an actual reason to do so. Sudan, Iran, Yemen, Afghanistan, Iraq, whatever who cares, what else is on. The IRA waged a war based on hundreds of years of legitimate greivances - discrimination, rape and murder, that continued to the start of their resistance and intensified once they began standing up. There will always, always, ALWAYS be people like Keefe to zero the focus in on one single sympathetic victim, leaving thousands of victims on the other side just out of frame, or just out of focus. And any inconvenient facts about that victim can always be stashed in the back of the book, but not the very back, because people tend to remember those last few pages.
Better to leave them with a vague sense that they were given a 'fair and balanced' accounting, even if they cant remember any specific details, beyond an emotional feeling of the injustice done to the Mcconville family.
Also, to present yourself as a trustworthy interlocutor because for most of your life, despite being from an ethnic group, despite being surrounded by people who cared deeply about their struggles, you were too self involved and ignorant to be arsed one way or the other to form an opinion? That somehow an opinion formed with THAT background is more meaningful or informed?
Also Fuck Gerry Adams, but also more generally every chickenshit Baby Boomer fake fucking revolutionary hustler turned real-estate mogul from the late 60's/early 70's. And every Gen-X humanities studies major who turned to licking imperial boots to pay the rent. That's right, Keefe is as big a shit as Yglesias.
joshualeggs's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
sad
tense
medium-paced
5.0
Intense and poignant. Colonialism and religious bigotry are scourges.
mysterymom40's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
mysterious
sad
tense
slow-paced
4.75
Content Warnings
Graphic: Gun violence, Violence, Toxic relationship, Excrement, Death, Death of parent, Toxic friendship, Self harm, Kidnapping, and Medical trauma
Moderate: Pedophilia, Eating disorder, Sexual violence, Incest, and Police brutality
testaroscia's review against another edition
5.0
I am of an age where The Troubles were a childhood background, where growing up agnostic a religious conflict appeared strange on not really comprehensible. When, later in life, i fell in love with [a:Adrian McKinty|12433|Adrian McKinty|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1584967497p2/12433.jpg] Sean Duffy series of novels set during troubles I immediately bookmarked this book to read when he recommended it.
In today's polarized world I am in awe of how NI managed to actually step back from appalling levels of violence to actually give peace a chance. Adams does not come out of this book well but i cannot be impressed with how he managed to thread the needle to bring the Good Friday Agreement as an acceptable option to Northern Irish Republicans 20 years ago and that it still holds, albeit with many ongoing issues.
This book is not about the GFA but is a history of the IRA but it is so well written (and from what I understand, researched) it gives the reader the basis to understand the magnitude of strife and thus the achievement of peace.
In today's polarized world I am in awe of how NI managed to actually step back from appalling levels of violence to actually give peace a chance. Adams does not come out of this book well but i cannot be impressed with how he managed to thread the needle to bring the Good Friday Agreement as an acceptable option to Northern Irish Republicans 20 years ago and that it still holds, albeit with many ongoing issues.
This book is not about the GFA but is a history of the IRA but it is so well written (and from what I understand, researched) it gives the reader the basis to understand the magnitude of strife and thus the achievement of peace.
ginapetruzz's review against another edition
5.0
Just excellent. I loved Empire of Pain but honestly this one was even better. Insanely well researched, insanely well written, took an immensely complicated issue and gave such a good unbiased view into the history of the Troubles which I knew quite literally nothing about. Patrick Radden Keefe is actually the coolest guy in America