AlterNet, that online bastion of American left-wing liberalism and anti-establishment rhetoric, has an opinion piece on the attendance of Sinn Féin’s Martin McGuinness, Joint First Minister in Belfast’s power-sharing regional administration, at the ceremony in London welcoming the Irish president Michael D. Higgins on his state visit to Britain. At least that was the main event that happened some weeks ago though you wouldn’t believe it reading the AlterNet piece where President Higgins isn’t even mentioned. In fact one strongly suspects that the author of the article is completely unaware of the reason for the meet-and-greet at Windsor Castle, the first official visit by a President of Ireland to our nearest neighbour, an event filled with historical significance for both nations. Instead we are regaled with a long and frankly incoherent diatribe against the (Provisional) Irish Republican Army and its thirty-year armed opposition to the continued British colonial presence in Ireland. In the article the titles of the main parties to the conflict are confused, individuals as misnamed, history and geography is clearly misunderstood, and everything is reduced to an absurd synopsis of the conflict that owes more to the pages of Britain’s tabloid press than any significant knowledge on the part of the writer. If it weren’t for the fact that the piece is little more than crude pro-British, anti-Irish propaganda it could be dismissed out of hand. Unfortunately propaganda is exactly what it is, which raises the question: why is it that so many on the American Left are so enamoured of all things British (for which one should read, English) that when it comes to Britain’s history in Ireland the truth must be well and truly buried?
This is just one of several articles hostile to Irish Republicanism to be featured by supposedly liberal US publications (online and offline) in recent months. Perhaps the most notable have stemmed from interviews with Anglophile author Paul Theroux where his twisted schadenfreude over the marathon-day bombings in the “Irish-American” city of Boston were given free (and unquestioning) rein. So what is up with Liberals in the United States? Why have intellectuals, writers, journalists and artists consistently fallen for Britain’s “Dirty War” propaganda? Does their love of all things British, their Harry Potteresque passion for Hollywood Englishness make them more susceptible to the myths of the noble British battling for civilization against the savage Irish than other nationalities? Watching television dramas from the United States the portrayals of Irish characters frequently go far beyond stereotype and into outright racism. The infamous “Sons of Anarchy” and its grotesque Irish storylines would be unthinkable if the people being supposedly shown were African-American or Jewish-American. Yet the Irish are fair game. The recent Amazon Sci-Fi pilot, “The After“, helmed by Chris Carter, featured an Irish character who could have stepped straight out of the pages of a KKK pamphlet, circa 1915. A violent, incoherent, foul-mouthed drunk with an obvious intent to rape the nearest female in sight he might as well have worn a tee-shirt asking: “Where’s all the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant women at?”.
So I ask again. American Liberals, why do so many of you act as apologists for Britain’s record of war and injustice in Ireland? Why do you knowingly regurgitate tired old clichés about that centuries-old conflict, clichés taken from the worse excesses of British popular culture? And AlterNet, why are you blocking my Comments from appearing under the article on your website? For the record here is what I wrote in reply to the contentious opinion piece:
“Who exactly were the “Royal Irish (Protestant) Constabulary”? Does the author mean the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), the British paramilitary police force in the north-east of Ireland made notorious for its ninety-year record of violence, terrorism, sectarianism and racism until it was disbanded as part of the Irish-British peace process of the 1990s? Or perhaps he means the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR), the British Army militia unit also disbanded as part of the peace process due to its less than enviable record of murder and mayhem? Soldiers by day, gunmen by night. No? Perhaps he has in mind the various British terror factions in Ireland, from the UVF to the RHC? Given that they contained large numbers of serving or former members of the British Forces it is easy to understand the confusion. Not to mention the fact that they were substantially organised, trained, financed, armed and directed by the British state, from intelligence services to government officials (with lots of lovely AK47s supplied by the Apartheid regime in South Africa, right-wing Protestant fundamentalists in Canada and the United States, Neo-Nazis groups in Britain, as well as weapons, ahem, “borrowed” from British Army stores).
How about the UDA-UFF? The largest and most active British terrorist group in Ireland, responsible for hundreds of gun and bomb attacks over the course of two decades? Of course the UDA-UFF was uniquely the only LEGAL terrorist organisation in the whole of Western Europe since Britain refused to ban it until, yes, that’s right, the peace process of the 1990s. Imagine, you could be a terrorist and wear a tee-shirt proclaiming it to the world. Cool! (Just ask Johnny “Mad Dog” Adair who greatly enjoyed his dinner parties with the head of British military intelligence after a hard day of shooting Irish men, women and children)
But then all these masked defenders of the Pax Britannia were part of Britain’s counter-insurgency war against the (Provisional) Irish Republican Army. Of course they started “defending” the last remnant of Britain’s colony in Ireland way back in 1966 when they murdered a grandmother and two teenage boys, one fire-bombed in her home the others gunned down in the streets. The (Provisional) Irish Republican Army didn’t come into existence until four years later but SHUSH, don’t ruin the British propaganda narrative with some Irish historical truth…”
AN SIONNACH FIONN 
Nuair a thug Blair cúnamh do Bush tháinig athrú orthu anseo & bhí Britain le feiceáil i ngach áit: ar an TV le BBC America (a bhí níos láidre ná cheana) agus ar na sráideanna le i bhfad níos mó daoine le blas Britain thart.
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Athbhlagáladh é seo ar pictishbeastie.
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When I was in college in Dublin in the 1990s a lecturer who had worked as a magazine designer with Conde Nast in New York told us that EVERYONE in American magazine publishing was British. The American liberal media establishment is intensely Anglophile and anti-Irish because it is largely run by Britons – and that goes for the broadcast media and Hollywood as well. Hence the “British invasion” of the 1960s, where British bands such as the Beatles and the Stones were enthusiastically promoted in America by what was in fact a British controlled American media. Even Jimi Hendrix’s manager was an Mi6 agent. Somebody who knows a good deal about such matters once told me that the CIA actually swear allegiance to Elizabeth Battenberg Windsor. I can’t vouch for that, but the hostility of the American liberal establishment for all things Irish is glaringly obvious . The Irish media is of course run by British intelligence as well – hence the constant sneering at all things Irish in newspapers such as the Sunday Indo, the Irish Mail on Sunday, not to mention the intensely Anglophile RTE. Dermot Morgan, the star of the rabidly anti-Irish caricature Fr Ted made his name lampooning hurley stick wielding Irish nationalists on RTE in the early 1980s. Morgan was a strong supporter of the Workers Party. Graham Linehan, the co-writer of Fr Ted appears on the BBC satire show Have I Got News For You regularly, and habitually uses “we”, “us” and “our” when referring to Britain – an indication, if it were needed, of where his loyalties lie. His mother Rosaleen presented a fawning forelock tugging tribute to the British royals on the eve of the 2011 Windsor visit to Ireland. The evidence of “The Lost Revolution – The History of the Official IRA and the Workers Party” leaves the careful reader in no doubt that OIRA/WP was in fact from day one a British Intelligence black psychological operation, designed to give the British pro-Unionist Revisionist agenda in Ireland a leftist progressive image. Hence the speed with which Eoghan Harris, Gerry Gregg & co ditched their macho Stalinist posturing around the time the Berlin Wall fell, and became outspoken advocates for the invasions of Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Hence also the way these supposed Stalinist class warriors always found employment in the Murdoch press and with Tony O’Reilly’s soft porn rags. The famous WP visits to Moscow and North Korea were clearly sponsored by British intelligence as a missionary propaganda exercise on behalf of British rule. This was the real reason for the WP’s pro-Soviet stance – it made it much easier to influence east Bloc regimes on behalf of Britain. The British are the acknowledged experts at “full spectrum dominance” psychological warfare – whereby all sides, left, right and centre, are manipulated into singing from the same Masonic songbook.
Incidentally none of this is particularly new: in his book Jail Journal John Mitchel observed that it was well known that the American Know Nothing anti-Irish riots of the mid 19th century were fomented by British agents.
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The British intelligence controlled Irish media studiously ignored Workers Party/Official IRA criminality and terrorism, because that party was, at its core, nothing more than a British intelligence front, which successfully infiltrated RTE, the Irish Times, Independent newspapers, the trades unions and the Irish artistic community, in order to advance the British imperialist agenda in Ireland. None of this is “conspiracy theory”. The very well researched book about WP/OIRA, “The Lost Revolution”, is written from a viewpoint extremely sympathetic to the WP, but nonetheless quotes many WP activists admitting that the British security forces facilitated the rise of the Sticky criminal empire, and that Belfast Special Branch officers drank in Workers Party clubs, and that senior Workers Party members collected intelligence on behalf of the British security forces. Rabidly pro-Unionist newspapers such as the Murdoch owned rag, The Sunday Times, employed WP hacks to disseminate anti-Irish propaganda, as did the Sunday Independent (aka “The Freemasons Journal”). It’s also highly significant that WP aligned performers such as Dermot Morgan specialised in virulently anti-Irish caricatures such as Fr Ted – still incessantly repeated on RTE and Channel 4. Another significant feature of Irish politics in the 1980s and 1990s was the very close relationship between the pro-Unionist Progressive Democrats and the equally pro-Unionist Workers Party. Ostensibly these two parties were poles apart ideologically but in truth they were two sides of the same crypto-Orangeist coin. One, the WP, was designed to appeal to the working class and those who fancied themselves as left-wing intellectuals, while the other, the PDs, was formed to reel the aspirational middle-classes into the big neo-Orangeist neo-con tent. Ray McSharry recorded former senior Fianna Fail minister, Martin O’Donoghue telling him that there was “lots of money around” for TDs who would agree to vote to unseat Haughey as party leader. The fact that when this tape was released no one in the Irish media ever inquired as to where these “funds” came from or who provided them and for what purpose, proves that the Irish media itself had no interest in finding out who really pulled the strings in Irish politics. Incidentally O’Donoghue also told McSharry that the Dick Spring led Labour Party had made it known that they would support a Fianna Fail minority government on condition that Haughey was removed as leader. All the evidence suggests that the “lots of money” that failed to unseat Haughey in the early 1980s was then channelled into setting up the Progressive Democrats. Since that time Fianna Fail have never had an overall majority, and indeed in 1997 Ahern made a specific promise to his backers in the Freemasons Journal and elsewhere that he would still form a coalition with the PDs EVEN if he got an overall majority. The PDs role then was to keep a watching eye over Fianna Fail and make sure that it never gave in to the temptation to appease the Republican populist aspirations of its grassroots. Hence the TV hagiography of Des O’Malley, produced by erstwhile Workers Party hack Gerry Gregg, not to mention Gregg’s propaganda film on behalf of the Shell pipeline. It’s also worth noting that pro-Unionist journalists in both Britain and Ireland almost always also tend to be pro-Neocon on foreign affairs – Eoghan Harris (ex-WP), Henry McDonald (ex-WP), Ian O’Doherty, Charles Moore, Dean Godson, Andrew Roberts, to name just a few. Such figures have close connections to the liberal interventionist globalist establishment – in both Britain and the States, and are as faithful as poodles in retailing this agenda to their readers.
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