Fact: The British Empire once spread across the planet and was held together by the use of extreme force including genocide, slavery, state sanctioned torture, endemic racism, ethnic cleansing and mass internment. Fact: the island of Ireland was the first of the British colonial occupations and will most likely be its last. Fact: the remnants of the British Empire are still occupying six counties of the Irish nation. Fact: under the United Nations Charter every country has the right to self-determination.

Fact: If a single, unimpeded vote was taken across the thirty two counties of Ireland there would be an overwhelming majority in favour of a United Ireland under one unitary government. How predictable that none of these incontestable facts are referred to either explicitly or even implicitly by the British media, including those sections that might otherwise consider themselves liberal and progressive. Gerry Adams, one of the leaders of the ongoing fight for Irish self-determination has absolutely nothing to answer for when it comes to the quisling government in the six counties of Ireland. That Gerry Adams feels he must offer denials for both his IRA membership and actions taken during that period of armed struggle is, I suspect, a strategic mistake which only serves to give succour to those who continue to deny the right of Irish nationhood. A simple policy of neither denying nor confirming the accusations, the very same policy adopted by all governments when confronted by uncomfortable truths, would suffice.

War is a barbaric way of resolving territorial disputes between nations, even in so called just wars. All wars tend to engender acts of terror, counter terror and punishments against collaborators. The British state during WW11 sanctioned the firebombing of an entire German city with no significant military importance as a way of punishing and demoralising the German civilian population. Hundreds of thousands of German civilians, men, women and children, perished in the resultant fire storm. We are still debating to this day the morality of that action, though the RAF who carried out the action are considered heroes. A similar punishment was meted out to the Japanese when the US government sought to punish the Japanese authorities for their dogged resistance in the Pacific Islands. The physical and psychological scars from those two atom bombs are still being felt today, yet the American Government is still lauded for bringing the war to a speedy conclusion. Hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians were incinerated in one deadly hour. More recently, the Vietnamese liberation forces carried out severe punishments to those deemed collaborating with the American occupying forced including the amputation of limbs of those that accepted inoculations from the Americans.

Similarly, but on a massively lesser scale, the Irish Republican Army carried out punishments to those they deemed collaborators, informants and anti-social elements, while pursuing their wholly legitimate war against British occupation. Seen in retrospect those punishments may seem barbaric, and of course they are, but from the perspective of fighting a war of national liberation against a brutal occupying force, such actions were logical and necessary.

Gerry Adams and the other IRA leaders need not defend nor deny these actions. Occupation of one nation by another ander inevitably produces a wave of violent resistance. Imagine that at the conclusion of hostilities in what is popularly known as the Second World War, Germany was in control of six British counties. One can easily imagine a long protracted war of resistance to liberate those counties from fascist control. Every means necessary would be employed including punishments against collaborators. And when such time as the occupying forces were expelled the British Liberation Army would be hailed as heroes and their actions deemed as totally justified. What a shame and disgrace that today’s British media cannot apply this historical perspective to Ireland and its liberation army in the six counties. What a shame and disgrace that the majority of Britain’s media cannot yet accept that Britain was and still is an occupying force with absolutely no justification for that occupation.

And what of the so called Loyalists in the six counties? You will search high and low to find even a hint of a progressive sentiment from these descendants of British protestant occupiers. From the very start these pro-imperialist unionists were on the beneficial end of a divide and rule strategy practised by the British throughout the empire. And as their favoured status has been slowly eroded over the past five decades, so their ideology has become increasingly fascistic.

As for the remaining Catholic community in the six counties of Ireland, they became a minority in their own country, without even the basics of electoral equality. And when they dared to protest, they were burned out of their houses by fascist mobs inside and outside of British uniform. The so called ‘Troubles’ is nothing but a euphemism for a full blown civil rights movement of which Gerry Adams was one of the prominent leaders. And successive British governments, Tory and Labour, found themselves consistently on the wrong of this civil rights uprising. In reply to the nationalists demand for social, legal and economic equality came internment, state thuggery and a hardly disguised shoot-to-kill policy. Gerry Adams and his comrades were nothing short of heroes in standing up to this sickening wave of British imperialist brutality. They were every bit as heroic as the ANC leaders in South Africa and the various leaders of the Black Civil Rights movement in America. While the likes of Nelson Mandela are now fated in the highest institutions of the British state, sadly the British media still cannot rid itself of its imperialist prejudices and pretentions when it comes to Ireland.

Whatever actions were taken by the Irish Republican Army, they were nothing in comparison to the bloody six hundred year occupation of Ireland by British Imperialism. And whatever actions were taken by the Irish freedom fighters throughout the centuries, no matter how ruthless, such actions must be seen within the context of that British occupation. What stands for Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X is equally valid for Gerry Adams and the IRA high command.