Militias and supremacist culture
BY MICK DERRIG
I ARGUED in this paper - (27 April 1995) in an article to mark the 25th anniversary of the setting up of the UDR - that the Orange statelet and out-of-control loyalist state militias went hand in hand.
I said then that changes of name per se were meaningless if there wasn't also a change of substance. The B-Specials had been disbanded and we got the ``non-sectarian'' UDR in their stead in 1970. In the end, it was the same good ol' boys: B-Men in new uniforms with better guns from the British taxpayer.
The point is that the arming of any psychotic bigot who wanted to legally stiff a taig and get paid for it was built into the DNA of the Orange State. To finally remove the militias is to weaken the Orange State irreparably, to compromise the Union.
The Northern state without the RUC is an amputee.
Therefore, although the knee-jerk rejection to the Patten Report by unionism is depressing, it shouldn't surprise anyone. To look at unionism today is to see a people fighting for their way of life and their culture. Unfortunately, their particular model of humanity requires a steady supply of victims to bait, taunt, intimidate and, when they feel like it, murder.
When the sash, flute and Lambeg drum are viewed in a situation free of state-approved intimidation, Orangeism has all the vibrancy of Morris dancing. Whether it is bowler hats or pillowcases with eyeholes, grand masters or imperial wizards, it could all be filed under ``men behaving bizarrely''.
However, when the oath-bound secret society has a hate agenda and it has exclusive control over the local armed state, then that isn't funny in the slightest. The Twelth is Glorious for Billy because it's a day to really ram it down Taig throats. Stewarding the entire degradation ceremony is THEIR police force. The RUC is THEIR culture, and the RUC is about keeping nationalists in their place.
In the aftermath of the killing of Rosemary Nelson it was said that Rosemary was the Six Counties' equivalent of an ``uppity nigger''. This statement brought a fusillade of abuse from the usual suspects.
Unionism is uncomfortable with the comparison with the Southern states of the USA. In the early 1960s, the federal government in America realised that the local states just couldn't be trusted with power. JFK sent in the US Army. The GIs were, in the last resort, the guarantors of the civil rights of African-Americans in the Southern states.
The Harold Wilson government, seeing the RUC beaten by Derry's risen people in 1969, also sent in the troops - but in this case to reinforce Stromont's defeated army. There are mistakes and there are mistakes that make the march of history mark time. Westminster bottled it. The idea that they had within their own state's boundaries an apartheid statelet when they were busy leaning on Rhodesia was an appalling vista. Much better to blame it on the kids from the Bogside or non-existent foreign agitators.
To look at the institutions of the Northern state - and the RUC is THE institution of the Northern state - is to examine the DNA of unionism. Not a nice place in there. The culture that spawns Trimble's worldview is one based on HIS people and HIS police force keeping the other lot down.
Norn Iron needs its niggers for its way of life to be preserved for future generations of bigots. Stripped of their ability to rape, burn and murder with impunity, putting the pillowcase over the head just seems to lose its cultural appeal.
Today in the United States, the Klan remains a cabal of racist sickos, but they no longer have the carte blanche from the local states that they enjoyed in their heyday. Their day is gone. Today, a Klansman who acts out his racist bile and kills a black person could find himself on Death Row. That would have been unthinkable while the federal government in Washington unfettered the local states.
In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan reached its height just as the Orange State was being set up. The Orange anthem, The Billy Boys, commemorates the Scottish loyalist Billy Fullerton.
When he wasn't being a busy Billy in the Nazi British Union of Fascists or one of Mosely's Blackshirts, he was establishing the first chapter of the Klan in his native Bridgeton in the East End of Glasgow.
Both the Orange state and the bits of the US South of that ol' Mason-Dixon Line are based on a culture of repression. The active collusion in that repression by the locally-recruited, locally-controlled state is a common factor. In the final analysis, the central government has to intervene - that's where the buck stops.
So when the bigots are finally told they can't indulge in their traditional pogrom of the underclass any more, they say that their `way of life is under threat'. Living in a society where they have the same rights and privileges of citizenship as everyone else is a terrifying prospect for them.
A society where everyone is treated with parity of esteem is, of course, what the Good Friday Agreement is all about.
Their appalling vista is having to live in a society where they don't have the comfort of being able to clean their feet on someone who is different to them.
Not a pretty picture, is it?
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