365 – A Whole Year of This Nonsense

So, umm… I feel a bit ungracious about saying this, especially since this was the episode where one of our hosts probably annoyed some of his fellow-Americans by calling the US imperialist. But as they will be able to tell if they read this, they pushed a particular button…

It’s fine for Siryn to feel a certain Irish bristling at imperialism. But the specifics of what John Francis Moore makes her say are horrible. They fall into, bluntly, a common American* stereotype of Irishness that is irritating, verging on offensive, and the main thing that makes it not offensive is that it’s pitifully ignorant. It’s meant to be sympathetic, but there is nothing sympathetic about representing Irish people as being stupid enough to have simplistic black-and-white views of the Northern Irish conflict, in which “Northern Ireland has suffered long enough” under British “jackboots.”

Some facts: while people in the South, where Theresa supposedly is from, have pretty consistently aspired to a united Ireland**, throughout the Troubles the majority were strongly opposed to IRA violence and broadly supportive of the British security forces, with whom the government of the Republic co-operated. Not to say that people weren’t and aren’t critical of the British. When, for instance, the British shot innocent people or locked up the wrong people for years (and covered it up) — that sort of thing does cause anger . But very few people could ever have thought that it made Warrington OK.

And frankly, even among actual IRA supporters, this would be pretty extreme language. I have a close friend from a very republican family: grew up reading An Phoblacht, the works. And he has never remotely framed Northern Ireland in this childish a way. He’s aware, amazingly enough, that Unionists *exist.*

Northern Ireland is complicated. To say something that Americans will probably find to be an annoying stereotype, Americans like to see situations in terms of good-guy heroes and bad-guy villains. Well, Northern Ireland is not a good place to look for heroes *or* villains.

And saying “the British occupation of Northern Ireland,” as our hosts did, is not great framing. “Occupation” suggests something like the Israeli occupation of Palestine, something that is a clear-cut case (whatever one’s views) of a state using force to seize territory belonging to another state and holding that territory against the will of the overwhelming majority of its population. “Occupation” suggests that this invasion and occupation is something that happened in recent memory and could easily be reversed, if only the British were not, you know, simplistic villains.

I do appreciate that this probably seems excessively harsh. Some of my feelings on the subject are because things are very tense in Northern Ireland at the moment, because of Brexit (see, I do blame the British for some things!). But it’s obviously rather unlikely that Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men will have much effect on the likelihood of people throwing petrol bombs in West Belfast.

A lot more of it is because this is something that has happened to me a lot since I moved to America, an assumption that I must hate British people and see them as evil foreign occupiers and nothing more than that. (I hope that IconUK feels that I have done a good enough job in these comment boxes of concealing my boiling national hatred of him and all his tyrant kind.) Americans seem remarkably incapable of noticing that Ireland and Britain are right beside each other and that as a result it would be very odd if Irish people did not go back and forth to Britain all the time, make British friends, marry British people, have British relatives. The history of Ireland and Britain is long and difficult, with many injustices and horrible things in it. But the idea that as a result, by virtue of having grown up in Ireland, I must feel a simplistic prejudice against and loathing for all British people — as I said, it would be offensive, if it weren’t so obviously rooted in ignorance.

And Northern Ireland is a particular hot-button for me. Peace in Northern Ireland is the single issue that’s most emotionally important to me. And peace in Northern Ireland requires compromise, and the kind of narrow-minded simplistic BS that John Francis Moore is using Siryn to peddle does nothing to promote that.

*In particular, naive Irish-Americans who romanticize things from which they are distant and about which they know very little.. John Francis Moore’s name suggests that he may fall into that category.

**Although it’s far from certain that in a border poll, the South would vote for a united Ireland. Some of it is an enlightened concern about repeating the mistake that the British and Northern Irish Unionists made in 1921, coercing a minority, this time Protestants, into a state to which they do not want to belong as a matter of deeply-felt identity. Some of it is because southern Irish taxpayers will not all be in a hurry to pay the tab that Westminster is currently picking up — the Northern Irish are an expensive people. But one quite possible outcome is that a majority in the North will vote to join the South, and the South will say, “Umm, are you sure you aren’t happier in the United Kingdom? Think of the NHS. It’s a marvel, isn’t it? Let me tell you, health care down here isn’t a patch on what you get where you are…”

Regarding the question about any mutants have powers related to man-made substances- don’t forget Soft Serve! She’s having something of a renaissance since getting to Krakoa!