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The Troubles wasn't a civil war, fighting was much less intense than in the Cultural Revolution or Germany squashing the communists. The UK government won and could've won harder at any time, if they were willing to use force more aggressively, if they didn't care about the media and fully committed to crushing the insurgency. What Cromwell did in Ireland, that's a civil war. There are major battles, sieges, multiple armies and an enormous death toll, mostly civilian.
Nuclear armed militaries have strong incentives to be united, they don't want to fight a nuclear war against themselves.
When it comes to inflicting atrocities, the state enjoys escalation dominance. They have everything militias have and much more. Even in the era of pikes and muskets (surely more accommodating to the untrained than today's weapons) Cromwell's army could singlehandedly dominate Britannia. People certainly tried to resist but the army crushed them. Only when the army divided could anything change.
They were hobbled by the pretence that the army was only there as a neutral peace-keeping force, that the North was nothing to do with them at all, and this was just the innocent Brits being nice, kind, good neighbours by helping out the Paddies with their little problem.
Under the hood, there were plenty of dirty tricks campaigns.
This is the main thing that continues to annoy me: the English will not take responsibility for their history. Dawkins shooting off his ignorant mouth about religion being the problem in Northern Ireland, that it was (Irish) Catholics versus (Irish) Protestants, was just one example of the view there: the nice kind Brits had nothing to do with centuries of political manipulation and setting one side against the other and colonisation, it was just stupid Paddies with their ignorant tribalism.
That link describes the activities of a British deep-cover agent in the IRA. He was there because it was important to know what the IRA was doing, and he did awful things because the IRA ordered him to.
In the nicest possible way, from the British side, 'taking responsibility for [English] history' always seems to mean 'take the blame for all the stupid stuff we did to each other and you should have magically stopped'. It's the same with the Benghal famine, a natural famine that occured in Bangladesh (and occurs again and again with monotonous regularity Empire or no Empire) but which we get it in the neck for because we didn't magically teleport food we didn't have past a blockade of U-boats.
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