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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   29163 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 31, 2023

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The IRA wasn't universally loathed by every institution within Ireland though.

I think if we look into the specifics you'd have a hard time making the case that conservatives have less power in American institutions than nationalists had in Northern Ireland at the outbreak of the Troubles.

Even in the Republic it's not as simple as it seems, the Irish government was sympathetic to nationalists but not to the IRA. Ireland still has a secret juryless court which was set up specifically to jail paramilitaries.

The fact that the IRA had sympathetic supporters in Ireland was big. The Irish government might have officially disagreed with their violent methods, but not with the idea of Irish unification.

Compare that to a hypothetical scenario today where Conservatives are trying to go up against a left-leaning FBI that's clearly willing to bend laws, and a left-leaning media that'd love to manufacture consent to legitimize doing so.

The main thing Ireland contributed was a sympathetic alternative for international support which the UK was seriously constrained by. I'll grant that this is an advantage American conservatives don't have, America isn't nearly as reliant on international support and even if it were Europeans don't like conservatives anyway.

I still think the advantages American conservatives do have are substantial. For all the bias that the FBI has against conservatives they still hold a lot more sway than nationalists ever did in MI5 or the Royal Ulster Constabulary. They still make up a far larger portion of the population, control a far larger portion of the government, and are much wealthier and better armed than nationalists ever were.

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