History Management

Now that Sinn Féin are in government at Stormont, Britain's leading liberal newspaper has discovered, to its horror, that civil war is a brutal business in which deaths and disappearances can sometimes occur. It is admitted that the number of abductions and killings during the Irish war of independence pales beside those committed by the régimes of Franco, Suharto and some good neighbours of the World Cop; and the Irish republicans seem also to have fallen behind these friends of freedom by failing to continue the purges after they attained power. Nevertheless, the Irish state remains in denial over the level of violence used in the war; quite unlike the British state, whose acknowledgement and repentance of the Kenyan concentration camps, the Malayan Emergency and Mr Churchill's Bengal famine are famously commemorated throughout the realm. Comparisons of the timing of this story with vulgar historiography of the Holocaust, in which six million proto-Zionists have been redeemed and sanctified as a certification of perpetual open season on the Palestinians, would of course be antisemitically invidious.