Quote Originally Posted by KukriKhan
I see. After I typed that, I wondered if it were true on the more local, Ireland, level.

So, given that that anti-catholic (and presumeably anti-protestant) rhetoric has faded 30-some years later, should we just not worry about today's anti-muslim rhetoric - as it too will fade when the conflict eventually resolves, and the shiek sits down with the pm in 2038?
If we resolve some of the issues that inflame eejits to acts of madness, and engage more constructively with moderate Muslims (rather than maintaining that there is no such thing) I can see the rhetoric of today looking as foolish as the papist-proddy nonsense of the Seventies.

Young men are notoriously foolish. When a callow youth, I was very impressionable in regard to the republican cause - not least because my father was a icon of the establishment, contrary to some of my more romantically doomed ancestors. "Atrocities" committed by the "Evil Empire" of the British were red meat and it was easy for us to wind ourselves up over internment, Bloody Sunday, Rev Paisley, the Orange Order and damn near anything.

I have a cut-glass English public-school accent that would shame a 1950's BBC announcer, but I also tend to fall into a soft Munster brogue from time to time. Doing that on the streets of England up until even the early eighties could attract unwelcome attention from Her Majesty's constabulary. There were certainly several examples of men jailed for life for the crime of being Irish after the hours of darkness.

All that is a potent cocktail for the foolish nationalism of youth. When one deludes oneself that the whole world is agin ye, it is easy to ignore the voices of moderation and listen to the radicals. Progressive, democratic achievement looks feeble and doomed compared to the glorious deeds of past revolutionaries. It's a remarkably easy step from nursing a Beamish listening to the Pogues to activism and finding oneself planting a pipe bomb behind a street brick. Or, as many Americans did, funding the ability to plant that bomb and dismissing the dead civilians alongside the soldier as casualties of the Great Cause.

I don't condone any of this, and look back on those days of stupidity with enormous embarrassment. But that experience, allied to the knowledge of terrorist methods gained when I took up the fight against them, informs me about how young Muslims may be feeling when so demonised. We must find ways out for them that are constructive, and laud them for taking the high road, and refrain from generalisations - and then yes, in thirty years' time, maybe the Great War for Civilisation will look as silly as the sectarianism of my youth.