State Violence Read Online Free PDF Page A

western culture. I hope I am positive about accepting the benefits of modern technology. I do not, however, accept as utopia the ideology of secular liberalism, pluralism or a ‘democracy’ based on capitalism. The Brandt report, which exposes the north-south divide of the earth, is too much a reproach for that. History repeats itself. Empires rise and fall. Each great new power regards itself as ‘civilisation’ and frowns on the rest of the world as ‘barbarism’. New Caesars need not lop off the enemy tribe’s right hands. They can bury them alive in trenches. The Rockeye II, weighing about 500lbs, dispenses 247 grenade-sized bomblets which produce a hail of around half a million anti-personnel shrapnel fragments which can kill or severely wound anyone within an acre. All that is needed is a target-rich area of human beings.
    I believe there is a utopia or a parousia – the redemption of Jesus Christ. That demands moving into the world of spirit. Redemption like creation is an ongoing thing. People in every age are heroic in their suffering, sacrifice and generosity. Jesus is eternally alive and he learns from every age of humanity. The boy with the loaves in the desert and Adhmed Kassim are telescoped.

On the wrong side of the track ...
    I do not find the Northern Ireland problem difficult to understand. It is in microcosm the problem of many countries and states in the world. The division of rich and poor is the basis of the division in Northern Ireland. Discrimination against Catholics was administrative policy of the Stormont government for fifty years. Its rule lacked charity and justice. In that sense the war in the north is a religious war. The facts of this injustice were admitted publicly by the British government in the Cameron Report on Disturbances in Northern Ireland of 1969. Justice in the work places is still being pursued by the Fair Employment Agency in Northern Ireland and by Irish people armed with the McBride Principles who lobby institutions of power in the USA. Sharing, power-sharing, is an answer to the Northern Ireland problem. The British government has further aggravated the dominance of one community and culture over the other by the one-sided structuring of the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the Ulster Defence Regiment which places security and power solely in the hands of unionists. This serious mistake has led to corruption of law, harassment, state killings and collusion of government forces with loyalist paramilitaries.
    The ghetto people of Northern Ireland, particularly those in Derry and West Belfast, are like other ghetto people. They regard themselves, in John Steinbeck’s phrase, as on ‘the wrong side of the track’. Problems like vandalism, illiteracy, drugs and violence in ghetto cities are basically the result of deprivation. There is a temptation on the part of government to regard these problems as a matter of ‘law and order’. That embitters the situation. The ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ divide seems to be perennial. It has led to major conflicts in today’s world – South Africa, Nicaragua, El Salvador and the Philippines.
    The rich eventually are forced to take notice of the situation. What do they say to the poor? They dictate to them from government offices, palaces, penthouse flats and mansions. The more they dictate to them, the more the poor resent their solutions. They presume the loyalty of the ghettos to the state but many ghetto people hate the state. Sometimes the poor reply with bombs and guns, as much as to say, ‘Well, if I don’t share, you are not going to enjoy your wealth in peace’. That is the raison d’être of anarchy.
    Why, for example, should the Northern Ireland Office presume the loyalty of the people of Ballymurphy, a little housing estate of nationalists in Belfast where in the past twenty years over sixty people have been shot dead by security forces and