AngryAsWell wrote:TR'sGhost wrote:AngryAsWell wrote:
I thought that as well, so I went to @ConnorMcGinn page and found this
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Reading the comments under it now.
That's all I've found as well.
I'm guess McGinn doesn't know who the person abusing him is, or he wouldn't be asking them.
An honourable right-wing journalist exaggerating a minor Twitter troll spat to attack a Labour leader? Not ever come across that before. No sign of pictures of corpses etc., but obviously an honourable journalist would never act as a third-rate Tory PR man, so clearly Hodges must be right.
No doubt the Zinoviev letter sending Ramsay MacDonald his instructions from Moscow was true as well. Not a forgery at all.
I'm not sticking up for Hodges, not even a little bit. I was trying to understand the historical relevance, if any, that's all. I genuinely don't know enough about the troubles period in Ireland - must do some reading.
Don't think there's any historical relevance at all.
Getting an accurate perspective on any period in Irish history tends to mean you need to have a grasp of the period before that and so on (and on). As RobertSnozers says, getting a remotely neutral perspective, if there even is such a thing, is many times harder.
It happens that I studied contemporary Irish history as part of my degree 30-odd years ago. It was a final year course and I think the only other place covering that period in any detail at the time was Queen's Belfast. My course concluded with the end of the People's Democracy movement and Bloody Sunday, which was considered alarmingly "political" by some. You just weren't supposed to ask questions about Ireland or even know much about it, but to patriotically nail your Union flag to your forehead, learn Daily Express headlines by rote and think Ireland was all about dim, violent and unreasoning religious nutcases, some on "our" side, some not. An attitude which is no help in understanding the issues and reaching a conclusion about how they might be resolved, of course.
I found it very useful that, by chance, I came to know a few students from Belfast and Armagh, from both sides of the republican/loyalist divide. They could provide a first-hand perspective, and, obviously, were aware of many nuances and perspectives that fleshed out the academic stuff.
For getting an idea of the history, I suggest starting with the time of the United Irishmen and Wolfe Tone, through the Famine, founding of the Orange Order and the Parnell period then the immediate struggle for independence, followed by partition.
Wiki can actually be quite useful for this.
I still have a few now very battered and quite rare books on the post World War II period, but they're long out of print. One, Michael Farrell's 1976 "Northern Ireland: the Orange State" is quite good, readable and available through google books -
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=qdY ... edir_esc=y" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Farrell was originally a "Labour Trotskyist", later a key member of People's Democracy. He can be accused of bias, but so can pretty much anyone who attempts a history of contemporary Northern Ireland. No matter what interpretation is placed on events, someone will always find something to strongly disagree about.
I'm getting tired of calming down....
)
