1 Boring Old Man

After I read about the "sex scandal" in Northern Ireland last night involving the First Minister’s wife, Iris Robinson [so here’s to you Mrs. Robinson…], my mind was filled with memories of the conflicts in Northern Ireland. I arrived in the UK in August 1971 for a three years tour in the Air Force. We were on a base in East Anglia, a very rural part of England known as the Fens. On the very day we arrived, I picked up a London Times and read that on that day, the British had begun a program they called Internment in Northern Ireland. The violence between the Catholic I.R.A. and Protestants had been at a fever pitch. So Internment meant that the British Army was going to round up dissidents and I.R.A. members and put them in custody in Internment Camps. I guess it was their version of GITMO. At the time, I knew nothing of the age old conflicts in Ireland.

One thing I didn’t know was that Ireland had never ever been a unified country, being dominated by the larger Britain throughout its history. In the 1600s, settlers from Protestant England moved into Northern Ireland, and by 1800, Ireland became part of the UK under the rule of the Protestants. In the early 20th century, there was a revolution, and Ireland was split. Northern Ireland, predominantly Protestant, remained part of the UK. Southern Ireland, overwhelmingly Catholic, became the Irish Free State. The hostilities never stopped.Though there were few "battles," there were bombings – particularly pubs, in both parts of Ireland.

Internment didn’t work. The bloody bombings kept happening. The whole time we were there, the evening paper invariably has a report of some atrocity in Ireland. When we went to Ireland [a wonderful place], we stayed in the South because Northern Ireland wasn’t safe. One Sunday evening in Dublin, we went to a movie [we lived in a rural place, so when we traveled, we often went to movies]. About halfway through the movie, the usher announced that there was a bomb report, so we were marched out of the theater and that was that. Nobody seemed upset. That was just life in Ireland at the time.

I never understood it, the conflict in Ireland. It seemed like it was in their DNA to fight with each other, blow each other to smitherines. It’s just what they did. Here it is, forty years later. They’re in a process to hopefully come up with a functional unitary government no longer under England, and this affair by the First Minister’s wife threatens to snafu the whole plan. The violence is starting anew. Bombings. Remarkable…

And yet Ireland’s not the only version. In the 70s, we visited Yugoslavia, still under Communist Tito’s rule. I thought it was a country, inhabited by Yugoslavians. Well, when Tito died, we found out there were all kinds of ethnic groups there who then set out to exterminate each other. Throughout that vicious war, I never even really got straight about who was fighting who. Was it ethnicity? religion? The whole time they were fighting I kept trying to figure it out. How did they even know who to shoot at? Now it’s a bunch of different countries, all separated again under some ancient set of borders.

And then there was the U.S.S.R. that turned [back] into a bunch of different places after the great communist experiment went belly up twenty years ago – not to mention the Eastern European countries that were, for all intents and purposes, part of the U.S.S.R. [places like East Germany, Poland, Hungary, etc.]. The Iron Curtain was effective in one sense, only students of history knew much about the internal divisions of the Soviet Union. When it fell, all kinds of entities just seemed to pop up.

The region that sits on the front burner these days is the Middle East – which is a horse of a different color. For the most part, the borders in the Middle East at least approximate the borders from antiquity – Babylonia [Iraq], Persia [Iran], Arabia [Saudi Arabia], etc. But as we know in spades, there’s no lack of conflict there. These ancient kingdoms have been plagued with foreign rule for centuries – Ottoman Turks, English, each other. The region is united by religion [Islam] and divided by religion [Shiite, Sunni]. And then there’s Israel and the Palestinians locked into constant conflict since the dawn of time. What they seem to want is to be left alone. At this point, the rest of us might be glad to do that except for their control of the world’s oil and their propensity to want to make atomic bombs. What will happen? As our guides in Egypt and Jordan often said, "Only God knows."

It would seem that there should be some lesson from all these unstable governments that fragment into ethnic or religious semi-unities when left to their own devices. When it’s all said and done, our nation of mongrels seems to be doing as well as any with this kind of factional, racial, religious, regional heterogeneity [not to imply that we’re doing all that well]. But what is the overall message for the future? Is there a big story in all of this?