The British corporate media ramble on about how progressive the visits of Elizabeth Windsor and her handshake with Martin McGuinness are, presented as the climax of peace and reconciliation portraying those who disagree as malcontents stuck in the past.British royalty and its history in Ireland is both a crime and an insult and a time to protest.
Ireland was Britain’s first colony and when the Irish resist there is repression. Britain imposed its oppressive regimes and sectarian division by force and duplicity. It was never about their portrayal of resistance as religious or ethnic but colonialism, with Britain dominating the Irish economy while keeping colonial Ireland in poverty.
The most extreme example being the Irish holocaust or what is generally known as the famine in 1845. The Potato crop failed causing the death of millions in an ethnic cleansing exercise by the British in the midst of prime quality food being exported to Britain, to support its war efforts clearing the land of more than 6 million peasants in abject poverty. They would not have starved if the food they’d grown had not under armed guard been exported to Britain.
Queen Victoria visited Ireland just at the end of their holocaust in 1849, putting on a royal display of banquets and celebration, while there was mass starvation all about her. The forthcoming royal visit and secret handshake with a former IRA Chief of Staff, despite recent massacres by her British troops still garrisoned in Ireland. Royal visits rubber stamp a wealthy establishment of enablers in an attempt to cower people to British rule.
The nationalist revolution during British difficulties tied to its crumbling Empire and the First World War, created their temporary solution to split Ireland in two states despite an overwhelming vote for all of the island's independence. With repression enforcing the arrangement, the British calculated fostering a return of their rule to all of the island.While McGuinness and his former republicans profess to convert a majority to Irish unity, the reality is, that the British with its superior media outlets like the BBC world service and constant barrage of royal propaganda, are converting the island to a return to the Commonwealth with the aid of McGuineess's collaborators.
The current hype around a secret handshake with the queen, hiding the reality of McGuinness on his knees, bowing to his nominal head of British forces, that murdered hundreds of civil rights marchers in cold blood on Bloody Sunday in Derry and defenceless civilians in places like Ballymurphy in 1972 is a distraction from a repressive reality. Yes a British Prime Minister muttered words meant t be an apology for Derry but the fact is, that a sincere apology involves restitution and ensuring the savagery is not repeated, i.e removing the British army permanently from the island, with both McGuinness and his queen making complete apologies for their personal part in their crimes against Irish humanity. The queen is the head of the British armed forces who still make war for the materialism of imperialism.
The Rise and Fall of the British Empire, enabling the American one to follow, portrayed with glorious accounts about piracy in India or the Victorian imperial mentality, through two world wars by British sponsored authors are often strangely silent on Britain's first and most difficult colony, Ireland. Its indefinite occupation or its other examples in places like Egypt, ignore the bitter legacy it left everywhere it went, leading up to the 1956 Suez Crisis, which really marked America inheriting British imperialism. Neither having any place in a world order, that claims an attempt moving towards greater and wider democracy.
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