Here we have Sinn Féin and People Before Profit, a Trot outfit including a collection of British socialists who believe Ireland should be part of the Union. They are joined by one of the Syrians brought here as planters by the Atlanticists. Isn't it crazy to see all the gray heads and old white faces?! It isn't 1970 anymore, that's for sure.
I'd like to take this time to make a few points which I have been thinking about over the years regarding Sinn Féin and their transformation or what I consider to be their inevitable trajectory.
I believe that the early framing of the nationalist insurgency as a "civil rights movement" was the thing which guaranteed that no meaningful Irish republic would ever be constructed from it. Picking up on the American Civil Rights Movement and the trends in decolonisation of the 1960s locked that generation into a New Left framing and connected Irish people to Britain's colonial subjects.
The truth about the Civil Rights Movement and decolonisation is that each was a managed movement. The Civil Rights movement was led by the Federal Government in America had the backing of the dominant classes such as Harvard lawyers. Decolonisation was simply a managed transition from the British Empire to Commonwealth and United Nations, institutions the British elites at Oxbridge had long pursued.
As soon as SF focused on "civil rights" rather than the Irish nation, it was already over. Then it became about discrimination and winning elections to sham parliaments north and south. The reunification of Ireland became conflated with resistance to racism in Britain and America.
Britain successfully kept the north by pursuing a dual strategy of capturing the Free State media and foreign diplomats on the one hand and ensuring that the republican movement was infected by international socialism. Gerry Adams was pivotal in that process.
The EU bucks were soon coming in. The dual strategy of presenting themselves as conservative nationalists in America and radical Marxists everywhere else paid off.
In recent times, SF realised that rehabilitating their image with progressives was pretty easy. As soon as it became necessary to pivot away from nationalism, their American supporters became "yanks". SF led the way on female representatives and were amongst the first to put an African up for election. They spoke Irish and had the biggest growth in universities. Irish nationalism was now just another form of liberation struggle tied to Africa and Palestine, Britain's former colonial territories. Irish nationalism was cut from its European roots and debased.
Links with British agent Nelson Mandela and black power activists were trendy and appealed to moron students who were trained to hate themselves for being white and racist. Many republicans fancied themselves as honorary blacks. Gerry Adams is the most guilty of this silliness. He remains a hero to British anti-racists to this day.
Adams and co became famous but they did so at the cost of losing the most important war, the war for an Irish Ireland. Nobody actually believed Irish people were black, they were just pretending. Now the truth has come out and it turns out that we were always just white and racist colonisers like the "Brits" and the "Yanks" all along. Irish Americans are now dismissed as Yanks when they show an interest in anything Irish by the republicans they supported for decades.
A united Ireland remains their big gimmick, or should that be a "United Eyeland"? Now, SF are part of a process which will surely result in a united Ireland. This outcome is assured but only because the peace process is directed by the British and Irish governments, not because SF are involved. SF are being managed by that process and are allowed present themselves as directors when they are only actors.
The problem is that this united Ireland will be demographically identical to Britain and will be governed under the exact same system of laws based on "human rights" which embed anti-white discrimination in British and European law.
The idea underpinning this process is that tolerance of diversity will result in old grievances easing off and people becoming more open. The more diversity, the more peace and prosperity we will have. Observant readers will note that this is the exact same lie behind the promise of multiculturalism which is a system developed in Britain and America to manage their modern empire.
Tony Blair's demographic transformation of Britain was soon brought to Ireland. It is no surprise that the first thing that came out of the Good Friday Agreement was increased immigration from Africa.
SF are so ideologically defeated that they think an Irish Ireland is a fascistic imposition from the British! They actually believe that a diverse Ireland was what was being fought for all along, an Irish version of Britain made up of former colonial immigrants from Nigeria and India.
Basically, SF lost a psychological warfare battle. In the future, SF will be cast aside for trendier progressive parties without their baggage on the left and by right wing nationalists who know that the continuation of the Irish nation is the central issue, not "civil rights".
An anti-racism rally has taken place in west Belfast.
A crowd gathered at the international wall on the Falls Road at 5pm.
Speakers there included Belfast Lord Mayor
@RoismairedSF, MLA
@GerryCarrollPBP, and Dr Raied Al-Wazzan.
Another rally is organised for Belfast City Hall at 1pm tomorrow
@BelTel