Bleeding Ulster:
Lessons for White Advocates in Mostly What Not to Do

[1]6,987 words

Northern Ireland is unique. The Wars of Religion that made seventeenth-century Europe a blood-soaked hellscape never ended there. To describe the situation in Northern Ireland simply, the Republicans — or Nationalists — are nearly all Catholic (or better said, culturally Catholic) and see themselves as Native Irish Gaels. They are the “Green” Irish. Those who wish for Northern Ireland to remain in the United Kingdom are called Loyalists, Orangemen, or Unionists and they are usually Protestant or culturally so. Loyalists see themselves as a different people entirely from the Native Irish. In Northern Ireland, they are usually called Ulster-Scots. In America, they are called the Scots-Irish.

In other words, the conflict is political, ideological, religious, and ethnic at the same time. There is one other thing to understand. Ulster is a place name. It refers to the traditional kingdom in the north of Ireland. Northern Ireland is a political entity that consists of the part of Ulster which remained with the United Kingdom after the rest of Ireland became a Free State in 1921.

The point of this article is not to take sides in the conflict. Instead, the point of the article is for American white advocates to learn from a conflict that has some applicable parallels to our dilemma. There are also things going on in Northern Ireland that don’t apply that should be discussed. There are also some big mistakes made there by the Irish Nationalists which will be examined.

The Irish Nationalists are and were the advanced guard for other Third World de-colonial [2] movements. Irish Catholic immigrants in America also developed the model for alienated non-white groups to follow in asserting themselves politically. The non-white portions of the British Empire that sought independence following World War II followed the Irish model, not the America of 1776 model.

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This Irish Nationalist mural shows the ideological link between Irish Nationalism and Third World de-colonial/anti-white movements elsewhere.

The relationship between the Sub-Saharans in America of the present day with the American political elite matches the Irish situation in the late 1800s. Then, Irish Nationalists formed a bloc in the British Parliament [4] that was so powerful that all other parties had to deal with them in some way to form a government.

In other words, by the 1880s, the Irish Nationalists sat at the pinnacle of British Imperial power, were mostly getting whatever they wanted, and were still nursing historical grievances against the British.

[5]

Left: The distribution of Scots-Irish persons in the United States. Right: Locations of those Americans with Scottish ancestors. The Scots-Irish dominate in Appalachia but are found all over the country. The American frontier — north and south — was advanced by the Scots-Irish.

The Ulster Plantation & America’s Backcountry

It is to the great misfortune of the Irish that they never developed the economic dynamism or political organization of their English and Scottish neighbors although they were very similar genetically. They were behind by every social and economic measure when Richard de Clare, the Earl of Pembroke and his army were invited to come to Ireland to support one Irish faction over the other in a domestic political struggle in 1170. Pembroke eventually “took over” Ireland, although his reach and the reach of his successors never really got far from Dublin. The situation continued on in Ireland until geopolitics caused the Tudors to start a renewed conquest and settlement scheme in the late 1500s.

The exact military and political situation in Ulster prior to 1603 is complex and beyond the scope of this article. Suffice to say a Scottish lord gained title to part of the property of a jailed Irish aristocrat that year and he started to settle Scottish Protestants in Northern Ireland in an organized way. The settlement expanded from there after some Irish Earls went into exile in 1607.

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Many of the Ulster-Scots originated on Scotland’s west coast. [1] [7]

The situation is analogous to that of First World people settling in the Third World in other places and times. Boers gained title to most of eastern South Africa after cutting a deal with a Zulu Chief, and the Jews gained title to much of Palestine by buying large tracts of land from Ottoman aristocrats. If one lives in a society where tenancy rights are not well-developed and property is concentrated in the hands of a dysfunctional, short-sighted elite, one might very well get dispossessed. A recorder of deeds office and a broad middle-class yeomanry matters.

The border between Scotland and England comes into play here also. The region was a lawless zone filled with “Border Reivers.” The Reivers weren’t particularly loyal to Scotland or England and spent much time feuding and stealing the cattle and sheep of others in the uncontrolled zone in which they lived. After King James got control of both sides of the border, the King’s sheriffs swiftly hanged the leaders of raiding parties. The border raids evaporated, but coaches and wagons in the region had a man armed with a blunderbuss and another with a drawn sword next to the driver for many decades thereafter. [2] [8]

King James I encouraged the Borderers to head to Northern Ireland to make a fresh start doing more productive and legal activity. The settlement also secured the Irish side of the seaborne approaches to Glasgow and Liverpool.

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The Border Reivers were expert soldiers. They used state of the art military equipment and wore practical uniforms.

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Border Plaid — a traditional regional pattern of woolen clothing — makes an excellent camouflage.

Those who made up the Protestant Ulster settlers were around 5:1 Scots to English. [3 [11]] There were also native Irish in Ulster that converted to Protestantism. Despite the converts, the settlers always feared a Native Catholic attack. Churches were built with gun ports and the Protestants built fortified areas to retreat to in case of an uprising.

For the next few decades, the Ulster-Scots developed their community and carried out ordinary economic activity. When the attack finally came, the Ulster Scots didn’t see it coming. In 1641, the Catholics revolted across Ireland. Thousands of Protestants were killed. [4] [12] In response, Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army deployed to Ireland and conducted a cruel campaign that led to the native Irish landowners being removed to west of the Shannon River.

[13]

After Cromwell deployed to Ireland, the native landowning elite were forced to the west of the island. This policy was duplicated in North America by Scots-Irish President Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Policy.

When King James II’s daughter Mary and her husband William of Orange were invited by Parliament to become the British monarchs in 1688, King James II used Ireland as a springboard to start his campaign to win back the crown. His army in Ireland besieged the Protestant town of Londonderry but were beaten off. King James II’s army was later decisively destroyed at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. Needless to say, King James II’s campaign in Ireland didn’t help community relations. The Irish and British governments and social elite never thought to carry out some sort of community healing or financial settlement to the dispossessed Catholic landowners after the conclusion of the English Civil War.

The Loyalist victories during the Williamite War (1688-1691) were the results of cumulative productive day-to-day economic activity of the Ulster-Scots prior to the conflict. The Orangemen were more literate, had more men qualified to be officers, and better equipment. King James II’s troops were often armed with pikes and poorly supplied. The commanders of the Royalist Army at Londonderry were French — not Irish Catholics. James II’s forces at the Battle of the Boyne were raw recruits.

Meanwhile, the English colonists in North America realized that they could encourage the Ulster Protestants to settle on the frontiers of the various colonies to protect the coastal settlements from Indian and/or French attacks. The Scots-Irish began to arrive in 1717, settling in New Hampshire and the western parts of Pennsylvania. They spread out from there. The potato got to Maine from Ireland.

The Scots-Irish in America and their cousins in Northern Ireland and the English/Scots Border did the same sorts of things. They developed industrial towns on both sides of the Atlantic — Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Saint Louis [14], Belfast, Glasgow, Newcastle, and Tyne and Wear. They both also created vast coal mining industries in places such as Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Northumberland. De-industrialization [15], opioid [16] addiction [17], and alcoholism affect both regions in the same ways. [5] [18]

The regions of Appalachia, Northern Ireland, and the English/Scots border send more troops to their respective nations’ militaries than other regions and these men give a good account of themselves. The mostly Scots-Irish 30th and 80th US Infantry Divisions share a common heritage of valor with the British 34th (Ulster) Division and the 50th (Northumberland) Division.

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Diversity destroyed Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland didn’t become an ethnostate in 1921. Instead it became a part of the United Kingdom with a hostile population that was more loyal to a neighboring country.

The Storm Before the Storm: The Ulster Crisis of 1912-1913

Throughout the nineteenth century, the rest of the British Empire moved away from the fierce battles of the Wars of Religion. Catholics were emancipated. As mentioned above, Irish Nationalists came to be a critical block in Parliament. Eventually, Home Rule for Ireland became a major effort of the British imperial elite. [6] [20]

Home Rule bills had advanced in Parliament before, but in 1912, a new Home Rule bill was on the cusp of being made law. To the Ulster Protestants, Home Rule meant potential dispossession. There were enough nationalist attacks on their community from time to time that they felt very threatened. The Ulster-Scots responded with an extra-parliamentary show of defiance [21]. On Saturday, September 28, 1912 two Ulster Protestants, Sir Edward Carson and Captain James Craig, organized a mass signing of the Ulster Covenant protesting Home Rule. Nearly a half million people turned out to sign the male and female versions of the covenant.

At this point, the Irish Nationalists should have headed to Ulster to inform the public how Home Rule would best serve the Orangemen. They could have made a considerable case on economic grounds alone. They could have added that everywhere else in Europe, the Wars of Religion had ended and they’d do their best to keep down any outrages from young Catholic hot-heads provided the Orangemen did the same. However, they laughed the whole thing off as a stunt. This was a terrible mistake.

The Ulster Protestants began to arm. This effort was led by Major Frederick Hugh Crawford. He raised money and did all sorts of cloak-and-dagger stuff to get rifles from Germany to Ireland, organized a militia, and created a secure communications network. When the British government attempted to apply Home Rule to Ireland, they were faced with an armed Protestant militia in the north. The British Army’s officers threatened to resign rather than enforce Home Rule there. After World War I, Ireland gained Home Rule but the six counties of Northern Ireland remained in the United Kingdom.

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Tens of thousands of Protestants signed the Ulster Covenant on September 28, 1912.

The Ulster Covenant — Not Applicable

The Ulster Covenant worked because it drew upon important cultural folk memories of the Ulster-Scots people. During the Reformation, the Scots had signed a Covenant protesting the use of prayer books in their churches. It was as important an event for them as 9/11 has become to Americans later. The Ulster-Scots also had support from the wealthy and politically connected elite of their community and broad sympathy in the rest of the United Kingdom.

White advocates have none of this. Forming a “militia” in America is easy — one can get an AR-15 and a box of .223 at a hardware store and tap into a communications network with encrypted emails from one’s cell phone. The problem is that no “militia” that any white advocates can create will have moral legitimacy. There is no pro-white moral narrative that is broadly understood or agreed to by the American population even as whites flee diversity, fear Congoid-caused crime, don’t want to fight for Israel, and grumble about Black Lives Matter terrorism.

The Americans involved in white advocacy must also go against a long-running cultural current of Negro worship in America that goes as far back as the abolition movement of the 1830s. The most critical thing to do is create a new metapolitical narrative.

We must write a new covenant.

The Storm Arrives: 1966-1970

In 1916 Irish Republicans captured the General Post Office in Dublin but were defeated after a heavy-handed British response. The Easter Rising [23] is a good story and matches the Indo-European “last stand” epic [24] that is mirrored in the tales of the Alamo, Isandlwana, Thermopylae, etc.

There are some really great movies and miniseries about the battle, but I will assert here that the Easter Rebellion was an unnecessary event. Prior to the outbreak of World War I, Irish Home Rule was in the bag and accommodations for the Ulster-Scots in Northern Ireland were already laid out. Had no rising taken place, Ireland would have become independent without much of the bloodshed that followed. New Zealand, Canada, and Australia became “free states” without civil wars. As it so happened after World War I, there was a fierce insurgency against the British (who were already disposed to leave) and then an even uglier Irish Civil War that pitted the “Free Staters” against the “Republicans.”

After Ireland stabilized, the Irish Republic’s government did nothing whatsoever to “reclaim” Northern Ireland. However, Nationalists in Northern Ireland used flashlights to guide German bombers during their raids on Belfast, and there was an IRA border campaign in the 1950s. Needless to say, Unionist resolve to remain in the UK only hardened.

[25]

A demographic map of Belfast.

The Troubles started in Ireland in 1966. There were several factors. First, the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, Terrance O’Neill (1914-1990) carried out moderate reforms that empowered and politically radicalized Catholics but didn’t make them loyal to Northern Ireland. Then, the 50-year anniversary commemorations of the Easter Rebellion and the Battle of the Somme occurred at the same time. The two communities viewed the events differently and tensions rose until 12 August 1969, when the first day of a three-day riot in a Catholic part of Derry occurred that came to be called The Battle of the Bogside.

The British Army was called in afterward. The Troubles had become official.

A Poor Nationalist Launch

The Prussian military leader Helmuth von Moltke the Elder said words to the effect that in war, a mistake in the initial disposition of forces can never be fixed after things get going. After looking at the situation from all angles it is clear that the Irish Nationalist effort had several flaws in their initial distribution of forces.

The first major flaw started in 1968, when the Nationalists started their campaign using the style and rhetoric of the “civil rights” movement that had recently taken place in North America. By 1968 it was clearly understood, but not discussed openly by anyone, that the “civil rights” movement in America had nothing to do with the obligations and benefits of citizenship, but instead was a racial/ethnic attack launched behind a smokescreen that used the language of citizenship.

The Ulster Loyalists were a bit more dialed-in to what was going on in North America than the Nationalists. The Loyalists saw the Irish version of “civil rights” as a sectarian attack [26] to move Northern Ireland into the Irish Republic. Steve Bruce [27], who wrote several books about the Troubles, goes further. He argues that the “civil rights” movement was a Republican United Ireland movement from the beginning.

Next, the Nationalists had no feasible strategy for how to achieve a united Ireland. By back-engineering the Nationalist strategy by looking at what they did and said, one can surmise that the plan was to unite Ireland via the violent Mau Mau tactics [28] that drove the British out of places like Kenya. Gerry Adams was inspired by the British retreat from Empire following the Suez Crisis [29]. He also referred to other de-colonial struggles in his writings.

Those that believe in “civil rights” always misread data. The situation in Ulster and Kenya were vastly different. The Mau Mau were attacking communities in Africa whose roots in the region were less than a generation deep while the Ulster-Scots had lived in Northern Ireland since before the founding of Jamestown. The second problem was that the Mau Mau and other non-white terrorists had the advantage of a new development in the social ecosystem of Western civilization — Negro worship. While African Nationalist movements can do no wrong no matter what, Irish Nationalists are whiter than Jefferson Davis. Finally, the Nationalists failed to recognize the path to gain victory — winning the hearts and minds of the Ulster-Scots.

[30]

You can buy Greg Johnson’s White Identity Politics here. [31]

The Storm’s Full Fury 1970-1972

They always had a chance to win hearts and minds on economic grounds alone. British policy in the late twentieth century towards the industrial areas in Northern Ireland and the Border region was every bit as awful as American policy was towards the industrial regions of the Rust Belt [32] at the same time.

As it happened though, the bombing campaign got going with little consideration for winning hearts and minds. Gerry Adams insists that the Nationalist bombings (mostly carried out by the Provisional IRA) [7] [33] were more humane than the British gunfire directed at rioters in the Republican-held areas of places like Derry or Belfast because the Provisionals called in thirty-minute warnings. However, the warnings were often late, often routed wrongly, or inadequate considering the number of bombs. It was a bit like the Israeli “warnings” before their artillery drops phosphorous shells on Gaza City.

Additionally, British soldiers were firing at active rioters. The IRA bombs were killing and maiming people unlucky enough to be passing through at the time of the explosion.

By 1972, the British Army was reeling. A secret memo to the British Cabinet from the senior British Commander explained how precarious the situation was and suggested withdrawal. Again, Irish Nationalist struggles match the anti-white/Third World efforts elsewhere. The 1970s were something of a high water mark for Third Worldist accomplishment. In 1972, the Americans were withdrawing from Vietnam and Saigon would go on to fall in 1975. That year, Moroccans carried out a “Green March [34]” that drove the Spanish from their colony in the Sahara. The Indonesians captured the Portuguese colony at East Timor in 1975 also. At the time in the United States, the Jewish-organized New Left carried out thousands of bombings [35] (mostly non-fatal) and black crime was so bad that muggings became a routine cost of living in a place like New York City. Even the Arabs were able to cooperate enough to tank the economy with an oil embargo.

The British Army started to turn things around during Operation Motorman [36]. Republican areas that had been no-go zones were swarmed with British troops, tanks, and armored vehicles. Meanwhile, the British started to conduct secret talks with the Nationalists while infiltrating their terrorist cells. The war in Northern Ireland was dirty, but the British didn’t use the same scope and scale of force that the Americans did during the Iraq War.

The Nationalists & The Sleeping Giants

In reading Irish Nationalist memoirs, I was struck by how little the Nationalists thought things through. For example, Gerry Adams seemed to be genuinely surprised to discover that the British Army deployed Scottish regiments to Northern Ireland and those regiments were highly sympathetic to the Ulster-Scots. None of the Nationalists seemed to do the “uncooperative S2” drill for high-level events. Such a drill is when the Military Intelligence Officer of a unit attempts to put himself in the mind of the enemy prior to any operations thus bringing to light potential surprises.

The Nationalists also ignored and failed to consider or utilize the sleeping giants that surrounded them. Any successes they had on that count seemed to be lucky breaks. To explain:

Sleeping Giant #1: NATO

There was a push on the part of the Nationalists that went nowhere to encourage the Irish Republic to send troops into Northern Ireland, but the Nationalists didn’t seem to recognize that such an affair would trigger a NATO Article 5 response against the Republic of Ireland. Nor did they seem to be sympathetic to the Republic of Ireland’s geopolitical situation. Ireland was a neutral loose cannon that would have been in the way of the United States and its important British ally should the Cold War have turned hot in Europe. The Irish Republic thus stayed as neutral as possible throughout the Troubles. The Irish Navy even intercepted arms shipments to Northern Ireland.

Sleeping Giant #2: The Political Balance in the Republic of Ireland 

The Nationalists failed to recognize how incorporating Northern Ireland into the Irish Republic would play out. At a minimum, a million-plus Ulster-Scots who were implacably hostile to the Republic would need to be dealt with. This could have led to the Republic of Ireland being forced to wage a difficult campaign that could be either an insurgency, with the Irish Republic getting the blame for the ugliness, or a campaign of ethnic cleansing which would not win the Irish Republic any friends. Had that not happened after a hypothetical unification, Irish politics could have become one where the Ulster-Scots formed a block of voters in parliament that had to be accommodated.

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The biggest Sleeping Giant during the Troubles was the Scots-Irish in America. The greatest feat the Nationalists pulled off was keeping the American Scots-Irish apathetic to the situation in Northern Ireland. It is likely that Irish Catholic impact in America is overstated. Those identifying as “Irish” in the 1990 Census (left) closely align with the Scots-Irish of Appalachia (right).

Sleeping Giant #3: The Americans

The biggest Sleeping Giant was the American response. The US government viewed the “Special Relationship” between the US and Great Britain as absolutely vital, but there was a big Irish presence in the States that could have had an impact.

Although there was always sympathy for the Irish Nationalists in British prisons, support from the Irish American community was tepid on the whole. Activists that raised money for Northern Ireland had to insist they were supporting the families of those jailed, not purchasing weapons. Much of the money that went towards the IRA’s weapons came from extorting organized crime rings in the United States. Other aid came from Libya  — the Irish Nationalists were ideologically part of the Third World’s decolonial efforts. The Libyan connection didn’t play well in Peoria.

The Irish Catholics in America [38] were not interested in repeating the Wars of Religion. They were more concerned about black crime, The Cold War, bread and butter issues, and getting by.

The Protestants in America were largely concerned about the same things and many were thinking very seriously about the ideas presented by Roman Catholics. [39] The Pope during the Troubles was John Paul II. He was highly regarded by Protestants in the United States.

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The Loyalists were able to remind Americans that many of them had Ulster-Scots roots.

The biggest advantage that the Ulster-Scots had in America was the fact that much of America’s religious heritage — North and South — was like that of the Ulster-Scots. Documentaries in the 1980s about the situation often showed a Loyalist attending a church service; included would be a few bars of a hymn Americans would recognize. Undoubtedly, this was a quiet influence.

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Tom Clancy’s Patriot Games (1987) made the Irish Nationalists the antagonists. This was a major metapolitical defeat for the Nationalists. Chuck Norris even fought the IRA in an episode of Walker, Texas Ranger.

Nationalists vs. Loyalists — Strategic Leadership

The Nationalists in Northern Ireland had a considerable body of metapolitical work. IRA songs, such as “Come out ye Black & Tans,” are catchy. It seemed like all my friends in the early 1990s had some Irish folk band in their collection of CDs. Additionally, the Easter Rebellion story is good and the Potato Famine narrative is a decent grievance story, but the Loyalists were not lacking either. In fact, the Loyalists had several things going for them at the same time and they took full advantage of those trends.

Because they were ensconced in the British Parliament and political system they were able to get the British Army to do the heavy counter-insurgency work. Had the Loyalists not had those regiments, they could have plussed up militias like the Ulster Volunteer Force. To see how things might have played out without the British Army, consider that the Croatian Ustaše was a deadly efficient machine that operated on a shoestring budget in the 1990s. The Nationalists would have responded, of course, and the Troubles would have swollen to Yugoslavia levels.

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During the Troubles, three men rose to the top of their respective communities. From left to right, Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness, and Ian Paisley.

In looking at the situation rationally, the Loyalists were playing the game with one fist behind their back, but clearly the biggest advantage they had was better strategic leadership.

As the Troubles played out, three men rose to the top as the figures leading their respective communities. On the Nationalist side, there was Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness (1950-2017). Adams’s memoirs of the 1970s display no sense of the total picture of how the Nationalist strategy was working or not working out. He makes no connection between this or that bombing and how it affected this or that election. It’s like reading a history of the US Civil War and not mentioning how the Fall of Atlanta impacted Lincoln’s re-election chances in 1864. Adams ties in a bunch of Leftist ideas and unicorns into his speeches, drops in Gaelic phrases that nobody understands, and apologizes for the “gendered language” used in the 1960s.

Martin McGuinness was not much different. He stated in an interview that the British Army was the only obstacle to peace. Since the British Army deployed after community relations had deteriorated from 1966 to 1969, McGuinness was obviously either wrong or being deliberately misleading. [8] [44]

One of the most prominent Loyalist leaders was Ian Paisley (1926-2014). Reverend Paisley led a public life, so there is much more information about him that I felt was accurate than with Gerry Adams. [9] [45] I also came to believe he and the British governments Paisley (sometimes) supported were better strategic leaders.

Ian Paisley’s Northern Irish community was every bit out-of-step with the globalist elite as his American Scots-Irish cousins. He was also a minister out-of-step with the dominant ecumenical movement within Christianity. Most articles about his life on the internet give a view of the man that is in a vacuum. From those accounts, Paisley’s actions appear bigoted and irrational. However, his actions were finely-tuned responses to a very serious threat to his community. No Congregationalist minister or Catholic priest in America has led a protest march against black crime although that is the number one physical threat to everyone in their community.

Paisley preached his first sermon at the age of 16. He then did a great deal of study. He attended a theological school in Wales and received degrees from two degree mills; Pioneer Theological Seminary in Rockford, Illinois, and Burton College and Seminary in Manitou Springs, Colorado. Despite the degrees by mail, Paisley was a serious theologian who wrote and published books on a number of religious issues. His Commentary on Paul’s Letter to the Romans [46] was written while he was in prison in 1966.

In 1951, Paisley broke with a different Protestant denomination and founded the Free Presbyterian Church. Initially, the denomination remained small. The challenge was to ordain ministers who were in agreement with the organization’s theology and goals and it took two decades to grow ministers. When Paisley was arrested in 1966 for “causing” a riot, he became famous overnight and all of the hard work he’d done since the 1940s came into fruition.

Paisley created the Democratic Unionist Party and was elected to several different political offices. While serving as a member of the European Parliament, he was attacked by Otto von Hapsburg when Paisley heckled the Pope.

Ian Paisley should be seen as something of an armed prophet. He organized a new religious denomination, caused it to grow, and carefully walked on a fine line with regards to legality when gunplay and bombings were common and passions were high. Eventually, he was able to come to an accommodation with the Nationalists in a compromise that I believe favors the Unionists. His broad skill set — from writing theology to fisticuffs with European Royalty to outstanding oratory with much hard work in-between was the critical strategic advantage.

Loyalist Paramilitaries

The Loyalists were able to create a metapolitical narrative that they were not the other side of the same coin as the Nationalists. The fact that they did fewer bombings was probably the most important part of their successful campaign to capture the moral high ground.

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For the most part, Nationalists did far more murders than the Loyalists. The worst of the killing was done in the 1970s. [10] [48]

Nonetheless, the Loyalists had a paramilitary and they did some ugly stuff. One of the first Loyalist paramilitary leaders was John McKeague [49] (1930-1982). He was a Protestant who owned a printing shop in Belfast. He was probably an active homosexual. He organized the Shankill Defense Association (SDA), one of the building blocks of the Ulster Defense Association [50] (UDA), the largest Loyalist paramilitary.

Initially, the Loyalist paramilitaries did bomb Nationalists, but they changed tactics to targeted assassinations of suspected IRA terrorists by the mid-1970s. The Loyalist paramilitaries had internal drama, but they usually — not always — fired members for personal failings or political differences rather than kill them outright.

At the start of the conflict in the late 1960s, many of the loyalists were veterans [11] [51] who’d served in the various de-colonial wars Britain fought in the 1960s. They were used to discipline and utterly unpersuaded by Nationalist propaganda about “freedom fighters.” A little military service goes a long way. They were able to bounce back from disappointment, handle things rationally, and easily fight off accusations of being “Nazis” since their lineage was tied to the British side in World War II.

Professor Steve Bruce called the Loyalist paramilitaries “pro-state terrorists.” This meant that their goals were in line with government policy. As the British government filled the police and army with Ulster-Scots, solid people joined the police or the Ulster Defense Regiment. Eventually, the Loyalist paramilitaries consisted of less reputable members.

As a result of the increasingly criminal nature of the Loyalist paramilitaries, they were able to be easily rolled up by their fellow loyalists in the police as the Peace Process became increasingly viable. In other words, the State was eventually able to maintain its monopoly on organized violence while suppressing the bad optics violence of its own members. The Nationalists did not have this advantage.

The Storm Continues: 1973-1988

Throughout the 1970s, Northern Ireland continued to be plagued with trouble. Provisional IRA bombs killed week after week. The war was a frustrating slog. There were tit-for-tat atrocities. Occasionally, they were ugly enough that they’d make the American news. I’ll focus on what was most notable.

On February 17, 1978, the IRA conducted a bombing whose effects were so bad the Irish Nationalist cause was lost then and there, although it still took another two decades for the war to come to its ragged end. Provisional IRA bombers set a napalm-like bomb at the La Mon Hotel [52]. The IRA screwed up the warning call, the bomb exploded, and twelve people were burned alive and another thirty injured. Many of the victims were attending a dog breeder’s convention. All were Protestants.

The outrage from the bombing further hardened attitudes. Margret Thatcher became Prime Minister shortly thereafter. In August that year, the Queen’s cousin, Lord Louis Mountbatten, was killed along with his grandson, another teenaged boy, and Lady Bradbourne. The Nationalists also ambushed British paratroopers that day, killing 18.

The British government then changed tactics — they started to treat captured Provisional IRA men as criminals rather than POWs. They also started the military working alongside Northern Irish policemen.

To protest the criminalization policy, imprisoned IRA men refused to wear prison clothes and smeared their feces on the prison walls. Bobby Sands and nine others refused to eat and starved to death. The reaction to this situation was probably the only time the Nationalists in Northern Ireland got a genuinely sympathetic response, but it was still a failure. [12] [53] The men were imprisoned because they were part of the group that had murdered a large number of ordinary people. Additionally, going on hunger strike while in the hands of one’s enemies is an obviously wrongheaded line of attack. The poo-smeared walls and self-starvation were deliberate acts of spite. The outrage eventually faded outside Ireland and Margaret Thatcher ended up looking very tough.

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The blanket men and the poo walls.

There are two schools of thought on how to deal with terrorism. One is to treat terrorism as a crime. This means that everything has to hold up in court and evidence is conducted using legal means. This limits terrorism’s potential to become a big war (like World War I or the GWOT), but law enforcement can’t prevent crimes and the situation can get out of hand quickly. The other way to treat terrorism is by considering it warfare. A captured terrorist might be treated like the POW’s in Hogan’s Heroes [55], or they might be considered illegal combatants and summarily executed, or they might be shot without warning as what happened to three Provisional IRA men who attempted to attack the British fortress at Gibraltar in 1988. The Nationalists didn’t seem to grasp this idea when they argued for “political status” for their prisoners.

In 1987, the Provisional IRA bombed a Remembrance Day parade in Enniskillen. The attack was another metapolitical failure for the Nationalists. The Irish band U2’s front-man made an impassioned anti-IRA speech in the movie Rattle and Hum [56]. The Nationalists lost millions of potential supporters. [13] [57]

[58]

You can buy The World in Flames: The Shorter Writings of Francis Parker Yockey here. [59]

The Storm Subsides: 1989-1998

Since much remains secret, one cannot know for certain when the tide turned in Northern Ireland, but it is certain that by the late 1980s many of the Provisional IRA’s management were secretly working for the British. The IRA’s chief of Internal Security, Freddie Scappaticci was almost certainly “Stakeknife” — a top British informant.

There were other problems. Nationalists were not getting the best in human material. When the terror cell that attempted to take out Margaret Thatcher in Brighton in 1984 was caught, one of its members turned out to be a manic depressive.

Later, the Nationalists started a severe round of in-fighting after some wished to focus on politics rather than armed revolutionary struggle. There were many murders. The Provisional IRA also started to kill suspected informants.

In 1996, a faction of the Provisional IRA bombed Manchester. By the end of the conflict, Nationalist bombers had bombed the Royal Family, the Conservative Party, many working-class Ulster-Scots, many British soldiers, and numerous other targets across Britain. They’d angered everyone and not won a single heart or mind.

In 1995, Bill Clinton journeyed to Northern Ireland [60] to help bring about peace between the warring factions. He was not alone. The British and Irish Republic were engaged in ending the Troubles also, but Clinton’s neutral attitude and Scots-Irish heritage helped.

Probably much of the drama was related to Eigentumsprämie [61], i.e. a property benefit, a place in the social order that young men try and seek. The worst part of the Troubles occurred during the time that the Boomers were of military age. The Troubles came to a sort-of end as the Boomer generation aged.

To sum up the Northern Ireland Peace Process, an agreement was made that promised both a peaceful path to joining Ireland as well as an assurance for Northern Ireland to stay in the United Kingdom. It encouraged all factions to cease fighting which they mostly did. It was two contradictory positions and the resolution is semi-dishonest, but the Unionists effectively won. The British can use any bomb or act of violence to nullify the agreement and easily send troops. The Irish Nationalists remain disadvantaged.

What Can We Learn from All This?

If one wants a dedicated group of people working hard for your cause, have children. The British Empire advanced on a high English birthrate. There is more, of course:

First, one must have a feasible strategy for victory that matches a narrative vision that even one’s enemies can believe in. White advocates can win hearts and minds of non-whites with the vision of Wakanda, free of wypipo, the police, redlining, etc. Second, controversial leaders, especially those like Ian Paisley — who are easy for pretentious middle-class white people to hate — need to live a personal life that is beyond reproach. Scandals with the perky young intern and the pool boy don’t help. Avoid drugs and alcohol. Think everything through, and work hard every day.

Additionally, there is more to life than waging racial conflict. The winners of the Troubles in Northern Ireland — at least the winners for now — had a broad view and were well-read in a number of issues. Margaret Thatcher managed economics, the Cold War, international diplomacy, the Falklands War, and the start of the Gulf War while she dealt with the events in Northern Ireland. In interviews with Ian Paisley, one sees a man not too far removed from the preachers of America’s Burned-Over District. He thought about much, much more than just Loyalism.

In the end, though, the troubles in Northern Ireland were a terrible tragedy. A truly ugly war between whites. That conflict didn’t help Western civilization in its fight with the Jacobin Soviet monstrosity during the Cold War. And while there has been some recovery, the economy in Northern Ireland is a wreck of its former self, and the situation is still unsettled. Remember this also: while Northern Ireland smolders, the Armies of the Prophet are always on the march.

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Notes

[1] [65] Madison Grant, The Conquest of a Continent. York, South Carolina: Liberty Bell Publications, 2004, p. 85.

[2] [66] “Ridin’ shotgun” got its start in the English/Scots marches!

[3] [67] This is a low estimate. Other estimates are 20:1. Scots-Irish President Andrew Jackson’s family origins are in northern Yorkshire, England.

[4] [68] After the 161 Rebellion, many Anglo settlers gave depositions. One can read them here [69].

[5] [70] The American Scots-Irish did intermarry with other groups — those from the New Sweden Colony, the Pennsylvania Dutch, Virginia Cavaliers, and Yankees. Ulysses Grant and John Wayne had Yankee ancestors. The Scots-Irish Pennsylvania Thomas Mellon married a Pennsylvania Dutch woman named Sarah Jane Negley.

[6] [71] The biggest problems that occurred in the British Empire had a commonality. To put it simply, whenever the Imperial elite decide to give the land and property of the settlers to the natives, problems like that of the Ulster Crisis of 1913 developed. In British North America, the Proclamation of 1763 was a major driver leading to the Revolutionary War. In South Africa in 1815, British Imperial virtue signaling and Negro worship led to the Schlachter’s Nek Rebellion. That disaster led to the Boer War of 1899 to 1902 — which in retrospect was a mortal blow to the British Empire.

[7] [72] The IRA had several factions. The Provisional IRA was the organization that did most of the bombing. I use the IRA and Provisional IRA as synonyms in this article, but I recognize that not every Nationalist bombing was the work of the Provisionals.

[8] [73] Both men were intelligent and charming. One can see Gerry Adams keep his cool during a grenade attack by a Loyalist [74].

[9] [75] Gerry Adams became a famous globalist superstar. Many of his colleagues leveled serious accusations against him. These accusations might have been true, but they had a ring of jealousy about them so I chose to not include these accusations in this article.

[10] [76] Steve Bruce, The Red Hand Protestant Paramilitaries in Northern Ireland. Oxford University Press, New York, 1992, p. 298.

[11] [77] One thing I thought noticeable is that the leaders of the various Loyalist paramilitaries took the title Lieutenant Colonel. They didn’t have a Queen’s Commission, so they could have taken any title. I suspect that this is a cultural trait of some sort. Ulster Scots, like the Scots-Irish in America, are, as a group, not at the top of society, but they form a critical part of it. Especially the part that does the work. They must not see themselves as landowning aristocrats who would take the title of Colonel.

[12] [78] The marches in response to Bobby Sands’ death by self-starvation are something like the “Pussy Hat March” after Donald Trump’s election. They were an emotional response to a loss, but not a rally to a victory.

[13] [79] Roger Waters also wrote metapolitical responses to the Provisional IRA’s bombing campaign. In “The Gunner’s Dream [80],” from the Pink Floyd album The Final Cut, Waters specifically calls out the IRA bombing band concerts.

Bibliography

Gerry Adams, Before the Dawn. South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 2017.

Steve Bruce, Paisley: Religion and Politics in Northern Ireland. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Steve Bruce, The Red Hand Protestant Paramilitaries in Northern Ireland. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Rory Fitzpatrick, God’s Frontiersmen: The Scots Irish Epic. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989.

Madison Grant, The Conquest of a Continent. York, South Carolina: Liberty Bell Publications, 2004.

Dan Jackson, The Northumbrians: North-East England and its People. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.

Kevin Myers, Watching the Door: Drinking Up, Getting Down, and Cheating Death in 1970s Belfast. New York: Soft Skull Press, 2009.

A. T. Q. Stewart, The Ulster Crisis. Glasgow: Faber & Faber Limited, 1967.

Colin Woodard, American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America. New York: Penguin, 2011.