Maggie takes on the IRA

Ian the Admin

Administrator
Donor
We did not stop the Nazis by being nice. We kicked them. And we kicked them hard. We bombed the Nazis till all their cities were rubble and they broke. And we won!

A rather odd argument given that the Nazis did not surrender until the combined forces of the Red Army and the Western Allies physically conquered Germany. The strategic bombing campaign proved singularly useless in "breaking" anyone, although it killed hundreds of thousands of German civilians.

So what would have happened if Maggie would have unleashed all hell upon Ireland? And did not stop till all of Ireland would be rubble. Would that have eradicated the IRA?

Now would that be Northern Ireland or the Republic of Ireland that you're speaking of bombing?

Are you actually advocating that either one of them be subjected to mass slaughter untl there is no more terrorism?
 

Lonewolf

Banned
Are you actually advocating that either one of them be subjected to mass slaughter untl there is no more terrorism?

I did not advocate that Maggie should have done anything like that.

But this is a forum about Alternate History. If you look at the various stories everything is discussed. You find threads about Hitler behaving nicely or couintries at each others throats. So I asked a question.

And if I remember real history correctly, only a few dared to critizise Winston Churchill as he unleashed bomber command, among them a bishop of a bombed british town. And not only british bomber command, also US bomber command was unleashed.

And what about the thread DBWI: What did you do in WW III after the Red Dawn?

Did anybody read it? Were some of these who posted reported too?

Let me remember?
In this thread camps are described and what happened in them. Resistance activities (up to and including torture and murder). And one even described how he paid Raoul Castro a visit and broke the Geneva Convention and made sure he could not be punished.

Do the rules apply to all of us the same or not?
 
I did not advocate that Maggie should have done anything like that.

But this is a forum about Alternate History. If you look at the various stories everything is discussed. You find threads about Hitler behaving nicely or couintries at each others throats. So I asked a question.

And if I remember real history correctly, only a few dared to critizise Winston Churchill as he unleashed bomber command, among them a bishop of a bombed british town. And not only british bomber command, also US bomber command was unleashed.

And what about the thread DBWI: What did you do in WW III after the Red Dawn?

Did anybody read it? Were some of these who posted reported too?

Let me remember?
In this thread camps are described and what happened in them. Resistance activities (up to and including torture and murder). And one even described how he paid Raoul Castro a visit and broke the Geneva Convention and made sure he could not be punished.

Do the rules apply to all of us the same or not?

Everything isn't discussed. Some things are off-limits, and advocating genocide is one of them.
 
I

If General Deveraux would have shot all 2 million, he would have automatically also shot all terrorists.

And you think this would have been a logical solution in Ireland? Attempted genocide to wipe out an organisation that was rapidly degenerating into a bunch of criminals anyway?

Not even Thatcher was insane enough to go through with that. She may have been a hardnosed, megalomanaical bitch who took my milk away, but you sir are a lunatic, and a necromancer to boot.
 

Lonewolf

Banned
but you sir are a lunatic, and a necromancer to boot.

And how would you describe Martin van Creveld, teacher of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem?

In 2004 he lectured the german Federal Ministry of the Interior, Mr Otto Schily, the Ministry of the Interior of the capitol Berlin, Mr Ehrhart Koerting and the chief of the Federal Intelligence Service, BND, Mr August Hanning about fighting against insurrections.
He repeated this lecture the next day before the Institut für Staatspolitik IFS (Institute for statepolitics).

He used two examples about how to fight insurrections. He described the british method (keep your forces on a short leash and make sure they behave) and the syrian method (send an army division with lots of artillery and fire away).

After his speech at the IFS there was a loud uproar. The next speaker Karl Feldmeyer of the newspaper FAZ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, left the meeting under protest. He said that the syrian method is totally unacceptable for western democracies and this method is unlawful regarding Article 1 of the German Basic Law (Grundgesetz).

After cooling down it was found out that the moral outrage was about the fact that van Creveld presented both methods but did not judge them morally.

In the article it was said:
" Creveld used this outrage to show the difference between analysis and worth evaluation (the german word wertentscheidung is not found among dictionaries). As an expert did he show the ideal type of procedures without political and moral distortion, the decision about which method is used, including the question of ethics, is the duty of the complete human. As his own family was partially killed in the holocaust, he is definitely no backer of the excisionstrategy."

This is the above translated text in german:
"Creveld hob aufgrund des Eklats ausdrücklich den Unterschied zwischen Analyse und Wertentscheidung hervor. Er habe als Fachmann idealtypische Prozeduren ohne politische und moralische Verzerrung dargestellt, die Mittelauswahl auch nach ethischen Gesichtspunkten sei die Pflicht des "ganzen" Menschen. Ihm, dessen Familie zum Teil dem Holocaust zum Opfer gefallen sei, stehe eine Befürwortung einer Ausmerzungsstrategie im Antiterrorkampf fern."

In his speech van Creveld also described a meeting between him and General Paddy Walters in 1988. General Walters was the CiC of the British Forces in Northern Ireland and he told van Creveld that the people in NI were killing them and their neighbours since 800 years and no army could change that. But he said, he would do everything in his power to reduce the numbers of killing.
Martin van Creveld was shocked about the way of thought of the General as about then the first Intifada had started and (according to the speech) Defense secretary Yitzhalk (of Israel) had ordered his forces to break arms and legs. (According to Wikipedia the defense secretary of 1988 was Yitzhak Rabin).

To quote Wikipedia:
"When the first Intifada broke out, Rabin adopted harsh measures to stop the demonstrations, even authorizing the use of "Force, might and beatings," on the demonstrators. Rabin the "bone breaker" was used as an International image."
For references please see the wikipedia site.

The reason for this speech was, how would Europe react, if every country would slide into the quagmire that Bosnia is. He eventually asked, if certain countries would be able to follow the british example or not. He was not sure if all countries have the same moral strength, backbone or however you call it, if an insurrection starts.

I am no Martin van Creveld.
But I was wondering what would happen, if a certain government would have reacted differently as it did. Pure Alternate History.

In this case: Just look at 1938-1945.
About 50 million people died. Remember Winston Churchills speech about "We will fight them on the beaches..."
If on September 3rd, 1939 GB and France had not declared war on Germany, how many million would not have died?

In my Alternate History question I molded Thatcher like she was an amalgation of Winston Churchill and Robert Vansittart, 1st Baron Vansittart. Both were diehard enemies of Germany.

To quote Wikipedia about Baron Vansittard:
" This doctrine, which was known as "Vansittartism", was quite influential in Britain and the U.S. The Morgenthau Plan drew on it, and Vansittartist attitudes helped obstruct contacts between the Western Allies and the German Resistance. "

I took the last halfsentence "and Vansittardist...Resistance" and translated it to "after the bombing Vansittardism made contacts between british and irish politicians who wanted peace (including unofficial contacts to the IRA; UDF) more than difficult."

And no, my father who lived as a small boy with the threat of bomber command, made sure that i definitely do not want to experience a war or God forbid, an ethnic cleansing.
If any of my words made this impression I apologize.
 
This could be quite a good (albeit asbish) POD to get a British civil war in the 80s.
You would get massed rioting across the country.

And damn necromancy.
 
The linky below will tell anyone terminally curious about how bad the situation in N.I. could have got in the wrong hands. Does a more than adequate job in my humble opinion. This undead thread doesn't really add anything new.

Something a lot of people will be familiar with, but hey, here goes...

http://www.btinternet.com/~chief.gnome/
 
This could be quite a good (albeit asbish) POD to get a British civil war in the 80s.
You would get massed rioting across the country.

I don't think so. About the civil war I mean. Short of the IRA exploding a nuclear bomb under Buckingham Palace the British people would reject these policies out of hand. It'd be Thatcher and a few die hard fanatics versus about 90% of the population, including most of the armed forces, the civil service and the establishment.
 

Deleted member 5719

And what about the thread DBWI: What did you do in WW III after the Red Dawn?

Did anybody read it? Were some of these who posted reported too?

No I did not read it. I trust the children to play make-believe in the sandpit unsupervised.

Re Maggie, shoot to kill was almost certainly a government policy, as was targeted assassination by proxy, through loyalist and possibly republican death squads (INLA/IPLO). But the policy of infiltration of the republican movement along with genuine civil rights policies was what managed to render the IRA much less effective.

Had Nationalists had more genuine grievances the IRA would have been far more dangerous, but Thatcher sensibly limited extra judicial brutality/killing to Ra men on active duty. It's also worth remembering that the Wicked Witch of the South never enjoyed the support of more than 45% of voters, so she probably couldn't have got away with the kind of mass repression you claim not to advocate.

More repression always leads to a radicalised population, and a lost war. I'm sure the British government planners had all seen the battle of Algiers by 1980.
 
Sorry, but I just had this vision of a Steve Bell style Maggie Thatcher, dressed as Rambo, armed with a couple of machine guns laying in to some hapless Fenians.
 

Deleted member 5719

Sorry, but I just had this vision of a Steve Bell style Maggie Thatcher, dressed as Rambo, armed with a couple of machine guns laying in to some hapless Fenians.

...screaming "Adriana" as she macine-guns a viet cong-filled bus private.
 

Deleted member 5719

More likely she'd be screaming Airey (as in Airey Neave).

Come on, she must have known that was MI5 ;)


Seriously though, it was a funny business that. The INLA were crap bombers, and it was the only mercury switch bomb ever used by an Irish organisation.
 

Keenir

Banned
To quote Wikipedia:
"When the first Intifada broke out, Rabin adopted harsh measures to stop the demonstrations, even authorizing the use of "Force, might and beatings," on the demonstrators. Rabin the "bone breaker" was used as an International image."

yeah, and how'd that work for ya? :rolleyes:


In this case: Just look at 1938-1945.
About 50 million people died. Remember Winston Churchills speech about "We will fight them on the beaches..."
If on September 3rd, 1939 GB and France had not declared war on Germany, how many million would not have died?

In my Alternate History question I molded Thatcher like she was an amalgation of Winston Churchill and Robert Vansittart, 1st Baron Vansittart. Both were diehard enemies of Germany.

my apologies; I had no idea the IRA was throwing people into ovens en masse.
 
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