"Bandit Country: The IRA and South Armagh" and how to record the worlds wars by Declan Hayes!
(2024-05-31 at 18:20:35 )

"Bandit Country: The IRA and South Armagh" and how to record the worlds wars by Declan Hayes!

The British Governments decision to open tendering for appropriately qualified historians to write the official history of the Irish Troubles has come in for some well-deserved flak from appropriately qualified historians.

The British Governments decision to open tendering for appropriately qualified historians to write the official history of the so-called 1966-97 Irish Troubles has come in for some well-deserved flak from appropriately qualified historians, who know exactly what these gangsters are up to in controlling the narrative in this squalid little war, for which they are primarily to blame.

Central to this controversy is the decision of the Irish government to take the British government to the European Court of Human Rights over its Legacy Act which, in essence, legislates how the farce that is the British judicial system is blackholing the litany of war crimes British forces and their Protestant proxies committed throughout the whole of Ireland during those years. Simply put, the British establishment should be in the dock and then on the gallows over this, rather than be tendering out for hired historians to once again whitewash them and their crimes.

First Draft from South Armagh to Bucha

If journalists are supposed to write the first draft of history, then the Daily Telegraphs Tony Harnden did a great job with his Bandit Country: The IRA and South Armagh, one of the best books written on the Troubles, which concentrated on the IRAs most lethal (South Armagh) Brigade and Michael McVerry, Slab Murphy, Patsy (the Undertaker) O Callaghan and Seán (the Surgeon) Hughes, who led it and who, between them and their men, were responsible for over one in four of all British fatalities during those years.

McVerry was killed in action, Slab, his earlier pig smuggling days long behind him, is now in his mid 70s, the Undertaker died of natural causes but not before being threatened with death by the IRA and the Surgeon now works for Sinn Féins fat cats, whose job it now is to make sure the Kings writ runs in what was once the IRAs heartland.

The importance of Slabs advanced years is that he and his contemporaries will not be with us for much longer and so it will soon be too late to get their first hand accounts of how and why South Armagh IRA battered the Brits.

No big deal you say but the Brits are counting down the clock until most of us, who witnessed their crimes at first hand, are dead and gone, after which they can more comfortably spin their bullshit.

Though Ed Moloney, whose Secret History of the IRA and The BrokenElbow blog are both compulsory readings, tried, in conjunction with former IRA prisoner Anthony McIntyre and Boston Colleges Belfast Project to get the IRA and other groups to reveal their war secrets, the British and their Belfast Sinn Féin sidekicks put the kibosh on that by prosecuting those like Brendan The Dark Hughes and Ivor Bell who spoke to them.

The same sort of half baked clowns who opposed the journalist Iris Changs excellent The Rape of Nanking first draft take on Japanese war crimes in China also opposed them.

If we switch over to Bucha, we can all agree that terrible things happened there when the Russians left and the Ukrainian Nazis moved in.

Though we all looked at things closely through the BBCs tainted lenses for a few days, we all moved on and NATOs BBC got to write the first widely disseminated draft which, I felt, went against the available evidence that the Nazis were to blame.

Robert Stuart saw much the same thing in the Syrian gas attacks, where NATOs so-called rebels and their Qatari backers were the obvious culprits but where the heroic Syrian Army were wrongly blamed to allow NATO to up their war games.

Far from collecting first hand accounts, I was actively obstructed by dubious Melkite nuns and other Damascus-based Israeli agents when I tried to interview child survivors of the 2017 Al Rashideen bus bombings. Heaven forbid that their unedited voices be heard.

For the first draft then, we need good journalists like Tony Harnden and survivors who can talk without South Armagh or Belfast IRA disappearing them, without killing them as they have done to some many others and as they even threatened to do to the Undertaker himself. That we have so many hired grifters and fakes floating about the worlds war zones masquerading as journalists, nuns and concerned citizens does not help either.

More globally, though we must unequivocally admire the 1973 British made The World at War for its excellent overview of the Second World War, we must also acknowledge that a similar time period has now elapsed since the IRAs surrender and the more time that elapses, the less first hand accounts there will still be available for historians to pluck at.

Although the guns are long holstered and the mouths are muzzled in South Armagh, they are still blazing throughout Ukraine and the Levant where those who have survived thus far have been likewise silenced.

There is, for example, nowhere I know of in "the free world" where Russia can clearly state or debate its case because Russia, like a long litany of prior NATO targets, is so evil that they cannot even be listened to, even though that would come as a surprise to any World War Two veteran who had ever listened to Lord Haw-Haw or Lili Marleen but that is where we are. Only the perpetrators may be heard. Only MI6, Mossad and the CIA can commission the truth.

Second Draft: sources, anomalies & singularities

Here is a video of the Belfast IRAs once legendary D Company burying the no less once legendary Billy McKee, who helped found and grow the Provisional IRA but who died as an ardent critic of Sinn Féins fat cats.

Although McKees colour party look like they are on their last legs, few of them ever enjoyed even the crumbs of office. These interviews with former IRA activists Anthony McIntyre, Dixie Elliot, Brendan the Dark Hughes and ex IRA bomb maker and recovering addict Packy McMahon show much the same thing, as does the finger pointing by some of them at such IRA intelligence officers as Brendan Tonto Golden, whose tangible contributions consisted of carrying the coffin of Frank Stagg, and robbing the relatives of dead and incarcerated IRA volunteers of their savings and keepsakes.

For the truth is that those like the Goldens or the child molesting Adams family who were weaned in this cult regarded all others as expendable pawns, there to be used, abused and discarded.

Even Paddy O Callaghan, the Undertaker, one of their most lethal operatives, was threatened with death when he was considered surplus to the feather nesting of the Surgeons new found fat cat friends.

Which is why, of course, a history of South Armagh IRA would not be complete without explaining why the Undertaker, Colm Murphy, Seamus Daly, Liam Cambell and other South Armagh IRA leaders threw their lot in with the Omagh bombing crowd.

Given the untimely deaths of those who talk out of turn about the Surgeons new found fat cat friends, there will be little anecdotal evidence forthcoming from Bandit Country and most of the primary documents were conveniently lost when the IRA broke into MI6s secure east Belfast HQ and found lengthy lists of the hundreds of senior IRA personnel who were on MI6s payroll.

A sticky wicket there for the historians, to be sure.

The war between the IRA, on the one hand and the Brits and their proxy gangs on the other was not a clean cut affair of good versus bad, cowboys versus Indians, just as the Eastern Front war was not a straightforward slug fest between the Wehrmacht and the Red Army but also involved a range of white Russians and beguiled nationalists in Ukraine, the Baltics and Poland.

Indeed, when the Poles were sounding off a few years back, Moscow produced some primary evidence from its own extensive archives detailing massive collusion between patriotic Poles and the Nazis, evidence perhaps that librarians and archivists can be the most dangerous of adversaries.

And, though we all might think we have an idea of what happened in the Battle for Berlin, there is much that still needs to be told as to why, for example, the defence of the Reichstag was left to French SS men, who had some serious explaining to do to the Russians and to de Gaulles resurrected French Army when the Germans finally threw in the towel.

The importance of Bandit Country to episodes like that or more contemporary ones in Yugoslavia or Ukraine is that we must know from the horses mouth what happened so that we can one day end NATOs never ending cycles of violence. The British and their Yankee and Sinn Féin buddies do not want that to happen as they might lose out as a result and so they must control the narrative by commissioning academic slatterns to peddle propaganda.

Provo Priests from Crossmaglen

Not that the IRA was the only game in Crossmaglen, whose main square, where many British soldiers drew their last breath, is named after the late and great Cardinal Tomas O Fiaich, the former Primate of all Ireland and a first rate historian in his own right.

South Armagh hunger striker Ray McCreesh had a brother a priest, Bik McFarlane was going to be a priest, Fr Paddy Ryan was a priest, Fr James Chesney is credited with carrying out the Claudy bomb and Frs Denis Faul and Raymond Murray did trojan work for human rights during the course of The Troubles. And that is not to forget the opinions of priests who had to bury the IRAs Disappered victims.

On the flip side, South Armagh IRA murdered Sr Catherine Dunne and lined up Protestants at Kingsmill and Darkley Chapel before executing them in cold blood, a methodology MI6s Glenanne Gang specialised in not only in South Armagh but much further afield as well.

Though the comparisons with what is going on in Ukraine and in Gaza should be obvious, let me just say that it is incumbent on the Russian government to allow those Russian speaking citizens who have been freed from the Zelensky junta to freely speak their minds and to have their uncensored experiences relayed to the four corners of the globe.

As regards war crimes charges being brought against Putin and, in particular, Maria Lvova-Belova, his co-accused, even a blind man can now see that was an integral part of MI6s ongoing propaganda war against Russia.

Overview, sources, models & templates

Although we are already over 1500 words into this article, we have not yet scratched the surface because we have not delved into South Armaghs gerrymandered topography and how the gerrymandering British sold the lie to the world that they were the good guys keeping the warring factions they always controlled apart.

Switch to Gaza, in particular, or Rwanda, Libya and a thousands other African killing zones and we see the same NATO hand at work behind the scenes. Almost all those places, and Ukraine as well, would have been spared hell had NATO not sent their legion of devils there.

Although a former American President once said that the business of America is business, the best business to be in is the arms trade, with Raytheon ($30 bn), Lockheed Martin ($41 bn), Boeing ($23 bn), BAE Systems ($23 bn) and Northrop (%22 bn) making record profits on colluding to kill millions in Ukraine, Iraq, Syria and Libya. Just like Krupp at Nuremberg, so also do those gangsters need more than a footnote to explain their rank complicity in NATOs crimes.

And, although South Armagh was small beer compared to all that, it must be remembered that NATO first honed their low intensity conflict and Hooded Men torture techniques in South Armagh before deploying them in Iraq, Syria and Libya.

If we look at war as NATOs primary business and at places like South Armagh and Gaza as lab experiments with live humans to experiment on, a clearer and very valuable template for historians to view NATOs criminality emerges to gauge NATOs crimes in Ukraine. But it is not one that will gain much currency in NATOs academic world.

Final draft

Although best practices necessitate that all wars deserve both a final draft and a definitive history, NATOs perpetual war mongering cannot allow that to happen with the Rape of Nanking, with South Armagh, or with Ukraine, Syria and Gaza.

The only way around this is for Russia, Iran and China to invest heavily in their own historians, librarians and archivists and to give them the freedom they need to accomplish their goals.

Iranian media outlets, for example, have done good work on how Israeli universities had their libraries stocked by looting the private libraries of Palestinians and I have repeatedly said how Russia Today gives platforms to eminently qualified Russians and Turks.

Russia, Iran and China should platform alternative but authoritative histories on Syria, South Lebanon and South Armagh with the comprehensive coverage they deserve and fit recent British White paper revelations that Sinn Féin fat cat Gerry Adams set up the Loughall IRA for ambush into a deeper, more informed narrative than the one MI6 peddles.

As with South Armagh, so also with South Lebanon, South Ossetia and other areas under attack, where the librarians and archivists of Russia, China and Iran must also stand up to the plate and show why NATO and its grifting scribes must fear not only their professionalism and thoroughness but also that of those they train to keep calling out NATOs bluffers where they and other unsung heroes have left off.

"This relevant article, its pictures, and its links are here:"

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