anniversary of Bloody Sunday

This blog post commemorates the 34th anniversary of Bloody Sunday in Derry, when a peace march supporting Civil Rights in that Northern Ireland city was fired upon by British soldiers and a number of people were killed. Like the shootings at Kent State and Jackson State in the States in the same period, these were tragedies that occurred when large numbers of non-violent protesters were confronted by armed soldiers who were unfairly and unrealistically ordered to do crowd-control. Also as with the Kent and Jackson States shootings, no charges were ever filed.

There's a fine film in quasi-documentary style about Bloody Sunday.

This event gets at something significant in all periods of Irish history ever since first colonization (by the Vikings, if we want to go back that far): that the gulf between "haves" and "have-nots" has too often been accomampanied by a kind of "zero-sum" game, in which each opposing side operates from a presumption that any gain by the other side means one's own side has lost something. In other words, in Irish sectarian and economic politics, too often there has been a tragic unwillingness to seek "win-win" situations--say, for example, peace, in which both sides gain--or to regret "lose-lose" situations--say, for example, violence, in which both sides ultimately suffer. So "peace and reconciliation" is a very hard job that often has mostly to do with re-educating people. This is why peace initiatives that work in Ireland have often targetted very young children: for example, by funding sending poor Catholic and Protestant children to summer camps together, and so on.