"Lols. More than one poster is allowed to disagree with you…"
Of course, but that isn't why I've suggested you failed to name change from sparechange to tenbob.
Your reply to me where I clearly quoted the sparechange account is where you outed yourself on your own:
"....I must say, I do love you taking it to the next level with your accusation that I don’t understand terrorism!"
Fact is, I said that to sparechange. It's not unreasonable to conclude YOU are also the sparechange account. 🤦♂️
"How are they similar? It’s plainly obvious but if you need it spelling out…"
Well, you say "it's plainly obvious" yet you go on to talk about partition rather than the conflicts themselves.
But I'll go with it!
"They are created when an imperialistic country with little to no regard for the culture and history of the country altered boundaries and told an incoming population they were entitled to it
And the indigenous population was quickly subjugated and disadvantaged in housing, employment and education."
This is pure surface level, ahistorical stuff and simply shows you didn't really understand the situation that led to the tri partitions of the United Kingdom, Ireland and Ulster.
As Professor Liam Kennedy of Queens University stated, "The treaty between the representatives of Dail Eireann and the United Kingdom government, agreed in London in December 1921, led to double acts of partition and secession: from a nationalist viewpoint the partition of the island of Ireland and the secession of the six northern counties; from a unionist viewpoint the partition of the United Kingdom and the secession of southern Ireland."
Sinn Féin's Michael Collins is on record as stating that in signing the Treaty, "“I did not sign the Treaty under duress" and "there was not, and could not have been, any personal duress.
“The threat of “immediate and terrible war” did not matter overmuch to me. The position appeared to be then exactly as it appears now. The British would not, I think have declared terrible and immediate war upon us. "
Collins further reiterated that “I am not impressed by the talk of duress, nor by threats of a declaration of immediate and terrible war. Britain has not made a declaration of war upon Egypt, neither has she made a declaration of war upon India."
And:
"We must not be misled by words and phrases. Unquestionably the alternative to the Treaty, sooner or later, was war, and if the Irish Nation had accepted that, I should have gladly accepted it. …
To me it would have been a criminal act to refuse to allow the Irish Nation to give its opinion as to whether it would accept this settlement or resume hostilities. That I maintain, is a democratic stand. It has always been the stand of public representatives who are alive to their responsibilities."
The people of the Irish Republic voted for and endorsed the Treaty.
Furthermore, historians agree that partition was caused by Republicans, Nationalists, Unionists and Loyalists.
As Joseph Chamberlain said in the Commons in March 1920:
"It is not we who are dividing Ireland. It is not we who made the bitterness of religious strife. It is not we who made party coincide with the religious differences. Those are facts of the situation which have embarrassed every English statesman who has had to deal with Ireland. Those are difficulties which no Statesman can remove. The cure lies in the hands of Irishmen themselves. It can come only from them."
The respected Irish historian, Roy Foster wrote:
"The convention's outcome [July 1917] also illustrated Ulster's intransigence: heavily committed to the war effort, with their champions strongly entrenched in Lloyd George's government, the prospect of entering a nationalist Ireland that had tried to stab the Empire in the back was less alluring than ever. By 1917 all that had been clarified was that both moderate nationalists and unionist accepted the exclusion of a six-county Ulster, including Fermanagh and Tyrone: an admission that reflected's Redmond's desperate need to achieve any settlement going."
The historian, A.T.Q. Stewart wrote in ‘The Narrow Ground - Aspects of Ulster, 1609-1969’ (1977):
"Whatever the ‘Ulster Question’ is in Irish history, it is not the question of partition, though it is commonly presented as such throughout the world…
The problem is clearly older than partition and would in all probability survive it. Thus if one could imagine the border abolished overnight, and a government in Dublin assuming responsibility for the whole country, far from being settled, as so many Irishmen believe, the Ulster problem would become acute.
After all, partition is not peculiar to Ireland, though Irishmen act as if it were…
No one imagines it to be a permanent solution. It rarely satisfies either side, let alone both, and it has a great many practical disadvantages, especially economic ones. It might be said to have only one positive advantage, but that one is paramount. Partition is preferable to civil war.
The artificially division of so small an island as Ireland by the authority then responsible, the British government, inevitably suggests that the problem which dictated it is itself an artificial one, deliberately created by imperial interests outside Ireland, for political advantage of the most expedient and transient kind.
No more misleading assumption could be made, and the consequence of such errors has been (and no doubt will be) the dangerous underestimation of the problem by successive generations of politicians, both Irish and British."
He continued:
"If one were to go no deeper, the case against partition would appear to be unanswerable, and it is scarcely surprising that it is so presented throughout the world.
But the truth is that partition is not a line drawn on the map; it exists in the hearts and minds of Irish people…
Nationalists may or may not be justified in their attempts to remove it and to annex the other six counties of Ireland to the Republic, but there is little point in doing so unless they can find a way to eliminate that other border of the mind.
Partition exists not because the entire population of one part of the country is in total disagreement with the population in the rest of it, but because a minority has been successful in asserting its right of dissent from the majority in the form of a separate administration and constitutional boundary…
By no stretch of the imagination can it be deemed a crime to remain loyal to the civil government whose authority operated when one was born."
He continued:
"It must be remembered, for example, that Ireland is not Algeria, and that Northern Ireland is not Cyprus. The white Algerians were not at all in the same situation as the protestants of Ulster, nor was their history the same. They were settlers in a sense that the Ulstermen were not. The difference between Christian and Muslim, between white-skinned and dark-skinned, is not that which exists between Catholic and Protestant in ulster. Similar problems occur in many counties, but no two problems have all the same features. The ulster problem is, when all is said and done, only the Ulster problem."
It is likewise true that history and situation of Northern Ireland's Catholics and Protestants is absolutely NOT the same or equivalent situation as that between the Israelis and Palestinians in the Middle East.
Our situation is very different from theirs. As A.T.Q. Stewart states, "The Ulster problem is, when all is said and done, only the Ulster problem."
The SDLP's John Hume argued much the same as Stewart:
"The real division in Ireland is not the line in the map that we call partition. That line in the map simply institutionalised a division that has existed for centuries in the hearts and minds of the Irish people. That is where the real border in Ireland lies - in the hearts and minds of the people."
And:
"The divisions in Ireland go back well beyond partition."
- John Hume in the House of Commons on 26 November 1986
It is both incorrect and ahistorical to blame the British Government rather than the people of the island of Ireland itself for our own problems. An argument articulated by John Hume in one of many articles I've collected over the years.
T.K. Whitaker, Secretary for Department of Finance, wrote to the Taoiseach Sean Lemas on November 11 1968 a memorandum which included notes on the use of force as a means to end partition, noting that force strengthens partition:
"The use of force to overcome Northern Unionists would accentuate rather than remove basic differences and it would not be militarily possible in any event… Force will get us nowhere; it will only strengthen the fears, antagonisms and divisions that keep North and South apart…There is, in fact, no valid alternative to the policy of "agreement in Ireland between Irishmen"; any other policy risks creating a deeper and more real partition than has ever existed in the past. ’We were in real danger that such a partition would be created during the IRA raids when the people of North and South almost ceased visiting one another and the Border resembled the Berlin Wall. Misunderstanding and suspicion can be broken down only by friendly and frequent contact."
SDLP's John Hume spoke publicly about how the outcome of the violence of Provisional Sinn Féin and Provisional IRA was to deepen partition. Not lessen it. Same argument as Whitaker to Lemass.
On partition, he wrote in 1968:
"The British are not blameless, as far as the origins of Partition are concerned, but neither are they wholly to blame... It is much too naive to believe that Britain simply imposed it on Ireland."
Barrister and judge Donal Barrington asserted:
"Partition was forced on the British government by the conflicting demands of the two parties of Irishmen”."
The truth is that Nationalists, Republicans, Unionists and Loyalists were willing to use physical force against each other to get what they wanted.
The British Government was not opposed to a united Ireland at the time, but it was also NOT in support of Republican threats to coerce Ulster into a united Ireland. It did the only thing it could in the circumstances of the time - partition.
"I come now to the more vexed question of Ulster. Here we had all given a definitely clear pledge that, under no conditions, would we agree to any proposals that would involve the coercion of Ulster.....Therefore, on policy I have always been in favour of the pledge that there should be no coercion of Ulster.
We have never for a moment forgotten the pledge—not for an instant. That did not preclude us from endeavouring to persuade Ulster to come into an All-Ireland Parliament."
- David Lloyd George, the then Prime Minister, in the House of Commons on 14 December 1921.
That has always been the UK Government’s position in relation to Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland alike.
A position completely vindicated by the 1998 Belfast Agreement, I must add.
This history is very, very different to that of the Israelis and Palestinians' own experience of partition.
The following excerpts have been taken from the United Nations website:
www.un.org/unispal/history/
"Palestine was among former Ottoman territories placed under UK administration by the League of Nations in 1922. "
You can see in this link which countries were members of the League Of Nations in 1922 when Palestine was placed under UK administration.
www.britannica.com/topic/League-of-Nations/Members-of-the-League-of-Nations
"UK considered various formulas to bring independence to a land ravaged by violence. In 1947, the UK turned the Palestine problem over to the UN."
Under British administration, Palestine was NOT partitioned, but you will often hear people talking as though it was!
So, we move on to the actual partition itself:
"After looking at alternatives, the UN proposed terminating the Mandate and partitioning Palestine into two independent States, one Palestinian Arab and the other Jewish, with Jerusalem internationalized (Resolution 181 (II) of 1947)."
As we can see, the partition of Palestine was not created by the British Government alone.
The collective members of the United Nations made that decision.
By now, it should be clear that the United Kingdom is not to blame for the partition as it didn't enact that plan.
Partition was a United Nations collective plan. Do you consider the UN to be imperialistic?
That partition led to the invasion of Israel in 1948 by five hostile Arab States.
This is entirely a very different situation to the partition of the United Kingdom, Ireland and Ulster. In fact, our own partition should be viewed very much in the context of the experience of partition within Europe itself. IIRC, Professor Brian Walker of the Irish Studies Institute made that very point in his work.
I'm afraid you've failed from the beginning to show how the partition of the UK, Ireland and Ulster was in any way similar or equivalent to the UN Partition Plan of 1948 in the Middle East.
Given that, I see no reason to respond to your very general comment about terrorism in the rest of your post.
"And actually MN debate can be constructive.
It can influence which relief charities people donate to, the way they explain news and events to their children, the marches they join.
Grassroots diplomacy and democracy is important and impactful. You know that or you wouldn’t have spent the last few months lecturing everyone on your point of view."
I, for one, look forward to any empirical evidence you have to show that Mumsnet debate has in any way been constructive and/or close to YOUR previous statement that Mumsnet debate has "anything constructive about how to stop this horrendous situation escalating or prolonging".
Let's see....🤷♂️