Today's Stories

December 22, 2008

Pam Martens
Madoff's Money Trail Leads to Washington

December 19 - 21, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
An Ethnic Cleansing in America

Jeffrey St. Clair
Salazar and the Tragedy of the Common Ground

Paul Craig Roberts
Country Without Mercy

Patrick Cockburn
The Baathist "Coup Plot"

Felice Pace
Green Myopia: Obama's Appointments Reveal What's Wrong with the Environmental Movement

Diane Farsetta
The Pentagon's PR Slush Fund

George Ciccariello-Maher
By the Time I Get to Arizona: ICE Raids and Resistance in Flagstaff

Eric Bergoust
Extinct Lifestyles: Redefining Prosperity

Marjorie Cohn
Torture Without Regrets: Cheney's Unrepentent Confession

Stan Cox
Clothes and Commentaries That Don't Fit

Michael Donnelly
Clinton III: Continuity We Can Believe In

Robert Weissman
The Auto Bailout

Ralph Nader
Excluded Democracy: Scholastic and the Two Party System

Alan Farago
Shock and Awe Economics

Sam Smith
Not All Public Work is the Same

Timothy G. Hermach
What Happened on the Way to the Inauguration?

Seth Sandronsky
Who's Not Getting By and Why

Rannie Amiri
All Quiet on the Gazan Shore

David Yearsley
Bach as Jihadi

Martha Rosenberg
Wyeth's Pay-to-Play

Dave Lindorff
White House Lied About Iraqi Yellowcake Buy (But That's Not the Biggest Scandal)

Christopher Brauchli
Weekend at Bernie's: the Confinement of Mr. Madoff

Missy Beattie
President Meathead

Richard Rhames
Corporatizing the Kids

Stephen Martin
Full-Spectrum Dominance of the Big Lie

Paul Krassner
Milk and Twinkies

Lorenzo Wolff
Does Coldplay Give a Shit Anymore?

Poets' Basement
Kathwari, Halling and Payne

Worthy Group of the Weekend
Heartwood

December 18, 2008

Phillip Doe
The Man in the Hat: Salazar and the Status Quo

Ronnie Cummins
Vilsack: Another Shill for Monsanto

Jesse Sharkey
No School Left Unsold: Arne Duncan's Privatization Agenda

Saul Landau
Postcard from Venezuela

Peter Morici
What's Next for the Fed?

Dave Lindorff
Prosecuting Bush and Cheney for Torture

Panos Petrou
Days of Rage in Greece

Jeff Cohen /
Norman Solomon
The 2008 P.U.-litzer Prizes: the Stinkiest Media Performances of the Year

Worthy Group of the Day
Organic Consumer Alliance

December 17, 2008

Peter Lee
Pushing Pakistan Over the Edge

Conn Hallinan
Angels and Demons in Mumbai

Mike Whitney
Bernanke's Fatal Flaw

Jeff Halper
Obama and the Israel-Palestine Conflict

Alan Farago
The Audacity of Parkland

Peter Morici
The Big Hole

Norm Kent
Obama Lights Up

Col. Douglas MacGregor
The Price of Expediency

Margaret Kimberley
Blacks and Gay Rights

Ron Jacobs
The Myth of the Good Guy: Waiting on a President to Do the Right Thing

Worthy Group of the Day
Campaign to End the Death Penalty

December 16, 2008

Vicente Navarro
A Forgotten Genocide: the Case of Spain

Patrick Cockburn
Each Shoe was Worth a Thousand Words

Thomas Michael Power
Back to the Pump: an Economic and Environmental Dead End

Jason Hribal
Orangutans, Resistance and the Zoo: the Story of Ken Allen and Kumang

Farzana Versey
Straw Warriors and the Pantomime of Patriotism

Wajahat Ali /
Ahmed Rashid
Indian Muslims: Defining Their Loyalty

Mats Svensson
The Order to Destroy has been Given

Paul Fitzgerald /
Elizabeth Gould
Mumbai Terror's Afghan Roots

David Macaray
Workplace Violence and Termination Etiquette

Howard Lisnoff
Left Control of Academia? The Case of William Felkner

Worthy Group of the Day
AWR: the Last, Best Hope for Saving the Big Wild

December 15, 2008

Andy Worthington
Hit Me Baby One More Time: a History of Music Torture in War on Terror

Franklin Lamb
Why Hezbollah Stiffed Carter

Karl Grossman
Dr. Chu's Nuclear Prescription

Brian Cloughley
Land of the Free (To Torture and Imprison Without Trial)

Mary Lynn Cramer
Stiglitz's Foolishly Flawed Morality

Steve Early
From Nicky Pockets to Blago: Why Pay-to-Play is Bad for Labor

Thomas Christie
Pentagon Train Wreck Awaits Obama

Ken Paff
Remembering Ron Carey: a Great Labor Leader

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
What is India to Do?

Dave Lindorff
A Hero of Our Time: Muntadar al-Zaidi

Alan Farago
The Artless Dodger

Worthy Group of the Day
Davis-Putter Scholarship Fund

December 12 / 14, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Hail to Chicago, Beacon of American Values

Michael Hudson /
Jeffrey Sommers
The End of the Washington Consensus

David Price
The Leaky Ship of Human Terrain Systems

Jeffrey St. Clair
Nukes Up the Hudson

Frank Barat
An Israeli in Gaza: an Interview with Jeff Halper

John Ross
Writing a Thesis in Blood

Binoy Kampmark
Humanitarian Imperialism: Obama and the Genocide Task Force

David Macaray
Killing the Auto Bailout: a Dagger to the Heart of Organized Labor

Ralph Nader
Antidotes to Plunder: a Holiday Reading List

Eamonn Fingleton
Whatever Happened to Iris Chang?

Lawrence Velvel
Why Blagojevich Might Be Acquitted

Behzad Yaghmaian
The Housing Crisis: a Timebomb China Can't Defuse

Sam Husseini
Putting the Pro in Protest

Tom Barry
Incentives to Detain: How Immigrants Drive Prison Profits

Howard Lisnoff
Why I Went to Jail

Laura Carlsen
Mexico's Immigration Problem

Raj Patel
The WTO and Other Fairy Tales

Ron Jacobs
The Manufacturing of History

Paul Watson
Risky Business Down Under

David Yearsley
They Also Serve Who Only Pull or Tread

Lorenzo Wolff
So You Want Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star...

Kim Nicolini
Finally, a Vampire Movie You Can Sink Your Teeth Into

Susie Day
Proposition 1984: the Problem with Heterosexuals

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Lerch and Crete

Worthy Group of the Weekend
Energy Justice

December 11, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
Total Defeat for U.S. in Iraq

P. Sainath
After Mumbai

Vicken Cheterian
The Zarqawi Generation

Ray McGovern
Will Obama Buy Torture-Lite?

Dedrick Muhammad
Post-Racial Racism at the Post: the Undying Obsession with Black Family Values

Lee Sustar
Victory at Republic

Peter Morici
The Big Drag

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
Must They Hate Us So?

George Wuerthner
Another Subsidy to Big Timber?

Christopher Brauchli
Mr. Berg's Strange Obsession

Worthy Group of the Day
Animal Balance

December 10, 2008

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Whose Interests Will Shape Obama's Change?

Mary Lynn Cramer
The Multi-Trillion Dollar Question

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Nuclear Weapons Obsolescence

Joshua Frank
Breaking the Stranglehold on Middle East News Coverage

Jack Ely
Stop Sobbing About Free Music Downloads: a Message to the Music Industry from the Lead Singer of the Kingsmen

Steve Conn
An Obama Public Works Program?

Lee Sustar
Republic Workers Target Bank of America

Glen Ford
The Die is Cast

Stephen Lendman
The Persecution of Syed Fahad Hashmi

Nadia Hijab
The Face of America

Dave Lindorff
We All Need a Union

Website of the Day
This One's For You, Senator Dodd

December 9, 2008

Mike Whitney
Card Check

Fawzia Afzal-Khan
Us vs. Them

Ghada Karmi
The UN Resolution That Time Forgot

Dave Lindorff
A Car Dealer Explains Why the Bailout is a Raw Deal

Steve Breyman
Notes on a Green Economy: Managing Stuff in the 21st Century

Lee Sustar /
Nicole Colson
Raising the Stakes at Republic

Rev. William E. Alberts
God of Our Fathers

Martha Rosenberg
Bill Richardson: Secretary of Bloodsports

Sam Husseini
How Holbrooke Lied His Way Into a War

David Macaray
The UAW in Peril

Website of the Day
This Toxic Life

December 8, 2008

Steve Early
Is Obama Backing Off a Crucial Pledge to Labor?

Michael Hudson
Obama's Favoritism: Wall Street, Not the Auto Industry

Patrick Cockburn
Talking to a Lashkar Militant

Diane Farsetta
An Officer and a Conflicted Man: McCaffery, the Pentagon and Fleishman-Hillard

Paul Craig Roberts
Chapters in Imperial Hypocrisy

Daniel Gross
The Chicago Sit-Down Strike

Saul Landau
To Bail or Not to Bail?

Harvey Wasserman
Why John Bryson is Unfit for Energy Secretary

Mike Ferner
The New Generation of "Non-Lethal" Weapons

Norman Solomon
The Silent Winter of Escalation

David Michael Green
The Other Foot

Website of the Day
The Remains of Detroit

December 5 / 7, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Honeymoans From the Left

Brian Cloughley
Shambles in Afghanistan

Paul Craig Roberts
Muslim Revolution: How Washington Arrogance Helped Drive the Mumbai Attacks

Liaquat Ali Khan
Mumbai and the Kashmir Tinderbox

Farzana Versey
Mumbai's Charge of the Lightweight Brigade

Peter Lee
Pakistan Nears the Breaking Point

Peter Morici
Slouching Toward a Depression?

Ralph Nader /
Toby Heaps
Junk Cap-and-Trade

Yinon Cohen /
Neve Gordon
Obama Could End the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Will He Meet the Challenge?

Wajahat Ali
Perverse Justice: the Holy Land Foundation Convictions

Johnny Barber
Aswad's Story: Illegal Detention and the Declaration of Human Rights

Alan Farago
Fallout from the Pass-Through Economy

Jeremy Scahill
Obama Doesn't Plan to End Occupation of Iraq

Mike Whitney
Powergrab in Ottawa

Ranjit Hoskote
Jahiliyya Versus Jihad

Carl Finamore
Thank God I'm an Atheist! (Or Boy is Bill O'Reilly in for a Big Surprise)

Marjorie Cohn
Obama and Women's Rights

Norm Kent
Tommy Chong, the Unanticipated Warrior

Missy Beattie
What Lies Ahead

Binoy Kampmark
Committing Suicide On-Line: the Briggs Case

David Macaray
The Best and the Brightest Redux: Too Many Brains, Not Enough Humility

Nancy Stohlman
Relational Activism

Ron Jacobs
Irreverent Politics Then and Now

David Yearsley
Thematics From the Golden Past

Lorenzo Wolff
Troubled Songs of Home and War

Poets' Basement
Orloski: The Door Opener

Website of the Weekend
In Prison My Whole Life

December 4, 2008

Ece Temelkuran
Inside the Ergenekon Case

Ralph Nader
Turning Crisis into Opportunity: Who Will Seize the Moment?

Harry Browne
The Bush-Obama National Security Strategy

Eamonn Fingleton
The American Car Industry: a Riposte to the Knockers

Conn Hallinan
The Syria Attack

Mike Whitney
Fiasco in Somalia: Another CIA Cock-Up

Stewart J. Lawrence
Obama and Latinos: Richardson, Alone, is Not Enough

Paul Fitzgerald /
Elizabeth Gould
Message to Obama: Stop Killing Afghanis

Karyn Strickler
Show Us the Green, Before We Show You the Money

Jennifer Matsui
Obama-Cola: the Great National Temperance Beverage

Website of the Day
"He Ain't Got Laid in a Month of Sundays..."

December 3, 2008

Andrew Cockburn
What's Wrong with the U.S. Military

Sheldon Rampton
Mormon Homophobia: Up Close and Personal

Robert Weissman
Nationalize GM

Yifat Susskind
From Mumbai to Washington

William Blum
The Obama Bummer: Vote First, Ask Questions Later

Alan Singer
The Ghost of the Defunct Economist

David Macaray
Trampled Under Foot at Wal-Mart

Martha Rosenberg
Born With a Statin Deficiency? Line Forms to the Left!

Mats Svensson
The Crimes Have No Period of Limitations

Website of the Day
Why Bill Richardson's Nomination Should be Opposed

December 2, 2008

Jeremy Scahill
Obama's Kettle of Hawks

Paul Craig Roberts
The New Arms Race

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
The Mumbai Terror Attacks: Is Pakistan to Blame?

Sarah Anderson /
John Cavanagh
Skewed Priorities: How the Bailout Dwarfs Spending on Other Global Crises

William Blum
The Mythology of the War on Terrorism

John Ross
Mexico's Drug War Goes Down in Flames

Dave Lindorff
A Tale of Two Terror Attacks

Nicola Nasser
A Peace Process That Makes Peace Impossible

Steve Conn
Operation Redskin Removal

Robert Bryce
Coal Hard Facts

Website of the Day
Country, Funk, Soul

December 1, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
From Baghdad to Mumbai, by Way of Pakistan

Damien Millet /
Eric Toussaint
Obama's Economic Team: Records of Failure

Vijay Prashad
The Fires in South Asia

Deepak Tripathi
Obama's Foreign Crises

Joshua Frank
Madam Secretary Clinton and the Middle East

P. Sainath
The Unlikely Martyrdom of Free Market Jihad

Alan Farago
The Right's War on Regulators

Binoy Kampmark
Sydney's Ball and Chain

Chris Genovali
Silent Fall

David Michael Green
Hope You Die Before You Get Old

Stephen Martin
The Chinese are Coming, the Chinese are Coming!

Website of the Day
Robert Rubin: Coward, Liar or Both?

November 28-30, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
In Time of Trouble

Mike Whitney
The Obama "Dream Team": Rubin Clones and Other Fakers

Ted Honderich
What is the Meaning of Obama's Election?

Tom Kerr
Preserving Filthy Lucre (Or Becoming My Dad)

Mike Ely
The Conquest of New England

David Yearsley
Hymns of the Conquest

Deepak Tripathi
Uproar in Police-State Britain

Sonja Karkar
Gaza's Death Throes

Ramzy Baroud
Salvation in a News Broadcast

Robert Weitzel
Israel's Settlement on Capitol Hill

Robert Roth
Can We Create a Movement for Change?

Carlos Fierro
Obama and the End of Racism?

David Macaray
How to Kill a Union

David Rosen
A New Sexual Agenda

James Cockcroft
Indigenous People Rising

Stan Cox
The Most Disappointing Gift

Steve Conn
Talking Turkey About College Basketball

Stephen Martin
The Electromagnetic Pulse and Economic Warfare

Richard Rhames
Busty Bimbettes, Bombs and Brand Obama

Kim Nicolini
Women as Products and Cannibalistic Achievers

Lorenzo Wolff
A Battle Cry for the Confused and Vulnerable

Poets' Basement
Woods, Harrison and Corseri

December 22, 2008

Historian, Politician, Censor

Conor Cruise O'Brien, 1917-2008

By NIALL MEEHAN

Conor Cruise O’Brien has died aged 91.

He had a long career: in the Irish Civil Service in the 1940s; in the 1950s in the UN; in the Congo, the University of Ghana and New York University in the 1960s, He was elected an Irish opposition Labour TD in 1969 under the slogan ‘The Seventies will be Socialist’. He became Minister for Posts and Telegraphs in 1973 and lost his seat in 1977. He became Editor in Chief of The Observer until 1981. He has been a writer and commentator ever since. He wrote numerous books on politics, history and literature.

Half way through he became a reactionary. The rock on which he fell was the Irish National Question.

In 1965, O’Brien said,

‘[A] liberal, incurably, was what I was[,]… profoundly attached to liberal concepts of freedom - freedom of speech and of the press, academic freedom, independent judgement and independent judges.’

In 1976, O’Brien told Bernard Nossiter of the Washington Post he wanted to imprison the Editor of the Irish Press for printing pro-Irish republican letters.

In 1993 O’Brien supported censoring a radio advertisement for a book of short stories by Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams. Favorable reviews in The Times, Sunday Times and Times Literary supplement were by IRA sympathizers, he suggested. Why not ban them then? Radio advertisements were more dangerous, said O’Brien, as the audience included,

‘people who are poor and who are not so well educated. That is... less educated people who on the whole are more likely to be impressed than more educated people’.

In 1998 he revealed that he had supported police brutality in 1974, by a group that went on to beat confessions out of, and obtain convictions against, innocent people.

He shifted rightwards under cover of the left. He had the kcredentials.

O’Brien was forced out of the Congo and the UN in 1961. He led the UN in a minor war against the Moise Tshombe’s breakaway Katanga. Time magazine called Tshombe the ‘solemn black defender of white capitalism in middle Africa’. White Rhodesia, Britain, France and the departing Belgians defended him. They, in turn, were backed by the US.

The ‘stripe shirted Castro’, as the British press described O’Brien, had to go.

Go he did, in public protest. He proceeded into the 1960s New Left. In 1963 he exposed Encounter magazine’s editorial ignorance of US racism at home and oppression abroad. He made fools of official and unofficial US government spokespersons. He humiliated Encounter in a 1967 libel suit, when its CIA funding was exposed. He opposed the Vietnam War. He got arrested (and kicked by a cop) trying to shut down the draft in New York in 1967. O’Brien joined Noam Chomsky, I.F. Stone, Betty Shabazz, and others in opposing police oppression of the Black Panthers. He opposed the 1968 police riot at the Chicago Democratic Convention. He backed Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 Anti-Vietnam War presidential platform.

The socialist new wine turned to vinegar in a paranoid 1973-77 Labour-Fine Gael coalition. O’Brien’s censorship is remembered alongside the repression perfected by Justice Minister Patrick Cooney.

But O’Brien started where he left off in New York in late 1968. This period is largely forgotten in the revisionist Irish history that O’Brien also promoted (see my previous Counterpunch article on Ken Loach’s Wind that Shakes the Barley).

On October 12 1968 O’Brien spoke in Queens University Belfast. It was one week after an October 5 Civil Rights march in Derry. A worldwide television audience saw British and Irish MPs, participants and bystanders batoned by local unionist police. According to then Republican Labour MP Gerry Fitt, it was ‘the beginning of the end of unionism in Northern Ireland’. The University meeting was barred to the media, due, said O'Brien, to pressure from a Protestant fundamentalist preacher, the Reverend Ian Paisley.  O’Brien reportedly,

‘described Northern Ireland as a ‘sub-state’ like Dixie which was under the control of Washington, whereas in the North the power lay with London. The beneficiaries of gerrymandering and discrimination in the North might be sacrificed by Britain just as the ‘Jim Crows’ were sacrificed by Washington. Civil Disobedience, he said, would only be a success if the Catholic population were prepared to run considerable risks and accept sacrifices in a disciplined way in order to improve their collective condition’.

O’Brien referred to the sectarian organization, the Protestant Orange Order,

‘The Orangemen had never been beaten… therefore their resistance to change would be all the stronger. Nor was it likely that all of them would restrict themselves to non-violence. [They] resembled the Afrikaners of South Africa in their qualities and their limitations, both of which were considerable’.

Later, O’Brien noted,

‘Some Protestant unionists favour the cause of the whites of Southern Africa and the white backlash generally: the [Paisleyite] Protestant Telegraph carried communiqués from Ian Smith’s Rhodesian front and members of [Paisley’s] movement denounced the boycott of the Irish trade unions of the South African Rugby Team on its 1970 Irish visit.’

In 1968 O’Brien thought it necessary to ‘keep up the pressure’ on then liberal unionist Prime Minister, Terence O’Neill, ‘to keep up his intentions’ and to counteract ‘hate merchants like Paisley’. However, O’Brien the liberal was largely indifferent to O’Neill’s fate, even if ‘replaced by a more right-wing unionist,’ because, ‘it often turned out that a strong man with a reputation for toughness was more able to make concessions than a reputed liberal’.

It was 1968’s ‘hate merchant’, Paisley, who was the 2007 ‘strong man’, able to make concessions. By that stage, O’Brien, who had come to call Paisley his ‘friend’, predicted that Paisley would not agree to share power with the pro IRA party, Sinn Fein. He was wrong, increasingly so.

O’Brien is remembered today as an opponent of violence.

Again, it was not always so.

In a then unpublished New York talk in December 1969, O’Brien said Catholics were,

‘the blacks in Northern Ireland… The Civil Rights Movement began as a strictly non-violent one, civil rights workers were pelted with rocks, thrown in jail, beaten by the police, without resistance or retaliation.’

He continued,

“No bombs, no rights” read a local headline. There is no doubt that the young people of the civil rights movement with backing from older people achieved first through non-violent symbolic protest, and then through the use of a degree of violence, far more than their elders had achieved in two generations of argument and minority voting… [T]he cost was high and not yet paid in full… In this case violence did indeed assure a hearing for moderation, which in the absence of violence had gone unheard for nearly fifty years.’

O’Brien also reported,

‘civil rights people and the people in the Catholic ghetto, in Derry itself, used force to break-up the traditional [Orange Order] procession of their oppressors – which signifies the oppression of the Catholics -  and successfully defended their ghetto against the police by use of petrol bombs. In Belfast armed defenders of Protestant supremacy started shooting Catholics and burning their homes.’

While O’Brien was endorsing violence, nationalists were seeking arms for self-defense. Dublin ministers attempted to aid them. Colleagues who knew of it claimed ignorance and betrayed them. The Ministers were dismissed in the May 1970 ‘Arms Crisis’. O’Brien and the Labour Party portrayed it as a grave threat to democracy. They changed a leftist no-coalition stance for mainly this reason.

Back in ’69 O’Brien said the use of ‘British troops… in Derry and Belfast resembled [President Eisenhower’s] decision in 1956 to send federal troops to Little Rock’ Arkansas. O’Brien hoped it was ‘the beginning of the end of the institutionalised caste system’. He noted,

‘the smaller of the[..] communities has been oppressed by the larger, and has now served notice of its determination to refuse to continue to be oppressed’

However, O’Brien opposed ‘American support’ for Irish reunification. It confirmed,

‘Protestant suspicions of an international conspiracy to place them under Catholic domination (or Communist domination, which militant Protestants take to be much the same thing)’.

This stance harmonized briefly with nationalist strategy. The violent refusal to grant so-called ‘British’ rights exposed the sectarian state. The violence O’Brien endorsed was a response to state violence. However, his opposition to Irish unification was a link to ideas O’Brien had before the 1960s. He ignored discrimination against Northern Ireland’s nationalists until, as he said of Encounter’s ignorance of US racism, ‘the news made it impossible to play it down’.

O’Brien’s observations in late 1968 contradicted the religious prism through which he later articulated a sympathetically pro-unionist outlook. Prior to the ‘Troubles’ he had also seen the conflict as religious. In attempting to explain it UCD’s Liam de Paor asserted,

‘In Northern Ireland Catholics are Blacks who happen to have white skins. This is not a truth. It is an oversimplification and too facile an analogy. But it is a better oversimplification than that which sees the struggle and conflict in Northern Ireland in terms of religion.... The Northern Ireland problem is a colonial problem, and the ‘racial’ distinction (and it is actually imagined as racial) between the colonists and the natives is expressed in terms of religion’.

Unionist references to their ‘kith and kin’ in white minority ruled South Africa and Rhodesia clarified matters. The Home Affairs Minister, William Craig, supported Apartheid. He also said, with a straight face, ‘It is well known that in countries where there is a Catholic majority there is a lower standard of democracy’. The Afrikaner and US racism comparison seemed then obvious to O’Brien. However, it was not one with which he persevered. Or rather, it was one to which he returned in the mid 1980s, but this time with a sympathetic view of Afrikaners. He said,

‘It probably doesn’t help to treat them as morally inferior to ourselves. We are morally superior to them only if we can be certain that we, if placed in their predicament would act better than they do. How many of us can be certain of that’.

The supporter of broadcasting censorship opposed an academic boycott of South Africa. He decided to break it in 1986 with the words, ‘I am off to Cape Town accompanied by my [adopted] Black son’. Combined anti-Apartheid, anti-O’Brien, and pro-IRA protests, erupted on campuses at which he attempted to speak.

After repositioning his view of white South Africans, O’Brien also identified with Israeli Zionists, whose position he appeared to compare favorably with Northern Ireland unionists. While rejecting out of hand comparisons between the 1845-47 Irish famine and the Nazi Holocaust, O’Brien elided the question of how unionist experience in Ireland could be compared with the Jewish people’s fate. In essence the comparison was contemporary and political, not historical, Unionists with Zionists and Nationalists with Palestinians, O’Brien tending to support the former equation over the latter. Four pages of acknowledgements in his The siege (1986) contain not one Arab name. It was suggested that he might interview Yasser Arafat. He replied ‘No, I don’t want to’.

A historical interrogation might not have been favorable to unionism.

In 1916 the Unionist Party drove out of Northern Ireland a former Unionist councillor and 1899, 1904, Belfast Lord Mayor, Sir Otto Jaffe. He, like other Jews in Britain and Ireland, was portrayed as a German sympathiser during World War One. It was hysteria encouraged by the British Government that Unionists endorsed. The Winston Churchill Archive for 1914 contains:
‘Telegram from Captain MacIlwaine, fitting out ships at Harland and Wolff, Belfast [Northern Ireland] to Admiralty, reporting that Sir Otto Jaffe, a prominent German Jew, was a suspected spy. MacIlwaine alleges that Jaffe had made an exhaustive report to the German Government on Belfast, and that he had been seen spying on ships fitting out “from an unusual place of observation”.’
The ‘suspected spy’ fled to England.

Many Jews fled south, where the increasingly republican atmosphere was considered more congenial. Similar unionist nonsense was replicated against Moslems after September 11 2001.

O’Brien acknowledged how civil rights demands opened up the 1922 Partition settlement. Almost immediately, he set out to suppress or to re-define the question. Then Taoiseach (Irish PM) Jack Lynch asserted that Partition was the ‘root cause’, and continued,

‘gerrymandering, discrimination in jobs and housing, suppression of free speech and the right of peaceful protest - could not be continued without the political and the huge financial support received by Britain’.

In reply, O’Brien indicated that Partition both was and was not the issue. It was not in that it merely reflected the consequences of the successful coloniatiozn of Ulster in the 17th Century. It was in the sense that parts of the province contained substantial nationalist majorities.

In early 1969 O’Brien believed that civil rights demands should be pursued while also warning that ‘an Irish Sharpeville was not out of the question’. He believed that it might be carried out by unionists, but provoked by southern interference. Therefore, he advised, avoid it. The ‘Irish Sharpeville’ did occur on Derry’s ‘Bloody Sunday’ on January 30 1972. 14 nationalist civilians were shot dead by British Army Paratroopers. Up to then the nationalist minority in the North felt it had been subject to many mini Sharpevilles and to a sectarian police and judicial system. O'Brien erected a ‘keep out’ sign to southern political parties. Increasingly, he did not wish to offend unionists, irrespective of how offensive they were toward nationalists. Avoidance of unionist upset became a regular theme. Unionists might act violently if disconcerted. It was to lead eventually to an elective affinity between O’Brien and those unionists he earlier compared with racists in the USA and in South Africa.

O’Brien also suggested that in 1969 in Dublin there was ‘thinly disguised impatience, irritation and even contempt’ directed at ‘the Catholics (alias in certain contexts the nationalists)’ of the North. The observation was not new. In his States of Ireland (1972) O’Brien noted the Dublin view of 1961 that northern Catholics had ‘brought... most of their troubles on themselves, it was now up to them to come to terms with reality’. They did. But the reality they came to terms with was increasingly driven by autonomous action. However, instead of welcoming political self-activity, as he had with African Americans, as early as 1968 O’Brien was wondering whether nationalists should endure their ‘disabilities’, which he said ‘are real, but not overwhelmingly oppressive’. He asked, ‘is their removal really worth attaining at the risk of precipitating riots, explosions, pogroms, murder’? This surprising request begs a question he did not pose: why such barbaric unionist methods in defense of supposedly minimal ‘disabilities’?

While addressing the views of the elite, O’Brien may also have been addressing his own irritation. He began to articulate a fear for the stability of the status quo on the island as a whole. He articulated an institutional preference for dealing directly with Unionist power, not the irritations of nationalist powerlessness. In the 1960s, the Dublin political establishment decided to turn away from articulating the grievances of nationalists. O’Brien’s political trajectory was in line with southern practice if not its then politically expedient rhetoric.

IRA violence was implicated in the creation of southern disaffection. However, the IRA served as a convenient scapegoat for a policy direction desired by the comfortably off down South. O’Brien’s target was not the IRA. Non-violent especially left-wing activists bore the brunt of O’Brien’s opposition. The targets included Labour’s Northern Ireland sister party, the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), and Labour itself. Also in the frame was the left wing of the republican movement, which had split in 1970. These efforts caused a crisis in relations between Labour and the SDLP.

O'Brien vs Labour vs the SDLP

In 1972 the left wing SDLP founder member, Paddy Devlin, formerly of the Northern Ireland Labour Party, noted O’Brien’s public ‘criticism’ of SDLP policy, Toward a New Ireland, ‘while the Irish Labour Party were planning a meeting to discuss the contents’.

Labour was reportedly ‘split down the middle over O’Brien’. David Thornley TD attempted unsuccessfully to remove him as foreign affairs spokesperson. A procedural motion at a party meeting in October 1972, that would have brought differences into the open, ‘was defeated very narrowly and Dr O’Brien survived’. John O’Connell TD called for endorsement of the SDLP policy. Discussion was ruled ‘out of order’. Protestant SDLP MP Ivan Cooper accused Labour of engaging in a ‘face saving charade in the interests of Dr Conor Cruise O’Brien’. Cooper said the SDLP and Labour ‘cannot continue maintaining a special relationship’.

O’Brien clashed sharply with a later SDLP leader, John Hume. In 1998 O’Brien described Hume as having been his ‘deadly enemy’ in 1972. Hume said O’Brien’s States of Ireland (1972),was ‘a more subtle and effective defence of unionism than any that has come from any unionist quarter’. O’Brien replied that Hume's was a ‘serious and unjust charge’. He said, ‘I have never been a unionist and John Hume knows that’.

Hume charged O’Brien with misrepresenting SDLP policy on Irish unity. The SDLP wanted a British declaration that ‘it would be in the best interests of both these islands if we became united on terms acceptable to all the people of Ireland, North and South’. O’Brien stated that unity ‘such as that sought by the SDLP would stick in his throat’. He said, paraphrasing Hume’s comment about a ‘United Ireland or nothing’ post-Bloody Sunday, that it would push ‘toward the terrible nothing of anarchy and civil war’. Hume replied that the ‘so called’ ‘unionist fears’ on which O'Brien focused ‘never had justification’. He continued, ‘the price of these fears had been very high on both sides of the border’, causing southern Civil War and ‘50 years of injustice’ in the North. He noted, as a consequence, ‘now there were 600 people dead’.

O'Brien asserted that ‘even to suggest unity is to destroy hopes for peace’. The Irish Times was critical of O’Brien’s charge, ‘that to mention unity is dangerous’. The Times suggested that ‘Dr O’Brien’s prognostications of incipient civil war are hardly compatible with his declared intentions’. The editorial went on to declare as ‘unfair and invalid’ O’Brien’s suggestion that a worsening of relations between the Irish Labour Party and the SDLP

‘would be saying to the Protestants that there is no room in Catholic Ireland for a dissenting voice or for anyone who urges that any form of Protestant opinion should be taken into consideration’.

In seeing Protestants politically as unionists, O’Brien’s stance encouraged an intertwining of religion and identity, rather than challenge it. The agnostic O’Brien now personified this sectarian identity. He became an ersatz Protestant.

Douglas Gageby, the last Protestant Editor of The Irish Times, said O’Brien ‘pushes his case too far’. He said O'Brien,

'did not dwell on the effects on the anti-unionist minority in the North if the battle in which he is engaged should spread further. The effect might be to throw more and more people into the arms of the men of violence’.

O’Brien in office marginalized the nationalist middle and populated the increasingly disaffected extreme.

Gageby’s point was interesting. The cycle of violence finally ended after Gerry Adams and John Hume began serious talking during the late 1980s. For nearly three decades, policy had been not to talk with, but also to actively censor, those whose violence did not have state sanction. That policy was a failure and it was O’Brien’s failure, but not only his.

Like Cooper, Devlin noted that as a result of O’Brien’s attitudes and actions relations between the two parties ‘could never be the same’. At a subsequent meeting between them, according to Devlin, ‘we were on our feet shouting and gesticulating at one another’.

The controversy caused Labour leader Brendan Corish to declare,

‘there could be no greater travesty of our position than to suggest that I, or any of my colleagues was in the slightest degree opposed to Irish unity’.

Corish said O’Brien wished for Irish unity, but ‘in such a way that there will not be violence or alienation of the two communities’. Since no one was calling for an Irish unity so encumbered, and since the current arrangement had plenty of both, the statement was meaningless, though politically expedient.

It was also untrue as a description of O’Brien’s thoughts on Irish unity, thoughts he hid and denied when criticised for having them.

O’Brien responded to the charge ‘that I am against the very idea of unity’. He committed himself to ‘reconciliation between Irishmen’, which he said was the Irish Labour Party’s ‘precondition’ for ‘socialism and unity in Ireland’. ‘Every utterance of mine’, said Dr O’Brien, to cries of ‘hear, hear’ at a prominently reported Labour party seminar in Kerry attended by ‘fewer than 100 people’, ‘was aimed at the achievement of that necessary precondition’.

He pursued a pre-condition. He allowed himself the right, availed of at every opportunity, to criticise anyone who argued for a United Ireland without it.

This stance became the Labour’s version of the Fianna Fail policy of unity through rhetoric and prevarication, though Dr O’Brien managed to add ‘socialism’ to the list of policy aims to be achieved once pre-conditional unanimity was attained.

O’Brien was Labour’s delegate at the November 1972 SDLP annual conference. The latter passed a motion that O’Brien should be denied the right to speak. He did achieve a sound bite. O’Brien interjected to support SDLP objections to Dublin’s attempt ‘to muzzle RTE’, the state broadcaster. Its governing body had been sacked for not operating state censorship to the then Fianna Fail government’s liking. The muzzled, but soon to be southern Minister for Posts and Telegraphs, was making a point, one he could not make for too much longer. Having at first opposed censorship, he went on to copper fasten and perfect it. RTE was well and truly muzzled then.

O’Brien’s arguments gained authority through the exercise of ministerial authority, through censorship. Prior to this O’Brien’s arguments, while in tune with the needs of the southern elite, competed with others. Once censorship and repression was imposed his arguments monopolised attention.

O’Brien hoped that unionists would become ‘moderate’. Persecuting their opponents was his chosen route in pursuit of this goal. It was not successful. In The Irish Times, Claud Cockburn suggested that

‘those such as Dr O’Brien and many others who pin faith and hope on the moderates, have to admit that the nerves of those unhappy people are far from in good shape. For years they have been under the protection of the British Army, the RUC [police], the UDR [state militia], the UVF, the UDA, the Tartan Gangs, [unionist paramilitary death squads] and an unlisted number of skilled assassins. Yet they cannot, it seems, feel easy in their minds unless and until they are assured that the Irish Labour Party intends them no harm’.

In his 1998 memoir O’Brien explained that setting up an independent Irish state in 1922 prevented his family from attaining its rightful place within the Irish ruling class, ‘those who would run the country when Home Rule [within the UK] was won’. After independence, ‘we were out in the cold, superseded by a new republican elite’. When O’Brien attained ministerial office in 1973 it was, effectively, payback time.

O’Brien briefly applied his 1960s left wing international experience to Ireland. The effort did not survive re-immersion in Irish politics. He began to frame constructs pleasing to the political right. This included those he had opposed in Encounter. They expressed genuine surprise and admiration for a lost sheep returning to the fold.

O’Brien joined the small UK Unionist Party in 1996. In 1998 he admitted that John Hume’s 1972 suggestion that O’Brien was a unionist apologist, ‘was quite a perceptive diagnosis’.

NIALL MEEHAN is researching the imposition of censorship in the 1970s and how Irish history was turned into propaganda. He can be reached at niall.meehan@gmail.com.

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