movements are meaningful but complicated

what Ireland can teach us about internal conflict and resistance

summary

The Irish conflict against British rule in the late 1900s was full of passion, internal conflicts, and morally ambiguous decision-making, but overall Ireland was able to succeed in finding strength and peace, and we can learn a lot from how their movement used parallel strategies, like protesting + political involvement, to achieve their goals.

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I really got into non-fiction a few years ago when I read Empire of Pain (2021) by Patrick Radden Keefe, an excellent journalistic book that talks about the US opioid crisis.

It’s well-researched and also has great storytelling, so it’s kind of like reading fiction except it’s real, so it’s that much more chilling.

He previously wrote another book called Say Nothing (2018) about the Northern Irish conflict against the British government’s policy and presence in the late 1900s, called The Troubles, and it brought up some interesting questions.

historically, the British empire has done some depraved things

This is the second book I’ve read recently that’s shown me some of the less well-known, brutal actions taken by the British empire.¹ I grew up studying under a British curriculum back when I lived in the Middle East, and while our teachers vaguely covered how Britain conquered other cultures, they conveniently left out all the gory details.

During the Troubles in particular, British forces would plant moles in the resistance, kidnap people, and take advantage of the religious divide between Irish Protestants and Irish Catholics.

Suppressing Ireland was particularly brutal because of the geographical closeness between the two countries.² It was strategic of the British ruling forces to leverage Ireland’s local religious conflict in order to cause chaos and confusion internally in Ireland, rather than it truly being about Northern Ireland’s desire for independence away from the British empire and be united with the Republic of Ireland.³

for aggressors, internal conflicts are just as effective as external ones

For the Irish movement in the late 1900s, it was effective of the British forces to sow discord internally rather than being the obvious bad guy and aggressor. They made the members distrust each other through planted moles and spies, and some were high-ranking and unknown until the movement was over. It felt like it was really hard to self-organize and move quickly towards the same end goal because people were suspicious of each other.

It reminds me of how Meta has been criticized for promoting polarization on their platforms. They were blamed for unintentionally influencing important political decisions, including Trump’s first presidency and Brexit, among many others. Groups like Cambridge Analytica and Russian interference teams wanted to manipulate elections, and they used internal conflicts and infighting to cause people to distrust each other.

In Taiwan, it sometimes feels like our political infighting is missing the bigger picture of trying to make us stronger and better at self-organizing. I do think passionate debate is a sign of a healthy democracy, as long as we focus on the communication part rather than other, less productive tactics.

peaceful protests are important when paired with systemic changes

In 2014, there were rallies in Taiwan of up to 500,000 people to protest Taiwan’s trade agreement with China. It was successful in raising public awareness and it did contribute to some political shifts, although in the long-term, not that many laws were changed, and a decade later, we spend a lot of time opposing political parties using some unhealthy fighting tactics. We did however start to think about our identity more; it wasn’t something that was talked about much before, and I see this as a very positive development.

The Troubles in Northern Ireland also started with peaceful protests, but a lot of the protestors were physically and violently attacked, which led to a rebellion group forming to counter the aggressors. It became much more violent for a few years, while at the same time, leaders in the rebellion group started looking into politics and running for office. The book makes it vague about what ended up contributing the most to the success of the movement, but it’s likely that all of these types of strategies, along with world events at the time, played important parts in Ireland achieving peace. There’s no playbook and, for many different reasons, other mainstream independence movements in the past haven’t been able to achieve this level of success, but it’s still interesting to learn about what happened in Ireland during this time.⁴

Likely because Ireland was able to establish their own cultural identity, they started investing in things like education and arts. Today, we’re seeing a rise in Irish artists, like actors Cillian Murphy, Paul Mescal, Barry Keoghan, as well as author Sally Rooney.

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Thanks for reading and hope you learned something new! It was very interesting for me to learn about the Irish movement and what we can take away from it. I want to especially thank

Jack An

, Hudson, and

mashbean

for giving good feedback.

One of the lingering questions from the book that I haven’t been able to personally answer is: once a war ends, what should happen to the soldiers who were involved and how do we think about justice?

I have a Google form where you can share ideas or feedback. Let me know if you have any thoughts about my question above.

1. The first one was The Wager (2023) by David Grann about a mutiny of a British ship in the 1700s. This is the same author who wrote the book Killers of the Flower Moon (2017) that was adapted into a movie with Leonardo di Caprio.

2. It’s particularly interesting to me because of the current tensions between Taiwan and China since we are geographically close as well.

3. It feels like the same is done to the Gaza war right now, where any protests against the Israeli government is seen as anti-semitic, shifting the focus away from the brutality experienced by Palestinians. Sometimes it feels like it’s a way to shut down dissenting dialogue and redirect the conversation away from humanitarian issues like dying and starving children in Gaza. Obviously this is a very simplified explanation and there’s deep history here, but I think there are parallels that can be drawn in how military forces operate.

4. There are definitely some other successful movements that led to independence and a stable democracy, including Somaliland, Slovakia, Kosovo, and North Macedonia, which we can learn from as well.