Who set up the Provisional IRA to combat socialists in August 1969?

 The CIA,Irish Army and the Irish Government,a few retired half -senile geriatrics,country bumpkins and petty criminals anxious to get the loyalists off their 'patch',not forgetting the good and godly Catholic Church. 

These political showmen,street urchins, medically-dependent self-styled friends of the oppressed engineered a long-running insurrection and appealed to learned philosopher,man of letters and thug and hooligan with simple well-worked mantras and airy-fairy notions about equality and justice which boiled down to a few witty aphorisms about nothing in particular. Little amuses the innocent, some say,as regards a captive audience in a prison colony.

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26.12.2022

It would be a rude idiocy to think that a counter-revolutionary gang could leave any legacy other than murder and ruin but let it be remembered,even Provos attracted intelligent people motivated by high idealism.

In the  early 1970's the Belfast and Derry Provos clearly had the character of a gang,a mafia-style organisation characterised in an American setting by The Godfather film.

The idealists of this paramilitary group were romantic  fools. They did not question those who they were firing up to idle enthusiasm, an idle enthusiasm which alternated with sectarian strife and internecine community violence.

The whole apparatus of terror was lent a high moral idealism by the hunger strikes.

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Attracted to republicanism after the hunger strikes,I built up the whole apparatus of "a routine,killing machine" on the basis of "intelligence-led operations". Those activities were actuated by the simple motto,"Think it out first!" I called my putting my hand to the tiller "building the New Model Army".

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What myself and so many other willing stooges of US imperialism have done has not just ruined our own lives but those around us who lent us succour and offered us support.

The moral idealism of the 1980's? The Late Romantic idealism of the 1970's? 

Two big gusts of wind best combatted by national democracy in the South and,in the North, by cross-community politics, common  decency and anti-sectarianism of either the kind of unionist democratic endeavour or the nationalist striving for equanimity in legal outcomes.

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29.9.2023

"Wherever you find a Provo, particularly one who is well up in that organisation or has been involved in it for many years,you will always have a little bollocks who thinks his own connections to the British Army will stand him in good stead when they inevitably come to blows and Martin Cahill and Owen Carron are two of those who you will have to deal with one day,Joe,if you want to get your health back because both are connected to the police on both sides of the Border as is Sean Lynch and quite a few of the people who you are mixing with. They think they're bigger fish than you and have more clout but the more you know about them,the more you have to laugh at their claims. If you don't deal with them,they will haunt you and scandalise you to your dying day. People like them are never out of pubs or sending people to check up on you. They'd shit themselves if they realised what you had done. The loyalists are absolutely paralysed with fear of you ... that's why they send young people to intimidate you and the UDR are no different. Lynch is only a bollocks who didn't do half the things he said that he did. Other people did those things and they don't want it to be known or talked about. Most of the people who were killed by the Provos were people who moved in beside other Provos or were there before them. They know where to find them and when they'll catch up with them. That's the origin of the expression,long runs the fox till he's trapped and caught since foxes usually have brown hair and most informants have it too whatever you think since people dye their hair to get rid of the stink of a police uniform. Lynch and Carron both tried to get you killed. You know about one of them,do something about the other and a lot of your problems with the police and neighbours will  disappear overnight." (My brother-in-law,John)

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"That's just some oul' story Shan  G. or Harry C. got D. to tell your brother in law to tell you because they didn't want you to know who your real friends are...."(My mother)

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30.7.2025

"The Americans are not remotely interested in the Europeans and try to catch them between two pillars. They think they are Samson because of their prolixity of knowledge and much greater abilities. These days,it is only the Irish who fall for their silly street games because of the importance of US investment and the competing power of the English in this country. No-one in the US is remotely concerned about Ireland or any European country, they're only interested in money and getting rich and driving around in stink and style. Their food couldn't even be given to the dog it's so full of hormones and steroids and other filth they take themselves. When the Americans pull out of the South,we will have a much better but more poor and less conservative country."