"Or we learn of something that was wrong at the beginning and should have been stopped, but whose amendment now would be a worse wrong." (pp. 150-159)
The Partition of Ireland divided not only Ireland but also the Province of Ulster which has nine counties but a Protestant majority in only six so the Border was drawn accordingly. Arranging a border to transform a national minority into a local, supposedly permanent, majority is hardly an exercise in democracy and generated decades of conflict. However, immediate reunification of Ireland is not necessarily practicable and requires consent on both sides of the Border. Meanwhile, a growing number of Northern Irish residents belong to neither sectarian "side." How many original wrongs are preserved in current political arrangements?
An example given in "The Pirate" is Nerthus, colonized before it was realized that it was inhabited. This is good future historical writing: earlier installments providing background information for later installments.
4 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
The problem, of course, being that the various attempts to enact Home Rule for Ireland (starting with Gladstone's first Home Bill) foundered on the absolute opposition of the Ulster Protestants to any kind of state ruled by Catholics. The various partition schemes were attempts to at least bring Home Rule to the rest of Ireland while placating the Ulstermen.
As so often happens, these compromises satisfied nobody.
Besides Nerthus, a better example might be Roland, in "The Queen of Air and Darkness," a planet discovered and settled by humans long before it was realized it had a native intelligent race. By then it was impossible for the human colonists, whose forebears came by STL means, to leave. Roland had been settled too long, the humans were now too numerous, for them to go.
Ad astra! Sean
People determine the nationality of territory; there’s an old saying that “It is the people who make the ground English, not the ground the people”.
Hence partition is often much more practical than futile attempts to make hostile groups sit around a campfire linking hands and singing ‘kumbaya’.
Eg., from the time of the original uprising of the Greeks against the Ottomans there was hardly a year in which Greeks and Turks weren’t killing each other, until the ‘population exchange’ following the Graeco-Turkish war of the early 1920’s; after that, lasting peace - except in Cyprus, where the hand of the British Empire kept the village-by-village and street-by-street mixture in place. As soon as the British hand weakened, the killing started again.
That only stopped in 1974, when the Turkish invasion and mutual ethnic cleansing created a clear political and ethnic boundary. Since then, peace.
Greeks and Turks didn’t like each other any better, but they stooped cutting each other’s throats when they didn’t have to live cheek by jowl under the same government any more.
Likewise, the attempt to turn central/Eastern Europe into nation-states foundered after 1918 because of the large minorities that centuries of rule by huge empires had created. Irredentism, terrorism and war-threats were endemic. After 1950 and the mass expulsions and border shifts, generations of profound peace. The fates of Yugoslavia and the USSR are also informative.
The desire to ‘live at peace among one’s own’ is very deep-rooted.
Nb., the only reason there were still Turks in Cyprus when the British left was that the British never decided to give it to Greece, though they came close to doing so several times. If they had, it would have been like Crete, which had a mixed population until Greece got it in the 1890’s, but which was all Christian Greeks by WW1. Likewise, if it had stayed Turkish, the Greeks would have vanished through massacre and expulsion. The way the huge population of Greeks in Anatolia did.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
The situation you described, of mutual massacre and ethnic cleansing, is all too plausible, because that was exactly what happened. And I thought just now of the undying hatred of the Armenians for the Turks. If Armenia ever regains its ancestral homeland around Lake Van in north eastern Turkey, the Turks living there will be lucky to be merely expelled!
Ad astra! Sean
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