Thanks again Fion:
One difference between the IRA and the ANC, which may shed some light on the fight for etc. The IRA, in it's structure, still retains the concepts laied down by Connolly, which creats an important and actually laudable difference. Connolly was a member of the IWW (as I am) and so was an anarchist\syndicalist, which in the days before Stalin redefined Marxism to exclude Austrio-marxism, syndicalism, and most other democratic marxist theories, was in fact made up of socialists and communists and anarchists. The major difference between syndicalist structures and post stalinist communist structures like the ANC, was the distrust of armed government. As such, whereas the press keeps refering to Sinn Fien as the political wing of the IRA, that is in fact inacurate, as was shown in the testimony reguarding the structure of the Provisional IRA during parts of Joe Doherty's hearings here in New York. The IRA is one of the few, if not only modern people's armies, which did not have political commisars, stating that they were fighting a defensive battle to win the right to open political systems and would not impose a government by force of arms. The structure of the IRA command reflects this anarachist democratic structure, where no active service unit is allowed to undertake an opportation without direction from the army council, but the Army Council cannot order a service unit to carry out an order, which is to say, any indivdual member of an active service unit has the right to refuse to carry out an order. As a result it is hugely democratic in structure, and relitive to other people's struggles their record of civilian outrages is far below the average of all the many people's struggles we all know and love, from the International Brigades in Spain, to the Viet Cong (boy am I gonna hear it for that one!) and the ANC. Those who live in close proximity to the actions of the IRA and oppose it, are not in the best possition to look at the war record in a less passionate way, but if you look at the statistics it is obvious that the IRA conducted a remarkably restrained campain in comparison to other insurections and most importantly in comparison to the British Army in Ireland (or India for that matter) or the Loyalists.
Best to all,
Larry