The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #130131   Message #2939738
Posted By: McGrath of Harlow
04-Jul-10 - 03:50 PM
Thread Name: BS: Bloody Sunday Report - AT LAST
Subject: RE: BS: Bloody Sunday Report - AT LAST
The thing is, when you have political engineering to ensure a particular electoral result, that distorts everything. Gerrymandering is just one aspect of it.

So for example in South Africa there was the attempted camouflage of declaring that black people were citizens of artificial Bantustans, and not of South Africa, and accordingly that denying them a vote was perfectly compatible with claiming that South Africa was a democracy.

Or in Israel you have a situation where most of the native population were ethnically cleansed, forced to leave and denied their right to return, and therefore excluded from any elections in the place they came from, ensuring a permanent majority for the people who had replaced them.

In Northern Ireland the trick was to draw the borders of the territory in such a way as to include large areas with majorities who did not wish to be included but in such a way that they could always be outvoted in the territory as a whole.

We can't re-run history to undue that kind of thing, but it is important to recognize that simple head-counting is not the whole story, and is not the only factor in determining whether a regime is "democratic". And of course that recognition is reflected in the complexities of the political settlement that followed the Good Friday Agreement, designed to ensure "power-sharing".
.............

As for Teribus's indignant response to a previous post, my point is that Bloody Sunday, combined with its cover-up played a fatal role in bringing about the escalation and continuation of the conflict. It turned the Provos from a fringe group on the edge of a Civil Rights movement into something far more central and far more deadly, with mass support. In the old saying, it was worse than a crime, it was a mistake.