On Being Winston Smith

 John Hurt as Winston Smith in the film adaptation of 1984 

Winston Smith, the antihero of George Orwell’s 1984, works in the Ministry of Truth where his job is to rewrite old newspaper reports in order to create a government approved record of events. He also has to remove “unpersons” from photographs when they have fallen out of favour with the all-controlling Party.

So successful is the Party in creating the false narrative that even Winston is shocked when he discovers newspaper evidence which contradicts the confessions of three members of the Inner Party convicted of treasonable activity.

Gradually Winston turns against the Party and grows to distrust it - something which means he falls foul of the Thought Police and ultimately ends up in Room 101 where he learns, in an exchange with a Party official, that 2 + 2 is not always 4 in spite of the evidence of his own eyes:

"How can I help it? How can I help but see what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four."

"Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.”

Open letter to a sniper published in the Belfast Telegraph in 1972 from the mother of Stephen Keating,  a soldier murdered in Belfast - one of many largely forgotten newspaper clippings which provide a telling insight into the PIRA campaign (click to enlarge)

I’ve thought of Winston Smith often over the past year and particularly how his discovery of a newspaper report which disproves the official state version of the past shakes his faith in a corrupt society in which

“The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink.”

Northern Ireland is undergoing a 1984 process.

Victims of the PIRA have been “unpersoned”. There is no collective memorial to them. Public photographs are even difficult to come by. In some cases, one has to trawl historic papers from 40, 50 years ago to find a photograph and even then it can prove unsuccessful.

This photo of 15 month old Graeme Dougan was in a copy of the Belfast Telegraph from 1977. I am not aware of any other public photograph of the baby victim of the IRA New Year's Day bombing in Glengomley.

The account of what happened in Northern Ireland over 30 years has been subject to Ministry of Truth process where inconvenient truths have been gradually wiped from the collective memory in a society where it is no longer politically expedient to face up to what happened here.

Roy Young was a 23 year old disabled clerk shot in his city centre workplace. His disability meant he couldn't move quickly and as a result he was shot twice in the head. His photograph was in a 1976 edition of the News Letter.

Victims of the PIRA are regarded in law as no different from the people who made them victims. The PIRA terrorist who blew himself up is regarded as the same as the innocent civilian blown up going about his or her business. Their families are eligible for the same support from the Government and their views are given equal weight when it comes to the formation of government policy.

This perverse situation has led to the sister of a PIRA terrorist killed while attempting to carry out a bombing; a person having clear publicly stated sympathies with the Provisionals, being appointed as a Victims’ Commissioner - someone whose job it was to represent the views of victims.  

Although she left the post some years ago, Patricia McBride is a regular contributor to debates in the media in Northern Ireland where she is invariably introduced as a former Victims’ Commissioner.

In Northern Ireland 2 + 2 is not always 4.

Report on Leonard Hanson returning to Brougher Mountain in 1973. He made a yearly pilgrimage to the mountain to play a lament on the pipes for his son - a BBC engineer blown up by the IRA in 1971. This is the only photograph I know - made public as a result of research for OTD PIRA.

I have written previously about why I specifically say in every tweet that “the IRA murdered” the victim concerned and how the word “murdered” has been banished from discussions about the PIRA campaign. One could think about how language has been changed in other ways in relation to the PIRA murder campaign. In the media, murderers are more often referred to as volunteers - as if bombers and gunmen were some sort of 1970s version of St John’s Ambulance. Other terms like “combatant” and “non-state actors” have similarly entered the lexicon.

Here too Orwell had a warning for Northern Ireland. In 1984 he describes how the state creates Newspeak, a controlled language of restricted grammar and limited vocabulary designed to limit freedom of thought. Why? Because as a character in 1984 says:

“‘Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.’”

Or as Orwell famously put it elsewhere:

“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful [and] to make murder respectable.”

14 year old Stephen Parker was murdered on Bloody Friday (1972) when he tried to warn people of a bomb which he spotted inside a car. Identified by his father only by trick matches in his pocket, Stephen was posthumously awarded the Queen's Commendation for Bravery but is now largely forgotten. I was struck by the number of people who remarked on how they didn't know his story when some of it was recounted on OTDPIRA. Such heroes don't fit the narrative in Northern Ireland.

If you dare to challenge the agreed narrative, particularly on social media, there are plenty of Thought Police to jump on you with accusations of seeking to stir up hatred. Tellingly they seldom sought to dispute the accuracy of what was posted on On This Day PIRA. They were not upset because what appeared was inaccurate but because it deviated from the agreed narrative. As Orwell puts it in 1984:

“If all accepted the lie which the Party imposed — if all records told the same tale — then the lie passed into history and became truth.”

Challenging a lie - when few others seem to be interested in doing so - is disconcerting to those who believe they have already got an agreed narrative which everyone has accepted as “the truth”. Or, equally perverse, that everyone has their own “truth” and that moral absolutes are an illusion.

In the course of this project a number of newspaper reports on babies born after the murder of their fathers have been discovered. This one is on the birth of the son of RUC officer William Coulter murdered 3 weeks earlier in 1981.

On 16th January 2020 OTDPIRA will have performed the role of Winston Smith for two years. 

Digging out the articles in old newspapers which disprove the Party record. 

Working against the depersoning of victims by sourcing photographs and film wherever possible. Trying to put a human face to every bullet and every bomb.

Going against the approved Ministry of Truth narrative that everyone who died in what is euphemistically called “The Troubles” was the same by only commemorating innocent victims of the PIRA and not murderers (like the bombers who died alongside 18 year old Aubrey Harshaw on Christmas Eve 1973).

Resisting the imposition of Newsspeak by employing the word murdered in relation to all of the PIRA’s innocent victims. 

Defying the Thought Police who believe that we should just keep quiet about these things and consign the sort of material posted on OTDPIRA to “the memory hole” - the small chutes in Orwell’s 1984 leading to a large incinerator where embarrassing newspaper articles are sent in order to aid the Party’s rewriting of history.

A photo of a Kermit the Frog toy with a bullet hole from the News Letter's report on the murder of Margaret Ann Hearst in 1977 is a stark reminder of how close her little daughter came to death.

This project has been very rewarding. The many messages from innocent victims have been most encouraging. Finding photographs and other material which they have appreciated has made this feel worthwhile. I am humbled that many provided photographs of loved ones which, in some cases, had never been seen outside the family home.

Some families suffered as a result of PIRA murder more than once. This report from 1972 tells the story of the Rudman brothers - two of whom were murdered while serving in Northern Ireland.

Having reflected on the experience of the past two years I want to explain how and why the project will change going forward.

Over the past two years, a set of tweets covering most known PIRA murders have been posted on the page. Some murders have been excluded from the account because it was felt the families concerned may not have wanted them to have been included. A few other victims have not been posted or removed at the request of relatives so the account, while as comprehensive or more than similar resources online apart from the CAIN Human Face project, is not entirely exhaustive. All posts are accessible to read, share or retweet via the search box.

Ian McCracken - another forgotten hero . He escaped the inferno of La Mon only to perish when he reentered the hotel which had been firebombed by the IRA in an attempt to rescue his wife of 18 months, Elizabeth, who also perished.

OTDPIRA has always endeavoured to produce tweets which have been historically accurate and written in a respectful tone. Gruesome material has been excluded. Source material has been drawn from a wide range of books, digital and microfilm records which, as mentioned earlier, often proves time consuming. The project has required many hundreds of hours and many late nights.

There have been many times in the past 24 months when On This Day PIRA has taken time that could have gone on other things. I think the time has come to scale back on the effort to tweet about every single innocent victim of the PIRA. Constantly reading about the death and destruction, cross checking records in order to ensure the tweets are as accurate as possible has taken a toll. Many things could be said about On This Day PIRA but happy is not an adjective which one would employ.

While OTDPIRA has focused on death there have been uplifting stories unearthed as well. George Barlow lost an arm in the explosion which killed fellow RUC officer Andrew Baird in 1975. He married Janet Pritchard in Craigavon hospital two months later.

As of 16th January 2020 On This Day PIRA will no longer attempt to post details of every innocent victim of the PIRA campaign but will be more sporadic. Days will pass when no murders will be posted.

There are ways in which this project can develop and avenues which could be explored. Time will tell if any of that comes to fruition.

On This Day PIRA couldn't be what it is without Hannah who has spent many, many more hours than I over the past year working on this project sourcing material. While On This Day PIRA is far from perfect, it would be much weaker without her immense contribution.

Photographs are very emotive artefacts. For a number of reasons even families may not retain photographs of loved ones. I know of several cases where only a single photograph exists and others where all were destroyed - often because families found the reminder too painful. This photo of Roderick Bannon, one of three soldiers blown up in south Armagh in 1976, was in an edition of the News Letter and was the first photo of him that his son had ever seen. 

I have always been aware that OTDPIRA is dealing with incredibly sensitive material and that accuracy is very important. In an attempt to address as many errors as possible, it is intended to make a point of tweeting any of the old tweets which contain errors with the mistakes removed.

This photo of Kurt Konig, a German who married a girl from the Creggan, was supplied by his family. Mr Konig was a catering contractor who supplied the RUC until 3 months before his murder in Londonderry in 1985. He was shot leaving his home, moments after kissing his children goodbye.

On This Day PIRA isn`t going away. Adding photos and articles in addition to material already posted on the page is something OTDPIRA would like to provide. If there is an innocent friend or relative murdered by the PIRA you would like to have mentioned on the anniversary of the murder email onthisdayni@gmail.com at least 24 hours in advance so that we can discuss any changes you may wish to make to the text and media contents of the tweet. Otherwise I will tweet material at my own discretion.                                        

I’ll sign off for now with a final quote from 1984:

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

On This Day PIRA has been and will continue to be an outlet which seeks to frustrate the attempts of evil people to control the past, present and future.

Postscripts

I Why one tweet a murder?

On OTDPIRA an off duty RUC officer like Maurice Rolston (above) is remembered in the same way as other, more well known, victims of the IRA.

Some people have asked me on occasion why I do not post more than one tweet when dealing with a murder. One of the challenges of the platform was often condensing the information down to the size of a tweet. Writing something longer would frequently have required less time and thought to prepare. That said, I’ve felt from very early on in this project that by affording each victim the same amount of space, even when the details of the murder and the individual were so scant that it was difficult to write a full tweet, underscored my belief that each of the PIRA’s innocent victims mattered and each deserved to be commemorated – none more and none less than any other.

II A note on whataboutery

The most common criticism directed at On This Day PIRA is the logical fallacy of whataboutism - OTDPIRA shouldn’t tweet about PIRA murders without tweeting about every other murder committed during 30 years of terror in Northern Ireland. 

This argument falls down on two grounds.

Firstly, it most commonly comes from those who openly support the Republican movement and make no apology about tweeting in support of Sinn Fein - a party which a Government report in 2015 said continued to be influenced by the PIRA Army Council. This assessment remains valid.

Furthermore, Sinn Fein continues to celebrate and laud the PIRA as heroes.

The bombing of Balmoral Furniture shop  which murdered 4 - including 2 babies - two weeks before Christmas 1971 is the sort of thing which is difficult to defend for even the PIRA's most passionate apologists.

It is my belief that people with this view of the world are bothered by On This Day PIRA because the account strips away the romanticism of terror. It is one thing to say the PIRA campaign was a just “war” for freedom and equality when dealing with it in the abstract. It is impossible to do that when confronted with the reality of over 1,600 people killed not on the battlefield but murdered while out shopping, coming out of a wedding, at a dinner dance, in school, etc.

The cold reality is that when broken down into individual incidents the PIRA campaign is simply indefensible - and even their most passionate apologists know as much (but still won’t say it out loud).

If you cannot defend what the PIRA did when someone factually and dispassionately recounts their actions without saying, “Yea, but what about…” perhaps it is you who needs to reflect rather than I?

Ivan Johnston was a lorry driver and former member of RUC Special Branch. He was abducted at a customs post on the Armagh / Monaghan border in 1973. His body was discovered two days after his abduction, blindfolded and bound near Keady. Three children were left without a father. Republicans would seek to suggest off duty and former security force members were "legitimate targets" - but that's a difficult argument to make when the facts of such murders are examined individually. 

Secondly, OTDPIRA has never hidden the fact that it focuses on the Provisionals because, as the tweet pinned to the top of this account since 9th February 2018 until the day it was replaced by a pinned tweet containing a link to this blogpost stated: “There are powerful forces in Northern Ireland who argue that the IRA’s actions were justified. I combat that twisted narrative simply by repeating what PIRA murderers did”.

In that respect the PIRA are unique in Northern Ireland. There is no other terror group which has a powerful political party which continues to justify the campaign of that terror group. That doesn’t mean the actions of the murderers of the UDA, UVF and other loyalist terror groups or indeed Republican groups were justified. They weren’t. They were wrong. Unjustifiable. Those responsible should be brought to justice. It does, however, thankfully mean that victims of terror groups other than the PIRA are much less likely to turn on a current affairs program in Northern Ireland and be exposed to someone who justifies the murder of their loved ones. 

On This Day PIRA is a respectful memorial to those who died at the hands of the Provisionals. But as made clear from the early days of the project it is also a retort to those who claim to be champions of human rights and equality while continuing to justify the actions of the PIRA.

To suggest that OTDPIRA should not tweet about PIRA murders unless it carries tweets about murders by other murderers is the very definition of whataboutism.

III Using On This Day PIRA to explore themes, etc.

Now that two cycles of OTDPIRA have been completed it can be used as a research tool. There are numerous ways in which it could prove to be useful to people looking at the PIRA campaign - a subject which is deserving of a lot more study, particularly from a victims’ focus perspective, than it has to date.

You can search the account by typing from:onthisdaypira into the twitter search box followed by the area you wish to look at to turn up all the examples in the account.

For example, if you type from:onthisdaypira off duty you will turn up all the examples of off duty UDR and RUC personnel murdered by the PIRA.

If you are looking for a specific victim search by their name. 

Certain key words have deliberately been included in tweets so that they can be looked for when looking at a theme.

If looking at the PIRA sectarian murder campaign search the account for sectarian and Protestant (I’ve been careful to avoid using the word Protestant in relation to murders which were not clearly sectarian).

If looking at the PIRA campaign of murder against contractors search for the word contractor.

If looking at the PIRA campaign in Europe search for Holland and Germany.

If looking at the PIRA campaign in a particular town or village; search for that word. Belfast is not searchable in this fashion. Most tweets refer to the region of the city or the street.

I know of one history undergraduate who is using OTDPIRA as a jumping off point for a dissertation on a much less obvious area of study. If you would like some pointers and think OTDPIRA might be able to help send a message or email.