I suppose we differ a bit that without bloody Sunday the IRA wouldn't have been a serious threat with significant loss of life.....Lets not forget why the British troops were there in the first place....the riots in 69....lets not forget that the IRA had been operating for decades.

Still, I agree that Bloody Sunday was a recruiting rallying cry. However, a sore left to fester eventually becomes far worse anyway...or in other words these confrontations were inevitable and the more confrontations you have with armed men....the more likely a Bloody Sunday will happen.

The experiences of the British in NI just reaffirms to me a truth I've learnt as I've got older......Democracies operating with any sense of control can't win expedition wars.

The will isn't there and the internal discord that is inherent within a democracy eventually will defeat it.....as both Russia and China well know.

Should the British have been trying to win in NI? That's a question where my opinion has started to change a bit.

As a nationalist I have an understanding of the feelings of the type of men in the IRA. They are still my enemy because they were prepared to kill my kin instead of purely using politics..... but I know that nationalist mindset.

Like I say, if the British really were determined to stay there then a wall was the only answer......As it is...the people who tried to make it work only enabled the deaths of many thousands of people.....before essentially giving NI away anyway.....so much for 'no surrender'.

This pretense that it can be made to work is much like what we are seeing in other areas now.

Edited by Stirlingsays (17 Mar 2019 7.31am)

Thanks for that. The bleeding heart who responded to my original post came up with the old "war crimes" nonsense. Soldiers faced with hostile mobs in an obvious civil war situation can hardly be accused of war crimes.
Blair of course marched thousands of servicemen into a war scenario in Iraq. The above comment is jocular but has a certain serious relevance.

Adlertag (Eagle Day) - 13th August 1940. The beginning of German air attacks on Britain. If there's evidence of Britain attacking Germany before that date, I've yet to hear it.

many Catholics North and South are quite happy for Ulster to stay British forever. So long as Catholic and Prod are 'equals in respect' then peace and prosperity for all.

I think this is close, although I vaguely remember reading somewhere that we started bombing cities deliberately to draw Hitler into a retaliatory strike and away from our air fields as we were close to being decimated.

Whatever the case, people need to realise that Hitler was a very bad man, Churchill a f***ing hero, and the people of Germany the enemy, so all is fair in love and war.

We won, they lost, good. We were very lenient and to this day haven't enforced reparations which allowed them to rebuild and become a thriving economy once more.

Very noble and peaceable of us. Now if only they could show gratitude by, I dunno, not flooding the continent with Islam or paying up their NATO contribution or maybe being fair and standing up for us with the EU punishing us for daring to exercise democracy that would be grand... Hang on...

Yeah, I don't care whether we threw the first punch or not. It's a war and they got given the absolute business. Fantastic.