NOVANEWS
modernityblog | June 15, 2010 | Tags: 1972, Bloody Sunday., Derry, Northern Ireland, Parachute Regiment, Saville Report, Six counties, State murder, Sunday, Widgery Report | Categories: Uncategorized | URL: http://wp.me/p4XPG-22Q
If you follow the reporting of the Saville Inquiry into Bloody Sunday, 1972 then you will notice a strange form of debate taking place in Britain.
The debate in the British media is primarily not over the culpability of the soldiers from the Parachute Regiment.
No, it is not that, instead they drone on about the cost of the new inquiry.
Even the liberal media, in the form of a Guardian editorial, is apologetic but seemingly constrained by the prevailing mood in Britain.
So it is reduced to arguing that whilst it was costly it was a price worth paying, which is a rather insipid argument.
No, even the supposed radicals at the Guardian can’t bring themselves to ignore the irrelevance of the cost and concentrate on British culpability and the past cover up, in the form of the Widgery report.
Had Irish nationalists not push for this inquiry then we would still be left with the Widgery whitewash and the British media wringing their hands.
But this poor state of affairs does highlight the nature of British hypocrisy and particularly amongst those in the media.
Only last week we heard them screaming blue murder about events in the Middle East, yet when it comes closer to home their savage invective leaves them and they often dance around the topics, avoiding the key issues.
It would be nice if the British media could make an effort, for once, to apply their critical faculties to the activities of British soldiers in the Six counties, and address the savagery of British rule in Ireland.
You might almost say it is strangely inconsistent that the British media can’t be objective about civilians murdered by British troops in one of the last remnants of Britain’s one-time empire. Hmm.
Anyway, this is the Saville report and the conclusions, sadly they do not provide easy and compact PDFs of the report, although much of the evidence and material is available as PDFs.
