BREXIT - Britain will be out of the EU!

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  • Risto the Great
    Senior Member
    • Sep 2008
    • 15658

    #91
    Originally posted by Vangelovski View Post
    As far as I can tell, the only check on the abuse of power in the UK is the Monarch (though that has rarely ended well for the King/Queen and possibly why they rarely refuse to assent to Acts of Parliament) and their mere "British" existence (whom one assumes can do no wrong).
    I guess we will have to wait and see what happens in Game of Thrones this season to see who our real monarch is.
    Risto the Great
    MACEDONIA:ANHEDONIA
    "Holding my breath for the revolution."

    Hey, I wrote a bestseller. Check it out: www.ren-shen.com

    Comment

    • Carlin
      Senior Member
      • Dec 2011
      • 3332

      #92
      Top Spanish Politician Gives Thoughts On Brexit
      Top Spanish politician, El Resitas, gives thoughts on Brexit results

      Comment

      • Gocka
        Senior Member
        • Dec 2012
        • 2306

        #93



        The Irish Border Is a Scar
        Could Brexit reignite the Troubles in Northern Ireland?


        By Patrick Radden Keefe
        Mr. Keefe is the author, most recently, of “Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland.”

        March 30, 2019

        My friend Sean, like a lot of people in Ireland, tells a good story. He used to work for the National Roads Authority; they couldn’t call it the Irish Roads Authority, he liked to joke, because the abbreviation “I.R.A.” was already taken.

        In 2010, Sean organized an event to celebrate the completion of a highway linking Dublin to Belfast, in Northern Ireland. You could now commute between the two capital cities, which had once seemed worlds apart, in under two hours. One of the grandees invited to celebrate on a stretch of road outside Newry in the north was Martin McGuinness, the former Irish Republican Army gunman who, like a number of ex-paramilitaries, had reinvented himself as a politician and helped engineer the Good Friday Agreement, which brought an end to the three-decade conflict known as the Troubles in 1998.

        But as Mr. McGuinness prepared to deliver his remarks, he looked momentarily confused, like a man who had mislaid his eyeglasses. He whispered to Sean, “Where exactly is the border?”

        For decades, the border had been an open wound slicing across Ireland, with checkpoints and watchtowers and vehicle inspections. Mr. McGuinness had fought a war to erase that border — and the British Army and Loyalist paramilitaries had fought a war to maintain it.



        Now, it was gone.

        At first, even Sean couldn’t locate where the Republic of Ireland ended and Northern Ireland began. Then he found a subtle tell, and pointed it out to Mr. McGuinness: the painted line demarcating the breakdown lane changed from solid yellow to white. “Can you give me a second, Sean?” Mr. McGuinness asked. He wanted to be alone, to contemplate the vanished boundary in silence.

        A border crossing into Middletown, County Armagh, Northern Ireland.
        Credit
        Rob Stothard for The New York Times

        Image
        A border crossing into Middletown, County Armagh, Northern Ireland.CreditRob Stothard for The New York Times
        It’s been over 50 years since the outbreak of the Troubles, in 1968, and more than 20 since hostilities formally ended, yet suddenly the conflict is everywhere. “The Ferryman,” Jez Butterworth’s terrific play about one family’s experience of the trauma of I.R.A. violence, is a hit on Broadway, and “Milkman,” Anna Burns’s trancelike evocation of tension and predation during the Troubles, won the 2018 Booker Prize. On Netflix, the scabrous comedy “Derry Girls” unfolds against the backdrop of the Troubles as well.

        From the safe distance of the United States, or even England, it can seem as if these are simply period pieces. And if you visit Belfast or Derry today, they are bustling, vibrant and relatively safe. It’s easy to forget that a dirty, grinding, undeclared war was fought in Northern Ireland rather recently. It’s so easy to forget, in fact, that three summers ago, 52 percent of the British electorate appeared to have forgotten, when they voted to leave the European Union.




        The British have long displayed a regally dismissive tendency to forget about the little island across the Irish Sea, and after 20 years of peace it may have seemed that what they used to refer to as “the Irish problem” had finally been solved. What they neglected to realize was that this new equilibrium, which many British and Irish people had come to take for granted, was facilitated by the European Union. Martin McGuinness couldn’t find the border because both the United Kingdom and Ireland were members.

        Predicting how Brexit will unfold is a mug’s game. The very people charged with administering the divorce have no apparent sense of what the coming weeks may hold. Hard or soft Brexit, deal or no deal: Parliament keeps voting — most recently on Friday — yet each vote yields only more uncertainty.

        Still, it doesn’t take much clairvoyance to see that if the United Kingdom leaves, the border must be reinscribed in some form. Doing so will be highly dangerous, for obvious economic reasons — but also because the tensions and grievances of the Troubles are not quite so safely relegated to history as British voters might like to think.




        The Good Friday Agreement was a landmark peace deal, but it lacked one key component: It didn’t make any provisions for how to deal with the past. There was no South Africa-style truth and reconciliation process, in which people could reckon with the atrocities of the previous 30 years. There was no bargain over who should be held accountable for which of the 3,600 or so deaths, and who should receive immunity.

        Crosses for Irish republicans who died in the hunger strike at the Maze prison in Belfast in 1981 are part of a memorial in County Armagh.
        Credit
        Rob Stothard for The New York Times

        Image

        Crosses for Irish republicans who died in the hunger strike at the Maze prison in Belfast in 1981 are part of a memorial in County Armagh.CreditRob Stothard for The New York Times
        So while the peace may have endured, it is a very brittle peace. Roughly 90 percent of children in Northern Ireland attend schools that are segregated by religion. Every summer, ritualized marches and bonfires inflame tensions, setting off riots and sectarian violence. Towering barriers — “peace walls” is the official euphemism — bisect neighborhoods, preserving stability by separating communities. If you want to know how reconciliation is going, consider this: There are said to be more peace walls in Belfast today than there were at the end of the Troubles.

        Time and peace alone do not heal wounds. Far from it. On March 14, British authorities announced that they would prosecute a former paratrooper for shooting unarmed civilians during the 1972 massacre known as Bloody Sunday. One side protested that aging ex-soldiers should not be subjected to a “witch hunt”; the other protested that prosecuting only one of the soldiers who opened fire that day was inadequate. The gulf between the two communities is so pronounced that for the past two years Northern Ireland has had no functioning government. The power-sharing executive and assembly created by the Good Friday Agreement shut down because the Unionists and the Republicans couldn’t share power.

        Were the Brexiteers simply blind to this context? Willfully blind, it seems. When he was challenged to visit the Irish border and talk to people who live there, Jacob Rees-Mogg, a leading anti-European Union member of Parliament with the affect of a Harry Potter villain, sneered that he could learn nothing from “going and wandering across a few roads.”



        But, as anyone who goes to the border discovers, you can’t ignore the past. Talk to people in Northern Ireland, and they’ll bring up events from decades, or even centuries, ago, with a visceral emotion that would make you think they’d happened just last week. Investigators are still churning up the soil, searching for the bodies of people who were murdered during the Troubles and buried in secret graves.

        Make no mistake: The border is a scar.

        And the scar is about to open. Brexit has foundered, in no small measure, on the question of how to cope with the Irish border. Prime Minister Theresa May has promised future technological innovations that would allow for a frictionless customs border, but for the moment, that is magical thinking. Under the withdrawal agreement rejected for a third time on Friday both the United Kingdom and the European Union are committed to a “backstop,” which, in the event that they have failed to negotiate a future relationship by the end of 2020, would prevent the abrupt reintroduction of a hard border. But that is, at best, a temporary measure.

        Will the violence return? It already has. In January, a car bomb exploded in Derry. This month, a dissident group claimed responsibility for several unexploded letter bombs that were sent from Ireland to London and Glasgow.

        I don’t believe that we will see a return to the full-blown violence of the Troubles. The paramilitary groups that oppose the Good Friday Agreement are marginal players, with none of the resources or popular support that empowered the I.R.A. and others. But then, conflicts seldom start because most of the population wants them to.




        The Troubles ignited in the first place, in large measure, because limited acts of violence were met with irrational escalation. Station a customs man at a border crossing, and kids are going to throw rocks at him. So you bring in the cops to stand guard. Then some fool with a rifle shoots a cop. What happens next?

        One solution, which the European Union proposed last year, was to shift the border, for customs purposes, into the Irish Sea, so Northern Ireland and the Republic could trade without barriers. The British government rejected this idea on the grounds that doing so would undermine the unity of the United Kingdom. It’s a further measure of the Brexiteers’ naïveté that they don’t realize that by forcing Northern Ireland to choose between the United Kingdom and Europe, they may have inadvertently hastened the eventual reunification of Ireland.

        Some prominent Irish Republicans have already called for a referendum on the question of Irish unity. How strange to think it could be Brexit that finally gets the British out of Ireland — an outcome that three decades of appalling violence failed to achieve.

        In the interim, we should all be watching Northern Ireland closely, and hoping that whenever Brexit happens and whatever form it takes, it does not bring back any version of the Troubles. Northern Ireland is a beautiful place, but it also a tinderbox, and to ignore the bloody history of the Irish border is to court disaster
        Everyone is edging towards national pride and unity while we pawn ours off.

        The way Brexit is going it very well may be Ireland that plays a pivotal role in the outcome.
        Last edited by Gocka; 04-01-2019, 09:09 PM.

        Comment

        • Risto the Great
          Senior Member
          • Sep 2008
          • 15658

          #94
          But, as anyone who goes to the border discovers, you can’t ignore the past. Talk to people in Northern Ireland, and they’ll bring up events from decades, or even centuries, ago, with a visceral emotion that would make you think they’d happened just last week. Investigators are still churning up the soil, searching for the bodies of people who were murdered during the Troubles and buried in secret graves.
          Meanwhile the world tells Macedonia to shut up and move forward.
          Risto the Great
          MACEDONIA:ANHEDONIA
          "Holding my breath for the revolution."

          Hey, I wrote a bestseller. Check it out: www.ren-shen.com

          Comment

          • Gocka
            Senior Member
            • Dec 2012
            • 2306

            #95
            Originally posted by Risto the Great View Post
            Meanwhile the world tells Macedonia to shut up and move forward.
            Most Macedonians don't even know nor care to know about what happened in 2001, let alone during WW2 or during the Ottoman occupation. If you ask me, the loudest voices telling us to shut up and move on come from our own people. The typical "stop making everything about politics" types. You wouldn't believe how many times I've been told "its just history, its in the past".

            Comment

            • Big Bad Sven
              Senior Member
              • Jan 2009
              • 1528

              #96
              Originally posted by Gocka View Post
              Most Macedonians don't even know nor care to know about what happened in 2001, let alone during WW2 or during the Ottoman occupation. If you ask me, the loudest voices telling us to shut up and move on come from our own people. The typical "stop making everything about politics" types. You wouldn't believe how many times I've been told "its just history, its in the past".
              I too have heard this a lot over the years and continue to do so, from people in macedonia and the diaspora. This lame expression usually is re-introduced when it comes to topics such as going to Greece for holidays, going to macedonian or 'balkan' parties which are usually serbian/yugoslav love fests, giving chauvanistic greeks the benefit of the doubt at social evets etc

              But i agree with RtG, there is a push from the European and American elite/Globalists for macedonia to cave in and become a nationless hollow state

              Comment

              • Big Bad Sven
                Senior Member
                • Jan 2009
                • 1528

                #97
                Originally posted by Gocka View Post
                https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/30/o...nd-brexit.html



                Everyone is edging towards national pride and unity while we pawn ours off.

                The way Brexit is going it very well may be Ireland that plays a pivotal role in the outcome.
                Macedonians are evolutionary Neanderthals, evolutionary misfits.

                Everyone is swinging to the right and nationalism – yet Macedonians are very proud of being bilingual, being progressive and have many mega mosques pop up like mushrooms, and its ok to share ‘common’ history with greeks and bulgars.

                Even newer nationalities like bosnians and Slovenes have progressed more than Macedonians LOL

                Comment

                • Carlin
                  Senior Member
                  • Dec 2011
                  • 3332

                  #98
                  Violence continues in Northern Ireland over rising Brexit tensions

                  URL:
                  The recent violence, largely in loyalist, Protestant areas, has flared amid rising tensions over post-Brexit trade rules for Northern Ireland.


                  Authorities in Northern Ireland sought to restore calm Thursday after Protestant and Catholic youths in Belfast hurled bricks, fireworks and gasoline bombs at police and each other. It was the worst mayhem in a week of street violence in the region, where Britain’s exit from the European Union has unsettled an uneasy political balance.

                  Crowds including children as young as 12 or 13 clashed across a concrete “peace wall” in west Belfast that separates a British loyalist Protestant neighbourhood from an Irish nationalist Catholic area. Police fired rubber bullets at the crowd, and nearby a city bus was hijacked and set on fire.

                  Northern Ireland has seen sporadic outbreaks of street violence since the 1998 Good Friday peace accord ended “the Troubles” — decades of Catholic-Protestant bloodshed over the status of the region in which more than 3,000 people died.

                  But Police Service of Northern Ireland Assistant Chief Constable Jonathan Roberts said Wednesday’s mayhem “was at a scale we have not seen in recent years.” He said 55 police officers had been injured over several nights of disorder and it was lucky no one had been seriously hurt or killed.

                  There was a further outbreak of violence Thursday night in the nationalist Springfield Road area of Belfast, where youths threw stones at police, who responded with a water cannon blast.

                  Britain’s split from the EU has highlighted the contested status of Northern Ireland, where some people identify as British and want to stay part of the U.K., while others see themselves as Irish and seek unity with the neighbouring Republic of Ireland, an EU member.

                  Unrest has erupted over the past week — largely in loyalist, Protestant areas — amid rising tensions over post-Brexit trade rules and worsening relations between the parties in the Protestant-Catholic power-sharing Belfast government.

                  U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson condemned the unrest, saying “the way to resolve differences is through dialogue, not violence or criminality.” He sent Northern Ireland Secretary Brandon Lewis to Belfast for talks with the region’s political leaders.

                  White House press secretary Jen Psaki said the Biden administration was concerned by the violence, “and we join the British, Irish and Northern Irish leaders in their calls for calm.”

                  Comment

                  • Carlin
                    Senior Member
                    • Dec 2011
                    • 3332

                    #99
                    Northern Ireland: Special forces deployed in Belfast as riots continue -- CityAM

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