A False Flag

By AM Tuesday, May 2, 2023

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John Crawley ✍ The term’ false flag’ originated in the 16th century when a naval ship approaching the enemy would hoist a bogus banner to misrepresent its true allegiance. 

Sinn Féin habitually flies a false flag by waving the Tricolour in nationalist areas but, while on the international stage, demonstrating their true allegiance to the British pacification strategy known as the Irish Peace Process.

I have heard a number of Republicans say Sinn Féin is attending the coronation of a foreign King who claims jurisdiction in our country in order to gain votes. I doubt that. There are few votes from nationalists, and certainly none from republicans, in doing so. Neither will a single unionist wake up republican the following morning.

The purpose is to signal to London, Dublin, and Washington that Sinn Féin is house-trained. That the counterinsurgency project of pacification and normalisation has been achieved, and the Provisional movement has fully bought into Britain’s analysis of the nature of the conflict and a British blueprint to resolve it. The Provos boast of the long war, but the Brits are masters of the long game. They realise Ireland has no shortage of weak and ambitious puppets keen to carve out political careers by partnering with Britain in validating and consolidating our country’s constitutional divisions. The Brits know the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. It won’t be long until you hear ‘this Shared Island’ become ‘these Shared Islands’. In the words of a senior British civil servant written nearly fifty years ago:

It is in our interest to see a strong Provisional Sinn Féin, if at the expense of the SDLP, so that the extremists are brought into the mainstream of politics and are forced to act politically and in due course responsibly... - - ‘The Republican Movement’, 5 May 1976, CJ4/1427, UK National Archives.

Who can doubt, when they watch Sinn Féin representatives attend the coronation of King Charles, that they are, in Britain’s view, acting responsibly? That Sinn Féin has been utterly co-opted to the muddled belief that the conquest and colonisation of Ireland shares parity of esteem and reciprocal legitimacy with its struggle for independence. That the British royal family should play a continuing role in our country, providing an institutional point of reference for the loyalties of those citizens who cannot bring themselves to discard the symbolism of the British Crown, the entity which underwrote the twin pillars of plantation Protestantism - confiscation and sectarian supremacy.

Far from breaking the connection with England, there are powerful and influential forces attempting to deconstruct the concept of Irish nationhood and lure the whole of Ireland more fully into a British orbit. Suggestions include changing the national flag, ditching the national anthem, and the 26-Counties re-joining the British Commonwealth. On the 29th of March this year, Lord David Frost, a former British diplomat and Minister of State at the Cabinet Office, told a gathering in Lisbon that, ‘In time, the Irish will be part of our British future’.

A major contextual thread running throughout Irish history since the first Home Rule Bill in 1886 is reconciling Irish nationalism to British sovereignty. Attendance at the coronation is a powerful symbol of how that definition of reconciliation has bedded in with counter-republicans.

An illuminating example of how Sinn Féin has corrupted the republican concept of reconciliation and converted it to a British definition can be found in their discussion document ‘Towards a New Ireland’ (2016), in which Sinn Féin makes no mention of the republican analysis of a national compromise but, incredibly, quotes King George V:

May this historic gathering be the prelude of a day in which the Irish people, North and South, under one parliament or two, as those parliaments may themselves decide, shall work together in common love for Ireland upon the sure foundations of mutual justice and respect. – King George V, message to the Stormont Parliament, 7th June 1921

Nationalist thought leaders who populate the GFA commentariat define political maturity as the ability to disregard republican principles and internalise Britain’s spin on Irish democracy. Among their more mature reflections:

• British jurisdiction in the North of Ireland is legitimate, and the Crown forces that protect and preserve it are the proper authority who retain a sole monopoly on the right to bear arms and the lawful use of force. Irish nationalists are encouraged to become their constables and informers.
• The sectarian dynamic and the resulting British/Irish cleavage in national loyalties should be embraced for the sake of peace, as opposed to ending them for the sake of peace.
• Dublin’s constitutional claim to the North of Ireland was archaic and aggressive and was rightfully superseded by Britain’s claim to jurisdiction over that section of our people and territory.
• Irish unity can only be achieved when terms and conditions set by the British government are met.
• Britain’s civil, political, judicial, and military apparatus in Ireland is no longer the British presence. Rather, it is those unionists who reside in six of the nine counties of Ulster (unfortunately, those of a unionist sympathy and heritage in the other three counties of Ulster are Irish citizens who, if born after 1949, do not qualify for British citizenship.)

Demolishing republican doctrine from within by an organisation universally considered to be the republican movement has been the ne plus ultra of British counterinsurgency strategy since day one. General Mike Jackson, former head of the British army and second in command of the Parachute Regiment on Bloody Sunday, said his army’s campaign in the North was ‘one of the very few ever brought to a successful conclusion by the armed forces of a developed nation against an irregular force’.

On the 6th of May this year, Britain’s King Charles, head of the only monarchy in Europe still conducting a religious coronation, will take three oaths - the Scottish oath to uphold the Presbyterian church in Scotland; the Accession Declaration oath to be a faithful Protestant; and the coronation oath, which includes promising to uphold the rights and privileges of the Church of England.

Sinn Féin will dutifully attend while the British state confirms with all the pomp and ceremony it can muster that it is, at heart, a sectarian state where no Catholic can lawfully be crowned sovereign. Do Sinn Féin forget, or do they simply not care, that England forcibly planted the malignancy of sectarian apartheid into our country? The Shinners will sit respectfully and listen while King Charles mumbles a few words in the Irish language, signifying that a part of Ireland remains one of the four nations of the United Kingdom.

What became of the Republican project to break the connection with England and assert the independence of our country? To unite the whole people of Ireland, to abolish the memory of past dissensions, and to substitute the common name of Irishman in place of the denominations of Protestant, Catholic, and Dissenter?

Wolfe Tone’s plea to embrace national unity across the sectarian divide was echoed over a century later by the signatories of the 1916 Proclamation calling for us to be … ‘oblivious of the differences carefully fostered by an alien government, which have divided a minority from the majority in the past.’ The signatories were not claiming these differences did not exist, nor were they saying they could be dismissed as irrelevant. They were saying that these differences should not be used to shape the political architecture of Ireland.

In contrast, those who support the Good Friday Agreement, and send their representatives to honour Britain’s king, are determined that these differences will be permanently embedded in our national fabric. That unionists will remain forever in Ireland but not of it. The Irish Republican movement was founded exclusively by Protestants. Yet, Sinn Féin proposes that Protestant schools in a united Ireland should continue to promote unionist culture and the British perspective. This is what they mean by an ‘Agreed Ireland’; British influence remains, and the Irish agree to it. When Sinn Féin speaks of ‘Sharing this island,’ they mean sharing in Britain’s analysis of the nature of the conflict, sharing in the colonial legacy of sectarian apartheid, and sharing in the imperial project of divide and rule.

Many in Sinn Féin see no sense in aiming high and potentially missing when they can aim low and hit every time. Why risk life, limb, and liberty pursuing a republican strategy the British will politically and militarily resist when careers can be enjoyed on the back of a counter-republican strategy the Brits will endorse and finance? Why risk struggling for a secular Republic when one can lower the bar to some nebulous entity called ‘This Island’ where the sectarian scaffolding comes preassembled by the British government? Why not internalise the conditions, parameters, and political architecture of the united Ireland demanded by Britain, should it ever come to pass, and proclaim victory by maintaining that’s what we were fighting for all along?

The Good Friday Agreement is a snare and a delusion. It entangles us in a web of terms and conditions regarding Irish unity that only Britain can interpret and adjudicate. It invites the delusion British legislation will pave the way to a national democracy within an All-Ireland republic. A political outcome Britain has strenuously rejected and sabotaged at every opportunity.

It is, however, a snare and a delusion that pays well. It has gifted some unremarkable people with remarkable careers, many of whom would never have held a rewarding job without it. George Orwell wrote,’ In times of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.’ At the moment, Republican truth cannot shout louder than those lies that come wrapped in a British pound note.

As I regard the self-satisfied smirks from the Shinners when their delegation returns from His Majesty’s coronation boasting of how they have played a blinder and wrong-footed unionism, I will recall the words of Samuel Adams directed toward former comrades during the American revolution:

If you love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquillity of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen.

⏩John Crawley is a former IRA volunteer and author of The Yank.