Self assurance - is meaningless without self awareness. Jon Burrows is a loquacious confident speaker but the output is a word salad of political nothingness, contradictions . . .
The inference is that as a former RUC officer Burrows has brought the force's lack of self awareness into the heart of the political arena with all the self assurance of one of Bertrand Russell's fools and fanatics who are invariably so 'certain of themselves,' while wiser counsel is often 'so full of doubts.'
However we choose to assess him he is neither foolish nor fanatical when denouncing attacks on the Ballymena war memorial in August. Twice over a three day period the memorial was vandalised. Flags were stolen and flag poles broken.
Mr Burrows castigating the attacks as “despicable and deeply disrespectful” added that he was:
absolutely disgusted to learn that this memorial has been attacked and damaged for a second night over the course of this weekend. This is not simply an act of mindless vandalism. It is an attack on a place of remembrance dedicated to those who made the ultimate sacrifice during the Great War.This memorial provides a quiet place where people can sit, rest and reflect. More importantly, it serves as a lasting reminder of the men and women who gave their all in service and sacrifice . . . To attack this memorial once was disgraceful. To return and target it for a second night shows a level of contempt for our community, for the volunteers who care for this area and, above all, for the memory of those commemorated here . . .Whatever motivates someone to deliberately target such a place, there can be absolutely no excuse for it.
Whether Great War or Great Waste, hate crime as alleged by the PSNI or clown crime, desecration of space reserved for quiet reflection in memory of lives lost should have as much place in discursive practices as the N word.
Critics are entitled to view the slaughter of World War 1 with the same contempt that Connolly and others did: an imperialist grab where lions were sent to their deaths by donkeys. That entitlement does not extend to desecration of memorial tributes to the dead of that war. Memorial marauding is as wrong in Ballymena as it is in Twinbrook where the Brendan Hughes mural was defiled by goondas associated with Sinn Fein. It is no different from what the IDF did in Gaza to a war cemetery, where satellite imagery showed:
extensive earthworks in the southernmost corner of the graveyard. Bomb craters can be seen around the cemetery, but in this area the destruction appears to have been more systematic.Rows of gravestones have been removed, the topsoil has been churned up and a substantial earth berm can be seen running across the middle of the affected area. It is of a size that suggests the use of heavy equipment.
No comments