You would think to hear most of the comment on the Loyalist uprising in Belfast last week that it was either an emotional outburst by unthinking and stricken people or that it was the opposite: an autonomous eruption of fire and blood that had nothing to do with anyone.
The first is suggested in the language of the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Peter Hain, who described it as 'a throwback to the past'. A lapse from an otherwise consistent and determined commitment to peace by the Loyalist community, a bit like a dry alcoholic slipping up.
The second image, of autonomous violence, runs through most of the news reportage. An Orange parade 'descended into chaos'. 'Violence erupted on the streets'. Bricks and blast bombs 'were thrown at the police'. Then 'the situation returned to normal'.
The passive voice and the use of abstract nouns cover the detail in a fog and deny human agency and reason. Probably some journalists think this is the proper language of objectivity and detachment but if Orwell was around today to rewrite Politics and the English Language I think he would focus on our modern Newspeak which affects to suggest that though bricks fly and bombs blast no person actually plans or does anything.
The rush from judgement has been with us a long time.
Riots used to get blamed on long hot summers.
At the start the government in Northern Ireland judged that drink was the problem and ordered that the pubs be closed early. That's how the Provisional IRA got a head start over others; no one else credited that people who were bombing and killing had the intelligence to think strategically.
More than a decade after the start of the peace process, you would think it would come more readily to observers and commentators to attribute political calculation to people rather than to discarnate passions. After all, that's where it all started. The two governments accepted the proposition that the Provisional IRA was politically driven and would therefore make calculations in its own best political interest. That meant they could draw republicans into negotiations and, if they were smart enough, manipulate them towards the wholly peaceful pursuit of their objectives.
If this was the right way to deal with the IRA in 1994 then why not with the UVF today?
Because we know that the Loyalists are really just thugs and gangsters?
The history of the UVF shows that they have been ruthless and indulgent sadists, responsible both for the bombings of London and Monaghan in 1974 and for the grotesque Shankill Butcher killings. That doesn't prove that they are stupid. Political operators often put barbarians to good use.
If a dispassionate analysis of the feasible outcomes of last week's uprising suggests political outcomes that Loyalists are likely to be happy with then it is reasonable to infer that they had thought of them too before they ordered their gangs onto the streets last Saturday.
I can think of several conceivably attainable advantages the Loyalists might be working to but they depend on my cynical reading of the peace process. Many people still believe that the process is a tricky courtship between unionists and republicans leading, in time, to an amicable marriage. It is not. It is conflict by other means and it is a conflict which unionists are losing. Republicans have seen off their SDLP rivals and destroyed the Ulster Unionist party to face Ian Paisley's DUP and neuter it too.
In January, just months after the Taoiseach had said that Sinn Féin leaders were complicit in the biggest bank robbery in history, the two governments were cheering a statement that the IRA's campaign was over. They had faith in people who had made asses of them. The British traded army bases for IRA weapons dumps and paid upfront. More, they had ignored Ian Paisley and yet said afterwards that they expected him back in negotiations by January.
Now, if you accept that the peace process is conflict by other means you can see how the Loyalists may be playing their hand in that game now.
But the game is supposed to be peaceful? No, republicans and loyalists have both made violent moves before. Violence is disapproved of but it doesn't close play. Nothing does. That's the first rule.
So what are the feasible objectives of the bloody move that Loyalists have made in the game?
One is to undermine the resolve of the IRA to disarm in the week in which it is understood to have begun. Some republicans are bound to be wondering if they will be needing those guns after all.
Another is to demoralise the parades commission in the week it is selecting new members.
A big one is to reinforce the hand of the DUP in the next round of talks on restoring devolution. The British and Irish governments 20 years ago signed the Anglo Irish Agreement primarily to reinforce the SDLP against Sinn Féin. By the same logic they should now be considering the need to strengthen Ian Paisley and to equip him with an argument he can put to Loyalist paramilitaries that his political approach is working.
Or the objective can be anything at all that Loyalists want it to be. They have reasoned that the governments attend most to the concerns of republicans because that is where the greater danger lies and that the best way to get some of that attention to themselves is to go back to war.
As a tactic it is useless, of course, unless they are prepared to escalate if they don't get their way. That's the really scary bit.
