Many people expressed versions of the same theme. They were the victims. Their enemies were the oppressors. Those who killed for their side were patriots. The other side were traitors and murderers.
One day, I was speaking to a young Irish republican in a poor housing project in Newry. He was articulate and passionate and well-read in history and said he lost no sleep over Irish nationalist paramilitaries killing British soldiers, cops, loyalists, Protestants — anybody on the other side. He didn’t care about them or their families, he said, because they had of their own free will chosen to take one side in what was a war. They were, he said in an Orwellian phrase from that conflict, legitimate targets.
The next day, I was in Belfast, having a cup of tea with a loyalist paramilitary in Rathcoole, a dreary housing project where poor Protestants lived in the sort of quiet desperation and deprivation that made their violent defense of the British status quo seem like they were working against their own self-interest.
He was about the same age as the Irish republican I had talked to the day before, and his account of his grievance, of his justification for killing Catholic nationalists, whether they were in the IRA or whether they simply had the misfortune of living in a Catholic neighborhood, reminded me so much of the conversation I had the day before. He had no sympathy for Catholics who were killed; in fact, he celebrated it.
Those two young men, of similar age and socioeconomics, with polar opposite political views and ideas of what Northern Ireland should be, used similar language but wouldn’t recognize it in each other. More significantly, they, like so many people I met in Northern Ireland in the 1980s and 1990s, kept score.
“They killed two of ours; we’ll kill three of theirs, hopefully more.”
In any divided community, when you start keeping score of the killing, when you create a hierarchy of victims, civil society collapses.
The other thing that sticks in my head after all those years reporting on the Troubles was how many times after someone was murdered, their killers would flee while cheering triumphantly, as if murdering an unarmed, unsuspecting person was some kind of victory worth celebrating.
As violence has become an increasingly spent piece of political currency in the United States, I’ve thought a lot lately about what I observed in the bad old days in Northern Ireland, before both sides there figured out a way to live in relative peace.
The reaction to the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the conservative provocateur and activist, has only heightened my fear we are sliding toward something like Northern Ireland back then that we haven’t experienced in this country since the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the US was so bitterly divided that assassination and politically motivated violence was common.
I’m not going to recount examples of those who celebrated Kirk’s death, figuratively dancing on a grave that had not yet been dug. The postings are vile, and, if you’re interested, all you have to do is go on Facebook or Instagram or whatever’s your social media choice of poison.
Neither am I here to judge Charlie Kirk. He was open and unabashed about his views, which I didn’t share, and which many people found offensive and even hateful.
I’m just here to say, I’ve seen what happens when people are so convinced of the righteousness of their side that they dehumanize the other side to the point that not only are they unmoved when someone from the other side is murdered, they actually celebrate it.
I’ve seen this movie before, and have no desire to see it again.
Many have pointed out the tragic irony of Kirk being killed with a gun when he was so adamant about protecting the Second Amendment that he believed a certain number of gun deaths was a cost worth paying to have unfettered access to guns.
I’ve been struck more by the idea of Kirk being assassinated for his ideas just as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated for his.
King was murdered because he advocated for civil rights for all Americans. And yet Kirk belittled and demeaned King, blaming him for causing the nation’s ongoing racial divide, a viewpoint which struck me as off the wall.
Martin Luther King Jr. believed in the moral power and authority of nonviolent resistance. And, here’s the irony: King would have been the last person to take pleasure from or celebrate the murder of Charlie Kirk.
Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at kevin.cullen@globe.com.
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