To the people who say the troubles was not a war

they do but realistically they are only doing it to do it or because they don't want to upset the parents, you won't see them in a church again before or after those so aren't catholics.

Catholic lite ?

speaking the truth is not insulting.

as i said to the other poster, it's not me deciding anything but the relevant book god and teachings that likely decide it.

i said likely decide it, meaning i only know from actual catholic friends what i state to be so.

it's common sense that if you don't take part in the teachings of a religion you are not of a religion really.

This is unfortunately the nature of war. The organisations themselves operated with the explicit intention of oppressing the subjugated demographic of the population, and maintaining an illegitimate government (illegitimate by virtue of coming to power via an intentionally undemocratic and discriminatory electoral system). In a conventional war, nobody asks which soldier on the opposing side drives the tank and which one pulls the trigger for its gun; by virtue of driving it both individuals are valid targets.

How Northern Ireland was run prior to the Good Friday Agreement was a good example of the kind of "rogue state" which honestly should have merited UN intervention. I personally believe that this vitriolic and toxic debate is usually doomed to failure from the beginning because so many people fundamentally refuse to recognise this.

Any government anywhere in the world which intentionally denies voting rights to some of its citizens in order to preserve an artificial majority is a legitimate target for an uprising, armed or otherwise. Those who work in defence of that government through the use of force rather than joining its dissenters are, likewise, legitimate targets.

I'd say the same about our own government, by the way - this is not specific to any particular conflict. If the Irish government tomorrow decided to remove voting rights from one gender or other, or those who do not own property, or those whose income falls above or below a certain threshold, or any other metric expressly designed to benefit one political movement over another during an election, I would have no hesitation in suggesting that a mass protest was in order. I would call for such a protest to be a peaceful protest, as indeed did NICRA in the late 1960s.

If, however, the Gardaí intercepted a march to the Dáil at, say, College Green, and mercilessly beat the sh!t out of those marching for defying a government ban on said march, I'd regard AGS as an organisation as a militant arm of an illegitimate government just as I regard the historical RUC as a militant arm of an illegitimate government. I say the same regarding the cops in the US, which is why I for one believe riots targeting the US police to be entirely justified until the era of unaccountable police killings of civilians in that country over minor offences comes to an end.

No one is suggesting that you or anyone else has to agree with this mindset, but I do find it frustrating that debates on The Troubles tend to go around and around in circles because this fundamental ideological difference is rarely addressed directly. Some people believe the pre-GFA government of Northern Ireland, and anyone who worked to uphold its rule, as fundamentally illegitimate and deserving of armed resistance. Others do not. Ergo, some regard violent resistance not only against the government, but against those who worked in its defence, as justified. Others do not.

I don't reckon any amount of arguing on the internet will ever convert somebody from one of these ideologies to another, but it does piss me off when people just argue ad nauseum "this was right" "no it wasn't" without addressing the fundamental underlying question, in this case "do you believe that the pre-GFA government of Northern Ireland was a legitimate, democratic government or an illegitimate, undemocratic plutocracy". Only with the answer to this question in mind does the question "is violent resistance against an arm of that government justified" make any sense.

Presumably most people would on some level agree that when a government reaches a certain level of brutality, autocracy, or oppression of large demographics, violent rebellion is justified after peaceful rebellion fails. If that's the case, all that's left to argue about is whether (a) Northern Ireland pre-GFA met that threshold, and (b) peaceful rebellion could be reasonably described to have already failed prior to the beginning of the armed conflict.

I would answer yes to both questions. I suspect that you and others who take a harsher view on the IRA's actions towards arms of the state might answer no to at least one of them?

You're obviously aware of the amount of deaths caused by Japanese aggression from the early 30s upto the end of the war and the concern that the Japanese were never going surrender.

A loose estimate of 14 million dead across South East Asia with some contributors being unable to give any estimate of Chinese dead .

Japanese military routinely murdered POWs and civilians, with less than 100 Chinese POWs being released after the war.

Bearing in mind the Japanese were never going to surrender , the dropping of nuclear bombs became the only option with Japanese showing no indication of surrender even after the first bomb.

Blaming the Americans for Hiroshima and Nagasaki is the easy option, the responsibility for those deaths is Japan's aggression across the Far East.