Ni hao, vampirock--
We are still playing, in fact. And this line of yours is so on-point:
"It might be hard to overthrow a government, but it's far far harder to set up a new, better one."
To that I would add "It might be hard to overthrow a government, and it might be a noble and well-intended act that is full of hope, but..."
I wish people in every political situation would understand this. And not only this, but the fact that government of some kind _is_ necessary. Romantic dreams of anarchy are for the latte-sipping graduate-school set, to be blunt about it. This is what drives me crazy about the anti-government tea-party types in the U.S., where this mythology has spread of how things get better for people as you move toward zero taxes and zero government. When people are pressed on the question, most (if they're rational at all) will admit that what they're really talking about is striking the right balance between freedom and control, and also eliminating as much waste as possible. But through the tyranny of anecdotal evidence, in which even a few examples to the contrary in a nation of 300 million people can create the false impression of a widespread problem, it becomes almost impossible to establish and maintain even the best government that can be expected in a world full of imperfect people and institutions. If an anti-government radical--and I'm talking about somebody who is anti-ALL-government, not just somebody who has disagreements with the current governing philosophy--can put on an hour TV show that includes four extended examples of people who were harmed in some way by government policy, it's enough to convince half the nation, tens of millions of people, that government is always evil and/or inefficient and/or stupid.
For just one example, look at what Fox News in the U.S. does to try to turn public opinion against nationalized health care; they'll cover the Canadian healthcare system, for instance--where at least 85% of the people are happy with it, according to polls--and they'll put three examples, or five, of attractive, sympathetic, well-spoken Canadians on the air who say they hate the system, and half the nation (in the U.S.) walks away swearing that Canadians hate their system, because of a few vivid examples handpicked for marketing effect.
Anyway, to your point re China: People make all kinds of pronouncements about nations they've never been to and situations that are far more complex than their oversimplified versions. It happens here in the U.S. with China, Cuba, the South American nations, et al., and heads of state like Castro, Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales, and so forth. Governments and the media in any nation use each other to paint pictures of other nations and governments that accomplish whatever purposes they want to accomplish, and in the process we end up with only an approximation of accuracy or even a complete obscuring of it.
This is the problem, I think, with much of what remains of the notion of Irish revolution and the unification of the island. For many families, unification is an idea that goes back for generations, even hundreds of years. But the majority of people in the North don't believe the problems they face are going to change much just because the place has a different flag over it and is run by different people. Hardly anybody believes in a united-Ireland utopia, and relatively few are still so committed to the unification for its own sake, the nostalgic or theoretical idea of it regardless of whether or not it will improve the daily lives of people, that they think it's worth killing and dying for. I used to think those people were mostly wrong and mostly sellouts. I don't anymore, partly because it seems increasingly to me that societies evolve the governments that end up in charge over them. Raise the tricolour over Belfast tomorrow and take down all British symbols, and you won't have any fundamental change in the economy or the societal structures. I'm not saying there wouldn't be _any_ improvements; I just don't think they would be as radical as people think.
Similarly, in the U.S., we have what is commonly called "low product differentiation" in marketing, where marketers try to find the thinnest hairs to split between one product and another, or they simply give up on trying to highlight subtle but true differences and instead market grand associations with products (as with cigarettes and icons like the Marlboro Man and the Virginia Slims woman, or Michael Jordan with Wheaties). What I mean with regard to politics is simply that the two major parties try desperately to portray themselves as vastly different from each other, and they also try to make the grand associations (Republicans are much better at this, with their marketing-image associations with "family values," religion, patriotism, etc.), but in fact there's about three beans' worth of difference in how they govern. Republicans are always yakking on about the evils of government, but in fact they want to use the machinery of government for their own purposes, and they know tax money and government action is necessary for things like roads, schools, libraries, armies, police, firefighters, safe food and drugs, Social Security, Medicare, on and on. And about 80% of Democrats in the national government engage in the rhetoric of populism, but are paid for by corporate interests and will vote in patterns that indicate they're trying to have it both ways (the right impression as a populist, but the right results for the corporations whose money funded their campaigns). Republicans are preferred by corporations and big business in general, of course, but the majority of Democrats are only slightly less preferable to them, ever since Democrats started taking corporate money in the 1980 campaigns.
So Americans walk around with this idea that there is a vast difference between the two ideas of government, when in fact it has become the American Corporate Party, varsity and junior varsity versions, and not nearly as much difference between those versions as most people have been marketed into thinking. People who had the idea that Obama was going to stop the rendition-for-torture program, or to investigate and prosecute torturers, or to take the strongest possible action against the financial irresponsibility amongst the big institutions in the private sector, have been sorely disappointed. But they shouldn't have been. In any other era of U.S. politics other than the current era of complete irrationality and the big swerve of the center to the right, Obama would have been considered a garden-variety moderate Republican. Instead, in this environment, half the nation calls him a "socialist." These are people who have no clue how the rest of the world lives or what a "socialist" actually is.
But I don't mean to pick on only the U.S. I think every nation, because of the culture of its people, tends to have a relatively narrow range of what it can imagine its government to be. China is never going to have a government like Greece, because the Chinese are nothing like Greeks. And so forth. In a similar way, I don't really think Northern Ireland would be radically different after a change in government; most of the potential I can see would lead to something close to a mirror image of what's there now, in fact, because I'm afraid that if strongly republican/nationalist elements were in power, the urge for revenge would be very strong, and at that point Protestants and people of British heritage might suffer recriminations and discrimination. This is why something like what Mandela et al. pulled off in South Africa is so rare (to be clear, I'm not saying they don't still have their problems). If right now those who think Irish unification (or opposition to Irish unification) is worth killing for, and they can't see the other side as people rather than targets, that doesn't exactly bode well for what would happen if they themselves had power. I really think the solution is a new way of looking at the problem and defining it, and part of that will come in realizing that, as you say, anybody trying to put together a government that works at all, that strikes anywhere close to the right balances between freedom and restraint, has a really tough task, and that the problems associated with that task don't really change all that much just because the new government is ethnically Irish and tied to (or unified with) the ROI rather than linked to Britain.
Wow...sorry to run on so long. It's just a subject of deep interest, and I really do hate seeing people oversimplify matters and choose sides like it's a football game or something. I hope the whole problem dissipates eventually due to efforts at cross-community contact (which seems to be really effective, at least with younger people), and I hope people who take up weapons will be increasingly isolated not as heroes but as anachronisms that aren't part of the move forward into change by agreement and constitution. I wouldn't be saying this if I believed the Catholic communities were under the kind of really vicious repression and violence that they were subject to in the past, but with things like they are now, it seems to me that if each side considers itself a leg, then maybe they can walk to a better place.
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