Thepensivequill.am Website Review

a matter of terminology? the distinction between ‘modern’ and ‘postmodern’ political thought and how it matters for our age.. merry xmas 2018 to all our readers @ the pensive quill. . tony donovan recalls christmas eve 1971 in a tense and politically violent belfast i have always loved ireland, ever since i was a kid: its music, what little irish history i knew. in 1969, i started reading about the irish civil rights movement in the north of ireland, and the harsh repression mounted by british police to shut the movement down. i remember seeing it as small bits of ap and upi wire press writing, five or six lines on the fifth page of the new york times. in 1969 the british army arrived there in large numbers and the catholic areas started to riot. i decided to go take a look. i bought a used leica, certainly the most famous camera brand at the time. and off i flew to ireland. somehow i had the number and address of the chief of staff of the provisional ira, one of ireland’s secret armies, i think he lived in navan. imagine that today! i met with him and told him my plans to travel up to belfast in two days, on a saturday. he told me not to go, to spend my weekend in the south. i asked why. he wouldn’t say, though i did take his warning and stayed in dublin for those days. a couple dozen bombs went off in belfast city that weekend. when i got there on monday, it was a cold, broken city with almost no electric light, nearly empty of people, the constant wail of sirens the only sound. after a few days i got to interview the catholic bishop in west belfast, poor man he didn’t have a place for me and pas*ed me on to a priest, not much older than myself who was urgently working to help his ballymurphy parish deal with a british curfew. he couldn’t have me around, but he told me about a catholic area in north belfast called “ardoyne” or “owen’s height” in irish. at that time ardoyne was under siege by its protestant neighbors, patrolled day and night by british soldiers; its northwest corner, an