Tuesday 21 March 2017

A DEATH TOO KIND

When I was a small child we were still hanging people; you'd hear about it in those Recieved Pronunciation voices on the BBC wireless, on the Home Service, even on the Light Programme, then the equivalents, respectively, of Radio Four and  Radio Two, sop, then as now, for both the so-called thinking middle class, alive to the issues of the day, and the whistling working class. The John Humphries of the day, or the Jeremy Vine, would solemnly broadcast the news that at eight o' clock that morning some hapless neck had been snapped like a twig and then go on to say that there had been protests outside the nick. 
Quite right, too. 

Used to make my infant blood run cold, it did, them topping people, just down the road, and I have been a Death Penalty Abolitionist all my life. I can't even watch a fictionalised execution without flinching and the real thing almost makes me pass-out. I have managed to avoid seeing the hanging of Saddam Hussein, one of New Labour's great achievements and the Caecescus being gunned down, which I have seen, was at least swift and  brutish, unpretentious, no simpering vicars, and lacking the nauseating pseudo-formality of the Death Row and its grisly sergeants.

One of the reasons I so hated Marty Kneecaps was that he shook my belief, threatened my resolute opposition to state murder;  I had only to see him - or his comrade, Gerry the Nonce - to reflect that, well, maybe some people do deserve a necktie party; maybe it is the only way to protect Decency from cruel Vice, or if not protect, at least avenge, and future-protect. 

 There has only ever been the one execution which I can watch.  I don't make a habit of it or anything, I think I've seen it twice, on the Nazi shows; it is the hanging, on his own gallows, of the former commandant of Auschwitz, a man so dreadful that his despatch seemed almost merciful, but even if it wasn't it seemed entirely, unequivocally appropriate.  
 And so would it have been with Marty, a man who, from his earliest,


 youthful photograph 
until his last, bitter, dying image 

 oozed a sinister, sadistic and utilitarian cruelty from every pore;  his were the mindset and the practice of the SS. 
 Peace Proh-cess be damned, if ever the world needed a man to be hanged, Marty Kneecaps was the prime candidate.

I had hoped, in these latter years of his miserable, obnoxious life,  that someone might shoot him on the street, like the mad dog he was, and maybe just cripple him, as he had crippled so many, leaving him in a painful half-life; death by heart disease seems so very kind an end for one so vile, we must hope that he was as frightened at his end as were the very many children whose limbs he treated to a Black and Decker mutilation;  teenagers pulled from the streets by Marty's nancyboy sadists, the Hard Men, as they call themselves, and savaged by Provisional IRA lawnforcement. I mean,  when we look at some of the members of the Northern Ireland Assembly I can't help but think that we gotta lotta nerve to take-on so, about Islamic State; there is no difference between the headchoppers and the authors of the Birmingham 'pub bombings, the Enniskillen Remembrance Day massacre, the Warrington bombing or countless other murderous attacks on defenceless civilian groups, no difference whatsoever.
War on terror? 
It's not too late for bringing it all back home.

Hard to see, by the same token, why we are so hard on Jimmy Savile, whilst eulogising Martin McGuinness;  Sir James, after all, never actually killed anyone, let alone thousands of people, and he  raised large sums of money for other people's use, whereas McGuinness cost us incalculable sums, mind-boggling - the cost of an army, the costs of endlessly rebuilding city and town centres; the costs of drastically expanded emergency services, of prolonged medical and psychiatric treatments, of bereavements, of army and police and civilian widows' pensions, of massively increased police, intelligence and security services; of lost businesses, of courts and trials and incarcerations; of investigations and interdictions at home and abroad.  The harm and expense caused by Savile's behaviours and by subsequent enquiries into them is as a drop in the ocean compared with the ongoing burden caused by Marty's dark fantasies.
And yet Savile - relative to McGuinness a petty offender - is a byword for infamy, while McGuinness himself lies rotting and surely putrid on a fraudulent hero's bier.
Blessed are the peacemakers, eh?
Fuck me, Jesus, it's enough to make the Saviour spit.


25 comments:

Mike said...

It was only a few weeks ago we sent Marty our best wishes. I was hoping he would cling to life a bit longer, tortured both mentally and physically.

Its fitting he dies in a hospital bed from natural causes, not in a hail of bullets to be lauded as a martyr. In fact, I do believe Marty and Gerry were turned assets, wittingly or unwittingly. Didn't they give Gerry an official car, only for there to be found, several years later when it was sold, a listening device?

Tdg said...

It is one of the few virtues of our times that his kind of violence would not now be forgiven.

Anonymous said...

Thank you for this Mr Ishmael. I read about his death, and came here hoping to find your thoughts. It was a relief to read them.

mongoose said...

We could hang him now, mr ishmael. A Cromwellian post-mortem execution. All the fun of the panto and none of the killing. Why, we'd be practically innocent. Sneak up the gunnell, across the honest cobbled yard, and through the wee back kitchen of his one-of-us terrace. And away through the front with himself in a sack while the Boys are away hammering the Guinness down the O'Wheeltapper's.

The BBC may have to be burned down again btw. Adrian Chiles, is it, yattering his hateful, illiterate gob away on the radio this morning as tweet after tweet (ffs!!) railed against the murderous bastard. "That's a bit one-sided; we'll bring you some comments from the other viewpoint in a minute." Pig. Tebbit, although he is a horrible bastard too, had it about right.

yardarm said...

Glad you are back, Mr Ishmael. I wondered if Kneecaps Calvary would bring you to the keyboard. Hopefully he died whimpering for his mummy as he soiled himself, copiously and noxiously. I wondered also if Gnasher`s blatant careerism, whining for her entitlement, had sent your blood pressure rocketing. Time to raise the Norwegian flag maybe. Independence for one, independence for all......

call me ishmael said...

Maybe so, mr mike, the wilderness of mirrors. Certainly Blair, today, spoke of the "armed struggle" as though he were a member of the IRA, himself, Gerry and Martin his comrades. Great how the more he shows his face the more rotten he looks and sounds. You are right, better natural causes than martyrdom.

call me ishmael said...

That's a good point, mr tdg, the mourners of Wootton Bassett, repatriating Tommies killed on the Falls Road would have made the PIRA's activitries intolerable,maybe even to Mr Corbyn, who, should he attend the funeral, may as well stay there, in Free Derry.

call me ishmael said...

I think you could read these thoughts, mr anonymous, and opinions, on the subway walls, tenement halls, within the sounds of silence. The nation has been queered and bullied into edgy acquiescence, we are all now citizen-suspects, whilst Vice holds Court in MediaMinster. And Holyrood. And Stormont.

call me ishmael said...

Yo, mr mongoose. I had thought of raising the Cromwell option but chose to postpone it. I should think, though, that any funerary monument raised to the great man will need guarding from now until Hell freezes over.

I have only been able to tolerate twenty seconds or so of PBC eulogising and I expect that its treatment of this dead poxy arsehole will only add to the national dissatisfaction, the wretched Kay Bully, on skymadeupnewsandfilth, did an interview with an entirely reasonable woman, whose mother had died in the Enniskillen outrage and which, in less than ten minutes. completely trashed the values of Blair-Provoism, the bogus Peace Process and the betrayal of Justice.

I don't see Chiles but just the knowledge of him makes me want to deny my erstwhile adopted Brummyness, as I am sure it does you.

call me ishmael said...

Thanks, mr yardarm, he was certainly a cowardly bastard, Marty, as were his footsoldiers, cowardly and stupid, no intelligent British government would have dealt with them, only fools such as Major and Blair.

Gnasher is insuffereable but the more exposure she gains the more ludicrous she appears, two years of this will see her out on her embittered arse.

Anonymous said...

The first IRA bastard to put a face over his balaclava.
-richard

Doug Shoulders said...

Not the first and won’t be the last murderer to be eulogised
Sure the young pups at the bbc will have no idea of the pain and suffering this person caused just as they have no clue about anything else outside their cosy bubbles.
Cremation would be advised. Would be telling if his grave required security surveillance and all that like those dead Russian mafia blokes.

callmeishmael said...

I wonder if there'll be a volley of shots over his coffin, him being a military hero 'n' everything, so he was. It's a gokd job that my cousin, Michael Stone, is banged away; he had a novel approach to IRA funerals.

If only the Westminster gang had responded properly and swiftly to the early, non -IRA civil rights marches in Ulster then nobody would ever have heard of the repulsive Marty and his sadistic bumchums; the marchers asking for One Citizen One Vote and the restraint of the B Special Constabulary was hardly revolutionary in the UK and in the States, after all, LBJ had done his best for blacks' civil rights, the whole horrid mess could so easily have been avoided by shrewder politics. That Stalinist filth like the Provos were able to hijack a legitimate protest movement, making rivers of blood run in British streets is a fact now lost on the PBCs ignorant and historically illiterate commentariat; Kirsty Wark, eh, fabricator of the Gerry'n'Cilla McCann show, quacking away there, last night, about Peace and Reconciliation.

I dunno for sure, mr richard, and you live there, after all, but I think there was a distinction to be made between the Officials, who attacked, in their day, hard targets and the Provos, who bombed school buses and 'pubs, certainly any Provos whom I ever met were fonder of Mao and Marx than ever they were of Michael Collins; revolutionary socialists, indifferent to the suffering of individuals in the pursuit of the Great Struggle. As I said, it is hard to rage against ISIL when, in Ulster, we released their fellow travellers from jail and put
them in government.

Cremation or not, mr doug, they will want a statue of the great man, perhaps on the site of one of his great victories, some school in Warrington, perhaps, or maybe Hyde Park.

RealEmotion said...

Never a truer description; 'Family Butcher'.

Anonymous said...

I lived in a bedit off the Lisburn road in 1983 and the chap in the next room was in the Workers' Party which was set up by the Official IRA when they decided to become political after splitting from SF.
He was a helpful fellow if somewhat eccentric - his bedsit was filled with hundreds, maybe thousands, of newspapers, floor to ceiling. At the time the Old Holborn tobacco company had a free toolkit which you could collect, one spanner etc. for every 20 empty pouches - he had at least a dozen complete kits plus biscuit tins full of tobacco.
That was none of my business, nor was an allusion to his "souvenir" made by Webley. What he did do was to advise me that in addition to basic unemployment benefit there were other such benefits, such as fridge, bedding, suit-for-interviews and so forth which most people didn't know about because they weren't mentioned by officialdom when you signed on. I applied and got paid for these, under his advice.
He also had a Belfast Council donkey jacket which was the predecessor of the flourescent vest. He therefore appeared to be vaguely official and would eat very cheaply at the City hospital staff canteen, and, following his example, I would later don a white lab coat for the same purpose.
He was certainly a Marxist but by no means a bigot as I bumped into him at the Twelfth which he said was part of Ireland's history and anyway he "liked a nice parade."
There was one other time, when I went looking for my brother-in-law who was the only Protestant who drank at a republican pub, in a rural setting on the Fermanagh-Cavan border. The people in the pub denied all knowledge and left. After a while someone appeared and asked who I was, and a few minutes later my in-law emerged from the back of the pub. The regulars had thought I was a non-local shooter, sent to do him in, and were hiding him in the toilet.
So I haven't had that much bother in the North. In contrast to this a Constable friend of mine answered his door at night only to receive a shotgun blast to the stomach and it would have been worse as they also had a machine pistol (Czech- made Scorpion) but it jammed. The IRA unit were known but lack of evidence precluded a trial.
He made a full recovery, thanks to his unusually well-developed abdominal musculature, achieved by years of off-road motorcycling, so most of his intestines are still with him.
Apart from that, and having my car inspected remotely by the Army following a call that there was a bomb under it - the call was from the UVF but was a hoax - and being in the same building when a bomb went off - I haven't really been affected.
As for Marty, he has undergone a lifecycle analogous to the Bot Fly. As a larva it burrows painfully in the flesh, hidden and hard to extract. As an adult it emerges and looks like a friendly bumblebee, harmless without even any mouthparts.
Nevertheless it's the same God-damned insect.
-richard

Harmeny said...

Wouldn't it be poetic justice if someone could steal the body and hide it where it would never be found.

mongoose said...

I do fear that tomorrow is going to see the full-on o'weeping and wailing. Of course, half of them will still be on MI5's payroll but they'll not let that spoil a daycent party, so they won't. I may send the kids to school in Raybans and berets.

call me ishmael said...

Thanks, mr richard, and in my humble IMHO you shold expand that and write it up for publication or just for posterity. i know that Ireland is awash with writers and other layabouts but your brief memoir has an unvarinished profundity to it which, to paraphrase the now-deceased Sage of St Charles County, just rings like a bell.

Funny how Chuck Berry was massively more influential than any of the freaks who died in - or were murdered by - the year 2016 and yet it remains up to degenerate old bozos like Mick Jagger to sing him home. If Chuck had been white, middle-class and preferably Jewish, with a manager who schooled him in the showbiz art of being enigmatic and had he enjoyed an audience of tossers with their heads up their effete collective arse - people like me - then he would have had a Nobel Prize long ago. No matter, prizes are for prats. But George Michael, David Bowie and Rick Parfitt, if there's a rock'n'roll Valhalla Chuck'll swiftly kick their arses into the servants' quarters.

I, too, once knew a Marxist Provo. Joe Farrington, then, was the most gracious, unassuming and generous human being I had ever encountered. He just had this disarming habit of - when someone riled him - slipping into stage Oirish and muttering darkly, By Jesus, OI'd make him suck on a detonator, so I would.

Thanks, again, for that.

call me ishmael said...

Oh, mr unknown, what a joy that would be, if his rotten corpse joined the Disappeared.

call me ishmael said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
call me ishmael said...

Yes, mr mongoose, the accoutrements of the global statesman, shades and berets. More prosaically, though, such sympathetic comments as I have heard from MediaMinster illuminate, once more, the gulf between We and They. I have only read that Blair called him a great guy, I didn't, couldn't, watch him, and I just saw some fuckdog tribesman in parliament praisesinging the Great KneeCapper, it might have been one of those guys who was circle-riding the SNP Westminster bicycle, wotsername, but I dunno, they all look and sound the same to me, jumped-up councillors, hacks and geography teachers. Such bilge will play well with dyed-in-the-woolers, with illiterate, gabshite, Celtic FC supporting, inebriate, cross-dressing, unemployable, wife-beating child molesters, those with the Decaration of Arbroath tattooed on their poxed-up Jock arses - I know onesuch - those known, as we say, to Social Services; those erstwhile disciples of coke-snorting gangbanger, tearful Tommy Sheridan, those who, bizarrely, find Mrs Gnasher's angry wee rodent face reassuring. These mongrels will see Marty as the next best thing to Mel Gibson.

Unfortunately for the SNP shiteaters, many in Scotland are Orangemen and women, supporters of Rangers FC and seeing these fucking spongers in their publicly-funded suits'n'tiesb hosannahing the IRA will sour their pints of Heavy.

You should actually keep the junior mongeese off school altogether, as a mark of solidarity with resistance fighters everywhere, shouldn't you?

Alphons said...

It's nice to have you back, sir, and I hope you have no more occasions to play truant.

I can imagine Mrs. Gnasher coming to grief before long, unless she has someone put her straight on "reality".

callmeishmael said...

Thank you, m. alphons, she is a truly horrid, fucked-up gabshite, Gnasher, from whom many here are disengaged by sheer revulsion, many unable to watch ScotNews for fear of seeing her shrivelled wee arseface and hearing her skriking I-Know-Best fishwife babble, it is herself she will fall foul of.

call me ishmael said...

Missed that, mr real emotion, good one, McGuinness and Adams, Family Butchers.

Anonymous said...

Thanks Mr.I for your kind words.
I've seen too many experts' swords and daggers to be unaware that I have nail-clippers. And a bad memory, I almost forgot about that.
-richard