Reader TTS

The BBC’s excellent set of documentaries _ Spotlight on the Troubles _ has proved illuminating in all manner of ways. One thing it has illuminated is this: that Gerry Adams must be the

unluckiest politician in Ireland. Mr Adams, we know, was _ never a member of the IRA. _  We know this because he has over several decades made the point for us.  That footage of him as a

young man in a black beret next to a passing IRA funeral cortege? Nothing to do with him. He was on the way to a meeting of the Frank Spencer Appreciation Society. The former “comrades” who

finger him as being responsible for the disappearance of Jean McConville, a mother of 10 children, all of whom subsequently ended up -separately- in care? They are just malicious interlopers

in a process of national salvation which he, happily, was able to manage. Despite of course never having been a member of the IRA. All of it: bad luck. Much of which he has shared with the

rest of us. Mr Adams must be the only draft dodger in history to vigorously advocate the legitimacy of a war he himself refused to fight. His denials of genuine (what the IRA would call)

“military” credentials have had a significant causal effect on the situation there, over many horrible and tragic years. He was chief architect of a grammar of conflict in which we all knew

what was really being said but which always gave IRA leaders the relevant Monopoly card. Adams used language with the specific intention of assimilating all the linguistic, musical and

historical symbols of decent Irish nationalism to his own dysfunctional historical narrative. The Republican movement was canny. These people are clever, they noticed that in order to win

the military war it was necessary to win the linguistic one first. If you grab the language then you define the parameters of the theatre of battle. I doubt that Mr Martin McGuinness was a

keen reader of Nietzsche, but he had integrated into his soul a central insight: unless there is a God we live in a post-modern context, one in which “Truth” is what we say it is. And if

there is a God then you don’t fight shoddy sectarian wars. If Brexit is thwarted because of a fictitious set of concerns about the Good Friday Agreement then in a way it will be fitting. The

deviousness of the Remain Establishment is straight from the Irish Republican playbook: when confronted with an obstacle insist that only you have the linguistic resources available to

circumvent it. Dishonesty in language can take many forms: you can collapse genuine distinctions (say, between a “deal” and a “Treaty”) or you can invent meretricious ones (between “hard”

and “soft” Brexit). And if none of that looks like working then reach for the pamphlet marked: “I am outraged and therefore I must be right!”. Because this is the reason why Remain fanatics

are winning: that they have reignited a discussion that should have been put to bed in 2016, and they have done so on their own terms, while the rest of us were out celebrating. And when

confronted with an attempt at linguistic correction they bring out the pamphlet. The EU is bending language in a way that would make Mr McGuinness proud. Manageable and virtual systems of

customs checks are described as cumulatively constituting a “hard border”; a treaty that is designed to implicate us _ ad infinitum  _ in the structures of the European Project is posited as

a means of “withdrawal”.  There is an intimate connection between language and thought. The detail of that connection is probably inexpressible. But the Left noticed it very early. You

control the latter by appropriating the former; you abolish history, and you make no room for any creative expression of dissent (in particular – you frown on humour). Mr Adams knew this

many years ago when, in another stroke of personal misfortune, he was relocated by the British into what he calls the “prison camp” of Long Kesh, and lectured the unfortunate assembled on

the thoughts of Comrade Mao. His interrogation of the English language has been going on for a while. It’s the main “legacy issue” that the rest of us now must face as we insist that when we

Brexit we do so as a single political entity, not one that has been carved up by the casual linguistic vandalism of Adams-Barnier. Mr Adams and his friends wrapped up -figuratively of

course (he was _ never _ in the IRA)- a set of Marxist principles which landed in the lap of the Remain Establishment, handily, in about 2016. Time to throw the package right back at them.