Our response to terrorist attacks is, like much else, becoming automated. We rarely deviate from script. Tragedies are mobilised by all, most effectively by the right, in service of some higher political aim. When I visited a 9/11 exhibit in Washington D.C’s Smithsonian Museum of American History, the note we departed on went something like “and the American people were determined on action”. The invasion of Iraq loomed large in that neatly laid-out wreckage.

Yet even among those less willing to service the clash of civilisations narrative, where atrocious attacks on parliament from a Kent resident in his 50s signify a need to close off ‘our’ borders to the thousands dying in the Mediterranean, and to reinvigorate foreign policy in the direction of belligerence, many responses ring hollow. One, this week, has been particularly galling to see:

Tweeted in February and widely shared on Facebook, the meme resurfaced this week to 45k retweets and counting.

This hugely popular meme makes a modest point, well-intended. Lone-wolf and fringe attacks should not subsume the political character of entire communities; just as we did not blame the IRA on Irish people and Catholics, we should not blame terrorism on Muslim people or Arabs. But politics is rarely about intentions, and rather more about finding solidarity, and diagnosing domination and oppression as it historically occurs. On any of these counts, the post fails utterly.

Grant, perhaps generously, the equivalence between the IRA and ISIS as organisations. What remains is the suggestion that British state and civil society treated Irish Catholics fairly at the height of the Troubles. It is an utterly false one.

Bernadette Devlin reminded us in her 1969 maiden speech to Parliament that there was never born an Englishman who understood the Irish people. Such a remark set the scene for the Troubles themselves; what began as a movement for economic, social, and political justice to the Irish people spiralled into a debate on the state itself, carried out violently in the streets, as institutions failed and failed again. And without ever understanding these material demands, deeply felt in the lives of people across the country, the British state was doomed to fail in its navigation of the conflict. Much of Irish history has been made and written from the standpoint of British people who precisely thought that the Irish people were a small group of cunts. The British never understood that the Irish were more than a ‘small group of cunts’ — indeed, they never understood them at all.

The ignorance endures. The coverage of Martin McGuinness’ death in the British media (as in the Irish) prefixed on his IRA leadership as if it happened in a vacuum, with only The Guardian acknowledging how he was propelled into political violence after seeing an MP bloodied by the state after leading a civil rights march. This failure to acknowledge the full violence of the Troubles makes it easier to justify the presence and action of British armed forces in the region. When Theresa May berated “left-wing human rights lawyers” to rapturous applause this year, you could almost see the fourteen ghosts of Bloody Sunday line up behind her onstage.

This meme works to conceal these violences and more. It airbrushes over the Birmingham Six, framed for a pub bombing and only freed after seventeen years of their life sentences. The Guildford Four and the Maguire Seven suffered similar fates after being tortured into confession. Giuseppe Conlon died in prison before ever being vindicated. Thousands were interned, mostly Irish Catholics, many utterly innocent, some tortured, in the early 1970s and after. The extent of British security’s collusion with loyalist paramilitaries appalls, despite barely being uncovered thus far. All this in mind, the meme becomes totally galling. To posit a world where the British never weaponised the Troubles against Irish Catholics is to utterly rewrite history.

This is the kind of history that the British polity must tell itself in order to sustain itself. If one of the auto-responses to tragedy is now to herald “British” values — of democracy, of human rights — then these values have to have some basis in Britishness. But that very same Britishness is one steeped in the domination and control of half the world. So the violences that Britain has enacted on Ireland (and others) must be forgotten. Those it currently enacts — on the women of Yarl’s Wood, on the dead in the Mediterranean, on those in Iraq and beyond — must be an aberration. This is the unspoken implication of the meme: “we never stigmatised Irish people like this — why on earth would we do it to Muslims? Have we lost our minds?” A cursory review of history brings us to reformulate the question: “Why on earth wouldn’t you?”

In the face of this erasure, our response must be to reclaim history as it happened. One of the spectres haunting this week’s atrocious attack — a spectre this meme, in fairness, recognises — was just how hard the pushback will be on Arab and Muslim communities. We must resist this pushback. It relies on an equation of terrorism and Arab/Muslim communities, on the very essentialism that gives ISIS its ideological power. We will resist it for the better if we understand it not as aberration, but as continuation of long-refined techniques of domination and surveillance, enacted on the marginalised people of Britain and its empire.

There are differences, of course. British Muslims have not been mass interned (yet). Irish people, never immune, were less susceptible to racialised violence and abuse in the streets. The sheer size of our state apparatus would make the surveillance of Irish people look pale; an apparatus accreted out of benevolence, only for rampant right-wing populists to take its reins. But the basic premise of citing violence to enact violence, of marginalising entire communities in the name of security, remains the same.

The links are not just theoretical, either. They are tangible. The Prevent duty, imposed on universities and educational institutions in 2015, is now notorious for its profiling of Muslim, black, and brown students in the name of counter-terrorism. Examples abound where Muslim students of conflict are reported to university authorities for reading textbooks on terrorism, or domestic managers searching rooms after overhearing a student pray in Punjabi. A widely-proliferated guide to Prevent, clearly written with Islamic terrorism in mind, barely countenances what to do with a young person in the claws of white supremacy, for example. In a similar fashion, it expounds in detail on the genesis of Irish republican terrorism, and barely mentions British loyalist terrorism, despite only having legal remit in Great Britain. Deep in the documentation of the state, we can see how moments of tragedy are invoked to marginalise the already marginalised. We see the commonality of the Irish and Muslim communities.

Taoiseach Enda Kenny celebrates St. Patrick’s Day with President Trump

We, too, must insist on this commonality. We have a word for it — solidarity. And to build this solidarity, we must repoliticise our conception of Irishness. When Bernadette Devlin visited the New York in the 1960s, she was given the key to the city. She and Eamonn McCann handed it over to the Black Panthers. When Taoiseach Enda Kenny visited Washington D.C. last week, he handed President Trump, on a lunch break from violently interrupting lives with borders, a bowl of shamrock. Eavan Boland writes that displacing the Irish language with the English language is ‘a kind of scar and heals after a while into a passable imitation of what went before’. Our politics too, it seems, is a passable imitation.

This meme does one thing right: it brings back into play the powerful historical comparison between Irish and Muslim communities in the UK, communities we may think of as radically divorced, but whose marginalisation is scantly justified and heavily enforced. We should move forward in full recognition of that history, in full hope of solidarity, to a future where the marginalised will no longer be flanked either side by the violence of the state and the violence of terrorism.

*A previous version of this blog made reference to “Islamism”. A good comrade pointed out the failures of the term, consolidating as it does a disparate set of militants with different political aims (say, ISIS and the PLO) into one category under Islam. It has been replaced simply with ‘terrorism’.