‘Orange Bitterness’

From two entirely different sources the whole world is currently witnessing an overflow of “Orange bitterness.” Both Northern Irish loyalists, the descendants of the Scottish planters of King James I’s reign and the Boers, descendants of 17th-Century Dutch and Huguenot settlers in the Cape Colony of South Africa (later colonizing the Transvaal and Orange Free State) have an awful lot in common.

Both share a siege mentality feeding upon Old Testament self-righteousness, which proclaims Yahweh to be on the side of the “Clean, glorious and free,” thus excluding the indigenous population from the true wealth of their own land.

The philosophy of apartheid has Hitlerian overtones of Untermenschen, whether applied to the Catholic nationalist minority or the black African majority.

Unlike the rest of the world, those living in a beleaguered society are blinkered from the realities of their own situation, which is rooted in injustice. In the case of the former, the Catholic penal laws and the latter, slavery.

Catholic emancipation was achieved in 1829, yet this is of minor significance to the Orange Order compared with the Battle of the Boyne. Slavery in the British Empire was abolished in 1833, yet it is the Battle of Blood River, which is gloriously emblazoned in Afrikaner minds.

When Judgment Day comes it will be the indifference of politicians that will be on trial, the true source of present day bloodshed. It is a terrible indictment of world society that it has befallen to the men of violence to highlight and to make us aware of the plight of the second-class citizen within his own land.

To insult the dignity of a human being in Ulster on account of his/her religion is to insult the worldwide community of Catholic people. Loyalists, especially, should pause to think that they are concomitantly insulting more than 5 million of Her Majesty’s subjects on the mainland and many millions more in her commonwealth.

For an Afrikaner to regard the black African as subhuman, to be swatted like a fly at the slightest sign of unrest, is a sin against God in particular and humanity in general.

JOHN A.B. TABOR

London, England