Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hey everyone, this is justin Richmond. We were all
Speaker 1: set to bring you a conversation between Rick Rubin and
Speaker 1: Rizzard today that we tapped a couple of weeks ago,
Speaker 1: but in light of the heaviness of the last week
Speaker 1: and what's going on this week, we figured it'd be
Speaker 1: best to hold that at least until next week. The
Speaker 1: music industry is doing something called blackout Tuesday, where a
Speaker 1: lot of people are refusing to do business as a
Speaker 1: symbol of not wanting to go on with business as usual.
Speaker 1: And even though it's a podcast, we're only really music adjacent.
Speaker 1: Ricks involved in the music industry of course, and the
Speaker 1: artists we have on or involved, and we just figured
Speaker 1: it'd be best to take a week off and do
Speaker 1: some deeper thinking. We did think instead of just not
Speaker 1: running something, we would bring you something from our other host,
Speaker 1: Malcolm Gladwell, who's written about policing a lot throughout his career,
Speaker 1: and he had a chapter in his book, David and
Speaker 1: Goliath that he really wanted to share with you guys,
Speaker 1: and we hope that you get a chance to listen
Speaker 1: and makes you think whatever you think you know that
Speaker 1: it just maybe adds to the dialogue that's going on
Speaker 1: right now, and we'll be back with the Rizzard from
Speaker 1: Mutang next week talking to Rick and we hope you
Speaker 1: guys all stay safe in the meantime, and we appreciate
Speaker 1: you guys, and yeah, we'll be back next week. Enjoy
Speaker 1: this chapter from Malcolm's book, David and Goliath. Here's Malcolm.
Speaker 1: Hello there, Malcolm Gladwell here. Many people have spoken up
Speaker 1: over the last few days, very eloquently about the tragic
Speaker 1: death of George Floyd at the hands of a police
Speaker 1: officer in Minneapolis. It says something about the country we
Speaker 1: live in with the most powerful things I've heard of
Speaker 1: come from mayors and preachers and rappers and talk show
Speaker 1: hosts and countless ordinary people on Twitter while the White
Speaker 1: House turned off its lights and the President hid in
Speaker 1: an underground bunker. Sometimes words fail me. As those of
Speaker 1: you who have followed my career now, I've been writing
Speaker 1: and thinking about race and policing for a very long time.
Speaker 1: The final chapter of my second book, Blink, was about
Speaker 1: the forty one shots fired at a young African immigrant
Speaker 1: named Amadu Diallo by New York City police officers in
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety nine. As he stood on his front porch
Speaker 1: and reached for his wallet to show them his ID.
Speaker 1: My latest book, Talking to Strangers, starts and ends with
Speaker 1: the tragic encounter between a young African American woman, Sandra Bland,
Speaker 1: and a highway patrolman on the streets of Prairie View, Texas.
Speaker 1: So I wanted to add my voice to the chorus
Speaker 1: and share some of that work. And what I decided
Speaker 1: on is a portion of the audiobook version of I
Speaker 1: booked David and Goliath. It was published in twenty thirteen,
Speaker 1: and this chapter is about a riot that took place
Speaker 1: in Belfast, in Northern Ireland. It's about a situation from
Speaker 1: miles away and many years ago, and about the divisions
Speaker 1: of religion and class, and not the divisions of race.
Speaker 1: But sometimes I think it's useful to take a step
Speaker 1: back and consider policing in a broader context. What happened
Speaker 1: in Northern Ireland fifty years ago and what is happening
Speaker 1: now on the streets of the United States are not
Speaker 1: all that different. The core question in both is if
Speaker 1: you have power, what does it mean to use it wisely?
Speaker 1: And what are the consequences if you don't. So here
Speaker 1: we go from David and Goliathe Chapter seven, Rosemary Lawler.
Speaker 1: When the troubles began in Northern Ireland. Rosemary Lawler was
Speaker 1: a newly wed. She and her husband had just bought
Speaker 1: a house in Belfast. They had a baby. It was
Speaker 1: a summer of nineteen sixty nine. Catholics and Protestants, the
Speaker 1: two religious communities that have lived uneasily alongside each other
Speaker 1: throughout the country's history, or at each other's throat. They
Speaker 1: were bombings and riots. Gangs of Protestant militants, loyalists, as
Speaker 1: they were called, roam the streets, burning down houses. The
Speaker 1: Lawlers were Catholic, and Catholics have always been a minority
Speaker 1: in Northern Ireland. Every day they grew more frightened. I'd
Speaker 1: come home at night, Lawlers said, and they would be
Speaker 1: riding on the door tags out. Tags is a derogatory
Speaker 1: word for an Irish Catholic, or no pope here. Another
Speaker 1: night we were there. We were very lucky. A bomb
Speaker 1: came into the back yard and didn't explode. One day
Speaker 1: I went to knock on my neighbor's door and I
Speaker 1: realized she was gone. I found out that day that
Speaker 1: a lot of people had gone So when my husband,
Speaker 1: Terry came home from work, I said, Terry, what's going
Speaker 1: on here? And he said, we're in danger. We left
Speaker 1: the home that night. We had no phone. You remember
Speaker 1: this in the days before mobiles. We walked out. The
Speaker 1: fear was in me. I put my son in his pram.
Speaker 1: I guided up best we could pieces of clothes for
Speaker 1: him and ourselves. There was a tray at the bottom
Speaker 1: of the pram and we stuffed them all in the tray.
Speaker 1: And Terry says to me, right, Rosy, We're going to
Speaker 1: walk straight out of here, I'm going to smile at everybody.
Speaker 1: I was trembling. I was a teenage mom, a teenage
Speaker 1: girl who got married, nineteen married, new baby, new world,
Speaker 1: new life taken away from me like that, do you know?
Speaker 1: And I have no power to stop it. Fear is
Speaker 1: an awful thing, and I remember being really, really scared.
Speaker 1: The safest place they knew was the all Catholic neighborhood
Speaker 1: of Bala Murphy in West Belfast, where Lawlor's parents lived.
Speaker 1: But they had no car, and with Belfast and turmoil,
Speaker 1: no taxi wanted to venture into a Catholic neighborhood. Finally,
Speaker 1: they tricked a cabin to stopping by, saying their baby
Speaker 1: was sick and needed to get to a hospital. They
Speaker 1: shut the car door and Terry told the driver, I
Speaker 1: want you to take us to Balamurphy. The driver said,
Speaker 1: oh no, I'm not doing that. But Terry had a
Speaker 1: poker and he took it out and he placed the
Speaker 1: point against the back of the driver's neck and said,
Speaker 1: you're going to take us. The cab driver drove them
Speaker 1: to the edge of Balamurphy and stopped. I don't care
Speaker 1: if you stick that in me. He said, I'm not
Speaker 1: going any further. The Lawlers gathered up their baby and
Speaker 1: their worldly possessions and ran for their lives. At the
Speaker 1: beginning of nineteen seventy, things got worse. That Easter, there
Speaker 1: was a ride in Balamurphy. The British Army was called in.
Speaker 1: A fleet of armored cars with barbed wire on their
Speaker 1: bumpers patrolled the streets. Lawler would push her pram pass
Speaker 1: soldiers with automatic rifles and tear gas grenades. One weekend
Speaker 1: in June, there was a gun battle in the Boordering neighborhood.
Speaker 1: A group of Catholic gunmen stepped into the middle of
Speaker 1: the road and opened fire on a group of Protestant bystanders.
Speaker 1: In response, Protestant law whilst tried to burn down a
Speaker 1: Catholic church near the docks. For five hours, the two
Speaker 1: sides fought locked in deadly gun battle. Hundreds of fires
Speaker 1: burned across the city. By the end of the weekend,
Speaker 1: six people were dead and more than two hundred injured.
Speaker 1: The British Home Secretary responsible for Northern Ireland flew up
Speaker 1: from London, surveyed the chaos and ran back to his plane.
Speaker 1: For God's sake, bring me a large scotch, he said,
Speaker 1: burying his head in his hands. What a bloody, awful country.
Speaker 1: A week later, a woman came through Ballymurphy. Her name
Speaker 1: was Harriet Carson. She was famous for hitting Maggie Thatcher
Speaker 1: over the head with a handbag at city Hall. Lawlor said,
Speaker 1: I knew her growing up. Harriet was coming around with
Speaker 1: two lids of pots and she was banging him together
Speaker 1: and she was shouting, come on, come out, come out.
Speaker 1: The people in the lower falls were getting murdered. She
Speaker 1: was shouting it up and I went out to the door.
Speaker 1: My family was all there and she was shouting, they're
Speaker 1: locked in their houses. Their children can't get milk, and
Speaker 1: they haven't got anything for a cup of tea, and
Speaker 1: there's no bread, and come out, come out. We need
Speaker 1: to do something. The Lower Falls is in all Catholic neighborhood,
Speaker 1: just down the hill from Balamurfy. Lawler had gone to
Speaker 1: school in the Lower Falls. Her uncle lived there, as
Speaker 1: did countless cousins. She knew as many people in the
Speaker 1: Lower Falls as she did in Balamurphy. The British Army
Speaker 1: had put the entire neighborhood under curfew while they searched
Speaker 1: for illegal weapons. I didn't know what curfew meant, Lawler said,
Speaker 1: hadn't a clue. I had to say to somebody, what
Speaker 1: does that mean? She said, they're not allowed out of
Speaker 1: their houses. I said, how can they do that? I
Speaker 1: was totally stunned. Stunned, what do you mean? The people
Speaker 1: are locked in their houses, they can't get out for
Speaker 1: bread or milk. While the Brits, the British Army were
Speaker 1: kicking indoors and racking and ruining and searching. I was
Speaker 1: what the biggest thought in everybody's mind was there are
Speaker 1: people locked in their houses. And as children, you have
Speaker 1: to remember some houses had twelve fifteen kids in them.
Speaker 1: Do you know that's the way it was? What do
Speaker 1: you mean they can't get out of their houses? They
Speaker 1: were angry. Rosemey Lawler is now in her sixties, a
Speaker 1: sturdily built woman with ruddy cheeks and short, white blonde
Speaker 1: hair swept to the side. She was a seamstress by trade,
Speaker 1: and she was dressed with flair, a bright floral blouse
Speaker 1: and white cropped pants. She was talking about things that
Speaker 1: had happened half a lifetime ago, but she remembered every moment.
Speaker 1: My father said, the Brits they'll turn on us. They'll
Speaker 1: say they're in here to protect us. They'll turn on us.
Speaker 1: You wait and see. And he was one hundred percent right.
Speaker 1: They turned on us and the curfew was the start
Speaker 1: of it. The same year that Northern Ireland descended into chaos,
Speaker 1: two economists, Nathan Ladies and Charles Wolf Junior wrote a
Speaker 1: report about how to deal with insurgencies. Ladies and Wolf
Speaker 1: worked for the Rand Corporation, the prestigious think tank started
Speaker 1: after the Second World War by the Pentagon. Their report
Speaker 1: was called Rebellion and Authority. In those years when the
Speaker 1: world was exploding in violence, everyone read Ladies in Wolf.
Speaker 1: Rebellion and Authority became the blueprint for the war in Vietnam,
Speaker 1: and for how police departments dealt with civil unrest and
Speaker 1: for how governments cope with terrorism. Its conclusion was simple.
Speaker 1: Fundamental to our analysis is the assumption that the population,
Speaker 1: as individuals or groups behaves rationally, that it calculates costs
Speaker 1: and benefits to the extent that they can be related
Speaker 1: to different courses of action, and makes choices accordingly. Consequently,
Speaker 1: influencing popular behavior requires neither sympathy nor mysticism, but rather
Speaker 1: a better understanding of what costs and benefits the individual
Speaker 1: or the group is concerned with and how they are calculated.
Speaker 1: In other words, getting insurgents to behave is fundamentally a
Speaker 1: math problem. If there are riots in the streets of Belfast,
Speaker 1: it's because the costs to rioters of burning houses and
Speaker 1: smashing windows aren't high enough. And when Ladies and Wolf
Speaker 1: said that influencing popular behavior requires neither sympathy nor mysticism,
Speaker 1: what they meant was that nothing mattered but that calculation.
Speaker 1: If you were in a position of power, you didn't
Speaker 1: have to worry about how lawbreakers felt about what you
Speaker 1: were doing You just had to be tough enough to
Speaker 1: make them think twice. The general in charge of the
Speaker 1: British forces in Northern Ireland was a man straight out
Speaker 1: of the pages of rebellion and authority. His name was
Speaker 1: Ian Freeland. He had served with distinction in Normandy during
Speaker 1: the Second World War and later fought insurgencies in Cyprus
Speaker 1: and Zanzibar. He was trim and forthright, with a straight
Speaker 1: back and a square jaw and a firm hand. He
Speaker 1: conveyed the correct impression of a man who knew what
Speaker 1: needed to be done and would do it. When he
Speaker 1: arrived in Northern Ireland, he made it plain that his
Speaker 1: patience was limited. He was not afraid to use force.
Speaker 1: He had his orders from the Prime Minister. The British
Speaker 1: Army should deal toughly and be seen to deal toughly
Speaker 1: with thugs and gunmen. On June thirtieth, nineteen seventy, the
Speaker 1: British Army received a tip there were explosives and weapons
Speaker 1: hidden in a house at twenty four Balkan Street in
Speaker 1: the Lower Falls. They were told. Freeland immediately dispatched five
Speaker 1: armored cars filled with soldiers and police officers a search
Speaker 1: of the house turned up a cache of guns and ammunition. Outside,
Speaker 1: a crowd gathered. Someone started throwing stones. Stones turned into
Speaker 1: petrol bombs. A riot started. By ten pm, the British
Speaker 1: had had enough. An army helicopter armed with a loudspeaker
Speaker 1: circled the Lower Falls to ending that all residents stay
Speaker 1: inside their homes or face arrest. As the streets cleared,
Speaker 1: the army launched a massive house to house search. Disobedience
Speaker 1: was met with firm and immediate punishment. The next morning,
Speaker 1: a triumphant Freeland took two Protestant government officials and a
Speaker 1: pack of journalists on a two of the neighborhood and
Speaker 1: the back of an open flatbed truck, surveying the deserted streets, like,
Speaker 1: as one soldier later put it, the British raj on
Speaker 1: a tiger hunt. The British Army went to Northern Ireland
Speaker 1: with the best of intentions. The local police force was overwhelmed,
Speaker 1: and they were there simply to help to serve as
Speaker 1: a peacekeeper between Northern Ireland's two warring populations. This was
Speaker 1: not some distant and foreign land. They were dealing with
Speaker 1: their own country, their own language, and their own culture.
Speaker 1: They had resources and weapons, and soldiers and experience that
Speaker 1: dwarfed those of the insert elements they were trying to contain.
Speaker 1: When Freeland toured the empty streets of the Lower Falls
Speaker 1: that morning, he believed that he and his men would
Speaker 1: be back home in England by the end of the summer.
Speaker 1: But that's not what happened. Instead, what should have been
Speaker 1: a difficult few months turned into thirty years of bloodshed
Speaker 1: and mayhem in Northern Ireland. The British made a simple mistake.
Speaker 1: They fell into the trap of believing that because they
Speaker 1: had resources, weapons, soldiers and experience that dwarfed those of
Speaker 1: the insurgent elements they were trying to contain, it did
Speaker 1: not matter what the people of Northern Ireland thought of them.
Speaker 1: General Freeland believed Ladies and Wolf when they said that
Speaker 1: influencing popular behavior requires neither sympathy nor mysticism, and Ladies
Speaker 1: and Wolf were wrong. It has been said that most
Speaker 1: revolutions are not caused by revolutionaries in the first place,
Speaker 1: but by the stupid and brutality of governments. Sean mcstephen,
Speaker 1: the Provisional IRA's first chief of staff, once said, looking
Speaker 1: back on those early years, well, you had that to
Speaker 1: start with in Northern Ireland, all right. The simplest way
Speaker 1: to understand the British mistake in Northern Ireland is to
Speaker 1: picture a classroom. It's a kindergarten class, a room with
Speaker 1: brightly colored walls covered in children's drawings. Let's call the
Speaker 1: teacher Stella. The classroom was videotaped as part of a
Speaker 1: project at the Curry School of Education at the University
Speaker 1: of Virginia, and there is more than enough footage to
Speaker 1: provide a good sense of the kind of teacher Stella
Speaker 1: is and the kind of classroom she has. Even after
Speaker 1: a few minutes, it is abundantly clear that things aren't
Speaker 1: going well. Stella is sitting in a chair at the
Speaker 1: front of the room. She's reading out loud from a
Speaker 1: book that she's holding up to one side. Seven slices
Speaker 1: of tomatoes, eight juicy olives, nine chunks of chief. A
Speaker 1: girl is standing in front of her, reading along, and
Speaker 1: all around her, the class is in chaos, a mini
Speaker 1: version of Belfast in the summer of nineteen seventy. A
Speaker 1: little girl is doing cartwheels across the room. A little
Speaker 1: boy is making faces much as a class seems to
Speaker 1: be paying no attention at all. Some of the students
Speaker 1: have actually turned themselves entirely around so that they have
Speaker 1: their backs to Stella. If you were to walk in
Speaker 1: on Stella's class, what would you think. I'm guessing your
Speaker 1: first reaction would be that she has a group of
Speaker 1: unruly children. Maybe she teaches in a school in a
Speaker 1: poor neighborhood and her students come from troubled families. Maybe
Speaker 1: her students come to school without any real respect for
Speaker 1: authority or learning. Ladies and Wolf would say that she
Speaker 1: really needs to use some discipline. Children like that need
Speaker 1: a firm hand, they need rules. If there is no
Speaker 1: order in the classroom, how can any learning take place.
Speaker 1: The truth is, though, that Stella's school isn't in some
Speaker 1: terrible neighborhood. Her students aren't particularly or unusually unruly. When
Speaker 1: the class begins, they are perfectly well behaved and attentive,
Speaker 1: eager and ready to learn. They don't seem like bad
Speaker 1: apples at all. They only start to misbehave well into
Speaker 1: the lesson, and only in response to the way Stella
Speaker 1: is behaving. Stella causes the crisis. How So, by doing
Speaker 1: an appalling job of teaching the lesson, Stella had the
Speaker 1: girl from the class reading alongside her as a way
Speaker 1: of engaging the rest of the students, but the pacing
Speaker 1: of the back and forth between the two of them
Speaker 1: was excruciatingly slow and wooden. Look at her body language.
Speaker 1: One of the Virginia researchers, Bridget Hamry said, as we
Speaker 1: watched Stella right now, she's just talking to this one kid,
Speaker 1: and no one else is getting in. Her colleague, Robert
Speaker 1: Pianta added, there's no rhythm, no pace. This is going nowhere.
Speaker 1: There's no value in what she's doing. Only then did
Speaker 1: the class begin to deteriorate. The little boys started making faces.
Speaker 1: When the child started doing cartwheels, Stella missed it entirely.
Speaker 1: Three or four students to the immediate right of the
Speaker 1: teacher were still gamely trying to follow along, but Stella
Speaker 1: was so locked onto the book that she wasn't giving
Speaker 1: them any encouragement. Meanwhile, to Stella's left, five or six
Speaker 1: children had turned themselves around, but that was because they
Speaker 1: were bewildered, not because they were disobedient. Their view of
Speaker 1: the book was completely blocked by the little girl standing
Speaker 1: in front of Stella. They had no way of following
Speaker 1: along we often think of authority as a response to disobedience.
Speaker 1: A child acts up, so a teacher cracks down. Stella's classroom, however,
Speaker 1: suggests something quite different. Disobedience can also be a response
Speaker 1: to authority. If the teacher doesn't do her job properly,
Speaker 1: then the child will become disobedient. With classrooms like this one,
Speaker 1: people will call what is happening a behavioral issue. Said
Speaker 1: we were watching one of Stella's kids wiggling and squirming
Speaker 1: and contorting her face and altogether doing whatever she could
Speaker 1: to avoid her teacher. But one of the things we
Speaker 1: find is that this sort of thing is more often
Speaker 1: an engagement problem than a behavioral problem. If a teacher
Speaker 1: is actually doing something interesting, these kids are quite capable
Speaker 1: of being engaged. Instead of responding in a let me
Speaker 1: control your behavior way, the teacher needs to think, how
Speaker 1: can I do something interesting that will prevent you from
Speaker 1: misbehaving in the first place. The next video Pianta and
Speaker 1: Hamrey played was of a third grade teacher giving homework
Speaker 1: to her students. Each student was given a copy of
Speaker 1: the assignment, and the teacher in the class read the
Speaker 1: instructions aloud together. Pianta was aghast. Just the idea that
Speaker 1: you would be choral reading a set of instructions to
Speaker 1: a bunch of eight year olds is almost disrespectful, he said,
Speaker 1: I mean, why is there any instructional purpose they know
Speaker 1: how to read. It's like a waiter in a restaurant
Speaker 1: giving the menu and then proceeding to read every item
Speaker 1: to you just as it appears on the page. A
Speaker 1: boy sitting next to the teacher raises his hand midway
Speaker 1: through the reading, and without looking at him, the teacher
Speaker 1: reaches out, grabs his wrists and pushes his hand down.
Speaker 1: Another child starts to actually do the assignment, an entirely
Speaker 1: logical action given the pointlessness of what the teacher is doing.
Speaker 1: The teacher addresses him sharply, sweetie, this is homework. It
Speaker 1: was a moment of discipline. The child had broken the rules.
Speaker 1: The teacher had responded firmly and immediately. If you were
Speaker 1: to watch that moment with a sound turned off, you
Speaker 1: would think of it as Ladies and Wolf perfectly applied.
Speaker 1: But if you were to listen to what the teacher
Speaker 1: was saying and think about the incident from the child's perspective,
Speaker 1: it would become clear that it is having anything but
Speaker 1: its intended effect. The little boy isn't going to come
Speaker 1: away with the renewed appreciation of the importance of following
Speaker 1: the rules. He's going to come away angry and disillusioned.
Speaker 1: Why because the punishment is completely arbitrary. He can't speak
Speaker 1: up and give his own side of the story, and
Speaker 1: he wants to learn. If that little boy became defiant,
Speaker 1: it was because his teacher made him that way, just
Speaker 1: as Stella turned an eager and attentive student into someone
Speaker 1: who did cartwheels across the floor. When people in authority
Speaker 1: want the rest of us to behave, it matters first
Speaker 1: and foremost how they behave. This is called the principle
Speaker 1: of legitimacy, and legitimacy is based on three things. First
Speaker 1: of all, the people who are asked to obey authority
Speaker 1: have to feel like they have a voice, that if
Speaker 1: they speak up, they will be heard. Second, the law
Speaker 1: has to be predictable. There has to be a reasonable
Speaker 1: expectation that the rules tomorrow are going to be roughly
Speaker 1: the same as the rule today. And third, the authority
Speaker 1: has to be fair. It can't treat one group differently
Speaker 1: from another. All good parents understand these three principles Implicitly,
Speaker 1: if you want to stop little Johnny from hitting his sister,
Speaker 1: you can't look away one time and scream at him another.
Speaker 1: You can't treat his sister differently when she hits him,
Speaker 1: And if he says he really didn't hit his sister,
Speaker 1: you have to give him a chance to explain himself.
Speaker 1: How you punish is as important as the act of
Speaker 1: punishing itself. Nor is the story of Stella all that surprising.
Speaker 1: Anyone who has ever sat in a classroom knows that
Speaker 1: it is important for teachers to earn the respect of
Speaker 1: their students. What is harder to understand, however, is the
Speaker 1: importance of these same principles when it comes to law
Speaker 1: and order. We know our parents and our teachers, so
Speaker 1: it makes sense that legitimacy should matter a lot inside
Speaker 1: the home or the school. But the decision about whether
Speaker 1: to rob a bank or shoots one seems like it
Speaker 1: belongs to a very different category, doesn't it. That's what
Speaker 1: Ladies and Wolf meant when they said that fighting criminals
Speaker 1: and insurgents requires neither sympathy nor mysticism. They were saying
Speaker 1: that at that level, the decision to obey the law
Speaker 1: is a function of a rational calculation of risks and benefits.
Speaker 1: It isn't personal. But that's precisely where they went wrong,
Speaker 1: because getting criminals and insurgents to behave turns out to
Speaker 1: be as dependent on legitimacy as getting children to behave
Speaker 1: in the classroom. We'll be right back with more of
Speaker 1: Malcolm's reading from his book David and Glithe. We're back
Speaker 1: with more of Malcolm's reading of David and Glythe When
Speaker 1: Ladies and Wolf wrote that influencing popular behavior requires neither
Speaker 1: sympathy nor mysticism, they meant that the power of the
Speaker 1: state was without limits. If you wanted to impose order,
Speaker 1: you didn't have to worry about what those whom you
Speaker 1: were ordering about thought of you. You were above that.
Speaker 1: But Ladies and Wolf had it backwards. That was the
Speaker 1: mistake General Freeland made in the Lower Falls. He didn't
Speaker 1: look at what was happening through the eyes of people
Speaker 1: like Rosemary Lawler. He thought he'd ended the insurgency when
Speaker 1: he rode around the hush streets of the Lower Falls
Speaker 1: like a British raj on a tiger hunt. Had he
Speaker 1: bothered to drive up the street to Balamurphy where Harriet
Speaker 1: Carson was banging the lids of pots and saying, come on,
Speaker 1: come out, come out. The people in the lower falls
Speaker 1: are getting murdered. He would have realized the insurgency was
Speaker 1: just beginning. July in Northern Ireland is the height of
Speaker 1: what is known as Marching season, when the country's Protestant
Speaker 1: loyalists organized parades to commemorate their long ago victories over
Speaker 1: the country's Catholic minority. There are church parades, arch banner
Speaker 1: and hall parades, commemorative band parades, and blood and Thunder
Speaker 1: and Kick the Pope flute band parades. There are parades
Speaker 1: with full silver bands, parades with bagpipes, parades with accordions,
Speaker 1: and parades with marchers wearing sashes and dark suits and
Speaker 1: bowler hats. There are hundreds of parades in all, involving
Speaker 1: tens of thousands of people, culminating every year in a
Speaker 1: massive march on the twelfth of July that marks the
Speaker 1: anniversary of the victory by William of Orange in the
Speaker 1: Battle of the Boyne in sixteen ninety, when Protestant control
Speaker 1: over Northern Ireland was established once and for all. The
Speaker 1: night before the twelfth, as it is known marches around
Speaker 1: the country, hold street parties, and build enormous bonfires. When
Speaker 1: the fire is at its height, the group chooses a
Speaker 1: symbol to burn. In past years it has often been
Speaker 1: an effigy of the Pope or some hated local Catholic official.
Speaker 1: Here's how one old twelfth ditty goes, sung to the
Speaker 1: tune of Clementine. Build a bonfire, Build a bonfire, stick
Speaker 1: a Catholic on the top, put the Pope right in
Speaker 1: the middle, and burn the fucking lot. Northern Ireland is
Speaker 1: not a large country. Its cities are dense and compact,
Speaker 1: and as the loyalists march by each summer in their
Speaker 1: bowler hats and sashes with flutes, they inevitably pass by
Speaker 1: the neighborhoods of the people whose defeat they are celebrating.
Speaker 1: The central artery of Catholic West Belfast is in places
Speaker 1: no more than a few minutes walk from the street
Speaker 1: that runs through the heart of Protestant West Belfast. There
Speaker 1: are places in Belfast where the houses of Catholics back
Speaker 1: directly onto the backyards of Protestants, in such close proximity
Speaker 1: that each house has a giant metal great over its
Speaker 1: backyard to protect the inhabitants against debris or petrol bombs
Speaker 1: thrown by their neighbors. On the night before the twelfth,
Speaker 1: when loyalists lit bonfires around the city, people in Catholic
Speaker 1: bhods would smell the smoke and hear the chants and
Speaker 1: see their flag going up in flames. In Marching season,
Speaker 1: violence always erupts in Northern Ireland. One of the instants
Speaker 1: that began the troubles was in nineteen sixty nine, after
Speaker 1: two days of riots broke out when a parade passed
Speaker 1: through a Catholic neighborhood. When the marchers went home, they
Speaker 1: went on a rampage to the streets of West Belfasts,
Speaker 1: burning down scores of homes. The gun battles the following
Speaker 1: summer that so tried Freeland's patients also happened during Protestant marches.
Speaker 1: Imagine that every summer US Army veterans from the Northern
Speaker 1: States paraded through the streets of Atlanta and Richmond to
Speaker 1: commemorate their long ago victory in the American Civil War.
Speaker 1: In the dark years of Northern Ireland, when Catholic and
Speaker 1: Protestant were at each other's throat, that's what Marching season
Speaker 1: felt like when the residence of the Lower Falls looked
Speaker 1: up that afternoon and saw the British Army descend on
Speaker 1: their neighborhood. Then they were as desperate as anyone to
Speaker 1: see law and order enforced in Belfast, but they were
Speaker 1: equally anxious about how law and order would be enforced.
Speaker 1: Their world did not seem fair. The twelfth, when either
Speaker 1: their flag or their pope would be burned in giant bonfires,
Speaker 1: was only days away. The institution charged with keeping both
Speaker 1: sides apart during marching season was the police force, the
Speaker 1: Royal Ulster Constabulary, but the RUC was almost entirely Protestant.
Speaker 1: It belonged to the other side. The RUC had done
Speaker 1: almost nothing to try and stop the riots of the
Speaker 1: previous summer. A tribunal convened by the British government concluded,
Speaker 1: after the Protestant loyalists had torched houses that the RUC
Speaker 1: officers had failed to take effective action. Journalists at the
Speaker 1: scene reported loyalists going up to police officers and asking
Speaker 1: them if they could borrow their weapons. One of the
Speaker 1: reasons the British Army had been brought into Northern Ireland
Speaker 1: was to serve as an impartial referee between Protestant and Catholic.
Speaker 1: But England was an overwhelmingly Protestant country, so it seemed
Speaker 1: only natural to Northern Ireland's beleaguered Catholics that the sympathies
Speaker 1: of the soldiers would ultimately lie with the Protestants. When
Speaker 1: a big Loyalist march had run through Balamurfy in the
Speaker 1: easter before the Lower Falls curfew, British soldiers had stood
Speaker 1: between the marchers and the residents, ostensibly to act as
Speaker 1: a buffer. But the troops faced the Catholics on a
Speaker 1: sidewalk and stood with their backs to the loyalists, as
Speaker 1: if they saw their job as to protect the Loyalists
Speaker 1: from the Catholics, but not the Catholics from the Loyalists.
Speaker 1: General Freeland was trying to enforce the law in Belfast,
Speaker 1: but he needed to first ask himself if he had
Speaker 1: the legitimacy to enforce the law, and the truth is
Speaker 1: he didn't. He was in charge of an institution that
Speaker 1: the Catholics of Northern Ireland believed with good reason was
Speaker 1: thoroughly sympathetic to the very people who had burned down
Speaker 1: the houses of their friends and relatives the previous summer
Speaker 1: and when the law is applied in the absence of legitimacy,
Speaker 1: it does not produce obedience, it produces the opposite. It
Speaker 1: leads to backlash. The great puzzle of Northerland is why
Speaker 1: it took to British so long to understand this. In
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty nine, the troubles resulted in thirteen deaths, seventy
Speaker 1: three shootings, and eight bombings. In nineteen seventy, Freeland decided
Speaker 1: to get tough with thugs and gunmen, warning that anyone
Speaker 1: caught throwing gasoline bombs was liable to be shot. What happened,
Speaker 1: The historian Desmond Hamil rights. The IRA retaliated by saying
Speaker 1: that they would shoot soldiers if irishmen were shot. The
Speaker 1: Protestant Ulster Volunteer Horse, an extreme and illegal paramilitary unit,
Speaker 1: quickly joined in, offering to shoot a Catholic in return
Speaker 1: for every soldier shot by the IRA. The Times quoted
Speaker 1: a Belfast citizen saying, anyone who isn't confused here doesn't
Speaker 1: really understand what is going on. That year, there were
Speaker 1: twenty five deaths, two hundred and thirteen shootings, and one
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty five bombings. The British stood firm. They
Speaker 1: cracked down even harder, and in nineteen seventy one there
Speaker 1: were one hundred and eighty four deaths, one thousand and
Speaker 1: twenty bombings and one thousand and seven hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: six shootings. Then the British drew a line in the sand.
Speaker 1: The Army instituted a policy known as internment. Civil rights
Speaker 1: in Northern Ireland were suspended, The country was flooded with
Speaker 1: troops and the Army declared that anyone suspected of terrorist
Speaker 1: activities would be arrested and held in prison indefinitely without
Speaker 1: charges or trial. So many young Catholic men were rounded
Speaker 1: up during in tournament that in a neighborhood like Balamurphy,
Speaker 1: everyone had a brother, or a father or a cousin
Speaker 1: in prison. If that many people in your life have
Speaker 1: served time behind bars, does the law seem fair anymore?
Speaker 1: Does it seem predictable? Does it seem like you can
Speaker 1: speak up and be heard? Things got even worse. In
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy two, there were one thousand, four hundred and
Speaker 1: ninety five shootings, five hundred and thirty one armed robberies,
Speaker 1: one thousand, nine hundred and thirty one bombings, and four
Speaker 1: hundred and ninety seven people killed. One of those four
Speaker 1: hundred and ninety seven was a seventeen year old boy
Speaker 1: named Amen. Amen was Rosemary Lawler's little brother. Amen appeared
Speaker 1: at my door. Lawlers said, he said to me, I'd
Speaker 1: love to stay here for a day or two, and
Speaker 1: I said, why don't you? He said, I would have
Speaker 1: a fit, she would go ballistic. Then he confided in
Speaker 1: myself and my husband that he was getting harassed by
Speaker 1: the British Army every time he was out, every corner
Speaker 1: he turned, everywhere he went, they were stopping him and
Speaker 1: they threatened him. Was he actually working with the IRA.
Speaker 1: She didn't know, and she said it didn't matter. We
Speaker 1: were all suspects in their eyes. She went on, that's
Speaker 1: the way it was. And Aimon was shot shot by
Speaker 1: a British soldier. Him and another fellow were having a
Speaker 1: smoke and one shot rang out and Aimen got it.
Speaker 1: He lived for eleven weeks. He died on the sixteenth
Speaker 1: of January, at seventeen and a half years of age.
Speaker 1: She began to tear up. My father never worked again
Speaker 1: at the dock. My mother was destroyed, heartbroken. It's forty
Speaker 1: years ago. This year. It's still rough. Lolla was a
Speaker 1: young wife and mother living what she had expected would
Speaker 1: be a normal life in modern Belfast. But then she
Speaker 1: lost her home. She was threatened and harrassed. Her relatives
Speaker 1: down the hill were imprisoned in their homes. Her brother
Speaker 1: was shot and killed. She never wanted any of it,
Speaker 1: nor asked for any of it, nor could even make
Speaker 1: sense of what happened. That was my life, my whole
Speaker 1: new life, she said. And then this was forced upon me,
Speaker 1: and I go, this is not right. Do you know?
Speaker 1: Here are my people I grew up within school being
Speaker 1: burnt out of their houses. The British Army that came
Speaker 1: in to protect us has now turned on us and
Speaker 1: has rackin and ruinin. I became hooked. I don't mean
Speaker 1: that flippantly. I became that way because I can't sit
Speaker 1: in the house while this is going on. I can't
Speaker 1: be a nine to five mother. People call it the troubles,
Speaker 1: she continued. It was war. The British Army was out
Speaker 1: there with armored cars and weapons and you name it.
Speaker 1: That's a war zone lived in the British Army came
Speaker 1: in here with every means that they had available to
Speaker 1: put us down, and we were like rubber dolls. We'd
Speaker 1: just bounced back up again. Don't get me wrong, we
Speaker 1: got hurt on the way down. A lot of people
Speaker 1: had heartache. I suffered from anger for a long long time,
Speaker 1: and I've apologized to my children for that. But the
Speaker 1: circumstances dictated that it wasn't how I was. I wasn't
Speaker 1: born that way. This was forced upon me. Malcolm will
Speaker 1: finish reading from this chapter of his book David and
Speaker 1: Goliath when we come back. We're back with the rest
Speaker 1: of Malcolm's chapter from David and Goliath. When General Freeland's
Speaker 1: men descended on the Lower Falls, the first thing the
Speaker 1: neighbors did was to run to Saint Peter's Cathedral, the
Speaker 1: local Catholic church, just a few blocks away. The defining
Speaker 1: feature of the Lower Falls, like so many of the
Speaker 1: other Catholic neighborhoods of West Belfast, was its legiosity. Saint
Speaker 1: Peter's was the heart of the neighborhood. Four hundred people
Speaker 1: would attend mass at Saint Peter's on a typical week day.
Speaker 1: The most important man in the community was the local priest.
Speaker 1: He came running. He went up to the soldiers The
Speaker 1: raid must be done quickly, he warned them, or they
Speaker 1: would be trouble. Forty five minutes passed, and the soldiers
Speaker 1: emerged with their hall fifteen pistols, a rifle, a Schmeisser's
Speaker 1: submachine gun, and a cache of explosives and ammunition. The
Speaker 1: patrol packed up and left, turning onto a side street
Speaker 1: that would take them out of the lower Falls. In
Speaker 1: the interim, however, a small crowd had gathered, and as
Speaker 1: the armored cars turned the corner, a number of young
Speaker 1: men ran forward and started throwing stones at the soldiers.
Speaker 1: The patrol stopped. The crowd grew angry. The soldiers responded
Speaker 1: with teargas. The crowd grew angrier. Stones turned to petrol bombs,
Speaker 1: and petrol bombs to bullets. A taxi driver said he
Speaker 1: had seen someone carrying a submachine gun heading for Balkan Street.
Speaker 1: The riders set up roadblocks to slow the armies advance.
Speaker 1: A truck was set ablaze one block away, blocking the
Speaker 1: end of the street. The soldiers fired even more tear
Speaker 1: gas until the wind had carried it clear across the
Speaker 1: Lower Falls. The crowd grew angrier. Still, why did the
Speaker 1: patrol stop? Why didn't they just keep going lingering in
Speaker 1: the neighborhood is exactly what the priests told them not
Speaker 1: to do. The priests went back to the soldiers and
Speaker 1: pleaded with them again. If they stopped the tear gas,
Speaker 1: he said he would get the crowd to stop throwing stones.
Speaker 1: The soldiers didn't listen. Their instructions were to get tough
Speaker 1: and be seen to get tough with thugs and gunmen.
Speaker 1: The priests turned back towards the crowd. As he did,
Speaker 1: the soldiers fired off another round of tear gas. The
Speaker 1: canisters fell at the feet of the priest, and he
Speaker 1: staggered across the street, leaning on a window sill as
Speaker 1: he gasped for air. In a neighborhood so devout that
Speaker 1: four hundred people would show up a mass on a
Speaker 1: typical weekday, the British Army gassed the priest. That was
Speaker 1: when the riots started. Freeland called in reinforcements to subdue
Speaker 1: a community of eight thousand people packed into tiny houses
Speaker 1: along narrow streets. The British brought in three thousand troops,
Speaker 1: and not just any troops to a fiercely Catholic neighborhood.
Speaker 1: Freeland brought in soldiers from the Royal Scots, one of
Speaker 1: the most obviously and self consciously Protestant regiments in the
Speaker 1: entire Army. Army helicopters circled overhead, ordering the residence by
Speaker 1: megaphone to stay inside their homes. Row blogs were placed
Speaker 1: at every exit, a curfew was declared and a systematic
Speaker 1: house by house search began. Twenty and twenty one year
Speaker 1: old soldiers, still smarting from the indignity of being pelted
Speaker 1: with stones and petrol bombs, forced their way into home
Speaker 1: after home, punching holes in walls and ceilings, ransacking bedrooms.
Speaker 1: Listened to one of those British soldiers looking back on
Speaker 1: what happened that night. A guy still in his pajamas
Speaker 1: came out, cursing, wielding a lamp and waxed stand across
Speaker 1: the head stand, dodged the next one and decked the
Speaker 1: bloke with his rifle butt. I knew full well that
Speaker 1: a lot of the lads were taking this opportunity to
Speaker 1: vent their anger over things already done. Heads were being
Speaker 1: cracked and houses trashed from top to bottom. Everything in
Speaker 1: the houses became a mass of rubble, but out of
Speaker 1: the blur, little sharp details still cut through school photos,
Speaker 1: smiley family pictures, cracked trinkets and crucifixes, stamped kids crying,
Speaker 1: crunching on the glass of the Pope's picture, unfinished meals
Speaker 1: and bad wall paper, colored toys and TV noise and
Speaker 1: radio crackle, painted plates, shoes, a body in the hall
Speaker 1: flattened against the wall. This is when I did feel
Speaker 1: like we'd invaded. Three hundred and thirty seven people were
Speaker 1: arrested that night. Sixty were injured. Charles O'Neill, a disabled
Speaker 1: Air Force veteran, was run over and killed by a
Speaker 1: British armored car. As his body lay on the ground,
Speaker 1: one of the soldiers poked a bystander with a baton
Speaker 1: and said, move on, you Irish bastard. There were not
Speaker 1: enough of you dead. A man named Thomas Burns was
Speaker 1: shot by a soldier on the Falls Road at eight
Speaker 1: pm as he stood with a friend who was boarding
Speaker 1: up the windows of his store. When his sister came
Speaker 1: to pick up his body, she was told he had
Speaker 1: no business being on the street at that time. At
Speaker 1: eleven PM, an elderly man named Patrick Ellman, thinking the
Speaker 1: worst was over, went out at his bedroom slippers and
Speaker 1: shirt sleeves for a pre bedtime stroll. He died in
Speaker 1: a burst of army gunfire. One of the neighborhood accounts
Speaker 1: of the curfew says of Ellman's death that very night
Speaker 1: British troops actually entered and courted themselves in the shopman's home,
Speaker 1: the distraught sister having been moved to the other brothers
Speaker 1: up the street. This tasteless intrusion into the abandoned home
Speaker 1: was discovered the next afternoon during the interval and the curfew,
Speaker 1: when the brother with his daughter and son in law
Speaker 1: went down to the house and found the door broken down,
Speaker 1: a window broken, kit lying on the floor, shaving tackle
Speaker 1: on the settee, and used cups in his scullery. Neighbors
Speaker 1: informed them that the soldiers had dust down in the
Speaker 1: upstairs rooms as well, a door broken down, a window broken,
Speaker 1: dirty dishes left in the sink. Ladies and Wolf believed
Speaker 1: that all the counts are rules and rational principles, but
Speaker 1: what actually matters are the hundreds of small things that
Speaker 1: the powerful dew or don't do to establish their legitimacy,
Speaker 1: like sleeping in the bed of an innocent man you
Speaker 1: just shot accidentally and scattering your belongings around his house.
Speaker 1: By Sunday morning, the situation inside the Lower Falls was
Speaker 1: growing desperate. The Lower Falls was not a wealthy neighborhood.
Speaker 1: Many of the adults were unemployed, or if they were not,
Speaker 1: relied on piecework. The streets were crowded and the homes
Speaker 1: were narrow, cheaply built nineteenth century terraced red brick row
Speaker 1: houses with one room to a floor and bathrooms in
Speaker 1: the backyard. Very few houses had a refrigerator. They were
Speaker 1: dark and damp. People bought bread daily because it grew
Speaker 1: moldy otherwise, but the curfew was now thirty six hours
Speaker 1: old and there was no bread left. The Catholic neighborhoods
Speaker 1: of West Belfast are packed so tightly together, linked by
Speaker 1: so many ties of marriage and blood, that words spread
Speaker 1: quickly from one to the next about the plight of
Speaker 1: the Lower Falls. Harriet Carson walked through Balamurphy, banging together
Speaker 1: the lids of pots. Next came a woman named Mary Drum.
Speaker 1: She had a bullhorn. She began walking through the streets
Speaker 1: shouting out to the women, come out, fill your prams
Speaker 1: with bread and milk. The children haven't gotten any food.
Speaker 1: The women started to gather in groups of two and four,
Speaker 1: and ten and twenty, until they numbered in the thousands.
Speaker 1: Some people still had their rollers in their hair and
Speaker 1: their scarves over their head. Lawla remembers we linked arms
Speaker 1: and sang, we shall overcome, We shall overcome. Some day
Speaker 1: we got down to the bottom of the hill, she
Speaker 1: went on. The atmosphere was electric. The Brits were standing
Speaker 1: with their helmets and their guns already, their batons were out.
Speaker 1: We turned and went down the Grosvenor Road, singing and shouting.
Speaker 1: I think the Brits were in awe. They couldn't believe
Speaker 1: that these women with prams were coming down to take
Speaker 1: them on. I remember seeing one Brits standing there scratching
Speaker 1: his head, going, what do we do with all these women?
Speaker 1: Do we go into riot situation here? Then we turned
Speaker 1: onto Slate Street where the school was my school, and
Speaker 1: the Brits were there. They come flying out of the
Speaker 1: school and there was hand to hand fighting. We got
Speaker 1: the hair pulled out of us. The Brits just grabbed us,
Speaker 1: threw us up against the walls. Oh aye, They beat
Speaker 1: us like and if you fell you had to get
Speaker 1: up very quickly because you didn't want to get trampled.
Speaker 1: They came out with brutality. I remember standing up on
Speaker 1: top of a car and having a look at what
Speaker 1: was going on in the front. Then I saw a
Speaker 1: man with shaving cream on his face and putting his
Speaker 1: braces on, and all of a sudden, the soldiers stopped
Speaker 1: beating us. The man putting his braces on was the
Speaker 1: commanding officer of the Slate Street checkpoint. He might have
Speaker 1: been the only voice of sanity on the British side
Speaker 1: that day, the only one who understood the full dimensions
Speaker 1: of the catastrophe unfolding. A heavily armed group of soldiers
Speaker 1: was beating up a group of pram pushing women coming
Speaker 1: to feed the children of the lower Falls. He told
Speaker 1: his men to stop. You have to understand the march
Speaker 1: was still coming down the road and the people the
Speaker 1: back hadn't a clue what was going on at the front.
Speaker 1: Lawla went on. They kept coming, women were crying, People
Speaker 1: started coming out of their houses, pulling people in because
Speaker 1: they were so many injured. Once all the people started
Speaker 1: coming out of their houses, the Brits lost control. Everyone
Speaker 1: came out on the streets, hundreds and hundreds of people.
Speaker 1: It was like a domino effect. One street that come out.
Speaker 1: Next thing you know, doors are opening on another street,
Speaker 1: another street, and another street. The Brits gave up. They
Speaker 1: had their hands up. The women forced, and we forced,
Speaker 1: and we forced until we got in, and we got
Speaker 1: in and we broke the curfew. I've thought about it. God,
Speaker 1: it was like everybody was jubilant. It was like we
Speaker 1: did it. I remember coming home and suddenly felt very
Speaker 1: shaky and upset and nervous about the whole episode. Do
Speaker 1: you know. I remember speaking to my father about it afterward.
Speaker 1: I said, Daddy, your words came true. They turned on us,
Speaker 1: and he said, true, British army, that's what they do.
Speaker 1: He was right. They turned on us and that was
Speaker 1: the start of it.