Talk:Arnon Street killings

Repeated insertion of opinion by JD

Please cease reverting all attempts to improve this article. I made half a dozen changes of various sorts and you mass reverted all of them without any reasoning. I thought we had established, in relation to the 1641 rebellion that while you have excellent historical knowledge you wouldn't recognise biased phraseology if it came up and bit you. Maybe you should just put up referenced facts and leave the task of linking them into an article to those of us who can write. Sarah777 (talk) 16:55, 31 October 2009 (UTC)

• Looked up that source Robert Lynch, The Northern IRA, on page 227 is an appendix of casualties in NI 1920 -1922. No interpretations of anything and no mentions of the post 1969 conflict. Reference therefore is not only wrong but deliberately misleading.
• Your edit removed the fact that the attack was a revenge killing for the killing of a policeman.
• NPOV, the orginal is NPOV, the allegation that there was a state sponsored campaign to kill nationalists up to the present is highly disputed -hence POV.
• Irrelevant. The comment added refers to the 1970s. The article is about the 1920s and abouta prticular incident in the 1920s. Jdorney (talk)17:15, 3 November 2009 (UTC)

Article title

Do we have reliable sources that this article is most frequently called a massacre? --John (talk) 19:19, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

Well I had two main sources when writing this article, Alan Parkinson's "Belfast's Holy War" and Robert Lynch's, "The Northern IRA and the Early Years of Partition". Parkison lists the incident in his index as the "Arnon Street Murders, (p357). Lynch describes the incident but does name it (p122-123). A google search turns up 6,220 hits, including a number of sources calling it a massacre [1] [2] [3]. A search for Arnon Street Murders gives 6,850 hits, but no significant use of the name as far as could see. A further search for Arnon Street killings, gave 20,900 hits, but again no explicit use of the term and several irrelevant results. I'd go for sticking with "massacre" because it doesn't have the most hits but it does seem to have the most relevant hits.Jdorney (talk) 20:01, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

JD! That is a virtual admission that "massacre" is not an appropriate title! (And you can hardly accuse me of political bias on this one). But I do reject you insistence that the latest tit-for-tat in a series that goes back hundreds of years can be called a "retaliation". That appears a justification; the sort of justification you go to great lengths to oppose when describing the Irish actions of 1641, for example. Why would the Unionist police "retaliate" against Catholics? Why not just shoot some random people passing by? Because they were pre-conditioned, by centuries of conflict, to see Catholics as the enemy. "Retaliation" removes that context entirely. Sarah777 (talk) 22:05, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Sarah I have no hounds in the hunt here, re the name. Or whatever the expression is. Change it if you want. Massacre seems to me the most widely used in the relevant hits, that's all.

Re the other thing, you're getting deep into social/historical analysis here. WP is not the place. This is about one incident in 1922, the sources say it was revenge attack/retaliation/whatever. So that's what does in the article. I'd point out that retaliation in no way justifies the massacre and I don't think there's anything in the article that implies that.

On the wider point (and this is just for discussion purposes, because our views are not suitable for the article), if the RIC were conditioned to shoot Catholics at random then why didn't they do this before the 1920-22 conflict, or after it (before the 1970s, when conflict broke out again)? Wouldn't it be fairer to say this was a product of the conflict itself? In any case, the RIC, pre-1920 or so was an overwhelmingly Catholic force. Agents of the British state? Yes. Unionist in the tribal sense? Debateable. Jdorney (talk) 22:30, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Tribalism is a funny thing; there is nothing more hated by a tribe than a traitor and in turn the traitor becomes the most extreme opponent of the tribes beliefs. Look at the Civil War in the South. Or at any civil war. The folk who make an accommodation with the outsider/invader/oppressor and those who don't become the bitterest of enemies. I won't change the title 'cos I don't mind it, being tribally aware :) But it is dodgy from a Wiki NPOV perspective I'd have to concede. And btw, if every shooting by lone gunmen nowadays is described as a "massacre" (Dunblane, Columbine etcetera) then any shooting could be - I'd say both Arnon St and Dunmanway would be described as such if they happened today. Sarah777 (talk) 22:47, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

"I have no dog in the fight" is the expression you were looking for :) Sarah777 (talk) 22:53, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Ah, thank you!

I see what you're saying re tribalism, but I'm not sure most nationalists (as opposed to separatists of the IRB and SF) would have seen the RIC as the enemy prior to the 1918-22 period. Tom Barry's father was a policeman for example. Most rank and file RIC men were probably moderate nationalists of the IPP school anyway. Things changed totally after the 1918 election of course. The north in any case was a different story. And the USC (est 1920) was certainly a Protestant and unionist force. Jdorney (talk) 23:01, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

And in the end....do we disagree on anything?! Sarah777 (talk) 23:03, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Whoever knows in the end Sarah? I usually lose track before then. Jdorney (talk) 23:05, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Move?

The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was Move  Ronhjones  ^(Talk) 23:19, 23 December 2009 (UTC)

---

Arnon Street Massacre → Arnon Street killings

Nominator's rationale -- there must be consistency and parity of esteem. If the Dunmanway deaths were "killings", so were those on Arnon Street. To do otherwise is to copperfasten a double standard that should be unacceptable to any editor with integrity. Rms125a@hotmail.com (talk) 20:57, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

As I've said there, Fine. I'm interested in the content, not the name. But as I've argued above, I'm not sure "killings" has been widely used to describe this event. Again, though if consensis is move then lets move it.Jdorney (talk) 23:24, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

Unfortunately, Wiki was not party to the GFA. The only issue re the name that is important here is: is it the commonly used name for the event and can that be reliably verified? Sarah777 (talk) 00:27, 4 December 2009 (UTC)

First what is a massacre? Collins says "savage killing of large numbers of people." I would argue a rule of thumb that the number of dead should be in double figures and that the event should stand out from other proximate killings. Arnon Street fails on that score. --Fynire (talk) 10:14, 4 December 2009 (UTC)

So you will propose to change Bloody Sunday (1972) to the Bogside massacre will you Fynire? BigDunc 11:33, 4 December 2009 (UTC)

Happy with that Big Dunc if we are removing emotive descriptive titles from Wikipedia. --Fynire (talk) 16:03, 4 December 2009 (UTC)

Google books attests the use of the current title (with 1 result), Arnon Street massacre (with 4), Arnon Street affair (3) and Arnon Street killings (7). Angus McLellan (Talk) 18:40, 11 December 2009 (UTC)

@ Finyre - you aren't getting it. It matters not a jot what the definition of a massacre is or whether this incident meets that definition. The only thing that matters is - Is this event commonly called a "massacre" in what Wiki considers "reliable sources". Those ain't my rules. In this case it does seem that maybe killings might be better. I'd have no worries about Bloody Sunday failing the test. Sarah777 (talk) 00:08, 13 December 2009 (UTC)

Google books is a rubbish way to check things, even worse when you forget to obvious things. Arnon Street murders gets 4 results as well. And even though that's less than some, if you look at the books it is found in it looks better than the raw numbers suggest. It would also be in line with McMahon murders, if the article ended up there. Consistency is overrated, but it's something to consider. Angus McLellan (Talk) 01:11, 13 December 2009 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

OK - I came to rate but stop to rant :) Consistency is overrated - Angus McLellan. Au contraire Angus - in Wiki, and especially in Wiki Admins there is an unacceptable lack of it. It is seriously underrated by folk who either don't understand or pretend not to understand WP:NPOV. Sarah777 (talk) 10:43, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

Maybe I'm missing the point, but I don't see where consistency is rated highly. All things being equal, WP:NPOV#Impartial tone would suggest that we should aim to use similar phrasing to describe similar events. But things rarely are equal: three people killed could be a massacre in one case, murders in another, killings in a third, and so on, just depending on what the sources say. This move was closed in line with the usage in print, so I can't see any real problem. Angus McLellan (Talk) 19:27, 17 March 2010 (UTC)