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Archamasse t1_j6bar3p wrote

The article does have a sort of point - the civil war metaphor is completely incoherent imho, and it is bizarre to see it trotted out consistently without any examination.

The Irish Civil War was about as clear cut a conflict as a Civil War can get. It was rooted in a very stark and simple dilemma - take what you can get of your own state now, or hold out for all or nothing so nobody's left behind and nothing is compromised.

Treating it all as some sort of bewildering folly of whim is bizarre to Irish people when it's only just passing from living memory.

The tragedy of the war was that it was totally ideological - that's why it famously set brother against brother, because even after everything they'd all shared together, they both had reasons to fight for opposite sides. It wasn't like the English Civil War, where it was about allegiances, or the US Civil War where it was about states' rights to keep slaves - it was about what you, personally, thought.

It is not something that happened out of the blue or without explanation.

That said - I grew up in a small village, and Calvary is a fucking documentary. I don't think people would be as irritated to think McDonagh spent most of his life in England as they will be at "a load of Blarney".

Nobody considers Shane McGowan anything other than Irish and he was born in Kent.

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DeedTheInky t1_j6cfpgy wrote

I took it as a dig at the islanders - this big important thing is happening literally within earshot and nobody cares to even try and understand it, it's just this sort of bemusing bit of background scenery to them. Which is why the sister leaves, she's just had enough of their ignorance and nonsense.

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Particular-Court-619 t1_j6eiylc wrote

"the civil war metaphor is completely incoherent imho."

I feel like people expect the interpersonal conflict to perfectly track the nature of the civil war.

But that's just a weird imposition on the film, there's nothing in it that says 'you must read this interpersonal conflict as an exact allegory for the civil war.'

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