Word: backlashers
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...toward Attica are still so divided that it is uncertain whether this tragedy will help or hinder the cause of prison reform. James V. Bennett, the former director of the federal Bureau of Prisons, is one who thinks the uprising will "harden attitudes" against change. "That's the backlash," he says. "The public is going to believe that the uprising in and of itself was a manifestation of revolutionary protest." Oth ers say that Attica will inspire nothing more than an increase in the quantity (but not the quality) of prison guards...
Ever since a militant faction of the Irish Republican Army stepped up its terrorism in Northern Ireland early this summer, a broad-scale Protestant backlash has been building in the British province. Earlier this month, 1,000 former B Specials, the Protestant police auxiliary disbanded on British orders two years ago, met to urge that the group be reorganized and rearmed. A few days later, 20,000 Belfast workers roared their approval of right-wing demands for a Protestant "third force...
Last week Ulster's Prime Minister Brian Faulkner moved to try to bring the backlash under control. First he persuaded the British to remove the 6,000-man limit on the Ulster Defense Regiment, a provincial militia. Then he announced that units of the reorganized regiment will be deployed to rural areas where Protestants have felt unprotected from I.R.A. raiders. The British army, in the meantime, decided to rearm part of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, a predominantly Protestant police force whose arms were replaced with truncheons after the rioting two years...
...terrorism was presumed to be the work of the militant "provisional" wing of the Irish Republican Army. Last week its estimated 200 guerrilla members in Belfast held the city of 400,000 virtually at ransom. Inevitably, the Protestant backlash began to take shape. The Ulster Special Constabulary Association, a body of 10,000 former members of the Protestant B Special police that were disbanded last year, held a mass meeting and called for the government to rearm them to protect Protestants...
Ulstermen could also be grateful that the peak of violence passed without an immediate widening of the conflict. The government had not declared a general curfew or a state of martial law; a widespread Protestant backlash against Catholic militancy had not appeared; and members of the illegal Irish Republican Army (the I.R.A.) had not resorted to mass terrorism. Nonetheless, the outburst marked a reversion to outright religious warfare. From Protestant and Catholic alike comes the warning in that pungent northern twang: "There's going to be a bloodbayeth, I'm afrayud...