Available at Telepolis is "Irish War: British Desease"
http://www.heise.de/tp/english/inhalt/te/6765/1.html

". . .The year of sixty-eight was an auspicious one for revolution. In
Paris, Les Evenements almost toppled De Gaulle. In the US, Kent State
University radicalised a generation of young people already disenchanted
with the war in Vietnam. In Czechoslovakia, a doomed resistance movement
made its poetic, hopeless gesture of defiance against the Soviets. In
Africa, the minority Ibo fought their failed campaign for independence from
Nigeria. Not since 1956 (Hungary, Suez) had resistance enjoyed such chic.

"The IRA had an opportunity in keeping with the age. A civil rights
movement, discarding the worn-out old verities of nationalism (or so it
seemed) snapped at the heels of the Protestant jackboot like a terrier. The
jackboot obligingly kicked the dog with excessive force. Television cameras
recorded the police batons, the broken heads of unarmed demonstrators. It
was a brilliant exercise in victimology and agitpropaganda which
discredited, at a stroke, the Royal Ulster Constabulary. The age of
war-by-perception had arrived. If it were immoral - as Western governments
asserted - for Soviet tanks to crush legitimate protest in Prague, then how
could London justify the use of police armoured cars and machine guns in
Belfast, where they killed a nine-year-old as he huddled fearfully inside
his own bedroom?. . ."

I'm including this as an aid in my own attempt to understand recent street
events -- whether they are ritual theater recreating what the mass mind
thinks of the 60's -- or something else. Telepolis is a very consistent and
possibly interesting site.