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Transformation Through Training Issue No 7 July 2015 23 military force by each government of the day and the concurrent policies of emancipation and acquiescence of generations past that secured the country and silenced the murderous echoes of Catesbys Gunpowder Plot. In short with every Catholic generational struggle time and political adroitness have been of the essence and it is from this perspective that the analogy is both relevant and important. As with many internal conflicts however todays insurgency is being reacted to out of context and within artificial constructs that not only belie the applicability of lessons from historical precedents but distort the nature of the threat from one with abstraction to one without. In doing so it has become near impossible to determine which values are necessary to balance the equation of threat and the arithmetic of the accumulative individual efforts of generations past has been lost. The result is that instead of a conventional adversary with threads of reference and a common anthology the conflict has been divorced from its roots and left to culture on its own theological indifferences. The zeitgeist of the generational struggle with radical Islam in the United Kingdom has hence become typified and influenced not by political action but by political reaction and in relative terms an Asquith-like policy of non- engagement. To return to the analogy at no point at least not until the Home Rule Crisis in British Ireland was such a strategic response to the Catholic threat one of either isolation or a policy of containment in which an acceptable sustainable level of violence was the ultimate goal. Even with the IRAs Long War sixty years later it would be disingenuous to negate the cumulative effect of attempts by previous generations to counter the stalemate directly and the historical parameters in which the war itself was eventually waged. Indeed the accelerated rate at which each generation actually set out to crush any Catholic dissent is readily apparent. From the Jacobite Rising to the Easter Rising time has always been primary and the luxury of a waiting game or a victory dependent on the passing of a generation an uncertain unwarranted and arguably unprecedented and dangerous concept. To put this threat to the state into perspective more than half a million Catholics served with foreign powers against their King in the years leading up to the 1790s and millions more were in empathy. Indeed in the first half of the century over a 100000 had been killed and wounded in foreign service. The import of the analogy however is not to highlight the terrific numbers involved but to show how the phenomenon of foreign fighters was reversed and the speed with which step by step the loyalty of Catholics was secured - despite a century in which Catholics rebelled on no less than six occasions and extreme redolent flagrant and radical displays of treason a rising immigrant population and political necessity ensured that ways were found that negotiated the paths between the different visions of the religions adherents and united the Kingdoms populations. Although the Papist and Relief Acts bear the scars of the tempestuous nature of these paths their application led directly towards the dismantling of the penal laws and to policies that ensured the demise of the spiritual and communal influence of foreign powers. By doing so the country was able to reign in the political outcasts that allegiances and oaths to the Crown had hitherto engineered by default and encompass Catholic powers into the apparatus of the state. The fruits of the process were evident from the outset and of immediate significance compared to the few thousand Irish Catholics that served Napoleon for example no less than 200000 had served the Crown by Wellingtons victory at Waterloo in 1815. Indeed by the 1830s a good half of the rank and file of the British Army were made up of Anglo-Irish Catholic blood. In short despite the legitimate fear of insurrection with many of the revolutions of the Enlightenment having either collapsed against the old regimes of Catholic Europe or indulged in the regicide and wholesale slaughter of its ruling families the drive towards emancipation and allegiance to the Crown continued unabated. The reason for this was not because of public demand or any egalitarian calling but that the political development of Britain had been staked and rested upon delivering an alternative to combat what was readily becoming a common enemy and an obstacle to the progressive expansion of the Empire. This political commitment to reformation as opposed to segregation in the early 19th century not only liberated the country from religious intolerance and buried the prejudices of its recusant inheritance but enabled Britain to counter the aggressive anti- Catholic sentiment that had stifled the concept of a unified state and release millions of English Welsh Scots and Irish nationals from loyalties that their fellow countrymen had perceived to be tantamount to treason. By the time of the Great War when the allegiance of entire populations was required and alongside hundreds of thousands of Muslim volunteers a generation of Irish Scots Welsh English and foreign Catholics answered the call and enlisted to fight for the shared values and commonality that this reformed concept of King and Country had come to represent. Simply put in a short period of time temporal and spiritual allegiances