Within days of each other, Fidel Castro and Ian Paisley relinquished power after a reign of four decades over the respective destinies of Cuba and Ulster. The coverage of these two events reflects the inherent biases of our media âe” and of our own “world view.”

Castro âe” Cuba Si, Yanqui No âe” got world “star” treatment ever since his “barbudos” came down on Havana from the Sierra Maestra in 1959, at the height of the Cold War. Paisley was treated as just a parochial oddball until May 2007 when, after much bloodshed, he finally said “Yes” to power-sharing with Sinn Fein.

To be sure, “Dr. No” Paisley never wielded state power until he became First Minister of Northern Ireland under the British Devolution Plan, while Castro was Prime Minister of Cuba in 1959 – then First Secretary of the Communist Party, Head of State, President of the Council of Ministers, and Comandante en Jefe of the Armed Forces.

Yet, as founding pillar of the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster, launched in 1951 in an Ulster village, Paisley foreshadowed by half a century the militant, fundamentalist brand of Christian evangelism that has gained supremacy in the United States under George W. Bush âe” with devastating consequences for one and all.

Fundamentalism vs communism

But then, religious extremism was one of our most effective weapons against the spread of communism during the Cold War. Roosevelt’s 1945 Quincy Pact with the Saudis âe” protection of wahhabism and the Kingdom in return for access to oil âe” preceded the creation, engineered by the British through partition, of the twin armed theocracies of Pakistan and Israel.

Ireland broke free of the British Crown by becoming a republic in 1948, but it seethed under the partition of its northern “six counties” known as Ulster. Here, the Protestant majority continued to lord it over the Catholics, as the Anglo-Norman conquerors had done over the whole of Ireland since the 12th century âe” and after Henry VIII broke with Rome 400 years later and turned armed Protestantism into a strategic weapon.

Paisley emerged in this context, fighting for Ulster and for Protestant privileges in one of the last strongholds of the defunct British Empire, for Unionism against Catholicism and Republicanism.

Though he achieved power only last year, and had to contend with David Trimble as a rival, Paisley worked in tandem with London, the British armed forces and the Royal Ulster Constabulary. He spoke for the Protestant majority of Ulster when he denounced the Pope as “the Anti-Christ” in the European Parliament in 1988.

The evangelical nexus

He earned his nickname of “Dr. No,” made popular at the time by Ian Fleming’s novel, from his knee-jerk opposition to any form of accommodation with the Irish Republic and the oppressed Catholic minority in Ulster, especially with Sinn Fein, which in the 1960s had renewed the armed struggle for pan-Irish nationalism.

His “Dr.” title was conferred in 1954 by the American Pioneer Theological Seminary of Rockville, Illinois. This being an outlawed outfit, his “doctorate” was “legitimized” by an honorary degree from Bob Jones University (BJU), of Greenville, South Carolina.

One of the most conservative U.S. religious schools, BJU is an anti-Catholic institution which excluded Black students until 1971, and which still bans inter-racial dating. It backed South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond all the way from his segregationist run for the presidency in 1948 though his successive conversions to the Democratic, and then the Republican, parties. It also backed George W. Bush. Bob Jones Jr., son of BJU’s founder, was a personal friend of Paisley, and a leader of evangelical Christianity.

The test of Empire

Over the years, as Ulster violence spread into Britain, Paisley gave Protestant terrorism, abetted by the police and the army, a biblical and millenarian meaning. He proved that he wielded veto power over change in Ulster âe” until he beat his rivals and achieved Chief Ministershipâe¦only to share power with Sinn Fein’s Martin McGuinness, a former IRA military leader!

The meaningful parallel with the Cuban leader is that Paisley fought for Empire whereas Fidel Castro fought against Empire. Hence our media’s obsession with Cuba and Castro, framed in the name of civil and political rights, and its soft-handling of Paisley, whose militant Protestantism was shielded by the media fog of an ongoing anti-IRA rant.

Ian Paisley was an antidote to Fidel Castro, hence his benign treatment in our media and by our leaders, who never ceased to malign the lider maximo.

Even Tony Blair’s belated denunciation of “Protestant bigots” at par with “Islamic terrorists” in 2006 made hardly a ripple âe” and was soon forgotten.

Jooneed Khan

Jooneed Khan

Jooneed is a native of Mauritius, who came to Windsor, Ontario on a Commonwealth scholarship in 1964. He is an Arts graduate of the Université de Montréal, and was a co-founder of the Mauritian Militant...