The protest taunt “Cops and Klan, hand in hand” emerged from an observable phenomenon: far-right vigilantes have long been either disproportionately represented in law enforcement agencies or allied with them. During the 1960s, Southern sheriffs fought civil rights advocates by day while Klansmen took over at night — and they were often the same people.
While the Klan may have seen themselves as opponents of the state, they frequently served the same ends. The far right has always played this role, drawing sections of the working class into reactionary movements that claim to be rebellious while ultimately defending the status quo by acting as an effective foil to the political left.
This dynamic has played out in other countries, especially in areas like the North of Ireland where minority rights are at the heart of conflict. When a civil rights movement emerged demanding equal rights for the nationalist minority in the late 1960s, unionists responded with violence, dismissing it as a plot by the Irish Republican Army (IRA).
Loyalism was a militant working-class unionist movement based around paramilitary groups such as the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and the Ulster Defence Association (UDA), ostensibly to defend against IRA violence but primarily geared toward repressing Catholics in general. There was a thirty-year guerrilla war involving the IRA, the British state, and loyalist paramilitaries.
Although loyalists occasionally clashed with British soldiers, their violence overwhelmingly targeted Catholic civilians. From beginning to end, the state security forces treated Irish republicans and loyalists in radically different ways. Collaboration rarely appears as formal policy but instead operates through informal relationships, ideological alignment, and the quiet avoidance of accountability.
According to the Sutton Index, the most comprehensive record of violence between 1969 and 2001, loyalists killed 1,027 people, of whom 878 were civilians, the vast…
Auteur: Shane Burley
