The writer Julian Barnes says that history is not what happened; history is just what historians tell us has happened. There is much truth in this. Much of what we thought was the truth about many of the seminal events of the Troubles in Ulster, or an approximation of them, have turned out not to be the truth at all, often not even close to it. The so-called ‘fog of war’, which supposedly describes how the truth is concealed in war and conflict, is by now a cliched and tired truism. Yet like all aphorisms it can be both true and not true at the same time depending on how you choose to interpret it. It is of course a fiction and a convenient fiction at that for those whose job it is to hide the reality of what is going on and conceal the truth. Instead, we should understand it as the ‘fog’ in war and as a strategy, deliberately designed that way or opportunistically seized upon, to cover up the violence of the powerful, by the powerful.
