'Our Father Organization': The Cult of the Somme and the Unionist 'Golden Age' in Modern Ulster Loyalist Commemoration
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Memories of military sacrifices and demonstrations of 'national' characteristics of bravery, comradeship and integrity still have considerable popular purchase within contemporary states and communities, and as such can accrue significant political capital. With this in mind, this paper will show how Ulster Loyalists attempt to anchor themselves in the memory of the Somme, seeking to deliberately construct a line of direct continuity between modern Loyalism, which has been suffering from a variety of pressures, fissures and marginalization throughout the Northern Ireland peace process, and Ulster Unionism of the early 20th century, a period which in contrast was marked by unity, mass mobilization and elite leadership. Crucially, that political generation's decimation during the First World War is a potent myth of blood sacrifice which thickens, rather than pollutes, the narrative of a Unionist 'Golden Age' of mobilization and strength. As such, the mythic proving grounds of battlefields long gone have become advantageous sites for modern political acquisition. This use of the memory of the Great War as an identity resource will be compared and contrasted with similar projects in Canada and Australia. Rather than simply miring Loyalists in archaic and militaristic tropes, and invented links to the past, this paper will argue that commemorations, particularly that of the Somme, can have a transformative and cohering effect on modern Loyalism, in both the political and paramilitary spheres.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".