For all the huge material progress, the last 100 years have been disfigured by world wars, mass exterminations, regional wars, prolonged and bloody internal conflicts, and by acts of terrorism targeting civilians, of which September 11th was the nadir. Total lives lost were in tens, if not hundreds, of millions, writes Martin Mansergh
In parallel, there have been painstaking efforts to establish an alternative and peaceful method of resistance to oppression that would bring about revolutionary change without bloodshed. James Connolly and other members of the Socialist International hoped in vain pre-1914 that workers would decline to participate in an imperialist war.
The philosophy of passive resistance is particularly associated with Mahatma Gandhi, who declared in 1921: "Non-co-operation is beyond the reach of the bayonet." The method used to such effect in India began during his life in South Africa in 1906 and was known as satyagraha.
In Ireland, Daniel O'Connell won Catholic Emancipation with the backing of a peaceful mass movement. It was less effective with Repeal, but the shortlived risings of 1848 and 1867 provided no convincing alternative either.
Arthur Griffith's Sinn Féin, founded in 1905, held out as a model the policy of passive resistance employed by Hungary to win complete self-government and parity from the Austrian emperor. Griffith's most potent proposal was to withdraw Irish MPs from Westminster, which occurred in January 1919.
The downside, as Eamon Phoenix has noted, was the virtual absence of nationalist MPs from Westminster to challenge the Government of Ireland Act, 1920, when it was being enacted. A key issue for Northern nationalists in this election is the price of being unrepresented in the Westminster parliament, while it continues to govern Northern Ireland.
Griffith had little enthusiasm for physical force. The passive resistance involved in setting up Dáil Éireann and the Dáil courts, the ostracisation of crown forces and non-payment of taxes made an important impact alongside actual guerrilla warfare.
Paradoxically, the civil rights campaign in Northern Ireland, out of which grew the SDLP and its longest-serving leader, John Hume, had more in common with the original Sinn Féin. The Provisional Sinn Féin of the 1970s in contrast was an ideological spare wheel on a ruthlessly militaristic Provisional IRA machine responsible for horrific civilian casualties.
A reviewer in An Phoblacht of the recent TV dramatisation of the activities of the Balcombe Street gang in the 1970s claimed it ignored the context of a war going on, and that loyalist and British agents had placed bombs in Dublin.
That, of course, begs the question: who had the right to declare and wage war between Britain and Ireland? The answer, since Independence, is only the State, which does not allow any private army to usurp its function, not least because of its responsibility to protect the people as far as possible from retaliation.
Pope John Paul II visited Ireland in 1979 a year after his election. He came from Poland, a country that had suffered the worst tyrannies. The ruthless suppression of risings in East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 meant that physical rebellion, even if justified, could only end in a bloodbath and heavy defeat.
Through his witness in Poland and his support for Solidarity, he made the first breach in the Iron Curtain. Along with Mikhail Gorbachev, he was co-responsible for the extraordinary miracle, amidst the confrontation of nuclear superpowers, of the overwhelmingly peaceful, democratic revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe, the tradition of which continues to this day.
As a dissident, Vaclav Havel wrote eloquently about the cumulative effect of a phased withdrawal of co-operation and popular consent and challenging the lies of communism.
When the Pope spoke out against the IRA struggle in Drogheda in 1979 as wrong, he was not "siding with the oppressor", as Danny Morrison has simplistically claimed. John Paul II spoke at length about injustice and human rights and state responsibility as well as the evil of violence.
In that speech too, he held out the hand of friendship to Irish Protestants, and spoke warmly of ecumenism and the fraternal spirit between churches, using a different tone from the stiffer official documents of later years.
A remarkable cumulative achievement in Ireland of Popes John XXIII, Paul VI and John Paul II is that between them they have banished most of the overt anti-Catholic and "anti-popery" sentiment from public discourse, even if not from all the loyalist backstreets of the North or the odd manse.
The hunger strikes had a greater resonance than all the rest of the IRA campaign, because they were passive resistance and in no sense criminal. As Gandhi, who went on many hunger strikes, said: "Real suffering, bravely borne, melts even a heart of stone. Such is the potency of suffering". They sparked the growth of a real political movement that today needs no army to back it up.
The mantra that republicans will not allow themselves to be criminalised takes advantage of the umbrella provided by Mrs Thatcher in 1981, when she denied the hunger-striking prisoners any political recognition. Vindicating the hunger strikers should not be conflated with justification of the conflict with its terrible atrocities.
There is a determination by long-standing democratic parties that neither paramilitary campaigns nor illegal state acts will be retrospectively legitimised. If peace, reconciliation and real progress are to be achieved, republicans, among others, need to become more self-critical and less defensive.
The McCartney family has set an example to communities of passive resistance to crude methods of paramilitary control that show total disregard for truth, justice and human rights.
Sinn Féin began 100 years ago as an inspired political movement. Equally, the United Irishmen were originally an inspired constitutional organisation.
There is now a near-universal consensus that armed struggle and the physical force tradition have outlived any validity they once had, and that there is a viable political alternative. We have to build with what we have, and we should stop trying to burn bricks.