Ireland, 1916
Results of the Dublin Events
The former prominent colonial bureaucrat of Great Britain, Sir Roger Casement, by conviction a revolutionary Irish nationalist, the go-between for Germany and the Irish uprising, on being sentenced to death declared, “I prefer to sit on the bench of the accused than in the seat of the accuser”, before the reading of the sentence, which ran according to the old formula that Casement should be “hung by the neck until dead”, at which God was invited to have mercy on his soul.
Should the sentence be carried out? This question must have given Asquith and Lloyd George many troubled hours. To execute Casement would make it even more difficult for the opportunist, nationalist, and purely parliamentary Irish party, led by Redmond, to ratify a new compromise with the government of the UK on the blood of the insurrectionaries. To pardon Casement, after having carried out so many executions, would mean an open “display of indulgence to a high-ranking traitor”. This is the demagogic tune of the British social-imperialists of the Hyndman type – downright blood-thirsty hooligans. But however the personal fate of Casement is resolved the sentence on him will bring to a conclusion the dramatic episode of the Irish uprising.[1]
In so far as the affair concerned the purely military operations of the insurrectionaries, the government, as we know, turned out comparatively easily to be master of the situation. The general national movement, however it was expressed in the heads of the nationalist dreamers, did not materialise at all. The Irish countryside did not rise up. The Irish bourgeoisie, as also the upper, more influential layer of the Irish intelligentsia, remained on the sidelines. The urban workers fought and died, together with revolutionary enthusiasts from the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia. The historical basis for the national revolution had disappeared even in backward Ireland. Inasmuch as the Irish movements in the last century had assumed a popular character, they had invariably fed on the social hostility of the deprived and exhausted pauper-farmer towards the omnipotent English landlord.
But if for the latter Ireland was only an object of agrarian plunder and exploitation, for British imperialism it was a necessary guarantee of their dominion over the seas. In a pamphlet written on the eve of the war,[2] Casement, speculating about Germany, proves that the independence of Ireland means the “freedom of the seas” and the death blow to the naval domination of Britain. This is true in so far as an “independent” Ireland could exist only as an outpost of an imperialist state hostile to Britain and as its military naval base against British supremacy over the sea routes. It was Gladstone who first expounded with full clarity the military imperialist consideration of Great Britain over the interests of the Anglo-Irish landlords and laid the basis for the wide agrarian legislation by which the state transferred to the Irish farmers the landlords’ land, very generously compensating the latter, of course. Anyway, after the agrarian reforms of 1881-1903, the farmers turned into conservative small property owners, whose gaze the green banner of national independence is no longer able to tear away from their plots of land.
The redundant Irish intelligentsia flowed in their thousands into the towns of Great Britain as lawyers, journalists, commercial employees, etc. In this way, for the majority of them, the ‘national question’ got lost. On the other hand, the independent Irish commercial and industrial bourgeoisie, in so far as it has formed over the past decades, immediately adopted an antagonistic position towards the young Irish proletariat, giving up the national revolutionary struggle and entering the camp of imperialism. The young Irish working class, taking shape in an atmosphere saturated with the heroic recollections of national rebellions, and clashing with the egoistic, narrow-minded, imperial arrogance of British trade unionism, naturally swing between nationalism and syndicalism, ever ready to unite these two concepts in their revolutionary consciousness. It attracts the young intelligentsia and individual nationalist enthusiasts, who, in their turn, supply the movement with a preponderance of the green flag over the red. In this way, the ‘national revolution’, even in Ireland, in practice has become an uprising of workers, and the obviously isolated position of Casement in the movement only serves to emphasise this fact still deeper.
In a pathetic and shameful article, Plekhanov recently pointed to the ‘harmful’ character of the Irish uprising for the cause of freedom, rejoicing that the Irish nation “to their credit” had realised this and not supported the revolutionary madmen. Only complete patriotic softening of all the joints could lead anyone to interpret the situation as if the Irish peasants had declined to participate in the revolution from the standpoint of the international situation, thus saving the ‘honour’ of Ireland. In actual fact they were led only by the obtuse egoism of the farmer and complete indifference to everything beyond the bounds of their plots of land. It was precisely because of this and only this that they supplied the London government with such a quick victory over the heroic defenders of the Dublin barricades. The undoubted personal courage, representing the hopes and methods of the past, is over. But the historical role of the Irish proletariat is only beginning. Already into this uprising – under an archaic banner – it has injected its class resentment against militarism and imperialism. That resentment from now on will not subside. On the contrary, it will find an echo throughout Great Britain. Scottish soldiers smashed the Dublin barricades. But in Scotland itself coal-miners are rallying round the red flag, raised by Maclean and his friends. Those very workers, who at the moment the Hendersons are trying to chain to the bloody chariot of imperialism, will revenge themselves against the hangman Lloyd George.
* * *
Clemency!
The Irish rising has been crushed. Those whom it was thought necessary to shoot first have been shot. The rest wait for their personal fate to be decided after that of the rising itself. The triumph of British rule is so complete that Prime Minister Asquith considered it possible to declare from his parliamentary platform the government’s intention to show “reasonable clemency” towards the imprisoned Irish revolutionaries. In so doing Asquith referred to the good fruits of the clemency shown by General Botha to those who took part in the South African rising. Asquith refrained from mentioning General Botha himself. Twelve years before the present war he stood at the head of the Boers who shed their blood in a struggle against British imperialism; but at the beginning of the war he successfully put down a rising of his own fellow-countrymen. Thus Asquith remains wholly within the traditions of British imperialism when he crowns the work of the “law and order” specialists in Dublin and other places with a proclamation of the principles of “expedient” humanity – humanity, that is, within the limits of what is… expedient. So far, then, everything is clear, and there can be no doubt in the minds of our readers about Asquith’s statement, which goes beyond what it is permissible to express in the French Republic in 1916.
But the matter does not end there. We have an uprising crushed, buildings razed, human corpses, men and women in chains. We have triumphant authority making a gesture of ‘philanthropy’. But in this picture which history has set in the frame of the world war, on this ‘stage within a stage’, one other figure is missing: the French social-patriot, the standard bearer of ‘liberating’ war and the principles of national ‘freedom’, commenting on the official ‘humanity’ of the Dublin government.
To fill in this gap, and add the finishing touch to our picture of the official governmental, patriotic aspect of our epoch, Mssr. Renaudel published an article on Clemency in the pages of his paper Humanité, which until now has not carried a single word about the Irish rising.
Now of course he, Renaudel, knows that there were facts in the past which clouded relations between Ireland and Britain. He allows that these facts could not but leave bitterness to this day in the most irreconcilable Irish hearts. But the Irish chose the most fatal hour for their action. He, Renaudel, had not doubted for a moment that the British government would do everything necessary to remain master of the situation, and he was not mistaken. But, therefore, “Britain who is fighting with her allies for the rights of nations, can and must show magnanimity.” And that is why being simultaneously a friend of Britain and of Ireland, of Britain which crushed down and of Ireland which was crushed, he, Renaudel, could only welcome Asquith’s magnanimous gesture.
One might think that this was quite enough. One might think it physically impossible for social-patriotic cynicism to go any further than masquerading like this as the advocate of clemency to a set of frenzied butchers. But no, Renaudel has also to introduce a national French factor in order to explain and rationalise his sage statesmanlike pleading on behalf of the vanquished and justify it to official France. “Of course”, he writes, “in a land which weeps over Corneille’s verses and the noble farewell to Cinna by Auguste[3] – in such a land it causes no surprise if we counsel that clemency be shown.”
Thus the spiritual heirs and political descendants of Thiers and General Gallifet[4] are reassured. For didn’t they, who wept on reading Racine[5] show clemency to the fighters of the Paris Commune? Here is the real crowning of the spiritual reconciliation between Gallifet’s descendants and the offspring of the movement in whose history the Commune is indelibly inscribed.
Endnotes
[1] On Easter week, April 1916, the joint forces of the petty-bourgeois nationalist Irish Volunteers, under the leadership of Patrick Pearce, and of the proletarian Irish Citizen Army, led by James Connolly, declared a Provisional Government and seized a number of prominent buildings in Dublin, including the General Post Office which dominates O’Connell Street. After resisting for six days, under siege and bombardment by the British army, the rebels were forced to surrender, and sixteen of their leaders were shot. Despite its defeat, the Rising was a turning point in Irish history, creating an unerasable revolutionary example and tradition, and galvanising a mood of anger against British imperialism.
[2] Ireland, Germany and the Freedom of the Seas, written in 1911, published in 1914 in New York. Republished as Crime Against Europe – Causes of War and Foundation of Peace in Berlin, 1915.
[3] In Corneille’s play Cinna (1641), the character in the title is a reluctant party to a conspiracy led by his uncle against the emperor, Augustus. He receives a political pardon.
[4] Louis Adolph Thiers (1797-1877) and Gaston Gallifet (1830-1909) were respectively leaders of the political and military forces that suppressed the Paris Commune of 1871. Thiers led the bourgeois government of the day and was the first President of the Third Republic. Gallifet became a general in 1870, and distinguished himself by ordering summary executions of the Communards. He thus became a symbol of counter-revolutionary repression.
[5] Jean Racine (1639-99) – French dramatist, mostly writing tragedies.