In
Honor Of The 100th Anniversary Of The Irish Easter Uprising,
1916-Sean Flynn’s Fight-Take Three
A
word on the Easter Uprising
In the old Irish working-class
neighborhoods where I grew up the aborted Easter Uprising of 1916 was spoken of
in mythical hushed reverent tones as the key symbol of the modern Irish
liberation struggle from bloody England. The event itself provoked such
memories of heroic “boyos” (and “girlos”
not acknowledged) fighting to the end against great odds that a careful
analysis of what could, and could not be, learned from the mistakes made at the
time entered my head. That was then though in the glare of boyhood
infatuations. Now is the time for a more sober assessment.
The easy part of analyzing the Irish
Easter Uprising of 1916 is first and foremost the knowledge, in retrospect,
that it was not widely supported by people in Ireland, especially by the
“shawlies” in Dublin and the cities who received their sons’ military pay from
the Imperial British Army for service in the bloody trenches of Europe which
sustained them throughout the war. That factor and the relative ease with which
the uprising had been militarily defeated by the British forces send in main
force to crush it lead easily to the conclusion that the adventure was doomed
to failure. Still easier is to criticize the timing and the strategy and
tactics of the planned action and of the various actors, particularly in the
leadership’s underestimating the British Empire’s frenzy to crush any
opposition to its main task of victory in World War I. (Although, I think that frenzy
on Mother England’s part would be a point in the uprising’s favor under the
theory that England’s [or fill in the blank of your favorite later national
liberation struggle] woes were Ireland’s [or fill in the blank ditto on the
your favorite oppressed peoples struggle] opportunities.
The hard part is to draw any
positive lessons of that national liberation struggle experience for the
future. If nothing else remember this though, and unfortunately the Irish
national liberation fighters (and other national liberation fighters later,
including later Irish revolutionaries) failed to take this into account in
their military calculations, the British (or fill in the blank) were savagely committed
to defeating the uprising including burning that colonial country to the ground
if need be in order to maintain control. In the final analysis, it was not part
of their metropolitan homeland, so the hell with it. Needless to say, cowardly British
Labor’s position was almost a carbon copy of His Imperial Majesty’s. Labor
Party leader Arthur Henderson could barely contain himself when informed that
James Connolly had been executed. That should, even today, make every British
militant blush with shame. Unfortunately, the demand for British militants and
others today is the same as then if somewhat attenuated- All British Troops
Out of Ireland.
In various readings on national
liberation struggles I have come across a theory that the Easter Uprising was
the first socialist revolution in Europe, predating the Bolshevik Revolution by
over a year. Unfortunately, there is little truth to that idea. Of the
Uprising’s leaders only James Connolly was devoted to the socialist cause.
Moreover, while the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army were
prototypical models for urban- led national liberation forces such
organizations, as we have witnessed in later history, are not inherently
socialistic. The dominant mood among the leadership was in favor of political
independence and/or fighting for a return to a separate traditional Irish
cultural hegemony. (“Let poets rule the land”).
As outlined in the famous
Proclamation of the Republic posted on the General Post Office in Dublin,
Easter Monday, 1916 the goal of the leadership appeared to be something on the
order of a society like those fought for in the European Revolutions of 1848, a
left bourgeois republic. A formation on the order of the Paris Commune of 1871 where
the working class momentarily took power or the Soviet Commune of 1917 which
lasted for a longer period did not figure in the political calculations at that
time. As noted above, James Connolly clearly was skeptical of his erstwhile
comrades on the subject of the nature of the future state and apparently was
prepared for an ensuing class struggle following the establishment of a
republic.
That does not mean that revolutionary socialists could not
support such an uprising. On the contrary, Lenin, who was an admirer of
Connolly for his anti-war stance in World War I, and Trotsky stoutly defended
the uprising against those who derided the Easter rising for involving
bourgeois elements. Participation by bourgeois and petty bourgeois elements is
in the nature of a national liberation struggle. The key, which must be learned
by militants today, is who leads the national liberation struggle and on what
program. As both Lenin and Trotsky made clear later in their own experiences in
Russia revolutionary socialists have to lead other disaffected elements of
society to overthrow the existing order. There is no other way in a
heterogeneous class-divided society. Moreover, in Ireland, the anti-imperialist
nature of the action against British imperialism during wartime on the
socialist principle that the defeat of your own imperialist overlord in war as
a way to open the road to the class struggle merited support on that basis
alone. Chocky Ar La.
********
Here
is a little commemorative piece based on the exploits of Frankie Riley from the
old neighborhood grand-uncle’s, Sean Flynn, who gave a good account of himself
when the time for fighting came:
Sean Flynn could still taste that acrid smell of smoke
in his lungs long after the last flicker of battle, long after they had known
that they had made major miscalculations about the enemy, about the savagery of
dear Mother England when she wanted to keep her little child Ireland close to
her bosom. He remembered the hard fighting, the loses of game comrades when the
British pulled the hammer down, while the Dublin crowds in particular, watched
in stony silence (or maybe and this is the insidious nature of the oppressor,
the effect the oppressor has on the psyche of the oppressed, with some secret
desire to see the “boyos” lose and return to normalcy). He would never forget
his own flight to the north where he hid out for many days until the coast was
clear. That escape had been a close thing since he had carried a small wound
from the rear-guard fight around their, the British, General Post Office in
Dublin (he would never call that institution, even after independence anything
but their building). And he would never forget the lessons that he had learned
about what a serious struggle for national liberation entailed.
Mostly though, and that smoke in his lungs was
constant reminder, he would always remember how the bloody British, the most
civilized nation on Earth to hear the paid historians tell the story, thought
nothing of burning down their jewel colonial capital city to the ground rather
than to let Ireland breath free and make its own mistakes. That had been the
major error in the thinking of the various leader even of the lost lamented
martyr James Connolly; thinking that the English in the throes of war in Europe
would not scramble whatever was necessary to suppress the uprising including
that needless burning of the town. Surely there had been other miscalculations
and mistakes; not having a coordinated plan, not abandoning the uprising
temporarily when a serious consensus could not be met on the timing of the
rising; of going with a few, too few, men expecting the population to rise up
once the spark had been ignited, various tactical military blunders which only
added to the tragic outcome and so on. But in the end the biggest mistake was
to underestimate the capacity of the British to display the same kind of
savagery and stupidity as they had in trench-filled Europe or in previous
places of native uprisings in Africa, Asia and India.
Just then though Sean, a little cough in his throat,
maybe really a lump, thought about the brave lads that he had fought with then
who had gone to meet their maker, including his older brother Seamus who snuck
him into the Citizens’ Army to begin with when he was just a lad. There was Ian
O’Riley who fell early to an advanced British guard when they tried to storm
the front door by force, Seamus Barry killed by a sniper’s bullet,
stout-hearted Liam Murphy who faced down a British patrol and paid with his
life for that deed, and of course, his old friend Bucko Bailey who stayed
behind drawing fire as the last remnant, including one Sean Flynn, made their
passage out of the firestorm that had become Dublin. But most of all his missed
the “Chief,” James Connolly, who, wounded and all, was strapped to a chair and
executed by those bloody British bastards. They would long rue the day when
they let Connolly near lethal weapons which he learned how to handle when he
was in their Army as a lad, and they would longer still rue the day when they
shot a brave man like a dog. Chocky Ar La.
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