Again, A Year Or Two With Ernest-“Papa: Hemingway In Cuba” (2015)-A Film Review

Again, A Year Or Two With Ernest-“Papa: Hemingway In Cuba” (2015)-A Film Review  

DVD Review

By Film Critic Emeritus Sam Lowell

[I will not bore the reader with yet again a detailed rationale for my recent taking myself “out to pasture,” retiring with the caveat that if I found something that interested me in the film world I reserved the right to comment via a timely review. Not as my erstwhile fellow film critic, Sandy Salmon, whom I cajoled into taking over the day to day chores at this site while he too waited to fade into the sunset of retirement, stated in his review of this same film when “the spirit moved me” which he falsely accused me of stealing from the Quakers who hardly had a copyright on the expression if Sandy would have known if he had been out in the real world over the past fifty years. Shockingly in taking over the job Sandy has needed the support of an associate, Alden Riley, to do the heavy legwork (like actually watching the films to be reviewed, grabbing summaries from Wikipedia maybe stealing some lines from reviews on Amazon, writing the first draft so I am not sure exactly what Sandy’s role is in all this). Up until the end I has done all that myself.

But I will let that pass as well since today I feel I need to say a few words about why I am doing a review of a film Sandy with a big assist from Alden who had to read from scratch some of Hemingway’s short stories which apparently neither he nor Sandy had read or more probably in Sandy’s case had not read in fifty years, already put in the can, Papa: Hemingway In Cuba, a semi-biopic of the old man who had so much influence on our generation of guys who liked to write, who liked that smooth clean sparse language while pushing on the story line without a lot of embellishment. For one of the few times in recent memory Sandy, once he found out the film was slated for review, and I watched the presentation together (Alden watched it later when he was assigned the heavy legwork). That is where the current tempest in a teapot got its start.       

As Sandy stated in his review he and I had gravitated toward Hemingway in our respective high school days and never left that admiration behind. Although we both agreed that the story presented on film while gripping in parts had been overwrought about the emotional traumas Hemingway was going through as he aged, aged not gracefully ending upon the other end of a self-imposed shotgun blast we argued over who would do the review. Frankly I invoked my “seniority,” my emeritus status since the mere subject matter of the film, what did Sandy call it, what do the poor besieged Quakers call it, oh yeah, got me in a “the spirit moves me” mood.

The long and short of it was that Sandy went to the site administrator, Pete Markin, to complain that that “old geezer” was stepping on his toes. Pete brought us into his “office” which did not help much since the scene got a little ugly. I reminded Sandy, Sandy, bigtime film critic for the American Film Gazette back in the day that I had to tell him who Orson Welles was, who had produced Citizen Kane, what it was about and where it stood in the pantheon of world classic films when he had first started out in the business. Had to remind Sandy too that he was the one who wrote that glowing review about Planet of the Apes and how it was a sure bet to win, get this, the Oscar for Best Picture that year (and I think for Best Actor too and it was not Charlton Heston who he was touting). The film critic fraternity laughed about that one for years at our annual gatherings.  From there only got worse until I let sleeping dogs lie and told Pete too let Sandy have his damn review.          

Then the review came out and I could not believe that we had watched the same film. Couldn’t understand why Sandy did not take on Hemingway’s alcoholism, his taunting of his fourth, count them fourth wife, Mary and the severity of his writer’s block in the  decisive period just a couple of years before he took his own life. Worse, worse of all Sandy only paid perfunctory mention to one of the great stories of the time, the Fidel Castro led guerilla war fight against the hated Batista regime in Cuba the results which still reverberates to this day. He totally failed to mention the scene where Papa and his young writer friend and acolyte (Ed in the movie) had doggedly come to grips as witnesses to a battle in the city between those two forces just like Papa had in the old days in Spain. I complained to Pete and he, pulling his hair out yet again, agreed that I could give “my take” on the film. See Pete knew, or I will assume that he knew, who was the guy to have done this review in the first place. Sam Lowell]      

Papa: Hemingway in Cuba, starring Giovanni Ribisi, Joely Richardson, Adrian Sparks, filmed in Cuba, 2015     

I have to agree with the esteemed regular film critic in this space that there was no question young men, and I have to agree with him on this as well maybe women too but Ernest Hemingway by subject matter and by reputation seemed to be the quintessential man’s man writer for good or evil, of the generation before mine and of my own generation who had a taste for the literary life saw him (along with Scott Fitzgerald on his good days, his The Great Gatsby good days) as the paragon of solid sparse writing that drew us in. Writing up a storm about the futility of World War I, the post-war alienation of the Jazz Age which his friend and fellow exile Scotty Fitzgerald practically invented, bullfighting in the hot afternoon in some drunken corrida, the glorious struggle in Spain where there appeared to be time enough to make the earth shake not just with mortars but with love and a million other short stories some of which made their way into film (and reviews by me, and, okay, okay Sandy).     

Funny as a kid I first gravitated toward Hemingway via the movies although I didn’t actually know that until later when I happened to read one of his short stories The Killers which had been made into a movie (actually two one in 1946 but the one I am thinking of is the version done in 1962 with Lee Marvin and, ah, Ronald Reagan who later parlayed that role in the film as a connected gangster into the presidency of the United States or something like that. When I viewed that film one Saturday afternoon at the old Strand Theater in my growing up hometown I felt I knew the story line and lo and behold in the credits they noted that the thing was based on Papa’s short story of the same name. Talk about cinematic license though (and in that 1946 version as well since the story is only a few pages long and is only a “teaser” about a guy who took a couple of slugs without grumbling when a couple of hit men came a calling and the story unfolds from that slight hint of a start).    

Like Sandy as a kid anything to do with Hemingway was like catnip and while I usually did my reading during the daytime on many a late night I devoured whatever I could get my hands on at the local branch of the town library. So when Sandy and I saw this film under review together, Papa: Hemingway In Cuba, we almost came to blows about who would review the thing. [See the introduction above for the gory details. Pete Markin] That emotional response on our parts despite the fact that both of us agreed that the film itself seemed kind of maudlin and less than informative as a slice of life semi-biopic.      

Naturally since the film is not an actual full biopic about either Hemingway or the young writer, Denn Bart Petticlerc, whose memoir the film is based on the producers used plenty of cinematic license in translating that story to the screen (just as any self-respecting writer would use a great deal of literary license to the same effect). What was interesting and might have been of interest to me knowing what happened in the film Ed, the name for Denn in the film, was that he and Papa met after Ed had sent Papa a “love letter” and he responded by inviting him to Cuba for a little off-hand fishing (one of about twenty “manly” pursuits like boxing which writers like Norman Mailer in the generation after his felt compelled to follow as a mantra for their own writing prowess, bullfighting, safari hunting, deep sea fishing, amateur gun-fighting and seemingly every other on the edge activity except bocce which he never did master for some reason.  Hemingway was into “action” in an age when men had to such pursuits to internally prove their manhood rather than like in my generation the more rationale reason to impress the girls. We always on a no dough, no girl Friday or Saturday night hanging around with nothing better to do used to speculate that all that manly-proving frenzy meant he might have been as we used to say “light on his feet.” I never heard anything that way and I am sure I would have in some be misbegotten doctoral thesis if there was any substance to the charge.) Damn I wish I had had the moxie, the balls to send the old man a “love letter” and maybe I would have had the opportunity to learn how to fish (and skinny dip).       

In any case the mentor-surrogate son relationship that developed was something very different once a young writer (Ed Myers in the film played by Giovanni Ribisi) caught the attention of Ernest Hemingway (played by Adrian Spark who looked the very image of Papa when I looked at some old photographs). Hell Ed would fly back and forth to Miami at the drop of a hat on Papa’s summons if for no other reason than to go skinny-dipping in Papa’s pool or to sit drinking pina colas while Hemingway sucked up the real booze and got nasty at his fourth wife Mary. (That four marriage should have been the tip-off, take it from a guy with three unsuccessful marriages under his belt and has finally given up that chase, that Papa was not an easy guy to live with any more than I was).            

Of course Hemingway seemingly spent half of his life in some kind of exile Paris, Africa, Idaho,  or out of America anyway and Cuba was his home along with his fourth wife, the well-known foreign correspondent Mary Welsh, played by Joely Richardson, for a good portion of the last twenty or so years of his life. Funny 1958, 1959 in Cuba was like some kind of fateful muse in the period when Papa and Ed were friendly which also happened to be a time when the Cuban Revolution, Castro’s guerilla fighters, were coming down from the hills to confront Batista and his forces in the cities. It might be worth checking out what Batista’s agents thought of Hemingway rolling around the gin mills of the island having made it clear that he had been in Spain when the deal went down there in the 1930s. In a compelling scene Papa and Ed are “doing the do,” doing what any journalist worth his or her salt would do and go out get the story especially as the Castro forces were coming out of the hills so you knew at that point the regime’s days were short, extremely short so you had best get the story of history in the making or forget it.

As already noted this film suffered from some overwrought emotional scenes of Hemingway in decline, in a love-hate relationship with Mary which seemed cruelty itself on both their parts at time. The real shocker for any writer, even Sandy took note of the fact in passing and then blew it off, though was Hemingway’s frustration that he could no longer write, had “writer’s block” the dreaded words that every writer, pro or amateur, wakes up in the midnight hour sweating about. Where the whole ball of wax comes down is when Ed was sending in copious copy to his newspaper and Papa was standing around his typewriter, the word processor of the day, almost paralyzed with a drink of rye whisky to buck him up. Damn. Papa had the shakes that way too. Sandy did have it right maybe Papa had lost it at the end but go read A Farewell To Arms, The Sun Also Rises, For Whom The Bells Toll, and The Old Man and The Sea if you want to know what it was like when Papa had the words, when he wrote those sparse clean words for keeps. For the young you heard it here first.

Train Smoke And Dreams-The Film Adaptation of Paula Hawkins’ “The Girl On The Train”-(2016)

Train Smoke And Dreams-The Film Adaptation of Paula Hawkins’ “The Girl On The Train”-(2016)   

DVD Review

By Sam Lowell

The Girl On The Train, starring Emily Blunt, Rebecca Ferguson, Haley Bennett, directed by Tate Taylor, from the thriller novel by Paula Hawkins, 2016

A tale of three women, three smart up and coming but troubled women, suburban women, suburban New York City women and that makes a difference, is an interesting way to introduce this cinematic thriller, Girl On The Train, adapted for the screen from the best-selling novel by Paula Hawkins. Especially since their lives, the lives of Rachael, Anna and Megan to give them names right at the start, are intertwined one way or another by the same man, Tom, a man who as one of the minor characters in the film stated rather succinctly if crudely could not “keep his dick in his pants.” That statement, made on the suburban commuter train from New York City, the train a symbolic metaphor for lots of what goes down along the way, toward the end of the film goes a long way to explaining why this well-done and suspenseful thriller ends the way it does.       

Here’s the scoop. Woman number one, Rachel, played by Emily Blunt, smart, artistic but emotionally fragile and unsure of herself, had as a result of her spiraling alcoholism brought on by her failure to bear a child (and by the nefarious manipulations of philandering Tom) been unceremoniously dumped by her philandering husband for another woman, woman number two, Anna, who had borne him a child.  Rachel was a dreamer, a romantic, had some almost child-like idea of what a leafy suburban perfect marriage might look like despite her alcoholic haze which during her binges had left her with big blank spaces in her memory, left her with blackouts. It is in trying to retrace the steps of her life that will finally aid her-and get her and others into a hell of a lot of trouble.

The romantic dreamer about some ideal marriage part for Rachel came when she passed her old neighborhood on the train she took every day supposedly going to and from work (she had been fired for her over-the-top alcoholic behavior so the trips back and forth to New York City were trips to nowhere). A few houses from where she had lived she spied a couple who look like they were the consummate expression of everything she still longed for-including reuniting with her husband.

Enter woman number three, Megan, played by Haley Bennett, young, neurotic and sexually promiscuous, who was the woman Rachel had seen from the train. Megan rather than the ideal suburban wife was seeing a psychiatrist about her problems (while trying to seduce him). And about the secret guilt she had felt ever since she had neglected her out-of-wedlock baby when she was a teenager. Megan had worked for Tom and Anna, who had her own set of emotional problems around having the child and having a philandering husband, as a nanny to complete the scene (a job that it turned out Tom had insisted she take).

Here is where things got dicey. Megan one night went missing, and would be found after some time dead in the woods along the nearby Hudson River, an obvious homicide. Rachel, in one of her less lucid and less sober moments witnessed a scene from one end of a tunnel where Megan, who had disillusioned Rachel from the train by apparently taking another lover, and somebody had been seen together the night she disappeared. The rest of the film unwinds around Rachel’s increased clarity and confidence in herself about what had happened that night, who had killed Megan and why. Naturally there is plenty of misdirection as in any good thriller. Rachel herself had come under suspicion due to her erratic and at times near hysterical behavior. As had, naturally given the statistics on such matters, Megan’s overbearing and overwrought husband (with a little help from trying to be helpful Rachel). Hell, even the shrink, Megan’s shrink, based on Rachel’s faulty foggy memory, was under a cloud for a time. But as the film winds down and the possible candidates with the motive to do the foul deed dwindle Rachel’s sense of what happened that night and who might have committed the foul deed improved.

Although this film (and the book it is based on) is predicated on solving the murder mystery which sets up the plot I was struck by how much these three very different women had been thrown together by an odd fate and reacted to things in very similar ways. The acting by the trio, particularly Emily Blunt whose very complicated role drove the action but also drove the psychological aspects of the film, was excellent as the three women went through their respective paces. As for whodunit check it out for yourself if you have not already read the book. A way better than average thriller.             

A View From The Left-The 1916 Irish Rebellion and the British Workers Movement

Workers Vanguard No. 1098	21 October 2016

The 1916 Irish Rebellion and the British Workers Movement

The following article, reprinted from Workers Hammer No. 235 (Summer 2016), newspaper of the Spartacist League/Britain, is based on a presentation by comrade Eibhlin McDonald at a 23 April public meeting in London.

One hundred years ago tomorrow, the Easter Rising broke out in Dublin. The armed insurrection against British rule was organised by some 1,000-1,500 militant nationalists, the Volunteers, together with the Irish Citizen Army (ICA). The leadership included James Connolly, a revolutionary socialist. Yet this was a nationalist uprising for an independent Ireland, despite the participation of Connolly and his ICA, a workers militia that had been formed during the Dublin Lockout of 1913, when the city’s employers tried to smash the trade unions.

It began when the rebels seized a number of positions across Dublin and proclaimed an Irish Republic from the General Post Office. But the majority of the Volunteers were demobilised by the nationalist leaders on the eve of the Rising, leaving the Dublin rebels isolated. Moreover, the arms and ammunition from Germany that were expected by the insurgents did not arrive. A few days before the Rising, Roger Casement, who had been in Germany trying to organise support for an Irish insurrection, was arrested after landing in Ireland on a German submarine.

The British ruling class responded with ferocity to this armed uprising, especially as it came in the midst of World War I, when all of the subject peoples in the British Empire—which in 1916 included India and much of Africa—were expected to be loyal, indeed to fight and die for the “Mother country.”

With overwhelming military force, the British shelled Dublin, destroying much of the city centre. The rebels were forced to surrender after five days. At first, the Rising did not have much popular support, but there was mass public outrage when the leaders were court-martialled and sentenced to death. Fourteen were shot, including Connolly who was executed tied to a chair because he had been wounded in battle and was unable to stand.

The British imperialists launched wave after wave of repression in the years to follow. But even in defeat, the Easter Rising marked the beginning of the end of British rule in Ireland. They were forced to grant independence in 1921-22, but these masters of divide-and-rule engineered the partition of Ireland by inflaming tensions between Protestants and Catholics. The partition was the result of a defeat of the working class in struggle and was accompanied by bloody pogroms against Catholics, as we shall see.

We Marxists honour the Easter Rising as a just struggle for independence of Ireland from British colonial rule. But we are politically opposed to the programme and ideology of nationalism, which lines up the working class behind its “own” capitalist rulers. Unlike nationalists, we’re certainly not advocates of the doomed but heroic “blood sacrifice.” But once the Rising happened, revolutionaries were duty bound to defend it, in contrast to those on the left who regard the capitalist state as inviolable and disavow any attempt to overthrow it.

Karl Marx on Ireland

For British revolutionaries, the question of Ireland, Britain’s oldest colony, has long been a test of their commitment to the overthrow of their “own” capitalist ruling class. Karl Marx insisted: “It is in the direct and absolute interests of the English working class to get rid of their present connexion with Ireland.... The English working class will never accomplish anything before it has got rid of Ireland” (Letter to Engels, 10 December 1869). The crucial importance of internationalist unity between workers in Ireland and Britain becomes obvious from studying the history of working-class struggles. Any revolutionary perspective requires resolute opposition to the politics of the Labour leaders—the left as well as the right wing—as we shall see.

Following on from Marx, Lenin formulated a general policy on the attitude of the revolutionary party to national oppression in the epoch of imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism that developed towards the end of the 19th century. With the advent of imperialism, Lenin stressed, the division of nations into oppressor and oppressed was accentuated. Correspondingly, the tasks of revolutionaries in each country are different: the proletariat of the oppressor nation, as Lenin put it, “must demand freedom of political separation for the colonies and nations oppressed by ‘their own’ nation. Otherwise the internationalism of the proletariat would be nothing but empty words.” He insisted that British socialists who do not demand freedom to separate for the colonies and for Ireland “act as chauvinists and lackeys of bloodstained and filthy imperialist monarchies and the imperialist bourgeoisie” (“The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination,” 1916). Socialists of the oppressed nations, on the other hand, must fight for the fullest unity of the workers of the oppressed nation with those of the oppressor nation.

The attitude of socialists in Britain towards the Easter Rising flowed from their attitude to World War I. The outbreak of the first interimperialist war saw the collapse of the Second International into mutually hostile camps as most parties supported their “own” capitalist rulers. On 4 August 1914, the parliamentary fraction of the German Social Democratic Party, the largest section of the international, voted in favour of war credits. The British Labour Party and trade union leaders, for their part, supported Britain and declared an end to working-class struggle for the duration of the war. The Bolsheviks insisted that revolutionaries must stand for the defeat, above all, of their own bourgeois state. For Lenin, the task of socialists was to seek to turn the imperialist war into a civil war, that is, into proletarian revolution. Further, Lenin saw that the Second International had been destroyed, and that a new revolutionary international must be built through a complete break with the opportunists and social chauvinists.

For Lenin, the attitude of revolutionaries to the Easter Rising was a measure of their commitment to the right of self-determination, and to proletarian internationalism. He argued against other revolutionaries, including Trotsky, who trenchantly opposed the social chauvinists but were dismissive of the Rising. Trotsky claimed that the Irish peasantry, whose struggle for land had been the motor force for previous national revolts, had been pacified by land reform, and thus he argued that the “historical basis for a national revolution has disappeared even in backward Ireland” (“Lessons of the Events in Dublin,” Nashe Slovo, 4 July 1916).

Lenin countered that revolutionaries must take advantage of every outbreak of struggle against imperialism. A national revolt in Europe could be the spark for broader revolutionary struggle, Lenin argued. Indeed, “a blow delivered against the power of the English imperialist bourgeoisie by a rebellion in Ireland is a hundred times more significant politically than a blow of equal force delivered in Asia or in Africa.” “It is the misfortune of the Irish,” Lenin wrote, “that they rose prematurely before the European revolt of the proletariat had had time to mature” (“The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed Up,” 1916).

The Labour Party had passed umpteen “anti-war” resolutions—right up to a few days before the war broke out. For example, on 1 August 1914, prominent British Labour Party leaders signed a resolution calling for demonstrations against war and proclaiming: “Down with class rule” and “Down with war.” Among its signatories was one Arthur Henderson.

Three days later, Henderson signed a document issued by the trade union leaders, calling for support to Britain against Germany, on the grounds that Britain’s imperialist rival was “seeking to become the dominant power in Europe, with the Kaiser the dictator over all.” The Labour Party and the Trades Union Congress (TUC) declared an end to working-class struggle for the duration of the war. In May 1915 Arthur Henderson, then leader of the Parliamentary Labour Party, became a member of the wartime coalition government. He was a member of the cabinet when the 1916 Easter Rising broke out.

Henderson was accused of having led the cheering in Parliament when news of the executions of the leaders of the Rising was received. Henderson denied it, but said he would not “violate Ministerial confidences” in order to reveal what he had said about the executions. It hardly matters whether he cheered or not. He was in the cabinet that ordered the repression in Ireland.

The Dublin Lockout of 1913

Another Labour MP [Member of Parliament] and leader of the National Union of Railwaymen (NUR), J.H. Thomas, has been aptly described as a “fervid imperialist” in relation to Ireland. Thomas’s hostility to James Connolly was already evident during the Dublin Lockout of 1913. The capitalists of Dublin came together and locked out their workers in opposition to the efforts of [union leader] Jim Larkin and Connolly to unionise the workforce. Larkin, aided by Connolly, led the workers of Dublin in some five months of bitter class war, in a seminal battle for the trade union movement in Ireland and in Britain.

At a time when the trade unions consisted overwhelmingly of skilled craft workers, Larkin and Connolly worked wonders on both sides of the Irish Sea by organising the unskilled workers into the unions. In Belfast, this meant recruiting Catholic workers as well as Protestants, and also women textile workers into the unions. In Britain, drawing the huge layer of unskilled workers into the unions injected tremendous vitality into the trade union movement and contributed to a wave of class struggle known as the Great Unrest during the period 1910-1914.

During the Lockout, Connolly and Larkin appealed for support from the British trade unions. The working class had tremendous sympathy with the Dublin workers. But the solidarity that was sorely needed was sabotaged by the TUC and Labour leaders, including the left-talking dockers’ leader, Ben Tillett. The British dockers and railway workers were key to defeating the Dublin bosses: had they blockaded goods destined for Dublin by boat and train they would have shut down the city. At one stage, two train drivers in South Wales, who were members of ASLEF rail union, were sacked for refusing to carry goods destined for Dublin. Some 30,000 railway workers went on strike in their support. NUR leader Thomas was instrumental in smashing the strike, getting his members back to work and actually ordering them to replace the two victimised ASLEF members, whom he described as “a disgrace” to trade unionism. Jim Larkin caustically described Thomas as “a double-eyed traitor to his class.”

It comes as no surprise then that Thomas condemned the Easter Rising and declared that “there was no Labour leader in this country who did not deplore the recent rebellion in Ireland.” Labour “left” MP George Lansbury published the most popular anti-war newspaper in England. But as a pacifist, Lansbury condemned the Easter Rising, saying: “No lover of peace can do anything but deplore the outbreak in Dublin” (quoted in Geoffrey Bell, Hesitant Comrades, 2016).

As I mentioned, the executions of the leaders of the Rising caused outrage in Ireland. Even among those in Britain who condemned the Rising, some thought the executions were a step too far. But Will Thorne, a London Labour MP, demanded in Parliament to know when Roger Casement would be tried, pointing out that he was “the forerunner of this movement,” i.e., of the rebels who led the Rising (quoted in Hesitant Comrades). Casement was a courageous figure: from an Irish Protestant background, he grew up believing the Empire was bringing progress to Africa. But he was disgusted by the atrocities perpetrated on the native peoples at the behest of the imperialists in the Belgian Congo (and in the Putumayo region of Peru) and became an opponent of British imperialist rule, including in his native Ireland.

At the time of his arrest for attempting to secure German military aid for the Easter Rising, Casement had much popular sympathy. Faced with growing demands for clemency in his case, the British authorities released excerpts from what they claimed were Casement’s diaries indicating he was homosexual. The British kept the diaries secret for decades after his death, giving rise to much doubt about their authenticity. When Casement was charged with high treason, and the public were being fed lurid allegations of his homosexuality, many of his liberal friends, including the novelist Joseph Conrad, shamefully refused to petition for clemency. He was hanged in London’s Pentonville prison in August 1916.

On the Question of Obtaining German Arms

From the point of view of the working class, obtaining military support, including from an imperialist power, is not a problem in and of itself—if it is for a just war. It would have been a different matter had the Irish nationalists placed their forces under the command of the German military, which they did not. However, nationalists frequently do place themselves under the military command of an imperialist power, becoming their proxies in unjust wars. For example, today in Syria and Iraq, the Kurdish nationalists are the “boots on the ground” for the U.S. imperialists. We have no side in Syria’s squalid civil war between the Assad military and the rebel forces dominated by different Islamists. But we do have a side against the U.S. and other imperialist powers. And while we are implacable opponents of everything ISIS stands for, we take a military side with ISIS when it aims its fire against the imperialist armed forces and their proxies in the region, including the Kurdish nationalist forces.

The British Left and the Easter Rising

Among the opponents of the war and of social chauvinism in the British Labour movement, a prominent voice was that of Sylvia Pankhurst, at the time a leader in the struggle for women’s suffrage. Pankhurst said there is only “one reply to the Irish Rebellion and that is the demand that Ireland should be allowed to govern itself.” Pankhurst had few illusions in parliamentary reform—the struggle for votes for women met with violent resistance from the British state and suffrage was grudgingly granted only after the Russian October Revolution of 1917. Pankhurst, to her credit, had clearly taken the side of the working class by supporting Larkin and Connolly in the Dublin Lockout. She broke from her bourgeois-feminist family and went on to become a socialist and later, briefly, a communist.

The British Socialist Party had been formed in 1912 as a fusion of H.M. Hyndman’s Social Democratic Federation with other socialists. The BSP underwent a split during the war, at its Easter 1916 conference, when the left wing took over and adopted an anti-war position. The split led to the departure of Hyndman, an anti-Jewish bigot and all-round social chauvinist. The BSP’s newspaper, the Call (4 May 1916), described the Easter Rising as “this latest phase of the war for liberation” and had no hesitation “in fixing full responsibility for the antecedents of the affair on the shoulders of successive British governments.”

Perhaps the most surprising response to the Easter Rising and the executions came from the Socialist Labour Party (SLP). The SLP, based primarily in Scotland, had been formed on the model of the party of the same name in the U.S. founded by Daniel DeLeon. Connolly was a former leader of the Scottish party. At the time of the Easter Rising, the SLP in Scotland was facing severe state repression for its role in organising militant strikes in strategic munitions industries in Glasgow, in the midst of war. The SLP’s main leaders—including Arthur MacManus, John Muir, Thomas Clark—had been arrested. John Maclean, who was a leader of the Clyde Workers Committee (CWC) but not a member of the SLP, was also arrested and imprisoned.

However, state repression alone doesn’t explain why the SLP’s monthly newspaper, the Socialist, said next to nothing on the Easter Rising, or on the execution of Connolly, their former comrade. Moreover it didn’t carry an obituary for Connolly until three years after his death, and during that time the paper carried very little coverage of Ireland. While the SLP led valiant strikes and the party press opposed the war, they maintained a strict separation between their political line on the war and their trade union activity. In an extreme example, when John Muir was in court for his role in organising the munitions strikes, he cravenly swore that the strike was purely over economic issues and that he was for the war and war production. This shameful performance contrasts with John Maclean who used his trial as an opportunity to indict the capitalist system and the war.

Muir should have been expelled for dragging the SLP’s record on the war through the mud, but the SLP kept him in their ranks. Had they fought for their anti-war line in the CWC, it would have split the leadership. Undoubtedly, had the SLP defended the Easter Rising and opposed Connolly’s execution, it would also have required combating anti-Catholic prejudices among Protestant workers in Glasgow, which had its own version of the Catholic-Protestant division that was prevalent in Belfast. Even such momentous trade union struggle as that which was waged on the Clyde [river in Glasgow] during World War I could not, in and of itself, overcome the divisions that existed, and thus could not arrive at the level of consciousness needed to overthrow the capitalist ruling class through socialist revolution. That requires a different kind of party.

Among the avowedly revolutionary parties of the time, Lenin’s party was unique. By 1912 the Bolsheviks had carried out a complete break with the opportunists in Russia. As early as 1902, in his pamphlet What Is to Be Done?, Lenin insisted that the revolutionary should aspire not to be “the trade union secretary, but the tribune of the people, who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects” in order to “clarify for all and everyone the world-historic significance of the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat.” Above all, Lenin insisted on the party’s responsibility to bring the working class to revolutionary consciousness. The principles and programme that Lenin hammered out for the Bolsheviks, which he then generalised following the collapse of the Second International into social chauvinism in 1914, were central to the forging of the party into the instrument that would lead the proletariat to victory in the 1917 October Revolution.

From the Easter Rising to Partition

The years after Connolly’s execution saw a resurgence of anti-British sentiment in Ireland, led by Sinn Fein. There was also a renewed wave of working-class struggles that continued through the war of independence of 1919-21. In the South, for example, as well as the Limerick Soviet, in which striking workers took over and ran the city, there were land seizures and workers protests. In 1919, Belfast saw a tremendous strike throughout the city. The majority of the strikers were Protestant, and the head of the strike committee, Charles MacKay, was a socialist of Catholic origin. The strike provided an opening for the sectarian divide to be transcended and could have given a tremendous impetus to the struggle for an Irish workers republic. But the Protestant bosses in Belfast played on Protestant fears that they would become an oppressed minority in an independent Ireland ruled by the Sinn Fein nationalists. Meanwhile the British Lord Lieutenant in Dublin released some of the Sinn Fein leaders who had been imprisoned, calculating that their Irish nationalism would incite Protestant workers’ hostility towards their Catholic counterparts and undermine proletarian unity.

Not long after the defeat of the Belfast strikes, in the summer of 1920 a wave of bloody attacks swept through the shipyards and spread to other workplaces, targeting mainly Catholics. Some 10,000 Catholic men and 1,000 Catholic women were driven out of their jobs. Many Catholic homes and shops were burned in “five weeks of ruthless persecution by boycott, fire, plunder and assault” in a wave of terror that was compared to the pogroms against Jews in tsarist Russia (quoted in Hesitant Comrades). Several hundred of the expelled workers were members of the carpenters union.

At the same time, 1920 was also the year of the “Hands Off Russia” campaign, in which workers in Britain mobilised in the thousands and forced the British government to stop shipments of arms to capitalist armies fighting against Soviet Russia. Among others, the carpenters union had also passed “Hands Off Ireland” motions. In Belfast, carpenters union members went on strike when a group of Protestant shipyard workers produced revolvers declaring they would drive out every Sinn Feiner—meaning every Catholic, every trade union militant and socialist—from their jobs. Only 600 out of 2,000 obeyed the strike call. But the Loyalist scabs were expelled from the union. The carpenters union leaders appealed for other unions to prevent goods and raw materials from going into Belfast, arguing that the trade union movement had a role to play in ending the sectarian strife—by standing up for its own principles.

The anti-Catholic pogroms in Belfast paved the way for Partition, a major defeat for the perspective of a workers republic. In opposition to Irish independence, the British backed the Ulster Loyalists and engineered the setting up of the Orange statelet in the North, a police state which institutionalised discrimination against the Catholic minority. Independence in the South led to the creation of a repressive Catholic state, which was rooted in the oppression of women. The poisonous legacy of Partition was to create an oppressed Catholic minority in the North, interpenetrated with a distinct Protestant community, which in turn harbours legitimate fears that they would become an oppressed minority in a Catholic-dominated united Ireland.

The only just resolution to these national antagonisms lies in the overthrow of capitalism on both islands. Our perspective is for an Irish workers republic within a voluntary federation of workers republics in these Isles. It is important to know that the situation that emerged from Partition was not the only possible outcome. Above all it was a result of defeats and betrayals of workers in struggle. And it is rich in lessons for the many struggles that we will face in the course of building a revolutionary party.

The Harp Beneath The Crown- With The Chieftains In Mind

The Harp Beneath The Crown- With The Chieftains In Mind

By Sam Eaton

“I’m as Irish as the next goddam bogger,” shouted Jack Callahan, “I just don’t like to wear it on my sleeve. I don’t have to break out in song every time I think about what my maternal grandfather, Daniel Patrick Riley and that should be Irish enough for you, called the “old sod.” For him it was the old sod since his own grandparents had come over on the “famine” ships in the 1840s after the bloody Brits had starved them out of County Kerry with their wicked enclosure policies so they could have grazing land for their sheep or something and they, the Brits hoarding enough food for a full larder for everyone and the starved broken bodied piling up on the roads after eating tree bark or something you wouldn’t feed a pig. At least that was the way my grandfather told me his grandfather told him.” 

Jack’s whole uproar over his heritage, over his bloody green flag, harp beneath the crown heritage had been brought about innocently enough as he and Bradley Fox, a friend whom he had known since his school days at Riverdale High, sat in The Plough and Stars bar on Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge when Bradley had mentioned that the Chieftains would again be doing their yearly series of shows around Saint Patrick’s at the Wang Center in downtown Boston and had assumed that Jack would once again jump at the chance to show his green side.

And that outburst was the way that Jack had answered him with some put-upon air of righteous indignation that he had to prove himself and his Irish-ness. Prove it he added to a half-breed like Bradley whose own father was descended from the bloody Brits, had only with fire and determination on his mother’s part had he been brought up in the true church rather than some heathen Protestant chapel with those god-awful hail high Jehovah psalms beseeching an unjust god to forgive them their bloody heathen sins, and who had only been saved by his mother’s full-blooded Irish lineage (his mother’s great-great grandfather having come over on the famine ships with Jack’s maternal great-great-great grandfather if that was the right number of “greats”)from being totally ostracized in the whole neighborhood by the old “shawlies” who commented on every little deviation. So no this year he would not be going to the annual concert, maybe would not even go to the Saint Patrick’s Parade over in South Boston which he had been going to since he was a kid although less frequently over the previous few years as he had lost patience with the drunks, the rowdies and the one-day-a-year Irish. The Polish Irish they would call them when they were kids, the Poles being the other big ethnic group in the town, the ones who worked on the watch factories that had dotted the river in those days. They would come into school on Saint Pat’s Day all in green calling themselves MacWalecki or something. That was the way the two old friends left it that night, left like they did many a blow-up argument with a semi-smile since half the time after a certain hour or a certain number of whiskeys they would collapse in on their arguments. This one had that same fate.            

[What Bradley did not know that night, did not know for several more weeks, was that Chrissie (nee McNamara) Callahan, Jack’s wife of many more years than any of them wanted to count and who had been the classic high school sweethearts was giving signals that she wanted to leave Jack now that the kids were grown and they were “empty-nesters.” Wanted to in her words “find herself” before it was too late and that she had felt like a stranger in Jack’s presence. That fate weighted heavily on Jack since Chrissie had been his rock through those many years and he was not sure what he would do if she left him high and dry like that. Tried to argue her out of her thoughts always going back to the usually tried and true argument about how they had first gotten together and that night had pledged their eternal love. Bradley had known that story since he had been at Molly’s Diner the night it happened. Jack had had a crush on Chrissie since sixth grade when she had invited him to her twelfth birthday party and as such things went at “petting parties” she had given him a big kiss that he never really forgot about. But being shy and self-conscious he never pursued the matter. Time passed and as they entered high school it turned out that Jack was a hell of a football player who led his team to the state division championship senior year.

So Jack could have had any girl he wanted from sophomore year on. But he still retained his Chrissie thing and his shyness. Chrissie had been harboring some such feelings as well although as more outgoing and a beautiful girl she did not lack for dates and the evil intentions of guys. One Friday night in the later fall of sophomore year though she had had enough and knowing that Jack and the boys would be at Molly’s playing the latest rock hits on Molly’s jukebox while having their burgers and fries she went into Molly’s front door, drew a bee-line to Jack, and to Jack’s lap. The way Bradley always described it later was that Chrissie had had such a look of determination on her face that it would have taken the whole football team to get her off that lap. A look a Jack said that it would take the whole football team and the junior varsity too to get her off his lap. So that night their eternal love thing started. Jack had told Bradley in confidence that he could have had anything Chrissie had to offer that night when they left Molly’s for Jack to take her home. That would come later, the next spring when on Saint Patrick’s’ Day night after the parade was over and after they had both consumed too many illegal beers they went over to nearby Carson Beach and Chrissie had given Jack all she had to offer. So those mist of memories had been were driving Jack dyspeptic response to Bradley’s question.]              

Later that night after Jack got back to Hingham where he had his business, his Toyota car dealership (he was perennially Mr. Toyota in Eastern Massachusetts), and his too big house, Chrissie asleep upstairs (in one of the kids’ bedrooms, so that was the way things were just then) turned the light on and went into his den. Sat down on his easy chair and turned the light off. He had just wanted to think in the gentle dark about how he was going keep Chrissie with him but he found that he started to drift back to the days in Riverdale when he was a kid and being Irish meant a lot to him, felt he had to uphold the Easter, 1916 brotherhood, had to buck the trend that his parents and their generation had bought into-becoming vanilla Americans. Losing the old country identities that men like his grandfather held too with granite determination in the flow of too many other trends driving them away from what they had been, where they had come from in this great big immigrant-driven country.           

All the funny little rites of passage. First of all listening to his grandfather’s stories about the heroic men of 1916 (women too but they slipped through cracks in his telling the womenfolk being held in the background in that generation), above all James Connelly who had place of pride on his grandfather’s piazza wall. Then the times once his grandfather was in his cups a bit the singing of all the old songs, some he had never heard of then but which later he would find were ancient songs going back to Cromwell’s bloody hellish times. Later when he and his friends, usually not Bradley since his father was adamant that he not attend some frivolous doings, would sneak out of school, walk to the bus which would take them to the Redline subway station and over to South Boston and the Saint Pat’s Parade. See that day, March 17^th was a holiday in Boston and Suffolk County, not Saint Pat’s Day but Evacuation Day, the day the colonial patriots drove the bloody Brits out of Boston during the American Revolution. But Riverdale in Middlesex County did not get a holiday hence the sneaking out of school.

Of course of all the Saint Pat’s Days the night he took all Chrissie had to offer stood well above all others. He thought about how Chrissie, all prim and proper on the outside, at first refused to skip school until he made a fuse over it that he wouldn’t have any fun without her. That got to her, and so they went with Jimmy Jenkins, Frankie Riley and a couple of other girls whose names he could not remember over to South Boston. They ran into one of Jack’s older cousins who gave them some beers. At first Chrissie balked at drinking the stuff but Jack said just take a sip and if she didn’t like it that was that. Well she liked it well enough that day (which was probably the last time she had beer since thereafter it was respectfully Southern Comfort, mixed gin drinks, and later various types of wine). They drank most of the afternoon, had somehow lost the rest of the crowd from Riverdale and Jack saw his big play. He asked Chrissie if she wanted to go to the beach to sit on the seawall and watch the ocean before going home. She didn’t resist that idea.  So they went to Carson Beach as it was starting to get dark, went to a secluded area near the L Street Bathhouse, and started to “make out.” Jack began to fondle her breasts and she didn’t push him away, didn’t push him away as he put his hand between her thighs either, actually held his hands there. And so they as they saying went after a Howlin’ Wolf song they had heard on Molly’s jukebox did the “do the do” for first time. He blushed as he thought about that first time and how they, foolish high school kids, didn’t have any “protection,” didn’t even think about such an idea. Later they got wise but then they were as naïve about sex and what to do, or not do, about it as any two Irish kids could be.

Jack as he sat there in dark then thought enough of this or he might head up those stairs, kids’ room or not. But above all that night he thought about his sainted grandmother, Anna, by his account, by all accounts, a saint if for no other reason than she had put up with his grandfather and his awful habits but also because she was the sweetest woman in the whole neighborhood and was not, it bears repeating, not afraid of the “shawlies” and their vicious grapevine (which had even caught wind of his and Chrissie’s trysts although they denied the whole thing every time somebody mentioned it-they were after all as good  virginal Catholics as anybody else in the neighborhood so there). He then remembered how when he was young she would sing the songs from the old country while she was doing the washing (the old-fashioned way with scrub board and wringer, clothesline-dried), Brendan on the Moor, Kevin Barry, The Rising of the Moon, and many others. He would always request The Coast of Malabar, ask her to sing it twice when she was in the mood. Such a song of being away from home. He always loved it when the Chieftains played the song as a part of their show.          

Jack had that song on his mind the next morning when after Chrissie had come down for her morning coffee he asked her, half expecting to be turned down, if she wanted to go to the Chieftains concert in March. She brightened and said “yes, yes of course.” Later that day he sheepishly called Bradley and told him to order three tickets for the Chieftains concert. Bradley chuckled. Enough said.         

***In Honor Of James Connelly On The 100th Anniversary Of The Easter Uprising-Commandant- Irish Citizens Army- A Critical Appreciation Of Easter, 1916

***In Honor Of James Connelly On The 100^th Anniversary Of The Easter Uprising-Commandant- Irish Citizens Army- A Critical Appreciation Of Easter, 1916

 

***In Honor Of James Connelly On The 100^th Anniversary Of The Easter Uprising-Commandant- Irish Citizens Army- A Critical Appreciation Of Easter, 1916

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.

"James Connolly"

The man was all shot through that came to day into the Barrack Square

And a soldier I, I am not proud to say that we killed him there

They brought him from the prison hospital and to see him in that chair

I swear his smile would, would far more quickly call a man to prayer

Maybe, maybe I don't understand this thing that makes these rebels die

Yet all men love freedom and the spring clear in the sky

I wouldn't do this deed again for all that I hold by

As I gazed down my rifle at his breast but then, then a soldier I.

They say he was different, kindly too apart from all the rest.

A lover of the poor-his wounds ill dressed.

He faced us like a man who knew a greater pain

Than blows or bullets ere the world began: died he in vain

Ready, Present, and him just smiling, Christ I felt my rifle shake

His wounds all open and around his chair a pool of blood

And I swear his lips said, "fire" before my rifle shot that cursed lead

And I, I was picked to kill a man like that, James Connolly

A great crowd had gathered outside of Kilmainham

Their heads all uncovered, they knelt to the ground.

For inside that grim prison

Lay a great Irish soldier

His life for his country about to lay down.

He went to his death like a true son of Ireland

The firing party he bravely did face

Then the order rang out: Present arms and fire

James Connolly fell into a ready-made grave

The black flag was hoisted, the cruel deed was over

Gone was the man who loved Ireland so well

There was many a sad heart in Dublin that morning

When they murdered James Connolly-. the Irish rebel

"James Connolly"

Marchin' down O'Connell Street with the Starry Plough on high

There goes the Citizen Army with their fists raised in the sky

Leading them is a mighty man with a mad rage in his eye

"My name is James Connolly - I didn't come here to die

But to fight for the rights of the working man

And the small farmer too

Protect the proletariat from the bosses and their screws

So hold on to your rifles, boys, and don't give up your dream

Of a Republic for the workin' class, economic liberty"

Then Jem yelled out "Oh Citizens, this system is a curse

An English boss is a monster, an Irish one even worse

They'll never lock us out again and here's the reason why

My name is James Connolly, I didn't come here to die....."

And now we're in the GPO with the bullets whizzin' by

With Pearse and Sean McDermott biddin' each other goodbye

Up steps our citizen leader and roars out to the sky

"My name is James Connolly, I didn't come here to die...

Oh Lily, I don't want to die, we've got so much to live for

And I know we're all goin' out to get slaughtered, but I just can't take any more

Just the sight of one more child screamin' from hunger in a Dublin slum

Or his mother slavin' 14 hours a day for the scum

Who exploit her and take her youth and throw it on a factory floor

Oh Lily, I just can't take any more

They've locked us out, they've banned our unions, they even treat their animals better than us

No! It's far better to die like a man on your feet than to live forever like some slave on your knees, Lilly

But don't let them wrap any green flag around me

And for God's sake, don't let them bury me in some field full of harps and shamrocks

And whatever you do, don't let them make a martyr out of me

No! Rather raise the Starry Plough on high, sing a song of freedom

Here's to you, Lily, the rights of man and international revolution"

We fought them to a standstill while the flames lit up the sky

'Til a bullet pierced our leader and we gave up the fight

They shot him in Kilmainham jail but they'll never stop his cry

My name is James Connolly, I didn't come here to die...."

James Connolly-Commandant- Irish Citizens Army- A Critical Appreciation Of Easter, 1916

James Connolly-Commandant- Irish Citizens Army- A Critical Appreciation Of Easter, 1916

http://www.icl-fi.org/english/wh/195/connolly.html


Click on title to link to "Workers Hammer" (International Communist League/Great Britain newspaper) critical appreciation of James Connolly, a hero of the Irish rebellion of Easter , 1916.

"James Connolly"

The man was all shot through that came to day into the Barrack Square

And a soldier I, I am not proud to say that we killed him there

They brought him from the prison hospital and to see him in that chair

I swear his smile would, would far more quickly call a man to prayer

Maybe, maybe I don't understand this thing that makes these rebels die

Yet all men love freedom and the spring clear in the sky

I wouldn't do this deed again for all that I hold by

As I gazed down my rifle at his breast but then, then a soldier I.

They say he was different, kindly too apart from all the rest.

A lover of the poor-his wounds ill dressed.

He faced us like a man who knew a greater pain

Than blows or bullets ere the world began: died he in vain

Ready, Present, and him just smiling, Christ I felt my rifle shake

His wounds all open and around his chair a pool of blood

And I swear his lips said, "fire" before my rifle shot that cursed lead

And I, I was picked to kill a man like that, James Connolly



A great crowd had gathered outside of Kilmainham

Their heads all uncovered, they knelt to the ground.

For inside that grim prison

Lay a great Irish soldier

His life for his country about to lay down.

He went to his death like a true son of Ireland

The firing party he bravely did face

Then the order rang out: Present arms and fire

James Connolly fell into a ready-made grave

The black flag was hoisted, the cruel deed was over

Gone was the man who loved Ireland so well

There was many a sad heart in Dublin that morning

When they murdered James Connolly-. the Irish rebel



"James Connolly"

Marchin' down O'Connell Street with the Starry Plough on high
There goes the Citizen Army with their fists raised in the sky
Leading them is a mighty man with a mad rage in his eye
"My name is James Connolly - I didn't come here to die

But to fight for the rights of the working man
And the small farmer too
Protect the proletariat from the bosses and their screws
So hold on to your rifles, boys, and don't give up your dream
Of a Republic for the workin' class, economic liberty"

Then Jem yelled out "Oh Citizens, this system is a curse
An English boss is a monster, an Irish one even worse
They'll never lock us out again and here's the reason why
My name is James Connolly, I didn't come here to die....."

And now we're in the GPO with the bullets whizzin' by
With Pearse and Sean McDermott biddin' each other goodbye
Up steps our citizen leader and roars out to the sky
"My name is James Connolly, I didn't come here to die...

Oh Lily, I don't want to die, we've got so much to live for
And I know we're all goin' out to get slaughtered, but I just can't take any more
Just the sight of one more child screamin' from hunger in a Dublin slum
Or his mother slavin' 14 hours a day for the scum
Who exploit her and take her youth and throw it on a factory floor
Oh Lily, I just can't take any more

They've locked us out, they've banned our unions, they even treat their animals better than us
No! It's far better to die like a man on your feet than to live forever like some slave on your knees, Lilly

But don't let them wrap any green flag around me
And for God's sake, don't let them bury me in some field full of harps and shamrocks
And whatever you do, don't let them make a martyr out of me
No! Rather raise the Starry Plough on high, sing a song of freedom
Here's to you, Lily, the rights of man and international revolution"

We fought them to a standstill while the flames lit up the sky
'Til a bullet pierced our leader and we gave up the fight
They shot him in Kilmainham jail but they'll never stop his cry
My name is James Connolly, I didn't come here to die...."

In Honor Of Easter 1916-Karl Marx on Irish Self-Determination

Workers Vanguard No. 1113 2 June 2017 TROTSKY LENIN Karl Marx on Irish Self-Determination (Quote of the Week) Writing when all of Ireland was under British rule, Karl Marx underlined that the fight for Irish independence could deal a heavy blow to the British capitalist order. Based on the understanding that the Irish struggle could act as a motor force to unlocking proletarian struggle in England, Marx stressed that the English proletariat must champion the cause of Irish self-determination as part of fighting for its own interests. All industrial and commercial centres in England now have a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who forces down the standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker, he feels himself to be a member of the ruling nation and, therefore, makes himself a tool of his aristocrats and capitalists against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself.... England, as the metropolis of capital, as the power that has hitherto ruled the world market, is for the present the most important country for the workers’ revolution and, in addition, the only country where the material conditions for this revolution have developed to a certain state of maturity. Thus, to hasten the social revolution in England is the most important object of the International Working Men’s Association. The sole means of doing so is to make Ireland independent. It is, therefore, the task of the “International” to bring the conflict between England and Ireland to the forefront everywhere, and to side with Ireland publicly everywhere. The special task of the Central Council in London is to awaken the consciousness of the English working class that, for them, the national emancipation of Ireland is not a question of abstract justice or humanitarian sentiment, but the first condition of their own social emancipation. —Karl Marx, “Letter to Sigfrid Meyer and August Vogt” (April 1870)