|
Post by hibernicus on Sept 8, 2012 19:45:52 GMT
I agree that that Pearse remark is idolatry. To be fair to Pearse, he was in many respects a man of his time and this sort of mixture of Christian sacrificial spirituality with sacralisation of the nation and a military-aristocratic honour code of bloodshed was found right across Europe. (Michael Burleigh's books SACRED CAUSES and EARTHLY POWERS are very good on this general phenomenon and its dangers.) What Pearse was doing was co-opting religious faith for his political agenda by equating anything less than full commitment to physical-force separatism with religious apostasy. That's a recipe for zero-sum politics (i.e. any concession to one side can only be a loss for the other) and for active hostility to thought (disagreement equals blasphemy). In the right circumstances, this can create great popular enthusiasm; in the wrong, it's a recipe for malevolent little political cults who see themselves as a self-selected hero-elite. Pearse is easily underestimated, but to be honest I think I prefer Connolly as a man (though I am not a socialist). There's something of the dilettante about Pearse, and the flat-out way he lied to MacNeill (who had known him for 25 years and therefore trusted him on a personal level) seems uglier the more I think of it.
|
|
|
Post by shane on Sept 8, 2012 20:41:36 GMT
Does collaboration with Nazism necessarily entail supporting its racist ideas? Sean Russell was no doubt a naive man, but he didn't support Nazi doctrine. Frank Ryan had even fought with the Spanish loyalists - which IMHO was far worse than any collaboration with Nazis. I think one has to look at peoples' motivations before judging them. If you take the view (as I do) that Stalin's Soviet Union was objectively more immoral than Nazi Germany, then what becomes of the Allied Cause? Surely we cannot fault British and American soldiers for supporting communism, just because they were allies of a genocidal monster.
|
|
|
Post by Young Ireland on Sept 8, 2012 20:59:55 GMT
Shane, it's not just Sean Russell I was talking about. In the IRA publication of the time, War News, an editorial openly praised Nazi Germany, of which an extract follows:
"Satisfaction was expressed that the "cleansing fire" of the German armies was driving the Jews from Europe. ... War News condemned the arrival in Ireland of "so-called Jewish refugees", along with unspecified numbers of "Albanian, Abyssinian, Mongolian [and] Tartars".
Brian Hanley, History Ireland Vol. 13 No. 3, May/June 2005, noted IRA statements in 1940, as the Nazis overran western Europe:
"in July 1940 the IRA leadership issued a statement [which] made clear that if "German forces should land in Ireland, they will land ... as friends and liberators of the Irish people". The public was assured that Germany desired neither "territory nor ... economic penetration" in Ireland but only that it should play its part in the "reconstruction" of a "free and progressive Europe". The Third Reich was also praised as the "energising force" of European politics and the "guardian" of national freedom. ... In August [1940] the IRA confidently predicted that with the assistance of "our victorious European allies" Ireland would "achieve absolute independence within the next few months"." Tbh, although Franco had many faults, his regime was far less heinous than Hitler or Stalin.
Also, bear in mind that Arthur Griffith supported the anti-Semitic Limerick Pogrom of 1905.
You are right about communism being more objectively immoral than fascism. Indeed, the alliance was involuntary, as the USSR only came into the war when it was invaded by Hitler, and the USA after Pearl Harbor. The only thing that united them was a common foe. The subsequent Cold War is another testament to that effect.
|
|
|
Post by shane on Sept 8, 2012 21:21:39 GMT
youngireland, that's not an extract of 'War News', but of Hanley's article. Without the context of the 'War News' article in question, it'd be impossible to correctly interpret the reference to 'cleansing fires'. The part about Jewish refugees isn't exceptional for the time, Roosevelt was also pretty intransigent about allowing Jewish refugees to come to America. It didn't mean he supported gassing them.
The tributes to Nazi Germany are reminscient of those given in the British press to Russia after the German attack. They do not praise Germany for the holocaust (which would have been unknown to them) but simply because they see it as offering an alternative European balance of power. To be honest, I can't see anything sinister in it. Indeed the article you linked to shows much evidence of opposition to Nazi ideology (with quotes of An Phoblacht denouncing anti-semitism and 'Hitlerism' in Germany) in the IRA of the time.
The Sinn Fein that Arthur Griffith founded is as much the ancestor of Fine Gael or Fianna Fail as Adams' party. His sentiments about the Jews were hardly exceptional for the time. I agree a common foe united the USSR and the USA, ditto the IRA and the Nazis.
|
|
|
Post by Young Ireland on Sept 8, 2012 22:19:58 GMT
My mistake.
Still, anti-semitism is objectively wrong regardless of how common it is.
"The Sinn Fein that Arthur Griffith founded is as much the ancestor of Fine Gael or Fianna Fail as Adams' party"
And that's why our politicians are so useless.
I'm glad that some republicans DID denounce the Nazis at any rate.
|
|
|
Post by hibernicus on Sept 9, 2012 15:36:45 GMT
I don't think the contemporary stories cited by Young Ireland amount to substantial ideological continuity (of the same sort we find among those Radtrads who still cite the writings of Fr Denis Fahey). O Snodaigh's comparison of Shatter to Goebbels is in the style of leftie rhetoric which thinks it is smart to equate Zionism with Nazism and to insult pro-Zionist Jews in this manner, and of course it is predicated on the assumption that Nazism is a bad thing. There is a good deal of legit debate about how far this sort of leftie anti-Zionism recycles the symbols and themes of classic late C19/early C20 European anti-semitism in a new guise, but that's a different matter. The Russell commemoration I think reflects more moral myopia and a sense that "we're not going to disown one of our own" (and the statue being a convenient site that nobody else is going to dispute with SF for possession of). Brian Keenan was a fairly hardcore Marxist, with a mindset quite different from Russell's militarism. BTW it was the Inter-Party government of 1948-51 that let SF put the statue up in the first place (basically Sean MacBride cocking a snook at De Valera for his crackdown on MacBride's IRA pals) and some members of the colour party at the unveiling were later prominent Stickies - I think Goulding and Garland were there. The War News article is pretty clearly anti-semitic to me, and is echoing Nazi propaganda. They may not have realised the Jews were being massacred, but they certainly knew they were being forcibly rounded up and sent to ghettoes in the East, which was criminal in itself. I have read quite a bit of the IRISH INDEPENDENT'S 1930s coverage, and although that paper had a very soft spot for Mussolini it left no doubt that the Jews were being badly treated in 1930s Germany. The stuff about Ireland being flooded with Jewish refugees and other miscellaneous Orientals is classic anti-semitic rhetorical codeword; one aim the Nazis had in expelling Jews from their territories (robbing them of all they possessed en route on the pretext that since Jews were incapable of creating anything they must have stolen whatever they had) was the hope that an influx of penniless refugees would encourage anti-semitism in the new host countries, and Nazi sympathisers in those countries did their best to promote this. The descriptions of the refugees as utterly alien Asiatics is not common or garden anti-immigrant prejudice of the type found in the British Home and Foreign Office and the US state department, it's the rhetoric used by hardline anti-semites and pro-Nazis. If that's not sinister I don't know what is - at the very least it means they were prepared to identify with the Nazis on this issue in return for help against the Brits. Quite a few European nationalists made that bargain, and it didn't end well for them morally or otherwise. Hanley's point is that the IRA attitude to the Nazis varied; the lefties who ran AN PHOBLACHT in the mid-30s were anti-nazi, the wartime IRA propagandists were more pro-nazi. I should add that outright Irish support for the Nazis was also inhibited by the 1930s clashes between the Catholic Church in Germany and the Nazis.
The Spanish Republicans are over-idealised and they were guilty of mass shootings and religious persecution, as well as the purges of their Trot comrades carried out by the Communists when they got the chance, but I don't think they can be remotely compared to the Nazis. Stalin's regime and the Nazis are a much closer match.
Anti-semitism was not central to Griffith's worldview in the way it was to the Nazis or to Fr Denis Fahey. He was an example of the sort of mindset that can provide a seedbed for worse forms of anti-semitism, and his views on Limerick were quite disgraceful, but he was nowhere near in the same league as (for example) Gearoid O Cuinneagain of Ailtiri na h-Aiseirighe, who was publishing anti-semitic material AFTER the Holocaust, or Maria Duce which in the 1950s used to claim (a) the Holocaust never happened (b) if it did, Hitler was a Jew and staged it in the itnerests of the wider Jewish conspiracy of which he was part.
There certainly were Faheyites in the IRA as late as the 60s, but that generation has died off or been weeded out. (Fahey himself was a bit ambivalent on republicanism - he was certainly an Irish nationalist but a lot of his material came from stuff written by British ultra-Tories who thought the IRA was a Judaeo-Bolshevik plot.) I suspect Faheyites can still be found on the fringes of RSF and some other ultra groups, but not SF itself.
|
|
|
Post by hibernicus on Dec 12, 2012 22:15:50 GMT
I was acquainted with some people who were involved in CSP and Muintir na hEireann in the early 90s, but didn't know anyone in the NP. However, some people I knew who were in CSP and had dealings with NP gave me a very unfavourable picture of the NP and Bennis in particular. According to them, Bennis's main concern was self-promotion and she was not willing to treat anyone else as an equal; she aggressively set out to recruit CSP members to the NP in areas where the CSP was already established and the NP had not had a presence previously; she made electoral agreements with the CSP and then broke them whenever she felt like it. Furthermore, on one or two occasions when interviewed on public media or at candidates' hustings she equivocated (to use no stronger term) about the party's relationship with the pro-life movement. Some of her acolytes defended this on the grounds that the other side lied about their support for abortion in order to get people to support them, so our side should do the same - the problems with this being (a) the other side know what their real policy is and discuss it among themselves, whereas she expected everyone to play follow-the-leader without question (b) if you don't set out your position to the voters you cannot say that the voters have given you a mandate for it (c) the principal reason for voting for the NP, as for CSP and Muintir, was precisely its pro-life policy; without that it would just be a bunch of amateurs trying to compete on equal terms with the established parties. All the leaders of the micro-parties suffered from the delusion that they spoke for the country as a whole and should be treated as the equivalent of the major party leaders, rather than realising that they had very little support and needed to build it up with time and effort. I get the impression that Bennis was the worst case of this delusion, and I would be very reluctant to have anything to do with her. Greene does make some attempt to articulate his views, at least in reference to ultra-sovereigntism. I don't think Bennis ever did other than talking of herself as the voice of the plain people (and particularly the housewives) of Ireland. Her better electoral performance may owe something to this image as seen at a safe distance by protest voters, but Bennis herself was not really able to build anything lasting on in terms of activists or analysis. The NP was not specifically discussed on this thread because it is long extinct whereas the CSP still survives, but some of my general remarks about the shortcomings of the Christian parties apply to it as well. Anyone who wants to discuss the NP on this thread is welcome to do so.
|
|
|
Post by hibernicus on Dec 12, 2012 22:16:58 GMT
BTW Bennis comes from a traditional Fianna Fail background - her father was a veteran FF activist from Limerick who actually dropped dead on the train going to de Valera's funeral in 1975.
|
|
|
Post by hibernicus on Dec 12, 2012 22:49:18 GMT
I wouldn't say her political views were similar to Dana's because Dana had (has?) somewhat more in the way of political smarts. Bennis did not seem to have much in the way of political views at all.
|
|
|
Post by Young Ireland on Dec 12, 2012 22:53:34 GMT
I see. I'm not sure though what you mean. Everyone has political views of some shape, even if they aren't necessarily articulate in expressing them.
|
|
|
Post by hibernicus on Dec 13, 2012 11:13:35 GMT
One of the big problems pro-lifers/Christian parties have (and had still more 20 years ago) is the assumption "we speak for the ordinary people and what we say is simple common sense, therefore we don't need to articulate it or justify it". Bennis seemed to me to have a very bad case of this, which of course lends itself to ego-tripping (because if you speak for the people anyone who criticises/disagrees with you is by implication going against the people). I'm not sure what is the basis for your comparison to Dana in particular, given that most pro-lifers tend to be somewhat eurosceptic and to subscribe to what might be called the Christian family agenda, but Dana was certainly a good deal more effective than Bennis. I think Bennis had largely faded from view by the 2002 referendum so I don't recall what stance she took on it. If you have access to a library with a file of the IRISH FAMILY (I'm not sure who has it other than the NAtional Library) it would have a fair bit of coverage of Bennis in the 90s but very uncritical - the IRISH FAMILY's great weakness was its tendency to uncritical cheerleading for anything that looked like a promising development. The criticism of Bennis I gave earlier circulated orally but I don't think it ever got into print sources.
BTW the FIELD DAY ANTHOLOGY OF WOMEN'S WRITING reprints a newspaper profile-cum-interrview of Bennis from the late 90s
|
|
|
Post by hibernicus on Dec 13, 2012 11:23:45 GMT
BTW a small news item. Sources tell me Richard Greene has stepped down (amicably) as CSP president since he feels he cannot give enough time to the post - he will remain active in the party. Cathal Loftus is the new party leader.
|
|
|
Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Mar 5, 2013 15:07:21 GMT
Richard Greene has political experience alright - he was never able to tailor that experience to work in his various attempts at party leadership.
|
|
|
Post by hibernicus on Mar 5, 2013 21:29:16 GMT
He has a piece in the current CATHOLIC VOICE calling yet again for the creation of a new political party to give a voice to pro-lifers. Unfortunately he never says anything concrete about what policies such a party might adopt, because he starts from the assumption that the party naturally represents the people as a whole and only a small number of malign manipulators are really heart and soul opposed to it (the rest being their dupes). I think he has a dose of Kevin Boland syndrome - taking traditional rhetoric seriously without making any attempt to relate it to the context in which it was put forward, and assuming that repeating the rhetoric is all-sufficing, will lead you straight into the desert. That mindset can achieve a certain personal nobility, but it gets nowhere
|
|
|
Post by Young Ireland on Mar 6, 2013 20:34:35 GMT
BTW, the CSP under Cathal Loftus seems to be very quiet. Have they disbanded?
|
|