[This is the second part of a piece posted earlier this month. In the interim, I have posted, as Gaeilge, concerning the conduct of the Apartheid colonial-settler regime or Israel’s continued crimes against the Palestinian people. It will hopefully strike readers how the mainstream media coverage of an equivalence of violence between immutable adversaries and the blanket silence regarding British and then US imperialism in the conflict has distinct parallels with Irish history. Indeed, while Balfour promised the Zionist State in his infamous declaration for what Ronald Storrs called a loyal little Jewish Ulster in a sea of hostile Arabism, he also disdainfully dismissed the concept of Ireland a nation to his cabinet colleagues. Apparently, self-determination was a right to be applied against defeated imperial rivals or in support of favoured colonial-settler communities.
The recent BBC documentary The Road to Partition confirmed much of the analysis that follows although I was heartened by the inclusion of some commentary about the Irish revolution’s importance to Indian nationalism. Nevertheless, historcial commentary within the documentary explained the ethnic cleansing of Catholics from Lisburn in August 1920 as a response to insecurity and provocation, in this instance the IRA assassination of Oswald Swanzy in the town, himself the assassin of the elected mayor of Cork, Tomás Mac Curtain. There was a distinct absence of any assessment of scale or intensity. Indeed, the previous expulsion of between eight and ten thousand Catholics and rotten Prods [socialists] from Belfast’s main industrial centres in late July was explained by Paul Bew as the moderate Unionist leaders’ tragic loss of control over the grassroots. Indeed, Robert Lynch [no stranger to readers of this blog] called the Belfast Boycott in response ‘racist’ in its conception while others claimed that it reinforced partition. This is lamentable.
As outlined elsewhere in this blog and addressed in less detail below, the Unionist leadership planned and directed the expulsions through the Ulster Unionist Labour Association, established by Carson and controlled by Dawson Bates. The Ulster Protestant Association was a front, and its leading lights in the shipyard meetings that sparked the pogrom, Connolly and Crumlin, were also UULA members. The UULA then intimidated a meeting of Belfast Corporation to demand the re-instatement of expelled workers. The idea that a boycott of Belfast goods should be described as racist or sectarian and responsible in part for reinforcing partition is ridiculous, when it represented a legitimate but ineffective response to a mass assault on northern Catholics and socialists by actual racists. Indeed, partition itself was designed and implemented by racist imperialists most notably Walter Long who had previously pledged to save the ‘white settler colony’ of Ulster from ‘submersion in a sea of inferior Celts.’ The pure cynicism of claiming that the Council of Ireland within Long’s Government of Ireland Bill was designed to facilitate eventual Irish unity beggar’s belief – there was a far simpler way to facilitate Irish unity: do not implement partition, accede to the democratic wishes of the Irish people as expressed in 1918 and 1920 and allow Ulster Protestants to reconcile themselves to a future as equal citizens in a democratic Republic. Rather, Long and the racist, imperialist cabinet dominated by Winston “dog in the manger” Churchill and David “right to bomb niggers” Lloyd George armed 49,000 Protestants and established a discriminatory one-party regime with disproportionate police and security powers – those are the facts.
The following piece attempts to demonstrate the connection between Irish historiography and a faux liberalism that largely ignores the imperial context of Irish history and serves a narrative favourable to the interests of the British state and indeed US state department. Anyone aware of the ‘revisionist’ controversy will be familiar Niall Meehan’s pioneering work. In this context his joint-piece with Kerby Miller on Raymond James Raymond resonates with the wider ideological project and perhaps darker manipulation of history by vested imperial interests and represents essential reading for anyone tempted to dismiss talk of the state’s role in controlling the historical discourse as a conspiracy theory. In terms of the wider perspective, those who haven’t already read Ian Cobain’s The History Thieves can no longer plead ignorance as an excuse.
P.S. the observant among you will notice a change in my TWITTER account due to access problems. I shall tweet this post on both accounts but, henceforth, I will be operating through @bhloscaidh_mac]
… continued
During RTÉ’s two-part documentary, Hawks & Doves, Michael Portillo’s analysis elided several fundamental issues, none more obvious than the a priori acceptance of Northern Ireland’s right to exist, or what the then editor of the Spectator, John St Loe Strachey, christened the two nations theory. Indeed, Bew’s account of the period in Politics of Enmity has the teleological audacity to employ the theory’s modern title – the ‘principle of consent’.xxxi This argument portrays the British state as a neutral arbiter adjudicating between two ethno-religious tribes, often pinpointing Irish republicanism as exceptionally irrational, sectarian and violent. The entire edifice in premised on a refusal to even admit Ireland’ position as a colony. ‘To assert that Ireland is and has been a colony,’ David Lloyd has written, ‘is certainly to deny the legitimacy of the British government in Northern Ireland and no less to question the state and governmental structures that have been institutionalized in the post-colonial Free State and Republic of Ireland.’xxxii Indeed, according to Bew et al: ‘struggles over the status of the north are no more automatically anti-imperialist than crimes against property are automatically anti-capitalist’.xxxiii The facts, as Bew would have it, tell a very different story, however.
Forces of Reaction
After the war, Lloyd George’s coalition obviously claimed it had no selfish interest in Ireland. Yet, above any other individual, Lloyd George owed his appointment as prime minister in December 1916 to Edward Carson and the very same Tories who challenged parliament’s sovereignty, openly supported the Curragh ‘Mutiny’ and funded the Larne gunrunning in 1914.xxxiv In the Politics of Enmity, Bew does little to elucidate the ‘heated and unusually intemperate rhetoric inside and outside Parliament’ during the Home Rule Crisis, 1911-14.xxxv Nevertheless, Bonar Law, the leader of His Majesty’s opposition told a crowd at Blenheim Palace in 1912, that there are things stronger than parliamentary majorities. Bew then outlined how ‘Tories as well as Ulster Unionists connived at illegal gunrunning’ in ‘an extreme form of political theatre’, before reassuring his reader that ‘civil war [was] more apparent than real’.xxxvi In fact, Carson privately assured his deputy, James Craig, that ‘I am not for a mere game of bluff and unless men are prepared to make sacrifices… the talk of resistance is no use’.xxxvii
Likewise, Bew describes the Curragh Mutiny in March 1914, when officers in the Irish garrison threatened to resign rather than mobilise against the UVF, as an aberration, a minor misunderstanding – ‘a kind of pre-emptive mutiny’, a month before ‘customs officers and police’ colluded in the Larne gunrunning.xxxviii In fact a group of leading Tory politicians connived with reactionary army officers to subvert the will of a democratic government, chief among their number, Sir Henry Wilson, who, as Chief of the Imperial General Staff, in March 1921 declared that ‘if we lose Ireland, we have lost the Empire’. Wilson also claimed that the ‘Palestine problem’ was ‘exactly the same as the Irish – two different sets of people living in a small area, each hating the other “for the love of God”.’xxxix Sir Ronald Storrs, the first military governor of Jerusalem, argued that a Zionist state ‘would form for England “a little loyal Jewish Ulster” in a sea of hostile Arabism.’xl Colonial administrators, statesmen and soldiers all acknowledged the imperial basis of partition.
As for the Larne gunrunning, the founder of the Ulster Union Defence League, Walter Long, the future secretary of state for the Colonies and First Lord of the Admiralty, handed the cheque to Fred Crawford on the floor of the Commons in the presence of the Tory leader, Bonar Law.xli The League pledged to rescue ‘the white settler colony of Ulster from submersion in a sea of inferior Celts’.xlii Long, who led Irish Unionist MPs at Westminster before Carson’s appointment, chaired the parliamentary committee that drew up the plans for six-county partition under the 1920 Government of Ireland Act, after his junior minister, James Craig, told him Unionists could not control, or did not want, nine counties.xliii We can only imagine the reaction had the previous leader of the opposition rejected the primacy of parliamentary democracy, colluded with the Army to frustrate the elected government and helped arm a paramilitary militia with weapons purchased from the state’s most powerful enemy, but then Jeremy Corbyn isn’t a Tory, indeed, at the time of writing, he isn’t even a Labour MP.
Long’s chief ally in the Ulster Union Defence League was the ‘race patriot’, Alfred Lord Milner, who had administered the British concentration camps during the Boer War. In his introductory letter to Edward Carson, requesting ‘a straight and confidential talk’ in December 1913, Milner impressed that Ulster’s position ‘goes very deep with me’ (original emphasis). Milner claimed that Ulster’s ‘uprising of unshakeable principles and devoted patriotism, of loyalty to the Empire and to the Flag’ had stirred him from political retirement as it went ‘far deeper than ordinary party struggles’ and required much more ‘than mere talk’.xliv Milner and Carson would play crucial parts in Lloyd George’s subsequent appointment in December 1916. That very year, Lloyd George had impressed on Carson the strategic rationale of six-county partition, that ‘we must make it clear that Ulster does not, whether she wills it or not, merge with the rest of Ireland’. Yet the PM later admitted in 1921 that: ‘If you asked the people of Ireland what plan they would accept, by an emphatic majority they would say: “We want independence and an Irish Republic”.’ xlv
Indeed, Carson, who wrote that Irish Catholics were ‘really far from civilised’ and that ‘the Celts have done nothing in Ireland but create trouble and disorder’, sought to transfer Milner’s racist populism to Belfast.xlvi While Milner funded the British Workers’ League, Carson sat on its executive and saw in the social imperialist body a blueprint for Unionist hegemony over labour politics. In short, ‘the term “National Socialist”, if it had not acquired a special meaning in Germany, would be a fair summary of the opinions propagated by the League.’xlvii Within this context, Carson developed his own ‘new unionism’ that promoted the Ulster Unionist Labour Association [UULA], which he insisted provide four official candidates in the 1918 election in Belfast. J. M. Andrews, mill owner and future Stormont prime minister, actually chaired this supposed labour organisation, whose MPs then formed a group with the National Democratic Party (the British Workers’ League) at Westminster.
Carson’s reasoning reflected developments in Belfast, where the independent trade union movement challenged Unionist hegemony among the Protestant working class. In the January 1920 municipal election, the anti-partitionist Belfast Labour Party won twelve seats. In total, explicitly anti-partitionist parties won over thirty thousand votes, while Unionist parties won under fifty thousand. In a city where Protestants made up three quarters of the population, this represented a hammer blow to Unionist prestige in the party’s citadel. In the June rural elections, Sinn Féin won 40% of the seats in Ulster’s nine counties, where anti-partition groups won 55%. In response to a potential fracturing of its hegemony between the 1918 coupon election and the 1920 local elections, the Unionist leadership promoted violence in anticipation of the creation of the Belfast parliament, weaving Orange supremacism into the new polity’s very fabric.
Carson and the Unionist leadership employed the UULA in workplace expulsions in the summer of 1920. In terms of this mass violence, Bew claims that ‘shipyard workers took matters into their own hands and expelled Catholic workers and “rotten Protestants” … [James] Craig sent wary signals of support to angry Protestant workers, but was fully aware of the dangers’.xlviii In fact, the UULA arranged a meeting with Carson through the Ulster Unionist Council [UUC] secretary and future Northern Minister of Home Affairs, Dawson Bates, over the Orange holiday of the Twelfth of July, under the premise of discussing labour’s status under the proposed new parliament.xlix Carson then gave an incendiary speech at the Orange field inciting his followers to expel Sinn Féin supporters and trade unionists. Internal minutes suggest that the UULA then organised the meeting that sparked the expulsions.l The group proceeded to break up a meeting of Belfast Corporation called by labour and nationalist councillors to appeal for the workers’ reinstatement. Dawson Bates effectively controlled the UULA, while Andrew’s acted as chairman. In short, the Unionist leadership left their fingerprints all over the pogrom. As the Westminster Gazette reported: ‘It is common knowledge in Belfast, and frequently admitted by individual Unionists, that plans were matured at least two months ago to drive all Home Rule workmen in the shipyards out of their employment’.li Furthermore, the city’s largest shipyard, Harland and Wolff, recognised the loyalist vigilance committee set up to assess the ‘loyalty’ of its employees.lii
Moreover, the British government then recruited the pogromists en masse into the new USC. This further consolidated the Orange economy on which the Unionist cross-class consensus rested. James Craig facilitated a meeting between the UULA and Bonar Law in relation to the Specials.liii For Bew the force ‘emerged in this crisis [1920] – with British funding; a possible means of control for Craig, [but] a bitter blow to working-class Catholics in Belfast’. The two leaders of Ulster Unionism then publicly backed the pogrom. At the unveiling of a flag in the shipyards in October, Craig told supporters: ‘Do I approve of action you boys have taken in the past? I say yes’.liv His wife wrote in her diary how Craig ‘unfurls a big Union Jack for them and makes a splendid speech… that he approves of their action in not allowing the disloyal element in their midst.’lv Carson subsequently told the House of Commons that ‘I am prouder of my friends in the shipyards than of any other friends I have in the whole world’.lvi Yet, with Bates operating as the political fixer, there is valid prima facie evidence that both leaders anticipated the expulsions, as well as the reorganisation of the UVF, with both pushing for a Special Constabulary in government – to conclude otherwise is to wilfully ignore the evidence.
By the May 1921 elections for the new Belfast parliament, the loyalist stranglehold on working-class politics and indeed Belfast itself found full expression in the intimidation of the four labour candidates.lvii When labour booked the Ulster Hall for a meeting, loyalist shipyard workers seized the building and telegraphed Craig: ‘Mass meeting of loyal shipyard workers who have captured Ulster Hall from the Bolsheviks Baird, Midgley and Hanna request that you address them for a few minutes tonight’. Craig replied that ‘I am with them in spirit. Know they will do their part. I will do mine. Well done big and wee yards’.lviii Likewise, the prominent Belfast socialist, James Baird, recounted how ‘many seeking to vote were brutally assaulted’ in the ‘worst intimidation’, with the poll ‘marked by wholesale impersonation’.lix The results indicated that loyalist direct action had crushed a growing labour constituency. The new Unionist government orchestrated this campaign, which the British state sanctioned. Yet, in spite of the racist and supremacist rationale, the political cleavages between northern Catholic and Protestant in Ireland are historical, not natural; ‘this does not mean that they are easily disentangled, dismantled,’ however. lx Yet, Ulster’s dark historical pit still glitters with brilliant diamonds in the rough like the United Irishmen, the 1907 Docker’s Strike, the Belfast Labour Party of 1918-2 and the working-class solidarity of the Outdoor Relief Strikes of 1932 – all brutally repressed by sectarian reaction at the behest of an Orange elite.
On the last day of May 1922, Lloyd George claimed that Mussolini’s Fascisti served as an ‘exact analogy’ for the Ulster Specials that the initial attack and brunt of subsequent violence involved the ‘murder of member of the [Catholic] minority’, while Britain had armed 48,000 Protestants. The British government would fully resource the USC for a subsequent two years to the tune of over £6 million, a period of little or no violence in the north.lxi Even prominent Unionists acknowledged that employment in the USC helped solidify support for partition.lxii Furthermore, the Specials’ campaign of vicious reprisals poisoned relations in nationalist areas. One Special Commander from Tyrone claimed that ‘today the feeling against the Specials … is more bitter than against the Black & Tans – with this great difference – on the removal of the Black & Tans one side of the contending parties was removed’. The USC established ‘a group of personal blood feuds which will last for generations to come’.lxiii
Marx in the service of Metternich
In short, Bew et al argue that, ‘there is nothing inherently reactionary about…a national frontier which puts Protestants in numerical majority’.lxiv Like claims in the Southern United States that Jim Crow did not rely on overtly racist legislation, one has to ignore the worldview and intentions of those who imposed the gerrymandered six-county border, the means by which they achieved it and the nature of the one-party regime that emerged in order to concur. Bew et al. argue that Unionist leadership ideology was ‘not primarily Orange at all’. Rather it represented a ‘democratic’, but ‘pro-imperialist… secular ideology’. Below this level, however, these Orange Marxists locate a ‘populist strain within Protestant ideology’, which the leadership struggled resolutely to control.lxv In reality, such analysis wilfully ignores the evidence and constructs ‘counter-factual fictions.’lxvi The agency and rhetoric of the Unionist leadership not only chimed with popular Orangeism, but Carson and Craig, through the organisational efforts of Bates, manipulated popular extremism to institute a white terror. Post-war Unionism constituted an Irish variant of a vicious, international counter-revolution, which included the allied invasions of Russia and subsequent civil war, radical right-wing paramilitaries across central and Eastern Europe and the rise of Italian fascism.
For a brief period, a significant minority of working-class Protestants embraced egalitarianism. No serious observer disputes the presence of a reactionary Orange ideology within sections of the Protestant working class, but this ideology did not operate on some intangible level of the superstructure; it required material sustenance and depended on determined agency. Its triumph relied on loyalist shock troops in the first instance and its consolidation operated against the foundation of a discriminatory statelet, whose birth pangs reverberated to the beat of Lambeg drums.lxvii Moreover, post-war Ulster Unionism mirrored aspects of authoritarian and fascist thought across Europe, which ‘tended to favour the military and foster the police, or other bodies of men capable of exercising physical coercion.’lxviii In 1924, England and Wales had one police officer for 699 people, Scotland one for 751, while, under Unionist rule, the ratio sat at one for every 160 inhabitants.lxix In fact, the establishment of a paramilitary police force served to consolidate the Orange economy and the temporary, and eventually permanent, suppression of British civil liberties under the 1922 Special Powers Act constituted perhaps the defining peculiarity of the one-party Unionist administration.
A supremacist dimension formed part of the internal logic of loyalism and, rather than restraining this tendency, the structures of the Unionist bloc encouraged conceptions of Protestant superiority and Catholic inferiority, thereby justifying violence. Indeed, separate republican and Free State intelligence reports in 1924 claimed that several Specials in Tyrone had formed branches of the Ku Klux Klan. In April 1924, the IRA reported that ‘The KKK has been formed about three months ago in Belfast under the title of the “Gay Crusaders”. Members consist of Specials officers and recently the ordinary rank and file have been admitted’.lxx On 4 January 1923, the Belfast Newsletter carried an article on the Klan and Italian Fascism, which claimed that while ‘undemocratic’ at root, it would ‘be absurd to underestimate the significance of such movements, or to ignore what is noble in their intentions. Their strength springs from the genuine desire … to make life sweeter and more wholesome.’ Fortunately, here, government rested ‘on the will of the people, rather than on the symbolism of White Hood or Black Shirt’.lxxi In 1934, Craig himself boasted that members of the ‘Orange Order, the Black Brotherhood or the B Specials could substitute as Fascists’.lxxii
Certainly, the evidence suggests that the Unionist elite deliberately manipulated a form of reactionary Orange populism, akin to contemporary authoritarian trends in post-war Europe and Britain, in order to subvert far more progressive, and developing, currents amongst working-class Protestants. Indeed, this Faustian bargain formed the very basis of the new Orange State, but cui bono? Bew et al paint a ludicrous picture of Ulster Unionist plutocrats as prisoners to their extremist grass-roots, tossing and turning across feather beds and silk sheets in their stately homes and Mayfair apartments, for fear of reprimand from the warren of red-bricked terraces on the Shankill Road and Sandy Row, with their outside toilets and weather-worn mural of King Billy on the nearest gable wall.
Conclusion
Northern Ireland emerged from a deeply reactionary, sectarian counter-revolution, enshrined in the very essence of the polity, which sowed the seeds of future conflict. In this venture the Unionist leadership received the unconditional support of an imperial state that applied the principle of self-determination against the vanquished, while its own dominions swelled – an empire built and maintained on concepts of race. Sympathetic cartoonists have depicted conservative prime ministers from Peel to Salisbury and even Ted Heath as Sisyphus, condemned to roll the rock of Ireland to the mountain’s summit, only for it to slip their grasp and face the same laborious task in perpetuity.lxxiii The Corinthian king’s punishment reflected his crime of duplicity and arrogance. The New Statesmen succinctly expressed this enduring dilemma as far back as March 1917: ’The Irishman regards himself as the heir of Irish history. The Englishman is inclined to behave as there was no such thing as Irish history. Irish history however exists as a witness in the Irishman’s favour.’ Modern day guff about Empire 2.0 ignores Britain’s role in the perpetuation of the Irish problem or the very obvious fact that ‘a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia’ because ‘a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race… has come in and taken their place’.lxxiv Yet the historical lessons emanating from Ulster’s A. J. P. Taylor rest on a doublethink that only confirms past prejudices for present imperial prerogatives. As Orwell noted in 1984: ‘Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’
Yet, the battle is not over. As Rousseau famously, remarked: Falsehood has an infinity of combinations, but truth has only one mode of being. Between establishment doublethink and popular understanding lies the vast chasm of the great mass of our ancestors’ historical experience and the reality of our contemporary lives. The nuance and sophistry of ‘liberal’ scholarship crashes against the reality of a exploitative social system or, as the late Miriam Daly may have put it; you can be as aware as anyone ‘of the subtleties and complexities of Irish as of all history’, but that should not distract you from the ‘glaring structural realities’ .lxxv In a ‘world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners.’lxxvi
BLOSC 
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