Fearghal Mac Bhloscaidh – James Connolly Festival 2024
As he looked on in horror as industrialised militarism decimated a generation of young Europeans in the name of Empire and for the sake of its masters – the masters of war – James Connolly not only signalled the grounds for his own future involvement in the 1916 Rising, but also identified the chief cause of the War to End all Wars and its only ultimate remedy – the overthrow of capitalism itself.
We have held, and do hold, that war is a relic of barbarism only possible because we are governed by a ruling class with barbaric ideas; we have held, and do hold, that the working class of all countries cannot hope to escape the horrors of war until in all countries that barbaric ruling class is thrown from power; and we have held, and do hold, that the lust for power on the part of that ruling class is so deeply rooted in the nature and instinct of its members, that it is more than probable that nothing less than superior force will ever induce them to abandon their throttling grasp upon the lives and liberties of mankind… It may well be that in the progress of events the working class of Ireland may be called upon to face the stern necessity of taking the sword (or rifle) against the class whose rule has brought upon them and upon the world the hellish horror of the present European war. Should that necessity arise, it would be well to realize that … there are no humane methods of warfare, there is no such thing as civilized warfare; all warfare is inhuman, all warfare is barbaric; the first blast of the bugles of war ever sounds for the time being the funeral knell of human progress. No, there is no such thing as humane or civilized war! War may be forced upon a subject race or subject class to put an end to subjection of race, of class, or sex. When so waged it must be waged thoroughly and relentlessly, but with no delusions as to its elevating nature, or civilizing methods.[1]
Like it did at the beginning of the last Age of Catastrophe, Ireland and her people of every race, creed and class stand in the crosshairs of an historical dilemma. Are those who seek Ireland to be a free and independent country to hitch our destiny to the coattails of militarism and empire which spouts hypocritical cant about ‘liberal democracy’ and a ‘rules-based order’ while it connives with autocrats and facilitates genocide in Gaza or are we, in the tradition of Connolly, going to carve out a future of genuine freedom and real democracy in solidarity with all of humanity? The former offers doles and platitudes, appeals to ‘common sense’ and notions of our own superiority, the latter requires sacrifice and struggle, but as one notable radical humanist from Palestine once remarked, we must enter ‘by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many.’[2]
Colonialism & capitalism
You cannot have genuine democracy under capitalism. You cannot decolonise under capitalism. If you locate our national question within the discourse of the radical enlightenment and humanism, you cannot bend the knee to US militarism. For under modern-day imperialism, the great majority of our human brothers and sisters are relegated to non-existence to a fetishised non-personhood by a brutal capitalist system, which feeds of the very militarist expansion deployed by the US Empire since Kipling notoriously urged them to take up the white man’s burden. As a deluge of live images of genocide pour onto our hand-held devices and television screens, we should remember that this carnage is part of a process previously wrought on Ireland and her people also, or as Jean Paul Sartre remarked of pied noir violence in Algeria:
How can an elite of usurpers, aware of their mediocrity, establish their privileges? By one means only: debasing the colonised to exalt themselves, denying the title of humanity to the natives, and defining them simply as absences of qualities – animals, not humans. This does not prove hard to do, for the system deprives them of everything.[3]
Human animals indeed, as Yoav Gallant, Israel’s Defence minister, infamously remarked as he laid siege to Gaza. This constitutes no mere series of unconnected events, no rhyming of history, the past is not a foreign country. What we witness today in Gaza is the outworking of capitalism or as Marx rightly noted, in the colonies, the ‘profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization lies unveiled before our eyes’.[4]
History is a process wherein ‘the mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life’.[5] The current bourgeois mode of production developed within the supposed ‘age of discovery’, but in reality, capital, as we experience it today, came into the world ‘dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.’[6] Colonialism, racism and genocide were the handmaidens of capitalism and the primitive accumulation that they spawned is locked into the uneven development and chasmic disparities of wealth that underpin Western hegemony today. In their youth, even Marx and Engels accepted the inevitability of this process, in the very moment they recoiled before its grotesque character. Thus, with a shrug and shudder, Marx characterised English rule in India as inevitable human progress that resembled ‘that hideous pagan idol who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain.’[7]
Nevertheless, as the sheer brutality of European imperialism unfolded before their eyes, both men began to consider the colonial process as a potential arena in which the conditions for ‘a great social revolution’ could emerge which might master ‘the results of the bourgeois epoch’.[8] This operated within the dialectic between the ‘material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic – in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.’ The ideological contradictions of bourgeois imperialism and the liberal enlightenment produced a consciousness that required explanation ‘from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production’.[9] Both then identified England’s first colony, Ireland, as a case study in the expansion of the bourgeois social system and the way the deep antagonisms and contradictions this generated provided the potential for social revolution.
Two years after the Fenian Rising of 1867, Engels had gone from full immersion in the deterministic dismissal of the Irish as uncivilised in the 1840s to falling for Lizzie Burns, then marrying her sister, Mary, and even considering learning the Irish language in anticipation of a never finished history of Ireland. Engels used translations of Gaelic sources and especially writings by English conquistadores like John Davies to suggest that prior to the eventual Tudor conquest ‘communal ownership of land was Anno 1600 still in full force in Ireland’ and that he had ‘never read anything more beautiful than this speech’.[10] The following year, Engels again wrote that the more he studied ‘the subject, the clearer it’ became ‘that Ireland has been stunted in her development by the English invasion and thrown centuries back’.[11]Alex Callinicos has recently, and correctly in my opinion, outlined the characteristics of imperialism and militarism across the long two centuries of Anglo-Saxon hegemony:
Capitalist imperialism can’t be equated simply with empire in the transhistorical sense of a powerful state imposing its will on its neighbours. It is a system of capitalist domination and inter-capitalist competition. Capitalist imperialism is necessarily plural, because it is regulated by the logic of competitive accumulation. The process of uneven and combined development inherent in capitalism creates a global hierarchy of states that reflect the unequal distribution of economic and military power. At the top lies a small group of imperialist states whose economic and financial weight and capabilities of power projection allow them to compete globally. Today these are mainly the United States (still far ahead of the rest), China, Britain, Japan, Germany, France, and Russia.[12]
The National Question
In the past, Britain similarly ruled the waves because it waived its own rules. Before the final collapse of the Gaelic Order, the population of Ireland circa 1540 lay somewhere between 0.75 and 1.0 million. As such, as David Edwards rightly points out: ‘the conquest must rank as one of the most destructive conflicts anywhere in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Europe.’[13] In fact, if not fully in actuality, the intention was to extirpate the Gaelic Irish. Indeed, Burghley’s 1575 ‘Degrees for the Government of Ireland’, proposed an early form of apartheid between the Gael and the Old and New English. A quarantine to stop the spread of the Gaelic contagion.[14] Ultimately, however, English statesmen based both extirpation and accommodation on colonial concepts of cultural superiority and when the Gael sought to assert their own autonomy and cultural legitimacy, the genocidal zero-sum implications emerged into clear relief. Cromwell’s genocide in 1649 resulted in the death of 41% of the population through violence and famine.
The Great Irish Famine represented the third genocide. Lords Palmerston, Russell’s Foreign Secretary, was an Irish landlord who favoured a policy of systematic clearance. He seldom ever visited his four-thousand-hectare estate in Sligo. He claimed that improvement in Ireland ‘must be founded upon… a long continued and systematic ejectment of smallholders and of squatting cottiers.’ When starving peasants attacked their persecutors, Palmerston advised that ‘whenever a man [of property] is murdered in Ireland, the priest of the parish should be transported. A more generally popular proposal would be that he should be hung, and many who clamour for martial law fancy, I have no doubt, that by martial law this latter process could be adopted.’ The Viceroy Clarendon, no friend of the Irish cottier, wrote to Russell that ‘surely this is a state of things to justify you asking the House of Commons for an advance, for I don’t think there is another legislature in Europe that would disregard such suffering as now exists in the west of Ireland, or coldly persist in a policy of extermination.’ The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Charles Wood, made his government’s intentions clear: ‘except through a purgatory of misery and starvation, I cannot see how Ireland is to emerge into anything approaching either quiet or prosperity’. The Times of London blamed the victims: ‘Before our merciful intervention, the Irish nation were a wretched, indolent, half-starved tribe of savages, ages before Julius Caesar landed on this isle, and that, notwithstanding a gradual improvement upon the naked savagery, they have never approached the standard of the civilised world’.
Indeed, when an Irish delegation visited the British Prime minister, John Russell, to ask for greater assistance, he read to them from Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. This episode reminded me of the quip from the apocryphal Kenyan diplomat who recounted how ‘every time China visits, we get a hospital, every time Britain visits, we get a lecture.’[15] In terms of the impact which the introduction of ‘political economy’ and laissez-faire had on Ireland and its people, Karl Marx told the International Working Men’s Association in 1867 that a million people had been replaced by 9.5 million sheep as a result of English rule. James Connolly’s passage from Labour in Irish History leaves little doubt as to the real nature of the tragedy:
No man who accepts capitalist society and the laws thereof can logically find fault with the statesmen of England for their acts in that awful period. They stood for the rights of property and free competition, and philosophically accepted their consequences upon Ireland; the leaders of the Irish people also stood for the rights of property and refused to abandon them even when they saw the consequences in the slaughter by famine of over a million of the Irish toilers.
British policy during the Famine could be said to fulfil the third clause of Article 2 of the Convention in Genocide: ‘deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part’. Raphael Lemkin, who coined the phrase, claimed in a New York speech on the Holodomor, or Ukrainian man-made famine of 1932-3, that the British government wilfully let the Irish starve. They did so out of a mixture of political economy, racism, and brute coercive force. Yet Ireland was not alone.
While the Atlantic triangular trade helped build the foundations of Empire, a subsequent eastern triangle cemented Britain’s position as global hegemon. For while London remained the hub, the other two points rested in India, the jewel in the crown, or the largest manufacturer in the globe before the East India Company got its hooks in and China, the richest country in the globe, before the Empire, or as John Newsinger rightly claims the largest drug pusher the world has ever seen, flooded the country with opium. The opium trade financed the Raj and underpinned trade in the East; indeed, it represented the century’s most valuable single commodity trade. What began as a smuggling tradein the eighteenth-century had increased to 2,500 tons in 1838, but rather than condemn the Scottish cartel of Matheson and Jardine, Lord Palmerston invaded China for them. Rather than a war on drugs, this was a war for drugs and Palmerston celebrated that their triumph ‘will form an epoch in the progress of the civilization of the human races’ and which incidentally would ‘be attributed with the most important advantages to the commercial interests of England.’ Palmerston a few years earlier claimed that ‘half- civilized governments such as those of China’ required ‘a drubbing every eight or ten years to keep them in order… they must not only see the stick but actually feel it on their shoulders.’ By the 1880s the British were exporting 6,000 tons of opium to China. Here we have ‘free markets, the rule of law, investor protection and relatively incorrupt government’ or a racket that would make Pablo Escobar blush, where the British act with impunity and then claim its legal after the event.[16] As Shashi Tharoor wryly remarked: ‘The sun never set on the British empire, an Indian nationalist later sardonically commented, because even God couldn’t trust the Englishman in the dark’.
The National Question
The aftermath of the Famine saw the consolidation of ‘a dominant Irish Catholic subculture’ whose own interests were closely tied to those of the British empire and its apparatus in Ireland. This class – deeply implicated in the colonial project – cherished the imperial ‘values that ratified and reinforced capitalist institutions and processes, such as private property, “free market” competition, and individual acquisitiveness’. This ‘West British’ tendency still holds enormous sway within the twenty-six counties, in spite of rhetorical flourishes of Fianna Fáil, the so-called republican party.[17] Connolly identified the schism between genuine democrats and lickspittle Shoneens in his comparison of the first and ultimate West Brit, Daniel O’Connell, and the Chartist Feargus O’Connor, who
being returned to Parliament as a Repealer, was struck by the miserable condition of the real people of England in whose interests Ireland was supposed to be governed, and as the result of his investigation into its cause, he arrived at the conclusion that the basis of the oppression of Ireland was economic, that labour in England was oppressed by the same class and by the operation of the same causes as had impoverished and ruined Ireland, and that the solution of the problem in both countries required the union of the democracies in one common battle against their oppressors. He earnestly strove to impress this view upon O’Connell, only to find, that in the latter class feeling was much stronger than desire for Irish National freedom, and that he, O’Connell, felt himself to be much more akin to the propertied class of England than to the working class of Ireland.[18]
There was a glaring contradiction in the way constitutional nationalism had to position itself in Ireland however: given the depth of grievances among Irish workers and the poor, it was periodically forced to resort to mass mobilisation; this was ‘despite the fact that [its own] programme entailed the creation of an Irish bourgeois state’ that would institutionalise ‘lower-class Catholics’ social marginalization, immiseration, and emigration.’[19] Connolly’s analysis in Labour in Irish History constituted a clarion call to subvert this process. The embodiment of the organic intellectual, Connolly fused the popular ideology of the Irish rural poor, which ‘oscillated between visions of a pastoral Gaelic commonwealth and the radical, half-assimilated ideals of the French Revolution and the United Irishmen’ with the socialism of the Second International to produce a potent new fusion of syndicalism and anti-imperialism.[20] Connolly intuitively understood the nature of ideology; his own popular writing reflected many of the insights made famous by his Italian contemporary, Antonio Gramsci.
As Kerby Miller outlines, the post-Famine consolidation of the ‘shoneen’ class meant that, by the second half of the 19th century, mass emigration and Irish poverty were ‘really more attributable to profit-maximization among Catholic commercial farmers and rural parents…than to the machinations of Protestant landlords or British officials.’[21] This class rode to hegemony on the back of a Land War, which relied on the very rural precariat that their dominance had driven to near liquidation. As the Fenian social radical, Matthew Harris, noted, the alliance of the small and large farmer in the Land League represented ‘the union of the shark and the prey’.[22] Millions of sans culottes from the subsistence sector of rural Irish society (smallholders, cottiers, and landless labourers) crowded into the slums of New York, Liverpool or Cowgate in Edinburgh. In Ireland, an alliance involving the Catholic hierarchy, constitutional nationalists, and the strong-farmer type ‘imposed on smallholders and labourers… models of “proper” religious, political, and socio-economic behaviour enjoined by middle-class townspeople, clerics, and farmers[.] All demanded absolute conformity and proscribed deviations as familial ingratitude, religious apostasy, or even national treason.’[23]
In this respect, ‘faith and fatherland’ Catholic nationalism rested upon on a century-long conveyor belt of emigration.[24] This vicious social cycle survived the revolutionary period. Indeed, Connolly’s involvement in the Easter Rising and the wartime pause in emigration meant that for a brief period the Irish rural and urban working class possessed the opportunity, ideology, and determination to challenge their fate. Those who claim that Connolly somehow abandoned his Marxism or took up nationalism when he entered the GPO are either disingenuous or ignorant of his work. Connolly had a consistent position on the national question since the turn of the twentieth century. Writing in Shan Van Vocht, he claimed that socialist republicans
must demonstrate to the people of Ireland that our nationalism is not merely a morbid idealising of the past but is also capable of formulating a distinct and definite answer to the problems of the present and a political and economic creed capable of adjustment to the wants of the future…Not a Republic, as in France, where a capitalist monarchy with an elective head parodies the constitutional abortions of England, and in open alliance with the Muscovite despotism brazenly flaunts its apostasy to the traditions of the Revolution. Not a Republic as in the United States, where the power of the purse has established a new tyranny under the forms of freedom; where, one hundred years after the feet of the last British red-coat polluted the streets of Boston, British landlords and financiers impose upon American citizens a servitude compared with which the tax of pre-Revolution days was a mere trifle. No! the Republic I would wish our fellow-countrymen to set before them as their ideal should be of such a character that the mere mention of its name would at all times serve as a beacon-light to the oppressed of every land, at all times holding forth promise of freedom and plenteousness as the reward of their efforts on its behalf.[25]
Connolly adapted his consistent anti-imperialist and Marxist analysis of the national question to changing historical conditions and when the colonial barbarity practiced by the bourgeois system returned to Europe with Aime Césaire’s boomerang in 1914, Connolly gradually moved towards making common cause with the anti-sectarian and anti-imperialist elements in the republican tradition and Gaelic Revival. When war initially broke out, he outlined how during the Second International ‘the whole working-class movement stands committed to war upon war – stands so committed at the very height of its strength and influence.’ When the German, French and British working classes rushed to the trenches, however, he lamented: ‘What then becomes of all our resolutions; all our protests of fraternisation; all our threats of general strikes; all our carefully-built machinery of internationalism; all our hopes for the future? Were they all as sound and fury, signifying nothing?’ Connolly then gave a very early indication of the rationale for revolution under the conditions of imperial carnage and catastrophe: ‘It is not as clear as the fact of life itself that no insurrection of the working class; no general strike; no general uprising of the forces of Labour in Europe, could possibly carry with it, or entail a greater slaughter of socialists, than will their participation as soldiers in the campaigns of the armies of their respective countries.’ Connolly’s conception of the national question is the only legitimate one today. Look at Simon Harris and his demand to take back the flag, while his followers sneer and jeer at the language and the ordinary people of the country and contort themselves into Atlanticisit liberal changelings, carbon copies of the same ‘radical centrist’ automatons who have brought the world to the edge of destruction from Boston to Brussels and from Brooklyn to Berlin. My conception of patriotism echoes that of Connolly, who attested
I make no war upon patriotism; never have done. But against the patriotism of capitalism – the patriotism which makes the interest of the capitalist class the supreme test of duty and right – I place the patriotism of the working class, the patriotism which judges every public act by its effect upon the fortunes of those who toil. That which is good for the working class I esteem patriotic, but that party or movement is the most perfect embodiment of patriotism which most successfully works for the conquest by the working class of the control of the destinies of the land wherein they labour. To me, therefore, the socialist of another country is a fellow-patriot, as the capitalist of my own country is a natural enemy. I regard each nation as the possessor of a definite contribution to the common stock of civilisation, and I regard the capitalist class of each nation as being the logical and natural enemy of the national culture which constitutes that definite contribution. Therefore, the stronger I am in my affection for national tradition, literature, language, and sympathies, the more firmly rooted I am in my opposition to that capitalist class which in its soulless lust for power and gold would bray the nations as in a mortar. Reasoning from such premises, therefore, this war appears to me as the most fearful crime of the centuries. In it the working class are to be sacrificed that a small clique of rulers and armament makers may sate their lust for power and their greed for wealth. Nations are to be obliterated, progress stopped, and international hatreds erected into deities to be worshipped.[26]
This is symbiotic relationship that is rapidly developing in Ireland as it has in France, Germany, Italy and the USA between what Tariq Ali called the extreme centre or a cynical radical centrism devoid of human compassion and intent on imperial unipolarity and control of the jungle outside ‘the West’ and the xenophobic and radical Right who fester in the popular disaffection and who germinate in the cracks and fissures of the social crisis provoked by nightwatchman neo-liberalism which views the state’s only legitimate role as mass incarceration at home and militarism abroad. These are the ‘patriots’ who protest refugees and asylum seekers by shouting ‘Sinn Féin are traitors’, while the two neo-liberal parties have ruled the state uninterrupted since its inception. I may frequently criticise Sinn Féin from the left for its “more New Labour than Corbyn Labour” triangulation but I have solidarity for its members who in my experience are committed republicans and socialists and even for leaders defamed by the puppets of British fascism at the behest of certain interested parties intent on subverting eventual Irish unity in any form.
The national question and militarism conjoin in the quagmire of social imperialism. Cruel Britannia ruled the waves through pedalling dope and prosecuting gory murder against anyone who dared challenge perfidious Albion. Anyone who reads Irishman, Robert Noonan’s, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, a novel over a century old,will be struck by eery echoes in the Daily Obscurer or Daily Chloroform of contemporary tabloids’ mendacious assault on the poor, hollow jingoism, and xenophobic bigotry. In one scene, a worker, reading the Obscurer,could not fully understand the figures regarding immigration, but ‘he was conscious of a growing feeling of indignation and hatred against foreigners of every description, who were ruining this country, and he began to think that it was about time we did something to protect ourselves. Still, it was a very difficult question: to tell the truth, he himself could not make head or tail of it.’ In the Philanthropists Noonan related how:
The papers they read were filled with vague and alarming accounts … the enormous number of aliens constantly arriving, and their destitute conditions, how they lived, the crimes they committed, and the injury they did to British trade. These were the seeds which, cunningly sown in their minds, caused to grow up within them a bitter undiscriminating hatred of foreigners… The country was in a hell of a state, poverty, hunger and misery in a hundred forms had already invaded thousands of homes and stood upon the thresholds of thousands more. How came these things to be? It was the bloody foreigner! Therefore, down with the foreigners and all their works. Out with them. Drive them b–s into the bloody sea! The country would be ruined if not protected in some way… It was all quite plain–quite simple. One did not need to think twice about it. It was scarcely necessary to think about it at all.
The world is still full of such ‘ragged trousered philanthropists, who not only quietly submitted like so many cattle to their slavery for the benefit of others but defended it and opposed and ridiculed any suggestion of reform’.
Cecil Rhodes echoed the sentiment in 1895 and it has become the bedrock of a form of social imperialism that had underpinned British and then US imperialism and militarism ever since:
I was in the East End of London (a working-class quarter) yesterday and attended a meeting of the unemployed. I listened to the wild speeches, which were just a cry for ‘bread! bread!’ and on my way home I pondered over the scene, and I became more than ever convinced of the importance of imperialism…. My cherished idea is a solution for the social problem, i.e., in order to save the 40,000,000 inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands to settle the surplus population, to provide new markets for the goods produced in the factories and mines. The Empire, as I have always said, is a bread-and-butter question. If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists.[27]
Connolly obviously recognised the pitfalls of the Tory working man and spent a great deal of time trying to convert his Irish cousin the bigoted Orangeman. His analysis of the British Empire mirrored that of contemporary republicans and anti-imperialists like Casement who called it the Pirate Empire. Connolly rightly argued that ‘the British fleet is a knife held permanently at the throat of Europe; should any nation evince an ability to emerge from the position of a mere customer for British products, and to become a successful competitor of Britain in the markets of the world, that knife is set in operation to cut that throat.’[28] The catastrophe of the First World War emerged from imperial competition and militarism.
Connolly had always been aware of the contradiction between Britain’s civilising mission and the actuality of colonialism, how, ‘in the name of liberty it hangs and imprisons patriots, and whilst calling High Heaven to witness its horror of militarism it sends the shadow of its swords between countless millions and their hopes of freedom,’ concluding that ‘the Devil’s children have their father’s luck!’’[29] But World War exposed the hypocrisy of the global imperial capitalist system, wherein the ‘war madness has swept away that humanitarian feeling, and revealed our rulers as what they are – Monsters, red in tooth and claw.’[30] Who, viewing the scenes in Raffa, would not agree that the same grotesque contradiction lies exposed in the wanton murder of fifteen thousand children. Yet this is what our national leaders want us to sign up to. We can have our Foreign Direct Investment and run our filthy tax haven, we can even have a United Ireland or sorts, but the US and EU will call the tune and Ireland will join the ranks of the imperium.
We have been here before when John Redmond and Joe Devlin sent a generation of Irishmen to the industrialised carnage of Flanders and Gallipoli. We see them again in Micheal Martin and a coterie of kept journalists, intent on arguing that Ireland owes an obligation to the US and NATO for the security they provide. Ireland must pay its blood debt and the collateral will be young working-class people sent across the Empire to oppress, murder, and maim.
Militarism & US Imperialism
Similarly, that shining light on the hill was built on the bones of the indigenous population through the sweat of African slaves. It is nearly impossible to conceptualise capitalism in the US without chattel slavery and racism. The British Empire, Washington’s predecessor, operated on a similar racist logic. In 1937, before apparently saving the world for democracy, Churchill told the Palestine Royal Commission that
I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly-wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.
When asked to comment on the estimate that western imperialism directly caused the deaths of 55 million people since the end of World War II, with hundreds of millions slaughtered indirectly, Noam Chomsky commented that:
Unfortunately, there is fierce competition over which is the greatest crime the West has committed. When Columbus landed in the Western hemisphere, there were probably 80–100 million people with advanced civilizations: commerce, cities, etc. Not long afterward about 95 percent of this population had disappeared. In what is now the territory of the United States, there were maybe ten million or so Native Americans, but by 1900, according to the census, there were 200,000 in the country. But all of this is denied. In the leading intellectual, left-liberal journals in the Anglo-American world, it’s simply denied …casually and with no comment.[31]
Since the Second World War, ‘the number of victims of US-backed violence in Latin America “vastly exceeded” the number of people killed in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc over the same period of time.’[32] US intervention has resulted in millions of deaths in Asia and has turned the Middle East into an open wound. In the decade after Hugo Chavez’s election in Venezuela, fourteen left-wing governments were elected in Latin America. The USA ousted ten by either initiating coups, manipulating the media and electoral process, or using the ‘rule of law’ or ‘lawfare’ to undermine them. As Fidel Castro told Allende before the west toppled him in a neo-liberal fascist coup: ‘the US imperialists, the oligarchs and their local fascist proxies ‘maintained their systems through violence and they defend them through violence.’ The obstacles to revolutions ‘are from an exterior order, because we hit immediately with the Imperialist interests.’[33] Yet all of the propaganda about free markets and the rule of law cloud the fact that the state has always stood firmly behind colonial market expansion. The hidden had of the market isn’t really hidden – it’s the fist of empire.
Even before the fall of communism the US pushed its ‘rules-based international order’ through structural adjustment with the IMF, the World Bank, and the WTO as agencies for imposing diplomatic and financial discipline. NATO and the European Union held the pass in Europe, but in the global south, U.S. performed at least 81 overt and covert known interventions in foreign elections during the period 1946–2000 as part of the Jakarta Method. The ‘war on terror’ destabilized the Middle East, shifting the regional balance to Iran. The global financial crisis further shook US confidence as ‘emerging market economies such as China, India, and Brazil refused to go along with the proposals of the United States and of the European Union.’[34]
When poor countries sought to spread democracy – the west crushed them. Vincent Bevins has written a remarkable book showing that Trump is not an outlier in U.S. foreign affairs. Indeed, Barack Obama ran as an anti-war candidate, but he ended his term in 2016 while the U.S. was still dropping bombs on seven countries. I’m not speaking of the 5-6 million killed in the two wars in Cambodia and Vietnam or the open wound of the Middle East, this book focuses on premeditated murder- and assassination on a profound scale and Indonesia operated as the laboratory of this horror just as Ireland had done for the British centuries earlier. The US backed the murder of 1-2 million and then deployed this as a framework for their actions in South America. In all cases from Indonesia to Chile and Allende hundreds of thousands were murdered without scruple by neo-fascist regimes. In addition, the US deployed black propaganda and psych-ops to confuse the people, like communist vampires and witches killing generals at black masses! Bevins finds a total of 22 countries. In truth, multinational [US] companies collaborated with these dictators from Suharto in Indonesia to Pinochet in Chile. For example, Ford and Citibank helped Videla in Argentina when trade unionists were kidnapped and murdered by death squads who murdered the ‘insurgents’ whole family and community.
The USA began training these fascists in Leavenworth Barracks in the 1950s, but then opened the School of the Americas in Panama. They supported the Salvadorian falangists who killed Bishop Romero and carried out massacres in the village of El Mozote, where 900 indigenous men, women and children were murdered. Another 75,000 people were executed in El Salvador. In Guatemala, the Army murdered as many as 200,000 between 1978-83, but that was fine, because, apart from the equally murderous Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, Efraín Ríos Montt was Ronald Reagan’s favourite dictator. Reagan lied on television about the Sandinista in Nicaragua before supporting the Contra drug lords in their genocidal campaign. 50,000 died during the conflict which cost the country $12 billion – a country of 3.5 million people with a gross national production of $2 billion – that’s US democracy and rule of law. In all, these fascists are estimated to have killed about two million in South America, like numbers during the Indonesian Coup. However, Bevins’ most forceful point is that western propaganda about free market neo-liberalism lifting billions out of poverty is a fat lie. China’s growth and developmentalist model explains most of the decline in global inequality since 1980. China, not an anti-communist regime created by the US during the Cold War but a country that did not suffer colonialism because of the 1949 successful revolution.
Yet even the West’s own propaganda about free markets and the small state is a fraud. Chomsky and Prashad have called the military-industrial complex a form of military Keynesianism which can be implemented with less public interest and participation. Only the most naïve individual or demented neo-liberal ideologue cannot credit that state intervention in the US military and market intervention have been hallmarks of global capitalism in the American century. Even Eisenhower predicted the dangers inherent in this economic model:
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defence with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together (17 January 1961).
It might be helpful to examine a few examples to tease out the structure of militarism under the US Empire. The Ford Motor Company flourished in the glow of New Deal post-war boom growth due to the company’s close links with the US state. Ford was already an integral part of the US military-industrial complex during the war, making ‘50 per cent of all the B-24 planes produced in the US, and by 1945, 70 per cent, many of which were constructed at a new plant built by the Ford Motor Company at Willow Run, Michigan. The US government had contributed $200 million to its construction.’ Yet at the same time, on the Russian front, ‘[o]f the 350,000 trucks used by the motorised German Army as of 1942, roughly one-third were Ford-made’. Ford’s German boss, Robert Schmidt supervised forced labour during Albert Speer’s war economy, where slaves worked twelve hours a day on a rations of 200 grams of bread for breakfast and a dinner of spinach and potato soup. Schmidt assumed his position with Ford of Germany after the war, dying in 1962. ‘Three years later, the company received over $1 million in compensation from the US state as a result of damage to its factories caused by Allied bombings.’[35] Although Ford did not receive a direct bailout, like the $80 billion Obama gave to General Motors and Chrysler, the company did benefit from state intervention, and it would have gone to the wall had the other two crashed.
After the same financial collapse, Boeing appeared set to go bankrupt. Yet the hint of a $17bn federal bailout led to an enormous rally in shares and Boeing actually ‘ended up issuing $25bn of new bonds, making its bond sale the largest of 2020 and the sixth largest on record at the time.’ As Grace Blakely argues the ‘growth of mega-firms like Boeing, a company with deep links to the most powerful state in the world, makes it much harder to argue that ‘capitalism’ is synonymous with ‘free markets’.’[36] In both cases these firms formed part of a massive global arms industry, who contracts and R&D are largely tax-payer funded and who can rely on state intervention if they ever appear close to collapse. Yet, the most obvious and egregious example of this was the Iraq War. Again, as Blakely outlines, the ‘military-industrial complex’ constitutes a network of ‘sprawling arms companies and private armies’, which ‘benefit from US imperialism and work closely within the state apparatus to start and lengthen conflicts that will allow them to win lucrative government contracts.’ With Dick Cheney in the box seat, state ‘sought to share the spoils of the invasion with US businesses and introduce the disciplining hand of American capital into Iraqi society…Naomi Klein sees the invasion and occupation as a perfect example of the ‘shock doctrine’ whereby crises and disasters – often caused by the parties involved – are used as a means to extract profit and embed capitalist social relations.’[37]
To borrow Josep Borrell’s racist analogy, while Washington ruled the ‘jungle’ of the global South with an iron fist, it allowed the ‘garden’ of western Europe to bloom. Under the threat of communism, the capitalist West built thirty glorious years of social imperialism in the Keynesian post-war consensus. The Reagan-Thatcher counter-revolution and collapse of the USSR opened the slush gates for the financial feeding frenzy that eventually consumed itself in 2008. While NATO emerged in the post-war period, after the collapse of communism it altered its role and, today, ‘many of these alliances are based in the ‘Anglosphere’ – the United States, Britain, and Britain’s former colonies.’ The US Empire has deployed NATO to expand its influence into the former Soviet sphere in tandem with the European Union, this explains US support for Ukraine and further expansion into the Baltic. As Leon Panetta, CIA head under Obama, put it more bluntly: ‘It’s a proxy war with Russia whether we say so or not.’[38] But NATO made it clear at Madrid in June 2022 what the real target was: China’s ‘stated ambitions and coercive policies challenge our interests, security, and values’ and that the ‘deepening strategic partnership’ between Beijing and Moscow and ‘their mutually reinforcing attempts to undercut the rules-based international order run counter to our values and interests.’[39]
This is what the clamour to accept Ireland’s responsibilities is all about. These are the political heirs of Redmond and Devlin, the Shoneen West Brit imperial lackeys who would sell their own mother to turn a pound. They will tell you there is no alternative. These are our global partners, and our economy is dependent on EU and US investment. We must accept their generous offer of protection, but that means playing out part. Across the West, ‘liberal democracy’ is collapsing in on itself because there is nothing particularly liberal and certainly nothing democratic about out. Or, as Connolly had it: ‘who are the Irish? Not the rack-renting, slum owning landlord; not the sweating, profit-grinding capitalist; not the sleek and oily lawyer; not the prostitute pressman – the hired liars of the enemy . . . but the Irish working class.’[40]
In the Treaty debates In typical vein, Mellows compared Ireland’s choice to the Devil tempting Jesus during his forty-days in the wilderness, warning the Dáil against ‘selling the honour of Ireland for this mess of pottage contained in the Treaty.’ Yet he also reaffirmed that ‘this country protested against being included within the British Empire. Now we are told [by Kevin O’Higgins] that we are going into it with our heads up. The British Empire stands to me in the same relationship as the devil stands to religion. The British Empire represents to me nothing but the concentrated tyranny of ages.’
It means to me that terrible thing that has spread its tentacles all over the earth, that has crushed the lives out of people and exploited its own when it could not exploit anybody else. That British Empire is the thing that has crushed this country; yet we are told that we are going into it now with our heads up. We are going into the British Empire now to participate in the Empire’s shame even though we do not actually commit the act, to participate in the shame and the crucifixion of India and the degradation of Egypt. Is that what the Irish people fought for freedom for? We are told damn principles. Aye, if Ireland was fighting for nothing only to become as most of the other rich countries of the world have become, this fight should never have been entered upon… This fight has been for something more than the fleshpots of Empire.35
This is what the national question represents today. Do we choose a democratic socialist future which will avert nuclear Armageddon or climate catastrophe, or will we sleep walk into oblivion like good little boys and girls, Christine Lagarde’s heroes, the creatures imagined in the rhyme recited up and down this island in the national schools in broken English: “I thank the goodness and the grace that on my birth has smiled and made me in this Christian age, a happy English child!”
No! We have a republican tradition of universalist, radical humanism which can chart a different course. A tradition to be proud of; Alex Callinicos concludes his book with Connolly: ‘The terrifying prospects we face demand that everyone become part of the struggle to rescue humankind. As the great Irish Marxist James Connolly put it at the start of the first age of catastrophe: ‘the only true prophets are they who carve out the future which they announce.’ Or The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.
In a 1913 St Patrick’s Day speech, Redmond told an English audience that the only way Home Rule Ireland would ‘attempt to interfere in any Imperial question’ was by ‘doing everything in our power to increase the strength and the glory of what will then be our empire at long last; and by sending in support of the empire the strong arms and brave hearts of Irish soldiers and Irish sailors, to maintain the traditions of Irish valour in every part of the world. That is our ambition.’[41] Whenever Roger Casement approached the Irish Party for support in his campaign against the Congo genocide, ‘John Redmond, was not forthcoming, as they excused themselves on religious grounds and allied instead with King Leopold II.’[42] Connolly knew what was at stake and, as usual he did not hit and miss.
James Fintan Lalor spoke and conceived of Ireland as a ‘discrowned queen, taking back her own with an armed hand’. Our Parliamentarians treat Ireland, their country, as an old prostitute selling her soul for the promise of favours to come, and in the spirit of that conception of their country they are conducting their political campaign. What is a free nation? A free nation is one which possesses absolute control over all its own internal resources and powers, and which has no restriction upon its intercourse with all other nations similarly circumstanced except the restrictions placed upon it by nature… How would you like to live in a house if the keys of all the doors of that house were in the pockets of a rival of yours who had often robbed you in the past? Would you be satisfied if he told you that he and you were going to be friends for ever more, but insisted upon you signing an agreement to leave him control of all your doors, and custody of all your keys? This is the condition of Ireland today.[43]
[1] The Worker, 13 January 1915.
[2] Matthew 7:13-14
[3] Jean Paul Sartre in preface to Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
[4] Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works (Moscow, 1969), vol. 1, p. 498.
[5] for those tempted to label this reductionist, look to the words ‘conditions’ and ‘general’: Karl Marx, Preface, Jan. 1859, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1977
[6] Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (Penguin, 1990), p. 208.
[7] Karl Marx, New York Daily Tribune, 8 August 1853.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Karl Marx, Preface, Jan. 1859, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1977
[10] Friedrich Engels to Karl Marx, 29 November 1869 in n Golman & Kunina, Ireland and the Irish Question (New York, 1971) pp 279-280.
[11] Engels to Marx, 19 January 1870 in Ireland and the Irish Question, p. 286.
[12] Callinicos, New Age of Catastrophe, p. 100.
[13] David Edwards. 08 May 2015, Tudor Ireland from: The Routledge History of Genocide p. 23.
[14] Christopher Maginn, William Cecil, Ireland, and the Tudor State (Oxford: OUP, 2012), pp. 90–96
[15] Quoted in the Spectator, 27 August 2022.
[16] The quote comes from Niall Ferguson’s introduction to Empire: How Britain made the Modern World (Penguin, 2003), xxi.
[17] Kerby A. Miller, Ireland and Irish America: culture, Class, and Transatlantic Migration (Field Day, 2008), p. 84.
[18] Connolly, Labour in Irish History, p. 114.
[19] Miller, Ireland and Irish America, p. 85.
[20] Miller, p. 86.
[21] Miller, p. 80.
[22] Fergus Campbell, Land and Revolution in the West of Ireland (Oxford, 2005), p. 25.
[23] Miller, p. 89.
[24] Miller, p. 89.
[25] Shan Van Vocht, January 1897.
[26] Forward, 15 August 1914.
[27] As quoted in Lenin, Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.
[28] International Socialist Review, March 1915.
[29] Workers’ Republic, 9 October 1915.
[30] Workers’ Republic, 16 October 1915.
[31] Noam Chomsky and Andre Vltchek, On Western Terrorism (New York, 2020).
[32] Quoted in Blakely, Vulture Capitalism (2024), p. 212.
[33] Ximena Odekerken and Paula Vidal Molina, Allende and Popular Unity: The Road to Democratic Socialism (Routledge, 2024)
[34] Callinicos, New Age of Catastrophe, pp. 89-90.
[35] Blakeley, Vulture Capitalism, pp 39-40.
[36] Grace Blakeley, Vulture Capitalism, pp. 25-26.
[37] Blakely, Vulture Capitalism, p. 213.
[38] Callinicos, New Age of Catastrophe, p. 109.
[39] Quoted in Alex Callinicos, The New Age of Catastrophe (London, 2023), pp. 96-97.
[40] The Workers’ Republic, 8 April 1916.
[41] Roger Casement, The Crime Against Europe, p. 70.
[42] A. Mitchel, 16 Lives: Roger Casement (Dublin, 2013)
[43] Workers’ Republic, 12 February 1916.
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