The Right Wing Media in
Britain has the cheek to criticize Ireland's centenary commemorations of the Easter Rising
It
seems that in Britain, the Right Wing Media is not content with merely
criticizing the EU or banging on about immigration. No, such newspapers, such as the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Express, go out of their way to criticize what is quite
frankly, other countries' business. This
Easter Weekend, they turned their attention on the Irish, our closest neighbors, over the latter's
commemorations of the centenary of the Irish Rising, an attempt by Irish
Nationalist Republicans to establish an independent Irish Republic at the
expense of British Rule in Ireland, through military insurrection in
Dublin. Such British newspapers are
quick to argue that it was an anti-democratic coup which brought a century of
misery to Ireland, but it seems that Charles Moore, former editor of the Daily Telegraph, writing for said
newspaper didn't think that such a view was harsh enough, and equated the
Easter Rising to Islamist fundamentalist terror, and the recent terrorist
attacks in Brussels.
While
there is no doubt that ISIS is a murderous death cult which aims to stamp out all
that is liberal, secular and democratic and is known for its cold blooded
murder of civilians, destruction of heritage, and desire for world domination, the
Easter Rising was based on ideals that were the complete opposite of that and
very enlightened for the time; universal suffrage, equal rights for women, religious
equality, a democratically elected head of state and anti-imperialism. While other British Right Wing newspapers
haven't been quite so far fetched to make that comparison, an article by John
Lewis Stempel in the Daily Express, a
newspaper which endorsed UKIP before the 2015 General Election, compared the
Easter Revolutionaries to Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, of all people.
Those in Britain like John Lewis Stempel, who argue that the Easter Rising was an
anti-democratic coup attempt by ultra-nationalists, would not be quite so quick
to point out that the British themselves were anti-democratic when it came to
Ireland in the years after the rising.
In the Westminster Election of 1918 (the First Election in which all men and some women could vote), Sinn Fein, the party which
wanted to establish an independent Republic of Ireland just as the Easter
Revolutionaries had envisaged, won 73 out of Ireland's 105 constituencies, and refusing to take their seats at Westminster, formed their own Irish
Parliament, the Dail Eirrean, and as promised, declared an independent republic. The British Government at first ignored the
result, not taking the subtle hint that Ireland had voted for independence and
within a year declared the Dail illegal. By definition, outlawing a democratically
elected parliament is not upholding the British tradition for Parliamentary
Democracy; by definition that is being anti-democratic. Throughout the subsequent Anglo-Irish War, the
British state ,ruled by a coalition of Liberal and Tory MPs led by Lloyd George,
acted against democracy in Ireland.
Then, in 1922, during the Treaty negotiations between the Irish Republic
and the United Kingdom for an end to the war, LLoyd George threatened to resume
the war if a newly independent Irish Free State did not accept the King as
their head of state, despite the fact that it was a republic that the Irish had
voted for . So by criticizing the Easter
Revolutionaries for staging an anti-democratic coup against a parliamentary
democracy, one should rightfully criticize Charles Moore for not telling
History quite how it happened - Britain acted against Parliamentary Democracy in Ireland when the Irish voted for what the rebels had wanted .
As for comparing Patrick Pearse to Kaiser
Wilhelm of Germany, I would like to point out that actually it was the British
government of Lloyd George who behaved just like the Kaiser in the years after the
rising. Lloyd George in 1922, like the Kaiser
in 1914, threatened a neighboring country at the point of a gun to succumb to his
will, which is particularly ironic given that in 1914 Lloyd George's apparent
reason for supporting the war against Germany was that it was wrong for Germany
to invade Belgium and that Britain needed to stick up for the 'rights of small
nations.' Eight years later, he sent an ultimatum
to the Dail, forcing them to accept a
foreign head of state, despite the fact that Ireland itself was a small
nation. And the partition of Ireland
into North and South, also forced on the Dail,
was not entirely democratic; there were constituencies in the north which
had voted for Sinn Fein in 1918 which became part of Northern Ireland.
It is a bit rich for us British to point to
Irish civilian deaths during the Easter Rising, although there was more than
one instance of civilians being fired on by rebels, when most civilian
casualties during the rising were actually caused by the British.
One only has to look at the North King Street massacre when British
troops killed 15 civilians out of frustration, and it was the British who used
heavy artillery and incendiary shells which destroyed much of the city center. A disregard for civilian life on the part of
the British was later shown during the Irish war of Independence, when, after
the death of 14 Irish civilians at the hands of the Black and Tans on Bloody
Sunday, 1920, a moderate non-Sinn Fein Irish MP, was shouted down in the House
of Commons and physically assaulted for raising the massacre in a debate. So when
one criticizes an apparent disregard for civilian life on the part of Irish
Republicans one hundred years ago, the British establishment seemed to care
significantly less.
Thus
the conduct of the Easter Revolutionaries a century ago may not have been
perfect; it is true that they did not have a democratic mandate to revolt
against British Rule. But we mustn't
forget that Britain was not as perfect a parliamentary democracy as British
Ultra-Nationalists like to claim we were - at the time of the Rising, only 30% of adults had the right to
vote, all of them men, while it had by 1914, taken more than 30 years of Irish
demands for a limited degree of Home Rule to be passed by the British
Parliament. Britain's upper house was a
House of Lords which, effectively allowed Britain's aristocracy to delay
legislation passed by the elected House of Commons by two years, and even today the House of
Lords has not been abolished. What the
Easter Revolutionaries were offering however, was a democratic and egalitarian
republic with religious and gender equality, and when, in 1918 , the Irish
voted for what the revolutionaries had stood for, the British refused to accept it, and still
didn't in 1922. The Irish Civil War,
tragic and unnecessary, was caused by a British government's anti-democratic and
outrageous demands, one of which was
that the Irish people should accept a foreign head of state, which divided opinion
in Southern Ireland into two camps. But
even so, scrutinizing the morality of the Easter Rising, is up to Irish public
opinion and their press; not us in Britain.
The
fact that such newspapers in Britain take the liberty to criticize another
country for commemorating its own independence struggle is quite astounding and
is cause for a debate that we, in Britain, ought to have.
Is this outrageous stance taken by the right-of-center press a sign that
Britain, or at least right wing opinion, still ignores our past violations of
other countries' sovereignty, while crying wolf at conquered peoples' attempts
to resist? If so, then too much of our country is still in a colonial mindset,
and hasn't moved in the twenty-first century. A bit of respect with regards to what is, let's
face it, another country's internal affairs would do also such newspapers some
good, I think.
