Rev Left Radio - Irish Insurrection: The Easter Rising of 1916

Episode Date: April 2, 2018

Guest Brendan Leahy and host Breht O'Shea discuss the Easter Rising of 1916 in Ireland. Outro Music: "Come Out Ye Black and Tans" by The Wolfe Tones Reach us at: [e-mail] Support the Show: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio follow us on Twitter @RevLeftRadio Follow us on FB at "Revolutionary Left Radio" Intro Music by The String-Bo String Duo. You can listen and support their music here: https://tsbsd.bandcamp.com/track/red-black This podcast is officially affiliated with The Nebraska Left Coalition, the Nebraska IWW, and the Omaha GDC. Check out Nebraska IWW's new website here: https://www.nebraskaiww.org

Easter, Monday 24th, 1916. A small band of rebels including poets and teachers, actors and workers, gathers in Dublin intent on establishing an independent Irish republic and bringing about an end to 700 years of British rule. Britain is engaged in war in Europe, where its army of millions, including 200,000 Irishmen, are suffering casualties and an unprecedented. unprecedented scale.

Britain's distraction presents the rebels with an opportunity and a glimmer of hope. But the rising is compromised by chaos from the start. Three days earlier on Friday, April 21st, Britain's Royal Navy intercepts 20,000 weapons being smuggled into Ireland from Germany for the rebellion. Convinced that without these weapons the rising is doomed, Chief of Staff of the Irish Volunteers, Owen McNeil, countermands the mobilization order issued by rebel leader Porrick Pierce. The countermanding order causes utter confusion. More than half of the rebels stay at home.

Despite the setbacks, the decision is made. The rising will go ahead. Revolution Revolution Now Revolution Revolution Revolution

Revolution Left the radio now Oppose the system Any way you know how Unite the left against the capitalist lies And liberate the proletarian's mind I'm for the working class

Five For the equality I guess the right way Fascist ideology Took it in and turn it up loud Revolutionary Left Radio Starts now Welcome to Revolutionary Left Radio

I'm your host and comrade Brett O'Shea And today we have a special episode An episode I'm extremely excited about an episode that I have personal investment in that is the Easter rising of 1916

the Irish rebellion against British imperialism and as a guest on this show today I have my good friend my red brother my comrade my fellow Nebraska left coalition organizer

and previous guest of four or four previous episodes he's been on and a fellow member of the Irish Diaspora, Brendan Leahy. Brendan, would you like to say hi to everyone? Hi, I'm Brendan Leahy. Yeah, what episode, so we had you on the Cube episode?

Yeah. We had you on the debate episode. Yep. We had you on the ideology episode. Yes. And you were the guest on the neo-Marxism episode. Yes, that one was probably my favorite. So this will be your fifth one, and I think that makes you supreme return guest.

Nobody else has had five returns, so I think we like you over here. Well, I'm honored. I'm especially excited to be on. this episode because learning about the Easter Rising was a big part of me becoming a socialist or a Marxist more specifically. Yeah, so let's go ahead and before we get into the events of the Easter Rising, let's talk a little bit about maybe our Irish backgrounds. I think it's important to know that, you know, we are two Irish American men who are invested in, you know, the sort of Irish history and we find it fascinating and it's always been a part of our identities. So can you talk about your Irish heritage and all of that and what that means to you?

Yeah, I am pretty Irish, especially on my dad's side of the family. I had an ancestor come in to the Midwest in the 1840s, which is pretty prime time for Irish immigration because of the famine, colonialism, and a lot of things like that. so yeah on my part of it um you know my ancestor my dad's dad came over from ireland full-blooded irish and that's where the name o'Shea comes from unfortunately he for family reasons left early and and my dad was eventually adopted by um my grandma's next husband and so there's a name change there um but you know the irish sort of part of my ancestry partially because um we don't have those connections because the family kind of went away and so I don't know that side of the family.

All I know is that I am Irish and I kind of carry that name into my political work because of that reason. But I've always kind of been fascinated by it. I wish I knew more about it. And so even when middle school and high school, my identity formation was really sort of focused around my Irish heritage because it gave me a point of identity that I could sort of work out those issues, you know, when you're an adolescent. So I was confirmed in the Catholic Church and I picked Patrick as my confirmation name for that reason, always obsessed with Irish aesthetics and as I, my politics developed, I became more interested in Irish politics, Irish anti-imperialism, Irish socialism, and big Irish figures like James Connolly, which we're going to talk about today.

So we have a lot to cover. The Easter Rising was an Irish insurrection in 1916 against British imperialism and colonial rule. So before we get into the rising itself, let's just flesh out some of the historical backdrop. And I know we are talking about 600 years of history here, but could you maybe try and summarize the events leading up to the rising? Flesh that out a little bit. Well, there's a very long process of English colonization of Ireland, which resulted in a lot of land displacement. Loss of culture, the Irish language at one point was in a threat of extinction. Because of the settlement process, Catholics were often dispossessed, especially under Cromwell, who was a Puritan.

So there's a big religious sort of divide that also occurred. So there was always a history of fighting back against that process and the number of rebellions. But in the 1800s, that sort of rebellious, directly violent sort of way of confronting the British, was slowly replaced with more constitutional methods, attempts to gain maybe not pure independence, but maybe just even an Irish, like an independent Irish parliament

or have home rule or something like that versus just an independent republic. But there was always people who wanted to carry on sort of the more working class struggles of Ireland through the land war or kind of regain a truly independent Ireland through an Irish Republic. And what was the role of British imperialism leading up to through the rising?

Yeah, British imperialism tested out a lot of its methods in Ireland before carrying it out throughout the world. So long before England was the colonial power that managed about a fourth of the Earth's population, it was dispossessing. Irish people legislating what parts of their culture they couldn't, couldn't do. So it was really like a culturally imperialist and dominating structure, trying to impose, again, Protestantism on what was mostly a Catholic population. Ireland, if I'm not wrong, was the first British colony ever, correct? I think that is a pretty fair claim to make.

Yeah. And leading up to the rebellion of 1916, World War I plays a huge role in this, partially because it had the British attention, inverted from Ireland. And so it provided an opening that the leaders of the rising kind of took advantage of. Is that correct? Yeah. It's been commonly thought by a number of Irish people that when Britain is in trouble abroad, that's the time to make a move for Ireland because it will be distracted. So a lot of the more militant people in Ireland were thinking this is the prime time to strike. On the other hand, British government, some parts of it were saying that home rule was going to happen. So a lot of, there were a number of people who were invested in home rule that

encouraged Irish people to join the British army to fight for the independence of small nations like Belgium. And that was kind of seen as, well, if we fight for Britain, then Britain will give us like our direct control over Ireland you know they'll if they really believe in you know rights of national determination for small countries like Belgium then they'll carry it on in Ireland and that attitude was pretty common in a lot of parts of the world you mentioned the concept of home rule I know we know what that is but can you flesh out what that means exactly yeah so rather than Ireland having a separate complete control it'd still be part of the British Empire. The, you know, head of state, or rather, would be still like, you know, the king

or the queen. I wouldn't have been in Georgia at the time, I think. It still would be part of the British Empire. It wouldn't be completely free, especially when it came to foreign relations, but it would still have some, like, more domestic control over things like the running of schools or things like that. Yeah, so you'd have Irish politicians, Irish capitalists, they would operate in Ireland as representatives of Ireland, but they'd ultimately still be connected up to Great Britain generally. Yes. All right, so let's get into who is, for me and for you, a major figure, a major influence, somebody that we've both sort of have a special place in our heart for. And that figure is

James Connolly. So who was James Connolly? What role did he ultimately play in the rising? And why is he an important figure for the left generally? For some, James Connolly is a 1916 patriot, a soldier, a union leader. and a great political thinker. For others, he's an idealist, a lefty, and a socialist dreamer. But James Connolly is my hero because he was a real human being with passion, dreams and flaws

who dedicated his life to working class men and women, not only in Ireland, but around the world. And ultimately, they were his words which inspired the 1916 proclamation, which defines our innate sense of decency and fairness as a society. That is the greatness of the man. Behind the mythology, there's so much more to the 48 years of James Connolly's great life. He was a complete man, a campaigner, worker, husband, self-taught intellectual, powerful speaker, revolutionary thinker and doer.

A true champion of the ordinary man and woman on the street. Truly Ireland's greatest. Yeah, James Connolly is definitely most famous for the Easter Rising, but long before, Before that, he was a socialist organizer. He was born to an Irish family in Edinburgh, Scotland. His father got wounded in a factory job, and so he lied about his age to get a factory job early on. He joined the British Army, and that took him to Ireland,

and that's where that kind of awoke his sort of understanding of his Irishness. He returned, he became a socialist, He was largely self-taught. Again, this is a working-class person who started working in the factory he's at a very young age. A poor man, his whole life.

His whole life, a working man. He taught himself several languages. He taught himself Marxist theory, socialist theory broadly. It's very clear he read pretty heavily. He began organizing. Due to his poverty, eventually he came to America, where he kind of got involved in the IWW, syndicalism,

De Leonism. I've heard, although I don't know that this is 100% true, that he actually founded in IWW chapter in New Jersey. Wow, that's awesome. Yeah, so there's a lot of his life that we could talk about. We could do an entire episode on his life. Some things I do want to highlight, he was born in Edinburgh, as you say. He lived in a, what amounts to an Irish ghetto for Irish immigrants that was called Little Ireland, and they lived in, you know, horrible conditions, as one would expect. His father was literally a manure carter. So he carted around manure and then eventually rose to supervise a public, what amounted to a public restroom. So these people were very, very poor and on top of their poverty were brutally discriminated against in Scotland.

So we talked about him going to America. Part of the reason that he went to America were because American socialists were trying to get and reach the Irish American working class. And the Irish at that time largely viewed communism or socialism as sort of atheistic. And because of their Catholicism, they weren't open to socialist ideas and American socialists weren't able to reach the Irish American immigrants. So they brought Connolly over to go on like a five month speaking tour and speak to them and try to, try to, you know, connect to their Irishness and give them that Irish sort of flare to socialism. And part of his self-taught education was precisely that he tried to figure out how he could make socialism sort of digestible

to the average Irish working person. And that was something that led him to study Irish history very deeply and the Irish clan system specifically, which he made good use out of when articulating socialism because there's lots of maybe primitive socialist curdles inside of that clan system overall. he did some really interesting things he was as you talked about before we started recording he was very theatrical in his protests at one point he

he orchestrated a protest where he had a black coffin and on the side he painted British imperialism and they carried it to a major bridge in Dublin I believe and threw it off into the river and he was arrested for that he was also way ahead of his time when it came to feminism he supported rights for women and this is in the 1800s, mind you.

Supported rights for women. He had this famous quote where he said, if the worker is a slave, then a woman is the slave of that slave, meaning women played an even deeperly, like subordinated, oppressed position even within that context. And he single-handedly got Irish women

put into the proclamation, which was sort of, which we're going to talk about later, which sort of announced to the Irish people that they were conducting the rising. So do you want to talk about a little bit more, more about Connolly and especially his sort of feminism, which I know, you know, it means a lot to you? Yeah, I think that's probably the most important contribution that we really need to look at about

Connolly, but Connolly really did. He synthesized sort of this Catholic communism or a Catholic socialism that led to him actually getting into a dispute with Daniel De Leon, who was much more anti-religion. He was very anti-imperialist. He was very anti-imperialist. He was very very anti-British imperialism, most specifically, but imperialism overall. He believed in syndicalism and he thought that you needed those unions and you needed worker control of the factories directly. But he also believed in a party, in an Irish Republican socialist party. He was a Marxist, but he was very much a feminist. I think he probably read Origin of the Family, private property, and the state by Ingalls. It sounds like the context where that

quote comes from is very similar to some of the arguments that Ingalls makes there. But as a working class person, he has a tendency to not use a lot of jargon. And he tends to basically translate these concepts in really simple ways. But he very strongly felt that the women's movement was an integral part of the Irish nationalist movement and the socialist movement. I think for him,

they were either different sides of the same coin or they could never be completed. And so he says very specifically that achieving socialism would solve the economic parts of the women's question, but those parts alone. So he was very,

very overtly saying that we're going to need social change as well as just the sort of economic conditions of a socialist state. And that's something that I think a lot of socialists dismiss or don't consider Yeah, there's sort of a crude Marxism or a vulgar socialism that wants to reduce everything to economics and sort of deny, like once we change the base of society, that we will automatically sort of achieve progress on the social front.

And that's not the case. And him way ahead of his time was articulating that nuance. That's really important. Also, he was, you know, we talked about his poverty. He lived his entire life, extremely poor. He would educate himself after, as you mentioned, he would go out searching for jobs. and then he'd come to the public library and just read vociferously. At this stage of his life, Connolly was no great political hero standing up for the downtrodden.

He was the downtrodden. There was no money coming in. The family were constantly pawning possessions to stay afloat or to buy work clothes for James to get a day's labor. Once he even went to work with lily's slippers tied to his feet with laces. Connolly's socialist principles and public organizing were not helping him, to get any work, so he had a lot of time in his hands. As an avid reader and self-taught scholar, he ended up spending a lot of that spare time,

reading, thinking and staying warm here in the National Library. In here are the origins of Connolly's unique thinking. When he arrived in Ireland, he was a committed socialist, but in here he learned that republicanism and socialism were inextricably linked. And the only way to save the working man from his poverty, and his slavery to the bosses was a workers' republic. Connolly read widely ancient Irish history, sociology

and the development of human behaviour just to see if he could trace the natural origins of socialism to show that it wasn't just some intellectual invention. He could see socialist structures in the way the old Irish clan system worked across thousands of years of Irish history. He saw the ancient clan attitudes to land ownership as a kind of Celtic communism and he believed this would make socialism connect to the ordinary Irish man or woman to make it resonate with being Irish. And then he'd go out and he would pamphleteer or try to organize and meet up with his other comrades and he'd come home and take care of his

family. He was a dedicated family man. He had many children and his wife Lily and him had a deep, deep connection that they met early in life and they just had a, you know, from all accounts, a wonderful marriage. Like, James Connolly, to me, is sort of a figure of purity. It's hard to find people in the historical canon, even people that we deeply admire that are really, like, without a lot of flaws. And Connolly stands out as being, as being one of those people. When he went to America, and you talked about his interactions with the IWW, there's a famous picture of him and Big Bill Haywood, a famous IWW organizer that people should check out. To talk about his self-list an anecdote that I would bring up is when he was in America he had to find a job and he worked

in a what was a largely immigrant factory is called the singer factory I forget what they do but it was just you know sort of one of these late 1800s factories when you had Italian immigrants German immigrants French immigrants and Irish immigrants and in that context he learned he taught himself German he taught himself Italian I think he taught himself other languages as well and of course just in his DNA he started rabble rousing on the shop floor and that drew the attention of the bosses so the story goes that the bosses told connolly's foreman to go down to the floor and tell connolly that he's fired they didn't want him around he caused too much trouble so when the foreman went to meet connolly the foreman liked connolly you know because you couldn't know connolly without liking him and so he

was really hesitant he just told connolly like you know they told me if i don't fire you they're going to fire me i don't know what to do connolly just said stuff stop. He's like, I'm going to, I'll take the hit. You do not need to get fired for me. He's like, keep your job. And he took the, he took the firing. And this is in the context of being extremely poor. Like, he would have a hard time, you know, making ends meet with his family. Another story talks about where he wrote about sleeping in on his days off, pretending to sleep through the day so that his family, his children, and his wife would have bigger portions of meals. So they didn't have to make a meal for him. And so they could have more food for

them. So he would pretend like he was sleeping on his days off when in reality he was just making sure that they had enough. This was a deeply selfless man. A man committed to the cause, a man who lived his entire life despite his poverty as an organizer and a fighter for the working class. And when it came to home rule, he argued against it because of his socialism. You know, there's that famous quote where he's like, even if, you know, we somehow get home rule or even if we get an Irish sort of republic, it doesn't matter if it's not socialist because we're still going to have bosses. We're still going to have exploitors. We're still going to have oppressors. When he would go out and search for jobs, he would tell his wife, he's like, I'm going out to

try to find my next exploiter. So he had this wry humor. He's just a really interesting, fascinating guy. I remember on Tuesday morning, an officer and one of the volunteers came up to my father and the officer said, commandant, this man wants to return to work. My father was so, astonished. He said, good gracious, don't you understand, you're in the middle of a revolution. And the ordinary Dublin worker said, well, he says, that's all right, Jimmy, says, but I have the keys to the warehouse. And if I don't open up all the other men on their job, we're going to lose a day's pay. So this tickled my father extremely, he said, all right, he says, go along. But he says, remember that the revolution is still on when you go home and have your tea.

Yeah, I think there are some interesting parallels between him and Marx and that because of their dedication to socialism and writing, they had a hard time keeping jobs because of their politics or, you know, moving from country to country, very in love with his wife, very in love with his children, excellent relationship with his daughters, who were very empowered and some of them went on to do great things, I think, for the socialist movement too. Except Connolly never had his angles. Yeah, no, I never had his angles. We all need an angles. I think I've said that on this podcast before. Yeah, it's true. Talking about their children, you know, Carl Marx faced the death of multiple of his children

and reading the accounts of how Marx reacted to the death of his children. I mean, it brings tears. It's absolutely heart-wrenching. I think we talked about it in our last episode where he lost his son and people at the funeral thought that Marks was going to dive into the grave himself because he was so hurt. and when Connolly came to America it took a while for his family to meet up with him

and they arrived on Ellis Islands about six or seven months after he got here and the first news that they had for him when he got off he's like where is his oldest daughter where is she and they started all crying and they basically said that she had died because in the horrible conditions that they lived in in Ireland

the dress she was wearing a dress or a gown cooking and the flame of the stove caught her dress on fire and burned her to death so when they met up Connolly here in America, just tragedy as the opening sort of salvo of their American life together. Yeah, I think it happened pretty right before they came over too. So it was fresh news and that's just an awful way to find that out, expecting to see. I don't know. Yeah, as a father myself, I mean, I relate to those moments of humanity in these people.

So let's go ahead and move on. I encourage people to check out James Connolly, learn more about really fascinating, a wonderful, important revolutionary thinker and really a sort of model of how a socialist and a worker can live to the highest potential. But the Easter Rising was ultimately carried out by a coalition of various groups and a cadre of leaders, including Connolly. So let's talk about the groups and the leaders. Who were they and what roles did they play? Okay. So the most largely present group would have been the Irish Volunteers, which was kind of founded out of this Gaelic revival movement, this attempt to revive Irish culture and stuff, as well as the Ulster volunteers were formed first in Ulster and the Northern

Ireland to kind of like preserve like the UK and sort of, you know, be a sort of Protestant sort of armed militia. So the sort of Irish Catholic volunteers were formed as like a counter to that. So they had previously smuggled guns into Ireland, but a lot of them were actually very much in favor of the home rule. If we fight for Belgium, we'll get Ireland sort of deal. So the Irish volunteers were largely infiltrated by a secret society dating to the 1800s, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and a number of key members of the volunteers were also members of the special military council of the IRB, whose job it was to plan the rising. Among those you have Patrick Pierce is one of the most famous who was a school teacher and a

poet and deeply committed to the idea that there needed to be in each century a major rebellion in order to basically have like a blood sacrifice of martyrdom. There's a lot of martyr mythology in the Irish nationalist struggle and he really bought into that I think he was also really inspired by the myth of cuckolin if you're familiar with him he used this Irish berserker basically who single-handedly fought off an army as he was dying more or less like you know he like tied himself to a tree or something so like this idea of martyrdom was really big and appears really idealistic there was Thomas Clark who was like um

member of the IRB, and before that, the Finians, who was arrested by the British for a bombing campaign who lived in America for years as well, and he was a major planner. Connolly was brought in specifically because the IRB was afraid that he was going to start his own rising if they didn't stop him. He was frustrated because he saw a bunch of Irish Republicans and things like that who had been talking about a rebellion and now Britain's in the middle of a imperialist war that he thinks is totally unjustified and they're doing nothing. So he was pretty vocally calling for a rising. So they actually kidnapped him and co-opted him into their military council, which was really good for them because most of them didn't actually have a lot

of direct military experience. Like I said, he was in the army. So he was heavily involved in the planning process. He was the head of the citizens army, which was formed to, basically in the aftermath or during the Dublin lockouts, the big, big labor adjectation moment in Irish history of 1913, in which there was a lot of reactionary violence against strikers. So the Irish citizen army was like put together to protect worker movements and worker protest from the forces of the state and the forces of reaction. Yeah, but under Connolly, it very quickly became geared towards the idea of establishing an Irish socialist republic. It was open to men and women. I think that's really important to note for an organization founded in 1913 to have fighting women in the ranks

is something that I think is historical, of great historical importance to me at least. Especially in the context of conservative religiosity that permeated that society. Yeah. In that group, you also have Countess Constance Markovic, who was heavily involved with, although not able because of her gender to be in the volunteers. Involved with the volunteers, she founded basically the Fiona, which is like the boy and Girl Scouts of the volunteers. She founded both of those. She was involved with Kuminaman, which was like the women's volunteers who didn't really do any direct fighting, but they were sort of like a parallel organization to the volunteers to provide a lot of support.

And they were integral in getting messages across Ireland at that time because women were less suspect than certain men. And so they were easily to travel without being stopped by British police. Yeah. So she is really important because she plays an intersecting role between these groups. She's also a militant feminist. The feminism of Britain in Ireland at the time was a much more militant form of suffragism, I think, than people realize now. She was involved with that.

Really close to Connolly, one of his lieutenants, there are a lot of important people who would go on to play really important roles in Irish history in the future, like Amanda Valera, who ended up becoming a leader of Ireland in a number of roles. Michael Collins, who later became the head of the IRB that I mentioned before, and a major leader in the IRA during the Anglo-Irish War as well. So, yeah, that history connects up really interestingly to the IRA and to the events that happened eventually later in that century.

But before we move on, I think it's important to flesh some of these words out when it comes to nationalism, when it comes to report, republicanism and when it comes to well socialism we all know but in the context of socialism and especially in the american context when people hear words like nationalism and republicanism they can get weird sort of you know correlations in their head so can you talk about what nationalism and republicanism meant in the context of early 20th century ireland yeah i think as socialists we do have a tendency a lot to hear the word nationalist and immediately think of of reactionaries or far-right nationalism or or

hyper patriotism. But when you live in a colonial context, when you're ruled from a different, you know, a different country, you know, religion, language, forms of government, all these things are imposed upon you. You know, the Irish language being suppressed, things like that really means that nationalism can be an empowering force. And you can, you know, read Mao or or any of those people. And you can see at that point the role that nationalism can be for emancipation in a colonial context. Exactly. And that's really important. There's so many national liberation struggles that, you know, I think principled socialist should and have traditionally supported because it's a fundamental prerequisite to clearing the way for more

radical change. If you're oppressed by another, you know, entity, then you can't build up your own sort of socialist society when you're under the thumb of this external force. So you have to buck off the external force in the form of a national liberation movement revolution, kick the colonizers out, clear the path, and then you can engage in that secondary struggle of building socialism. And so I think that's extremely important to understand. And so when we talk about these people being nationalists and Republicans and socialists, it's all tied together. But let's go ahead and get into the rising itself and the document that is sort of held up as the quintessential you know codified version of the of the rising which was the proclamation so what was the

proclamation and what role did it play in the rising yeah the proclamation um its significance almost comes into play after the rising more than during but it was mostly written by pierce uh but connelly's influences very strong in it and it's essentially a declaration of the republic. When the rising started, they were in multiple points in Dublin, but Liberty Hall, which was sort of the socialist main center, was very close to the general post office. So they started the rising by marching from Liberty Hall to the general post office, seizing the post office, and reading this proclamation, which they declared an Irish Republic. They're saying they're creating a provisional government that Ireland should be controlled by

the Irish people. It very specifically mentions women, which almost everyone is sure comes from Connolly's influence. It starts out Irish men and Irish women. Yeah. It very strongly promises universal suffrage, which again, this is a time where women aren't allowed to vote in the United States or England or most countries. So it's actually a really progressive document that has a lot of socialist influence. And it draws on sort of Irish dignity, Irish history. It's a call to the Irish people that were fighting for your interest and the interest of Irish working people especially. So it's a really interesting document. But let's get into the rising itself. I mean, this was an insurrection. And it lasted only six days. But in that time, it contained

quite a bit of bloodshed and guerrilla warfare. So what was the Easter rising of 1916 and what happened during it. Yeah, the Easter Rising is what we've been getting at, where the IRB, and what is the IRB again? The Irish Republican Brotherhood, lots of acronyms in liberation struggles. So yeah, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the Secret Society, this is the rising. They've been planning in secret. They try to get through their infiltration, the volunteers to carry it out. they co-opt the citizens army and they get support from the kuminaman as well so all these groups kind of come together during this rising and connolly looks to them and says you're you know i'm paraphrasing here but you're all those different groups aren't a thing now you're now part of the irish republican army so here's where we get the name IRA which is going to be used and reused you know throughout history sense um but uh Because they were very reliant on getting arms from Germany and America, the promised arms from Germany never arose. The British intelligence knew it was coming, basically.

The shipment of guns? Yes. And as has always kind of been a problem in the history of Irish struggle, you know, struggle. infiltration or like being found out by the British is always a big problem. There's always leaks. So people knew it was coming. There is a planned roundup of people who might have been involved and the guns aren't arriving. So the head of the volunteers who didn't know this rising was being planned until right before issued countermanding orders to cancel the demonstrations that were supposed to turn into the rising that Easter.

The cat was kind of out of the bag, and it was stopped. But eventually a lot of the planners decided they're just going to do it anyway. So part, like, somebody called it off, put it out in the papers. They said, it's not happening. So half of the volunteer army was just like, oh, I guess we're staying home. Yeah, more than half, I think. Like the volunteers, it was like a fifth of what they expected. I mean, and almost the entirety of the citizens' army did show up,

so there was some balance there, but the numbers that they required for their plans were just not there at all. They didn't have the guns they expected, but they decided to do it anyway. I think Connolly was basically like, we have to, at this point, because we've gone too far in the plan, and we already know that people like Pierce

were committed to that martyrdom thing, so it didn't matter if they were going to win or lose, you know, and so they still had to do. do it because for them it was a symbolic act. So the fighting that took place, and we're talking guerrilla warfare, can you talk about some of the tactics, some of the maneuvers? I mean, you're having a 20,000 at this point British, basically military coming into these areas of Ireland, and you have roughly about 2,000 fighters on the Irish side.

So you're already beat by 10-fold increase in numbers. So you're not going to have a straight-on old-style battle. It's going to be guerrilla in nature. you talk about that a little bit? Yeah, so the plan was for these demonstrators to seize the general post office and declare this republic. And then most of the people who were going to be aware initially of it were situated in Dublin and were supposed to seize key points, cut off British military. Connolly studied street fighting. But this is before Michael Collins, who was almost surely, I mean, was very surely influenced by Connolly and the rising,

both the failures and the successes. And this is before Che Guevara, this is before Mao. So there's not really a synthesized modern guerrilla warfare strategy yet. There's the Boer War and stuff, and commonly study those. So the plan was really to take a defense of key positions to basically cut off British troops from one another. Because they didn't have the people, they couldn't seize a lot of the locations they planned to.

There were a couple of places they should have planned on seizing that they didn't plan to, but again, they didn't have the men anyway. So they seized the general post office, a couple other key locations in Dublin, and the plan was that the rest of Ireland would rise. But because of the countermanding orders, because they didn't seize all the places they met to seize, there was really not much fighting throughout the country. It was almost exclusively in Dublin. Cork and a couple other places, there's some outbreaks. Yeah, so there were some outbreaks in other cities, but double. was really the heart of it, and you had Irish soldiers basically shooting from rooftops, picking off British soldiers as they marched through the streets and guerrilla warfare.

By Wednesday, we knew that number 25 was being held by only two men, Michael Malone and Jim Grace. It's a horrible vignette of urban fighting to think of Mick Malone and Jimmy Grace going into number 25, going up the stairs. They found this little bathroom at the back with a window looking out. down Northumberland Road and they knew this was the position. Around about one o'clock in the day we heard the noise of marching men and looked out and here we saw as we thought the whole British army coming in and they were marching along quite unconcerned

and the men in number 25 waited until they got to the junction of Haddleton Road Road and a Thumberland Road. When they came under fire, it was complete chaos. Clearly nobody knew what to do. A lot of soldiers killed on the spot, they had no idea where the firing was coming from. The sound echoes across all the surrounding buildings, you just can't tell where it's coming from.

Well, we thought there were probably two or 300. Their fire was so good and so accurate that they misled the troops as to the numbers. Eventually, the British traced the sniper fire on Northumberland Road to the upper floor window of number 25. It would have been between half of six and seven, it was still bright when they made an almighty rush. And they got up the steps and they threw a bomb at the door and we heard an explosion when we saw a bright light. and we knew it was the end of those two. As soldiers forced their way into number 25, Jimmy Grace escapes out the back,

but Mick Malone is shot dead. The second outpost, Clan William House, is reduced to a blazing shell and finally abandoned by the rebels. In the end, 230 British soldiers are dead or wounded. The rebels lose just four men. But ultimately, because of the number indifference, because of the superior weaponry, I mean, they even, the Brits even had what is known as the Helga, which basically was a river battleship that they drove into the river of inside Dublin and were shelling parts of Dublin with that, with that battleship. Yeah, it was a gunboat. And the very first place they shelled was Liberty Hall that I mentioned before. They're like, we're going to take out the socialist headquarters first. Connolly and the other organization.

razors left it pretty empty on purpose. So that was fortunate, but they shelled all over Dublin. Connolly, this is a mistake on his part, I think, thought that Britain would not destroy the capitalist center of Ireland, Dublin. I mean, alongside Belfast, most of Ireland wasn't terribly industrialized at the time. So he thought that the capitalist wouldn't want to destroy that infrastructure, But, I mean, it's hard to under-emphasize how little the British Empire cared about Irish citizens because the majority of the casualties of the Easter Rising were civilians, and they were mostly caused because of the shelling. Right.

Yeah, there's even stories of British soldiers on North King Street, especially going door to door and rounding up Irish men and basically executing them in front of their families. because the Brits basically thought that they might be. And this was an area where a lot of the Irish rebels were. And so they could have indiscriminately basically killing civilians. It was really, really brutal. North King Street was reputed to be an absolute hotbed of the people. You know, the people were causing the trouble.

Strategically, North King Street is important because it offers an opportunity for British forces to, around the forecourts. In a maze of narrow streets and alleyways, British soldiers make painfully slow progress as they come under intense rebel fire. Frustrated, they begin boring through the internal walls of adjacent buildings to advance along the street to avoid rebel fire. As terrified residents die for cover, British soldiers and rebels exchange shots across the narrow street.

I hear the knives picking at the walls. walls. I shouted, Mr. Hickey, someone's breaking into the house. He got up and soon after several soldiers dashed through a hole he'd made in the wall from next door. The soldiers had drawn swords, crowbars and pickaxes. The men were brought into the back. We heard poor Christy pleading for his father's life. I don't kill father. Shots rang out. That night, in houses along North King Street, British soldiers execute 15 men. Although the British first claimed they were shooting only those identified as rebels, the casualties in North King Street are innocent civilians.

I will say compared to the black and tans and stuff, it wasn't the overall policy of the British to terrorize the civilians, but there were a couple high-ups that did. they killed actually I think a pro-British journalist in that way and they killed a pacifist a pacifist socialist named Francis Sheffi Sheffington who was friends with Connolly a dedicated feminist he actually hyphenated his name with his wife's last name that's why he's got that long name but he was a pacifist and he was opposed to violent action and he tried to organize people to stop looting, basically, during the Easter Rising. And the British executed him because he was a socialist and Irish, even though he was a pacifist and not involved at all. Right.

Yeah, and then there was looting, and we'll talk about that, I think, a little bit later, when we talk about tactics and what could have been improved and all of that. Connolly was injured in the rising. He was shot in the ankle or shin. Things vary, I think the ankle. and had to be carted off the battlefield, basically. But ultimately, you know, the rising was crushed. It only lasted six days, and it ended in an unconditional surrender on the part of the Irish.

So can you talk about how the rising ended and what became of its leaders? Yeah. So, as you said, Connolly was wounded. He first gets shot in the arm, but he hides that wound and keeps fighting. It's either a direct sniper shot or a ricochet. I've read both. shattered his ankle. So he couldn't walk, but he was still giving orders from a stretcher. A lot of the leaders at the GPO weren't really militarily experienced, so he kind of stayed

giving orders and trying to put on a brave face for the soldiers, more or less. But they were clearly, they had to leave the GPO using Connolly's street fighting tactics, dug trenches and things like that and tried to go from location to location. But the fighting was too thick. They were too surrounded. So they surrendered. Pierce writes the unconditional surrender. Connolly signs back just to make sure all of the socialists follow the orders.

And then slowly the other positions, once they hear that Pierce has surrendered, surrender to. Very soon we were marching through O'Connell Street to lay down our arm. Sean McDermott had read Pierce's order to us and told us that this week of East would be long remembered. And as we marched along under a white flag, our own flag still flew over the gutted GPO. And for long my mind was haunted by a glimpse on that last march of the O'Rehali in his green uniform,

lying waxen and still on a Moor Street pavement. Unknown to his comrades, the O'Rehali is still alive, having been shot on Moor Street. Several hours passed before he finally succumbs to his wounds. A note is found in his clothing, addressed to his wife. Written after I was shot. Darling, Nancy. I was shot leading a rush up Moore Street

and took refuge in a doorway. While I was there, I heard the men pointing out where I was and I made a bolt for the lane way I'm in now. I got more than one bullet. Got more than one bullet, I think. Tons and tons of love, dearie. To you and the boys and to Nell and Anna. It was a good fight, anyhow.

Goodbye, darling. Though sporadic resistance continues, by Sunday all the main rebel garrisons have surrendered. Gravely injured, Connolly is moved to a hospital ward in Dublin Castle. The other leaders, along with many of the rebels, are taken to Richmond Barracks. Hundreds of us. Very disheveled men I remember. Unshaving, soil, twir-looking, but a marvellous spirit of defiance. It seems a very eerie going down such a silent O'Connell street.

It was hardly a sound and the GPO smoke still rising from it. thought to myself that's like our dreams in ruins now. More than 500 people are killed during the six days of the 1916 rising. Some 70 rebels, 140 soldiers, and at least 300 civilians. The rising is over, but the revolution has only just begun. And then what ultimately came of the leaders? Yes, all of the leading figures, some of whom we haven't mentioned here today, were to be executed. And some people who weren't really that involved in the planning were executed, too.

The British military wanted to execute them basically as traitors through like a military court and not through like a civilian process. they kill Pearson a couple other people first they kill Connolly towards the end because he is wounded you have two things going on in the press a group of people who say oh he's wounded his leg is gangreness so you know he's just imprison him

like don't kill a man who's you know deeply injured very sick and injured right and then there's a bunch of people notably some capitalists too who are basically like he's the one you need to execute get rid of him but they do they strap him to a chair and shoot him

and he's one of the last ones to go they don't kill Markovic because she's a woman which I think she says something to the lines of like that pissed me off and they they don't kill Emma de Valera because he was born

in the United States and even though he didn't really like engage in his American like status there was the question of whether he was a citizen or not and that was enough to delay the process to the point that the civilian part of the British Empire was like we're done with these executions right and the execution of Connolly is just worth drilling down in a little bit because as you say he was he was injured he had an injury in his arm his ankle was completely shattered he actually had to be stretched out to the firing squad.

And the doctor who was taking care of them, they got him onto the chair. And they literally had to sit a man down in a chair, tie him to the chair in order to shoot him and kill him. And the doctor had been treating him and had become quite fond of him, sat there and watched the execution. And he said that, you know, Connolly,

right when the execution was getting ready to go, he just basically grabbed onto his chair, stuck his chest out and raised his head high and just stared at his executioners. they just filled them with bullets. And he said, the doctor said that, you know, Connolly was the bravest man he'd ever known. The way he not only, you know, was a part of the uprising and dealt with his own injuries, but the way that he took his final death, it was reminiscent in some ways of Che Guevara's death,

where he looks his executioner in the eye and says, shoot, coward, you're only going to kill a man. They shot Che, and he falls to the ground, and he bites his wrist to stop from screaming because he doesn't want to let out the pain and they shoot him in the throat and ultimately kill him. One of the worst parts of it for me that really, you know, kind of heartbreaking was the discussion with his wife and his children before he was killed. They went in there and they were able to talk to their father. And we're going to play a clip from James Connolly's daughter, giving the firsthand perspective of how that went down. It was a strange journey in that army ambulance to the silent, darkened city. Mama and I sat not speaking

The only moving figures on the streets were English soldiers Two armed soldiers stood outside the door of my father's room My father lifted his head from the pillow as we came in You know what this means he said Mama broke down Don't Lily he said Don't

you'll unman me. But your beautiful life, James, she sobbed. Your beautiful life. And he said, but hasn't it been a full life, Lily? And isn't this a good end? But it was really just horrible. They killed all the leaders.

And to this day, there's like iconic, iconic imagery of Connolly strapped to the chair, many drawings, many artistic renderings of Connolly in that final moment, because it really encapsulated the martyrdom and the sacrifice that these fighters ultimately paid for their socialist uprising against their oppressors. At one point, Pierce confides and volunteer Desmond Ryan. When we are all wiped out, people will blame us for everything. condemn us but only for this protest the war would have ended and nothing would have been done

after a few years they will see the meaning of what we have tried to do there is an element of deep historical self-consciousness where they stand in the centuries of Irish history the historic moment that they have arrived at and that they are creating but let's go ahead and talk about sort of the tactics and kind of reflect on what happened And what were some of the major tactical and strategic errors that the Irish made that we should reflect on and be aware of? And how could they have done things differently and possibly more successfully? Yeah. A hindsight is always nice.

So keep that in mind. Again, we don't have a Mao or a Guevary yet to have, you know, written a great guerrilla war manual. The defense was a little too static, in my opinion. Connolly and having talked briefly about mobility in war, I feel like should have been more aware of the ability to, you know, beat a much larger army by being mobile, but again, you know, hindsight. Beyond that, he's working with, and it's not just him who's planning it. He's planning it with the volunteers who aren't even a socialist group, who are, you know, very interested in fighting like a conventional army. And so there is like this sort of

dual side to the struggle where they fight very conventionally sometimes, very unconventionally in others, a lot of success with the snipers, for example, but in a lot of places they were just shelled. They were in a building. They had much better luck at beating British, or killing British people and the British did, vice versa. Again, like, most of the people who died were civilians because of British bombing. But the second largest group to die was the British because of the Irish. Or like, I'll say there were Irish people in the police. So with that ran assault. But they didn't seize positions they could have easily taken, like Dublin Castle. Part of that's an intelligence issue. Had they known that there were virtually no armed guards

in Dublin Castle, they were surely taken. it. But I think because that's such a symbol, it had been in the past a symbol of like British rule, I think they took it for granted that it would be heavily defended. They didn't take like communication spots or railroads and like they didn't guard the ports enough so the British were able to land a bunch of troops in and reinforce Dublin. Yeah, and in the Dublin Castle case, you know, they thought that Dublin Castle would be full of British soldiers. In fact, In retrospect, we find out there's only six of them in there. They could have easily taken Dublin Castle,

which would have been a huge, just if not tactical, symbolic win. They could never have known that, but at the same time, it was out there. Yeah. And then also I would talk about, they seized the park, I forget the name of the park,

but they dug trenches into the park. St. Stephen's Green. Yeah, St. Stephen's Green. They dug trenches in there. And in retrospect, what they could have done that would have been more effective is to set up snipers on the roves instead of trenching into the park itself.

which gave them ultimately a disadvantage and they were drawn out of the park by the British. And then also the proclamation was an attempt to reach out to the Irish people, but at the same time there wasn't a lot of connections with the Irish people at that time. You had situations where as the rising started up, it really annoyed some of the poor and working Irish people at the time because they were just trying to get to their job. Things were being shut down and for them, that means no wages for the day or for those six days. and so at the beginning of the of the rising you had a lot of working and poor irish people like what the hell are you doing like even fights broke out between like the volunteers and some of the irish people and they're like you guys need to fucking stop we need to get our wages there were Irish people fighting in world war one and they were trying to a lot of Irish people were trying to go see with their husbands getting their money or their letters from their husbands from the war front and were blocked because of the chaos and the shutting down of system so it annoyed people there and

you had looting that occurred, which I think is always going to happen when there's destabilization, especially in the context of poverty, when people don't have anything, you see looting occur. And the volunteers tried to talk to them. They tried to reach out to them, but to really no avail, the looting continued. So those were some of the things that, just tactical stuff that they could have improved on, they went in as an underdog. You had half of the people being called off in the front. You had gun shipments being picked off by the British.

you had infiltration so the British knew that what was coming in some sense so on all those fronts it just added to the disadvantage yeah and they

went in knowing that they had made a bunch of errors I don't think everybody who was involved in the risings planning were going in

with the intention of being martyrs but for some they were going in with that intention and so the errors weren't a deal breaker and some people

I think just kind of got roped in at that point which is a big tragedy for sure for sure now the easter rising it was reported on around the world it was a pretty big event in the u.s the new york times covered it on their front page for 14 days straight which is i mean really impressive what were the reactions to it from the international left and specifically what did lennon and trotsky have to say about it did the rising inform their own insurrection a year later in any way yeah um i think connelly said to his daughter Nora that the socialist friends of his on the continent wouldn't get that he was

an Irish person and totally dismiss the rising. He was already pissed at them for not stopping World War I to begin with, and a lot of them, as Lenin had criticized them as well, got involved in supporting their national government. So the continental left kind of sought as a waste, Why did this socialist die for a nationalist cause? Why did he team up with all these non-socialists to do this rising? They didn't consider the imperialist dimension of it. They just didn't get it. A lot of the Bolshevik or future Bolshevik leadership reacted the same way.

The only person who's really completely for it is Lenin, who says basically that it shows what good instruction can actually do. and also that it was an opportunity for the working class to learn from mistakes, like basically reiterating something that Lenin has said multiple times, and you can find the idea in Marx too, that the failures of the working class are where the working class learns how to win. Trotsky has, he is basically defending it from the people who dismiss it outright. he kind of says that the Irish working class

have kind of synthesized nationalism and socialism and that's attracted a bunch of petite bourgeois intellectuals more or less so he's mostly talking about the class breakdown of it which is I think pretty accurate and more or less says that this is like sort of the embryonic start of like the workers movement in Ireland which so relatively support

as well, not quite as much as Lenin. Yeah, I know Lenin defended it on the grounds. He's like, you know, anybody that's expecting a peer social revolution, you're going to live your whole life waiting to see it because it's never going to happen. And then I think, you know, sort of a Maoist critique. And, of course, this is retrospect because Maoism wasn't a thing yet. But the notion, the Maoist notion of a mass line, this notion of being in the community and constantly checking in with it

and learning from it and having your theory and practice in like sort of dialectical relationship with the masses themselves. I think in retrospect that would have helped the part of it where the Irish people themselves were kind of at first taken aback by it. there's also an interesting concept in insurrectionary anarchism and illegalism called propaganda of the deed because at the time this took place as we say a lot of irish people were sort of on the fence about it some outright rejected it but very quickly after um the irish people saw it for what it was and it really inspired a lot of them to to be sympathetic with it and ultimately there was sort of a hegemony of opinion and the um among the irish people that this was a good thing and that these that these um fighters were

were total heroes. So the propaganda of the deed of going out and doing a thing and then that's actually acting as propaganda for your cause was something that absolutely took place in that situation. But I know that you have sort of a Gramscian perspective on it. Can you talk about that and what sort of Gramshian analysis of the situation would be? Yeah, I think that the Gramscian perspective really comes, is the sort of Marxist take on the same propaganda. end of the deed thing and that this was part of this ideological war of position in which the needs that aren't necessarily purely class-based or articulated and like collaborations are made that make it possible for the struggle to be carried out in this way or that way

and I think the rising and the events after the rising really demonstrated to the Irish people that home rule was that the promises were not always going to be kept and people who'd studied Irish history a lot of them already thought that which is you know the peaceful track had been tried before it wasn't a new plan and and for the people who are like well this isn't getting anywhere. So we're going to do, you know, the rising. A lot of their points seemed to be played out because the British were relatively merciless. And so if you're arguing that the

British aren't going to be sympathetic and they, you know, destroy the city, then you've got a pretty good, you know, bit of evidence for your point, even though it was like a self-fulfilling prophecy. So I think it really did shift Irish, like, perspective. They, you know, You know, they saw that the conventional fight were going to declare a republic and then we're going to, you know, we're going to march and we're going to meet you head on and, like, fight for the center of the city. Well, it wasn't a fair fight because the British had, you know, artillery and stuff like that. And so I think it became clear to people at that point that, you know, if they wanted to have their own national independence, they weren't going to get it by fighting for Belgium. All right. All right. So what were some of the main lessons that we can draw from the Easter

rising as revolutionaries in 2018? This is something I ask at the end of every episode because we should always be thinking about how we can apply these lessons to our own situation. So what would you say to that? Yeah, I think there's a lot of lessons that can be learned from the Easter Rising as well as sort of their larger effects on the like sort of Irish struggle against England. It's kind of hard to say exactly what those are because we're speculating at that point. I think the mass line sort of critique about making sure

people know what's going on, that you're listening to their feedback and drawing upon their needs is an important part of the picture. At the same time, I think it really shows that that sort of secrecy model or whatever there's a reason for it because the fact of the matter is British intelligence would have put a stop to the rising had they been more public with it the sort of dedication to secrecy that some people had in the Irish Republican movement has reasons and when you're fighting a giant imperial power with the most money and technology anyone's ever seen yet and people think it's impossible to overthrow or fight against that anymore.

I think there are a lot of parallels to today. I think a lot of the things that people would have said about the British Empire then, people say about the United States now. Absolutely. Yeah. And the disparity in advantages and the notion of fighting in basically city situations, guerrilla warfare inside the sort of concrete jungle of a city is really interesting in things that we can learn from. if anything were ever to happen in the U.S.,

and I know sitting where we are looking at the possibilities, for some people it seems absurd that street fighting would ever break out against the U.S. state or maybe even against the reactionary right. But as things devolve, as climate change picks up, I mean, imagine an economic catastrophe as bad as the Great Depression right now. You know, we can sit here and think,

oh, this will never happen, this is not applicable to us, but the old Lennon quote of, there are decades when nothing happens and there are weeks when decades happen, you know, that sits in the back of my mind all the time. We don't know what's going to happen. We don't know. We can't predict the future. We can't predict future catastrophes either environmental or economic. But what we can do is organize right now and learn lessons from failed insurrections in the past. And I think one thing that revolutionary leftists could do is study guerrilla warfare, all the all the advancements that have been made on it so far,

you know, the militarized approach to these problems, one day it may become a thing and one day it may be pertinent that we know it. And I think it's better to be prepared and not ever have to use it than it is to sort of dismiss it as absurd and never prepare for those possibilities. But I guess that leads nice into the final question, which is, you know, how would a revolution happen in the U.S. today? And in what ways is it any, would it resemble the Easter rising? Do you see a revolution ever popping off? How do you see a revolution ever popping off? How do you think about that here in the U.S.? Well, I think

sometimes I wonder why it isn't in certain places. But I think in the same way that there was a very long buildup to the rising. I think there would be a lot of buildup before things happened in the United States.

I do think, like, there's a parallel to the fact that there are city centers and then, like, large rural areas and those sorts of issues of things like, you know, communication and transport, things like that, really kind of come into play that we'd see in Ireland, we'd have to consider that here. I think that the United States would not be afraid to shell one of its own cities. So I think like that's a mistake that we should probably not make.

and in the same way that, you know, a British captain killed a pacifist who wasn't involved in the rising and suffered very little consequence for it. That same sort of thing is something that, like, we need to consider in the United States. United States government kills pacifists. The police kill people without consequence. All the time. Yeah, I kind of, you know, I always talk about this to my friends and my close comrades, But I always say that I have a tiny survivalist in the back of my head.

I'm not a prepper or a paranoid person, but I do not see this system being sustainable over the long term, even the course of my own life. I see climate change increasing. I see neoliberalism continuing to fail as real existential and structural threats to the country that we live in. And it would be a huge error if we just sort of assume that things are going to remain as they have been over our lifetime or the last half. century in the U.S., I don't think that that can possibly be true. I cannot see U.S. capitalism

and neoliberalism existing in the 22nd century. To me, that seems absurd. So in that context, like, we should be ready for whatever may happen. That doesn't mean dedicate all your time to thinking about armed insurrection and all of that, because, you know, right now it's not materially coherent to take up that strategy in the U.S. But I can see, and I talk about this a lot because I did a podcast with it's going down a long time ago, and I mentioned this in multiple podcasts since, but they said something that really stuck out to me, which is the likelihood of a wholesale capture of the U.S. state is not likely.

But what is more likely is that as environmental and economic catastrophes continue to pile up, as climate change continues to intensify, that there could be areas of the U.S. that are more or less deserted by the state. And then those will be battlegrounds for different forces, different possibilities. Miami could be underwater by the end of the century. What's going to happen when you have a huge hurricane that messes up the eastern seaboard,

you have some fracking earthquake on the west coast, you have some horrible catastrophe on the southern coast and the Gulf of Mexico, the U.S. state is eventually not going to be able to handle all of those, and so it might pull out of areas. And in those moments, There's opportunity. There's also threats.

The reactionary right will certainly be looking to take over territory. And the right generally is way more armed, way more trained, way more ready for that situation than the U.S. left is. You have places in the U.S. like Flint where capitalism has already failed, right? Where capitalism has completely abandoned the people and is in some sense a failed economic system. Detroit, I'm thinking. but Flint in regards to the water supply. So these things can only get worse. I don't see him getting better.

So just think about those things. Be reasonable. Don't be paranoid, but at the same time be prepared and try to organize for any and all contingencies. But having said that, I think it's time to wrap it up. So what would you recommend to anyone

who wants to learn more about what we've discussed today? Because this is an event in a broad movement, it's a singular event in something that. it is, you know, a hundred-year-long movement at least, you know, depending on where you want to cut that off. I think it's better to maybe pick a couple people and learn about them. So Michael Collins is not particularly important in the Easter Rising, goes on to be involved

in the IRB, the IRA, and a major figure in developing guerrilla warfare for the Irish against the English during the Anglo-Irish war. So learn about him maybe would be a good story. Art or Constance Markovich or Emin de Valera or Connolly or any of those people. There's a lot of adaptations because of for various reasons. Some of them are not that reliable. So maybe be careful watching movies about Irish independence because you're going to find a lot of sensationalized stuff. There's a biopic of Michael Collins that actually starts with the Easter Rising,

but it's mostly about his life. That's actually fairly accurate. Yeah. I think there's a lot of stuff on YouTube. I watch a lot of documentaries for free on YouTube, which can really give you a really interesting perspective on the entire affair. So I recommend going and checking that out. Ultimately, though, Brendan, I would love to have you back on to discuss the IRA, because the IRA and what happened later in that century can be traced back, as we mentioned in the show, to the Easter Rising itself. And so there's a historical sort of continuity there that is worth exploring. Obviously, it's too much for one episode, but perhaps you can come back on at some later time. We can do an entire episode on the IRA and sort of catch up people from that front. Yeah. And just in case we somehow gloss this over, the main significance of the Easter Rising is that for a lot of Irish Republicans, that proclamation was real. And from that point forward, there was an Irish Republic, even though, you know, Pierce and all those people were executed. There was a

provisional republic. And so they had to ignore the British government's authority. And that led directly to the Anglo-Irish War and the IRA and things like that. Absolutely. Well, thank you, Comrade, for coming on. It's always a pleasure to talk to you. I hope people enjoy this episode. And I'm sure you'll be back on at some point in the future. Thanks for having me. I was born in the Dublin Street where the lyle runs the beat and the loving English feet the walk the lobelus And every single night When me da would come home tight

He'd invite the neighbours out With this chorus Come out, chivalagin' hands Come out and fight me like a man Show your wife, how you won medals Thou the Flanders The Al-Ey are a-R-A Major unlike Callaway

From the green and lovely veins I'll kill a stand-vull Come tell us hell you slew them all are ups two by two Like the Zulus, they had spears A bow and arrows How brave you face the one A bit your 16 pound a gun

And you frighten them Dan natives do tomorrow Come out Chiavelackin' hands Come out and fight me like a man Show your wife how you and menos Down in Flanders That I'll the airway You've made your run like hell away

From the green and lovely dains Of Killishamble Come let us hear you tell How you slander great Parnell When you taught him well And truly persecuted What are the sneers and jeers That you loudly let us hear

When our leaders of 16th were executed Come out chivalagin' hands Come out and fight me like a man Show your white by you and medals Down in Flanders The Al-R-A He plays your run like hell away From the green and lovely days

Of Kailashamro Come out, chippel like in tans Come out and fight me like a man Show your wife how you won medals Down in Flanders That I'll the IRA You made you run like hell away From the green and lovely days

Of Kailashamra Oh