April 24 2024 An Irish Song of Liberty: the 1916 Easter Rebellion

The beauty and grandeur of anticolonial resistance and liberation struggle unto death, against impossible odds, and of solidarity in action which affirms our humanity under tyranny and state terror as imposed conditions of struggle; the 1916 Easter Uprising speaks to us of resilience and the limitless capacity of humankind to overcome unequal systems of power by refusal to submit.

Here is a kind of victory which cannot be taken from us, and like Dorothy’s Magic Ruby Slippers bears the power to send us home and confer ownership of ourselves and realization of those truths written in our flesh.

The 1916 Easter Uprising was both tragic and glorious; tragic because it was answered not with brotherhood and solidarity by the English people as a united front with the Irish against systemic oppression versus divisions of language, faith, history, and national identity weaponized for centuries by the British Empire in service to power, but by forces of reaction and the Occupation. Glorious, because the Uprising was a Defining Moment which turned the tide of history and created the Republic of Ireland as a sovereign and independent nation, and because the Irish people fought on beyond hope of victory or survival.

This is where freedom is born. In the words of Max Stirner; “Freedom cannot be granted; it must be seized.”

As I wrote in my post of February 8 2020, Hope for the Union of Ireland: Sinn Fein Wins a Place at the Table; Today we celebrate with triumphant joy the electoral victory of Sinn Fein, the Irish party of liberation and social justice, which puts Union back on the table, the glorious dream of freedom from the colonial imperialist tyranny of England, which squats like a toad of foulness on the shores of Northern Ireland.

What if all the former colonies of the British Empire sent troops to aid the people of Ireland in their struggle for liberty? How then can tyranny survive?

Imagine with me a United Humanity of Free Peoples and Army of Liberation comprised of former slaves and victims of oppression with a historic mandate to export the revolution and bring justice to all humankind, India and America, Zimbabwe and Malaysia, Australia and Eqypt, Israel and Singapore, and so many others. Such a force would be unstoppable, would sweep across hierarchies of authoritarian force and control like the Black soldiers of the Union Army who liberated Richmond and brought the Confederacy to submission or the Allied victory over fascism in the Second World War.

Liberty is a dream resonant with historic momentum and power; we need only harness it to ride to victory on its tides.

So I wrote three years ago, and with electoral victory of May last year we moved a step nearer to our goal of Union; Northern Ireland with Ireland as one sovereign and independent nation. So very like the Thousand Day War in which the people of Vietnam liberated themselves from colonial Occupation and reunited their nation; the imposed conditions of struggle may yet force a return to such strategies as Vietnam used to win independence, but for now the peace holds and the struggle is limited to the arena of electoral politics. This too I celebrate; voting is always better than shooting.

Here in Ireland we play what in chess is called a Long Game, in which the sacrifices we make along the way to liberation become our stepping stones to victory. And with the issue of trade as leverage, and all of the intractable issues signified by the term Brexit, as our civilization begins to collapse from the mechanical failures of its internal contradictions amid a changing world order, we now have unique opportunities for revolutionary struggle and for independence.

As Guillermo Del Toro teaches us in Carnival Row; “Who is Chaos good for? Chaos is good for us. Chaos is the great hope of the powerless.”

As I wrote in m y post of September 23 2021, When Things Fall Apart and the Center Cannot Hold, Embrace Change; Transformative change and the forces of Chaos lie at the heart of our universe, a reality and medium of being characterized by illusion and impermanence, destruction and recreation, as its central motive principle.

Chaos is a forge of creation which endlessly generates contradictions and paradoxes as the forking points of universes, of multiplicities and relative truths, a wellspring of life and the realization of unknowns but also of our darkness born of attachment to that which is by its nature ephemeral and transitory, and moreover a world filled with falsifications of ourselves, echoes and reflections like the distorted images in funhouse mirrors which multiply into infinity as a theft of our uniqueness and our souls.

The trauma of death and of life disruptive change, and our immersion in a sea of grief, despair, and terror; when the anchorages and truths we cling to have shifted and cast us adrift into topologies of the unknown, when we dare to look behind the curtain and the figures of our faith are revealed to be lies and instruments of our subjugation, when these existential threats and crises of hope, trust, and faith combine as they have this past year with the loneliness of our modern pathology of disconnectedness, how shall we answer our nothingness?

To this I say, how can we not embrace Chaos and transformative change, when it is endless and ongoing, and challenges us to live in the eternal now? Why fix and react wholly to its negative aspects as death and destruction, when it offers us equally possibilities of liberation from order and authority, self-creation, autonomy, and unknowns to explore, and a space of free creative play?

Here is Yeats great and visionary poem The Second Coming, written in the wake of three successive mechanical failures of civilization as systems of order and oppression from their internal contradictions, the First World War, the Easter Rising of 1916, and the Russian Revolution of 1917. It is a song of rage against the dying of the light, of the embrace of our darkness, and of warning that the lies and illusions which enforce authority and our subjugation are and must always fail with cataclysms, but for myself it is also a song of hope.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

As I wrote in my post of January 30 2022, Fifty Year Anniversary of Bloody Sunday; Fifty years ago the massacre of Irish citizens by the British Army, an atrocity of state terror known throughout the world as Bloody Sunday, shifted American and global public and official support to the cause of Irish nationalism and reunification and like the brutal repression of Gandhi’s Salt Tax Protest delegitimized the British Empire. We have not yet fully emerged from the shadows of our imperial and colonial histories, but in the last century since the collapse of civilization from the mechanical failures of its internal contradictions in World War One and the revolutions and liberation movements which swept the world the tides have begun to turn.

Such is the terror and ruin of the age in which we live, and of its hope and glories as a liminal time of the reimagination and transformation of ourselves and the limitless possibilities of becoming human.

The people of a nation are living echoes, reflections, consequences, and bearers of its histories, and the people of Ireland are no different in this from any other, our songs of survival, resistance, and triumph over those who would enslave us acting like forces of nature, like the winds and the tides, to shape us as informing and motivating sources. So national identities are formed from the legacies of our stories, both as epigenetic and multigenerational trauma and harms and as freedom and the ownership of ourselves.

History, memory, identity; we are prochronisms, histories expressed in our form of how we have solved problems of adaptation over vast epochs of time, truths written in our flesh like the shells of fantastic sea creatures.

What has been written in our lives has all too often been a tale of tyranny and repression, imperial conquest and colonialism, the theft of the soul by carceral states of force and control, and the consequences of falsification, commodification, and dehumanization by the state as organized violence and enslavement by elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege and divisions of exclusionary otherness by fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.

And this we must resist, by any means necessary. To tyranny and fascism there can be but one reply; Never Again.

When those who would enslave us and steal our souls come for us, let them find not a humankind subjugated by police terror and the control of false histories and propaganda, abjection and learned helplessness, but united in solidarity and refusal to submit.

Whosoever refuses to submit becomes Unconquered and free, and this power of self ownership cannot be taken from us. Here also is the moment of decision wherein the tide turns and tyrannies of force and control break; for the social use of force is hollow and brittle, and fails at the point of disobedience. This great truth is the keystone of my art of revolution, and why liberation movements will eventually be victorious when applied as disruptive forces to systems of unequal power which will inevitably fail from their internal contradictions.

Always there remains the struggle between the stories we tell about ourselves and those others tell about us. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for ownership of ourselves.

Tyrants may own the monstrous shadows of the past, but the future is ours.

Liam Neeson reads WB Yeats’ Easter 1916