"Betrayed and deserted by all but a faithful few, Ireland was attacked by every poisonous agency ever brought to bear upon the mind and soul of a people. Her religion, her love of nationality, her strict sexual morality, her natural affection for the weak, her sympathy for suffering and distress – every high and noble instinct implanted in her by ages of suffering, was appealed to that her children might deny the past of their country, and surrender their hopes of moulding its future. Ireland was asked, nay, was ordered, to deny all that her martyrs had affirmed, to affirm all that her martyrs had denied. And this assault upon the soul of the country was planned and carried out in all its minutes and most revolting details by the men whom a cruel fate had allowed to become the leaders and guides of Irish public opinion."
#nation #martyrs #country
#nation #martyrs #country
"At the present moment this Empire has dominions spread all over the seven seas. Everywhere it holds down races and nations, that it might use them as its slaves, that it might use their territories as sources of rent and interest for its aristocratic rulers, that it might prevent their development as self-supporting entities and compel them to remain dependent customers of English produce, that it might be able to strangle every race or nation that would enter the field as a competitor against British capitalism or assert its independence of the British capitalist."
#irishrace #nation
#irishrace #nation
Taken from In Praise of the Empire (1915), this quote again highlights that Connolly uses the word "race" in the same way we use "ethnicity".
www.marxists.org
James Connolly: In Praise of Empire (1915)
James Connolly: In Praise of the Empire (1915)
"Let us consider our case – the case of Ireland. Consider it, not impartially, but with hearts beating fiercely with anger against all the organised injustice that threatens our existence.
Impartiality in the face of injustice is the virtue of a slave, or of well-fed beneficiaries of the fruits of injustice. Thank God, we are not impartial."
#existence
Impartiality in the face of injustice is the virtue of a slave, or of well-fed beneficiaries of the fruits of injustice. Thank God, we are not impartial."
#existence
"For over 68 years the population of Ireland has been declining, the lifeblood of Ireland has been draining away. Whilst every European state has increased in population despite war and turmoil Ireland has gone steadily down the hill.
We have the most beautiful climate in the world, a climate which a wise national government could even improve by restoring the forests that once covered the island and broke the rainfall that comes in from the Atlantic ocean. We have a lively, quick minded, intelligent people, rich in soft kindliness, and graced with womanly beauty and manly vigour.
For centuries this people have been treated as outcasts in their own land, shut out from every chance of developing its resources, and ruled by an insolent class of land thieves and its followers."
#irishpeople
We have the most beautiful climate in the world, a climate which a wise national government could even improve by restoring the forests that once covered the island and broke the rainfall that comes in from the Atlantic ocean. We have a lively, quick minded, intelligent people, rich in soft kindliness, and graced with womanly beauty and manly vigour.
For centuries this people have been treated as outcasts in their own land, shut out from every chance of developing its resources, and ruled by an insolent class of land thieves and its followers."
#irishpeople
"Heartbroken in such a land where the amenities and gifts of life are reserved for those most sordid in soul, where the possession of public spirit damns the career of the possessor, the young men and women have been deserting her as life deserts the things of this world upon whom Death has set its seal.
But still the nation persisted in claiming its right to existence, in determinedly planning a future built upon those young people who remained."
#nation #existence
But still the nation persisted in claiming its right to existence, in determinedly planning a future built upon those young people who remained."
#nation #existence
"But what is the price of war – the price as it must be paid by a nation? That all the young and vigorous men go out to be killed, and all the unfit and diseased stay at home to be fathers of the next generation. All those splendidly developed young Irish men whose bones now lie mouldering beneath the soil in Flanders or upon the shores of the Dardanelles – all those physically perfect Irish men would in due course have been the husbands of young Irish women, the fathers of Irish children inheriting the vigour and virility of their parents.
But now those young Irish women are doomed to go husbandless through life, or to mate with the diseased and unfit who stayed at home, or the diseased and crippled who will return."
#children #nation
But now those young Irish women are doomed to go husbandless through life, or to mate with the diseased and unfit who stayed at home, or the diseased and crippled who will return."
#children #nation
"The perfect Irish children of perfect Irish parents will never be born. They who would have been their fathers lie dead in far off countries. Think of the colossal nature of this crime. The children of Ireland are being killed before they are born, the Irish race of the future denied an existence."
#children #irishrace #existence
#children #irishrace #existence
"Upon the top of this sacrifice of the living comes the borrowing of money to continue the work of hell, and this borrowing means pawning the labour and genius of the future to the financial leeches and usurious money-lenders of Europe and America.
Generations yet unborn are to be taxed to pay for the blood madness of the rulers of this; our children and our children’s children are to be compelled to pay in sweat and blood and tears for our weakness in submitting to the criminal ambitions of our rulers."
#children #usury
Generations yet unborn are to be taxed to pay for the blood madness of the rulers of this; our children and our children’s children are to be compelled to pay in sweat and blood and tears for our weakness in submitting to the criminal ambitions of our rulers."
#children #usury
"We did not all submit, a fact for which such of the Irish as exist in the future will bless us. Every Irish man or woman who helped to persuade a young Irish man to abandon Ireland and go to Flanders or the Dardanelles helped at the same time to assassinate Ireland, to rob her of her future children, to stifle the coming generation before it was born.
And every man who kept such a man at home helped by doing so to preserve the race, to keep for Ireland and for humanity the fathers of the future generation. That generation, those children yet unborn are the heritors of our hopes, the heirs of all those holy things for which our poets sung, our soldiers fought, our martyrs died."
#martyrs
And every man who kept such a man at home helped by doing so to preserve the race, to keep for Ireland and for humanity the fathers of the future generation. That generation, those children yet unborn are the heritors of our hopes, the heirs of all those holy things for which our poets sung, our soldiers fought, our martyrs died."
#martyrs
The above passages are taken from Notes on the Front (1915). Here Connolly discusses the dysgenic effects of emigration and war on the future of the Irish race.
www.marxists.org
James Connolly: Notes on the Front (1915)
"...for us of the Citizen Army there is but one ideal – an Ireland ruled, and owned, by Irish men and women, sovereign and independent from the centre to the sea, and flying its own flag outward over all the oceans."
"We cannot conceive of a free Ireland with a subject working class; we cannot conceive of a subject Ireland with a free working class. But we can conceive of a free Ireland with a working class guaranteed the power of freely and peacefully working out its own salvation."
"That freedom and that security can only come as a result of complete absence of foreign domination. Freedom to control all its own resources is as essential to a community as to an individual. No individual can develop all his powers if he is even partially under the control of another, even if that other sincerely wishes him well. The powers of the individual can only be developed properly when he has to bear the responsibility of all his own actions, to suffer for his mistakes, and to profit by his achievements."
"Man, as man, only arrived at the point at which he is to-day as a result of thousands of years of strivings with nature. In his stumblings forward along the ages he was punished for every mistake. Nature whipped him with cold, with heat, with hunger, with disease, and each whipping helped him to know what to avoid, and what to preserve...
Just as the whippings of nature produced the improvements in the life habits of man, so the whippings naturally following upon social or political errors are the only proper safeguards for the proper development of nationhood."
#nation
Just as the whippings of nature produced the improvements in the life habits of man, so the whippings naturally following upon social or political errors are the only proper safeguards for the proper development of nationhood."
#nation
"No nation is worthy of independence until it is independent. No nation is fit to be free until it is free. No man can swim until he has entered the water and failed and been half drowned several times in the attempt to swim.
A free Ireland would make dozens of mistakes, and every mistake would cost it dear, and strengthen it for future efforts. But every time it, by virtue of its own strength, remedied a mistake it would take a long step forward towards security. For security can only come to a nation by a knowledge of some power within itself, some difficulty overcome by a strength which no robber can take away."
#nation
A free Ireland would make dozens of mistakes, and every mistake would cost it dear, and strengthen it for future efforts. But every time it, by virtue of its own strength, remedied a mistake it would take a long step forward towards security. For security can only come to a nation by a knowledge of some power within itself, some difficulty overcome by a strength which no robber can take away."
#nation
"Out of that experience is growing that feeling of identity of interests between the forces of real nationalism and labour which we have long worked and hoped for in Ireland. Labour recognises daily more clearly that its real well-being is linked and bound up with the hope of growth of Irish resources within Ireland, and nationalists realise that the real progress of a nation towards freedom must be measured by the progress of its most subject class."
#nationalism
#nationalism
"We want and must have economic conscription in Ireland for Ireland. Not the conscription of men by hunger to compel them to fight for the power that denies them the right to govern their own country, but the conscription by an Irish nation of all the resources of the nation – its land, its railways, its canals, its workshops, its docks, its mines, its mountains, its rivers and streams, its factories and machinery, its horses, its cattle, and its men and women, all co-operating together under one common direction that Ireland may live and bear upon her fruitful bosom the greatest number of the freest people she has ever known."
#nation #irishpeople
#nation #irishpeople