"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
The above quotes are taken from Economic Conscription I (1915).
www.marxists.org
James Connolly: Economic Conscription 1 (1915)
"It will be found that Ireland failed in the present crisis where her children knew least about the past of their race. And Ireland most wisely met the crisis where her sons and daughters knew most of what that past had held for the people of Ireland."
#irishrace #irishpeople
#irishrace #irishpeople
"Before we can talk of or develop a policy for the re-conquest of Ireland it is well that we picture clearly to our mind the essential feature of the conquest itself, how far it went, and how far it has already been reversed. Let it be remembered, then, that the conquest was two-fold – social and political. It was the imposition upon Ireland of an alien rule in political matters and of a social system equally alien and even more abhorrent."
"There are then three pictures we must needs conjure up before our mind’s eye in our endeavour to understand the point we have reached in the history of the Irish nation. These three pictures are successively – of Ireland as she was before the conquest; as she was at the completion of the conquest; as she will be at the re-conquest by the people of Ireland of their own country."
#nation #country
#nation #country
"The first is a picture of a country in which the people of the island were owners of the land upon which they lived, masters of their own lives and liberties, freely electing their rulers, and shaping their castes and conventions to permit of the closest approximation to their ideals of justice as between man and man. It is a picture of a system of society in which all were knit together as in a family, in which all were members having their definite place, and in which the highest could not infringe upon the rights of the lowest – those rights being as firmly fixed and assured as the powers of the highest, and fixed and assured by the same legal code and social convention. It is a system evolved through centuries of development out of the genius of the Irish race, safeguarded by the swords of Irishmen, and treasured in the domestic affections of Irish women."
#family
#family
"The second picture is a picture of the destruction by force of the native system and the dispersion and enslavement of the natives.
...transplanting to Connacht, gangs of soldiery were despatched throughout Ireland to kidnap young boys and girls of tender years to be sold into slavery in the West Indies... the native Irish were then being hunted to death, or transported in slave-gangs to Barbadoes,"
#native
...transplanting to Connacht, gangs of soldiery were despatched throughout Ireland to kidnap young boys and girls of tender years to be sold into slavery in the West Indies... the native Irish were then being hunted to death, or transported in slave-gangs to Barbadoes,"
#native
"Here then is the conquest. Fix it clearly before your eyes. National liberty, personal liberty, social security all gone; the country ruled from its highest down to its meanest officer by foreigners; the Irish race landless, homeless, living by sufferance upon the mercy of their masters, or trusting alone to the greed of their conquerors to gain that toleration which even a conqueror must give to the slaves whose labour he requires to sate his avarice or minister to his wants.
This, then, is the second picture. Mastery of the lives and liberties of the people of Ireland by forces outside of and irresponsible and unresponsive to the people of Ireland – social and political slavery."
#irishrace
This, then, is the second picture. Mastery of the lives and liberties of the people of Ireland by forces outside of and irresponsible and unresponsive to the people of Ireland – social and political slavery."
#irishrace
"The third picture must be drawn by each, as it suits his or her fancy, who wishes to visualise to the mind’s eye the complete reversal of all that was embodied in the second. As they construct that picture of the future so they will shape their public actions."
"Catholic women were within the forbidden territory as wives of Protestant officers or soldiers, and by rearing up their children in their own faith, whispering old legends into their ears by day, or crooning old Gaelic songs to them at night helped, consciously or unconsciously, to re-create an Irish atmosphere in the very heart of the ascendancy. Ere long, by one of those silent movements of which the superficial historian takes no account, the proscribed people were once more back from the province into which they had been hunted, heartbroken and subdued, it is true, but nevertheless back upon their own lands."
#gaelic
#gaelic