JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 888
In the heavy mist of the Civil War, where brother fought brother, there was another sort of fratricide, of countrymen removed from their homes, finding themselves in America and there fighting against one another in opposition. Such is the case of the Irish in the American Civil War, where 180,000 of the immigrants fought in the war, with 30,000 fighting in butternut, and 150,000 fighting in blue. The Irish faced one another across battlefields like of Appomattox, Malvern Hill, and especially Antietam, along the Sunken Road.
I was thinking about the American Irish of New York and Pennsylvania and Louisiana and Texas of 1864 while looking at this Underwood & Underwood New Photo Service photograph of the “Irish Tommies” of WWI. It shows a large group of Irishmen displaying their trophies taken from Germans, and dated 18 July 1917. This was also a period of terrific change and hardship, what with the Easter Rising of 1916 and the Proclamation of the Irish Republic (24 April 1916) having taken place just a year earlier
I don’t know what it meant to be Irish and fighting with the Brits during the war, during this time of Trouble and upheaval (the enemy of my enemy bit come to mind). It is interesting to see this piece by Sinn Feinist and Irish Republican Robert Lynd in the Irish War News, “If the Germans Conquered England”, and making elegantly and cleverly making the case of superior similarity between the British in Ireland and the Germans in England. I know it is far off the mark to think about black slaves
owned by the Cherokees sold into service to fight for the Confederacy, but maybe not so very far off....
(Irish War News source)
Read the full text by Robert Lynd IF THE
GERMANS CONQUERED ENGLAND, AND
OTHER ESSAYS Printed by George Robert, Dublin, 1917.
The article begins:
"When a small tradesman applies for exemption from military service on the ground that his business would be ruined by his absence, a question that is often put to him is: "What do you think will happen to your business if the Germans win the war ? " As a rule the tradesman does not know what to think. He has no means of measuring world-catastrophes. He has not Dr. Johnson's short way with questions to which there is no answer. In the first place, the small tradesman does not believe in the possibility of a German victory. In the second place, he has not the slightest idea what would happen to his business as the result of one. Perhaps, however, he knows as much about the matter as the members of the tribunals. All of us know that a German victory which involved the conquest of England would make life intolerable for Englishmen until the conquest was undone. But as to its effect on small businesses, that is another matter. It is quite possible that the little grocery, the little tobacco-shop, and the confectioner's would be able to hold up their heads under German rule as under English. The valid argument against a German conquest is not that it would make an end of the small business man ; it is that it would make an end of a free England. If it could be proved that a German conquest would add twenty-five per cent, to the incomes of all Englishmen, even that would not make it tolerable. Most men in all nations are ready to sacrifice their lives in order that their country may be free."
They are also though this is apparently much more
difficult ready to sacrifice their fortunes.
Consider for a moment the possibility that England
might actually grow richer under German rule. It
is very unlikely, because England is already a highly-
developed country, but consider the one chance in a
hundred million. We know that, so far as material
wealth is concerned, Prussian Poland has gone
forward, not backward, under Prussia. Mr. W. H.
Dawson, author of The Evolution of Modern Germany,
is a witness whose evidence on this point cannot be
lightly dismissed. Referring to the work of the
Settlement Board in Prussian Poland, he writes :
" If the purpose had simply been the economic re-
awakening of the Polish East there would be much
to praise and to admire in the results that have been
achieved, for the settled districts have been entirely
transformed and raised to a level of prosperity never
known before." There are men with a passion for
efficiency to whom such a record of material
progress appeals as a justification of any kind of
tyranny. We had an example of this spirit some
time ago in the boasts of some German newspapers
that under German rule the industries of Belgium
were already reviving, and that Belgian prosperity
would soon be on a sounder basis than ever. One
may be sure that in the conquered territories, even
in these days of martial law and high prices,
thousands of little businesses in Belgium are as-
tonishingly alive. Lawyers still practise in the
law-courts, doctors attend the sick, priests go on
preaching, shops are open, factories are working,
fields are cultivated. This, of course, is not uni-
versally true ; and, while the country remains a
battlefield, it can only be true of certain parts of it.
But it is clear enough that, whatever other evils
would follow the permanent conquest of Belgium, the
refusal to allow the average Belgian to make a living
would not necessarily be one of them. It is not for
the right to make a living, it is for the right to live
their own national life, that the Belgians are fighting.
Like Wordsworth's Englishmen, they " must be free
or die." That is not mere uneconomic rhetoric.
Freedom is a form of wealth which brave nations
prize above gold and silver. Professor Kettle
horrified some of the followers of Sir Edward
Carson during the Home Rule controversy when
he declared that he put freedom before finance. In
ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, I admit, freedom
and sound finance, so far from being antitheses, are
complementary to each other. But, even though
they were not, Professor Kettle's attitude would
be the right one. The man who would prefer
finance to freedom ought also, in order to be con-
sistent, to prefer finance to honour and justice, and
all those other noble abstractions, belief in which
differentiates good Europeans from wild animals.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that Germany
triumphed so overwhelmingly an extremely un-
likely supposition, I agree that she was able to
incorporate England in the German Empire, and
suppose that she was resolved to purchase the
acquiescence of Englishmen in German rule by
developing English industries and English arts
as they had never been developed before, would the
spirit of England yield to the bribe ? One can
imagine how Germany, with the hope of this in her
mind, would set out with all her efficiency to
reorganize the railways and the canals, and so give
an unwonted elasticity to the industrial life of the
country. One can imagine how she would set
about the work of town-planning and street-sweep-
ing. One can imagine how she would build
technical schools, art schools, and musical academies
and opera houses. One can imagine how she
would build the long-lost Shakespeare Memorial
Theatre. But even though the English farmer
found himself with a freer access to markets and
the English manufacturer found himself with a
kingdom of chemists and inventors at his disposal,
the country would still have something to complain
about. In the first place, it would be constantly
irritated by the lofty moral utterances of German
statesmen who would assert quite sincerely, no
doubt that England was free, freer indeed than
she had ever been before. Prussian freedom, they
would explain, was the only real freedom, and
therefore, England was free. They would point to
the flourishing railways and farms and colleges.
They would possibly point to the contingent of
M.P.'s which was permitted, in spite of its deplor-
able disorderliness, to sit in a permanent minority
in the Reichstag. And not only would the English-
man have to listen to a constant flow of speeches
of this sort ; he would find a respectable official
Press secretly bought by the Government to say
the same kind of things over and over every day
of the week. He would find, too, that his children
were coming home from school with new ideas of
history. They would be better drilled, more obe-
dient than he himself used to be in his schooldays,
but he would get angry when he heard what was
taught to them as history. They would ask him
if it was really true that until the Germans came
England had been an unruly country constantly
engaged in civil war, as in the days of the Wars of
the Roses, Cromwell, William III., the Young
Pretender, and Sir Edward Carson a country
one of whose historians actually glorified a king
who had beheaded his wives, and one of whose
kings was afterwards beheaded ; a country which
sold its own subjects into slavery ; a country which
was given its Empire by Frederick the Great, and
which then deserted him ; a country which gave
birth to Shakespeare, but could not appreciate him ;
a country which had won its way in the world by
good luck and treachery, not by honesty and in-
telligence. One can guess how the blackening
process would go on. It would be done for the
most part by reasonable-looking insinuation. The
object of every schoolbook would be to make the
English child grow up with the feeling that the
history of his country was a thing to forget, and
that the one bright spot in it was that it had been
conquered by cultured Germany.
And in every University the same kind of thing
would be going on. Behind round spectacles
generation after generation of Prussian professors
would lecture on the history of the German Empire
(including, as one of its less important aspects, the
history of England). They would teach young
Englishmen that Luther, and Frederick, and Stein,
and Goethe, and List, and Bismarck were the
founders of civilisation. They would possibly add
the suggestion of Houston Chamberlain that Christ
and St. Paul and Dante were part of the German
tradition. They would begin to spell Shakespeare
with an " Sch." They would probably explain
that Shakespeare in German was superior to
Shakespeare in English. Like Houston Chamber-
lain, they would believe in " the holy German
language" as they believe in God. They would
say it was a better language than English because
it was inflected. They would set on foot a move-
ment to substitute it for English in the schools
and colleges, in order to prevent English children
from growing up insular and cut off from the
world-civilisation. Gradually it would become an
offence to use English as the language of in-
struction. In another generation it would become
an offence to use it at all. If there was a revolt
and, by the dog, as Socrates used to say, there
would be ! German statesmen would deliver grave
speeches about " disloyalty," " ingratitude," " reck-
less agitators who would ruin their country's
prosperity." Prussian officials would walk up and
down every town and every village in the country,
the embodiment of this grave concern for the
welfare of England. Prussian soldiers would be
encamped in every barracks the English conscripts
having been sent out of the country either to be
trained in Germany or to fight the Chinese in
order to come to the aid of German rectitude,
should English sedition come to blows w.ith it.
Thus, if England could only be got to submit, would
she be gradually warped. She would be exhorted
to abandon her own genius in order to imitate the
genius of her conquerors, to forget her own history
for a larger history, to give up her own language
for a " universal " language in other words, to
destroy her household gods one by one, and to put
in their place alien gods. Such an England would
be an England without a soul, without even a
mind. She would be a nation of slaves, even though
every slave in the country had a chicken in his
pot and a golden dish to serve it on. No amount
of prosperity could make up for the degradation
of living perpetually under the heel of the Prussian
policeman and under the eye of the Prussian
professor. Even the man who kept a small
sweet-shop would feel queer stirrings of rage
within him, however prosperous he was, how-
ever clean the streets were swept, as he saw his
policeman-conqueror tramping majestically past
his door. He would feel as if he were in the
grip of some monstrous machine. He would
tell himself that law and order was a good thing
but not at this price. To live among all those
pompous foreign officials would be worse than
being in prison. There would be a fire in his head
till he met another man with a fire in his head, and
together they would form a secret society and look
forward to the great day of rebellion.
It is against this spiritual conquest of England
rather than against the threat of bankrupt busi-
nesses that Englishmen will fight with the fiercest
inspiration. The real case against Germany is
not so much that a German conquest would
make England bankrupt, as that it would make
England no longer England. Englishmen would
shrink from German rule at its best no less than
from German rule at its most atrocious. They
would spurn Germany as a conqueror bringing
gifts equally with Germany as a conqueror bringing
poverty and destruction. Wordsworth, in a similar
mood, has expressed the feelings of a " high-minded
Spaniard " when in 1810 Napoleon held out to
Spain the hope of peace and prosperity under his
sway:
"We can endure that he should waste our lands,
Despoil our temples, and by sword and flame
Return us to the dust from which we came ;
Such food a tyrant's appetite demands :
And we can brook the thought that by his hands
Spain may be overpowered, and he possess
For his delight a solemn wilderness
Where all the brave lie dead. But when of bands
Which he will break for us he dares to speak,
Of benefits and of a future day,
When our enlightened minds shall bless bis sway ;
Then, the strained heart of fortitude proves weak ;
Our groans, our blushes, our pale cheeks declare,
That he has power to inflict what we lack strength
to bear."
That is not one of Wordsworth's greatest sonnets,
but it expresses well enough the passion which
Belgium must feel at the present moment, when
the Germans are trying to get them to look forward
to an era of benefactions under German rule. It
expresses, too, the passion which Englishmen would
feel in the same circumstances. No man with
the slightest glimmer of patriotism would consent
to see his country made a nation of millionaires at
the price of being a nation of slaves.
Timely tidbit for me ... I'm just to the point in Ulysses, after the funeral, wherein Bloom goes to his newspaper's offices, and I'm feeling kindly and nostalgic about the newspaper business, and this on the heels of a friend saying without blinking that he was sitting at his kitchen table reading the paper on his laptop, and I thought Paper?, but with great equanimity I thought, Anitya, Anitya, and proceeded apace. Merry New Year, John, with thanks.
Posted by: Jeff | 28 December 2009 at 09:34 PM
Paper laptop. And they say that we are in a post-ironic age? I think that there is nothing but irony--perhaps in a place where there is nothing but a certain something, perhaps you can't see it at all. I suspect that anitya is one of those Buddhist things that I know nothing about--I'd go and open up my Devil's Dictionary, I would.
Posted by: John Ptak | 28 December 2009 at 11:00 PM