AN ENGLISH VIEW OF THE IRISH EASTER REBELLION

Easter Rising1916 by John Wight

William Butler Yeats’ epic poem on the Easter Rising of 1916 has immortalised an event which possesses all the elements of a Greek tragedy and which ninety-six years later is still capable of stirring strong emotions.

The audacity and bravery, bordering on insanity, of just over 1200 combined Irish Republican Brotherhood Volunteers, led by Patrick Pearse, and Irish Citizen Army Volunteers, led by James Connolly, unleashing an armed rising in Dublin against the British state, which at the time controlled an empire covering a quarter of the globe and had a million men under arms, is even more astonishing when measured against the lack of popular support that existed at the time among the Irish people for armed struggle.

The First World War was in the process of destroying an entire generation of Europe’s working class, including 30,000 Irishmen out of the 200,000 who’d enlisted to fight under British arms, many of those Catholics and members of the nationalist Irish Volunteers from the south of the country, where constitutional nationalism had succeeded in gaining popular support. Led by John Redmond, the constitutional wing of Irish Nationalism had won a pledge from the British government that the Home Rule Act (1914), granting Ireland self government within the UK, would be implemented at war’s end. The act had already passed through the British Parliament, only to be postponed at the outset of hostilities.

The Redmonite wing of Irish Nationalism derived its legitimacy from the constitutional path previously laid out by Charles Parnell, one of the most powerful and effective parliamentarians ever to sit in the House of Commons. By virtue of his strong personality, stunning oratory, political convictions and acumen, Parnell succeeded in enlisting the support of Liberal leader and prime minister, William Gladstone, for the concept of Irish Home Rule in the face of strong opposition from the Tories and their unionist allies in the six counties. However, a split within the Liberals, in which a large section of the party shifted its support behind unionist and Tory opposition to Irish Home Rule, saw Parnell’s First Irish Home Rule Bill of 1886 defeated in the Commons by a slim majority.

Parnell was an enigmatic character. He was closer to the Conservatives in his political instincts, yet able and willing to work in tandem with the Liberals in order to advance the cause of Irish Home Rule that was closest to his heart. While committed to the constitutional path, he was also sympathetic to the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the radical wing of Irish Nationalism, though this was probably more to do with the conservative Catholic doctrine they espoused than their political methods and belief in complete independence from British rule by any means necessary.

Despite John Redmond’s support for the war, and the enlistment of thousands of Irish Volunteers (formed as a mass organisation by the revolutionary Irish Republican Brotherhood in response to the emergence of Edward Carson’s Ulster Volunteers in the North in 1912 in opposition to Home Rule) to fight in the British Army, a sizeable minority within the organisation were against taking Britain’s side, resulting in a split. The IRB, within this minority, were not just content with staying out of the war, however. Instead they viewed it as an opportunity to strike for Ireland’s independence. The most prominent advocate of this position was Patrick Pearse, who sat on the leadership of both the Volunteers and the IRB.

Pearse was a teacher, poet, barrister, writer, and champion of native Irish language and culture. From a very early age he had been committed to the cause of Ireland’s freedom, with a romantic attachment to Irish history, both real and mythological, which combined to imbue him with the belief in the need for a ‘blood sacrifice’ in order to awaken the Irish people to action. Pearse’s romanticism is evident in the speech he gave at the funeral of Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, lifelong champion of the Fenian cause who died of natural causes at the age of 83. Pearse’s oration closed with

“Our foes are strong and wise and wary; but, strong and wise and wary as they are, they cannot undo the miracles of God Who ripens in the hearts of young men the seeds sown by the young men of a former generation. And the seeds sown by the young men of ’65 and ’67 are coming to their miraculous ripening today. Rulers and Defenders of the Realm had need to be wary if they would guard against such processes. Life springs from death; and from the graves of patriot men and women spring living nations. The Defenders of this Realm have worked well in secret and in the open. They think that they have pacified Ireland. They think that they have purchased half of us and intimidated the other half. They think that they have foreseen everything, think that they have provided against everything; but, the fools, the fools, the fools! — They have left us our Fenian dead, and while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace”.

The leader of the minority faction of the Irish Volunteers who supported Ireland taking a neutral stance in the war was Eoin MacNeill. MacNeill was resolutely against attempting an armed rising against British rule, viewing any such undertaking as doomed to certain defeat. However, he did support the use of force in the event that the British attempted to suppress and disarm the Volunteers, implement conscription in Ireland, and/or arrest the leadership. In this regard he was tricked by the IRB, who produced a forged official British document, known as the Castle Document, stating that MacNeill and other prominent leaders of the Volunteers were to be arrested.

It was now that MacNeill was told about the plan for the Rising and the imminent arrival of German arms. Believing now that the British were about to move against the Volunteers, he reluctantly agreed to give his support. The IRB knew it would be vital in mobilising the entire membership of the Irish Volunteers, which after the split stood at just over 13,000.

However, when he learned of the arrest of Roger Casement, the man charged with organizing the German arms shipment, and the interception of the ship transporting them three days prior to the start of the Rising on Easter Sunday, MacNeill changed his mind and countermanded the orders he’d originally supported mobilising the Volunteers on Easter Sunday. This resulted in confusion and a drastic reduction in the number of men who came out, which ultimately led to the Rising only taking place in Dublin, where it had to be delayed by one day to take place on Easter Monday instead.

The leaders of the Rising in Dublin, chief among them Pearse and Connolly, were under no illusion as to their chances of success when news arrived of the loss of the German arms shipment and MacNeill’s counter orders preventing a national mobilisation from taking place.

Pearse, as stated, was a romantic and an idealist, consumed with the desire to make what he described as a ‘blood sacrifice’ in the cause of Irish freedom. He desired martyrdom, believing it would inspire future generations to take up the cause. Connolly on the other hand was a committed trade unionist, socialist, and Marxist, whose being was consumed with the objective of winning the Irish working class to the cause of mass revolutionary struggle.

Born in Edinburgh to Irish parents, Connolly early on developed a devotion to Ireland. He’d led an active life, during which he had stood as a socialist candidate in municipal elections in Scotland, been a full time organizer with the Wobblies in America, and been a full time trade union official back in Ireland, where he played a key role in the famous 1913 Dublin lockout, when the bosses grouped together to lock out thousands of workers in an attempt to break the growing influence of the Irish Transport and General Trade Workers Union (ITGWU), led at the time by James Larkin. Out of this struggle, during which the police baton charged thousands of workers during a protest meeting, came Connolly’s support for the formation of a workers’ militia, which became the Irish Citizens’ Army.

As well as a brilliant organizer and natural leader, Connolly was also a major thinker and theorist, his work around the National Question was in particular a significant contribution to the Marxist canon. It seems strange then that he would embrace the desperate tactic of an armed uprising that by the time it began he knew was doomed to fail. The reason can be found in his devastation at the sight of thousands of Irish working class men enlisting to fight in an imperialist war under British arms, the same British arms that were holding his beloved Ireland in colonial subjugation.

“This war appears to me as the most fearful crime of the centuries. In it the working class are to be sacrificed so that a small clique of rulers and armament makers may sate their lust for power and their greed for wealth. Nations are to be obliterated, progress stopped, and international hatreds erected into deities to be worshipped.”

It was this which decided him on the desperate course of an armed rising by a committed minority, hoping it would raise the consciousness of the Irish working class to follow their example and struggle against the British state. This turn to action preceding consciousness on Connolly’s part dovetailed with Pearse’s commitment to a ‘blood sacrifice’ in Ireland’s cause, responsible for two of the most unlikely of allies joining forces to make history.

That said, Connolly was never under any illusion about the deep political differences that existed between his conception of a future Ireland and the one held by the ultra nationalists of the IRB. He knew that the plight of the Irish working class would not be improved one inch by replacing the Union Jack over Dublin Castle with the Tricolour. It is why he urged his volunteers to keep hold of their weapons in the unlikely event of a victorious outcome to the Rising, as they would need them to carry out the next stage of their struggle to turn a political revolution into a social one against their erstwhile allies.

But, as mentioned, by the morning of the Rising on Easter Monday 1916, Connolly knew that he and his men were about to embark on a disastrous course. As they formed up outside their Liberty Hall HQ, he turned to a trusted aide and said

“We’re going out to be slaughtered.”

What followed was a story of courage and sacrifice that has elevated the Easter Rising to the status of legend throughout the world. The romantic symbolism of the reading out of the Irish Proclamation to bemused passersby outside the GPO in the middle of O’Connell Street, was matched by the rebels’ naivete in taking up fixed positions throughout the city, trusting that the British would be reluctant to bring artillery to bear on Dublin, the closest city within the British Empire to London, to force them out. The forlorn hope that events in Dublin would inspire the remaining Volunteers around the country to mobilise despite MacNeill’s orders to the contrary never came to pass either. Initially taken by surprise, the British responded with overwhelming force, bringing thousands of reinforcements and artillery into Dublin from the mainland to batter the rebels into submission after six days of heavy fighting, when Pearse finally gave the order to surrender.

The aftermath proved as dramatic as the Rising itself. The rebels were initially vilified by their fellow Dubliners, who blamed them for causing the destruction of large parts of the city. As they were marched off to confinement by British troops they were harangued and pelted, especially by women whose husbands and sons were at that moment fighting in the trenches. But public and popular sentiment soon fell in behind them as the leaders were executed one after the other without trial or due process apart from military courts martial.

Here the British government made a catastrophic error in handing responsibility for the fate of those who’d surrendered to the British military authority in Dublin. In the end fifteen were executed by firing squad, including the seven signatories of the Irish Proclamation – Padraig Pearse, James Connolly, Thomas J Clarke, Sean Mac Diarmada, Thomas MacDonagh, Eamonn Ceannt, and Joseph Plunkett. Another name that can be added to the aforementioned list is that of Roger Casement, who was later hanged in Pentonville Prison for his role in attempting to organise the shipment of German arms.

Casement was a colourful character who despite enjoying the benefits of a privileged background devoted his life to ending the cruel treatment suffered by the victims of colonialism in Africa and the Americas.

Some of the most moving testimonies ever given by condemned men were made by the leaders of the rising in the hours and days before their execution. James Connolly said during the court martial held in his prison cell prior to being shot that

“Believing that the British government has no right in Ireland, never had any right in Ireland, and never can have any right in Ireland, the presence, in any one generation of Irishmen, of even a respectable minority, read to die to affirm that truth, makes the Government for ever a usurpation and a crime against human progress”.

Patrick Pearse testified that

“When I was a child of ten, I went on my bare knees by my bedside one night and promised God that I should devote my Life to an effort to free my country. I have kept the promise. I have helped to organise, to train, and to discipline my fellow-countrymen to the sole end that, when the time came, they might fight for Irish freedom. The time, as it seemed to me, did come, and we went into the fight. I am glad that we did. We seem to have lost; but we have not lost. To refuse to fight would have been to lose; to fight is to win. We have kept faith with the past, and handed on its tradition to the future. I repudiate the assertion of the Prosecutor that I sought to aid and abet England’s enemy. Germany is no more to me than England is. I asked and accepted German aid in the shape of arms and an expeditionary force; we neither asked for nor accepted German gold, nor had any traffic with Germany but what I state. My object was to win Irish freedom. We struck the first blow ourselves, but I should have been glad of an ally’s aid. I assume that I am speaking to Englishmen who value their freedom, and who profess to be fighting for the freedom of Belgium and Serbia. Believe that we too love freedom and desire it. To us it is more than anything else in the world. If you strike us down now, we shall rise again, and renew the fight. You cannot conquer Ireland; you cannot extinguish the Irish passion for freedom. If our deed has not been sufficient to win freedom, then our children will win it by a better deed.”

Pearse was proved right. His sacrifice and that of the others who were executed lit the flame of Irish resistance to British rule, which ended with the formation of the Irish Free State in 1922 after a bitter guerrilla war lasting three years, followed by a brief civil war between former comrades over the terms of the Anglo-Irish Treaty enshrining the partition of six counties in the North, which remained British.

As Yeats wrote in his poem, with the Easter Rising of 1916 a terrible beauty had been born. Ireland would never be the same.

CONNOLLY & BILLY BHOY AT EASTER

JAMES CONNOLLY

Irish: Séamas Ó Conghaile or Ó Conghalaigh, June 5,1868 – May 12, 1916) was a Scottish-born Irish socialist politician and fighter against British rule. He became involved in the socialist movement while in Scotland, and when back in Ireland founded the Irish Labour Party. He was Commandant of the Dublin Brigade during the Easter Rising, and after being captured by the British, was shot by firing squad.

Quotes

If you remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organization of the Socialist Republic your efforts would be in vain. England would still rule you. She would rule you through her capitalists, through her landlords, through her financiers, through the whole array of commercial and individualist institutions she has planted in this country and watered with the tears of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs.
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Yes, friends, governments in capitalist society are but committees of the rich to manage the affairs of the capitalist class.


'Those who live by the sword shall perish by the sword' say the Scriptures, and it may well be that in the progress of events the working class of Ireland may be called upon to face the stern necessity of taking the sword (or rifle) against the capitalist class..."

Under a socialist system every nation will be the supreme arbiter of its own destinies, national and international; will be forced into no alliance against its will, but will have its independence guaranteed and its freedom respected by the enlightened self-interest of the socialist democracy of the world.

Such a scheme .. the betrayal of the national democracy of Industrial Ulster, would mean a carnival of reaction both North and South, would set back the wheels of progress, would destroy the oncoming unity of the Irish labour movement and paralyse all advanced movements while it lasted.

The cause of labour is the cause of Ireland, the cause of Ireland is the cause of labour.

Theobald Wolfe Tone

Theobald Wolfe Tone (1763-1798) was born of the Protestant ascendancy class in Ireland. He was also a rebel, one of the founding members of the United Irishmen, and is regarded as the father of modern Irish Republicanism. He organized a convention of elected delegates that forced Parliament to pass the Catholic Relief Act of 1793, and staged a rebellion against British rule in Ireland in 1798. He was captured by British forces in Donegal and taken prisoner. Before Tone was due to be executed he attempted suicide and consequently died from his wounds a week later, thus avoiding being hanged for his involvement in the 1798 rebellion.

Some of his quotes:

"To subvert the tyranny of our execrable government, to break the connection with England, the never-failing source of all our political evils and to assert the independence of my country - these were my objectives. To unite the whole people of Ireland, to abolish the memory of all past dissensions, and to substitute the common name of Irishman in place of the denominations of Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter - these were my means."

"If the men of property will not support us, they must fall. Our strength shall come from that great and respectable class, the men of no property".

As can be garnered from his sentiments, Tone, although a Protestant, recognised the oppression and injustices inflicted upon the indigenous Irish Catholic people by the British ruling class, and wanted nothing more than to discontinue British rule in Ireland with the aim of creating an egalitarian Ireland independent of the British crown, and one where "Protestant, Catholic, and Dissenter" could live in peace and harmony and as equals.

I ask you, what was wrong with that attitude then? And what is wrong with it now?

By Wikiquote

by Billy the Prod

IRISH SPIRIT OF 2016 LIBERATION

Many International Socialists regard the Easter Rebellion of 1916 in Ireland, as a betrayal of the Cause of Labour, in that they regard it, as a Nationalist rebellion, led by leaders like Pearse of the Gaelic tradition and Connolly of Labour, rather than being a matter of self-determination and liberation. Some, particularly the revisionists, have even gone so far, as to accuse Padraic Pearse of neo-fascism, while Labour MPs in the House of Commoners in London, stood up and applauded the news, of the execution of Labour stalwart and working-class hero, James Connoly in a wheelchair. I have no doubt, that the Provos of the Stormont Junta today, would do the same if it did not cost them votes. You only have to look at their 2016 video promo and see how they have denigrated the Connolly contribution or examine their collaboration in the torture of Irish POWs today, which replicates the brutality, meted out to the ten hunger strikers. Their treatment and censorship of nationalist youth, has caused  considerable death, suicide and wholesale incarceration, within their constituencies and is well on the way to being as vicious, as the Blueshirts. They are morphing into American Republican Darwinism, at an alarming rate, in their pursuit of political power at all costs, paying only lip service to traditional Irish republican values. Of course their manipulative skills learned in surviving paedophile homes, are a great asset, in the orifice licking environment of political Ireland.

To return to the 1916 legacy, I see the Pearse tradition, as more an expression of Motherland, rather than Fatherland, found in writings and in his poem, The Mother, which foretells his own martyrdom and that of his brother William.

The Mother

I do not grudge them: Lord, I do not grudge
My two strong sons that I have seen go out
To break their strength and die, they and a few,
In bloody protest for a glorious thing,
They shall be spoken of among their people,
The generations shall remember them,
And call them blessed;
But I will speak their names to my own heart
In the long nights;
The little names that were familiar once
Round my dead hearth.
Lord, thou art hard on mothers:
We suffer in their coming and their going;
And tho' I grudge them not, I weary, weary
Of the long sorrow-And yet I have my joy:
My sons were faithful, and they fought.

Both Pearse and Connolly for me are very complex characters but then so is the truth, in political matters. Connolly, born in Scotland of Irish stock, by participating in the Easter rebellion, remained true to his class and his DNA. It appears to be a DNA, that only the colonially, oppressed understand. It requires EQ rather than IQ to comprehend, best expressed by Pearse at the grave of O'Donovan Rossa, when he stated," the fools, the fools, they have left us our Fenian dead, and while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace." 

Connolly was a politically desperate man, when he engaged the Pearse and Clarke tradition. he had already experienced the betrayals of Labour and it's careerists, over and over again, while experiencing daily, the misery of his class in the slum tenements of Dublin, along with Larkin. Once he took his first step with the Irish Citizen Army, Connoly would have known full well, his approaching fate. He was sufficiently acquainted with the Britsh Army, to know that there was no turning back. Anyone who tries to re-write history on this fact, fools themselves. 

On the other hand, it is not clear, whether Pearse and Clarke were entirely aware, of the international nature of the tradition, they were engaging with, in Connolly and the ICA. It also appears, that many, assuming their legacy today, are not remotely aware, either. The basis of Connolly ideology, was expressed by him, when he stated, "The Cause of Ireland is the Cause of Labour and the Cause of Labour is the Cause of Labour". The Cause of Labour is International and primarily material, while the Cause of Ireland is primarily of Spirit and Self- Determination. The Legacy of 1916 is both. The realization and fulfilment of both traditions are equally important elements, for any successful Liberation Movement to sustain itself and succeed.

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BRITIRA

Ireland has a particularly bloody history, that involves eight centuries of British invasion and occupation, which includes, genocide, holocaust, war crimes and ethnic cleansing. In the interest of fairness, every story has at least two sides, and so it is with Irish history. The problem for the native Irish, is that few are aware of their side, because, to a large extent Britain dominates the English narrative of world media, and usually the victor, gets to write history. The other difficulty with outing the truth, is that the ruling class in both parts of the currently divided island, have a vested interest, in preserving the status quo, which is based on mentored privilege, dishonesty, covert censorship and oppression.

This writer believes, that the truth of Ireland's Cause, taken to a sufficient number of people worldwide, and to the International Criminal Court, can achieve national freedom, without recourse to violence, reserving all armaments, for strictly defensive purposes. However, this will require the same organization, commitment and concerted effort, that traditionally was used in Ireland's armed struggles. Reactionary violence has proven to be self-defeating, time after time in Ireland's history, and the events of limited success, hves been followed, by sell-out, self-serving, native leadership. Irish Republicanism has traditionally been the Cause of the People of No Property, or as James Connolly, one of the principal leaders of the 1916 Rising, who was taken for execution in a wheelchair, said, the Cause of Ireland, is the Cause of Labour, and the Cause of Labour, is the Cause of Ireland. Irish hearts are passionate and discipline, to refrain from reactionary, violence, difficult, but as one of our more intelligent martyrs, Mairead Farrell recently said, before her execution, our head is our best weapon. I believe enlightened leadership in Ireland, needs to release all political prisoners, with an undertaking, to this course of action, rather than violence. Genuine traditional Irish Republicans, are both fair-minded and people of honour, who keep their promises, unlike their political British counterparts, as history has proven. You can come to your own conclusion, if this is the case, in the McGuinness story below. The Truth will set Ireland Free, but we need your help, to get it out there, as it is mostly, censored. Below is a reliable article, borrowed from the Broken Elbow, a blog I recommend, to help you come to your own conclusions.

Martin McGuinness & Frank Hegarty

The story of how Martin McGuinness allegedly lured Derry IRA informer Frank Hegarty back from England, promising his mother – on bended knee according to accounts – that he would not be harmed, only for Hegarty to end up on a lonely country road with a bullet in his head has been told here, here, here and here.


Doubtless it will figure again in the course of the Presidential campaign and will be used by his opponents and enemies as evidence of the man’s flawed character and unfitness to represent the people of Ireland in the Phoenix Park.


I am not going to rehearse the story here but I thought it might be useful to place the McGuinness-Hegarty tale in the context of the time it happened, 1986, and the politics of the then IRA leadership. That way it might be possible to understand why it happened.


The story begins in February 1978 when Gerry Adams was arrested and charged with IRA membership just a few days after the awful La Mon tragedy when a botched firebombing of the hotel on the outskirts of east Belfast killed twelve people, all Protestants, who were incinerated to death, and injured thirty more, some horribly.


The move against Adams was done to placate angry Unionist public opinion, understandably, but the charge of IRA membership was impossible to sustain – short of self-incrimination membership charges were never successful. But it did keep Adams off the streets for the best part of a year. He had been released from Long Kesh a year or so earlier and had set about implementing the re-organisation he, Ivor Bell, Brendan Hughes and others had plotted in jail. So placing him in the remand wing of Crumlin Road jail removed a key player at an important moment.


Changes in security policy introduced after the lengthy but ineffective ceasefire of 1974/75, especially the use of Castlereagh interrogation centre, had brought the IRA to its knees and close to defeat. Adams’ re-organisation, principally the introduction of a new Northern Command, was beginning to revive the IRA when La Mon happened.


With his arrest Adams automatically lost the post of Chief of Staff, which he had just taken from Seamus Twomey, and so Martin McGuinness, then Northern Commander, replaced him. The subsequent three or four years were to provide dramatic evidence that the IRA was indeed back in business and while not the force it had been in 1972, it was nonetheless strong enough to sustain the ‘long war’ crafted in Long Kesh. It was during these years that the rank and file trust in the Adams-McGuinness leadership was created, a trust that would prove so valuable when the peace process began.


By the summer of 1982 however the IRA was set on a different path. The hunger strikes of 1981 had created an opportunity for Sinn Fein to enter electoral politics. Owen Carron had replaced Bobby Sands as MP for Fermanagh-South Tyrone, a council seat had been won in Carrickmore, Co. Tyrone but the big test, Sinn Fein standing in a Northern Ireland-wide election, was yet to come. That October it did when the British held elections to a new putative power-sharing Assembly, a body doomed to failure by the result which saw Sinn Fein win ten per cent of the vote and stun the Irish political and media establishment.


Martin McGuinness badly wanted to stand in that poll. He knew he was popular enough in Derry to win a seat and such was the level of post-hunger strike Nationalist anger in the city that he might even give John Hume a scare. The problem was that he was Chief of Staff and others on the Army Council bridled at the thought of their commander holding a seat at Stormont, even on an abstentionist basis.


So McGuinness was obliged to give up the post, handing it to Ivor Bell, one of Gerry Adams’ closest colleagues in the Belfast IRA. Less than a year later however Bell was also arrested and briefly held on charges based on evidence given by Belfast Brigade supergrass Robert ‘Beano’ Lean. Although Lean later retracted, Bell lost the Chief of Staff job which went to Aughnacloy man, Kevin McKenna. (A few years later Bell was forced out of the IRA altogether when his unease at Sinn Fein’s political direction and anger and suspicion at the deprioritisation of the IRA combined to persuade him to launch a tilt at Adams which failed). It is around this time that the Frank Hegarty story really begins.


During his tenure as Chief of Staff, Ivor Bell had dismissed Frank Hegarty from the IRA. A member of the organisation since the early 1970’s, Hegarty had risen to the post of Northern Command Quartermaster (QM) by 1982, a significantly important job. But he was also having an affair with the wife of a soldier in the Ulster Defence Regiment, the mostly Protestant militia created in 1970 to replace the B Specials. Someone in the IRA found out about Hegarty’s dalliance and reported him. Clearly his liaison made him vulnerable to blackmail and since he was now regarded as a potential informer Hegarty had to go.


Some time after that Hegarty was approached by the Force Research Unit (FRU), a British Army agent-running unit with headquarters at Thiepval Barracks, Lisburn and persuaded to rejoin the IRA which he did. How no red flag was raised in the IRA at Hegarty’s return would become one of the divisive issues in the affair, especially as he also managed to inveigle his way back into the Northern Command quartermaster’s department.


The Force Research Unit had ambitious plans for Hegarty telling him, as the IRA learned when they eventually interrogated him, that they wanted him to rise as high as he could, even as high as Quartermaster General (QMG). The FRU would remove his bosses, one by one, to facilitate his ascent.


By the end of 1985 Hegarty had been seconded to work on attachment to the QMG’s department to help shift weapons which were beginning to arrive from Libya. A year or so earlier Libyan Intelligence and the IRA had struck an audacious and ambitious deal. The Libyans would supply hundreds of tons of weaponry and millions of pounds if the IRA pledged to make life for Mrs Thatcher’s government uncomfortable, something the IRA had no difficulty agreeing. It was Libya’s revenge for the expulsion of their diplomats after the shooting of WPC Yvonne Fletcher while the IRA then laid plans for a major military offensive, based on the Vietnamese ‘Tet’ offensive, designed to sicken British public opinion with Northern Ireland and perhaps force the British to take counterproductive security measures such as internment.


Hegarty was part of a squad that moving some 80 AK-47’s smuggled in from Libya in August 1985 to dumps in the north-west. The weapons were stored in two temporary dumps in Roscommon and Sligo when they were discovered. The Garda Special Branch were ultimately responsible for everything that happened afterwards. Eager for a coup against the IRA the Garda insisted on raiding the dumps, ignoring British advice to ‘jark’ the weapons instead, that is bug them so they could be followed to their destination.


Hegarty had been told that the weapons had come from Europe and the presence of some Belgian rifles in the dumps seemed to authenticate that. Nonetheless British & Irish intelligence had come very close to discovering the Libyan arms smuggling venture at a very early point.


Realising that his past expulsion from the IRA would surface when the IRA investigated the arms seizure and that he would then be the prime suspect for betraying the weapons, Hegarty fled to England where MI5 housed him at a secure location. Homesick and missing his family Hegarty contacted them by phone, the Provos found out and at this point Martin McGuinness entered the story. He was enticed back home, naively believing McGuinness’ assurances about his wellbeing, interrogated by the IRA’s Internal Security Unit and then killed.


So why did Martin McGuinness go out of his way to cajole Hegarty back to Derry? It was, after all, a high-risk enterprise. He must have known that Hegarty had no chance of surviving and that he would be killed. He also knew that Hegarty’s family would be angry with him for so blatantly misleading them and that in all likelihood they would make their feelings known publicly and blame him for the killing. His name and reputation would be sullied for ever. He could have sent someone else to lie to the Hegarty family but he knew that Hegarty would accept assurances from no-one with less clout and authority in the IRA than himself. It was, we can then conclude, enormously important for McGuinness not just that Hegarty be brought back to Derry but that McGuinness be known as the man who brought him back. Again the question, why?


The answer might well lie in the intense rivalry and mutual dislike between Martin McGuinness and Kevin McKenna and the vying between them for the Chief of Staff job. According to IRA sources who knew the two men well and observed them in action, a deep loathing characterised the relationship.


For his part McKenna, a very private, publicity-shy figure, deeply resented constant media reports that McGuinness was the real Chief of Staff and more so that, as someone who was one of the more media-friendly Provo leaders, he had done very little to discourage that impression. McGuinness on the other hand, according to former colleagues, harboured ambitions to get his old Chief of Staff job back, especially so when the Libyan deal was struck. If there was an IRA ‘Tet’ offensive, Martin McGuinness wanted to be known as the man who led it. And McKenna stood in his way.


By late 1985, Kevin McKenna had been Chief of Staff for just two years but already there had been some bitter clashes between them at leadership meetings. At one Army Council meeting McGuinness launched such a powerful assault on McKenna’s stewardship of the IRA that it seemed as if the Chief of Staff might be forced to offer his resignation. Only the intervention of ‘Slab’ Murphy to show support for McKenna stopped that happening.


The Garda swoop on the Libyan arms dumps and Hegarty’s flight to England brought a new and deadly intensity to the rivalry. The first question was how on earth Frank Hegarty had got back into the IRA? Since both McGuinness and Hegarty were Derry men who had been in the city’s IRA units together in the 1970’s & knew each other, and since McGuinness was now Northern Commander and Hegarty was attached to Northern Command then surely, McKenna and others asked, McGuinness must have known that he had got back into the IRA?


The question was full of unspoken menace and danger for McGuinness. The IRA knew full well that when British intelligence wanted to infiltrate and advance agents inside their ranks they would sometimes use other agents to smooth their path. If McGuinness had allowed Hegarty back into the IRA knowing his past, then this made McGuinness a suspected British agent. McGuinness denied, according to these IRA sources, knowing anything about Hegarty’s re-instatement and initially said the informer must have been someone else (during his interrogation by the IRA Hegarty claimed that McGuinness had in fact known and approved his return to the ranks. This sparked another blazing row between McGuinness and McKenna but Hegarty’s assertion was unprovable).


One way of clearing his name, or at least going some way to doing so, would be if McGuinness were to play a leading part in luring Hegarty back to Derry and to his death. It wouldn’t settle the matter since the IRA was well aware that British intelligence would have little compunction in sacrificing one, now useless informer to protect another active and more valuable one but it would suffice until some more compelling evidence against McGuinness emerged, if it ever did.


None of this means that McGuinness was an informer. But it does suggest that he was frightened of being labeled one and that if he didn’t act to clear his name, his arch-rival Kevin McKenna would triumph and his IRA career might be so clouded with doubt and suspicion that it would be effectively over. As it was the Frank Hegarty affair killed off any chances that McGuinness would oust McKenna and replace him as Chief of Staff. McKenna would serve as Chief of Staff for another eleven years until he was replaced in 1997 by ‘Slab’ Murphy. He was the Provisional IRA’s longest serving commander. McGuinness survived and has prospered so well that he is now a contender for the Aras.


Postscript: Frank Hegarty’s FRU handler was Ian Hirst, better known as Martin Ingram and the man who outed Freddie Scappaticci, the notorious British agent in the IRA’s Internal Security Unit whose codename was Steaknife. Handlers often get very attached to their agents and there’s no doubt that Ian/Martin was deeply affected by Hegarty’s death. I have often wondered if his understandable anger at McGuinness for coaxing Hegarty to his death led him to make his own, later allegations that McGuinness worked as a double agent for MI6.Intriguing stuff, but will we ever get definitive answers to all these questions?

2016 IRISH CITIZEN ARMY DIRECT DEMOCRACY

I am not by nature a violent man, in fact I abhor it to the point of carrying insects out of my home, rather than kill them. Having said that, there is something lying around strictly for self-defensive purposes, should someone enter the boundaries of our home, in today's lawless corporate society. I have witnessed more than my fair share of violence in my lifetime and I certainly do not condone rape of any kind but I am also full of contradictions between my head and my heart.The following experience is a good example of this.

I was staying in a four-star hotel at the time in Bangkok, and unlike most hotels, on this particular night, there was no protection on the windows, against mosquitos entering my bedroom. Now when I am awakened by something like that, I am not a cosmopolitan man, so I phoned reception and asked them to send up something, to get rid of the mosquitos, that were plaguing me, but they had nothing in their arsenal. I was enraged with the bastards who were bloodsucking my arse, testicles and any flesh they could find all phukin night, while I tried to sleep, for some important business, I needed  to do next day.

Anyway, after I returned to my bedroom from business next day, there was an attractive chief housekeeper, standing at the foot of the bed, who asked me what my problem was. After I explained to her explicitly, in a rather emotional way and asked her to please get an aerosol or something, she stood at the foot of my bed, as bould as brass, sneering at me, with a glint in her eye. She said, "this is a buddhist culture and mosquitos have to live too".Well I was incensed and I just wanted to slam her on the bed and give her the hardest phuck, she ever had in her life. By the grace of the star dust and experience I did not. I am not respsonsible for what comes into my head, only what I do with it. So please forgive me sisters and brothers but there's a dark dog lurking in these savage veins,  especially when aroused by some creature drawing blood, from this thin skin or someone provoking my sensitive veneer of civility.

Violence is not smart, particularly reactionary violence and as Mairead Farrell said,  "our head is our best weapon". She too however was martyred by political violence, which is part of the many contradictions of Irish political reality.The big question however, is what does a wee country like Ireland do, when you have had mosquitos torturing you for eight hundred years or a dirty war of British counter gangs, lurking on your doorstep, under the false flag of sectarianism or political counter gangs, like the one who murdered Charlie Hebdo? I have scripted in a petition from Care2 for the Irish Holocaust to be taken to the ICC for adjudication but It has been censored since day one? 

How do we achieve justice intelligently, without unnecessary violence, with such a perfidious enemy? Young, impetuous  revolutionaries are not going to listen to the counsel of experience or excess, unless they are presented with a better way. The reality is that our so called present Democracy, is not a facilitator of genuine change or social justice.Technology has advanced considerably since the guerilla days of Tom Barry. It brings with it, a considerable upside and downside to the traditional tactics of revolution, indeed if not, it makes it next to impossible, without overwhelming citizen support and solidarity. While the internet holds considerable potential, surveillance technology, leaves little privacy, if any, to ordinary citizens. This must be factored into any resistance leadership choices and decisions. Youth are impatient by nature and are not going to hang around, while we are pensive about it.

I am not a born-again virgin, as anyone who knows me well, will testify. I have known poverty of the worst kind, which often includes poverty of the Spirit of Freedom, as Bobby Sands called it. It is the worst poverty of all, and many have it stolen by our present, education system of censorship and ignorance. Case in point being, that almost all students of third level education in Ireland, are not aware, that the greatest crime against humanity on earth, i.e the Irish Holocaust, was committed by the British Government and cost more than 6 million lives, not the one million famine, they are brainwashed with. Now I have been in prison, but the worst prison of all, from my own experience, is extreme self-centeredness, something the Irish education system cultivates. I have also tasted my own personal freedom, which is conditional on your freedom. Yes, the truth really did set me free, but it is also conditional on passing it on. So my reasons for writing are not entirely altruistic. I know from experience, that freedom starts with the truth and as a result, I detest masks of any kind, whether it be a fake or condescending smile, a patronizing one, talking out of the side of the mouth, censorship of any kind, astroturf societies, poser  balaclavas and hypocritical establishment concern for Charlie Hebdo.

The Charlie Hebdo affair, clearly demonstrates, that any citizen army, wearing masks, in the age of the terrorist narrative, leaves itself wide open, for serious abuse and discredit of the Cause, for which we claim justice. From my own experience, and reading Craig Robert's analysis yesterday, I would guess, there was considerable British involvement in the matter and that volunteers, on orders from what was formerly British Aden, now known as Yemen, were waiting for the car used in the attack, at a predetermined venue, while the real murders made their excape, as the two brothers, paid the price with their lives, case closed. I could be wrong, i have no evidence, other than very similar experiences in Ireland, directed by British intelligence, which is still on going. The two young innocent boys in the picture, at the top of this page, are in fact victims of quite similar activity, with critical recorded transcripts, edited for the trial, in the same manner, as the unedited video released of the Charlie Hebdo attack.

We simply need to find a more intelligent way, in this time and cyberspace. Those who fail to grasp this, are failing their citizens, with unnecessary bloodshed and decades of incarceration of volunteers, with the highest ideals, coupled with bravery. Their release needs to be negotiated, and a new, more intelligent form of resistance to imperialism and corporatism, needs to be found sooner rather than later. So to any potential militant, I call on them, to consider this, and either lead, follow or get out of the way, intelligently. The island is full of headless chickens, flapping around aimlessly and it needs unity, direction with solidarity, for the sake of it's long tortured people. I learned in the process of being forced to get honest with myself first, that ego and foolish pride, pre-empt downfall and we simply cannot afford this any longer. This is not to be confused with the humility and pride, that comes with serving and making sacrifices like those made in 1916 and the Hunger Strike, for our communal identity and liberation. Too much ego is a terrible thing as I know from personal experience. I don't have all the anwers, no more than I have a monopoly on the truth. This can only be arrived at, in the dialectic of materialism, in an unfettered, uncensored, discourse.

The tricolour was taken from the Revolution in Paris by Irish Protestants, to become an emblem of the the Irish Republic. Alongside it in Irish Republican tradition, the Starry Plough and flags of the four Provinces have always flown. It appears, that right now, little unity can be found within or without that tradition, behind the tricolour, but surely all of the Irish working class, can find common purpose and Unity for now, behind the Starry Plough. Until we are materially free, we cannot realize our aspiration for the visionary unity of the 1916 leadership, because of British divide and rule tactics in the the dsicourse 

All traditions which survive the test of time, pay good heed to it's elders. Only they have the true wisdom, that can only be forged in the cauldron of experience and excess. Heaven knows, for a small island, we have experienced more than our fair share of violence, only to be sold out, time and time again, that has taken us backward not forward. Only the people of no property, without vested interest other than it's class consciousness, can guarantee and protect the gains and progress of revolution. No one else can be trusted, human nature is greedy and selfish, without, transparent, guarantees of protection. The political violence, since the massed ranks of the Civil Rights protests were massacred on January 30, 1972, 42 years ago, has not progressed Ireland one iota. Working people have been sold out and it will continue that way, until Irish people, empower themselves and regulate themselves, on a day to day basis. The armalite did not win equality. Anything that traspired in that direction, was a consequence of the Civil Rights campaign, which would have happened anyway.

We have plenty of people, with  a proven track record of integrity in the north, who have not sold out, like Bernadette McAliskey, Eamon McCann, Martin Corey, Marian Price, Francie Mackie, that can be trusted, to counsel a younger generation of people, serving a united leadership of working people, as opposed to the present self serving one, that cannot be trusted, which along with the Right2Water movement in the south, can lead and liberate. We already have had more than enough cannon fodder of Irish men and women dying for the sellouts, the captains and the kings of exploitation. We are living in an internet age, where direct working class democracy is possible. I am not so naive as to believe it can be entirely achieved in cyberspace. No one has a monopoly on the Truth. The Solidarity and Unity of the people of no property, behind ethical leadership of Principles, not Personalities, is a necessity. We have to work for it as persistently, intelligently and as transparently, as did our comrades of the past on the battle field, to overcome censorship, masks, disinformation and tyranny.

Those who do not learn from the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it, the voice of experience tells us. We have been sold out time and again by those whom we have delegated with our own empowerment. This is irresponsible, it does not fit with the Protestant ethic of taking responsibilty for ourselves and our children's future. You don't have to be particularly bright, at reading the political tea leaves of the island, to see that it's a horrific future, with bank debt and sectarianism, little wonder we have the fourth highest rate of suicide in the world among our male teens. Direct, Transparent, Uncensored, Democracy is the way of the future. We have to make it happen now as an alternative to political violence. We must occupy it. The only credible, realistic way to occupy and honour 1916, is to unite behind the Starry Plough, until our Republic is realized. Like the epitaph of Robert Emmet, the 1916 Republic can only be honoured properly, by uniting and achieving our place among the Nation's of the World with nonour, with the Starry Plough on our mast. Again I call on all progressive leadership on the island, to consider this, and either lead, follow or get out of the way, under the flag of the Starry Plough, with the tools of direct democracy. Please if you are an activist, bring this to their attention, as it is censored and make it happen.

The Secret History of Guns

The Ku Klux Klan, Ronald Reagan, and, for most of its history, the NRA all worked to control guns. The Founding Fathers? They required gun ownership—and regulated it. And no group has more fiercely advocated the right to bear loaded weapons in public than the Black Panthers—the true pioneers of the modern pro-gun movement. In the battle over gun rights in America, both sides have distorted history and the law, and there’s no resolution in sight.ADAM WINKLER

Joseph Durning/Durning 3D

THE EIGHTH-GRADE STUDENTS gathering on the west lawn of the state capitol in Sacramento were planning to lunch on fried chicken with California’s new governor, Ronald Reagan, and then tour the granite building constructed a century earlier to resemble the nation’s Capitol. But the festivities were interrupted by the arrival of 30 young black men and women carrying .357 Magnums, 12-gauge shotguns, and .45-caliber pistols.



The 24 men and six women climbed the capitol steps, and one man, Bobby Seale, began to read from a prepared statement. “The American people in general and the black people in particular,” he announced, must
take careful note of the racist California legislature aimed at keeping the black people disarmed and powerless Black people have begged, prayed, petitioned, demonstrated, and everything else to get the racist power structure of America to right the wrongs which have historically been perpetuated against black people The time has come for black people to arm themselves against this terror before it is too late.

Seale then turned to the others. “All right, brothers, come on. We’re going inside.” He opened the door, and the radicals walked straight into the state’s most important government building, loaded guns in hand. No metal detectors stood in their way.

THE TEXT OF the Second Amendment is maddeningly ambiguous. It merely says, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Yet to each side in the gun debate, those words are absolutely clear.It was May 2, 1967, and the Black Panthers’ invasion of the California statehouse launched the modern gun-rights movement.

Gun-rights supporters believe the amendment guarantees an individual the right to bear arms and outlaws most gun control. Hard-line gun-rights advocates portray even modest gun laws as infringements on that right and oppose widely popular proposals—such as background checks for all gun purchasers—on the ground that any gun-control measure, no matter how seemingly reasonable, puts us on the slippery slope toward total civilian disarmament.

This attitude was displayed on the side of the National Rifle Association’s former headquarters: THE RIGHT OF THE PEOPLE TO KEEP AND BEAR ARMS SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED. The first clause of the Second Amendment, the part about “a well regulated Militia,” was conveniently omitted. To the gun lobby, the Second Amendment is all rights and no regulation.

Although decades of electoral defeats have moderated the gun-control movement’s stated goals, advocates still deny that individual Americans have any constitutional right to own guns. The Second Amendment, in their view, protects only state militias. Too politically weak to force disarmament on the nation, gun-control hard-liners support any new law that has a chance to be enacted, however unlikely that law is to reduce gun violence. For them, the Second Amendment is all regulation and no rights.

While the two sides disagree on the meaning of the Second Amendment, they share a similar view of the right to bear arms: both see such a right as fundamentally inconsistent with gun control, and believe we must choose one or the other. Gun rights and gun control, however, have lived together since the birth of the country. Americans have always had the right to keep and bear arms as a matter of state constitutional law. Today, 43 of the 50 state constitutions clearly protect an individual’s right to own guns, apart from militia service.

Yet we’ve also always had gun control. The Founding Fathers instituted gun laws so intrusive that, were they running for office today, the NRA would not endorse them. While they did not care to completely disarm the citizenry, the founding generation denied gun ownership to many people: not only slaves and free blacks, but law-abiding white men who refused to swear loyalty to the Revolution.

For those men who were allowed to own guns, the Founders had their own version of the “individual mandate” that has proved so controversial in President Obama’s health-care-reform law: they required the purchase of guns. A 1792 federal law mandated every eligible man to purchase a military-style gun and ammunition for his service in the citizen militia. Such men had to report for frequent musters—where their guns would be inspected and, yes, registered on public rolls.

OPPOSITION TO GUN CONTROL was what drove the black militants to visit the California capitol with loaded weapons in hand. The Black Panther Party had been formed six months earlier, in Oakland, by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. Like many young African Americans, Newton and Seale were frustrated with the failed promise of the civil-rights movement. Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were legal landmarks, but they had yet to deliver equal opportunity. In Newton and Seale’s view, the only tangible outcome of the civil-rights movement had been more violence and oppression, much of it committed by the very entity meant to protect and serve the public: the police.

Inspired by the teachings of Malcolm X, Newton and Seale decided to fight back. Before he was assassinated in 1965, Malcolm X had preached against Martin Luther King Jr.’s brand of nonviolent resistance. Because the government was “either unable or unwilling to protect the lives and property” of blacks, he said, they had to defend themselves “by whatever means necessary.” Malcolm X illustrated the idea for Ebony magazine by posing for photographs in suit and tie, peering out a window with an M-1 carbine semiautomatic in hand. Malcolm X and the Panthers described their right to use guns in self-defense in constitutional terms. “Article number two of the constitutional amendments,” Malcolm X argued, “provides you and me the right to own a rifle or a shotgun.”

Guns became central to the Panthers’ identity, as they taught their early recruits that “the gun is the only thing that will free us—gain us our liberation.” They bought some of their first guns with earnings from selling copies of Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book to students at the University of California at Berkeley. In time, the Panther arsenal included machine guns; an assortment of rifles, handguns, explosives, and grenade launchers; and “boxes and boxes of ammunition,” recalled Elaine Brown, one of the party’s first female members, in her 1992 memoir. Some of this matériel came from the federal government: one member claimed he had connections at Camp Pendleton, in Southern California, who would sell the Panthers anything for the right price. One Panther bragged that, if they wanted, they could have bought an M48 tank and driven it right up the freeway.

Along with providing classes on black nationalism and socialism, Newton made sure recruits learned how to clean, handle, and shoot guns. Their instructors were sympathetic black veterans, recently home from Vietnam. For their “righteous revolutionary struggle,” the Panthers were trained, as well as armed, however indirectly, by the U.S. government.

Civil-rights activists, even those committed to nonviolent resistance, had long appreciated the value of guns for self-protection. Martin Luther King Jr. applied for a permit to carry a concealed firearm in 1956, after his house was bombed. His application was denied, but from then on, armed supporters guarded his home. One adviser, Glenn Smiley, described the King home as “an arsenal.” William Worthy, a black reporter who covered the civil-rights movement, almost sat on a loaded gun in a living-room armchair during a visit to King’s parsonage.

The Panthers, however, took it to an extreme, carrying their guns in public, displaying them for everyone—especially the police—to see. Newton had discovered, during classes at San Francisco Law School, that California law allowed people to carry guns in public so long as they were visible, and not pointed at anyone in a threatening way.

In February of 1967, Oakland police officers stopped a car carrying Newton, Seale, and several other Panthers with rifles and handguns. When one officer asked to see one of the guns, Newton refused. “I don’t have to give you anything but my identification, name, and address,” he insisted. This, too, he had learned in law school.

“Who in the hell do you think you are?” an officer responded.

“Who in the hell do you think you are?,” Newton replied indignantly. He told the officer that he and his friends had a legal right to have their firearms.

Newton got out of the car, still holding his rifle.

“What are you going to do with that gun?” asked one of the stunned policemen.

“What are you going to do with your gun?,” Newton replied.

By this time, the scene had drawn a crowd of onlookers. An officer told the bystanders to move on, but Newton shouted at them to stay. California law, he yelled, gave civilians a right to observe a police officer making an arrest, so long as they didn’t interfere. Newton played it up for the crowd. In a loud voice, he told the police officers, “If you try to shoot at me or if you try to take this gun, I’m going to shoot back at you, swine.” Although normally a black man with Newton’s attitude would quickly find himself handcuffed in the back of a police car, enough people had gathered on the street to discourage the officers from doing anything rash. Because they hadn’t committed any crime, the Panthers were allowed to go on their way.

The people who’d witnessed the scene were dumbstruck. Not even Bobby Seale could believe it. Right then, he said, he knew that Newton was the “baddest motherfucker in the world.” Newton’s message was clear: “The gun is where it’s at and about and in.” After the February incident, the Panthers began a regular practice of policing the police. Thanks to an army of new recruits inspired to join up when they heard about Newton’s bravado, groups of armed Panthers would drive around following police cars. When the police stopped a black person, the Panthers would stand off to the side and shout out legal advice.

Don Mulford, a conservative Republican state assemblyman from Alameda County, which includes Oakland, was determined to end the Panthers’ police patrols. To disarm the Panthers, he proposed a law that would prohibit the carrying of a loaded weapon in any California city. When Newton found out about this, he told Seale, “You know what we’re going to do? We’re going to the Capitol.” Seale was incredulous. “The Capitol?” Newton explained: “Mulford’s there, and they’re trying to pass a law against our guns, and we’re going to the Capitol steps.” Newton’s plan was to take a select group of Panthers “loaded down to the gills,” to send a message to California lawmakers about the group’s opposition to any new gun control.


THE PANTHERS’ METHODS provoked an immediate backlash. The day of their statehouse protest, lawmakers said the incident would speed enactment of Mulford’s gun-control proposal. Mulford himself pledged to make his bill even tougher, and he added a provision barring anyone but law enforcement from bringing a loaded firearm into the state capitol.

Republicans in California eagerly supported increased gun control. Governor Reagan told reporters that afternoon that he saw “no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons.” He called guns a “ridiculous way to solve problems that have to be solved among people of good will.” In a later press conference, Reagan said he didn’t “know of any sportsman who leaves his home with a gun to go out into the field to hunt or for target shooting who carries that gun loaded.” The Mulford Act, he said, “would work no hardship on the honest citizen.”

The fear inspired by black people with guns also led the United States Congress to consider new gun restrictions, after the summer of 1967 brought what the historian Harvard Sitkoff called the “most intense and destructive wave of racial violence the nation had ever witnessed.” Devastating riots engulfed Detroit and Newark. Police and National Guardsmen who tried to help restore order were greeted with sniper fire.

A 1968 federal report blamed the unrest at least partly on the easy availability of guns. Because rioters used guns to keep law enforcement at bay, the report’s authors asserted that a recent spike in firearms sales and permit applications was “directly related to the actuality and prospect of civil disorders.” They drew “the firm conclusion that effective firearms controls are an essential contribution to domestic peace and tranquility.”

Political will in Congress reached the critical point around this time. In April of 1968, James Earl Ray, a virulent racist, used a Remington Gamemaster deer rifle to kill Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee. King’s assassination—and the sniper fire faced by police trying to quell the resulting riots—gave gun-control advocates a vivid argument. Two months later, a man wielding a .22-caliber Iver Johnson Cadet revolver shot Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles. The very next day, Congress passed the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, the first federal gun-control law in 30 years. Months later, the Gun Control Act of 1968 amended and enlarged it.

Together, these laws greatly expanded the federal licensing system for gun dealers and clarified which people—including anyone previously convicted of a felony, the mentally ill, illegal-drug users, and minors—were not allowed to own firearms. More controversially, the laws restricted importation of “Saturday Night Specials”—the small, cheap, poor-quality handguns so named by Detroit police for their association with urban crime, which spiked on weekends. Because these inexpensive pistols were popular in minority communities, one critic said the new federal gun legislation “was passed not to control guns but to control blacks.”

INDISPUTABLY, FOR MUCH of American history, gun-control measures, like many other laws, were used to oppress African Americans. The South had long prohibited blacks, both slave and free, from owning guns. In the North, however, at the end of the Civil War, the Union army allowed soldiers of any color to take home their rifles. Even blacks who hadn’t served could buy guns in the North, amid the glut of firearms produced for the war. President Lincoln had promised a “new birth of freedom,” but many blacks knew that white Southerners were not going to go along easily with such a vision. As one freedman in Louisiana recalled, “I would say to every colored soldier, ‘Bring your gun home.’”

After losing the Civil War, Southern states quickly adopted the Black Codes, laws designed to reestablish white supremacy by dictating what the freedmen could and couldn’t do. One common provision barred blacks from possessing firearms. To enforce the gun ban, white men riding in posses began terrorizing black communities. In January 1866, Harper’s Weekly reported that in Mississippi, such groups had “seized every gun and pistol found in the hands of the (so called) freedmen” in parts of the state. The most infamous of these disarmament posses, of course, was the Ku Klux Klan.

IN RESPONSE TO the Black Codes and the mounting atrocities against blacks in the former Confederacy, the North sought to reaffirm the freedmen’s constitutional rights, including their right to possess guns. General Daniel E. Sickles, the commanding Union officer enforcing Reconstruction in South Carolina, ordered in January 1866 that “the constitutional rights of all loyal and well-disposed inhabitants to bear arms will not be infringed.” When South Carolinians ignored Sickles’s order and others like it, Congress passed the Freedmen’s Bureau Act of July 1866, which assured ex-slaves the “full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings concerning personal liberty … including the constitutional right to bear arms.”

That same year, Congress passed the nation’s first Civil Rights Act, which defined the freedmen as United States citizens and made it a federal offense to deprive them of their rights on the basis of race. Senator James Nye, a supporter of both laws, told his colleagues that the freedmen now had an “equal right to protection, and to keep and bear arms for self-defense.” President Andrew Johnson vetoed both laws. Congress overrode the vetoes and eventually made Johnson the first president to be impeached.

One prosecutor in the impeachment trial, Representative John Bingham of Ohio, thought that the only way to protect the freedmen’s rights was to amend the Constitution. Southern attempts to deny blacks equal rights, he said, were turning the Constitution—“a sublime and beautiful scripture—into a horrid charter of wrong.” In December of 1865, Bingham had proposed what would become the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Among its provisions was a guarantee that all citizens would be secure in their fundamental rights:
No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

The key phrase, in Bingham’s view, was privileges or immunities of citizens—and those “privileges or immunities,” he said, were “chiefly defined in the first eight amendments to the Constitution.” Jacob Howard of Michigan, the principal sponsor of Bingham’s amendment in the Senate, reminded his colleagues that these amendments guaranteed “the freedom of speech and of the press,” “the right to be exempt from unreasonable searches and seizures,” and “the right to keep and bear arms.”

Whether or not the Founding Fathers thought the Second Amendment was primarily about state militias, the men behind the Fourteenth Amendment—America’s most sacred and significant civil-rights law—clearly believed that the right of individuals to have guns for self-defense was an essential element of citizenship. As the Yale law professor Akhil Reed Amar has observed, “Between 1775 and 1866 the poster boy of arms morphed from the Concord minuteman to the Carolina freedman.”

The Fourteenth Amendment illustrates a common dynamic in America’s gun culture: extremism stirs a strong reaction. The aggressive Southern effort to disarm the freedmen prompted a constitutional amendment to better protect their rights. A hundred years later, the Black Panthers’ brazen insistence on the right to bear arms led whites, including conservative Republicans, to support new gun control. Then the pendulum swung back. The gun-control laws of the late 1960s, designed to restrict the use of guns by urban black leftist radicals, fueled the rise of the present-day gun-rights movement—one that, in an ironic reversal, is predominantly white, rural, and politically conservative.


TODAY, THE NRA is the unquestioned leader in the fight against gun control. Yet the organization didn’t always oppose gun regulation. Founded in 1871 by George Wingate and William Church—the latter a former reporter for a newspaper now known for hostility to gun rights, The New York Times—the group first set out to improve American soldiers’ marksmanship. Wingate and Church had fought for the North in the Civil War and been shocked by the poor shooting skills of city-bred Union soldiers.

In the 1920s and ’30s, the NRA was at the forefront of legislative efforts to enact gun control. The organization’s president at the time was Karl T. Frederick, a Princeton- and Harvard-educated lawyer known as “the best shot in America”—a title he earned by winning three gold medals in pistol-shooting at the 1920 Summer Olympic Games. As a special consultant to the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws, Frederick helped draft the Uniform Firearms Act, a model of state-level gun-control legislation. (Since the turn of the century, lawyers and public officials had increasingly sought to standardize the patchwork of state laws. The new measure imposed more order—and, in most cases, far more restrictions.)

Frederick’s model law had three basic elements. The first required that no one carry a concealed handgun in public without a permit from the local police. A permit would be granted only to a “suitable” person with a “proper reason for carrying” a firearm. Second, the law required gun dealers to report to law enforcement every sale of a handgun, in essence creating a registry of small arms. Finally, the law imposed a two-day waiting period on handgun sales.

The NRA today condemns every one of these provisions as a burdensome and ineffective infringement on the right to bear arms. Frederick, however, said in 1934 that he did “not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns. I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses.” The NRA’s executive vice president at the time, Milton A. Reckord, told a congressional committee that his organization was “absolutely favorable to reasonable legislation.” According to Frederick, the NRA “sponsored” the Uniform Firearms Act and promoted it nationwide. Highlighting the political strength of the NRA even back then, a 1932Virginia Law Review article reported that laws requiring a license to carry a concealed weapon were already “in effect in practically every jurisdiction.”

When Congress was considering the first significant federal gun law of the 20th century—the National Firearms Act of 1934, which imposed a steep tax and registration requirements on “gangster guns” like machine guns and sawed-off shotguns—the NRA endorsed the law. Karl Frederick and the NRA did not blindly support gun control; indeed, they successfully pushed to have similar prohibitive taxes on handguns stripped from the final bill, arguing that people needed such weapons to protect their homes. Yet the organization stood firmly behind what Frederick called “reasonable, sensible, and fair legislation.”

One thing conspicuously missing from Frederick’s comments about gun control was the Second Amendment. When asked during his testimony on the National Firearms Act whether the proposed law violated “any constitutional provision,” he responded, “I have not given it any study from that point of view.” In other words, the president of the NRA hadn’t even considered whether the most far-reaching federal gun-control legislation in history conflicted with the Second Amendment. Preserving the ability of law-abiding people to have guns, Frederick would write elsewhere, “lies in an enlightened public sentiment and in intelligent legislative action. It is not to be found in the Constitution.”

In the 1960s, the NRA once again supported the push for new federal gun laws. After the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 by Lee Harvey Oswald, who had bought his gun through a mail-order ad in the NRA’s American Rifleman magazine, Franklin Orth, then the NRA’s executive vice president, testified in favor of banning mail-order rifle sales. “We do not think that any sane American, who calls himself an American, can object to placing into this bill the instrument which killed the president of the United States.” Orth and the NRA didn’t favor stricter proposals, like national gun registration, but when the final version of the Gun Control Act was adopted in 1968, Orth stood behind the legislation. While certain features of the law, he said, “appear unduly restrictive and unjustified in their application to law-abiding citizens, the measure as a whole appears to be one that the sportsmen of America can live with.”

A GROWING GROUP OF rank-and-file NRA members disagreed. In an era of rising crime rates, fewer people were buying guns for hunting, and more were buying them for protection. The NRA leadership didn’t fully grasp the importance of this shift. In 1976, Maxwell Rich, the executive vice president, announced that the NRA would sell its building in Washington, D.C., and relocate the headquarters to Colorado Springs, retreating from political lobbying and expanding its outdoor and environmental activities.

Rich’s plan sparked outrage among the new breed of staunch, hard-line gun-rights advocates. The dissidents were led by a bald, blue-eyed bulldog of a man named Harlon Carter, who ran the NRA’s recently formed lobbying arm, the Institute for Legislative Action. In May 1977, Carter and his allies staged a coup at the annual membership meeting. Elected the new executive vice president, Carter would transform the NRA into a lobbying powerhouse committed to a more aggressive view of what the Second Amendment promises to citizens.

The new NRA was not only responding to the wave of gun-control laws enacted to disarm black radicals; it also shared some of the Panthers’ views about firearms. Both groups valued guns primarily as a means of self-defense. Both thought people had a right to carry guns in public places, where a person was easily victimized, and not just in the privacy of the home. They also shared a profound mistrust of law enforcement. (For years, the NRA has demonized government agents, like those in the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the federal agency that enforces gun laws, as “jack-booted government thugs.” Wayne LaPierre, the current executive vice president, warned members in 1995 that anyone who wears a badge has “the government’s go-ahead to harass, intimidate, even murder law-abiding citizens.”) For both the Panthers in 1967 and the new NRA after 1977, law-enforcement officers were too often representatives of an uncaring government bent on disarming ordinary citizens.

A sign of the NRA’s new determination to influence electoral politics was the 1980 decision to endorse, for the first time in the organization’s 100 years, a presidential candidate. Their chosen candidate was none other than Ronald Reagan, who more than a decade earlier had endorsed Don Mulford’s law to disarm the Black Panthers—a law that had helped give Reagan’s California one of the strictest gun-control regimes in the nation. Reagan’s views had changed considerably since then, and the NRA evidently had forgiven his previous support of vigorous gun control.

IN 2008, IN A LANDMARK ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that the government cannot ever completely disarm the citizenry. In District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court clearly held, for the first time, that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual’s right to possess a gun. In an opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia, the Court declared unconstitutional several provisions of the District’s unusually strict gun-control law, including its ban on handguns and its prohibition of the use of long guns for self-defense. Indeed, under D.C.’s law, you could own a shotgun, but you could not use it to defend yourself against a rapist climbing through your bedroom window.

Gun-rights groups trumpeted the ruling as the crowning achievement of the modern gun-rights movement and predicted certain victory in their war to end gun control. Their opponents criticized the Court’s opinion as right-wing judicial activism that would call into question most forms of gun control and lead inevitably to more victims of gun violence.

So far, at least, neither side’s predictions have come true. The courts have been inundated with lawsuits challenging nearly every type of gun regulation; in the three years since the Supreme Court’s decision, lower courts have issued more than 200 rulings on the constitutionality of gun control. In a disappointment to the gun-rights community, nearly all laws have been upheld.

The lower courts consistently point to one paragraph in particular from theHeller decision. Nothing in the opinion, Scalia wrote, should
be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.

This paragraph from the pen of Justice Scalia, the foremost proponent of constitutional originalism, was astounding. True, the Founders imposed gun control, but they had no laws resembling Scalia’s list of Second Amendment exceptions. They had no laws banning guns in sensitive places, or laws prohibiting the mentally ill from possessing guns, or laws requiring commercial gun dealers to be licensed. Such restrictions are products of the 20th century. Justice Scalia, in other words, embraced a living Constitution. In this, Heller is a fine reflection of the ironies and contradictions—and the selective use of the past—that run throughout America’s long history with guns.

IRISH WATER REVOLUTION CONNOLLY WILL BE THERE

James Connolly: 16Lives

 By Lorcan Collins  BOOKLINK

DIVIDE AND RULE CUTS BOTH WAYS IN IRELAND SCOTLAND

Ruling By Fooling “Home Rule on the Statute Book”

(1914)

---

From Irish Worker, 19 September 1914.
Transcribed by The James Connolly Society in 1997.

The greatest strategic move by the British Forces this week took place, not on the fields of Belgium or France, but on the floor of the House of Commons. In that fortress the forces of the enemy are too firmly entrenched to fear defeat, and therefore their strategic move was crowned with brilliant success. The problem was not how to defeat a nation in arms battling for all that makes life worth living, but how to fool a nation without arms into becoming the accomplice of its oppressor. And the strategic move in question is already being hailed as a great landmark of national progress.

As the reader guesses I am alluding to the great debate on Home Rule, to the great fight between Home Rulers and Unionists and the dramatic march-out of Mr. Bonar Law and his followers. And as the reader must also guess I believe the whole thing to have been a carefully-staged pantomime to fool Nationalist Ireland. All the evidence points in that direction. Listen. To any reader of the Irish Worker who can point out any real difference between the proposal of Messrs. Asquith and Redmond on the one hand and that of Bonar Law and Carson on the other I will give the first brass farthing with their name upon it I find floating down the Liffey on a grindstone.

Now, Mr. Printer, will you please put the proposals of the two parties side by side that the readers might get an opportunity of judging them apart from the lying rant of the Party Press:

CARSON’S PROPOSAL

That the Home Rule Bill should not be put on the statute book until the end of the war, and should then be considered along with an Amending Bill.

ASQUITH-REDMOND PROPOSAL

That the Home Rule Bill should be put on the statute book, but “no steps taken to put it into practical operation” till the end of the war, when an Amending Bill will be passed to “alter, modify and qualify” its provision.

Again I ask, will some person tell me please what is the difference? There is none! What, then, was the reason for the great ‘scene’ in the House of Commons?

The reason, simpleton, why the reason is plain. When Carson consented to encourage his Volunteers to enlist in return for a promise on the part of the Government that the Home Rule Bill would be hung up high and dry he had to agree not to betray the fact of the compact to the public lest it destroy the chances of recruiting in the Nationalist district. And for the same reason it was necessary that the Tories who are delighted at Asquith’s surrender should pretend to be indignant. The scene in the House and the alleged disappointment of the Tories will be a great help to recruiting. Lord Crewe declared


“He was quite confident that when the Government of Ireland Bill had been placed on the Statute Book there would be a rush to enlist in the army on the part of the whole of Ireland. (Ministerial cheers).”

And the matchless leader of the Irish race, John E. Redmond, alluding to the recruiting mission of Mr. Asquith, hastened to hold out the same hopes of an inexhaustible supply of Irish food for powder. He said


“The Premier had announced that he was going to address a meeting in Dublin. Let him beg him to go soon. He hoped to have the honour to stand on the platform beside him, and he could promise him that he would have an enthusiastic response to his appeal.”

The great American humorist, Artemus Ward, declared during the American Civil War that he was prepared to sacrifice all his wife’s relations in the sacred cause of the American Union. Our leaders are better than that. They are prepared to sacrifice all the sons of the poor, and all the soul and honour of their nation for the deferred promise of a shadow of liberty.

And so the great scene in the House of Commons was but a fresh staging of the old game of treachery and intrigue making its own price with compromise and weakness. That is understandable, but that compromise and weakness should masquerade as patriotism and statesmanship is for Irishmen a humiliating confession.

Home Rule is postponed until after the war. After the war the game will be entirely in the hands of Sir Edward Carson, according to the following words of Mr. Asquith


“It might be said that those whom Sir Edward Carson represented had been put at a disadvantage by the patriotic action they had taken. The employment of force for what was called the ‘coercion of Ulster’ was an absolutely unthinkable thing. As far as he and his colleagues were concerned it was a thing which they would never countenance or consider.”

These words were a plain intimation to the Orange forces and their leader that if they stand firm they will win. A hint they are surely wise enough to take.

Meanwhile the official Home Rule press and all the local J.P.’s., publicans, land-grabbers, pawnbrokers and slum landlords who control the United Irish League will strain every nerve in an endeavour to recruit for England’s army, to send forth more thousands of Irishmen and boys to manure with their corpses the soil of a foreign country, to lose their lives and their souls in the work of murdering men who never harboured an evil thought of Irish men or women, to expend in the degradation of a friendly nation that magnificent Irish courage which a wiser patriotism might better employ in the liberation of their own.

Yes, ruling by fooling, is a great British art – with great Irish fools to practice on.

ARTICLE LINK Ireland 'model' of 'divide & rule'

OTHER AGGREGATOR EXAMPLES:

Morag in Scotland said:

Have been aware of the divide an rule tactic since ma daddie sat me on his knee and told me the ways o’ the world. Sometimes it’s difficult though to keep the heid, especially when you come across MI5 YES voters who are racist, bordering on fascist. Anyway I will rise above it and leave that fight for the ballot box in 2016 after we gain independence



The divide-and- conquer tactic always works and cuts both ways.

Roseanne Archy


One would never guess from reading it that it was not so long ago that Britain ruled Palestine, or that she set in motion the Arab-Israel conflict in the first place, or that the conflict would not even exist without decades of British broken promises and odious divide-and rule maneuvers in the Middle East.

Triple Cross: How Britain Created the Arab-Israel Conflict


In the 19th century, talent flocked to cricket clubs, christened along racial lines by our divide-and- conquer colonisers: Sinhalese Sports Club, Tamil Union, Moors' Sports C.lub, Burgher Recreation Club and the perversely titled Nondescripts Cricket Club

Ruling By Fooling, James Connolly, IRELAND, SCOTLAND, DIVIDE AND RULE, CUTS BOTH WAYS, #indyref, uk politics, Irish Politics,

Divide and Rule

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


For the collection of novellas by L. Sprague de Camp, see Divide and Rule (collection).

In politics and sociology, divide and rule (or divide and conquer) (derived from Greek:διαίρει καὶ βασίλευε, diaírei kaì basíleue) is gaining and maintaining power by breaking up larger concentrations of power into pieces that individually have less power than the one implementing the strategy. The concept refers to a strategy that breaks up existing power structures and prevents smaller power groups from linking up.

The maxim divide et impera was attributed to Philip II of Macedon, and together with the maxim divide ut regnes were utilised by the Roman ruler Caesar and the Corsican emperorNapoleon. The example of Gabinius exists, parting the Jewish nation into five conventions, reported by Flavius Josephus in Book I, 169-170 of The Wars of the Jews (De bello Judaico).[1] Strabo also reports in Geography, 8.7.3[2] that the Achaean League was gradually dissolved under the Roman possession of the whole of Macedonia, owing to them not dealing with the several states in the same way, but wishing to preserve some and to destroy others.

In modern times, Traiano Boccalini cites "divide et impera" in La bilancia politica, 1,136 and 2,225 as a common principle in politics. The use of this technique is meant to empower the sovereign to control subjects, populations, or factions of different interests, who collectively might be able to oppose his rule. Machiavelli identifies a similar application to military strategy, advising in Book VI of The Art of War[3] (Dell'arte della guerra),[4] that a Captain should endeavor with every art to divide the forces of the enemy, either by making him suspicious of his men in whom he trusted, or by giving him cause that he has to separate his forces, and, because of this, become weaker.

The strategy of division and rule has been attributed to sovereigns ranging from Louis XI tothe Habsburgs. Edward Coke denounces it in Chapter I of the Fourth Part of the Institutes, reporting that when it was demanded by the Lords and Commons what might be a principal motive for them to have good success in Parliament, it was answered: "Eritis insuperabiles, si fueritis inseparabiles. Explosum est illud diverbium: Divide, & impera, cum radix & vertex imperii in obedientium consensus rata sunt." [You would be insuperable if you were inseparable. This proverb, Divide and rule, has been rejected, since the root and the summit of authority are confirmed by the consent of the subjects.] On the other hand, in a minor variation, Sir Francis Bacon wrote the phrase "separa et impera" in a letter to James Iof 15 February 1615. James Madison made this recommendation in a letter to Thomas Jefferson of 24 October 1787,[5] which summarized the thesis of The Federalist #10:[6]"Divide et impera, the reprobated axiom of tyranny, is under certain (some) qualifications, the only policy, by which a republic can be administered on just principles." In Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch by Immanuel Kant (1795), Appendix one, Divide et imperais the third of three political maxims, the others being Fac et excusa (Act now, and make excuses later) and Si fecisti, nega (when you commit a crime, deny it).[7]

Elements of this technique involve:
creating or encouraging divisions among the subjects to prevent alliances that could challenge the sovereign
aiding and promoting those who are willing to cooperate with the sovereign
fostering distrust and enmity between local rulers
encouraging meaningless expenditures that reduce the capability for political and military spending

Historically, this strategy was used in many different ways by empires seeking to expand their territories.

The concept is also mentioned as a strategy for market action in economics to get the most out of the players in a competitive market.



Contents [hide]
1 In the workplace
2 Examples
2.1 Africa
2.2 Asia
2.3 Europe
2.4 Indian subcontinent
2.5 Middle East
2.6 Mexico
3 See also
4 References
5 External links


In the workplace[edit]
Main article: Psychopathy in the workplace

Boddy found that "divide and conquer" was a common strategy by corporate psychopathsused as a smokescreen to help consolidate and advance their grip on power in the corporate hierarchy.[8]
Examples[edit]


[hide]This section has multiple issues. Please helpimprove it or discuss these issues on the talk page.

This section needs additional citations forverification. (November 2007)

The examples and perspective in this section may not represent a worldwide view of the subject.(November 2011)

This section possibly contains original research.(August 2007)



Africa[edit]

The divide and conquer strategy was used by foreign countries in Africa during the colonialand post-colonial period.
Germany and Belgium ruled Rwanda and Burundi in a colonial capacity. Germany used the strategy of divide and conquer by placing members of the already dominant Tutsiminority in positions of power. When Belgium took over colonial rule in 1916, the Tutsi and Hutu groups were rearranged according to race instead of occupation. Belgium defined "Tutsi" as anyone with more than ten cows or a long nose, while "Hutu" meant someone with less than ten cows and a broad nose. The socioeconomic divide between Tutsis and Hutus continued after independence and was a major factor in the Rwandan Genocide.
During British rule of Nigeria from 1900 to 1960, different regions were frequently reclassified for administrative purposes. The conflict between the Igbo and Hausa made it easier for the British to consolidate their power in the region.[citation needed][9]
Asia[edit]
At the same time the Mongols imported Central Asian Muslims to serve as administrators in China, the Mongols also sent Han Chinese and Khitans from China to serve as administrators over the Muslim population in Bukhara in Central Asia, using foreigners to curtail the power of the local peoples of both lands.[10]
Europe[edit]
Romans entered Macedonia from the south and defeated King Perseus of Macedon in the battle of Pydna in 168 BC. Macedonia was then divided into four republics that were heavily restricted from relations with one another and other Hellenic states. A ruthless purge occurred, with allegedly anti-Roman citizens being denounced by their compatriots and deported in large numbers.
Following the October revolution, the Bolsheviks engaged at various times in alliances with the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, some anarchists, and various non-Russian ethnic nationalist groups, against the White movement, Right Socialist-Revolutionaries, and other anarchist and ethnic nationalist groups. This was done to establish theCommunist Party of the Soviet Union (the Bolshevik party) as the sole legal party in theSoviet Union. Similar shifting alliances were played out amongst various dissident factions within the CPSU, such as the Workers Opposition and Left Communists, withJoseph Stalin and his supporters gaining absolute power within the party by the mid-1920s.
The Salami strategy of Hungarian Communist leader, Mátyás Rákosi.[citation needed]
Alliances with various parties played a role in the Nazi Machtergreifung andGleichschaltung, the seizure and consolidation of total power by the National Socialist German Workers Party. The Enabling Act, which banned the Communist and Social Democratic parties, was supported by the Nazis' coalition partner, the German National People's Party, as well as by the Centre Party. Several months later, all political parties in Germany were banned except for the NSDAP.
Indian subcontinent[edit]
This section requiresexpansion. (January 2007)


The strategy of "Divide and Rule" was employed by most imperial powers in Indian subcontinent. The British and French backed various Indian states in conflicts between each other, both as a means of undermining each other's influence and consolidating their authority.
Middle East[edit]
The Sykes-Picot Agreement
Mexico[edit]
Chiapas conflict
See also[edit]

British Raj
Counter-insurgency
Culture of fear
Criticism of identity politics
Infighting
Marginalization
Promoting adversaries
Salients, re-entrants and pockets#Motti
Social undermining
Toxic leader
Toxic workplace
Wedge issue
References[edit]

Jump up^ "Flavius Josephus, The Wars of the Jews, Book I, section 159". Perseus.tufts.edu. Retrieved 2011-08-27.
Jump up^ "Strabo, Geography, Book 8, chapter 7, section 1". Perseus.tufts.edu. Retrieved 2011-08-27.
Jump up^ http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au
Jump up^ http://www.intratext.com
Jump up^ "Constitutional Government: James Madison to Thomas Jefferson". Press-pubs.uchicago.edu. Retrieved 2011-08-27.
Jump up^ http://www.constitution.org
Jump up^ "Immanuel Kant: Perpetual Peace: Appendix I". Constitution.org. Retrieved 2011-08-27.
Jump up^ Boddy, C. R. Corporate Psychopaths: Organizational Destroyers (2011)
Jump up^ www.historyworld.net
Jump up^ BUELL, PAUL D. (1979). "SINO-KHITAN ADMINISTRATION IN MONGOL BUKHARA".Journal of Asian History. Vol. 13 (No. 2). Harrassowitz Verlag. pp. 137–8. JSTOR 41930343.

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