This weak marks the second anniversary of internment. In the past two years the record of the British left in relation to the struggle in Ireland has suffered from serious weaknesses.
In particular, there has been a great deal of confusion about the nature of the struggle in the North and the role of the Protestant working class. Many sections of the left seem to think that the Protestant working class is little different from the British working class - only a little more "backward".
The whole struggle in Ireland is thus reduced to a devilish trick by the ruling class, which has managed to split the Irish working class along religious" and 'sectarian" lines. The task for revolut ionaries, then, is to bring enlightenment to these poor benighted souls and free them of their illusions and prejudices. In the meantime, the nationalist population should not aggravate" the situation by doing anything foolish such as taking up arms.
A few days before the northern Ireland assembly elections former Stormont Prin Minister Lord O 'Neill said on British television that the failure of the assembly would throw northern Ireland into a situation like that of 1912.
Clearly the Orange ruling class and their supporters remember the experiences of 1912.
Unfortunately the left and the working class movement in Britain does not have such a good memory, and has never properly learned the lesson of this crucial period.
La 1912 the Orange lodges throughout Ulster began to prepare themseives for civil war, under the leadershup of Sir Edward Carson, a Westminster MP and former Cabinet Minister.
As one ruling class historian has said, thuse years brought Britain nearer to civil war than at any time since the seventeenth contury...
Had ibeir been no European war in the summer of 1914, Britain might well have relapsed into an anarchy from which the only rescue would have been a dictatorship either of the belt or the right. Britain might have produced her own Lenin or Mussolini some years before either emerged on the mainland of Europe.
The years leading up to 191? were marked by a great social upheaval: massive strike waves, the growth of a mass movement for women's rights, a series of Parliamentary crites that split the ruling class and weakened the power of the House of Lords. Ail these were capped Red Weekly 27 July 1973 Page 4 by the Irish crisis, which was rapidly moving to a head during the same period. WORKERS ARM in Ireland the working class was under arms, organised in the Irish Citizen Army of Larkin and Connolly, described by Lenin as the first Red Army in Europe. Moreover, the revolutionary layers of the nationalist petty bourgepisie armed themselves in the Irish Volunteers led by Padraic Pearse.
Among the Protestants of the north-cast. imperialisee also armed itsell. This produced The Cister Volunteer Force, a mass movement of all cissses, including workers, organ ised as an open weapon of counter-revolution. As Lenin put it. the LiVF was organised by revulutionaries of the right. It was thus a forerunner of the fascist movements of the postwar period.
CAPITALIST BACKERS The UVF was backed by the most powerfu finance capitalists in Britain, indeed in the world. Lord Rothschild was one of its main contributors. Waldort Astor, the American millionaire who biter bought Ter Ties, and whose tamuy was to be at the contre of Ulte pro-Hitler Cliveden Set.' was another. The entire City of London stood behind Carson. Through the Rhodes Trust and Sir Leander Start Jameson (a notorious imperialist adventures, who had lead the "Jameson Raid" which led up to the Boer War in South Africa), the Britist slavo-masters who ran the South As the brief historical study below shows, this picture is nonsense. The Protestant working class