The NY Times piece was disgusting, if predictable, as are contemporary efforts, with the apparent complicity of Sinn Fein, to erect a memorial to the British soldiers who died in the suppression of the Rising next to a monument to the republican martyrs, and the replacement in Belfast's Catholic Falls Road of a portrait of one of the 1980 hunger strikers with a painting of Sir Edward Carson, the head of the Ulster Volunteers, which led the pre-WWI resistance to Irish home rule. We must be even-handed, you know, if we are ever to put these antiquated sectarian squabbles behind us!
As to the second point: One enduring value of the entire Irish experience is its refutation of all arguments--by colonizers or colonized--that colonial oppression has anything intrinsically to do with race. All of the horrors perpetrated by British and other colonial powers on black, brown and yellow people--including notions of their innate inferiority-- were first and continuously visited upon a people that was every bit as white as they were.
Jim Creegan
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The New York Times had a nauseating piece on the Easter Rising by "Lawrence Downes, a member of The New York Times Editorial Board"
A sample -
"Leave it to Sinn Fein...[in] one of its videos about the Rising...the faces of Padraig Pearse, Tom Clarke, Thomas MacDonagh and the other rebel leaders, and their dates of execution. 'They delivered a blow to Britain?s global domination from which it never recovered,' a title card reads. The wisdom of that blow was debatable then, and is debated still. "
Barf!
Of course this fellow pining for the days of the British Empire, on which the sun never set and the blood never dried, is "two generations removed from Ireland...raised Roman Catholic" etc.
Of course in a sense it is comforting that a century later, the Rising is still something the New York Times Editorial Board sees as something threatening. Bernadette Devlin McAliskey has had a lot good to say about this from the 1960s until today in terms of why the continuing struggle is important in the worldwide context. It's a national struggle led by that nation's working class against one of the central pillars of imperialism. What's probably truly threatening is that it is easy to paint an Arab, Arabic speaking bearded Muslim fundamentalist anti-imperialist in Guantanamo Bay as something alien, but the attempts to paint the white, English-speaking, soc-dem/socialist faces of Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness, Bobby Sands, Mair?ad Farrell, Dominic McGlinchey etc. as something alien runs into more trouble.
-- Adelson