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Today's
Stories
November 29 / 30, 2003
Standard Schaefer
Unions
are the Answer to Supermarkets Woes
November 28, 2003
William S. Lind
Worse Than Crimes
David Vest
Turkey
Potemkin
Robert Jensen / Sam Husseini
New Bush Tape Raises Fears of Attacks
Wayne Madsen
Wag
the Turkey
Harold Gould
Suicide as WMD? Emile Durkheim Revisited
Gabriel Kolko
Vietnam
and Iraq: Has the US Learned Anything?
South Asia Tribune
The Story
of the Most Important Pakistan Army General in His Own Words
Website of the Day
Bush Draft
November 27, 2003
Mitchel Cohen
Why
I Hate Thanksgiving
Jack Wilson
An
Account of One Soldier's War
Stefan Wray
In the Shadows of the School of the Americas
Al Krebs
Food as Corporate WMD
Jim Scharplaz
Going Up Against Big Food: Weeding Out the Small Farmer
Neve Gordon
Gays
Under Occupation: Help Save the Life of Fuad Moussa
November 26, 2003
Paul de Rooij
Amnesty
International: the Case of a Rape Foretold
Bruce Jackson
Media
and War: Bringing It All Back Home
Stew Albert
Perle's
Confession: That's Entertainment
Alexander Cockburn
Miami and London: Cops in Two Cities
David Orr
Miami Heat
Tom Crumpacker
Anarchists
on the Beach
Mokhiber / Weissman
Militarization in Miami
Derek Seidman
Naming the System: an Interview with Michael Yates
Kathy Kelly
Hogtied
and Abused at Ft. Benning
Website of the Day
Iraq Procurement
November 25, 2003
Linda S. Heard
We,
the Besieged: Western Powers Redefine Democracy
Diane Christian
Hocus
Pocus in the White House: Of Warriors and Liberators
Mark Engler
Miami's
Trade Troubles
David Lindorff
Ashcroft's
Cointelpro
Website of the Day
Young McCarthyites of Texas
November 24, 2003
Jeremy Scahill
The
Miami Model
Elaine Cassel
Gulag
Americana: You Can't Come Home Again
Ron Jacobs
Iraq
Now: Oh Good, Then the War's Over?
Alexander Cockburn
Rupert Murdoch: Global Tyrant
November 14 / 23, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
Clintontime:
Was It Really a Golden Age?
Saul Landau
Words
of War
Noam Chomsky
Invasion
as Marketing Problem: Iraq War and Contempt for Democracy
Stan Goff
An Open Letter to GIs in Iraq: Hold on to Your Humanity
Jeffrey St. Clair
Bush Puts Out a Contract on the Spotted Owl
John Holt
Blue Light: Battle for the Sweetgrass Hills
Adam Engel
A DC Lefty in King George's Court: an Interview with Sam Smith
Joanne Mariner
In a Dark Hole: Moussaoui and the Hidden Detainees
Uri Avnery
The General as Pseudo-Dove: Ya'alon's 70 Virgins
M. Shahid Alam
Voiding the Palestinians: an Allegory
Juliana Fredman
Visions of Concrete
Norman Solomon
Media Clash in Brazil
Brian Cloughley
Is Anyone in the Bush Administration Telling the Truth?
William S. Lind
Post-Machine Gun Tactics
Patrick W. Gavin
Imagine
Dave Lindorff
Bush's
Brand of Leadership: Putting Himself First
Tom Crumpacker
Pandering to Anti-Castro Hardliners
Erik Fleming
Howard Dean's Folly
Rick Giombetti
Challenging the Witch Doctors of the New Imperialism: a Review
of Bush in Babylon
Jorge Mariscal
Las Adelitas, 2003: Mexican-American Women in Iraq
Chris Floyd
Logical Conclusions
Mickey Z.
Does William Safire Need Mental Help?
David Vest
Owed to the Confederate Dead
Ron Jacobs
Joe: the Sixties Most Unforgiving Film
Dave Zirin
Foreman and Carlos: a Tale of Two Survivors
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Albert, Greeder, Ghalib and Alam
November 13, 2003
Jack McCarthy
Veterans
for Peace Booted from Vet Day Parade
Adam Keller
Report
on the Ben Artzi Verdict
Richard Forno
"Threat Matrix:" Homeland Security Goes Prime-Time
Vijay Prashad
Confronting
the Evangelical Imperialists
November 12, 2003
Elaine Cassel
The
Supremes and Guantanamo: a Glimmer of Hope?
Col. Dan Smith
Unsolicited
Advice: a Reply to Rumsfeld's Memo
Jonathan Cook
Facility
1391: Israel's Guantanamo
Robert Fisk
Osama Phones Home
Michael Schwartz
The Wal-Mart Distraction and the California Grocery Workers Strike
John Chuckman
Forty
Years of Lies
Doug Giebel
Jessica Lynch and Saving American Decency
Uri Avnery
Wanted: a Sharon of the Left
Website of the Day
Musicians Against Sweatshops
November 11, 2003
David Lindorff
Bush's
War on Veterans
Stan Goff
Honoring
Real Vets; Remembering Real War
Earnest McBride
"His
Feet Were on the Ground": Was Steve McNair's Cousin Lynched?
Derek Seidman
Imperialism
Begins at Home: an Interview with Stan Goff
David Krieger
Mr. President, You Can Run But You Can't Hide
Sen. Ernest Hollings
My Cambodian Moment on the Iraq War
Dan Bacher
The Invisible Man Resigns
Kam Zarrabi
Hypocrisy at the Top
John Eskow
Born on Veteran's Day
Website of the Day
Left Hook
November 10, 2003
Robert Fisk
Looney
Toons in Rummyworld: How We Denied Democracy to the Middle East
Elaine Cassel
Papa's Gotta Brand New Bag (of Tricks): Patriot Act Spawns Similar
Laws Across Globe
James Brooks
Israel's New War Machine Opens the Abyss
Thom Rutledge
The Lost Gospel of Rummy
Stew Albert
Call Him Al
Gary Leupp
"They
Were All Non-Starters": On the Thwarted Peace Proposals
November 8/9, 2003
Kathleen and Bill Christison
Zionism
as Racist Ideology
Gabriel Kolko
Intelligence
for What?
The Vietnam War Reconsidered
Saul Landau
The
Bride Wore Black: the Policy Nuptials of Boykin and Wolfowitz
Brian Cloughley
Speeding Up to Nowhere: Training the New Iraqi Police
William Blum
The Anti-Empire Report:
A Permanent Occupation?
David Lindorff
A New Kind of Dancing in Iraq: from Occupation to Guerrilla War
Elaine Cassel
Bush's War on Non-Citizens
Tim Wise
Persecuting the Truth: Claims of Christian Victimization Ring
Hollow
Toni Solo
Robert Zoellick and "Wise Blood"
Michael Donnelly
Will the Real Ron Wyden Please Stand Up?
Mark Hand
Building a Vanguard Movement: a Review of Stan Goff's Full Spectrum
Disorder
Norman Solomon
War, Social Justice, Media and Democracy
Norman Madarasz
American Neocons and the Jerusalem Post
Adam Engel
Raising JonBenet
Dave Zirin
An Interview with George Foreman
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Albert and Greeder
November 7, 2003
Nelson Valdes
Latin
America in Crisis and Cuba's Self-Reliance
David Vest
Surely
It Can't Get Any Worse?
Chris Floyd
An Inspector
Calls: The Kay Report as War Crime Indictment
William S. Lind
Indicators:
Where This War is Headed
Elaine Cassel
FBI to Cryptome: "We Are Watching You"
Maria Tomchick
When Public Transit Gets Privatized
Uri Avnery
Israeli
Roulette
November 6, 2003
Ron Jacobs
With
a Peace Like This...
Conn Hallinan
Rumsfeld's
New Model Army
Maher Arar
This
is What They Did to Me
Elaine Cassel
A Bad
Day for Civil Liberties: the Case of Maher Arar
Neve Gordon
Captives
Behind Sharon's Wall
Ralph Nader and Lee Drutman
An Open Letter to John Ashcroft on Corporate Crime
November 5, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Just
a Match Away:
Fire Sale in So Cal
Dave Lindorff
A Draft in the Forecast?
Robert Jensen
How I Ended Up on the Professor Watch List
Joanne Mariner
Prisons as Mental Institutions
Patrick Cockburn
Saddam Not Organizing Iraqi Resistance
Simon Helweg-Larsen
Centaurs
from Dusk to Dawn: Remilitarization and the Guatemalan Elections
Josh Frank
Silencing "the Reagans"
Website of the Day
Everything You Wanted to Know About Howard Dean But Were Afraid
to Ask
November 4, 2003
Robert Fisk
Smearing
Said and Ashrawi: When Did "Arab" Become a Dirty Word?
Ray McGovern
Chinook Down: It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Vietnam
Woodruff / Wypijewski
Debating
the New Unity Partnership
Karyn Strickler
When
Opponents of Abortion Dream
Norman Solomon
The
Steady Theft of Our Time
Tariq Ali
Resistance
and Independence in Iraq
November 3, 2003
Patrick Cockburn
The
Bloodiest Day Yet for Americans in Iraq: Report from Fallujah
Dave Lindorff
Philly's
Buggy Election
Janine Pommy Vega
Sarajevo Hands 2003
Bernie Dwyer
An
Interview with Chomsky on Cuba
November 1 / 2,
2003
Saul Landau
Cui
Bono? The Cuba Embargo as Rip Off
Noam Chomsky
Empire of the Men of Best Quality
Bruce Jackson
Midge Decter and the Taxi Driver
Brian Cloughley
"Mow the Whole Place Down"
John Stanton
The Pentagon's Love Affair with Land Mines
William S. Lind
Bush's Bizarre Korean Gambit
Ben Tripp
The Brown Paste on Bush's Shoes
Christopher Brauchli
Divine Hatred
Dave Zirin
An Interview with John Carlos
Agustin Velloso
Oil in Equatorial Guinea: Where Trickle Down Doesn't Trickle
Josh Frank
Howard Dean and Affirmative Action
Ron Jacobs
Standing Up to El Diablo: the 1981 Blockade of Diablo Canyon
Strickler / Hermach
Liar, Liar Forests on Fire
David Vest
Jimmy T99 Nelson, a Blues Legend and the Songs that Made Him
Famous
Adam Engel
America, What It Is
Dr. Susan Block
Christy Canyon, a Life in Porn
Poets' Basement
Greeder, Albert & Guthrie
Congratulations
to CounterPuncher David Vest: Winner of 2 Muddy Awards for Best
Blues Pianist in the Pacific Northwest!
October 31, 2003
Lee Ballinger
Making
a Dollar Out of 15 Cents: The Sweatshops of Sean "P. Diddy"
Combs
Wayne Madsen
The
GOP's Racist Trifecta
Michael Donnelly
Settling for Peanuts: Democrats Trick the Greens, Treat Big Timber
Patrick Cockburn
Baghdad
Diary: Iraqis are Naming Their New Babies "Saddam"
Elaine Cassel
Coming
to a State Near You: The Matrix (Interstate Snoops, Not the Movie)
Linda Heard
An Arab View of Masonry
October 30, 2003
Forrest Hylton
Popular
Insurrection and National Revolution in Bolivia
Eric Ruder
"We Have to Speak Out!": Marching with the Military
Families
Dave Lindorff
Big
Lies and Little Lies: The Meaning of "Mission Accomplished"
Philip Adams
"Everyone is Running Scared": Denigrating Critics of
Israel
Sean Donahue
Howard Dean: a Hawk in a Dove's Cloak
Robert Jensen
Big Houses & Global Justice: A Moral Level of Consumption?
Alexander Cockburn
Paul
Krugman: Part of the Problem
October 29, 2003
Chris Floyd
Thieves
Like Us: Cheney's Backdoor to Halliburton
Robert Fisk
Iraq Guerrillas Adopt a New Strategy: Copy the Americans
Rick Giombetti
Let
Them Eat Prozac: an Interview with David Healy
The Intelligence Squad
Dark
Forces? The Military Steps Up Recruiting of Blacks
Elaine Cassel
Prosecutors
as Therapists, Phantoms as Terrorists
Marie Trigona
Argentina's War on the Unemployed Workers Movement
Gary Leupp
Every
Day, One KIA: On the Iraq War Casualty Figures
October 28, 2003
Rich Gibson
The
Politics of an Inferno: Notes on Hellfire 2003
Uri Avnery
Incident
in Gaza
Diane Christian
Wishing
Death
Robert Fisk
Eyewitness
in Iraq: "They're Getting Better"
Toni Solo
Authentic Americans and John Negroponte
Jason Leopold
Halliburton in Iran
Shrireen Parsons
When T-shirts are Verboten
Chris White
9/11
in Context: a Marine Veteran's Perspective
October 27,
2003
William A. Cook
Ministers
of War: Criminals of the Cloth
David Lindorff
The
Times, Dupes and the Pulitzer
Elaine Cassel
Antonin
Scalia's Contemptus Mundi
Robert Fisk
Occupational Schizophrenia
John Chuckman
Banging Your Head into Walls
Seth Sandronsky
Snoops R Us
Bill Kauffman
George
Bush, the Anti-Family President
October 25 / 26,
2003
Robert Pollin
The
US Economy: Another Path is Possible
Jeffrey St. Clair
Outsourcing US Guided Missile Technology to China
James Bunn
Plotting
Pre-emptive Strikes
Saul Landau
Should Limbaugh Do Time?
Ted Honderich
Palestinian Terrorism, Morality & Germany
Thomas Nagy
Saving the Army of Peace
Christopher Brauchli
Between Bush and a Lobotomy: Killing Endangered Species for Profit
Laura Carlsen
Latin America's Archives of Terror
Diane Christian
Evil Acts & Evil Actors
Muqtedar Khan
Lessons from the Imperial Adventure in Iraq
John Feffer
The Tug of War on the Korea Peninsula
Brian Cloughley
Iraq War Memories are Made of Lies
Benjamin Dangl
and Kathryn Ledebur
An Uneasy Peace in Bolivia
Karyn Strickler
Down
with Big Brother's Spying Eyes
Noah Leavitt
Legal Globalization
John Stanton
Hitler's Ghost Haunts America
Mickey Z.
War of the Words
Adam Engel
Tractatus Ridiculous
Poets' Basement
Curtis, Subiet and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Project Last Stand
October 24, 2003
Kurt Nimmo
Ashcroft's
War on Greenpeace
Lenni Brenner
The Demographics of American Jews
Jeffrey St. Clair
Rockets,
Napalm, Torpedoes and Lies: the Attack on the USS Liberty Revisited
Sarah Weir
Cover-up of the Israeli Attack on the US Liberty
David Krieger
WMD Found in DC: Bush is the Button
Mohammed Hakki
It's Palestine, Stupid!: Americans and the Middle East
Harry Browne
Northern
Ireland: the Agreement that Wasn't
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
|
Weekend
Edition
November 29 / 30, 2003
"What Should
I Wish to Live For?"
On
the Anniversary of the Death of Theobald Wolfe Tone
By PETER LINEBAUGH
On 19 November 1798 the prison surgeon (a French
émigré) whispered over the severely weakened body
of Wolfe Tone that should he attempt to move or speak, death
would arrive instantly. Overhearing the welcome news, Tone thanked
the sawbones and replied, having already written farewell to
his wife and children, "What should I wish to live for?"
and the first, paramount leader of the struggle for an independent
Irish republic duly expired, gracious to the last.
The death prepared for the extinction
of the name of Ireland as a nation by the Act of Union forming
the United Kingdom. His son describes the subsequent mood not
unlike that of Israel in our day or the Ohio river valley two
hundred years ago. "The next day was passed in a kind of
stupor. A cloud or portentous awe seemed to hang over the city
of Dublin. The apparatus of military and despotic authority
was every where displayed; no man dared to trust his next neighbor,
nor one of the pale citizens to betray, by look or word, his
feelings or sympathy." They hid their evil complicity in
a debauch of frightened greed.
Wolfe Tone was born in 1763 in St Bride's
Street, just behind Dublin Castle, and thirty-five years later
he died in the Provost's Prison in the same neighborhood. His
mother was the daughter of a captain in the West India trade;
his father was a coach-maker. He was not a proletarian, but nor
was he far from it. He was the oldest of sixteen children.
His mother converted to Protestantism when he was eight years
old. The children had a 'wild spirit of adventure.' Three died
taking up  arms against England, a fourth
served in Dutch navy and later with the Americans in the war
of 1812, a fifth dabbled in espionage for the French and died
of yellow fever in Santo Domingo. A lazy student he went to
a Latin school to prepare him for Trinity College which he entered
in 1781 and excelled in the Historical Society, the debating
society formed by Edmund Burke.
In August 1791 as the slaves in Haiti
revolted, Wolfe Tone published An Argument on Behalf of the
Catholics of Ireland, which joined half a dozen others in
the age of manifestoes - Paine, Sièyes, Equiano, Wollstonecraft,
Spence, Thelwall--expressing a new prose, a new politics, a new
class, and new thinking with a lucidity arising from its purpose
which was the destruction of an odious regime and iniquitous
civilization. Couldn't they only get rid of capitalism, while
they were at it?
In Ireland then the poor people were
Catholic by and large, while the powerful were ascendant Protestants.
Wolfe Tone therefore addressed the Protestants of Ireland calling
for the extension of the franchise. The grounding of the argument
for Catholic liberty was this: "Are we not men, as ye are,
stamped with the image of our maker, walking erect, beholding
the same light, breathing the same air as Protestants. Hath
not a Catholic hands; hath not a Catholic eyes, dimensions, organs,
passions? Fed with the same food, hurt by the same weapons,
healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same summer
and winter, as a Protestant is. If ye prick us, do we not bleed?
If ye tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not
die? And if ye injure us, shall we not revenge?"
Catholics were not to be excluded from "the communion of
our natural rights."
The main fear of the Protestants was
"the resumption of Catholic forfeitures; and of course setting
the property of the kingdom afloat." He argued that the
old dispossessed families were "in penury and ignorance
at the spade and the plough." The Catholic middle class,
since repeal of Penal Laws, had become tenants and merchants,
and would join the Protestant interest against such confusion.
Tone replaced Edmund Burke's son as agent of the Dublin Catholic
Committee. "It is wonderful with what zeal, spirit, activity
and secrecy all things are conducted," he wrote of this
period of intense, happy organizing.
Inspired by the French Revolution he
helped form the United Irishmen, Catholic and Presbyterian alike.
With the English declaration of war (1793) against France and
its revolutionary principles, the full weight of repression fell
on the United Irish--prison, banning of the Volunteers, outlawing
of conventions. The United Irish were driven underground, and
Wolfe Tone into exile.
He turned flight into a glorious mission
to enlist French help, a revolutionary embassy, sponsored by
Catholics in Dublin and Presbyterians in Belfast. Before leaving
he ascended Cave Hill with spectacular views over Belfast and
much of Ulster (on a clear day) and swore with his comrades of
the United Irishmen "never to desist in our efforts until
we had subverted the authority of England over our country, and
asserted our independence." This is part of his answer
to the question, "what should I wish to live for?"
When Wolfe Tone and his wife and two
children and his sister and his younger brother boarded the Cincinnatus
in Belfast harbor to share a cabin six foot by eight for a six
weeks' voyage with three hundred other emigrants, they embarked
on a central experience of their age. The oppressed were islanders,
and so were the oppressors: the ship therefore became the emblem
of all rule and the epitome of every exploitation. A week shy
of north America their ship was stopped by three frigates of
the Royal Navy and boarded by the hated press gang. All the
deckhands and 48 of the passengers were then forcibly impressed
by the British. Wearing a sailor's trousers rather than an officer's
breeches (thus a "sans-culottes") Tone himself would
have been impressed too had it not been for the expostulations
of his sister Mary and wife Matilda.
It's good to remember these facts this
week. If you can't attend the Bush-Blair meeting in London you
can go to the movies - The Master and Commander just opened
- and meditate on styles of the anglo ruling class in the midst
of noisy, soft-focus maritime violence. It is an exciting, counter-revolutionary
movie. Wolfe Tone acted as ship's physician, and despite overcrowding
and lack of fresh water, he lost only one. We could thus compare
Tone to the fictional Irish ship's surgeon, Maturin, who plays
the scientist and healer in against "Lucky Jack" Aubrey,
the belligerent ship's captain. In September 1795 a leading United
Irishman noted that 25,000 of the best men of Ireland were sent
to the West Indies, and with the inherent, unintended irony of
political economy observed that such a loss will make provisions
more plentiful in Ireland and the demand for boots and shoes
put more to work.
In Ireland Wolfe Tone had written favorably
of the American bill of rights. Classical republicanism provided
the rhetoric of opposition--the good of the commonweal, restraint
on private interest, civic virtue. The republic was a dispensation
to replace monarchy, as one mode of production might replace
another to "establish a system of just and rational liberty
on the ruins of the thrones and despots of Europe." He
saw the struggle in America as the same as that in Ireland, aristocracy
of wealth against democracy of the people. He associated with
the Irish around the democratic newspaper, Aurora.
In August 1795 he landed in Wilmington
with six hundred books. He lived in West Chester whose Ancient
Order of Hibernians division still carries his name. It is the
hometown of Bayard Rustin, the gay Afro Am quaker who organized
the 1963 March on Washington ("my activism [sprang] from
the concept of a single human family and the belief that all
members of that family are equal"), as well as the outstanding
Marine Corps general, Smedley Butler--"I was a racketeer
for capitalism." Westchester had fifty houses, court house,
gaol, and Catholic Church. Then they moved to Downingstown.
It was a sweltering summer. Yellow fever had carried off a tenth
of the Philadelphia population a year or two earlier.
His first impression of the people of
Philadelphia, "a churlish, unsocial race, totally absorbed
in making money," was unimproved by further impressions.
"I do believe from my very soul that Washington is a very
honest man But he is a high-flying aristocrat." Washington
and his allies pursued policies "to bring in more dollars
to the chests of the Mercantile Peerage of America." He
wrote his friend, Thomas Russell, that "the directors of
the banks went round and insinuated pretty plainly that those
who refused [to heed their wishes] should remember their discounts,"
and Washington did. Tone loathed America, and its "abominable
selfishness of spirit." Americans were "the most disgusting
race, eaten up with all the vice of commerce and that vilest
of all pride, the pride of the purse."
His strictures against America are all
but all omitted in the Life which his son published in
two volumes in Washington D.C. in 1826. This deprived Irish Americans
with the important hesitations, if not warnings, to the American
embrace. "I bless God I am no American," he wrote to
Russell. (Bayard Rustin said something similar:"I fought
for many years against being Americ an--in my speech, in my manners,
everything.") Poor Tone was tormented by the thought that
his daughter might have to marry one.
Thus, American capitalism was not to
live for. What about the multiculture? As for the middle ground
or frontier where red, white, and black mixed, he called it "the
back." He was given an introduction to judge Edwards of
Philadelphia who possessed of huge tracts of land requiring settlers,
and was recruiting Irish. He wrote Russell after his banker dissuaded
him from his first idea, "As I have no great talent for
the tomahawk, I have therefore given up going into the woods."
In Armagh the Orange Order led a campaign of terror which succeeded
in large-scale dispossession of Catholic peasants, comparable
to Sharon's action on the West Bank and the dispossession of
the Palestinians or to the militia in the Ohio River valley responsible
for the massacres of the Shawnee. The 'frontier' is a terror
zone. Wolfe Tone saw this clearly in Ireland, as with bated
breath he studied the rise of the Defenders, but not in Pennsylvania.
No evidence has yet been found of his relations with Volney,
or Cobbett, or exiles from Haiti.
On New Year's 1796 he sailed from New
York for le Havre where he disembarked a month later under the
nom de guerre "James Smith." He wrote a novel
and journals where we find his irony, fondness for self-mockery,
impatience with anything that looks like humbug or pretentiousness;
his sense of fun and gaiety; his love of opera, ballet, theatre;
his gift for friendship. His embassy was to agitate from bureau
to bureau. A small force ready to land in Belfast. This he
called the revolutionary plan, "that is to say I reckon
only on the Sans-culottes." He refused to act the part of
the subaltern. Tone proposed landing at a point near in England
and then dashing to London. What Tone wants from the French is
a point d'appui, a starting-point, that Archimedian fulcrum
simple in itself but able to move mountains, or give the Brits
the toss.
Irish sailors in the Royal Navy were
to be offered increased pay and the right to elect their own
officers, under proclamations issued by the United Irish, argued
Tone. He considered abandoning corporal punishment. The arguments
were confirmed by the mutinies of 1797. The militia in Ireland
would be offered a provision of land. The "immediate confiscation
of every shilling of English property in Ireland." He wrote
the French ambassador "for the first time in six hundred
years united among themselves and all sects and parties save
the aristocracy and the rich join in the utmost hatred and abhorrence
of England." "It is evident from the general sentiment
of the lower classes of the people that it will be impossible
Ireland can long remain in her present situation. They all look
to the French, and consider them as fighting their battles."
Already in 1794 he understood the revolutionary
dynamic to the left and the enlistment in the process of ever
increasing numbers of people. This social movement was reflected
in the revolutionary's thinking. In 1794 he wrote, "the
power of these people being founded on property, the first convulsion
would level it with the dust." In 1796 he told the French
that "the revolution was not to be made for the people of
property." He was fully aware of the military necessity
of making requisitions on the one hand and the gallows on the
other, and nevertheless concluded, "If the men of property
will not support us, they must fall; we can support ourselves
by the aid of that numerous and respectable class of the community,
the men of no property."
He comprehended the class war. "The
Irish aristocracy are putting themselves in a state of nature
with the people, and let them take the consequences. They show
no mercy, and they deserve none." "Our unfortunate
and misguided peasantry have become more outrageous; neither
the gaol nor the gibbet deter them; they even meet death with
firmness." Two regiments mutinied in Ireland against service
in the West Indies.
The story of the mutinies aboard these
violent vectors of globalization is kept quiet in The Master
and Commander where the voice of the mastered and commanded
is provided by decrepit old geezer who leads the crew with a
mangled Old Testament version of Jonah and Satan, as far from
Blake or C.L.R. James as you could imagine. Indeed neither Mariners,
Renegades, and Castaways, nor Melville, whether in White
Jacket, or Moby Dick, or Billy Budd, finds
even an echo in this movie. Melville referred to the crews as
an Anacharsis Clootz delegation, referring to the hippie-like
episode in the French Revolution when the author of The Republic
of Mankind invaded the constituent assembly with a cosmopolitan
crew of Russians, Poles, Indians, Arabs, Chaldeans, &c. In
the age of the birth of nations the ship was also the midwife
of cosmopolitanism. The bas-relief at the foot of the Nelson
plinth in Trafalgar Square represents more ethnic diversity than
this movie whose range of human hue about equals that found in
the massive, heroic, history paintings in the Queen's Dressing
Room of the Houses of Parliament--where the sailors are all white,
and none Irish. We know that a fifth of Nelson's fleet was black.
To make the contempt of the people absolutely
clear, the old man had recently a frontal lobotomy, and part
of his brain replaced with a large coin. The person with money
on the brain, however, is "Lucky Jack" Aubrey, the
captain--'the prize' is his last word on boarding the enemy.
The film of global counter-revolution in the week of the FTAA
in Miami. It is a far cry from la république universelle
advocated by the ambassador of the human race, as
Clootz called himself, who actually gave a testimony to
a man from Mesopotamia as "a free man of the earth."
Let me not flog a dead horse. Wolfe
Tone enjoyed a sea yarn as well as any. Indeed he wrote on the
subject. "Battles and victories are fine things to read
and hear tell of, and, for my own part, I like stories of that
kind as well as another, but never could learn what good came
to the poor people by a battle or a victory." It
was a brilliant essay in navalist deconstruction written as
"A Liberty Weaver" in 1793. "Many of us formerly,
he continued, "could take a turn aboard a privateer or man
of war for a year or two and then we had a chance of picking
up a little prize money but [now] there is no such thing--all
wooden legs and no gold chains."
Wolfe Tone deliberated with the French
Directory over the readiness of the sailors of the Royal Navy
to mutiny. Tone learned that on one of the frigates 210 of the
220 men on board were Irish. Tone saws coffles of chained and
handcuffed recruits dragged from their homes through the countryside.
Wolfe Tone did not build from the sailors' patriotism but from
his passions and interests. He did not deceive himself in thinking
that brutalization was sufficient preparation for leadership.
The idea of "debauching the Irish seamen in the British
navy is in my mind flat nonsense" though often proposed
by the French. Within a year the fleet was flying the red flag
of the floating republic at the Nore. Three score hangings put
an end to the mutiny, with the great and long-lasting victory
that sixteen, not fourteen ounces shall comprise the pursers'
pound.
Tone received a commission in the French
army, "Citoyen Wolfe Tone, Chef de Brigade in the service
of the republic" and he sailed on the Hoche with
the expedition to invade Ireland in 1798. His ship "was
soon surrounded by four sail of the line and a frigate, and began
one of the most obstinate and desperate engagements which have
ever been fought on the ocean. During six hours, she sustained
the fire of the whole fleet, till her masts and rigging were
swept away, her scuppers flowed with blood, her wounded filled
the cock pit, her shattered ribs yawned at each new stroke and
let in five feet of water in the hold, her rudder was carried
off, and she floated a dismantled wreck on the waters; her sails
and cordage hung in shreds, nor could she reply with a single
gun from her dismantled batteries to the unabating cannonade
of the enemy." Tone commanded one of the batteries and
fought with utmost desperation. He was unrecognized until a
leader of the Derry Orangemen a college fellow student saw him
at dinner. When he was placed in shackles, he defiantly said
"I feel prouder to wear these chains than if I was decorated
with the star and garter of England."
His plea was to be shot by firing squad,
a soldier's death with honor. The request was denied; he was
to die the death of a traitor. Cornwallis, however, somewhat
mitigated the punishment: his skull was not to be piked in a
public place. Wolfe Tone took a knife to his own throat, perhaps
to gain time for a legal appeal. Friends or family were not permitted
to visit him. There was no coroner's inquest. The authorities
were reluctant to acknowledge that he was wounded. "As
for what passed within the Provost's Prison, it must remain forever
among the guilty and bloody mysteries of that pandemonium,"
wrote his son who did not consider it suicide: "it was merely
the resolution of a noble mind to disappoint, by his own act,
the brutal ferocity of his enemies, and avoid the indignity of
their touch." Tom Bartlett considers it an open question
whether he intended to commit suicide, in contrast to Marianne
Elliott who says it's indisputable. Bartlett argues that had
Tone intended to kill himself the time to have done so was aboard
the furious action on the Hoche. Tone's mistake was that
he cut too deeply, hence his remark, "I am sorry I have
been so bad an anatomist."
Wolfe Tone accepted the chances of war,
he "braved the terrors of the ocean covered as I knew it
to be with the triumphant fleets of that power which it was my
glory and my duty to oppose" "I have courted poverty;
I have left a beloved wife, unprotected, and children whom I
adored, fatherless. After such sacrifices, in a cause which
I have always conscientiously considered as the cause of justice
and freedom--it is no great effort, at this day, to add 'the
sacrifice of life.'
Before setting sail for his last attempt
at liberating Ireland, twice Tone expressed his wish to cheat
the British gallows with the simple prayer, "please God,
they should never have his poor bones to pick." Yeats picked
up the theme in his poem, "Sixteen Dead Men," about
those shot in the Easter Rising of 1916.
How could you dream they'd listen
That have an ear alone
For those new comrades they have found,
Lord Edward and Wolfe Tone,
Or meddle with our give and take
That converse bone to bone?
What is the conversation bone to bone?
It refers to unfinished business: the Chaldeans, the independent
republic, Mesopotamia, the election of officers, the "back,"
American capitalism. It is a conversation between this and the
past generations. The dead are unquiet, not silent sentries
to immortality or nullity. As pertains to unfinished business,
whether those in the conversation are alive or dead is the least
of it. The pith and marrow of the conversation arises from recognition,
choice, and courage. "What should I wish to live for?"
indeed!
Peter Linebaugh
teaches history at the University of Toledo. He is the author
of two of CounterPunch's favorite books, The
London Hanged and (with Marcus Rediker) The
Many-Headed Hydra: the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic.
He can be reached at: plineba@yahoo.com
FURTHER READING
Jervis Anderson, Bayard
Rustin: Troubles I've Seen (HarperCollins: New York,
1997)
Thomas Bartlett (ed.), The
Life of Wolfe Tone Compiled and arranged by William Theobald
Wolfe Tone (Lilliput Press: Dublin, 1998)
Thomas Bartlett, David Dickson, Dáire
Keogh, Kevin Whelan, (eds.), 1798--a Bicentenary Perspective
(Four Courts: Dublin, 2003)
Smedley D. Butler, War
is a Racket (Feral House: Los Angeles, 1935 and 2003)
Marianne Elliott, Wolfe
Tone: Prophet of Irish Independence (Yale University
Press: New Haven, 1989)
C.L.R. James, Mariners,
Renegades, and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the
World We Live In (Allison & Busby: London, 1985)
James Smyth, The
Men of No Property: Irish Radicals and Popular Politics in the
late 18th century (St Martin's: New York, 1992)
Albert Soboul, "Preface" to
Anacharsis Cloots Oeuvres, 3 vols. (Munich: Kraus, 1980)
Weekend
Edition Features for Nov. 14 / 23, 2003
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Is Anyone in the Bush Administration Telling the Truth?
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Bush's
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