Now
Available from
CounterPunch for Only $10.50 (S/H Included)
Today's
Stories
October
21, 2003
Uri Avnery
The
Beilin Agreement
October
20, 2003
Standard
Schaefer
Chile's
Failed Economy: an Interview with Michael Hudson
Chris
Floyd
Circus Maximus: Arnie, Enron and Bush Maul California
Mark Hand
Democrats Seek to Disappear Chomsky
& Nader
John &
Elaine Mellencamp
Peaceful
World
Elaine
Cassel
God's
General Unmuzzled
October
18 / 19, 2003
Robert
Pollin
Clintonomics:
the Hollow Boom
Gary Leupp
Israel, Syria and Stage Four in the Terror War
Saul Landau
Day of the Gropenfuhrer
Bruce Anderson
The California Recall
John Gershman
Bush in Asia: What a Difference a Decade Makes
Nelson P. Valdes
Bush, Electoral Politics and Cuba's "Illicit Sex Trade"
Kurt Nimmo
Shock Therapy and the Israeli Scenario
Tom Gorman
Al Franken and Al-Shifa
Brian
Cloughley
Public Propaganda and the Iraq War
Joanne Mariner
A New Way to Kill Tigers
Denise
Low
The Cancer of Sprawl
Mickey Z.
The Reverend of Doom
John Chuckman
US Missiles for Israeli Nukes?
George Naggiar
A Veto of Public Diplomacy
Alison
Weir
Death Threats in Berkeley
Benjamin Dangl
Bolivian Govt. Falling Apart
Ron Jacobs
The Politics of Bob Dylan
Fidel Castro
A Review of Garcia Marquez's Memoir
Adam Engel
I Hope My Corpse Gives You the Plague
Poets' Basement
Jones, Albert, Guthrie and Greeder
October
17, 2003
Stan Goff
Piss
On My Leg: Perception Control and the Stage Management of War
Newton
Garver
Bolivia
in Turmoil
Standard
Schaefer
Grocery Unions Under Attack
Ben Terrall
The Ordeal of the Lockheed 52
Ron Jacobs
First Syria, Then Iran
David
Lindorff
Michael
Moore Proclaims Mumia Guilty
October
16, 2003
Marjorie
Cohn
Bush
Gunning for Regime Change in Cuba
Gary Leupp
"Getting Better" in Iraq
Norman
Solomon
The US Press and Israel: Brand Loyalty and the Absence of Remorse
Rush Limbaugh
The 10 Most Overrated Athletes of All Time
Lenni
Brenner
I
Didn't Meet Huey Newton. He Met Me
Website of the Day
Time Tested Books
October
15, 2003
Sunil
Sharma / Josh Frank
The
General and the Governor: Two Measures of American Desperation
Forrest
Hylton
Dispatch
from the Bolivian War: "Like Animals They Kill Us"
Brian
Cloughley
Those
Phony Letters: How Bush Uses GIs to Spread Propaganda About Iraq
Ahmad
Faruqui
Lessons
of the October War
Uri Avnery
Three
Days as a Living Shield
Website
of the Day
Rank and File: the New Unity Partnership Document
JoAnn
Wypijewski
The
New Unity Partnership:
A Manifest Destiny for Labor
October 14, 2003
Eric Ridenour
Qibya
& Sharon: Anniversary of a Massacre
Elaine
Cassel
The
Disgrace That is Guantanamo
Robert
Jensen
What the "Fighting Sioux" Tells Us About White People
David Lindorff
Talking Turkey About Iraq
Patrick
Cockburn
US Troops Bulldoze Crops
VIPS
One Person Can Make a Difference
Toni Solo
The CAFTA Thumbscrews
Peter
Linebaugh
"Remember
Orr!"
Website
of the Day
BRIDGES
October
11 / 13, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
Kay's
Misleading Report; CIA/MI-6 Syrian Plot; Dershowitz Flaps Broken
Wings
Saul Landau
Contradictions: Pumping Empire and Losing Job Muscles
Phillip Cryan
The War on Human Rights in Colombia
Kurt Nimmo
Cuba and the "Necessary Viciousness" of the Bushites
Nelson P. Valdes
Traveling to Cuba: Where There's a Will, There's a Way
Lisa Viscidi
The Guatemalan Elections: Fraud, Intimidation and Indifference
Maria Trigona and Fabian
Pierucci
Allende Lives
Larry
Tuttle
States of Corruption
William A. Cook
Failing America
Brian
Cloughley
US Economic Space and New Zealand
Adrian Zupp
What Would Buddha Do? Why Won't the Dalai Lama Pick a Fight?
Merlin
Chowkwanyun
The Strange and Tragic Case of Sherman Marlin Austin
Ben Tripp
Screw You Right Back: CIA FU!
Lee Ballinger
Grits Ain't Groceries
Mickey Z.
Not All Italians Love Columbus
Bruce
Jackson
On Charles Burnett's "Warming By the Devil's Fire"
William Benzon
The Door is Open: Scorsese's Blues, 2
Adam Engel
The Eyes of Lora Shelley
Walt Brasch
Facing a McBlimp Attack
Poets'
Basement
Mickey Z, Albert, Kearney
October 10, 2003
John Chuckman
Schwarzenegger
and the Lottery Society
Toni Solo
Trashing
Free Software
Chris
Floyd
Body
Blow: Bush Joins the Worldwide War on Women
October
9, 2003
Jennifer
Loewenstein
Bombing
Syria
Ramzi
Kysia
Seeing
the Iraqi People
Fran Shor
Groping the Body Politic
Mark Hand
President Schwarzenegger?
Alexander
Cockburn
Welcome
to Arnold, King for a Day
Website of the Day
The Awful Truth about Wesley Clark
October
8, 2003
David
Lindorff
Schwarzenegger
and the Failure of the Centrist Dems
Ramzy
Baroud
Israel's
WMDs and the West's Double Standard
John Ross
Mexico
Tilts South
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
Repub Guru Compares Taxes to the Holocaust
James
Bovard
The
Reagan Roadmap for Antiterrorism Disaster
Michael
Neumann
One
State or Two?
A False Dilemma
October
7, 2003
Uri Avnery
Slow-Motion
Ethnic Cleansing
Stan Goff
Lost in the Translation at Camp Delta
Ron Jacobs
Yom Kippurs, Past and Present
David
Lindorff
Coronado in Iraq
Rep. John Conyers, Jr.
Outing a CIA Operative? Why A Special Prosecutor is Required
Cynthia
McKinney
Who Are "We"?
Elaine Cassel
Shock and Awe in the Moussaoui Case
Walter
Lippman
Thoughts on the Cali Recall
Gary Leupp
Israel's
Attack on Syria: Who's on the Wrong Side of History, Now?
Website
of the Day
Cable News Gets in Touch With It's Inner Bigot
October
6, 2003
Robert
Fisk
US
Gave Israel Green Light for Raid on Syria
Forrest
Hylton
Upheaval
in Bolivia: Crisis and Opportunity
Benjamin Dangl
Divisions Deepen in Third Week of Bolivia's Gas War
Bridget
Gibson
Oh, Pioneers!: Bush's New Deal
Bob Fitrakis and Harvey
Wasserman
The Bush-Rove-Schwarzenegger Nazi Nexus
Nicole
Gamble
Rios Montt's Campaign Threatens Genocide Trials
JoAnn
Wypijewski
The
New Unity Partnership:
A Manifest Destiny for Labor
Website
of the Day
Guerrilla Funk
October
3 / 5, 2003
Tim Wise
The
Other Race Card: Rush and the Politics of White Resentment
Peter
Linebaugh
Rhymsters
and Revolutionaries: Joe Hill and the IWW
Gary Leupp
Occupation
as Rape-Marriage
Bruce
Jackson
Addio
Alle Armi
David Krieger
A Nuclear 9/11?
Ray McGovern
L'Affaire Wilsons: Wives are Now "Fair Game" in Bush's
War on Whistleblowers
Col. Dan Smith
Why Saddam Didn't Come Clean
Mickey
Z.
In Our Own Image: Teaching Iraq How to Deal with Protest
Roger Burbach
Bush Ideologues v. Big Oil in Iraq
John Chuckman
Wesley Clark is Not Cincinnatus
William S. Lind
Versailles on the Potomac
Glen T.
Martin
The Corruptions of Patriotism
Anat Yisraeli
Bereavement as Israeli Ethos
Wayne
Madsen
Can the Republicans Get Much Worse? Sure, They Can
M. Junaid Alam
The Racism Barrier
William
Benzon
Scorsese's Blues
Adam Engel
The Great American Writing Contest
Poets'
Basement
McNeill, Albert, Guthrie
October
2, 2003
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
What's
So Great About Gandhi, Anyway?
Amy Goodman
/ Jeremy Scahill
The
Ashcroft-Rove Connection
Doug Giebel
Kiss and Smear: Novak and the Valerie Plame Affair
Hamid
Dabashi
The Moment of Myth: Edward Said (1935-2003)
Elaine Cassel
Chicago Condemns Patriot Act
Saul Landau
Who
Got Us Into This Mess?
Website of the Day
Last Day to Save Beit Arabiya!
October 1, 2003
Joanne
Mariner
Married
with Children: the Supremes and Gay Families
Robert
Fisk
Oil,
War and Panic
Ron Jacobs
Xenophobia
as State Policy
Elaine
Cassel
The
Lamo Case: Secret Subpoenas and the Patriot Act
Shyam
Oberoi
Shooting
a Tiger
Toni Solo
Plan Condor, the Sequel?
Sean Donahue
Wesley
Clark and the "No Fly" List
Website of the Day
Downloader Legal Defense Fund
September
30, 2003
After
Dark
Arnold's
1977 Photo Shoot
Dave Lindorff
The
Poll of the Shirt: Bush Isn't Wearing Well
Tom Crumpacker
The
Cuba Fixation: Shaking Down American Travelers
Robert
Fisk
A
Lesson in Obfuscation
Charles
Sullivan
A
Message to Conservatives
Suren Pillay
Edward Said: a South African Perspective
Naeem
Mohaiemen
Said at Oberlin: Hysteria in the Face of Truth
Amy Goodman
/ Jeremy Scahill
Does
a Felon Rove the White House?
Website
of the Day
The Edward Said Page
September 29, 2003
Robert
Fisk
The
Myths of Western Intelligence Agencies
Iain A. Boal
Turn It Up: Pardon Mzwakhe Mbuli!
Lee Sustar
Paul
Krugman: the Last Liberal?
Wayne Madsen
General Envy? Think Shinseki, Not Clark
Benjamin
Dangl
Bolivia's Gas War
Uri Avnery
The
Magnificent 27
Pledge
Drive of the Day
Antiwar.com
September
26 / 28, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
Alan
Dershowitz, Plagiarist
David Price
Teaching Suspicions
Saul Landau
Before the Era of Insecurity
Ron Jacobs
The Chicago Conspiracy Trial and
the Patriot Act
Brian
Cloughley
The Strangeloves Win Again
Norman Solomon
Wesley and Me: a Real-Life Docudrama
Robert
Fisk
Bomb Shatters Media Illusions
M. Shahid Alam
A Muslim Sage Visits the USA
John Chuckman
American Psycho: Bush at the UN
Mark Schneider
International Direct Action
The Spanish Revolution to the Palestiniana Intifada
William
S. Lind
How $87 Billion Could Buy Some Real Security
Douglas Valentine
Gold Warriors: the Plundering of Asia
Chris
Floyd
Vanishing Act
Elaine Cassel
Play Cat and Moussaoui
Richard
Manning
A Conservatism that Once Conserved
George Naggiar
The Beautiful Mind of Edward Said
Omar Barghouti
Edward Said: a Corporeal Dream Not Yet Realized
Lenni Brenner
Palestine's Loss is America's Loss
Mickey
Z.
Edward Said: a Well-Reasoned Voice
Tanweer Akram
The Legacy of Edward Said
Adam Engel
War in the Smoking Room
Poets' Basement
Katz, Ford, Albert & Guthrie
Website
of the Weekend
Who the Hell is Stew Albert?
September
25, 2003
Edward
Said
Dignity,
Solidarity and the Penal Colony
Robert
Fisk
Fanning
the Flames of Hatred
Sarah
Ferguson
Wolfowitz at the New School
David
Krieger
The
Second Nuclear Age
Bill Glahn
RIAA Doublespeak
Al Krebs
ADM and the New York Times: Covering Up Corporate Crime
Michael
S. Ladah
The Obvious Solution: Give Iraq Back to the Arabs
Fran Shor
Arnold and Wesley
Mustafa
Barghouthi
Edward Said: a Monument to Justice and Human Rights
Alexander Cockburn
Edward Said: a Mighty and Passionate
Heart
Website
of the Day
Edward Said: a Lecture on the Tragedy of Palestine
The Great Alejandro Escavedo Needs Your Help!
September 24, 2003
Stan Goff
Generational
Casualties: the Toxic Legacy of the Iraq War
William
Blum
Grand Illusions About Wesley Clark
David
Vest
Politics
for Bookies
Jon Brown
Stealing Home: The Real Looting is About to Begin
Robert Fisk
Occupation and Censorship
Latino
Military Families
Bring Our Children Home Now!
Neve Gordon
Sharon's
Preemptive Zeal
Website
of the Day
Bands Against Bush
September
23, 2003
Bernardo
Issel
Dancing
with the Diva: Arianna and Streisand
Gary Leupp
To
Kill a Cat: the Unfortunate Incident at the Baghdad Zoo
Gregory
Wilpert
An
Interview with Hugo Chavez on the CIA in Venezuela
Steven
Higgs
Going to Jail for the Cause--Part 2: Charity Ryerson, Young and
Radical
Stan Cox
The Cheney Tapes: Can You Handle the Truth?
Robert
Fisk
Another Bloody Day in the Death of Iraq
William S. Lind
Learning from Uncle Abe: Sacking the Incompetent
Elaine
Cassel
First They Come for the Lawyers, Then the Ministers
Yigal
Bronner
The
Truth About the Wall
Website
of the Day
The
Baghdad Death Count
September
20 / 22, 2003
Uri Avnery
The
Silliest Show in Town
Alexander
Cockburn
Lighten
Up, America!
Peter Linebaugh
On the Bicentennial of the Execution of Robert Emmet
Anne Brodsky
Return
to Afghanistan
Saul Landau
Guillermo and Me
Phan Nguyen
Mother Jones Smears Rachel Corrie
Gila Svirsky
Sharon, With Eyes Wide Open
Gary Leupp
On Apache Terrorism
Kurt Nimmo
Colin
Powell: Exploiting the Dead of Halabja
Brian
Cloughley
Colin Powell's Shame
Carol Norris
The Moral Development of George W. Bush
Bill Glahn
The Real Story Behind RIAA Propaganda
Adam Engel
An Interview with Danny Scechter, the News Dissector
Dave Lindorff
Good Morning, Vietnam!
Mark Scaramella
Contracts and Politics in Iraq
John Ross
WTO
Collapses in Cancun: Autopsy of a Fiasco Foretold
Justin Podur
Uribe's Desperate Squeals
Toni Solo
The Colombia Three: an Interview with Caitriona Ruane
Steven Sherman
Workers and Globalization
David
Vest
Masked and Anonymous: Dylan's Elegy for a Lost America
Ron Jacobs
Politics of the Hip-Hop Pimps
Poets
Basement
Krieger, Guthrie and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Ted Honderich:
Terrorism for Humanity?
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.
|
October
21, 2003
"Is This the
Place?
On
the Bicentennial of the Hanging of Thomas Russell
By PETER LINEBAUGH
A large crowd gathered at Downpatrick, co. Down,
Ireland, for the hanging of Thomas Russell on the morning of
21 October 1803 two hundred years ago. A makeshift scaffold of
planks over a couple of barrels and a cross beam above them to
attach the rope served the purpose. Axe, knife, sawdust, and
a block lay nearby, for the traitor's death included the severing
of the head, following the hanging. He was the quintessential
United Irishman, from its foundation in 1791 to its last stand
in 1803. He possessed powers of extraordinary mobility: between
Belfast and Dublin: between Protestant and Catholic: between
urban proletarians and country peasants: between town and country:
between England and Ireland: between bourgeois and plebeian.
"Few, few have I known like him," said his friend,
Martha McTier.
As he stepped out onto the scaffold,
according to his nephew, he said, "Is this the place?"
They are the words of a man whose life has been passed imagining
some other place than the one he's at, and this sense of uncertain
geographical coordinates is conveyed in the ballad about him,
"The Man from God Knows Where." They are they words
of a sworn revolutionary (in May 1795 he swore on Cave Hill oath
with Tone, Neilson, McCracken "never to desist in our efforts
until we had subverted the authority of England over our country
and asserted our independence") and a religious millenarian
(at the end he begged for three days to finish his studies of
Revelation, which were not granted).
He probably swore the Dublin oath, too,
of the United Irish: "I shall do whatever lies in my power
to forward a brotherhood of affection, an identity of interests,
a communion of rights, and a union of power among Irishmen of
all religious persuasions, without which every reform must be
partial, not national, inadequate to the wants, delusive to the
wishes and insufficient for the freedom and happiness of this
country," so striking if its phrases are taken politically,
to die for. A communion of rights, for instance.
The revolutionist believes history is
on the side of the revolution. Millenarianism helps. Russell
read Isaac Newton's Observations upon the prophecies of Daniel
and the apocalypse of St John (1733). He corresponded with Francis
Dobbs, Irish MP, who opposed the Act of Union as anti-scriptural
because the army of the messiah is described in Revelations as
"harping on harps" and "clothed in fine linen."
Armageddon he construed as Hebrew for Armagh. Thus the Apocalypse
anticipated the Irish Republic. Amid the Rebellion  papers of the National Archives
of Ireland are two millenarian prophecies which appear to have
Russell's signature on them. One is written in Irish with English
translation; the other foretells eight eras of Ireland--defeat,
conquest, resistance, loss by sea, loss by land, "But last
of all, the Erins win the day." It foretold crop failures,
factory destruction, &c., &c. "Gog and Magog who
will make war against the inhabitants of the earth."
Such scholarship contrasts with the economic
determinism favored by the ruling class when gog and magog were
feudalism and capitalism, but listen to Russell on Jesus in the
social war: "When I read those daily accounts in the papers
which advertise the cruelties committed by and upon this wretched
race of people I feel all that is Irish within me melt with compassion.
When will this social war cease? How my heart beats Jesus wept--O!
were He to revisit this earth, where would He be found? Would
it be at the Episcopal tables or with stall-fed theologians?
He would be found in the cottier's cabin His hand would pour
balm on the mangled body of the expiring husband; and His eyes
would spread the consolation of heaven upon the wretchedness
of the Irish peasantry." The intention of William Wickham,
Secretary of State for Ireland, was "to make the leaders
contemptible and to represent them to the people as traitors
to the cause and sacrificing the lower orders by their own falsehood."
In response, the United Irish politicized the gallows. By late
September Robert Emmet and sixteen of his followers had been
hanged for treason. In Russell's address to the court which sentenced
him to hang, he referred to Emmet, the "youthful hero, a
martyr in the cause of liberty, who had just died for his country.
To his death I look back, even in this state, with rapture."
Wolfe Tone cut his own throat rather than submit to hanging by
an authority he did not recognize. 7 June 1798 Coigly peeled
an orange on the Guildford gallows while waiting for the executioner
to get on with his work. (The terrorist Orange order was formed
three years earlier.)
"Is this the place?" Some were
ready to say he was demented, like William Sampson (the government
turned Russell's "once gentle heart to desperate madness")
or William Drennan ("long imprisonment and perpetual recurrence
to the same ideas makes enthusiasm turn into a partial insanity")
but they did not participate in the attempt. Besides, in that
year the forces of repression were so prevailing that any opposition
seemed insane. This was Coleridge's view.
Of course it was the place! These are
the granite stones which composed Downpatrick jail. He would
know whence they were quarried. The jail was part of a prison
building program. The gray architecture of the Protestant Ascendancy--those
blocks of granite at the Customs House, Four Courts, the court
on Henrietta Street - convey the impression of permanence, power,
stability. What doubts about location could be expressed in the
face of such monuments? He was a geologist, tapping with his
hammer, for fossils, the Giant's Causeway.
True, he had been moved from Newgate
jail in Dublin but that was on 12 October when he was transferred
to Downpatrick where 600 yeomanry and a troop of cavalry stood
guard. He was to be tried in the north and to die in the north,
the place where he had plotted, and hiked, and drunk, conspired,
whored, sinned, redeemed himself with the United Irish. Was this
the place, indeed!
Was he distracted by his Greek and Hebrew
studies as a scholar can be? "He pointed out a mistranslation
in Paul's epistle to the Hebrews [9:26] objecting to the 'end
of the world' and showing from the Greek testament it should
be to the 'end of the age.'" Little words, like "world"
and "age" upon which the salvation of his soul might
depend, or the metaphysics of science be made, or the course
of human history known. Did revolution depend on space or time?
It is true that he had been to a great
many places. "I have traveled much and seen various parts
of the world,"--India, Africa, Scotland, England, Germany,
Holland, France were places he had actually been, and south America
and north American Indians were places he studied in imagination--"and
I think the Irish the most virtuous nation on the face of the
earth--they are a good and brave people, and had I a thousand
lives, I would yield them in their service." In this sentence
the virtue of Ireland comes after a multicontinental experience.
We call this 'the Casement effect,' named after the consular
official for the English Foreign Office, Roger Casement, actually
an Ulster man who did not recognize the colonized state of his
native land until he served the Empire in Congo and Amazonas.
Then he joined the Irish armed struggle.
Thomas Russell was one of the great walkers
of the decade. He was a roving emissary, covering immense distances,
spreading the gospel of republicanism by peregrination of propaganda--newspapers,
pamphlets broadsheets, handbills. He relied on the hospitality
of the road. He met story tellers. In Antrim we see him poking
about with his hammer exploring geological formations; working
with disaffected militia; stock-piling arms. Walking had its
risks. Later, in 1803, while crossing Westminster bridge he was
recognized by John Beresford, an Orangeman. He hurried to his
brother's, cut his hair, and left that night for Liverpool.
Generally, however, for Russell, like
Engels later, walking immersed him in the life of the people.
It deepened his contribution to cultural nationalism which flourished
at the Belfast Library and in his studies of Irish language.
He promoted the collection of ballads from Irish speaking areas.
He wrote a poem "The fatal battle of Aughrim" published
in 1797 about the defeat of the Gael (see also James Joyce, "The
Dead" and Ford's film). Even from prison he sent Edward
Bunting (the collector of ancient Irish music) songs he heard
in prison. In 1795 the Belfast United Irish published Paddy's
Resource containing Russell's composition, "Man is Free
by Nature." Let's listen to him singing in the glens,
Why vainly do we waste our time Repeating
our oppressions Come haste to arms, for now's the time To punish
past transgressions They say that kings can do no wrong Their
murderous deeds deny it And since from us their power has sprung
We have a right to try it.
The Rights of Man, Tom Paine's manifesto
defending the revolutionary republic of France, appeared in Dublin
in March 1791, and in eight months it sold 40,000, twice the
sales in England. Russell sang out:
The starving wretch who steals for bread
But seldom meets compassion
Then shall a crown preserve the head
Of one that robs a nation.
Beggars in Dublin had become numerous,
insistent. Flogging was frequent in the House of Industry. Multitudes
of children were admitted to the Foundling Hospital, and multitudes
died. Women who were committed for petty offences had their heads
shaved. "The laws do not afford their protection to the
lower orders," Russell wrote, and then sang:
Such partial laws we all despise
See Gallia's bright example
The glorious scene before our eyes
Let's every tyrant trample.
Proud lordlings now we must translate
From senate, see and pensions
Virtue alone must teach the state
In spite of kings' intentions.
These despots long have trod us down
And judges are their engines
Such wretches--minions of the crown Demand a people's vengeance.
The despots are trodden, the tyrants
are trampled. Was Russell thinking again of his army years in
India where thousands of yoked bullocks hauled cannon and the
hundreds of elephants could extinguish life under foot?
The golden age will yet revive
Each man will be a brother
In harmony we all shall live
And share the earth together
In September 1796 he published his great
pamphlet, A Letter to the People of Ireland on the Present Situation
of the Country, the fruit of his years tramping the countryside.
He writes that the earth was given to all for our subsistence
not for the oligarchical few. He was certainly ready to challenge
privatization of land. He pays a beautiful tribute to the hospitality
and rundale of the Irish peasantry, and then concludes,
In virtue's school enlightened youth
Will love his fellow creature
And further ages prove the truth
THAT MAN IS FREE BY NATURE.
He was arrested 16 September 1796 and
his restless spirit held in Newgate prison for two and a half
years.
Russell was born in Mallow, co. Cork,
in 1767. His father was an Anglican from Kilkenny and a veteran
of wars against France, his mother was a Catholic from Tipperary.
The arrest notice described Russell as a "tall, handsome
man, about 5 ft. 11in. high, dark complexion, aquiline nose,
large black eyes, with heavy eyebrows full-chested, walks generally
fast and has a military appearance speaks fluently, with a clear
distinct voice, and has a good address." He followed his
brother into the army, and was commissioned an ensign in the
52th regiment of foot, July 1783. His regiment was sent to relieve
Mangalore on the Malabar coast, a royal port that was seized,
raped and plundered, then lost to Tipu Sultan who punished the
town's Christian population with imprisonment. The Second Mysore
war was conducted against this Moslem modernizer who was the
last stand-out in southern India against British rule (admired
later by Nehru). When he was killed at the Battle of Seringapatnam
in 1799 ending the Third Mysore War, it was in parallel to the
defeat of the Irish the year before, leaving 30,000 dead.
In 1797 a Jacobin club was established
in Seringapatnam, a tree of liberty was planted, and liberté,
égalité, and fraternité declared for the
first time on Indian soil. By this time Russell was imprisoned
in Dublin, then on March 1799 he was transferred with the other
state prisoners to Fort George in the Highlands of Scotland.
He wrote his brother of the war, "Which embraces every quarter
of the globe [and] the fate of the human race. [It] is not a
contest for relative power or riches, whatever momentary hues
it may assume, but is a contest between the two principles of
despotism and liberty and can only terminate in the extinction
of one or the other."
Imperialists conquer under the guise
of liberation, and thus it was with Russell. One of Tipu's allies,
the Bibi of Cannanore, imprisoned two hundred shipwrecked sepoys
in the English service. The 52nd seized Cannanore in three days
fighting. Russell would have heard of the Massacre of Anantpur
when "four hundred women" were raped, bayoneted, and
drowned, and the Sack of Bednur in which the army by failing
to give a moiety violated the East India Company's "plunder
and booty" regulation. Many of his comrades became prisoners
of war undergoing circumcision and conversion to Islam before
being enrolled in the European chela companies of Tipu. In this
context prison narratives began to be published in England, and
the demonization of Tipu into the archetype of the Oriental despot
commenced.
What was it like for the Irish teenager?
He doesn't say much, in fact, he was tongu-tied: "when in
India I could not find either words or ideas to write a letter
home to my father and was in great distress at my want of capacity."
Another soldier of the time does say something. Bristow, the
son of a Norwich blacksmith, arrived in India at the age of fourteen.
A year later he was imprisoned, and stripped by a species of
soldier called the lootie-wallah, the guy who takes the loot.
For the next ten years he suffered as a circumcised Mohammedan
under Tipu Sultan's rule in Mysore. Bristow of the Bengal Artillery
tells us of poor O'Bryan, "compelled to perform the office
of common coolie and to carry dirt in the streets of Seringapatnam."
Three years later at the age of nineteen
Russell resigned his commission, quit. "Remember the Mangalore
gibbets!" still in his ears. Not only did he learn about
the political uses of imprisonment, he also saw first-hand how
British propaganda instilled bigotry between Moslem, Christian,
and Hindu. He recalled walking from "the camp at Cannanore
down to Tillicherry, 15 miles in that burning climate and for
what? To get a wench!" It is remorse that is conveyed, as
well as a repressed memory ("want of capacity") that
suggests violence. Some words come later in his life, but then
they will be displaced to Ireland.
Bristow is grateful to the Hindus who
had compassion for him after escaping. "[They] are a very
quiet, inoffensive, and humane race of men, many of whom do not
even know the name of their ruler, or have the least idea of
the despotism they live under, being too remote from the immediate
object of tyranny, and too much attached to peace and indolence,
to be inquisitive about who receives the revenues of the country,
or who dissipates them; conceiving the whole duty of their lives
comprised in tilling their grounds, paying their taxes, and adoring
their cows." What else had Russell seen in his walks?
The voyage out to India required stop
for wood and water along the African coast. Russell quoted the
French botanist, Michel Adanson's, description of Goree in Senegal,
"Which way so ever I turned my eyes on this pleasant spot
I behold a perfect image of human nature the ease and indolence
of the negroes reclined under the shade of their spreading foliage;
the simplicity of their dress and manners, the whole revived
in my mind the idea of our first parents, and I seemed to contemplate
the world in its primitive state; they are generally speaking
very good-natured, sociable and obliging, honest in their dealings,
friendly to strangers, of a mild disposition, conversible, affable,
easy to overcome with reason."
The anti-slavery petitions of spring
1792 preceded the fateful 'spot in time' which divided the struggle
for the abolition of slavery from the working-class struggle
for the reform of Parliament. After that time they went their
separate ways, the slave story and the working class story. Russell,
however, saw them neither separately nor racially. Among the
songs he sang in the cabins of Antrim, Armagh, Down were "The
Negro's Lament," "The Captive Negro, (tune, 'Farewell
Killeavy'), and "The Dying Negro" (tune, 'Laughaber').
He wrote, "how much selfishness and ostentation must we
suspect in the boasts of the English, that their laws are thus
free, and declarative of the natural rights of mankind, while
the same laws hold thousands of our fellow creatures in a bondage
worse than that of Pharaoh There is perhaps no part of the earth
where beasts of burden are so much oppressed as the negroes are
in the sugar plantations. They are sixteen hours in the service
of cruel masters; and the shouts of their drivers, and the cracks
of the whip on their naked bodies, which cuts out small pieces
of flesh at almost every stroke are heard all day in the fields."
He had high degree of class consciousness.
"Those gentlemen who have all the wealth and power of the
country in their hands, I strongly and earnestly exhort, to pay
attention to the poor--by the poor I mean the labouring class
of the community I advise them, for their good, to look to their
grievances. It is possible that they may not hold their power
long." He praised combinations of workmen. He inveighed
against the unwholesome conditions of the factories or cotton
mills. "Poverty is a sort of crime," "property
must be alter'd in some measure," he wrote. "I believe
that the swinish multitude are born only to labour and be governed"
he mocked Edmund Burke in The Lion of Old England or Democracy
Confounded (1793). Under questioning in Kilmainham jail he challenged
the view that the poor were devoid of politics. "It is not
true that they require the instigation of leaders--they are as
ardent as any leaders. The miscarriage of different attempts
does not extinguish either the principle or the intention--it
serves only to make them more cautious."
Russell was released from prison after
the Peace of Amiens was concluded in June 1802. His revolutionary
ardor was not weakened. He wrote a Dublin friend, "Who indeed,
that entertained our opinions could live to insult the memory
of the heroes who fell for Ireland, by trampling on their unhonoured
graves? Who that knew the colossal power was shaken from its
summit to its base, by the gallant peasantry of a few counties,
ill-armed, and ill-led, could ever cease to promote a general
and effectual movement? Who could walk the streets of your city
and see the great houses where free legislators of a great and
good people should now be sitting, abandoned by its mock parliament,
and converted into a temple of mammon, and not wish the earth
to gape and swallow him up, to save him from witnessing such
unparalleled infamy and disgrace?"
The old Irish Parliament building had
become the new Bank. Russell took ship to Hamburg, then Amsterdam,
and Paris. Bonaparte who re-introduced slavery in the Caribbean
and authoritarian government in France, he regarded as a traitor.
He met the Jacobin general Humbert who was planning an expedition
to the West Indies, and the creation of a federal republic of
the Caribbean islands. When a French force sailed in November
1802 it contained no significant Irish participation. It was
not to be the place.
The key to Emmet's plan was the capture
of Dublin. Russell arrived in Dublin in April 1803. He repaired
to Dublin as soon as he learned that Emmet was arrested, to rescue
him. With £1,500 on his head, it was dangerous. He was
taken only a stone's throw from the Castle. Looking back on it
James Hope thought that the rebellion of '98 failed because the
United Irish failed to engage sufficiently with the problems
of the poor which alone would motivate the rank-and-file. James
Hope, the Ulster weaver, suggested a sweeping reform of the system
of land-holding. Thomas Russell helped transform the United Irishmen
into a revolutionary, clandestine organization, with multifaceted
links among the artisans, carmen, workers, cottiers, and peasantry.
James Connolly praised the 'proletarian character' of Emmet's
revolt and said it was the first real effort of the Irish working
class to secure 'political and social emancipation." To
this we would add that Russell's internationalism was essential
to that emancipation. Hence the peculiar question, "is this
the place?"
The rising in the north met draconian
response, arrest, transportation, and five hangings. A Downpatrick
shoemaker, James Corry, was to act as a junior officer. He led
fourteen men with pitchforks on a hill at Ballyvange, just outside
Downpatrick, but the signal fire was never lit to march on Downpatrick.
They were not to be prevailed upon "to catch cannon balls
on the points of pikes and pitchforks." Disenchantment with
France, Bonaparte's concordat with the Pope, the destruction
of Irish parliament, the provision of a secure market for the
linen industry as a result of the Union. Six of the members of
the jury that convicted him had once been members of the United
Irish.
His presence as a wandering stranger
is evoked in Florence Wilson's well-known ballad about Russell
called "The Man from God Knows Where." The hospitality
of the townland characteristic of 'below' can be compared to
the values noted by Bristow among the Hindus or observed by Adanson
in Senegal.
Into our townlan' on a night of snow
Rode a man from God knows where; None of us bade him stay or
go, Nor deemed him friend, nor damned him foe, But we stabled
his big roan mare; For in our townlan' we're decent folk, And
if he didn't speak, why none of us spoke, And we sat till the
fire burned low.
The coach taking him from Dublin to Downpatrick
passed through the remains of five thousand years of human habitation:
the standing stones, ringforts, and passage tombs of prehistoric
Ireland and its Bronze Age people. "I acted for the good
of the country and of the world," he had told the court
and continued, "In ancient times we read of great empires
having their rise and their fall, and yet do the old governments
proceed as if they were immortal." The Lecale peninsula,
co. Down, is an ecological unit whose creeks and many natural
harbors form a welcoming landfall in the northwest of Irish sea.
The dominant settlement pattern, the clachans of open-field farming
by groups of related families holding and working land in common,
survived into the 20th century.
The United Irishmen provide such florid,
beautiful, noble examples of gallows eloquence which can be so
distant from our own experience that when we catch them with
such simple expression as Emmet saying to the hangman "not
yet!" or Russell asking "is this the place?" we
hear the economy of language of Beckett's tramps not the grandiloquence
of republican rhetoric from the Age of Enlightenment. "If
you really get down to the disaster, the slightest eloquence
becomes unbearable," wrote Beckett. What place was he thinking
of? The no-place of utopia? Was it as simple as stepping into
the sunlight from the dungeon to the last place on earth?
Seven years earlier to the day Russell
suffered (exactly 207 years ago), fifteen hundred people dug
Sam Neilson's potatoes in seven minutes; three thousand dug the
potatoes of Rev. Cleverty. "Numbers of the fair sex assisted
on these occasions, unwilling that the men should exceed them
in promoting union, or in assisting the oppressed." Three
thousand dug up two acres near Banbridge and sowed and trenched
the field with wheat. Several hundred meanwhile built a barn,
timbered and thatched it. "On Tuesday the potatoes of David
Lang, of Drumbo, now in Down jail, on a serious charge, was dug
by about 1000 people, in the space of ten minutes and a half,
after which they carried in his hay on their backs; and when
all were done, a wooden bowl was placed in the middle of the
field, each person contributed his mite for his support in jail,
to a large amount, which was immediately sent to him." These
were called "hasty diggings" and were organized by
the United Irishmen. That was the place where subsistence solidarity
was exercised, with its alternative values to those of Bank,
palanquin, and scaffold.
The Insurrection Bill was passed against
the collective "raising of potatoes and shearing of corn."
A whiskey hawker with two casks of spirits could find no market
among them.
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
F.H.A. Aalen, Kevin Whelan, and Matthew
Stout (eds.), Atlas of the Irish Rural Landscape (Cork University
Press: Cork, Ireland, 1997)
James Bristow, Narrative of the Sufferings
of James Bristow of the Bengal Artillery (London, 1794)
Denis Carroll, The Man from God Knows
Where: Thomas Russell, 1767-1803 (Tartan: Dublin, 1995)
James Connolly, Labor in Irish History
(1910 and frequently republished)
Irfan Habib (ed.), Confronting Colonialism:
Resistance and Modernization under Haidar Ali & Tipu Sultan.
Indian History Congress: Commemorating Srigangapatnam 1799. (Tulika:
New Delhi,1999)
Dáire Keogh (ed.), A Patriot Priest:
The Life of Father James Coigly, 1761-1798 (Cork University Press:
Cork, 1998)
James Quinn, Soul on Fire: A Life of
Thomas Russell (Irish Academic Press: Dublin, 2002)
Kevin Whelan, The Tree of Liberty: Radicalism,
Catholicism and the Construction of irish identity 1760-1830
(Cork University Press: Cork, 1996)
Weekend
Edition Features for Oct. 18 / 19, 2003
Robert
Pollin
Clintonomics:
the Hollow Boom
Gary Leupp
Israel, Syria and Stage Four in the Terror War
Saul Landau
Day of the Gropenfuhrer
Bruce Anderson
The California Recall
John Gershman
Bush in Asia: What a Difference a Decade Makes
Nelson P. Valdes
Bush, Electoral Politics and Cuba's "Illicit Sex Trade"
Kurt Nimmo
Shock Therapy and the Israeli Scenario
Tom Gorman
Al Franken and Al-Shifa
Brian
Cloughley
Public Propaganda and the Iraq War
Joanne Mariner
A New Way to Kill Tigers
Denise
Low
The Cancer of Sprawl
Mickey Z.
The Reverend of Doom
John Chuckman
US Missiles for Israeli Nukes?
George Naggiar
A Veto of Public Diplomacy
Alison
Weir
Death Threats in Berkeley
Benjamin Dangl
Bolivian Govt. Falling Apart
Ron Jacobs
The Politics of Bob Dylan
Fidel Castro
A Review of Garcia Marquez's Memoir
Adam Engel
I Hope My Corpse Gives You the Plague
Poets' Basement
Jones, Albert, Guthrie and Greeder
Keep CounterPunch
Alive:
Make
a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online!
home / subscribe
/ about us / books
/ archives / search
/ links /
|