For some 66 years a secret underground revolutionary organization operated across the globe but in particular in Ireland, the USA and Britain with the aim of overthrowing British rule in Ireland. The activities which included repeated invasions of Canada, land war & rebellions in Ireland and the bombing of British cities led to the creation of the secret police in Britain (Special Branch), greatly accelerated the confederation of Canada into a single state and even played a part if the development of the submarine.
I recently read a biography of the Young Ireland revolutionary William Smith O’Brien, leader of the 1848 insurrection in Ireland, sometimes disparagingly referred to as ‘The Battle of Widow McCormack’s cabbage patch.’ I’ve vague memories of being taught about it in school, the focus being on the arguments between Daniel O’Connell and the Young Irelander’s in the years before the rising with the details of the rebellion very much an afterthought, nothing in fact that I recall beyond that one battle. But the detail of this rebellion which took place during the Great Hunger that killed over a million has a lot to say about nationalism, republicanism and class and the way those tensions would play out over the next 150 years.
Consider the situation of loaning a spade to a friend or associate. Imagine further that you are away from your home for some time. In that time the loaner of the spade then loans it out to another person. When you return and need the spade back you may not be aware of where it currently is – that is you don’t have total knowledge of the entire chain of transference – but you have the first link in the chain and a reasonable expectation that each link will either lead to another or, if the chain is broken, accept responsibility for replacing the spade.
In the ongoing attempts to analyse the causes of the global financial crisis in the mainstream media, a continual refrain is that the underlying cause is the “imbalance” in world trade. This diagnosis is superficially tempting as it is always self-evidently correct. For the same reason, it is also an utterly cretinous tautology, rather like the sub-Marxian left’s kneejerk response of “overproduction” as the cause of any particular crisis.