Messages and morals for the new millennium
As we move into a new century and a new millennium, the safety catch
is very definitely off on how many superlatives can be used to
describe the brave new world that awaits us on 1 January 2000.
One common theme throughout all the hype is the ``newness'' of what is
to come. Unbelievable promises and predictions have been made about
our new `information age', our `digital society' made up of `virtual
communities' living in a new `Electronic democracy', a real
`computopia' awaits us all.
Before we descend into this promised cyber nirvana, An Phoblacht's
Robbie MacGabhann takes stock of the past 200 years plus of republican
and international struggle and offers us a compact pick and mix user's
guide of messages and morals from the old millennium that will still
be indispensible in the next.
On Freedom and Rights
``Our freedom must be had at all hazards. If the men of property will
not help us they must fall; we will free ourselves by the aid of that
large and respectable class of the community - the men of no
property.''
Theobald Wolfe Tone
``As well might you leave the fairies to plough your land or the idle
winds to sow it, as sit down and wait for freedom.''
Thomas Davis
``The principle I state, and mean to stand on is this, that the entire
ownership of Ireland, moral and material, up to the sun and down to
the centre is vested of right in the people of Ireland.''
James Fintan Lalor
``One does not sell the earth upon which the people walk.''
Tashunka Witko (Crazy Horse)
``The earth was created by the assistance of the sun, and it should be
left as it was... The country was made without lines of demarcation,
and it is no man's business to divide it.''
Heinmot Tooyalaket (Chief Joseph)
``Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks
differently.''
Rosa Luxemburg
``The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and
equal opportunities to all its citizens, and declares its resolve to
pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and of all its
parts, cherishing all the children of the nation equally.''
The 1916 Proclamation
``The parties affirm in particular: the right of free political
thought; the right to freedom and expression of religion; the right to
pursue democratically national and political aspirations; the right to
seek constitutional change by peaceful and legitimate means; the right
to freely choose one's place of residence; the right to equal
opportunity in all social and economic activity, regardless of class,
creed, disability, gender, or ethnicity; the right to freedom from
sectarian harassment; and the right of women to full and equal
political participation.''
The 1998 Good Friday Agreement
On Children and Education
``It shall be the first duty of the government of the Republic to make
provision for the physical, mental and spiritual well being of the
children, to secure that no child shall suffer hunger or cold from
lack of food, clothing or shelter.''
The 1919 Democratic Programme of the First Dáil
``Educate, that you might be free. We are most anxious to get the
quiet, strong minded people who are scattered throughout the country
to see the force of this great truth''
Thomas Davis
``Education should foster; this education is meant to repress.
Education should inspire this education is meant to tame. Education
should harden; this education is meant to enervate. The English are
too wise a people to attempt to educate the Irish in any worthy sense.
As well expect them to arm us.''
Pádraig Pearse, from The Murder Machine
``In the banking concept of education, knowledge is a gift bestowed by
those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they
consider to know nothing... The raison d'être of liberation education,
on the other hand, lies in its drive towards reconciliation.''
Paulo Freire, from Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 1970
On Oppression and Struggle
```Come, come' said the magistrate, `we will hang her' and they dragged
me out to the yard and my poor little sister after me, trembling in
her chemise and bleeding profusely from where they had stabbed her in
the breast. She still begged of them to let her go and put on her
frock. My father had sometime before sent over to Mr Emmet's residence
a light cart to give the appearance of business... I was hauled over
and a rope was thrown... `Will you tell now where Mr. Ellis is?' `No
villains I will tell you nothing about him' I said... they have a
tremendous shout and pulled me up. How long I was suspended I cannot
say.''
ne Devlin's account of her torture after the 1803 rebellion
``If you remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over
Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organisation of the Socialist
Republic your efforts will be in vain. England would still rule you.
She would rule you through her capitalists, through her landlords,
through her financiers, through the whole array of commercial and
individualist institutions she has planted in this country and watered
with the tears of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs.''
James Connolly, from Socialism and Nationalism in Shan Van Vocht,
January 1897
``We have not only been oppressed and exploited shamelessly, but also
tortured and poisoned pitilessly. We have been poisoned with opium,
alcohol etc... Prisons outnumber schools and are always overcrowded
with detainees. Any natives having socialist ideas are arrested and
sometimes murdered without trial. Such is the so-called justice in
Indo-China.''
Ho Chi Minh, speaking at the French Socialist Party National Congress,
December 1920
``We must know Ireland from its history to its minerals, from its
tillage to its antiquities before we shall be an Irish Nation, able to
rescue and keep the country. And if we are too idle, too dull or too
capricious to learn the arts of strength, wealth and liberty, let us
not murmur at being slaves.''
Thomas Davis
``Will we let ourselves be destroyed in our turn without a struggle,
give up our homes, our country bequeathed to us by the Great Spirit,
the graves of our dead and everything that is dear and sacred to us? I
know you will cry with me, Never! Never!''
Tecumseh of the Shawnees
``Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The
proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world
to win. Working men of all countries unite.''
Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 1848
``It is better to die on your feet that to live on your knees.''
Dolores Ibarriuri, `La Pasionaria', during the Spanish Civil War and
Emiliano Zapata, Mexico 1910
``Brother Malcolm said once: `if you're black, you were born in jail'.
Jail - the buildings, the cells, the bars - means only a change in the
form of our restrictions and confinement. It is only a matter of
degree. And the barless jails and the jails with bars will and
certainly must be disrupted more and more. All who seek to put justice
in the place of injustice are moving in that direction, black people,
Puerto Ricans, Mexican Americans, Indians, poor whites. The pigs have
nothing going for them but beastly repression and fancy murder
machines. All power is truly in the hands of the people and in the end
the people will win.''
Kuwasi Balagoon, one of the 21 New York Panthers indicted in 1969 for
allegedly `plotting to bomb public places'
``It did not seem to me that prejudice, poverty, discrimination,
repression and racism were confined to the North of Ireland. I could
see them everywhere I spoke and still cannot comprehend the mentality
that argues that I should have pretended not to see them, because it
wasn't my business.''
Bernadette Devlin, writing in Twenty Years On
``I was a skeleton compared to what I used to be but it didn't matter.
Nothing really mattered except remaining unbroken. I rolled over once
again, the cold biting at me. They have nothing in their entire
imperial arsenal to break the spirit of one single Republican
Political Prisoner of War who refuses to be broken.''
Bobby Sands from his book One Day in My Life
On Economic Democracy and Justice
``The first difference between manufacturers now and in any former time
is the substitution of machines for the hands of man. It may be indeed
questioned whether the increased strength over matter thus given to
man compensates for the ill-effects of forcing people to work in
crowds; of destroying small and pampering large capitalists, of
lessening the distribution of wealth even by the very means which
increases its productions.''
Thomas Davis
``We do not, however, mean to say that the English political economists
have never enunciated any truths... They have materialised everything;
with them the sole object of existence is the production of wealth,
not the advantages which its equitable distribution would have on the
community. They only look to the actual sum total of the wealth of a
country, even when that wealth is in the hands of a few millionaires,
while the masses are debased paupers.''
James Fintan Lalor
``We declare that the Nation's Sovereignty extends not only to all men
and women of the Nation, but to all its material possessions; the
Nation's soil and all its resources, all the wealth and all the wealth
producing processes within the Nation and... we affirm that all rights
to private property must be subordinated to the public right and
welfare.''
The 1919 Democratic Programme of the First Dáil
``We, in the name of the republic, declare the right, of every citizen
to an adequate share of the produce of the nation's labour.''
The 1919 Democratic Programme of the First Dáil
On Revolution
``To wait until one has grown to half the voter plus one is the
programme of cowardly souls who wait for socialism by a royal decree
countersigned by two ministers.''
tonio Gramsci
``Under socialism, all will govern in turn and will soon become
accustomed to no one governing.''
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, form the State and Revolution
``It is necessary to explain what the Cuban revolution is, what this
special affair is that has made the blood of the empires of the world
boil, and has made the blood of the dispossessed of the world... boil,
but with hope.
``It is an agrarian, anti-feudal, and anti-imperialist revolution,
transformed by its internal evolution and by external aggressions into
a socialist revolution.
``It is a socialist revolution that took land from those who had much
and gave it to those who worked on that land as hired hands, or
distributed it in the form of cooperatives among other groups of
persons who had no land to work, not even as hired hands.
``It is a revolution that came to power with its own army and on the
ruins of the army of oppression.''
Ché Guevara speaking at the Inter-American Economic and Social
Council, 8 August 1961
``When the day comes when the whites who are really fed up - and I
don't mean these jive whites, who pose as liberals and who are not,
but those who are fed up with what is going on - when they learn how
to establish the proper type of communication with those uptown (Black
Harlem) who are fed up, and they get some co-ordinated action going.
You'll get some changes. And it will take both, it will take
everything that you've got, it will take that.''
Malcolm X
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