JAMES CONNOLLY, Irish Worker newspaper, Saturday, 5th September, 1914:
"I wish that no man shall be seduced to go to that front [Great War] in ignorance. Let the truth be known! Let those who wish to sacrifice themselves for England—for The Enemy—know the extent of their sacrifice and risks, and then if they go let them know that their country disowns them.
But let them go—let the dupes go— Ireland is well rid of them. There will be more room for the good men who remain behind."
Connolly's 1914 article in full
James Connolly and the Great War
[Appendix: May Day Lecture by Manus O'Riordan, SIPTU Head of Research, to Cork Trades Union Council, May 2 2006. ----->
------> Click on: The Justification of James Connolly]
Why Connolly Supported Socialist Germany in World War 1
In a famous photograph of Irish Citizen Army outside Liberty Hall during World War 1 a prominently displayed banner reads – ‘We serve neither King nor Kaiser, but Ireland’
On the other hand, the 1916 Proclamation reads: Having organised and trained her manhood through her secret revolutionary organisation, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and through her open military organisations, the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army, having patiently perfected her discipline, having resolutely waited for the right moment to reveal itself, she now seizes that moment, and, supported by her exiled children in America and by gallant allies in Europe, but relying in the first on her own strength, she strikes in full confidence of victory.
According to the excellent history of the Party on display at the Labour 2012 Centenary Conference in Galway, ‘the proclamation of the republic was written by Connolly and printed in Liberty Hall. Connolly was also appointed Commandant-General of the Rising.’
So how is the declaration of neutrality in the Liberty Hall banner to be reconciled with the Proclamation’s declaration of alliance with the Central European Powers in the Great War?
Well, Connolly speaks for himself on this. His explanation makes perfect sense.
In an article published on 15 August 1914, Connolly wrote as follows in Forward, a publication of the Independent Labour Party in Glasgow:
A Continental Revolution
And now, like the proverbial bolt from the blue, war is upon us, and war between the most important, because the most Socialist, nations on earth. And we are helpless. What then becomes of all our resolutions, all our protests, of fraternisation, all our threats of general strikes, all our carefully-built machinery of internationalism, all our hopes for the future? Were they all sound and fury signifying nothing? ...
Is it not clear as the fact of life itself that no insurrection of the working class, no general strike, no general uprising of Labour in Europe could possibly carry with it or entail greater slaughter of Socialists than will their participation as soldiers in the campaigns of the Armies of their respective countries ...
I am not writing in captious criticism of my Continental comrades. We know but little about what is happening on the Continent ... But believing as I do that any action would be justified which put a stop to this colossal crime ... I feel compelled to express the hope that ere long we may read of the paralysing of the internal transport service on the Continent, even should the fact of paralysing necessitate the erection of socialist barricades ... Even an unsuccessful attempt at Socialist Revolution by force of arms ... would be less disastrous to the Socialist cause than the fasct of Socialists allowing themselves to be used in the slaughter of their brothers in the cause. A great Continental uprising of the working class would stop the war ...
On 22 August 1914 Connolly wrote in similar vein in Forward:
A Martyr for Conscience Sake
[Noting that Socialists throughout Europe seemed to be protesting against the war but then agreeing to fight it, Connolly wrote:]... what does it mean? It means that the Socialist parties of the various countries mutually cancel each other, and that as a consequence Socialism ceases to exist as a world force and drops out of history in the greatest crisis of the history of the world, in the very moment when courageous action will most influence history ...
We know that not more than a score of men in the various Cabinets of the world have brought about this war ... and that all the alleged ‘reasons’ for it are so many after-thoughts invented to hide from us the fact that the intrigues and schemes of our rulers had brought the world to this pass. All Socialists are agreed upon this. Being so agreed, are we now to forget it all ... because some twenty highly placed criminals say our country requires us to slaughter our brothers ... The idea outrages my every sense of justice and fraternity. I may be only a voice crying in the wilderness, a crank amongst the community of the wise; but whoever I be, I must, in deference to my own self-respect, and to the sanctity of my own soul, protest against the doctrine that any decree of theirs of national honour can excuse a Socialist who serves in a war which he has denounced as a needless war ...
This is consistent with the “neither King nor Kaiser but Ireland” neutrality line. And the note of desperate disappointment is understandable.
The socialist movement had, in the preceding generation or two, pushed through huge advances in all spheres. The ruling elements in each of the central and western European countries had enacted major reforms. In the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, for instance, the new Liberal government of Asquith introduced the Old Age Pensions Act in 1908. (In a phrase of the period, to some of the beneficiaries the Chancellor of the Exchequer Lloyd George was “the greatest Irishman that ever lived”!)
But in August 1914 the rhetoric of international solidarity between the national components of the European socialist movement turned out to be just rhetoric.
What did Connolly want? What might he have meant by an attempt at Socialist Revolution by force of arms, as he called it?
Jim Larkin’s ITGWU showed what could be accomplished by strike action by inhibiting the movement of British troops during the War of Independence. A general strike of transport and munitions workers in 1914 would have had powerful effects on the belligerent governments. Could it have led on to seizure of state power by the strikers? Could they have formed their own militias like the Irish Citizen Army?
It is possible that a transport and munitions strike would have been suppressed by overwhelming military force, the participants interned, and their leaders executed as fifth columnists in the pay of other governments.
But, just like Ireland’s 1916 Rising, a powerful example would have been given to the population at large, putting a brake on the belligerence of governments, and perhaps eventually bringing about the cessation and return to the status quo ante which Pope Benedict XV proposed, and to which the Central Powers actually agreed. (It was Britain which, accustomed to actually winning its many wars – mostly against herders, farmers, hunters and fisherman who lacked proper modern weapons – forced a fight to the finish and consigned millions more to perdition.)
In fact Connolly did not simply give up and retire from the fray in 1914. His moment of disillusioned despair was temporary. He took stock of the situation and prepared for action.
In Larkin’s newspaper, The Irish Worker (29 August 1914), Connolly characterised the war as “the war of a pirate upon the German nation”:
The War upon the German Nation
Foremost and most successful European nation in this endeavour to escape from the thraldom of dependence upon England’s manufactures stands the German nation. To this contest in the industrial field it brought all the resources of science and systematised effort. Early learning that an uneducated people is necessarily an inferior people, the German nation attacked the work of educating its children with such success that it is now unreservedly admitted that the Germans are the best educated people in Europe. Basing its industrial effort upon an educated working class, it accomplished in the workshop results that this half-educated working class of England could only wonder at ... It was determined that since Germany could not be beaten in fair competition industrially, she must be beaten unfairly by organising a military and naval conspiracy against her ... remember that the war found England thoroughly prepared, Germany totally unprepared ... The British capitalist class has planned this colossal crime in order to ensure its uninterrupted domination of the commerce of the world.
The week previously, in The Irish Worker, 22 August 1914 (America and Europe), Connolly took issue with the idea put out by British and Home Rule papers that American public opinion was practically unanimous on the side of Britain and its allies, telling his readers that American opinion was almost universally hostile to Britain. Native-born Americans were suspicious of Britain. The Irish in America were hostile to Britain. And the immigrants from Central Europe, notably Jewish and German immigrants, were hostile to Russia on the side of Germany: “The German press is the most powerful press in America not printed in the English language”, and it was read not only by Germans, but by Hungarians, Poles, Lithuanians, Czechs, Slavs, and Jews. “One may be sure that the German journalists [in the then-massive U.S. German-language press, presumably] have kept well to the front the fact that the German Government offered to concede all that the British Government had asked for in the matter of Belgium, and had even asked the British Government to name its own terms of neutrality, and that the British Foreign Minister concealed this fact from the Parliament when speaking before the declaration of war.” The Jews were “surely one of the most influential of the races represented in America ... Particularly is this true of the eastern states, and in the commercial and journalistic world.” And the Jewish press would be at least hostile to Russia. (In the Irish Worker of 12 September 1914, Connolly, in Friends of Small Nationalities, quoted New York Jewish newspapers, in German and Yiddish, as declaring Germany and Austria to be the least anti-Semitic nations in Europe.)
America and Europe concludes: Finally, as a word of warning this week. Do not let anyone play upon your sympathies by denunciation of the German military bullies. German military bullies, like all tyrannies among civilised people, need fear nothing so much as native democracy. Attack from outside can only strengthen tyrants within a nation. If we had to choose between strengthening the German bully or the Russian autocrat the wise choice would be on the side of the German. For the German people are a highly civilised people, responsive to every progressive influence, and rapidly forging the weapons for their own emancipation from native tyranny, whereas the Russian Empire stretches away into the depths of Asia, and relies on an army recruited from amongst many millions of barbarians who have not yet felt the first softening influence of civilisation.
Connolly was not the only observer taking this position. In The War Against Europe (pamphlet, September 1914, New York edition), Roger Casement wrote:
“England fights as the foe of Europe and the enemy of European civilization. In order to destroy German shipping, German commerce, German industry, she has deliberately plotted the conspiracy we now see at work. The war of 1914 is England’s war. For years she has been plotting how she could, without danger to herself, destroy the peaceful menace of German prosperity. A few more years of peaceful expansion by Germany and the chances of success would be less if not quite gone. Since August 1911, the sole object of British foreign policy has been to put Germany in a false position and to arrange for the blow to be struck by other hands – by hired hands.
“Today we see the triumph of British diplomacy. Russia and France have been nerved up to the task. The sword has been drawn against Germany, and England ... enters joyfully into a struggle that while it shall never touch her shores, or interrupt or lessen a single English meal, must end in the laying waste of Germany and the annihilation of the only European people who had shown themselves capable of serious competition in the peaceful arts of commerce and industry. In order to achieve this crime England is prepared to hand Europe over to Russia. Herself a non-European power she cheerfully contemplates Europe dominated by an asiatic Power ...
“In this war Germany fights not only for her own life – she fights to free the seas and if she wins she fights to free Ireland ... The fight may be fought on the seas but the fate will be settled on an island. The crippling of the British fleet will mean a joint German-Irish invasion of Ireland and every Irishman able to join that army of deliverance must get ready today.”
Military domination of eastern Europe by Russia actually came about thirty years later, in very different circumstances. In the light of actual events (German defeat of Russia in the Great War), it may be a bit difficult to see what Casement, who had been a prominent insider in the British diplomatic corps, was getting at in his 1914 pamphlet.
In the Allied theory of the impending Great War, Britain would help France to hold the Germans on the western Front, while “the Russian streamroller” would overwhelm the eastern front by pouring its inexhaustible Asiatic hordes of human cannon fodder into the heart of Central Europe.
Making this happen required removal of the British military veto on Russia’s heart’s desire, the warm-water Mediterranean port of Constantinople, birthplace of Russian Orthodox religion and culture: “Czargrad”. Throughout the 19th century Britain had opposed Russia’s designs on Turkey, and fought its last but one war (Crimea) against armed white people in defence of Turkey (and the Middle East/Afghanistan) from Russian pressure on the vulnerable western flank of Britain’s Indian Empire.
But now the steamroller of Russian autocracy was to be deployed against socialist Europe.
A brutal, if brilliant, war strategy. Sure enough, secret treaties ceded Constantinople (and ‘Turkish Armenia’ and ‘Kurdistan’ and ‘Persian Azerbaijan’ to Russia, while, in rest of the Middle Eastern carved-up, France was awarded territory between the new British Middle Easter territories and the expanded Russian Empire, to serve as the buffer against post-War Russia that Turkey had been throughout the 19th century. (Not to mention awarding Palestine to the Zionist movement.)
The full facts and full horror of this were not totally evident in 1914. The secret treaties had yet to be formalised. But the broad outlines and intentions could be discerned, just as NATO machinations can be observed today.
Connolly was well-connected to the European socialist movement, and he had lived in America. There is not scope here to assess the details of the geopolitical analysis of himself and Casement, and how historic enmities were overturned out of the blue, and turned into alliances. (“We are at war with East-Asia. We have always been ast war with East-Asia.”)
These days we are told we must choose between Boston and Berlin, between German welfare capitalism and the financial piracy of Wall Street and the City of London. Indeed, Berlin itself has had to choose between Boston and Berlin. Germany’s lurch towards Boston a decade or so ago fed steroids to the Celtic Tiger and gave it its fatal heart attack.
But in regard to King and Kaiser in 1914, Connolly’s choice of Berlin’s welfare capitalism over London’s finance-capitalist-militarist piracy gets support from an unlikely source.
On 19 February 1916, in his newspaper, The Workers’ Republic, under the heading The German State, Connolly published part of the concluding chapter of Socialized Germany by Frederic C.Howe.
Frederic Clemson Howe (1867–1940) was a member of the Ohio Senate, Commissioner of Immigration of the Port of New York, and President of the League for Small and Subject Nationalities. His book on Socialized Germany can be read in full at http://archive.org/stream/socializedgerman00howeuoft#page/n7/mode/2up
Howe was very much on the Anglo-Saxon side, and represented President Wilson at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. ( In another book http://archive.org/stream/whywar00howe#page/232/mode/2up (Why War, 1916), Howe gave his views of the true origins of the Great War.) Howe’s Socialized Germany book is essentially good advice to the Allied side on how they needed to get their act together in order to keep Germany down.
Unlike Howe, Connolly was not an Anglophile. Connolly’s dream of joint European Socialist action against war was dead. He had done his utmost to get better wages and conditions, housing, health care, pensions, and all the rest, so that people did not have to live like animals.
But the catastrophe had occurred. The William Martin Murphys, the Redmonds, the bishops, the newspapers, and the rest, had endorsed and encouraged something far worse than unemployment, low wages, miserably housing and diet. They were shovelling the people that Connolly had worked for into trenches to die like animals. They were screaming for the slaughter of young men who had never done any harm to Ireland or its people.
What is the use of jobs, wages, pensions if you are dead at 20?
But Connolly had the Irish Citizen Army, and he prepared to actually do something about the catastrophe. The Socialist movement failed to act in 1914. But Connolly did not sit around in despair, thinkingly longingly of what might have been, and now could never be. He took action in 1916. Did he achieve anything?
At the very least, the Rising changed the rules of the game, in Ireland and perhaps more widely. The Military Governor Lord French arrived with many of thousands of troops, with plans at the ready to conscript 100,000 young men, so they could be forced at gunpoint into the war and then shot dead if they refused to kill other young men. But Conscription was averted, and tens of thousands of lives were saved. Ireland has not gone to war in other countries since then. It has dipped its toe in the water by sending a few soldiers to Afghanistan. It remains to be seen whether Connolly’s legacy is completely lost.
And what about Connolly’s “gallant allies” in the Rising? His gallant socialist allies? Here is an extract from the part of Frederic Howe’s book published by Connolly in 1916:
"Fatherland" signifies many things to the German; it has many other meanings than patriotic attachment. And all of the activities described in the previous chapters form part of German Kultur as the Germans use the term. Kultur is not limited to educational and aesthetic things. Kultur includes history and traditions, politics, statecraft, and administration; it includes state socialism, social legislation, the conservation of human life, and the promotion of the well-being of the people. All of the individual and collective contributions which Germany has made to the world form part of Kultur as the German understands the word. These contributions are colossal. And they are largely social.
This emphasis on human welfare is one of the remarkable things about the German idea of the state. Almost all of the achievements enumerated have been brought about in the short space of a generation. The greatest advance is coincident with the reign of William II. Bismarck laid the foundations of the structure, but his work was horizoned by the conditions of his generation and the unification of the empire. It remained for William II to give unity to the work by harmonizing the landed aristocracy and the commercial classes with humanism in legislation, and by calling to his aid the scientific thought of the nation and identifying with the state the contributions of the universities and technical schools, the scientists and artists, the educators and the business men.
Connolly’s extract includes description of Productive and Distributive Socialism as implemented in Germany. Here are the Preface and Contents of Howe’s Socialized Germany:
Much of the material for this book was ready for publication in the fall of 1914. It is the product of rather intimate knowledge of German life during the past quarter of a century. When the war broke out the manuscript was laid aside to await its termination, but as the contest wore on and the extraordinary resources of Germany were disclosed, it seemed to me the book should be published, partly as an explanation of the efficiency of Germany, but primarily as a suggestion of a new kind of social statesmanship which our own as well as other countries must take into consideration if they are to be prepared to meet the Germany which, in victory or defeat, emerges from the war. For the "German peril" is only in part a military peril. It is a peace peril as well. The real peril to the other powers of Western civilization lies in the fact that Germany is more intelligently organized than is the rest of the world. The individual German receives more from society. He is better protected in his daily life. The gains of civilization are more widely distributed than they are with us. His dignity and his personal liberty are on a different, and from our point of view on a lower, plane than in America and Great Britain, but his daily and his hourly needs, and those of his wife and family, are better cared for. And
the individual man is more efficient. He is better prepared for his work. He enjoys a wholesome leisure life. He is assured protection from la misere in old age. The workhouse does not await him if he falls by the wayside.
It is my belief that Germany had just reached the beginning of her greatest achievements. Had not the war intervened, the next generation would have seen her competitors in industry, trade, and commerce outdistanced at an accelerated speed that would have soon left them far and possibly permanently in the rear.
If this is to be averted, new ideas of the obligations of the state must animate our legislators. There must be an abandonment of the old conception that the only business of organized society is to protect the individual from domestic and foreign aggression. There must be a wide extension of public ownership, a greater control of the aggressions of privilege and property, a big programme of social legislation, a change in our system of education, and the exclusion of privileged and business interests from the long ascendancy which they have enjoyed in our political life. It required the war to make this clear to Great Britain. It should shake us from our complacency as well. ...
Frederic C. Howe.
New York, September, 1915.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. Introductory — The Dual Germany
II. The Background of Modern Germany
III. The Constitution of the Empire
IV. The Economic Foundations of Class Rule
V. Recent Economic Progress
VI. The Theory and Extent of State Socialism
VII. The State-Owned Railways
VIII. Canals, Waterways, and Free Ports
IX. Harbors and River Shipping
X. Mines, Forests, and Agricultural Lands
XI. The Attitude of Germany toward the Social Problem
XII. Caring for the Unemployed
XIII. Labor and Industrial Courts
XIV. Social Insurance and Social Democracy
XV. Higher Education — Providing the Expert
XVI. Elementary Education
XVII. Vocational Education — Preparing the Child for Life
XVIII. Sanitation and Health
XIX. The War upon Disease
XX. Governing Cities by Experts
XXI. Municipal Socialism
XXII. The Building of Cities
XXIII. Municipal Landownership and Housing Projects
XXIV. The German Conception of the State