Date: Sat, 18 Oct 1997 19:19:56 +1000 (EST) From: Gary MacLennan <g.maclennan-AT-qut.edu.au> Subject: M-I: Ahmad & Nationalism & Ireland (1 of 3) Ahmad and Nationalism: The Irish Instance (1 of 3) On my recent trip to England I worked through Monthly Review V 49 No 2. Of especial interest to me was the enjoyably spiteful exchange that S. V. Rajadurai & V. Geetha had with Aijaz Ahmad. (: 35-49) I like what I have read of Ahmad's work. Moreover in this debate he enunciated what I feel is a very important distinction. I do not know if any reference has been made to it before on the list, but if it has comrades will excuse me. Ahmad outlines two conceptions of the state A. The Enlightenment one. Here the state is an "ethical,, pedagogical function designed to serve people's needs for reform and progress in the various social and economic domains." (:46) This contrasts with that conception of the state descended according to Ahmad from Herder and Fichte: B. "The state embodies a general will arising not out of a common citizenship but out of a cultural essence, based on race, religion, language, or some other form of a primordial intimacy specific to an ethnic entity that by definition excludes others." (:46) Ahmad endorses A. and has little tolerance for B. I feel that most marxists would share this attitude and by and large I do too. Frankly I am very inclined to regard any politics based on B. to be unfortunate and backward and to be hopefully overcome when we begin creating the socialist society. But of course I recognise that one has to be a good deal more subtle than that and one has to make lots of concessions etc. I have been reading Comrade Proyect's posts! Still underneath it all I am happiest with what I feel are socialist struggles. Ahmad's distinction then broadly speaking provides us I feel with some sort of means of judging the progressiveness or otherwise of a brand of nationalist politics. Applied to my own country - Ireland I feel that by and large Irish Republicanism is very much in the tradition of the enlightenment. Its founders were the Irish Presbyterians of Ulster and theirs was a brief but brilliant enlightenment. Long long ago, on a list far far away Karl Carlile said that Ireland never had an Enlightenment. He was of course wrong. In the late 18th century the Ulster Presbyterians represented the most advanced class in Europe. They enthusiastically endorsed the French Revolution. They single handedly saved from extinction the Old Irish Harper Culture. They made great advances in science and education. But above all they represented a force in Ireland which was absolutely non-sectarian. Their fate was to be brutally crushed by the British and their memory has been almost wiped out. It is kept alive now only by the Irish Republican movement especially in the annual pilgrimage to the grave of the Founder of Irish Republicanism Wolfe Tone. But this is almost the equivalent of the handful of Mayan peasants who make the trip to the ruins to preserve the mere vestiges of the once great civilisation. In the North of Ireland the direct descendants of the Revolutionary Presbyterians of the 18th Century either know nothing of their great predecessors or go out of their way to destroy any attempt to revive their memory. In the north of Ireland now the savage irony of history is that it is the Presbyterians and the Protestants who advance a politics based on the Fichtean and Herderian 'model'. Theirs is a nation held together by obscurantist religion and unyielding bigotry. By contrast when Gerry Adams speaks he is the direct descendent of the Irish Enlightenment. Such indeed is the cruel logic of the remorseless dialectic. There is of course much to be said here about the destruction of revolutionary Presbyterianism. From the start it must be understood that the chief means of doing this was to increase sectarian hatred of Catholics among the Protestants of Ulster. In this context the following quotation is quite illuminating "I have arranged...to increase the animosity between Orangemen and the United Irish. Upon that animosity depends the safety of the centre counties of the north. Were the Orangemen disarmed or put down or were they coalesced with the other party, the whole of Ulster would be as bad as Antrim and Down." (a British general writing to General Lake who commanded the British forces in Ireland in 1798 at the time of the Great Rebellion in Bell.G. _The Protestants of Ulster_, London: Pluto Press, 1976: 15) This policy of direct encouragement of sectarianism was further augmented by economic polices which saw the growth of industrialism in the North around Belfast and the construction of a Protestant Labour Aristocracy. Now we have had in the past to defend this concept against the likes of Adam Rose and others from the International Socialist tendency and even worse against the rabid renegades from the Maoist Movement represented especially by that little Protestant Marxist Paul Cockshott - our very own Rangers supporter. But the facts are there. On a whole range of fronts Ulster Protestants enjoyed *significant* economic advantages over their fellow Catholics. The creation in 1922 of the Protestant statelet merely served to confirm and strengthen that pattern. For the doubters I urge them to turn to Bell especially Chapter 2. Page upon page of official statistics carefully document the material base of Ulster sectarianism. Given the history of the origins of Ulster bigotry it is almost funny to contemplate the embarrassment that the British exhibit when they come to discuss the prejudices of their most loyal supporters in Northern Ireland. This week Blair experienced a little of this when he was jostled briefly. Once Winston Churchill had his car nearly overturned by the same brand of enthusiastic loyalism. Recently Ulster Unionist leaders have had to declare that theirs is not a politics based on religious privilege. It has just occurred to the brighter of them that they have to unite Ulster and that it will no longer be good enough to simply preside over the crushing of the Catholic minority within that state. But the task of uniting Ulster is beyond them. Just as the task of uniting Arab and Jew is beyond the Zionists. In Northern Ireland the only way forward is for a politics which once again takes up, defends and spreads the views of the heroic Ulster Enlightenment. I will close this post with a quotation from William Orr, a Presbyterian and the first member of the United Irishmen to be executed. Orr was the son of a prosperous Co. Antrim farmer. He was hung in Carrickfergus on the 14th October 1797. His anniversary would have gone unnoticed by his fellow presbyterians. If they know of him at all it is only to revile his memory. Yet he was a great person and deserves to be remembered as such. At his trial he defended himself in this way:- "My comfortable lot, and industrious course of life, best refute the charge of being an adventurer for plunder; but if to have loved my country - to have known its wrongs - to have felt the injuries of the persecuted Catholics, and to have united with them and all other religious persuasions in the most orderly and least sanguinary means of procuring redress - if these be felonies, I am a felon, but not otherwise." (in T.D., A.M. & D.M. Sullivan (eds)_Speeches from the Dock_, Dublin, 1909: 32) The next post will consider the nationalism of Michael Collins and endeavour to address what conditions determine which of our two models of nationalism will predominate. The final post if I can get round to it will deal with Gerry Adams and it will seek to locate him within the context of a. peace processes, b. the post-communism isolation of revolutions and c. the desire-to-come-in-from-the-cold that has gripped the ageing revolutionaries of our time. Source: India: Case and Great State Nationalism: An Exchange by S.V. Rajadurai & V. Geetha. Reply by Aijaz Ahmad, Monthly Review, V 49 No 2 June 1997: 35-39 --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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