The Crooked Cross; fascism and appropriation of Celtic Culture

 

Croeso! 

A bit ago, a US politician got in some trouble when he unwittingly disclosed that he had a tattoo of the SS emblem, the Totenkopf (Death's Head). That politician is called Graham Platner, and he's a Maine Democrat. In a related story, another Democrat politician Dylan Blaha disclosed he has six tattoos, five of which seem to be typical military ink (both Dylan and Graham are ex-servicemen) but the sixth raised an eyebrow for me. On his right calf, Dylan has a Celtic cross, which he got in Germany after a trip to Ireland.

Now, I don't know either of these guys, Graham Platner claims he didn't know it was the SS murder skull and says he got it altered when he found out. As for the Celtic cross, it isn't a hate symbol yet, but there is a determined push to make it into one. And I know from experience this is largely overlooked in Anglophone circles.  So, I have no idea if either Democratic politician is a secret Nazi. I think it would be a very stupid thing for secret Nazis to declare themselves that way, but I'll sit back and let better placed individuals look into those stories. What I am going to do is take advantage of the rare window of public attention these revelations have caused to sound the alarm bells about a pernicious tactic on the far right. 

 I don't like talking about myself, but this text will go on to rely on my personal experiences, so I may as well get this out of the way. I am a Celt (it's pronounced Kelt) I grew up in a Celtic family surrounded by other Celts, in Ireland, Wales and Scotland, and the part of England I live in is one with a large Scottish and Irish population. I would not pass an Irish or Welsh language test nor could I write a book on Celtic folklore (not yet anyway) but I did grow up hearing words from both languages. In fact, in a funny twist for today's topic, my blood is so purely Celtic that I have a rare genetic blood disease that targets north European Celtic populations. That's not relevant to this particular discussion, but I think you should keep it in mind for when you encounter gobshites bemoaning the watering down of Europe with all that race mixing.  

Cultural appropriation, now to be clear I'm not using this term the way some do to mean any and all cross-cultural interaction and exchange. I mean it in the sense of taking something from one cultural and deliberately and radically trying to reclaim it as something else for a deliberate political end. I have no objection to other peoples learning about Celtic history and culture and myths, if anything I think its beneficial that cultural awareness is increased as a way to combat the attempts to hijack it for divisive ends. 

Fascists and their fellow travellers have been busy for years trying to replace the old toxic branding, swastikas, fasces etc, with new ones that can serve to rally the racists without tipping off normal society. They've mostly targeted Scandinavian cultural artifacts with knock off runes due to associations with Viking warriors and the convenient overlap with German mythology and some connections to original Nazi occultists.

I'm not knowledgeable enough to comment in detail on the pillaging of the Norse lore, so I'll also leave that to others. They have also appropriated Celtic symbology, including adopting a variation on the Celtic cross that marks very old churches in Ireland and Britain and have a smaller presence in Northern Europe. Celtic cross have many designs, what they usually have in common is a circle behind the head and the arms of the Cross. Fascist groups have latched onto to a simplified version of that characteristic and use variations of it that often look like a target cross-hair or a plus symbol in a circle. I've known for sometime that knowledge of these fash rebrand attempts isn't very high for some time. Even experienced anti-fascist activists who clock that these are fash emblems often don't know what they are. I remember one calling out the use of "fascist plus signs" on a banner when checking out who was marching down the street.

 

The sheer gall, or should I say Gaul, of French far right using Celtic imagery

 

I grew up with tattoos of Celtic crosses, every man from my father's generation who's a Celt has one somewhere, its become a very popular symbol of heritage and pride. Like the Harp for the Irish, Red Dragons for Welsh or Thistles for Scottish only this one can be used by most Celtic peoples. Generally the more the tattoo looks like its based on a real 9th century cross in a graveyard somewhere in Donegal or rural parts of Western Scotland, and the owner is a Celt or someone who has parents/grandparents, or just lives in Wales or Brittany or something, it's probably benign. When someone is using the streamlined version and has no connection to the Celts or a part of Europe where the Irish Catholic Church (which promoted the adoption of that cross style) had no presence, I would ask questions, like "what is that?" and then "why did you choose that?" and their answer is some nonsense about "our heritage" or pride I would be wary of them.

To link back to original premise, if Dylan Blaha had got the tattoo in Ireland, I'd think it's either a touristy thing or an attempt to get in touch with his "roots". Getting it in Germany gave me a moment of pause, the Ancient Celts were around the Rhine and Alpine regions but didn't get into the German interior much. However, designs for "authentic" crosses are popular, and their details are a good way for a skilled tattoo artist to show off their skills. If it turned out he just went to a tattoo parlour in Germany where knowledge of far right symbols is more common especially for tattoo artists who can get into trouble for making them, and got a short and quick plus and circle job I'd be far more suspicious. 

From a friend on Bluesky, a stall for the National Rebirth Party in Leicester, using a Triskelion as their emblem.

It's not just the cross that's been high jacked, other lesser known Celtic symbols are also being used. A variation on the Triskelion also pops up from time to time. Now Triskelion's aren't strictly a purely Celtic symbol, like the swastika its appeared in many cultures, some of which predate the Celts, it was also heavily tied to early civilisations in Sicily as another example. The Celts of ancient times used versions of it in many forms, and I have seen variations used by fash types that are based on the more common Celt designs. So, by talking mostly about the Celt versions I don't wish to imply the other cultures are fair game, just sticking to what I know.

If you don't know what a Triskelion is, the flag of the Isle of Man uses a version, the three legs on it are an example. Yes, the tri in triskelion means three, so it's a triskelion if it uses a pattern of three.  This appropriation is not as well known but goes back further. The ultra racist Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) took the Nazi flag, cut the swastika out of it and stitched a black triskelion into its place.

I guess subtlety doesn't translate into Afrikaans.

 There was also a SS division that used one as their personal logo.

Again I don't like seeing symbols I grew up with re-purposed for hate politics, growing up the Triskelion was a symbol of protection, a silly good luck charm. Speaking of luck charms, specifically Irish symbols are commonly used by far right groups in the United States of America. I'm thinking of the Ayran Brotherhood who use clovers as their emblem. This one I feel is more well known, I've seen documentaries about it for one, and I'm not familiar with conditions in the United States, so I won't talk further on this other than to note that in the documentaries I've seen on this group they allege that the Brotherhood considers clovers to be their symbol and not an Irish symbol and will attack Irish American inmates who have clover tattoos who aren't a "brother". I can't think of better example of the dangers of cultural appropriation.

Part II, Why?

  Now I've detailed some of the more common examples I feel It's important to look at why these disparate groups are doing this. Well while it may not seem like it in 2026 with the far right gaining popular support in many nations the authentic WWII era Nazi branding is still toxic and weird to even the majority of their voters. Fascism has always relied on euphemism and that reliance has grown since the WWII defeat and the Holocaust and the other brutal occupations from that time. One curious fact about the Graham Platner incident is that he says he got the SS tattoo in Croatia. Croatia like all the former Kingdom of Yugoslavia suffered greatly from German occupation, events marking the partisan movement are still publicly commemorated to this day. That said, Croatia also had an infamous history of collaboration with the Axis powers. I'm going to be careful here and make clear I do not mean all Croatians collaborated, there was however a fascist Croat movement called the Ustasha who were given de facto control of a collaborationist state and this state and its movement enthusiastically carried out genocides against Serbs, Jews and Freemasons and Communists and Gypsies and other undesirables*. I have no idea if Graham Platner is being honest when he claims ignorance, however it is inconceivable that the tattooist who gave him that skull didn't know about it.

In addition to misdirection the choosing of Celtic bits and pieces also slots in nicely with pre-existing fascist pseudo-history. The Celts in the accounts of Ancient Greek and Roman sources are violent and war like, which fits in with the machismo men of action cult. The Celts are also quite pale and European, so those are two ticks on the check sheet right there. Of course, most of this breaks down once you take even a cursory look at history, but I'm getting ahead of myself. Theirs also a religious component, the Celtic cross is also a cross, and its origins lie with the Irish Catholic Church. While fascism is quite diverse on questions of spirituality, hostility to Jews and Muslims means some form of militant Christianity will appeal to some of them. I don't think every fash with the fascist plus symbol is a militant christian, but I have seen its use in places like Italy and France where the Celtic connection just doesn't make sense, but the "a normal Italian/Frenchman is a Christian/Catholic" does make some kind of ideological sense.

And of course we can't overlook the follow the leader phenomena. I have a suspicion that if you were to conduct a poll of the international far right population where the Celtic cross is used many respondents wouldn't know what it really is and just copied what another fascist group did. This isn't the first time this has happened. When Mussolini came to power in Italy their was a global trend in copycat ___ Shirt movements. The Brown Shirts in Germany, Blue Shirts of Ireland, Silver Shirts in the USA, in Britain Mosely couldn't be bothered to pick a different colour they just ripped off Benito entirely.  And when Hitler rose to power in Berlin their was another wave of copy cats aping him. The fascists in Hungary where called the Arrow Cross party because their knock off Swastika was a cross made of Arrows. 

They're also fairly easy to draw and have the added bonus where should a fascist group find itself out of step and under hostile scrutiny they can play the "Nu-uh" card. They can use to attract sympathisers in the know while playing coy to everyone else. Of course this is subject to the rule of diminishing returns, the more they use it the less cover it provides. The more times an "immigration sceptic" is caught at a stop the boats protest with a triskelion t-shirt is found to have been at a national front rally in the 80s with a Nazi armband the less credulous the general public will become.

 Part III, Why the Celts make terrible stormtroopers

I was debating whether or not to include this part, I don't think this is the place for a full history of Celts whether ancient or modern. However as I said when I spoke about cultural appropriation, I think knowledge of real Celtic culture and its symbols will help to expose the operation, its also really interesting, with dragons, vengeful gods, curses and so on. Though I believe most Euro fash are unaware and do not care about the Celts even as a tool to use. As an example I've seen the symbols stolen by groups operating in countries where the Celts left no impact if they ever got their and Italian and French fascists are using it. If you wonder why I keep bringing them up, Italian fascsits love the Romans, who committed multiple genocides against many Celtic tribes and are in fact the nemesis of the ancient Celts. Meanwhile the French republic in 2026 is currently actively carrying out policies to destroy the culture and language of the Bretons, its Celtic minority. That's the nasty side of appropriation and fetishisation, it doesn't actually care about its targets, it just exploits them for its own gain.

 So here's a few inconvenient facts that get in away of a more serious fash interpretation of the Celtic legacy. 

1. Ancient Celts were quite diverse. The old Celts of the times of Asterix and Obelisk got around, they spread out so far and for so long that there is still debate over where the Celts originated, one theory says Central Europe, another says they came from Iberia and Western Europe. With an open question about where did their ancestors come from.
2. Celtic culture originates in language, the Ic in Celtic means speaker of a Celt language. Attachment to the Celtic peoples of antiquity were on the basis of tongue not race. Some nationalists may push back on this with an appeal to shared Europeanness. But that doesn't hold either, while the Celts were concentrated in North and Western Europe we know that Celts were present in areas further afield, the Galatians from the bible were a Celtic people and they lived in the middle of what is now Turkey. Celtic tribes also had access to the Mediterranean and traded extensively, where there was differences on parentage or relationship was along tribal lines within the Celts. They were never a unified "Volk" there were variations in culture, custom and language throughout. 
3. If the Celts had a "nemesis" they wouldn't be Jews or Africans or any other foreign bogeyman picked on by the far right. There enemies were other Europeans, Vikings, Germanic tribes, Romans, Greeks etc. If there were stop the boats protests in Britain in the 6th Century the targets would be the Saxons, Jutes and Angles who created the proto-English culture**. That Celts even still exist is a testament to resistance to these attempts to destroy and subjugate them. The French Republic is still trying to force the Bretons to become French by doing all it can to make Brezhoneg a dead language. The people who have been oppressing us, destroying our cultures and forcing us to behave as they see fit are fellow Europeans, often motivated by nationalism.
4. The Celts expose the arbitrariness of nations, races and culture itself. The terms Celt and Celtic dissappear until the 1700s when very early studies in what would become anthropolgy and linguistics realised the langauges and cultures of the people living in Wales, Ireland, Brittany etc shared many common characteristics and that some them seem to connect these modern peoples to those of the civilisations from ancient times. They could've easily not adopted the common "family name" and kept us all separate afterall while the Celtic languages are related they're not mutual intelligible, at least not at without a good deal of exposure. And since language was the main decider rather than religion or physical characteristics (I would say stereotypes) we can easily redefine the Celtic population drastically downward excluding many including myself but include a small number of other people including a student from Hong Kong who speaks far better Cymraeg then I can. If langauge is the deciding factor that it de facto means that ethnicity and sense of belonging are largely arbitrary and open to change. Which it already has, many English and French share the same ancestors as Bretons and Welsh, and yet we think of them as different peoples because when the labels were reintroduced the majority of them didn't speak a Celtic language as their first and main language.  

That's the annoying thing about history for propagandists its too messy and doesn't fit neat sides of a box. If militant Celtic nationalism where to take off as a movement it'd be more likely to divide the Euro fash camp even more. Let's look at one Welsh national hero, Owain Glyndŵr (Owen Glendower in English). There's a man who in the popular retelling rallied the Cymry in a heroic struggle for freedom from the violent alien oppressor the English... Mainstream Celtic nationalism is already speratist.

 Appendix: Real Celtic Fascism

I wasn't sure whether to add this or not, but on re-reading I felt there was a theme of alien corruption of noble culture. While I beleive much of this appropriation is from non-Celtic sources there are examples of homegrown Celtic fascist and other reactionary tendencies. And while I'm busy pre-empting criticism I'll reiterate my personal view that these fash types being "foreign" is not the issue, I genuinely like it when others show interest in culture and language, nor do I have an issue with benign use or borrowing for new things.  Its very much the exploiting a frankly damaged and misunderstood culture for xenophobic purposes that I can't stand, regardless of whose doing it.

 So, with that in mind I will briefly document a few examples of Celtic fascism from history. 

 The Blue Shirts,

 

Fascist politician Eoin O'Duffy inspects his troops,

The Blue Shirts were one of the copy cats of Mussolini, their leade O'Duffy also set up a Corpratist Political party further copying his mentor. At their peak in 1934 the Blue Shirts numbered 48,000 though they quickly lost most of those members. The Blue Shirts were formed as a paramilitary and security unit for one of the groups that merged into Fine Gael (Family of the Irish) the same Fine Gael that currently is the ruling coalition of the Republic of Ireland. The Blues infamously raised a brigade of Irish volunteers for Franco's army rebels in the Spanish Civil War. Some Irish historians try to avoid the Fascist label for the Blue Shirts but curiously not its leader O'Duffy, by arguing they were motivated by extreme authoritiarian catholicism. I won't deny there Catholic zealotry but that's not a disqualifier for fascist politics. They also officially supported democracy in Ireland, however they materially supported a fascist dictatorship in Spain and their idea of a model democracy was the Irish Free State, a state that was not free and had came into existence through an extreme and ruthless victory in a civil war. The Blue Shirts were founded largely due to the release of prisoners from the losing side in that war. The Free State of the 30s was not the tourist friendly Temple Bar of modern Dublin, it was suspicious and actively controlling of the population.

The Breton National Party

The Breton National Party, founded in 1931 was a nationalist party that sought independence from France. It rivaled a Breton federalist movement***. During the second world war it collaborated with the Nazi Occupation forces. Brittany had its own little Vichy. 

Members of the BNP in 1942, its hard to make out, but those armbands they're wearing sport a Triskelion

 The BNP was disbanded forcibly in 1944 during the liberation of France. Meanwhile the rival federalist movement which sported a Hevoud symbol which is also sometimes called a Celtic swastika was driven out of eixstence sometime after 1938. Though sucessor organisations of sorts for both them came into existence in the 2000s, the Adsav being the far right bastard child of the BNP, still keeping the triskelion emblem, while the Federalists revived the Federalist League name. 

Defence Leagues

The English Defence League or EDL was the most popular and in your face strain of far right politics in the UK in the 2010s. Of course there was both a knock off Scottish Defence League and a Welsh Defence League but the EDL had the numbers and caused the biggest impact and damage to communities all over Britain. 

I don't know much about the Scottish Defence League but I'm more familiar with the WDL, though not by much as it collapsed into infighting and feuding after investigations into their members and their links to Neo-Nazis were exposed**** soon after launching. The same fate eventually befell the EDL with many splinter groups and rivals often trying to beat the rump EDL of the streets in some regions.  

The Welsh off shoot collapse so quickly that the EDL tried to pick up the slack by marching in Wales demanding "their country back", which didn't go down well. 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 *I should also mention that there were Croats who resisted occupation and that the other groups and peoples in Yugoslavia had collaborators too, it's not a clear-cut distinction. 

 ** A fun fact, in all the Celt languages still spoken, the word for an Englishman literally translates as Saxon. Whereas Welsh and Wales come from Saxon words meaning foreigner and outsider. 

***  "..the pressing duty to gather those of our compatriots who do not want to confuse Brittany with the Church; Brittany with reaction; Brittany with puerile anti-French bias; Brittany with capitalism; and even less, Brittany with racism." From the manifesto of the Breton Federalist League 

**** Unmasked: Welsh Defence League, by the BBC 

The Significance of Sinn Fein Psychological, Political, and Economic. J R White

The Significance of Sinn Fein

Psychological, Political, and Economic.

J R White
(Published Martin Lester, Ltd, Dublin 1919.)

---

(AUTHOR'S NOTE: This paper was written about Christmas, 1918, shortly after Sinn Fein's triumph in the recent election. The letter of the prophecy that the British Government would not hesitate to suppress by force a rival assembly in Dublin has been falsified by events. The accuracy of several other forecasts, however, is already manifest.)

PSYCHOLOGICAL

PSYCHOLOGY is the science of the soul. The soul for the purposes of the present article means the sum of the powers and faculties in a human being, by which he feels and thinks and acts. Can we get some grasp of the relation of these faculties to each other in an individual and then apply them to present conditions in Ireland in such a way that both the race and individuals may understand themselves and their inter-connection better? I think we can.

The most elementary psychological division in an individual is between his sub-consciousness and surface consciousness. By the former I mean here not so much those freakish powers of memory and prevision, which are manifested in mediumistic or hypnotic trance, as the whole sum of instincts and tendencies which are inherited, or, at any rate, inborn in the individual, which are so much part of him that he may be quite unconscious of them, and is certainly unconscious of how they arose. By the latter I mean those beliefs, opinions, tendencies, and habits of reasoning which are formed by contact with outer environment, which depend on outer experience and observation, and may be in direct opposition to inner instinctive emotion.

Happy and rare is the man in whom the two consciousness are reconciled and harmonious, who finds, or makes, his outer environment the expression of his deepest instincts and desires. As the world is now, indeed, any such complete reconciliation is impossible for any man or woman in whose sub-consciousness there well up deep and creative emotions.

The sub-conscious soul life is checked and thwarted by environment. People of strong feeling must try to remould it nearer to the heart's desire. Immovable, by the effort of a few solitary individuals, the best of these are forced to compromise, or, failing that, shatter to bits, not the world, but themselves. The revolt against environment to be effective must be collective.

We see to-day two main kinds of collective revolt, that of subject races and subject classes. They may be (indeed, generally are) quite distinct. A class may revolt against the pressure of a social system, although the race of which it forms part has evolved that system as part of its character and culture. Or a race may revolt without formulating any distinct class protest. The race revolt corresponds to the subconsciousness, drawing its impetus from inborn racial instinct. The class revolt is an affair of the surface consciousness, concerned with the modification or reconstruction of external conditions. Where the two revolts unite in one the whole National Being is engaged.

But what is the relation between the two aspects of revolt thus fused, differing as they do in their motive and inspiration. W. H. Myers has defined genius as a "subliminal uprush," that is to say, the emergence of elements which remain latent below the threshold of consciousness in less gifted men into harmonious fusion with the reasoning and expressive powers of the surface personality. Where such harmonious fusion is absent we have not genius, but madness or hysteria. It would seem, therefore, that the inborn race-inspiration of Ireland, which Sinn Fein represents, has got to be harmonised with the conclusion and demands of Irish Labour, drawn from and directed towards external environment. Failing that, Labour's efforts will lack the subliminal element of genius, and Sinn Fein be in danger of lapsing into hysteria.

The Irish race is pre-eminently intuitive, that is to say, it feels its conclusions rather than thinks them, and often proceeds direct from feeling to action, which subsequent events fully justify, though reasoned calculation would have condemned. Its genius in this respect rests on a radical difference of psychology, a sealed book to John Bull, and to all peoples devoid of the education of untamed suffering necessary to read it.

In civilised life, as we know it, it is usual to base mental conclusions on actually observable facts or their easily predictable consequences. Practical men and nations sneer at the colouring of thought by emotion, and consider that practical thought should confine itself to hard external facts. The conflict of this outlook with the Christian teaching that the Kingdom of Heaven is within and cometh not by observation should be obvious; but to those who resent the implication that Christianity is concerned with practical affairs or that it is man's business to establish the kingdom without as well as within, it may be well to point out that the teaching of elementary psychology is equally plain. The limitation of thought to the data of external experience implies stagnation. Mere knowledge taken alone is a matter of receiving, not of initiating. Feeling makes the movement with which knowledge deals. The intellect by itself moves nothing, and the quest of reality, though it may be greatly assisted thereby, would never be undertaken by the intellect alone. Without emotion, will would he dormant and the intellect lapse into a mere calculating machine. The whole of man's environment is built up, however short it fall of the mark, at the spur of emotion in search of his happiness and well being. To deny the place of emotion, therefore, as an element in constructive thought is to cut off the stream of life from its source. Consciousness is always trying to run ahead of the data of reason as given in the past and present. The soul of Man, while it feels there is more to love and more to know, can never be satisfied by turning over all possible rearrangements and combinations of its effort up to date. It must make a new effort, to create by its own intensity something nearer to the heart's desire, To deny the reasonableness of emotion is to give no rational sanction for the condition of progress. So much for the criticism sometimes seen in the English press that Sinn Fein is an emotion not a policy. What has already been said and what follows is an attempt to show in its true light the vast significance of Sinn Fein's function in re-introducing pure emotion as a factor in Western world-politics.

The longer dwelt on, the deeper does that significance become. It will be more fully unfolded in the political and economic sections of this paper. Before leaving the psychological, however, some aspects of national emotion as a cohesive force as well as a driving force may be noted. The individual can only trace the roots of his own tendencies in the past history of the race to which he belongs. Sinn Fein and the Gaelic League, therefore, in isolating the national spirit from foreign influences and reviving the national past, not only enhance the consciousness of each individual, but bring to bear a great combining force to weld individuals together. Quot hommes tot sententiae may be roughly translated "as many opinions as there are minds to form them." The intellectual element can neither initiate nor spontaneously combine. This is the explanation why anti-militarists and international socialists, however clear their intellectual grasp of their tenets, succumbed and fell into line with the predatory emotions of the few in their respective countries. The binding-force of a common emotion was too weak until the opening of the great dynamo in Russia. For good or ill, not intellect but emotion is the element of agreement and combination among men, whether their combination is that of wolves who hunt their prey, or of bees who make their honey in common.

Two great emotional forces make for this unity in Ireland, her nationality and her religion, and since they are neither of them aggressive and predatory, and both of them dependent on attraction rather than compulsion, her unity is spontaneous, and so proof against external force, and her influence is the great bulwark against the dominance of the brute combination resting on compulsion in the Western world.

In conclusion of this section: the functions of Sinn Fein and Irish Labour have been compared to the dual functions of the mind, receiving its material from the inner or sub-consciousness on the one hand and external environment on the other. Sinn Fein seeks to restore the soul, Labour to recreate the body. Will soul and body fit? Whitman's line springs to my pen. "I swear to you the body is the soul." Irish Labour is in tune with that great uncompromising movement of the world's workers, which prepares a freer body for all and each of the nations of the world. In the past the soul has assumed an air of some superiority to the body, in dogma, in untested moral dictation, in the subordination of economics to politics But this is the day of the resurrection of the flesh, the uprising of the despised mass of humanity condemned to bodily labour and denied a self-directing soul. In freeing their bodies so shall they free the souls of themselves and all of us who were pitiably less in that we thought ourselves greater than they. Let the seekers for the soul of Ireland observe this new up-heaving body of Labour with deference, for in it lies a new world soul, and Ireland's own.

POLITICAL

The connection between politics and economics is so close that the division between them must be one of careful definition to avoid being one of loose thinking. In treating, therefore, of the political aspect of Sinn Fein, as distinct from the economic, I propose to call politics all movements based on the tacit acceptance of the continuance of the basis of Government with which we are at present familiar. This may be described as Parliamentarianism, democratic in form, in that the opinions of the people, or a great majority of them are nominally reflected in the legislation imposed on them, or, at least, in the election of the legislators. Whether the present method is or can be democratic in substance may transpire as I proceed, and the relation of Ireland to politics, her great and growing disabilities may serve to point the distinction between "democratic" politics and economics in the sense I employ the word. If political forms, as I hold, are dissolving for lack of economic substance, observation of the process of dissolution will serve to clear the issue, and help to reveal economics as the basis of the politics of the future. It is not, of course, to be inferred that there has been no economic basis to politics as we have known them; far from it. But the instability of that basis has been the cause of the instability of the whole world-order and the terrific upheaval which it has just undergone. That things cannot resettle on the old basis would seem to be a sufficiently obvious, even respectable, opinion, for has not Mr. Lloyd George told us to look for "fundamental reconstruction." But the principle of the new foundation, and wherein it differs from the old, is far to seek in the utterances of English politicians. Ireland's aloofness from the recent World War has certainly not been imputed to her for righteousness outside her own borders. Yet, perhaps, this aloofness may be explicable by other reasons than callous indifference to the rights of small nations other than her own. She may have felt herself planted on the new foundation which Mr. Lloyd George omits to define, and been wisely, even altruistically, anxious to conserve it for the benefit of society at large. "Fundamental reconstruction" is handicapped if all the foundations are in the melting pot together. In the general collapse of those built upon the sand, any house with even a partial foundation of rock has the more need to stand.

What, then, is the justification for the attitude expressed in the phrase: "It is not Ireland's war." When the outbreak of the war violently threw society off its balance, the sluice gates built by democracy for its own protection were destroyed, and the current of the people's force was guided into the various streams of bellicose nationalism. Despite an intellectual realisation of the seeds of World War contained in the Capitalistic system, the great majority of International Socialists succumbed at the first blast of the trumpet, and the Internationale ceased to be anything but a name. The psychological reason for this collapse has already been given, that the combining power of emotion was on the side of race and overbore the intellectual grasp of a doctrine not yet ingrained in the subconsciousness. But why did Ireland's racial emotion enable her to stand firm? In the answer to this question lies the key of the door between Anglo Irish politics and world-economics. It was not necessary for Ireland to have so much as heard the word Socialism to have a healthy distrust of Imperialism and pierce the disguise of its blandishments. And Imperialism is at once the father and the child of Capitalism. So Ireland fought without talking for the ideals which most of the Socialists talked about while fighting for their opposite. But since this Section sets out to deal with the political significance of Sinn Fein, let us get to the point and say at once that Sinn Fein's political function can only be not only to break the political link with Westminster, but to abrogate politics on the basis with which we are familiar. And since the formation of the new basis can hardly lie with other than industrial organisation in the first place, we believe the function of Sinn Fein to be to encourage and co-ordinate such organisation. There are half a dozen insuperable reasons why Ireland's united emancipation as a nation must attend a programme world-wide and man-deep in its appeal, disintegrating from within the enemies that are invincible from without, and welding into one the separate elements of her own being in a manner that Sinn Fein alone can never achieve. Take the question of Ulster. Speaking as an Ulsterman with up-to-date knowledge of Ulster conditions, I assert that the only chance of combining the two racially distinct sections of Ireland is a programme which will make the liberation of Ireland arise automatically from the emancipation of the Irish workers. It is necessary to find something to unite the soul of Ireland, North and South, to prevent the partition of her body. National emancipation arising .out of human emancipation was the ideal which worked the combination in '98, and it must be the same again. But if any are sanguine enough to believe that a population of somewhat unimaginative Scotch Protestants will embrace the ideals of Celtic nationality simply because it is Celtic, let them do so. Let us follow the recent development of that nationality itself in its struggle for freedom, and see if any but the explanations of two Socialists, Connolly and Karl Marx, will fit the past and present facts or provide for the conquest of future obstacles. What is the position of Ireland today? To quote the Belfast Newsletter - "With regard to Ireland, the election has cleared the air. It is now an open issue between the maintenance of the Union and an Independent Irish Republic." And in the new Westminster Parliament there is now a clear majority of Unionists over every other Party. There are also, I am informed, 8o,ooo British troops in Ireland. Glancing abroad we find Mr. Daniels proclaiming the need of a supreme American navy, M. Clemencean declaring himself a realist and planning that the war to end war shall in no way disturb the old game of military preparedness; not to mention the unanimous intention to make Germany pay, after an armistice signed on the basis of no annexations and no indemnities, to the tune of something approaching the total national debts of the principal allied belligerents. These facts are worth mention, as indicating that the temper of the world's present rulers and their aims are not such as depend on moral persuasion themselves, or offer rosy prospects for its success as the sole weapon of their opponents. Nevertheless, no man is more convinced than the writer that an Independent Irish Republic has got to be and will be, the present English Government's refusal, notwithstanding. But how? How was Ireland solidified into the Western bulwark against servile Imperialism? By a rising, of which the driving force was the Labour Citizen Army. How was the great Capitalistic menace of conscription defeated? By a strike of Irish Labour. I have no wish to minimise the part played by other sections of the community, but I believe I give honour where honour is due to the class that has been and must continue to be the corner-stone of Ireland's resistance and liberation. The facts, so far, fit Connolly's theory that in the struggle for liberty of any subject nation the owning and employing class are forced by economic pressure to make terms with the oppressor with whom and whose system they become linked by a hundred golden threads of investments and the like. Thus, the onus of the struggle is thrown more and more on the working class. But what of Sinn Fein? I reply the vast majority of Sinn Fein do belong to the working class in the widest sense of the term, and that in so far as they are unable to exercise alone a force greater than aeroplanes and machine guns they will be compelled to unite with the workers who can exercise such a force or relinquish their object. Ireland has in the recent election disavowed the class that has made terms with the oppressor. Sinn Fein stands for the principle of no compromise in their stead. But assuming the disappointment of hopes in President Wilson, where shall Sinn Fein look for the accomplishment of that principle in practice? Sinn Fein must buy its Socialistic education, but any instructed Socialist could foretell that Ireland has nothing to hope from President Wilson, granting him, for the sake of argument, the best intentions in the world. Mr. Wilson is not a divine being, but the President of a Capitalistic Republic, and any League of Nations under the patronage of Capitalistic Governments can only be a league of exploiting rulers against exploited peoples, from which Ireland can expect nothing but reinforced coercion, for, to quote Connolly again, the cause of oppressed nations and oppressed classes is one and the same.

Thus it is that the really instructed International Socialist is the best and only practical Nationalist. Karl Marx declares that the struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, though international in substance, must first be national in form, as the proletariat must first settle accounts with the bourgeoisie each in its own country. Lucky for Ireland, she has settled that account with the ballot box instead of the bayonet. She now is near presenting an united front against the English bourgeoisie, with their eternally irreconcilable ideas. Here a remark attributed to Jaures is apposite: La classe ouvrire Brillanique c'est une classe bourgeoise (The English working class is a bourgeois class), and so as long as they are fed with the crumbs of their master's exploitations, the mass of them seems likely to remain. But the crumbs will run out, and there is a small but virile minority, not the Pacifists, who are tired of crumbs already.

To return to my statement that Sinn Fein's function was transitional. The policy of abstention from Westminster is excellent as far as it goes. The question is, can it go any further in the direction of setting up any form of "Parliamentary" Government in College Green, and would it be in the line of progress if it could? I answer both in the negative. It is as little to be supposed that the British Government, as at present constituted, will hesitate to suppress by force a rival assembly in Dublin, as that the Irish people will be overawed or thwarted by that force. They will simply be driven to other means against which The force is powerless, less invitingly simple, but infinitely more stable than a Parliament on the bourgeois model A true self-determination of a whole people cannot be achieved under the forms of Government that have heretofore passed for democracy.

Parliamentarianism, as it has been spoke, is as obsolete as a wooden plough. Democracy was the watchword with which the bourgeoisie obtained power. By the same watchword they seek to hold it. They mean by democracy that the people should vote, and work, and pay for them; their democracy is far more outraged by its concrete fulfilment as in Russia than by its abstract denial as in the old Germany. Even were Sinn Fein bourgeois in feeling or aim, as it emphatically is not, nothing but concrete democracy can possess the attractive or resisting power to realise Sinn Fein's undoubted aim of an Independent Ireland. Concrete democracy means the abolition of wage-slavery, which in Ireland, more even than in most countries, because of the numerical weakness of Labour, would be postponed, sine die, by any Parliament. The abolition of wage slavery, the workers' independence, can no more be achieved through an Irish Parliament in the first place than Irish Independence could have been achieved through an English one. The only education for liberty is liberty, taken possession of and practised. Sinn Fein intends rightly to deny the substance of English rule by refusing to pay taxes. So must the workers deny the substance of Capitalist rule by refusing to pay profits. And so far from this refusal to pay profits being a separate issue from Ireland's national independence, it is on that refusal that her united freedom must depend. The ascendancy caste in Ulster are the fortified outposts of England's rule in Ireland, and well are they rewarded for their position of honour. Ulster is the profiteer's paradise. Labour, except in Belfast, and largely even there, is almost unorganised. There are engineers in Ballymena today getting 31s a week, when the Belfast rate where this trade is organised is £3 12S. So intense has been the ignorance and bigotry, that not long since in Ballymena Labour organisers had to get police protection back to the station after attempting to address a meeting on purely Labour matters. But this very abnormal backwardness is the very factor making for revolutionary progress. Psychology is a science as exact or more exact than physics. If water accumulates to a certain level in a reservoir and is excluded from a dammed off area it will rush in with redoubled force when the dam is removed, and the level of the water in the excluded area will rise temporarily above the remainder. The emancipation of Labour has reached a certain level in all the world except Ulster. Ulster is becoming aware of the fact slowly but surely. Her workers have not yet realised that they have dammed themselves off from the twentieth century b their concentration on damning the Pope, but, then, they have not yet fully realised the existence of the 20th century any more than the non-existence of the Pontiff of their imagination. I submit that the actuality of the former must oust from their consciousness the phantasm of the latter, that this realisation of injurious illusion must come with a sudden impetus in proportion to their distance below the level of the time spirit. Their very lack of organisation combined with the force of belated indignation, will tend to make them skip the stage of trade-union organisation for sops and assert the reality which their Protestant spirit has been perverted to obscure and deny, the self-acting freedom of each individual in the collectivity. In other words, the abolition of a wage-slave class, and the control of industry by its creators.

Ireland has a greater task than the setting up of a bourgeois democracy on the English model, for she herself is the scene of the exposure of that democracy's deep-rooted fraudulence. Under it, the gang possessing economic and political control abrogate democracy as soon as they see their control threatened, and prepare to throw machine-gun bullets when they can no longer throw dust in the people's eyes. It should not be necessary to offer further proof of this to Irishmen. The Lame gun-running, the Curragh mutiny, the wholesale arrest of Sinn Fein leaders, and their imprisonment at this moment are proof enough.

The continuance of subject classes and nations is too necessary to bourgeois society for Governments representing that society to permit their genuinely democratic emancipation. In Ireland they have repeatedly abrogated it themselves and supported and rewarded its abrogation by their "fortified outposts." In Russia they demand and are endeavouring to enforce that the working class should withdraw from the concrete democracy they have conquered to reconquer it by abstract democratic means. The Bolsheviks are tyrants and anarchists who suppressed the constituent assembly, and Russia must be rescued for democracy, which means the restoration of Capitalistic industry and the recovery of their interest for a host of cosmopolitan fundholders. We all know the force of habit, and a social order is infinitely more tenacious of its habits than an individual. The forms of Government reflect the social habits of life. Any fundamental change in the economic order of a State must create for itself a new form of Government, and insistence on the old form is a subtle but utterly disingenuous means of smothering the new order at birth, of spoiling the new wine by pouring it into old bottles.

So much for the sacredness of constituent assemblies, called into being before a fundamental and progressive change has had time to leaven the habits of a people and create a governmental form to express itself.

We thank, therefore, both Sinn Fein for separating Ireland from the form of Parliamentarianism which has hitherto blessed us, and the British Government for its determination to prevent us saddling ourselves with a native version of the same blessing. Between them they help us to build better than they know. They keep open the field and compel the preparation of some form of Government based on the sure foundation of contact with the actual lives of the people, and expressive of their needs. And if such Government should develop on the lines of the Russian Soviets, it will be from no unreflective imitation, but because the said Soviets are the natural means for co-ordinating the social activities of free men and supplying their common necessities.

ECONOMIC

At the commencement of the "political" section of this paper, I defined as politics all movements based on the tacit acceptance of the continuance of the basis of politics with which we are at present familiar. Throughout the section in question I attempted to show the instability of that basis, and to indicate the subsidence on to a new foundation already in progress. But the representatives of the unstable equilibrium who did not shrink from the war are not likely to shrink from maintaining it if they can by means of the peace. A Capitalistic peace is indeed a far greater menace than a Capitalistic war, for the latter separates its authors into hostile camps, and promotes enquiry among their victims as to the causes for which they are asked to die. Whereas the former bids fair to substitute for the unstable balance of power between Capitalistic States a League of Governments foisted by armed force on the bewildered and unrepresented peoples of the world. The discredited secret diplomacies of Europe, or such of them as have not been overthrown by revolution, band themselves together to prevent the revolution of their own States and promote counter-revolution in the others. This amiable intention is advanced to within measurable distance of realisation under a thickening screen of camouflage about brotherhood and altruism, amid the plaudits of all the Broadbents of Anglo-Saxondom on both sides the Atlantic. When an indiscreet Latin gives the show away by advocating the old militarism pure and simple, they drown his words with their hosannas and go on diverting the troops from the Eastern battleground to Russia. It is high time for Ireland to realise that the stupefied people are entrusting the old gang of their overpaid and under-controlled servants with an enormously enhanced power to enforce their will and instead of becoming infected with that stupefaction, to consider what she is going to do about it.

It is no longer with England alone that Ireland has to reckon, but with a League of Allied Nations, banded to defend and continue the Capitalistic system. Ireland must restate her national position in international terms, and she has only to think it out to be able to do so in a way which will at once integrate her nationhood and disintegrate the national and inter-national cohesion of her foes. In pointing to England as the sole enemy, Sinn Fein may be said to be right for the past, but wrong for the future, for there are two Englands rapidly separating into hostile camps along economic lines. Ireland suffered in the past at England's hands the simplest form of economic subjection - the conquest and confiscation of her land. By the superimposition of the feudal system of land tenure on the Irish clan system of communal ownership, the land passed into the hands of the few and with it the basis of all the means of subsistence. The dispossession of the many is the first step in their enslavement, and the worldwide exploitation of Labour to day is the logical outcome of the system of private ownership and hereditary lordship of land. By victory in the Land War the Irish farmers may be said to have pulled out the roots of the feudal system, but not to have destroyed its poisonous fruits. The restoration of the land to those who work it is only the first round in the contest between Capital and Labour, and there is a danger that the winning of the first round may be a positive handicap to success in the second, if the comparative prosperity of the farmers tends to make them unite to enforce the status quo on the labourers. Here we have an example of the way in which material prosperity can militate against spiritual freedom, and it may be well to clear our minds on the subject. The spiritual life of a nation is not something apart from its material welfare.

Just the reverse. It is that form of self-expression which ensures the vital and material well being of the whole of a nation. Materialism means the assertion by a part of interests incompatible with those of the whole. From this definition we may pass to see how spiritual in the fullest sense of the word is Ireland's destiny, for her national emancipation has awaited through the centuries the dawn of the day of liberation for the whole of Europe, perhaps for the whole world. Sinn Fein points rightly to England as the introducer of a disease foreign to Irish life. But does Sinn Fein realise that since the disease has become worldwide the cure must be worldwide, too. In Russia the disease has been diagnosed as a cancer of worldwide extension, and so far as the authority of the Bolshevik Government extends the cancer has been cut out. That authority is steadily extending till we have a leader in the Times, headed "Bolshevik Imperialism." The uprising of the workers of the world against that very Capitalism which is the underlying cause of England's stranglehold on Ireland, both for strategic and economic reasons, moves on apace. Did Sinn Fein grasp this, we believe it would look less to the President of a Capitalistic Republic and more to the principles which alone have power to dissolve Ireland's chains.

The war after the war is in full blast, and it is in very truth the war to end war by removing the tension of unstable social equilibrium in every country which is transmitted to their external relations. Abolish commercial competition, and you will thereby abolish the race of competitive armaments, which is its reflection.

Let us examine the special position of Ireland in view of the present paramount influence of the Sinn Fein Party with regard to the world class-war. The class-war is a reality which cannot be conjured away by denial or asserting, what is true, that it is morally deplorable. Its removal must attend first its recognition by the social mind and then the elimination of the perfectly definite facts which give it being. These facts in the main are three: (i) The private possession of land, factories, and raw material; (ii) the increment to private persons, directly or indirectly of the profits of what is privately owned, in the shape of rent or interest, and (iii) the confused mind and incomplete organisation of the workers, which keeps them in subjection as wage slaves, and unable to demand and distribute for themselves among themselves their full share of the profits they create.

In most industries to-day the industrial side is sufficiently in the hands of the workers for its actual operation, to enable them, were they sufficiently awake, to assume control and run it themselves. But the industrial is only one aspect. There is also the clerical and administrative. In a country where the clerical and official classes make common cause with the industrial workers, the inauguration of production for general use as opposed to production for profit would be far easier than in a country where as, so far, in England the clerks and officials throw in their lot with the owners and employers. Given, then, that close alliance between Sinn Fein and Irish Labour, which seems obligatory in face of the common enemy, unless each wishes to be defeated in detail, the number of clerks and civil servants in Sinn Fein are a factor making for the mitigation of the class-war by throwing weight enough to win a bloodless victory on to one side. And the confusion inseparable from a purely proletarian revolution with the class of trained administrative ability in the other camp might well be avoided.

This point may be further illustrated by reference to the controversy now raging in England around the Whitley Councils. For the benefit of the uninformed, these Councils are being set up for the meeting of employers and workers round one table to discuss jointly the conditions of employment of the latter. Such questions as hours of labour, appointment of foremen, and even introduction of machinery are covered by their terms of reference, which, however, exclude any admission of the workers' representatives to the counting-house side of the business, such as the obtaining of raw material, the making of contracts, distribution of goods, or allotment of profits. The advanced wing of English Labour is opposed to the whole Whitley scheme, holding, not without reason, that the contact of the workers' representatives with the employers on the Councils would result in the sapping of their class loyalty in exactly the same manner as has already been notorious among Trades Union officials. Men like the Shop Steward leaders argue that to accept the limitation of the Council's reference to conditions of wage-slavery is to compromise the principle of demand for full control. No doubt, the Councils will be accepted by the great body of English workers and the result, which the clear-sighted foresee will ensue, that the workers will thereby assist in riveting the chains of wage-slavery on themselves. Unless the administrative and manual sides of industry make a joint effort for control, the admission of the manual workers to a share in the regulation of their toil is calculated only to secure their consent to their own subjection.

Sinn Fein is rejecting the principle of the Whitley Councils as applied to Anglo-Irish relations. It refuses to sit around the same table at Westminster with the "bosses," and it does well. But does it realise that attached to the centre of English Government is the great part of the economic fabric of Ireland, and that the more complete the severance from England, the more pressing is the need to organise Ireland on an alternative economic base. We predict for Sinn Fein a testing by fire of its leaders and supporters. Those that emerge true to the principle of independence will do so convinced of the need to found that independence with its roots in the soil of Ireland's emancipated and co-ordinated agriculture and industry. The soil is not yet prepared. Ireland cannot be independent while she is still dependent on English and West British capital. But for success, the success that is surely coming, Ireland's independence must rest four-square on the overthrow of Capitalism, native or foreign, co-operative production in agriculture and industry, co-ordinated distribution, and such local and central Government as will facilitate production and distribution at home and regulate exchanges abroad.

Black (and others) Nationalism and History

Hannibal was not the ruler of Carthage*

After reading Satan the next chapter of Malcolm X's autobiography is saved. It basically explains that after listening to the initial teachings of Elijah Muhammad Malcolm through himself into extensive reading of the prisons library with a particular focus on the few books covering African and "Negro" History. He also gives an explanation for why the Nation of Islam's teachings including the nutty parts were so easily accepted by so many Black Americans. By erasing the Black Americans history both his African heritage, not only were most Black names European, but there last names were either those of a slave master or the generic "Freeman" which still carried an association to slavery. And the knowledge of his experiences in the "New World", Malcolm claims, and I have no reason to doubt him, that in school a very prestigious one in Lansing Michigan had only one paragraph on the whole of Negro history. American society had created a void in the intellectual and emotional being of most Blacks which meant they were quick to embrace teachings and philosophy's like Elijah's that filled that void.

The teachings of Mr. Muhammad stressed how history had been "whitened"-when white men had written history books, the black man simply had been left out. Mr. Muhammad couldn't have said anything that would have struck me much harder. I had never forgotten how when my class, me and all of those whites, had studied seventh-grade United States history back in Mason, the history of the Negro had been covered in one paragraph, and the teacher had gotten a big laugh with his joke,"Negroes' feet are so big that when they walk, they leave a hole in the ground."This is one reason why Mr. Muhammad's teachings spread so swiftly all over the United States,among all Negroes, whether or not they became followers of Mr. Muhammad. The teachings ring true-to every Negro.

This is one area where I can totally relate. Having grown up in Britain as a mixed Celt (my parents are Welsh and Irish and my ancestors are Scottish) the concept of "Britishness" is heavily dominated by "Englishness". One of the main reasons Nationalist groups like Plaid and the SNP maintain a sizeable support base is because a lot of Celts will never feel part of a Great Britain because its just another extension of England. With the exception of Scotland I never learnt anything about Wales or Ireland that wasn't heavily linked to England until Sixth Form history. And even with Scotland it was limited to a bit a bout the Jacobite rebellions after we had looked at the Stewart's (so it was really just an addendum to the Civil War lessons) and a few brief biography's of a couple of clever Scottish inventors though they were presented as British inventors with just a brief mention that they came from Edinburgh or Glasgow.

I know from first hand experience one of the few areas were both Plaid and SNP have been very popular has been the education reforms focus on Celtic history and culture. I myself once I started to learn about Celtic history and mythology, in my own free time became something of a cultural nationalist for a brief period. Fortunately reading the work of critical historians about national myths like the Jacobite rebellions and the fact that most "English loving Traitors" in Celtic history did so purely for monetary reasons convinced me of the importance of class over nation. For example most Welsh Nationalists venerate Owain Glyndwr (Owen Glower) as a sort of Welsh Braveheart. The problem is he used to be a staunch supporter of England he was part of the Anglo-Welsh Gentry and he served in its army as a noble officer. He only led the rebellion after his lands were confiscated by a personal friend of Henry IV and English racism barred him from solving his grievances legally.

It also helped that many Blacks never received sufficient education in general, Malcolm for an example says he didn't know what the word genetic actually meant until AFTER he heard Yacub's history. And when he looked it up the discovery of the dominant and recessive gene structure seemed to support the tales of Yacub the ancient eugenicist.

Unfortunately while Malcolm came to learn enough to see absurd fables like Yacub's history and every white man is literally the devil for what they were he till his dying day believed in quite a few fictions.

I perceived, as I read, how the collective white man had been actually nothing but a piratical opportunist who used Faustian machinations to make his own Christianity his initial wedge in criminal conquests. First, always "religiously," he branded "heathen" and "pagan" labels upon ancient non-white cultures and civilizations. The stage thus set, he then turned upon his non-white victims his weapons of war.

What's the problem here? There is no such thing as a "Collective" White man, never has been and never will be. For example the English language gets the word Slave from the word Slav. The Slavs are a mixed group of people from Transcaucasia and have lived for centuries in Eastern Europe. They are a diverse bunch but two things they all have in common is their pale skin and their shared history of poor treatment and oppression at the hands of other white Europeans.

Google assures me this is what an average Slav looks like

Furthermore the usage of the labels of heathen and pagan were not exclusively directed at "coloureds" Protestant and Catholic Europe branded each other by that terminology all the time and it lead to a lot of bloodshed. The Thirty Years war being the most blatant example involving most of Europe and decimated entire populations of several of the warring kingdoms. 

I don't see any black faces do you?

Pop quiz which nation is the following qoutation about?

They use their fields mostly for pasture. Little is cultivated and even less is sown. The problem here is not the quality of the soil but rather the lack of industry on the part of those who should cultivate it. This laziness means that the different types of minerals with which hidden veins of the earth are full are neither mined nor exploited in any way. They do not devote themselves to the manufacture of flax or wool, nor to the practice of any mechanical or mercantile act. Dedicated only to leisure and laziness, this is a truly barbarous people. They depend on their livelihood for animals and they live like animals.

The answer is Ireland, I'm sure its sentiment seems very familiar if not its target.

　I read how, entering India-half a billion deeply religious brown people-the British white man, by1759, through promises, trickery and manipulations, controlled much of India through Great Britain's East India Company. The parasitical British administration kept tentacling out to half of the subcontinent. In 1857, some of the desperate people of India finally mutinied-and, excepting the African slave trade, nowhere has history recorded any more unnecessary bestial and ruthless human carnage than the British suppression of the non-white Indian people.

Again the Indian experience does not show a collective white man but rather the opposite, in addition to a British East India Company, there was also a French and Dutch East India Company and several more. And all of them got up to the same dirty tricks the British Company did until they lost controlled and were expelled from India.

　　Over 115 million African blacks-close to the 1930's population of the United States-were murdered or enslaved during the slave trade. And I read how when the slave market was glutted, the cannibalistic white powers of Europe next carved up, as their colonies, the richest areas of the black continent. And Europe's chancelleries for the next century played a chess game of naked exploitation and power from Cape Horn to Cairo.

Again both examples disprove Malcolm's assertion the slave trade was not an example of White collective action but individual competition. Portugal also exported millions of slaves to Brazil via its colony in Angola. And for a time Spain and England (and then Britain) went to war over who would dominate the North Atlantic slave trade.

And of course I'm sure we're all familiar with the White racists favourite argument for slavery. "Blacks had slaves too"! This is true but aside from academic accuracy its irrelevant. It is not an acceptable defence that someone else does it too, its the equivalence of "an older boy told me to do it".

And then we come to big one, Empire. Its undeniably true that Europe and the USA colonised vast swathes of territory and carried out brutal exploitation to fund the wealth of their rulers. But again it directly contradicts the idea of a "Collective White man" not only where these Empires in direct competition with each other, buts this competition drove them to greater heights of cruelty and expansion. Conquering foreign lands and stealing there natural wealth wasn't just an exercise in greed it was also a necessity, failure to take this territory was an open for your rivals to exploit. Oh and Ireland was also one of the earliest colonies, British immigrants were actually called Settlers and in addition to them monopolising the government and landed estates they Anglicised the culture and nearly destroyed the Irish language.

But perhaps I'm misunderstanding Malcolm's usage of the term Collective. When I hear the term collective I associate it with concious collaboration, maybe he just meant that since so many White nations acted this way they could be lumped together. I know of several Black Nationalists who clearly state that is why they hate white people. If so there's one severe problem with that analysis is its highly hypocritical.

Empires and slavery and militaristic expansion have existed on every continent. For example a lot of Black Nationalist have come to regard Hannibal of Carthage the same way Welsh Nationalists view Owain Glyndwr. Because he was a skilled General from Carthage (Tunisia, and Northern African Coastline) and defeated Rome (A symbol of White power) several times during the second Punic War. He even did so most famously using War Elephants probably the most African symbol there is.

There's just one massive problem here, Carthage was in many ways just as despotic as the wicked white Romans. They were an Oligarchic Republic similar to Rome they also shared Rome's corruption, they had conquered territories along the Mediterranean coast and in Spain. They also had slaves, in fact they probably stopped raiding for slaves because the Romans outlawed it in their treaties with Carthage. Hannibal's march on Rome was less a blow for the freedom of the Africans and more about reversing Carthage earlier defeats and becoming fully independent again which would have involved being free to launch slave raids again. But that's just one example.

The flag of the Benin Empire, clearly a Peaceful land

As I've said the continent of Africa was full of Empires, and since White people were in Europe who do you think they fought,conquered and exploited? The above is the Benin Empire it lasted from 1440-1897 it wasn't very big, the modern day nation of Benin is of similar size. But it was still a despotic regime that saw the rise of Edo people over neighbouring tribes. Culturally the Empire was quite tolerant but other ethnic groups leaders were appointed by the Edo dynasty and ultimate authority lay with the Edo clans. And the Edo Kings power as their flag demonstrates was martial.

"The King of Benin can in a single day make 20,000 men ready for war, and, if need be, 180,000, and because of this he has great influence among all the surrounding peoples. . . . His authority stretches over many cities, towns and villages. There is no King thereabouts who, in the possession of so many beautiful cities and towns, is his equal."

 Another snag is that in addition to local Empires Muslim and Arab encroachment caused great pain and suffering to the African peoples conquered by them. In the Congo the main opposition to total Belgian control was the presence of Arab slave traders, and the Slave trade in Eastern Africa served to enrich Arabic lands. Unsurprisingly Malcolm a fervent Muslim was silent on this issue(though its possible he didn't know), and Arabs also being of colour tend to get a free pass by current Black Nationalists since acknowledging this chapter of history conflicts with their simplistic black and white (pun half intended) views. In fact Islamic slavery of indigenous Africans gave European Imperialism moral cover as conquest of Muslim controlled territories like the Sudan was seen as a moral crusade.

It was Africa's history of repressive governments even after independence that kept the Black Panther Party from embracing Black Nationalism and an uncritical Pan Africanism. Black Nationalism they argued would only lead to a Black Bourgeoisie and a Black oppressor class.  

But lets leave Africa for now and lets move onto Asia or as Malcolm called them the "Yellow men".

 I listen today to the radio, and watch television, and read the headlines about the collective white man's fear and tension concerning China. When the white man professes ignorance about why the Chinese hate him so, my mind can't help flashing back to what I read, there in prison,about how the blood forebears of this same white man raped China at a time when China was trusting and helpless. Those original white "Christian traders" sent into China millions of pounds of opium. By1839, so many of the Chinese were addicts that China's desperate government destroyed twenty thousand chests of opium. The first Opium War was promptly declared by the white man. Imagine!
　　Declaring war upon someone who objects to being narcotized! The Chinese were severely beaten,with Chinese-invented gunpowder.
　　The Treaty of Nanking made China pay the British white man for the destroyed opium; forced open China's major ports to British trade; forced China to abandon Hong Kong; fixed China's import tariffs so low that cheap British articles soon flooded in, maiming China's industrial development.
　　After a second Opium War, the Tientsin Treaties legalized the ravaging opium trade, legalized a British-French-American control of China's customs. China tried delaying that Treaty's ratification;Peking was looted and burned.
　　"Kill the foreign white devils!" was the 1901 Chinese war cry in the Boxer Rebellion. Losing again, this time the Chinese were driven from Peking's choicest areas. The vicious, arrogant white man put upthe famous signs, "Chinese and dogs not allowed."Red China after World War II closed its doors to the Western white world. Massive Chinese agricultural, scientific, and industrial efforts are described in a book that Life magazine recently published. Some observers inside Red China have reported that the world never has known such a hate-white campaign as is now going on in this non-white country where, present birth-rates continuing, in fifty more years Chinese will be half the earth's population. And it seems that some Chinese chickens will soon come home to roost, with China's recent successful nuclear tests.

I'm sure those Zen meditation types have a land of peace and equality right?

Oh, I guess not

To be fair to Malcolm he is right China suffered horribly at the hands of Europe and America, I mean you can't get more disgusting then the Opium Wars. Chinese refer to this period as the century  of humiliation to this day, and frequent policy announcements in the People's Republic claim to have ended that century by building a new China. But he forgets that Japan was also involved, not only did it go on to carve up China it also helped put down the Boxer Rebellion.In fact they were the largest military component of the alliance.

The Japanese were noted for their skill in beheading Boxers or people suspected of being Boxers. General Chaffee commented, "It is safe to say that where one real Boxer has been killed... fifty harmless coolies or laborers on the farms, including not a few women and children, have been slain."

 So again this Collective label doesn't really stick. Also China itself before being brought so low by its rivals was itself  quite an expansionist power. Though to be even fairer to Malcolm this belief in China as a peaceful neighbour isn't just a few I've heard peddled by Nationalists, I've heard some liberal historians say similar things. I can only assume Orientalism to be at work since only a brief glance at Chinese history proves this to be nonsense.

The closest I've heard to an elaboration of China being a land of peace was to either chance the subject to discuss China's many contributions in philosophy, or scapegoat the Mongolians who had seized control of China in the 13th century. Its true that being incorporated into the Mongolian Empire led to Chinese forces being led into foreign fields but it doesn't cover everything. For just one example China has a very long history of invading and occupying Vietnam.

But even if we accepted this explanation we also have to concede that all the territories of Modern China to be inherently Chinese, which would be a unique concession indeed and something the Uighurs and Tibetans would probably query.

But even if this weren't the case, there's still plenty of domination in Chinese history. The Chinese Emperors were not particularly benevolent, women could be treated viciously, foot binding comes to mind but so does the concubine system. Then there were inter ethnic rivalries, the last Imperial Dynasty of China the Qing were Manchu's from Manchuria. There corruption and impotence against foreign powers inflamed ethnic Han Nationalism so much so that if it wasn't for the leaders of the Kuoming Tang (KMT) like Dr Sun being so outspokenly republican and inclusive of China's ethnic groups the 1911 Revolution may well have resulted in the replacing of the Manchu Court with a Han one.

Ancient China also practised slavery and that did include the rare African (Chinese explorers and merchants made it to East Africa and the middle East).

And furthermore to hammer home the Class>ethnicity theme I'm getting at those very same rulers of China Malcolm rightly points out got a raw deal from the white powers had no problem relying on the support of those white powers when their own privilege was threatened. For example remember Gordon? the man who died in Khartoum well he had an unusual nickname "Chinese" Gordon. He got helping the Chinese Empire to victory in Taiping rebellion which was after the Opium Wars.

And during the Boxer rebellion the Imperial Court favoured siding with the foreign Legations over the Boxers but only changed their minds due to the popularity of Boxers amongst the population.

"Perhaps their magic is not to be relied upon; but can we not rely on the hearts and minds of the people? Today China is extremely weak. We have only the people's hearts and minds to depend upon. If we cast them aside and lose the people's hearts, what can we use to sustain the country?"

And even then Imperial forces were more likely then not to fire on and detain boxers rather then unite to drive out the foreign armies. Naturally this uncertainty had a disastrous effect on the conduct of the
 rebellion and it was inevitably defeated.

And of course we have the last Emperor of China, Puyi  deposed in 1912 at the ripe old age of 6. Not only did Puyi and his predecessors employ outright slaves (the Eunuchs) but after being fired he eventually found a new job administrating the lovely land of Manchukuo. Japanese annexed Manchuria giving legitamacy to the Empire of the Sun's vile exploitation and crimes.

An example of the leisure activities of Puyi's benefactors

No account of my childhood would be complete without mentioning the eunuchs. They waited on me when I ate, dressed and slept; they accompanied me on my walks and to my lessons; they told me stories; and had rewards and beatings from me, but they never left my presence. They were my slaves; and they were my earliest teachers.

In conclusion none white nations were just as prone to violence and domination as anywhere else. The only difference was that whitey was more successful at the Empire game, which effectively boils none White Nationalist arguments down to a case of jealousy. As much as I admire and respect Malcolm X's intelligence and opinions his theses on world history needs more work. A shame he'll never get the chance to revise his work thanks the "Honourable" Elijah Muhammad.

*He became Carthage's Suffete (similar to Rome's Pro Consul) but his policies were unpopular and the Carthaginian Aristocracy the real rulers of Carthage force him into exile.