Vol. 71/No. 26      July 2, 2007

You might come away from the film, though, thinking that British premier Lloyd George’s threat of a new war—the excuse for the capitulation of the Irish bourgeois nationalist forces at the close of the 1919-21 Irish Civil War—was insurmountable.

But London was not in good shape to carry through its threats. It had come out of World War I declining as the world’s dominant imperialist power. The working class in the United Kingdom was getting stronger with the workers upsurge on the Clyde in 1919—a foretaste of the 1926 General Strike. The Communist International had been formed, spawning parties based on the Bolshevik example.

Referring to the film, Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams called the Irish Republican Army, “the wind that shook the barley.” But this doesn’t reach the heart of the matter. It was the mass mobilization of workers and farmers from 1919 to 1921 that truly shook London. Forging a proletarian leadership out of that was what was needed to reap the harvest. But it was not to be.

Pete Clifford
Edinburgh, Scotland  
 
 
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