The past instructs the present

Last week Irish history came up somehow, and my wife and I looked into the Irish Republican Army and the British invasion force sent in 1920 to keep Ireland under British control - the Black and Tans.  Pretty soon, she wanted to know about the Easter Rising of 1916, about Michael Collins and Eamon de Valera.

Anybody that likes hillbilly music, like my wife, is going to like Irish music.  A short tutorial from Youtube on the Black and Tans, featuring "Come out, ye Black and Tans:"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJv8QVRT09s

I was born on a Dublin street where the Royal drums did beat,

And the loving English feet walked all over us;

And every single night, when me Da would come home tight,

He'd invite the neighbours outside with this chorus:

 

Oh, come out ye Black and Tans;

Come out and fight me like a man;

Show your wife how you won medals down in Flanders;

Tell her how the I.R.A. made you run like hell away

From the green and lovely lanes in Killeshandra.

 

Come, tell us how you slew

Them ol' Arabs two by two;

Like the Zulus, they had spears and bows and arrows;

How you bravely faced each one,

With your sixteen pounder gun,

And you frightened them poor natives to their marrow.

 

          Chorus

 

Come, let us hear you tell

How you slandered great Parnell,

When you thought him well and truly persecuted,

Where are the sneers and jeers

That you bravely let us hear,

When our heroes of sixteen were executed.

 

          Chorus 

Oh, come out ye English Huns;

Come out and fight without yer guns;

Show yer wife how you won medals up in Derry.

Ye murdered free young men,

And you'll do the same again,

So get out and take yer bloody army with ye. 

 

How little has changed!  Isn't this how occupied populations feel everywhere?  You can find fault with the Irish Republican Army just as you can with the Taliban or anybody else that stands up against an empire, although the empires accusing them of "terrorism" never seem too concerned about their own conduct.  But if the Chinese army ever occupies the USA, I'll bet real money that the American resistance won't follow Miss Manners either.

 

The British defeated the Easter Rising in 1916 in about a week, but they lost by executing the leaders.  The Americans lost in Iraq, thrown out of the country by the puppet government they had installed, because no one was willing to put up any longer with the wanton murders and torture carried out by the occupiers.  Nobody in Iraq was willing to offer immunity from prosecution to these guys - who like the Black and Tans are so undisciplined that they can't even be restrained from regularly raping their own female comrades.  See here, for instance, from Stars and Stripes.

 

The reference in the song to Arabs was the rising against the British occupation of Iraq in 1920.  Not much has changed there either.  

 

And as it was for the Zulus in 1879, so it is today, when the resistance in various bombed and invaded nations is resisting the most powerful armed forces in the world with small arms, RPGs, and roadside bombs - and yet, although at great cost, they are holding them off.  As the Black and Tans "ran like hell" from the IRA, it seems that the American forces are preparing to run from Afghanistan as they had to run from Iraq and Vietnam.  Greater force and wealth does not always win the day for injustice and pride.  If the American forces had to meet the resistance equally armed - no tanks, no missiles, no helicopters or other air support - how would they fare, do you think?  The righteous are as bold as a lion.  Not so, the servants of injustice.

 

So let's learn from the past and from the follies of others.  The British found nothing but shame and humiliation in Ireland, and the American empire will find nothing else in the various nations all over the world that it is now tormenting.  Truly it is written, "Let none of you suffer as a murderer, a thief, an evildoer, or as an overseer of the affairs of others."  If we take that advice, pulling the plug on the American empire as the British and French did before us and letting the rest of the world live in peace, we might even manage to save the American republic from the cancer of empire.