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The Plough1974Loyalism and unionismPartition and the national questionLoyalism and unionismPartition and the national question
Read the scan at the Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line (PDF, page 3) →Machine-read text, not corrected. Cut from the scan by machine, by the size of the headline type. Where columns were set close together, lines of a neighbouring article can run in, and a headline can be missed so that two articles share a page. For anything you quote, read the scan.
Scan page 3
strengthe of the loyalists” , . . rigour mortis.. . I suppose.
To say that whoever doesn’t accept this, or your definition of the protestants as “bribed pro-Imperialists” will be unable to understand why the should have reacted so violently to the Civil Rights movement and the introduction of power sharing” is incorrect. Such distortions come about by viewing reality through the “prism of the national question” . . . prisms distort!
The protestant’s reactions are explicable by a theory which lies (horror) outside ““‘The revolutionary intellectual tradition of Ireland”, this is no reason to ignore it, or is this what is meant So, Dick Spicer finds it hard to understand Connolly’s estimation of Unionism as a “dying cause” or our repetition of it. Perhaps some knowledge of Irish history might help enlighten him.
Connolly, in’his day, was able to perceive what Spicer cannot see even with the benefit of sixty years hindsight, namely that in 1912 Unionism was forced to abandon its historic claim to subjugate the whole of Ireland to British domination. Faced with a sweeping rise he should say so. of our viewing reality through the prism of the national question. A prism distorts, he says.
Firstly we do not, as our article on the Protestant working class makes clear, subscribe to the idea that British imperialism has simply duped the Protestants. The article taking the HISTORICAL development of the Northern economy into account, attempts to deal with the REAL materia! foundations of the Protestant workers political outlook. If Spicer has some specific disagreement with this analysis Secondly Spicer’s technical knowledge is as faulty as his knowledge of history. A prism to take them over. Are the sophisticated (!) Two Nationists now “Catholic nationalists” with their own particular brand of Irish Republicanism? Not really; they are only a clique of pseuds afraid to face up to the reality of the class struggle in Ireland. THAT reality is the need to build a massive, democratic, secular and socialist anti-imperialist movement that will not capitulate to backward prejudices. As we said before, the sooner revolutionaries face up to this fact the better.
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THE PLOUGH — PAGE 3