Cool Zone Media.
Hello, and welcome to Coolbyble Did Cool Stuff, the podcast where I talk about how I worked all day yesterday, so I made cookies and you're close to midnight.
What kind of bake cookies?
Really bad? Chocolate chip cookies that I don't specifically recommend the recipe of.
Yeah, but like chocolate chip cookies are just automatically not bad.
Oh I ate them all.
Yeah, yeah, I allowed to talk yet Oh yeah.
Yeah, yeah. I mean we'll introduce you in a minute, but.
Yeah, yeah. But in the meantime, you guys, if you haven't read the title or the promotional material, you can just guess whose voice is speaking. It's hard to ultimately, truly profoundly mess up a chocolate chip cookie because you still got sugar and you got chocolate in there. But I very much am feeling I'm very much in my cozy baking fuck around and find out era where I want to just see And it feels a little wasteful at some point because sometimes I mess up the cookies.
But I keep specifically trying to do cookies, and I've landed on a pretty good peanut butter cookie gluten free.
Yeah, okay, see it wouldn't work for me because I'm vegan and I don't believe there's such thing as a good vegan gluten free baking. I think you can do one or the other.
You can't do both. Yeah, you can't do both. That's just sad.
If you're listening and you do both, I applaud your.
Bevery my very good friend Lacey, who makes baked goods and is the reason why I don't make my own baked goods anymore, because why would I make my own when I could eat the ones that she makes. Yeah, she makes all kinds of things for people with diet he restrictions and allergies and is extremely talented, So it does exist.
She probably is extremely talented. I will pause it though, that the vegan and gluten free double header and one it's hard, hard, yeah to nail. But if you are vegan and gluten free, boy, I bet that cookie tastes so damn good.
That's a decent point.
Okay.
Yeah, So this is a show called Cool People Did Cool Stuff, and it's sometimes about cookies. This time it's not as much about cookies, though it's clearly a little bit about cookies. And I'm your host Margaret Kiljoy and every week we talk about some cool people did cool stuff, like me for making cookies. I didn't have any almond milk that was playing. I didn't realize I was out, so I use chocolate oat milk and it's why they
tasted weird. That's really interesting. But my guest today is the one and only Katie Stole, who is the well hello, the host of even More News, a show that is okay. It's interesting because you posit that this is the only news show, even More News, but in the title it implies that you're lying.
It does imply that, doesn't it. But we never get to the bottom of that.
There's only one way to find out. It's even more.
I mean, look, I'm pretty sure it's the first and only news podcast, but I don't listen to podcasts, so I don't know.
Yeah, no one, no one.
That's also a lie. I listened to podcasts.
Every day.
Someone's coming with me on my walks in the morning, and.
Oh absolutely walking my dog without a podcast. Whatever I do, look at the choice.
This just a waste of time. Enjoy nature please.
Yeah. Also with us is our producer Sophie Hi.
Sophie Hi just want to shout out my friend again space lace gluted free confections.
Hell yeah, I'm gonna write that down.
She's she She is a beautiful.
What city are we talking about?
For people? She's the Pacific North Delivery.
But she ships like they go in the mail.
I know, I'm not one hundred percent sure about that, but if you're ever in the Pacific Northwest, there's a lot of markets and stuff. Okay, and yeah, I just want to shout her out of the shipping she made the most fantastical like shinned heel cake gluten free with nothing, with nothing I'm allergic to for my birthday.
It was very beautiful, nice.
Nice.
Our audio engineer is Daniel, which is not Ian. So every want to say hi to Daniel.
Hi Danel, Hi Daniel Danel, but also Hi Ian, I miss you.
So yeah Hi Ian?
Okay, Hello Ian oar.
The music was written for us by Unwoman high on Woman. So, Katie, yeah, you tricked me into I was on your podcast an hour ago and you, yeah, as part of the interview, asked me what today was going to be about. But I'll pretend like you don't know. Yeah, you ever heard of the British Empire. You know what that does.
Ring a bell. I'm vaguely familiar with the concept of the British Empire.
Yeah, this is an episode of How Cool. Wait, no, the people who follow Oh you ever heard of the Easter Rising?
I have. I have heard of the Easter Rising.
Yeah, it's I guess it's not particularly obscure, but we're going to talk about it anyway because it's fucking cool.
Today's topic is the Easter Rising. It's when a motley collection of rights poets, musicians, working class, trade union organizers, queers, suffragettes, school teachers, sick and disabled folks, and dropouts from the aristocracy took over the capital of Dublin in Ireland, the second city of the British Empire, and did their part in tearing apart the largest empire of the world's ever known.
Like when I say that, in nineteen thirteen, the British Empire ruled more than four hundred million people, Around twenty three percent of the world's population was under.
The staggering number. I know. It's like, I know, so many problems today could be traced to them. So that's a fun thing always, yeah, in the back of your mind.
Yeah, even a lot of the stuff that's America's fault, it first comes from being Britain's fault.
It's like, because who are we without Britain?
You know, yeah, free? Well probably not in North America. Yeah, those who rose during the Easter Rising didn't agree about everything. They didn't even agree actually about most things, including very important things. They were They disagreed on some pretty major and important issues. They agreed on one thing and that was enough for them. The one thing they agreed on was fuck the British Empire.
It's a good thing to agree on.
It's a it's a pretty you think it's a universal but you know, it took a lot of you would think, a lot of shooting to yeah, to get there, to get free of them. I have done the overall context of Ireland and British and the British colonization of Ireland an awful lot on this show. So I'm going to do the absolute speed run. There's an island called Ireland, wild and untamed and freeish and generally lacked centralized government.
For a very long time, folks came together every now and then to do shit like fight off the Viking slavers and shit. Then the British colonized it. Then the British genocided it twice. First when the fuck Oliver Cromwell since his troops around to just like murder everyone, and second when English capitalism colonization watched everyone starve in the middle of the nineteenth century, and in the process they slandered one of the world's most perfect foods, the potato.
The potato who was not at fault. It was a thing that fed poor people very well until all of a sudden one year it couldn't keep up because there was a blight, and then because a capital at whatever. We've talked about this bunch of times on the show. Every generation or two, the Irish would revolt, and it went this way for centuries. He usually went badly for the Irish. In the end, Ireland was and is very divided between Catholics and oppressed majority and Protestants and empowered minority.
Although both there are both Catholics and Protestants on both sides of every single one of these fights, and for centuries the difference between the two politically wasn't necessarily a big deal until seventeen ninety eight, when England bribed the Protestants by giving them more power over the Catholics. Furthermore, Ireland was colonized and oppressed through landlord And this is the part that doesn't get talked about as much unless you are reading actual Irish history by Irish people. Most
people didn't own their land. It was generally owned by British people. Occasionally it was owned by Irish Protestants, and even more rarely and later it was owned by rich asshole Irish Catholics. But that was an awful lot of the fight against colonization is. People weren't like, oh, we specifically are mad at England. Usually they were like, all I have on a landlord, this sucks. I liked when I owned my land.
Yeah, well, it's easy to misplace your anger at well, I'm sure that they sucked to The landlords were bad.
Yeah, but when you stopped there instead of going further back right, And it was it was that the landlordism was the symptom, yes of the colonization.
It was the way in which it expressed. It was one of the many ways of the expressed. It was also shit like you weren't allowed to have a mustache, which the English didn't have a word for. Mustache. Yet I can't even remember what that call today. This isn't a different script that I wrote about this.
It was like trying to couple with something clever. But they didn't have a word for mustache. They just didn't even accept that, we're not going to acknowledge the existence of you, that people can grow hair there.
Yeah, exactly, Ireland, most of it is now its own country these days, although obviously capitalism is still extracting the wealth of the working class. But they're their own country, mostly because around the turn of the twentieth century, a fuck ton of people put a fuck ton of work in and a fuck ton of blood and they built
up powerful oppositional groups of all kinds. In nineteen sixteen, in the middle of World War One, while the British were busy, several groups revolted in what's called the Easter Rising because it took place on Easter. Well, I actually technically took place on Easter Monday instead of Easter Sunday, because they were like.
Go ahead, oh no, I that was just something that I always struck me. I was like, oh, Eastern Monday, not Easter Sunday. But you have more information about why.
Were being clever. They were like, it's too obvious that we're gonna do it on Easter side, because yeah, they knew the Brits were onto them, and the Brits were absolutely onto them, and it was complete. The Brits were like literally like, we're going to wait till the holidays over before I rest all these people. And then they were like, oh, whoops, they acted on the holiday, and but they acted on the Monday instead of the Sunday to kind of like shake things up a little bit, you know.
Also, then they got their Easter Sunday.
That's true. Well, actually they spent most of it making bombs.
But wait, is that YouTube song Sunday Bloody Sunday?
Actually, wow, that's different Easter so Ireland has four Bloody Sundays. Yeah, okay, I believe that song is referencing one of the like ones from like I want to say, the seventies. Yeah, we're going to talk about one of the bloody Sundays, okay, but unfortunately, well whatever, we'll get to it. Two of them take place in the nineteen tens. Only one of them's in this particular script.
Okay.
I had to like look up be like wait, how any of these fucking bloody Sundays are there?
Makes sense? Okay, So one of them was a bloody because I guess Monday, bloody Monday doesn't work as well.
That is like a fucking Monday. It's a very natural thing to say.
Yeah, it's like, who does it? I hate fucking Mondays?
Yeah, right, Garfields over here. And so in nineteen sixteen they had the Easter Rising. It didn't go well for anyone involved, you know, I mean like, it didn't even go well for the people putting it down because a lot of them got shot too. It was a bit of a shit show and it got a lot of people killed, but it lit the fuse. Within a few years, the Irish War for Independence was raging, which drove the British to the bargaining table. The British very good at
divide and conquer. They offered a compromise treaty that told the Irish they could mostly have their country, but they had to swear an oath of allegiance to the British crown, and they had to let the elector out of Northern Io, which was way more Protestant and colonized, decide its own fate. Basically, they were like, we're going to partition Ireland.
Yeah.
About a third of the country was like, no fucking deal. We're not fucking swearing an oath of allegiance to the fucking crown. What are you talking about. They wanted full freedom, so they fought a civil war against it. The compromise side, the pro treaty side, won this war in nineteen twenty three, and the Irish Republic as we know today was born, well, actually was the Irish Free State until nineteen thirty seven,
but whatever. And then the troubles with a capital t started because an awful lot of Ireland was like, but what if we actually still have all of Ireland as a republic the fucking plan. What if we stuck to the fucking plan? You know, Yeah, how about the rest of our island? Yeah, we'd like that too, please, And an awful lot of the rebels also realized what a lot of the older rebels realized. Until you get rid of capitalism, you're not actually getting rid of colonization.
Yeah.
After nineteen sixteen and after the nineteen twenty one treaty, politics in Ireland gets really really messy. You lose track of good guys and bad guys really quickly. And in the middle of the twentieth century, you've got a lot of like cool people doing questionable things, or questionable people doing cool things, or my favorite, stopped clocks who are currently telling the right time. That's gonna be the next podcast that I'm going to run past everyone. This is
stop clocks, Puck. That'll be terrible all the time. The horrible right wing people were technically right. Never mind, I retract Sophy gave you a look. Yeah, Sophy's actually pretty good at pretty good at a job. Like knowing that he's very good.
You just have to look at our face.
Yeah, which you all can't do. Ah No, but we get reason to run a pot the treat Yeah, teen sixteen. Though these people aren't perfect, but there is a clear cut case for their anti colonial revolution, and these are the people who did the revolution. They lost, and by losing they won. Yeah, so the Easter Rising, I will contend it's cool people who do cool stuff.
I'll accept that contention. Excellent because we're here to talk about it. So yeah, no, totally, no, that's it. That's I told you about the No. That was the big bird's eye view and the personal part of it. I shook hands with my great great uncle who was shot in the leg while fighting in the Rising. It was this one hundredth birthday in Galway, and I'm sure I've brought this up on the show before, but fuck it.
He and all of his brothers except my great grandfather, who'd fled poverty and made his way to Boston, were locked up for a while for their role in the Rising. And I think he's one of the coolest people I've ever met. And so he's not named in this story, but he's a this story and it makes me part of it. I love that.
Okay, the Easter Rising a tale of two movements is not what we're going to call the show, but of the episode.
But yeah, in progress.
Yeah they're not opposing movements, but they're very distinct, and it's a good way to understand the Easter Rising. You've got the Irish labor movement, which is heavily syndicalist, and you've got Irish nationalism. One group is fighting for workers' rights against bosses, and the other group fought for the reintroduction of the Irish language and against the Anglicization of Ireland.
And along the way they actually fought each other a couple of times because some of the Irish Nationalists were capitalists, and you know a lot of them socialists were not capital none of them actually were.
None of them. Yeah yeah, but I thought, uh, this is a four parter by.
The way, everyone is listening, and it's going to be worth it. But the awkward part is part ones about the nationalists. Okay, then we'll start with the latter restoring.
This is good because to be honest, I find this whole period and all of this very interesting, but it does get confusing when you hear about it and learn about it and trying to keep track of it. So this is very helpful and I already know it is going to be and I'm taking lots of notes for myself.
No, I'm glad and honestly like, it's funny. I've made a couple like every now and then someone's like, oh, are you gonna do the you know, the troubles in
Northern Ireland. And I actually did end up covering a fair amount because we did an episode about I wanted a way to talk about hunger strikes since we did an episode of hunger strikes and the two groups we talked about the most was Northern Ireland IRA of much later than what we're talking about today, and then also Palestinian Freedom Fighters, oh yeah, and because those are two
groups that did amazing work with hunger strikes. But overall I've been like, I don't want to keep track of who the provos are versus the real IRA, versus the you know, there's a million Iras and so instead what I'm trying to talk about today is the beginning. I mean, obviously it's not the beginning beginning, but it's the beginning of a lot of the modern political movements, and it's the stuff that all of them mythologize and draw from.
So the nationalists, first of all, Ireland's having this problem right now where there's a bunch of Irish nationalists in a bad way who are trying to like kick out the immigrants and be all right wing and shitty. And so I want to point out that a fucking ton of the Irish nationalists who fought for and got Irish freedom were not one hundred percent Irish by blood. They weren't like pure Gaelic Catholics or whatever the fuck some of them were. As often as not, they were Protestants.
They were Anglo Irish, they were Spanish Irish, they were born in England, born in the US, born in Scotland, of direct Welsh defense descent, with no Irarish blood, et cetera, et cetera. And this is not to invalidate these Irish nationalists who are not like pure blah blah blah. It's to point out to anyone who's using their legacy to promote some like blood and soil, kill all the foreign immigrants, nonsense. Anyone who's doing that as a fascist, who should be shot.
The history of Ireland is the history of the galicization of immigrants and or colonization, and so I like the galicization of immigrants more I gus don't live there, but yeah, fuck whatever, fuck the fascists, but fuck.
The fascist seems like pretty standard. And I've got family that lived there and they would agree with you, fullheartedly, full threatedly.
Yeah, and overall you will find that in a lot of I mean, Ireland is kind of standing alone among Western European powers right now and supporting the Palestinian people and anti Camial struggle more generally. So that said, some of these nationalists that we're going to talk about are right wing as hell and we're just stopped clock about Irish independence. However, some of them were socialists and internationalists as well as being nationalists, which is contradictory, but it's
not we'll talk about it a little bit. Overall. I would say that this group existed before this is the I spent so much time, like trying to research academic articles about how to classify these Irish nationalists into modern right and left politics. Right and left were not clear cut in Irish politics at the time and don't map easily to modern political understandings. We're going to start with
not the coolest, but one of the weirdest. We're going to start with a woman named mod Gone mod Gone Yeah, like go nne oh cool. So she's weird as hell. She was born in eighteen seventy seven in England and she's of Anglo Irish descent. But when she was five, her army officer father was stationed in Dublin, so she moved over there. Like several of our heroes today, she was a sickly child and she was sick with I don't know how well you know this show, but I
think Sophie knows what she was sick with. She was sick with friend of the pod tuberculosis.
To say, consumption, I don't know.
Yes, actually that is yeah, yeah, it is consumption.
Yeah.
But since she was rich as shit, she didn't die of it. I mean a lot of richest shit people died of it too, but mostly poor people died of it.
Yeah.
Instead, she like you know, like traveled around and like went to like fancy like spas for her health and stuff. And since she was rich as shit, she just like traveled around the world. She's an archetype. There's so many archetypes in today's stories. She's like, hello, I am a beautiful, sickly woman with tons of money and archetype that will exist for a long long time.
Oh yeah, frail woman of.
Means yeah absolutely. And she's like she starts fucking the right wing Irish poet Yates and he's like obsessed with her. She tries to marry her like four times, and every time she's like, nah, I'll fuck you, but I'm not going to marry you. You know, yeah smart, And she gets into all him as occultism shit like the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which is okay, yeah, okay, okay. Then this is the weirdest part of the whole fucking four part. She starts fucking this other guy and she
has this kid, and then her kid dies. It's tragic. So her and this guy fuck next to her kid's sarcophagus. Oh, so that the soul of her dead kid could be reincarnated into the next kid she had.
Okay, so that's aology. Scientology as fuck. Now did you say she was of the Protestant or the Catholic person?
She was like, what if scientology was horny?
Yeah, basically saying all right, well you know what I'm not. Here's kak Shamer or whatever. I don't know.
Yeah, and she she does so much for Irish nationals. She's called the Irish Joan of arc Oh. Usually they don't talk about the sarcophagus part incarnation fucking part.
Wow, that's the thing that got me looking.
Enough, it's the hook.
And so she moves into Irish nationalism and she does cool shit like write articles called the Famine Queen about Queen Victoria. Just a sick and metal and accurate name for Queen Victoria.
Yeah.
And at one point a newspaper was like talking shit on her. So this other Irish nationalist, Arthur Joseph Griffith, who will talk about a little bit more a second he quote thrashed the journalist with a stick, I believe a Shealaly like an Irish walking stick slash club. And later Arthur's going to go on and start the political party Shin Fein, which is still a very major part
of Irish politics. And what also is a part of major Irish politics is goods and services and consumerism, which also has infiltrated this very show starting now and we're back so mod gone Easter Sunday nineteen hundred, she meets with fourteen of her friends. They're all women, and their plan was that they like they got together to like make a present. They were going to get an engraved blackthorn stick of Chaleley to give to Arthur, basically being like, hey,
thanks for beating the shit out of that dude. Like, here's another stick for beating the shit out of the next dude, which is cool. I actually have no notes here. But then they talked way more than that, and they wound up putting together the seeds of an organization called the Daughters of Ireland. It was named in Irish and some of the things I wrote down in English and some of them I wrote down in Irish, and this one I wrote down in English. So I'm going to
call it the Daughters of Ireland throughout. And they get together and they're like, all right, we're gonna have an all women nationalist groups. Is around the time. They're not the first Irish nationalist group, but they're you know, the Gaelic League comes a few years before them, but they're ahead of the curve. The fucking Queen is visiting and she's trying to get irishmen to go join their war in South Africa against the Boers, which are a white
ethnic minority in South Africa. So the Daughters are like, well, we don't want Irish people to go fight in your fucking war. So they organized a march of children, thirty thousand children marching against the queen base. And then afterwards, isn't that sick based?
Yeah? Thirty thousand kids.
Yeah, And then they had a day in the park with a picnic and like anti recruitment speeches and it went really well, I mean obviously went really well. They managed to get thirty thousand fucking kids out and so they became a permanent organization. They use the funds that they raised for this. They were like, you know, fuck it, we're now Daughters of Ireland. We exist. Also, Queen Victoria
died the next year. Is it a coincidence? Yes, but yes, But I like to think the stress of seeing all those kids marching against her, just did he in?
Yeah? Yeah, the stress of the kids. I mean that's a terrifying sighte yeah, very unsettling, thirty thousand kids marching, I know, thinking that, would you would carry that, it would haunt you, Yeah, but not for very long, no, just about it because you'll die next year. Yeah, yeah, And I like to think that they chanted Vickis in the box the way that.
But anyway, Uh so they get together as the Daughters of Ireland and their goal is to assert Irish independence. They want control over the island. They want return to the Irish language and the decolonization of culture, the de
anglicization of their culture. But they're also so kind of I can't specifically say, like right wing, but one of their things was that they had a particular hatred of English low culture, of like cussing and like lewd stuff and like body theater and all that, unlike the enlightened Irish culture that they were all yes, yeah, it's rich bitches, right. I mean, I don't know, maybe only mogone. But they did a lot of fucking work. They put on plays,
they taught classes for kids and adults both. They protested British army recruitment. They published a newspaper called The Women of Ireland, and they were one part among many, of a growing nationalist movement and people trying to figure out whether their right or left wing. They either argue about it or stay the fuck out of it. The nationalism of oppressed group is fundamentally a different thing than the nationalism of an oppressor group, but they're related, and we'll
talk more about that later. I just want to put pain in that concept, because if I'm going to be talking about nationalists, I think it's worth pointing out that this is a oppressed minority saving a fucking language. Because there was the Gaelic League formed in eighteen ninety three at the beginning of the nineteenth century, So like eighteen hundred, forty five percent of Irish people were brought up speaking Irish at home. By eighteen ninety one, three point five
percent were raised speaking Irish. Wow, so a couple generations just trashed Irish as a language. The League understandably, it was actually way more popular. Not in the Irish speaking Galtech to the northwestern part of Ireland was more Irish speaking right than the rest because it anglicized less and later, but the Gaelic Lee was more popular in the eastern part. That was like more Irish English speaking because people were like, well,
we need to get this shit back right. It's compared to the people are like, oh, we just never stopped.
Yeah.
So the Gaelic League pushed Irish classes. It sent students to the Gaeltech, the Irish being part of the country, to be immersed in their own language. Their first newspaper was called The Sword of Light, and it was edited by Patrick Pierce, who's considered the leader of the Easter Rising by many standards. We'll talk about him more in a minute, and its motto was shin fain, which means
we ourselves. I was reading people who were like, it's often translated as like we by ourselves, like us doing it, just us, fuck everyone else, And then like other more modern translators are like, that's actually kind of a mistranslation is more like we ourselves anyway.
Whatever I feel like, that's yeah, that's a distinction us together or something.
I don't know, Yeah, no, totally. And it it gets into some of the core arguments that people have about the Irish nationalism, the degree to which it's xenophobic and degree to which it's preserving a culture that's oppressed. By nineteen oh five, the political group shin Fain was started by the thrasher, the chiley wielding guy Arthur. But by nineteen oh four, in just one year, the Gaelic League
had more than six hundred branches and fifty thousand members. Also, in nineteen oh four, Irish was added to the National school curriculum, so they like came out the fucking gaate. And then it gets real messy when religion gets involved.
With the smile on Margaret's faith.
All right, So the Catholic Church takes a lot of credit for Irish independence, and it uses the revolution to like institute a theocracy later, you know, and sometimes it actually fought against the Irish language in the nineteenth century. This part caught me completely off guard because overall you have this like, oh, Protestantism is the English you know, religion, and I mean it's the Church of England. Well, it's the Church of Ireland, but it's the same thing, yeah,
versus the good Catholic Church or whatever. All the true Irish peopleh blah blah blah. But in the nineteenth century, for a while, during what was called the Bible Wars, the Anglican Church, or rather the Church of Ireland, it went on this wild recruiting scheme and it translated the Bible into Irish and it taught Irish folks to read Irish in the process. So the Protestant Church was trying to get people to read Irish as a way to get people to convert to Protestantism from Catholicism. And so
the Catholics are like, oh, no, you don't. And so they managed to spin that's speaking Irish was the real Anglicization, even though that's really the opposite.
It's the opposite. Oh yeah, this is getting messy, isn't it.
Yeah, And this doesn't stick around for too long. I read all of this, I read some papers about this, and I was like talking to my friend and I was like, what the fuck? And then my friend kind of provided a lot of counter arguments of like I'm not getting into it here, but there's like these things called hedge schools that are more deepy schooling and stuff like that, and it did and it was often supported
by the church, and it often did teach Irish. So there's a counter examples to this, but it just it's just a real interesting the idea of how fucking it makes me feel better about like right now where you like get on Twitter and people will like, like every year a political position will have like changed what people think you mean by it?
M you know, yeah I do, and yeah, absolutely, And it's hard to keep track of where things are and for people, and I might agree with somebody on this thing and then be like, wait a minute, what was that? What did that person say? Now wait a minute, I support this part of it, but are you saying it because of that totally?
Like how like, you know, supporting Palestinian freedom does not equate to anti Semitism. There are anti Semites, There are anti Semites and Nazis who are trying to use that to leverage their own way, and we just have to like just stay aware, you know.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, We're We're in a brave well it's not that brave knew of the world. There is something I've been thinking about it as you're setting this up, just how things don't change, how like, oh, yeah, this is how it goes, isn't it. It's like you do, you try to make your best alliances as you can and also changes and anyway, Yeah, no, it's nothing changes.
It's just so messy. I even got kind of sad about it this week. This is like one of my favorite topics. I actually put this off for a couple of years. I knew I wanted to do the Eastern Rising because of my family connection and all this shit, and I was like, I'm not ready yet, And I'm glad I waited, because, like, I have more practice with this messy shit than I used to. Yeah, so now we're gonna get to another messy guy.
Yeah.
His name is Patrick Pierce, and he is a nationalist, playwright and poet. He's one of the Easter Rising leaders. He's sort of like the leader. And if you ever want to read a fuck ton of speculation, then read academics, journalists, historians, and people on Reddit arguing about whether he was gay, autistic, a pedophile, and or a fascist.
Oh Okay, the whole gamut.
I'll give you my money. My money is on that he was asexual autistic, and I'm sort of glad he died before fascism came around, so we never got to find out what he would have thought about that.
Yeah. Yeah, people love to throw in gay and pedophile in when people are a stranger different to them or not strange, but you know where they don't quite understand, and then they lump it all in everything.
Okay, So this one's messy. Okay, First of all, you get into this really messy thing where late nineteenth century homophile stuff. You know, homosexuality didn't really exist. I mean, I know we're talking about the early twentieth century too, but like homosexual didn't exist as a concept, and you had different previous concepts to it. A lot of them were around attraction to boys in addition to men. That
was absolutely part of that. There was also this kind of like cult of the boy in right wing circles in like European literature at the time. So Patrick Pierce wrote a pedophile poem. He wrote a poem about kissing a little boy and how it's better than kissing a woman. Oh it was the style at the time to write that. Yeah, but he also fucking ran a school.
Yeah.
It's messy, it's messy, it's messiest shit. I still hold the autistic thing makes complete sense. I'm trying not to like, and the ace thing honestly seems to track.
Yeah.
But he also supported labor unions, which is a good thing.
Yeah.
And so Patrick Pierce messiest person we'll talk about, I think this week. He was an Irish nationalist and he was a language activist. He was raised in the middle class with a unitarian British father and an Irish mother who had the best available name in the world. Margaret.
Oh yeah, that's a good one.
His sister had a pretty good name too, or she too was named Margaret. He and the Margarets. There's like eight hundred Margarets. There's like later there's an all women's unit and it talks about like all of the women of that who were killed during the following like ten year period, and it's like like ten different women and
four or five of them are all named Margaret. But so he and the Margarets and his brother Willie Pierce, they together run an Irish language school called Saint Edna's, which taught in Irish and existed to help preserve Irish language and culture. He and Willie are both going to get executed in Easter Rising, and the two Margarets will
continue to run the school without the boys. And I was talking to my friend about this episode and they were pointing out how important music and culture mattered in all of the Irish revolutionary movements, and a lot of that work was done by the nationalistscluding Pierce. He wrote the adaptation of one of my favorite rebel songs of all time, Oh Rousha Baja Walia. You've randomly heard this song, it's I couldn't tell you, Yeah, no, it's it's in Engrish,
so I can't really sing it. It goes on after his death to become one of the anthems of the revolution. And I'm gonna talk about that song because I really fucking like it. Although this is how I first learned that Patrick Pierce is like real complicated. I was like, interviewed by this magazine. Now I'm totally offscript. I was interviewed by this magazine and they were like, what's your favorite neo folk song? And I was like kind of
fucking with him. So I was like, oh, Rousha baja walia and which which is not a modern folk song, It's a traditional militant folk song from the Irish Rising. And this Irish communist wrote me and was like really upset and was like Patrick Pierce is a fucking fascist. And I have done a bunch of research and I disagree with that person's assessment, but I understand where they came from and don't have a counter. I'm not like,
I'm like, no, oh, he was a leftist. Yeah, but the song title oh RuSHA baha wa yah means cheers welcome home, much like you can welcome home the people you care about with stuff, things. Whatever is being advertised is what you should bring with you when you next meet your loved one at the airport.
I think that you need to have whatever is about to be advertised. You'll probably I know you need it.
She'll leave you if you don't have it. Yeah, grim it is. Here's the ads.
And we're back. Hopefully you bought a bunch of stuff.
Yeah. If not, rewind yep, don't use the pool fifteen second button to skip all the ads, which is why would you ever what I do? Except when I'm like when I'm like working, like like with my hands. Yeah, I'm like, ah, fuck, I have to listen to the ads right now, because like you can't take my work gloves off or whatever.
Yeah, I'll put up with them then.
Yeah whatever, surgeons listening to this, you can't skip the ads. You're please don't listen to podcast all of them.
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So this song cheers welcome home, very very rebellious title, right, yeah, Like lots of folks songs, its actual origins are like pretty much lost. When it was first written about in eighteen fifty five, it was deferred to as an ancient clan march. Ireland was divided up into clans instead of essential government for a very long time. Some folks also think it was likely a sea shanty, which makes sense, like hey, welcome home. You know we're like, fuck, yeah,
you made it. That's how I like to translate the title. Yeah I don't speak Irish. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And there's also a version that was sung a month after a wedding, where in a traditional Irish wedding, the bride would move into the husband's house a month after the almost a funeral, but the opposite are kind of the same.
Oh no, it depends on how you look at it.
Yeah, exactly the death of your free life.
Yeah.
And then in seventeen forty five it was written to be a song for the Jacobite Rebellion, which is some complicated Kings of England shit where Ireland supported a Catholic king who was trying to reclaim the English throne. And in this version there's a line that says they'll be with him French and Spanish, and it's basically like, hey, all the Catholic nations are going to come together support
the king. Fuck these Protestants, you know. Patrick Pierce rewrote the song to be about the Irish themselves free in Ireland, not waiting on help from an English crown or the French or Spanish. That line became Gale's Day and neither French nor Spanish, and later like people kind of use that to be like, oh see, this is this, like like we don't like any other Tree song. I think it's fairly easy to say, like, no, it means we don't need help from any other country. We can do this, you know.
Especially in the context of what we're talking about. Right at the time period.
Right, And so this is me arguing with someone who sent me an email years ago.
And if you are that person in listening right now, consider yourself told.
Yeah, although you might also be right because he's a complicated.
Anyways, like a very light point.
Yeah, but he also included in this song Granio O'Malley, the pirate Queen of Ireland. We did a whole two parter about you should go listen to. She was a real person. She like divorced husbands and rated ships and add shit. Yeah, she's cool as hell. He was a nationalist in the truest sense of the word. He believed it was the patriotic duty of true Irish men to go off and get made dead in order to free the country. He wrote about that kind of shit all
the fucking time. He also went and made himself dead to try and feed the country. So you can't like he's not armchairing this shit, you know, Yeah.
He did it, but that's where he stopped.
So yeah, and this is where most of the accusations against him with fascism come from. Is this writing. I read a fairly convincing piece that says his writing is in line with mainstream European writing at the time, no more or less specifically fascist than what people in every country who were writing in early twentieth century Europe. However, considering the whole of Europe almost fell into fascism within two decades of this man's death, it doesn't mean all
that much. We don't know how he would have gone, how I feel. He talked a lot about manhood and war and heroism and the fatherland. He and some other of the nationalists men were really into reclaiming masculinity for Irish men because the English were making them all effeminate with their like Girly's founding.
How many things you say that, I'm like, still, we're still doing this exactly. I just can't exactly continued. Yeah, but you also there's like Soviet propaganda that's the same shit.
You know, the Western decadent man is gay, like you know, us good brave, virile communists.
We're all just so boring. Let's get some new creative narratives going, just some different conversationists.
Please, Totally. He was a good poet. He wrote really beautiful, fucked up lines like the old heart of the earth needed to be warmed with the red wine of the battlefields.
Okay, evocative?
Yeah, no it is. It's evocative, which gives us a good segue to start talking about the other half of the Easter Rising socialists. The most prominent Irish socialist was a pretty fucking cool guy, one of the only people that I got. No, that's not sure. With the whole socialist side, I've got almost no coveiats about. They're actually pretty fucking this one, which is funny because sometimes I'll talk shit on some socialists and my fucking shows, but not, no,
not this time. James Connolly. We'll talk more about him in a little bit, but I want to just he wrote a quote specifically talking shit on what I just read about the red wine of the fucking battlefields. James Connolly is chiming in from the leftist side of Catholic Irish independence, and he said, quote, No, we do not think the old heart of the earth needs to be warmed with the red wine of millions of lives. We
think anyone who does is a blithering idiot. We are sick of such teaching, and the world is sick of such teaching. And these two militarily run the Rising together. Interesting, and I think that that's an important way to understand that there was not a unity of thought.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, because they're very different figures here, but they do want ultimately the same goal. Yeah, after you achieve that goal, what it looks like probably a different reality, but you know, they're working together towards something, which is something we all should keep in mind in our own as.
Well, totally, you know. And it's like, all this is happening before a lot of the like great splinterings of revolutionary movements. You know, within a couple of years you're going to start seeing like the the Bolsheviks turning on the rest of the left in the USSR and killing
everyone and all that stuff. But that hasn't happened yet. Overall, the Irish socialists were less nationalist and more internationalists, and you know, like gun to my head, I'd have a real hard time defining nationalism, you know, because there's a million fucking ways of understanding it. Exactly when someone says nationalism, you have to it's not enough information for you to figure out what they're talking about, because.
It can mean so many things, and especially at this point in time, what's it mean versus now.
And internationalist isn't all that different. It's a little bit more precise, but it can be defined a million different ways. The best way I can describe it in this context is that internationalism isn't isn't Everyone is the same and there's no cultural distinctions between people, right Because Okay, there's this idea that there's like nations which are different than states.
Often they're use interchangeably, but in this particular way of understanding things, a nation is more about the people and the culture, whereas the state is like the structures, the organizational and governmental structures.
And so.
Internationalism is not no nations. It's nations working together. It is the It is not melting pot America. It is all of these cultures can stay culturally distinct and find ways to work together. I like that because I think that's coolest shit it is.
It's also a preserving of culture as well. It's not about not that there's anything wrong with cultures intermingling, but there is something beautiful about protecting your own heritage and also not being afraid of someone else's or of another culture.
It's an acceptance, yeah, totally. And in order to explain the difference, I want to introduce a final one of the nationalists, that is, the people fighting for cultural Irishness and against Anglicization as their primary goal rather than like socialism. But this nationalist best I can understand, and I'm I'm running off of I'll tell you what I'm running off of my argument as to why this man's an internationalist. But he's one of the most interesting motherfuckers in the
whole Rising. He probably wouldn't like me saying motherfucker because he's very Catholic. Joseph Plunkett Joseph Plunkett was our second rich Catholic who spent his whole life fighting friend of the pod tuberculosis. In this episode in the way of nineteenth century rich Europeans, he spent time in North Africa and Algiers and specifically and shit for his health as a kid to be like in the good coastal Mediterranean air or whatever, right I mean, he survived fucking well.
Esventually the British are going to shoot him, but until then he survived, so it clearly worked for a while, you know. Yeah, So as a kid, he learns Arabic and he starts writing poetry in it, and he also learns Irish, and then he learned the most internationalist shit to ever internationalist esperanto. You were, Oh you ever heard of esperanto?
No?
Oh, man. So he formed the Irish Esperanto League, which is where a bunch of the Eastern Rebels met one another. Four of the Easter Rising martyrs spoke this language, esperanto. Esperanto is an attempt at creating a universal language. It still exists. You can't this language. There's still i don't know,
a couple million speakers or whatever worldwide. Esperanto was not designed to supplant local languages, but instead it was to provide internationalism by allow different people to have an auxiliary language that they can all speak, instead of like the way that English is the universal language right now, right, and like probably at one point, at some point it'll
be Chinese or something, right, yeah, Mandarin. So instead of having it be someone's language that we use as the international language, this guy who will talk about in a second was just like, well, we'll just make one and it'll be no one's home language, and everyone can have their home language, and when they have to talk to each other, they can use this one. Instead of allowing cultural chauvinism to force one language upon everyone because we do need a way to communicate in this world.
I love that.
Yeah, he's neat, He's a neat.
It's a great idea.
Yeah, I'm like, I'm I'm not going to learn it. No, but it would be about tenth on my list of languages to learn. I like really need to finish my Spanish, and they kind of want to learn English, and yeah.
Some practical prioritiesier, but in a vacuum, very into it.
Yeah, if they had one, you know, And it was like a thing like so. Esperanto was developed by an anti Zionist Jew from Poland in eighteen eighty seven, and his name was ELLL. Zamenhoff. He is this fucking banger of a quote about nationalism. And this was like later when people were like, hey, will you join this Jewish Esperantis league and he's like, I'm not into nationalism and Zionism and stuff. He actually briefly was into Zionism when he was younger, because he was like, man, these pogroms
that I'm living through fucking suck. They keep killing us as Jews. We need to do something about that. But he quickly determined the Zionism was not the thing to do about it. And this was like a fuck one hundred and thirty years ago.
Interesting how he could put those pieces together back then, and so many of us are struggling with it right now.
Yeah, like fifty years before Israels were saying, he like ran through the thought process and was like, ah, cig.
This doesn't end well, is what he thought.
So yeah, here's this quote about nationalism, and it's it's how I feel. I don't need other people to feel how I feel about this. I am profoundly convinced that every nationalism offers humanity only the greatest on happiness. It is true that the nationalism of oppressed peoples as a natural self defensive reaction is much more excusable than the nationalism of peoples who oppress. But if the nationalism of the strong is ignoble, the nationalism of the week is imprudent.
Both give birth to and support each other.
That is so eloquent. I know, that's a perfectly stated Oh yeah, yeah.
He's also the first person to write a Yiddish grammar, like to like write down, this is how Yiddish go. That would not be the way to do that if you were doing it anyway. He died in nineteen seventeen. His all three of his fucking kids were murdered by
Nazis in the Holocaust. The second esperantist author after, I believe, after him, was an irishman who wrote the English language textbook of it and also spoke Irish, So Yiddish and Irish were like, hey, let's figure out non colonial like anti colonial ways to defend our fucking like ways of being, and the Irish people would be more likely to have called it nationalism.
But you know, yeah, fascinating.
Yeah. I first heard about Esperanto when I was a squadron the Netherlands. And this is totally just a side so I can tell this story because just a shout. I have no idea if this man listens to it, to the show. But there was this gay anarchist squatter lawyer who had moved to the Netherlands from the US and gotten his citizenship and shit there because of the
thriving Esperanto scene in Amsterdam. He was an Esperantist and he was like, I gotta go where the Esperantis are, and so he moved to Amsterdam and one day we were squatting this abandoned gay bar. It was like the oldest gay bar in Amsterdam, and we were like the gay squat scene was trying to like make it a
thing again. And so this man was one of the two police liaisons, and I just want to like paint this picture where you have this fabulous American queer and like an ostentatious fur coat is one of the police liaisons, and he's not particularly tall. And then the other one is this towering dutch man who's like an anti fascist skinhead who's wearing all black black bomber jacket, tight black pants and a bright pink mini skirt over his punk pants.
What and a good cop, bad cop to the cops, where like the big dude is like screaming at them, and then the esperantoses calmly explaining why we weren't breaking any laws because we weren't because squatting was legal at the time. Incredible anyway, on Esperanto, this is how I heard about it, and.
It holds a special place in your heart.
Exactly oh later, I'm gonna draw a weird Okay, I really like my my red strings conspiracy boards where I draw all these weird connections through history. So that was plunket, we went way off. He was the He was the tuberculosis afflicted nationalist internationalists who started the Esperantis League. He also wrote poetry, including a poem I quite like, but I'm going to spare you all a reading of called I See his Blood upon the Rose, which is basically
like a god is in everything kind of poem. He also he's a rich kid, right, so he turned his family property into a training center for the Irish Republican Brotherhood. So like all the people with guns would be like, well, where are we going to practice and drill? And he's like, well, I own.
A fuck ton of land mommy and daddy's house.
Yeah exactly, the estate, which is what you should do if you're born into wealth.
Absolutely, let's go, lads, Yeah exactly.
So that's the nationalists. When we come back on Wednesday, we're gonna talk about the socialists. You will be shocked to know. I feel more unqualifiedly positive about socialists, and I think none of them are going to fuck next to sarcopha guy. But you know what maybe they do, and that's just not included in what I learned.
That It's it's so I'm sure someone will let you know, someone will get very angry that you've left it out and let you know that you are indeed a fascist for overlooking it.
Pretty much. Margaret did a section on nationalists. Yeah, uh, but that's part one of our four parter about the Easter Rising. It's gonna be two parts of context, two parts of action. But don't worry, there's lots of good action in all the context. The context is full of action and very exciting. This is great fucking on the grave, but fucking on a grave, which is a terrible way to segue to you and the stuff that you should talk about, right.
Sure, plug, Well, I've got some shows you can check out.
Uh.
We have our YouTube channel which is called some More News. Maybe you're like, hey, I know that channel, but that's a boy on that channel. As frequently when I tell people where I work, they're like, that's not a girl, that's Tody Johnson. Yeah. No, I've been there the whole time. You Fox and started that show together hosts it. I feel that in my core.
Thank you.
And we also have a podcast called even more News, and we take the audio from the YouTube channel. If you don't like watching YouTube channels, you can listen to the audio of it. Also in the podcast feed to just look up some more news, and that's where you'll find me. Technically, I'm on Twitter, but I don't use it very often.
Katie posts really cute picks of her perfect dog Benny on Instagram.
I do, I do tell me on Instagram. I recently I will be re emerging out of Twitter. It is the platform that I have the most, you know, not that it matters, but that's where if you want to share your work, the most people follow you. But it's become so hard for me emotionally and physically to use the space. So but on Instagram, I try to just post pictures of the mountains and animals and wholesome things. But even that's hard to maintain these days anyway. But
that's a whole other conversation for another time. Those are the places you can follow me.
Hell yeah, and I appreciate it because I as I do watch you too, But I watch YouTube at twice speed, yeah, because if I'm watching, it's harder for my add to make it work, whereas listening is fine because I'm out walking or doing something else.
Exactly multitask, So you got options if you want to listen to some more news.
Yeah, and if you want to listen to me. I have a podcast called cool People The Cool Stuff. You can find every Monday and Wednesday and it comes from cool Zone Media, which Sophie runs. Hi Sophie, Hi, I think plug. Just keep it looked out.
And if you're if you subscribe to the goal Zone Media channel on any of the ops people, look out for a couple of new shows launching very very soon.
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Listen, not gonna lie pretty much a big fan of cool Zone Media. In my very unbiased opinion, totally Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff on cool Zone Media is a great show.
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