Cool Zone Media.
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Make Cookies. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and I'm still thinking about the really mediocre cookies I made that I ate. All of my guest today is Katie still? Hi Katie?
I'm back Hi?
Yeah, on this totally different day.
That is a totally different day.
Why I'm still thinking about the cookies. The cookies did not last long enough for me to still be thinking about if we had recorded on a sear But.
See if you're still thinking about them the next time you record.
Hopefully all be thinking about better cookies.
Yeah.
But someone's going to send me their punk house cookie recipe and it's going to be better than what I had, So I'm excited. But our producer Sophie, Hi, Sophie, Hey, And everyone's say hi to Daniel, who's our audio engineer?
Hi? Danel?
Hi Danel?
What up? Dj Danel?
Our theme musical is written for us by one woman. And this is part two of a four parter about the East Rising, which was well, you should listen to part one. I did the quick version of it. Why would you listen to only part two? Is there something be a weird choice? I know, I can't even that's why I can't get into I've said this before. It's like why I can't get into like comic books or things that are not I can't. I have to start at the beginning of things and work my way through.
And it's so overwhelming. When you saw you see there's five hundred issues.
They're not this is not linear, it doesn't work, and this one is linear mostly. I mean, actually, all of history is a big, non linear, complicated web of a story you can't actually sit down in, but you can try. And that's my job because it's cool, little cool stuff.
Linear in the sense that you've planned.
Out four episodes, So that's true. We're on number two, that's true. Where we last left our heroes, we only talked about half of them when we talked about the sketchy aar half the nationalists. Today we're going to talk about the socialists, which for some of you listening might be the sketchy half, in which case we have different conceptions of things. Today we're gonna start James Connolly, we briefly introduced last time as the guy who was like,
what are you talking about? We're not into the red wine of battlefields? What the fuck is wrong with you, or specifically said blithering idiot about Patrick Pierce.
Oh love that.
James Connolly was born poor as fuck an Irish slum in Edinburgh, Scotland. He went to work at ten. Contrast, and a lot of some of the nationals are working class too, But overall, this man went to work at ten because he couldn't not because he needed to make money for his family. He joined the army as an old old child of fourteen years old. Oh boy, I think he lied about his age. I don't think England's not the best place in the world, but I don't think they were recorded.
They also didn't ask for his identification.
Sure think kid, Yeah whatever, fucking Irish, Scottish whatever. Yeah. So he spent seven years stationed in Ireland, realizing he was on the wrong side. An awful lot of Irish rebels spent time in the British military, or the British Colonial Service, or even the British aristocracy. So twenty one, he's been in for seven years. They're like, go to India, and he's like, go to fucking hell, I'm not going
to serve in India. So he deserted. He married a woman named Lily Reynolds and moved to Scotland and had a bunch of kids, six of them. Did I mention he was Catholic?
Yeah, and I well Irish Scottish, yeah like it or it's almighty in Scotland.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. I'm sure there's people who like really care, you know, there's people are like, ah, you know whatever, I don't fucking care. And as an aside, I complained all the time about this on the show. But there's all these histories of these like great men of history, and it ignores their families and they're like the women in their lives right, who are often as involved as
in whatever project they're doing as the man is. Because a lot of these histories kind of come across like these guys themselves also ignore their families and the women
in their lives. And sometimes that's true. But I'm realizing more and more because the actually there's people who talk about this, they talk about why sometimes people leave their families and their personal lives out of it when they're kind of like because there's a certain part about like when you're like, oh, I'll be the figurehead of this, it's kind of like I'll take the fall for this, you know, sometimes in a literal way, right, You're like, nah, I swear I'm the only one who I know, you
saw a hundred people with guns, but I was the only one there.
Yeah. Yeah, but they want to protect their family to a degree.
Yeah, And so more and more, I'm realizing that that's happening more often than I realized, which is cool because one of the biggest disappointments of this show usually is when the men who get written about in history turned out to be pieces a shit to the women in their lives. And that's one of the primary ways that I judged straight men.
Yeah, me too.
Yeah, James Connelly had a family and he cared an awful fucking lot about them. Yeah, and he he included them in his work. He fought for them, and I everything I've read is its good.
Like you.
Yeah, he's also like basically canonized, you know, Like yeah, so it's like but whatever, like I've you know, I try to read contrasting opinions about various people and stuff, and like, I read a fuck ton of like right wing people writing about all these people too, you know, And soon enough, James Connelly is a socialist and he's the head of the Scottish Socialist Federation and he's working
with all of these different socialist groups. He starts off as like more of a British style Marxist, which at the time means he's more into like social democracy, slow change through electoralism and all that. He does not stay in this school of thought. Meanwhile, while he's working in Scotland, he's already fighting for an Irish socialist Republic, his lifelong dream. He's also a sober man, or as it gets written about,
he's abstentatious. Abstentatious, Okay, I know, I kind of like there's all these like different words for teetotal or straight edge or whatever in history, and a lot of people in history I keep finding sober people and vegans. They'll be called vegetarians or pure vegetarians sometimes, but I run across a lot more of them in history than I am originally would have expected.
That's interesting. Yeah, we just kind of gloss over that, but yeah, it seems like an important fact, and I think for him it's like part of this like you know, when we're drunk, we don't get shit done kind of thing, you know, or like our worst selves come out.
I haven't actually read him talking about it. I've only read him like kind of complaining about in the like different revolutionary spaces when there's too much drinking at them.
And definitely diffuses your revolutionary energy.
Yeah, or sometimes it's spikes it.
It can. But then you get a hangover the next day and you're like, oh, I have to actually show up.
I know, and you're like in prison and you're like, I don't remember throwing a rocket a cop. Take your word for it. He was a fucker, yeah, yeah, probably, I mean he did, but yeah, probably did. So he's sober. The pay for Socialist Revolutionary Organizer. You're going to be shocked to hear this. It's shit. It's shit pay really Yeah, and when you have six kids none not easy to work.
Yeah.
So he goes to the US for a while. First he goes to travel and raise money for the Union and you know, to pay for his own life and family and stuff by going on speaking tours and selling newspaper subscriptions to the Irish diaspora in the United States. And he's giving talks all over the country about why Irish American folks need to support socialism, which is not popular at the time, you know, I mean the Irish American diaspora leans slightly conservative. Yeah, he misses the shit
out of his family. He writes his wife letters about how fucked up America is for having stolen all the land from indigenous people. Because this guy can't miss this is like the late nineteenth century, you know, he sure can't live in an unlucky and hard life. One of the times, while he's in the US, his eldest daughter
dies tragically in a fire. While he is away, He's gone back to the US, to Troy, New York, and he's setting up for his family to emigrate there because he's like, well, this is where I can have a better life for my kids. This is where they can be educated better than they would be in the Irish slum of Edinburgh, you know. And one of his daughters dies, and I think this haunts him for the rest of
his life. His family moves with him to Troy, New York, and at least two of his daughters, Nora and Fiona, find work pushing shirt collars around the city and big crates. Obviously, you know that Troy, New York was called Collar City Coller City, and it was where all the shirt collars were being made, and the shirt collar Worker Union was the first all woman union in history in US history. Sorry, it was found in eighteen sixty four by a nineteen
year old woman who worked the shirt collar factory. But by the early nineteen hundreds, the pay is shit for his daughters, the conditions are shit. Workers aren't allowed to talk to each other. The Protestant Irish get all the managerial jobs and the Catholics get all the worst jobs. Is a big part of like, there's a lot of anti papist bigotry that we've come up a bunch on this show. And Troy is the third time we'll bring
this up on this episode. Won't be the last. Troy had the highest tuberculosis rate in the country.
Oh, there it is again.
It's a marker of poverty. Yeah, because of people living in crowded and on hygienic conditions. Yeah, so his daughter's won on strike. The first version I read about this was like Connolly organized his daughter's workplace. I don't think that's true. I think his daughters and the union at the factory organized to that. Yeah, he supported them, he raised money for them, and he also raised some daughters. That sound kind of badass, so I know exactly right.
And local union politicians and the Catholic Church were backing the owners, which is not a good sign when you're trying to have a union and the fucking that is like specifically fighting against like antipapas, bigotry and hiring practices, and the Catholic Church and the local union politicians are like, eh, but we like the money of the companies, you know. So he did that thing. And then in nineteen oh five, everyone get out your Bengo cards. Tuberculosis free space has
been checked off. In nineteen oh five, the union organizers in the US did one of the coolest things I've ever done. Time for a Bingo square. They founded the Industrial Workers of the World. Yeah, they they fucking I didn't try to put them into this episode. Industrial workers, by the way, doesn't mean people who industrial work do industrial work like foundries and like molten metal and shit. It means entire industries being organized into one union instead
of like different. Prior to industrial unionism, it was like, oh, the drivers of the train have one union and the coal shovelers of a different union, and the porters don't get one fuck you.
And you know this is a big change.
Yeah, and it changes the labor movement worldwide. And this union we talked about way more than I ever expected to. It was founded by anarchists and socialists getting together and being like, fine, fuck it, work together. The Bolshevik thing hasn't happened yet. There's no reason for us to hate each other.
Like Irish nationalism and Irish labor.
Yeah. Kind no, totally, And I have a feeling that because this is going to influence the shit out of the Irish movement. And so now all the workers can strike together because they fight together for the same contract and they are specifically an anti racist union. They are specifically a they probably probably say anti sexist union rather than feminist union, but they're specifically fighting also for the
rights of women in labor. The black anarchist who is hero of the first ever episode of Cool People did Cool Stuff, Lucy Parsons. She has this quote that I found about this that I am ninety percent sure as a paraphrase and not her actual words, but it is cool anyhow and a decent reflection of her and the union's perspective. Quote. Every time a cleaning lady gets paid less than a janitor for doing the same work. It
hurts all the women and all the men. It robs women and keeps men working for low pay so he won't get replaced by a woman. When Negroes or Jews or the Chinese are paid less, it keeps wages low for all. White Christians are paid a little bit more and told that they are not exploited. And so the IWW is like running around like all of the immigrant groups and the racialized groups and the gender minority groups that the regular unions aren't touching. They're running around organizing them.
Fucking cool at home, incredible. Lucy Parsons was one of the founders of the IWW, and James Connolly does what half the heroes on this show do. He joined the IWW's the thing to do while you're in the US,
which means get out your red string. I can draw a direct line from Lucy Parsons, a black and indigenous woman born a slave who becomes an anarchist union organizer, to James Connolly, one of the most prominent East a Rising heroes, and therefore to lighting the fuse that trashed the British Empire.
Yes, okay, thanks Lucy.
Connolly. He starts working for the Wobbles, that's what they're called the IWW. There's a lot of arguments about where that comes from, and it probably has to do with their interracial solidarity and some of the ways that people were mishearing some of the ways that they talked. He moves to New Jersey and starts working as a sewing machine factory, and in order to work there, and rather in order to organize there, he learns Italian and German
in order to better organize with the workers there. Then he's in the Bronx and he's selling labor newspapers alongside some other Irish immigrants socialists. They formed the Irish Socialist Federation and they have three basic principles. They want to organize the Irish in the US to assist the revolutionary movement in Ireland. They want to teach the Irish and the US socialist principles, and they want to teach the Irish workers in the US to cooperate with workers of
all other races and nationalities. So no notes, good goals. Yeah yeah. The Irish Socialist Federation published a newspaper called The Harp which taught basically, hey everyone, let's get along socialism like Protestants and Catholics. Can we please be fucking chill. Also, we need to support the Indian independence movement against the British and atheists. We love you guys, but could you like be a little bit less Internet Reddit atheist about it?
Yeah?
Yeah, it was like a talking point back then.
Internet read it right, specifically.
Yeah, because it was like yeah, because the atheists were like, anyone who is religious is a piece of shit and a moron and can't be a socialist, right, okay, and so like, but all these people believe in God, do you want them to be socialists or not?
This like what, Yeah, come on, give me something. Let's yeah, make this a space for people, a welcoming space.
Yeah. And that was this big thing. And he wrote a lot about being both a Catholic and a socialist, which is a very contentious thing at the time, And he mostly wrote about what I would call now I would say he wrote about being like culturally and somewhat theologically Catholic, but not like interested in the institutions of the Catholic Church. He constantly railed against it whenever it
would wield power against people. But he has this quote that I think more than anything else, sums up what went wrong with the Irish Revolution a couple of years later, and just accurately predicts the problem. Quote if you remove the English Army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you said about the organization of the
socialist Republic, your efforts would be in vain. The green coated Irish soldiers will guard the fraudulent gains of capitalist and landlord from the quote thin hands of the poor, just as remorselessly and just as effectually as the scarlet coded emissaries of England do today. Yeah, yeah, you can, you can relabel it green, but.
Yeah, say this. One thing I love about this show is learning just how strong progressivism and different thing for so long that people have been talking about these things. And I'm always surprised by like, wow they're saying that back then. Wow, yeah, specifically anti racist, anti sexist. Wow.
Yeah, are we still having these conversations? But yes, no, Like that's such a good point. And one of the things that's really interesting is that a lot of it went backwards for much of the middle of the twentieth century, and like we'll talk about it a little bit later. But like during the revolutionary period of Ireland you got a lot of women who were involved in the government, and then you don't until the late seventies.
Wow.
Yeah, in all of these revolutionary movements you'll see like women combatants, and we'll talk about some more of them that are gonna come up. We've actually already talked about one of them. And then you don't for a very long time, you know. But in nineteen ten James Connolly and his family moved back to Ireland and the story
really gets going. But first what gets going is you out to the stores in order to buy the things and the stuff that make the things to turn me into a hypocrite by talking about it.
Just you on this computer machine in front of you, typing in the website. You don't have to go to a.
Store buy stuff dot com. Don't go to that. That's probably a real site and it's probably probably probably bad. But here's the ads anyway, and we're back. And one thing I learned while doing this show all of this
I'm offscript again, sorry, Sophie. All of these old revolutionary groups they all like sold newspapers and stuff, which is like the podcast at the time, like the people would read the newspapers for like the letters section right where people would just like talk shit and stuff is like the Twitter.
Yeah, and it was our Twitter.
They sold ads like anarchists, socialist whatever, you know, super lefty newspaper sold ads And it made me feel better because I only learned that while doing this show.
We've always had ads people.
Yeah, so goes back to Ireland and Irish leftists and revolutionary history is entirely interwoven with how Irish responded to the enclosure of the comments. We're gonna talk about Irish leftism for a minute. We talked about this in our episode about the Molly mcguires. Basically, in England they were like, hey, let's form above ground unions and withhold our labor to build power for the working class, which is cool. That is actually overall a better strategy than we're about to describe.
The Irish faced with the same problem the enclosure of the commons. Their primary form of solution was let's meet at the pub, put on crazy costumes, including a lot of cross dressing, and then go kill the landlords. Huh okay. And they were approaches yeah, similar vibe, no, completely different vibe and you actually get this whole thing. In Pennsylvania did a two part are about it. The Molly mcguires, where where you run into this like tension where the
English and the Irish coal miners are organizing together. And basically like whenever the union is made illegal, then everyone's like, all right, well, put on a dress and kill some otherfuckers, and so like it really incentivizes them to keep the union. It is legal because when you outlaw unions, men put on dresses and kill people and that's good, and that's good, I guess.
Yeah, first, yeah, in this context especially.
Yeah, So there's an awful lot of names for these an awful lot of these secret societies, and they're very informal. Some of them are more formal. It's all scattered. And also the Iris shouldn't write a lot of their medieval and early modern history, so you only get what's written by outsiders and what's written by the courts against them and stuff, you know. But overall, the names that people remember these secret societies the most are the Ribbon Men and the Molly mcguires, And.
They're both great names.
Yeah.
What's funny is the first one was called the White boys.
It was.
It was not about the racial it was not about whiteness as a racial concept that did not exist at that time. Yes, just the white boys. I know it is bad.
Oh is better?
Yeah. Ribbon men's good. They're gonna cut you up.
And that's good. Yeah.
So these tactics influenced the Irish rebels of the late nineteenth century, the Fenians, who preferred the secret society model overall to the labor union model. But you also get unionism in Ireland. Another fucking returning hero of the pod. This is just like the Capstone piece. I'll probably shut up about Ireland for a while after this. Jim Larkin. Yeah, Jim Larkin is another returning hero of the Pod. He's
a big part of Irish Unionism. He's mostly famous for trying to make Ireland free and socialist, but to our listeners, he might be famous for helping run the Dill Pickle Club in Chicago, which was a desegregated social club and jazz club that didn't serve alcohol and helped create Chicago's underground political and cultural scene at the end of the
nineteen tens, which he ran alongside an anarchist dynamiter. Fuck yeah, but in the meantime, before all that, he helped unionize Ireland alongside Connolly basically for until nineteen thirteen, nineteen fourteen. It was like, kind of him in charge of this union about to talk about and then Connolly is the second in command, and then and then Jim leaves the country.
They and others they start the Irish Transport and General Workers Union, which was a IWW inspired union, and specifically, the thing it did that scared the shit out of the political class, the capitalist class was that skilled workers and unskilled workers were now in the same union. So in nineteen thirteen we get the most immediate precursor to
the Easter Rising, which is called the Dublin lockout. The workers were like, hey, we're like fucking starving to death and dying of tuberculosis because the history of the world, I swear to God, is the history of tuberculosis. Irish deaths by TB were fifty percent higher than England or Scotland at this time. Wow, and like those aren't Like England's not just full of rich people. There's a lot of poor people there.
There's a lot of poor people there too. Yeah, it's actually.
This really interesting thing where whenever the socialists would leave Ireland or Scotland and go to the US, they'd be like, the American poor has a higher standard of living in that they have more stuff, but work way the fuck harder and are like more fucked. Yeah, but then like the Irish and whatever, the poor are just fucked everywhere. And in Dublin they all have TV.
It's bleak.
Like two of our heroes this week have lifelong struggle with TV and probably only survived to do the fighting because of access to familial wealth. So it's mostly poor people dying of it, right, Yeah, So folks are like, we're going to do something about this. It wasn't just about TV. But you know, as a part of it, we have this new union bring us all together so we can do a general strike, which you know, we can do so much more because we have this one
big union attitude. This is fucking great. We love it. Everybody loved it. No one had any problems with it except for all the people but with power and money.
Yeah, the people you would assume might have a problem with it.
Yeah, this is like this this part just stays in like classic no complications. This is like we're just strongly in regular cool people territory, the great lockout. The richest man in Ireland was this guy, William Martin Murphy or is the press like to call him William Murder Murphy. Ooh, if people to be fair, if people said that about me, I'd be like, yes, murder is my middle name.
Yeah, I'd lean into it.
Yeah. He was a press baron and an industrialist and a politician and just like everything's shitty. He's just a fucking classic nineteenth century Robert baron. Dude. He's a little bit like a little bit lefty compared to a lot of them. Right, He's fine with skilled workers having unions, but unskilled workers. Oh no, that is a step too far, okay, to make things messy. Not only is an Irish Catholic, he's an Irish nationalist.
Oh yep, we are get in the messy territory.
Yeah, Ireland for the Irish, just you know, with capitalism. Basically, his position is Ireland for me, please, I want to run it. Also, he calls himself Catholic, but his workers got one day off in ten Like, I'm sorry, I have you ever heard of the fucking sabbath? You fucking Catholic?
Yeah?
That doesn't sound super catholic, but a lot of times people that are Catholic don't sound super catholic.
It's true. It's true. Also, sometimes his workers work seventeen hour days, and he had a whole network of spies and informers among his workers to like hear what they were up to and see that.
It sounds awful.
He's a piece of shit. He's absolutely a fucking He's an archtypical cool people bad guy.
Mm hmmm.
Not and that he is cool people. Although his middle name is murder, so he's interesting.
That part's cool, but not because of him necessarily. Someone gave him a cool nickname.
Yeah, it's like cool, like in that way that like when you watch a movie and there's like a bad guy.
Yeah, we don't like him.
Yeah, sometimes I like the bad guy, especially when they're gay coded. I don't feel good about that. Yeah. Twice in my life, small children have looked at me and turned to their parents and said, mom, is that a villain?
Well, Margaret villain kills jo I has a bring to.
It is It's true. It's true.
It's a vibe.
Yeah, And to be fair, it was like and like just a little bit of a beard, was wearing a black dress and had like a little bit of makeup and long dark hair. I looked like a Disney villain because they painted Disney villains to look like me before I transitioned.
Oh, are you the true the Disney villain archetype. Yeah. Yeah, they owe you a lot of money.
I agree.
Yeah, you should be getting some fat residuals for that.
I agree. I'm just going to join whategricultural groups are fighting against Disney right now. I feel like that'll go really well for me. I made a Current Events joke. It's almost like a pop cancer joke.
Yeah.
So Murder Murder Murphy. What's his last name, Murphy, Murder Murphy Murphy. He's like old Bill Murder Murphy. Him and all the other bosses, not all of them, A lot of the other bosses just lock out the workers of Dublin. Like thousands and tens of thousands of workers are suddenly unionizing in this general union, and so they're like, all right, your workers unionize, fire them all and hire scabs. Don't
let them come to work anymore. They're fucking done. One notable exception to this, this is not a beer ad. Guinness didn't lock out their workers. Okay, they actually paid their workers pretty well and they didn't lock out their workers, including several who are in this union. However, they weren't like totally on the side of the workers, and they
told their workers they couldn't sympathy strike. Okay, they did that they would be fired, but they wouldn't be fired just for being in the US union and it, you know, and they would continue to negotiate with the union. Yeah.
Also, Guinness is delicious.
I know their founder for more than a century back was against Irish independence. Well, don't like that, but that was the one hundred years prior to all of this, Okay, so whatever, we can't.
Wow, Guinness has been around a long time.
Yeah, there's like late seventeen hundred's dang, Okay, it is really good. I really like their na beer. I drink. I'm not abstentatious, but I'm not the fasiest thing, and I kind of like an a beer.
So yeah, we're of an age. I don't know how you told you are, but we're of an age where that non alcoholic beer sure sounds better sometimes.
Absolutely, like, oh, I can drink a beer with no consequences. This is great, yeah, exactly, but there were consequences for the resulting labor struggle. It was fucking huge. This was the largest labor uprising in Irish history. I believe. Whenever you see like the largest or the first or whatever,
I'm like, I gotta see a lot more sources. But yeah, all across Dublin the police started acting like police, which is to say, well, you mentioned earlier about how Ireland had a bloody Sunday, and I mentioned that they had four, which is approximately four too many. I almost wrote three too many because one of the bloody Sundays kind of has a little bit of a back and forth and like fifteen police informers get shot, but then like a fuck ton of Irish civilians get gunned down by the army.
This is years later. This is a couple years later. It's like nineteen twenty years. So I don't have the numbers in front of me because this is some part of what I'm talking about today.
But we're offscript again.
Yeah, the first bloody Sunday was in nineteen thirteen during the lockout, when the police attacked protesting union workers in Dublin. They killed two people and they injured more than four hundred people, just like fucking shooting into the crowd and
all that shit. And here you run into the tensions between nationalism and labor unionism again because immediately when the workers are locked out, when he starts coming in from socialist unions in England, the British cooperative movement starts sending literal tons of food on rented ships because they're like, oh, workers need our help. We're workers, Our fucking loyalty is
to our class, not our fucking country. And there's another tactic that syndicalists used to great effect very recently at this time, which I've talked about, not just in the episode about the Battle of Cable Street, but even talked about I think last episode I did, because it's so fucking cool when it keeps coming up, which is that when the Irish dock workers were starving in London during a strike, the syndicalists organized that the kids of the
starving dock workers would get taken care of and literally raised for about a year or so in the homes of the Jewish like tailors. Okay, and later this defeats British fascism because when the fascists are like Hey, Irish, you're white, join us against these fucking Jews. And then they're like, are you fucking kidding me? Those Jews fucking raised me a piece of shit. I speak Yiddish, die you know, and they beat in the Battle of Cable
sit whatever. Anyway, this was a whole fucking I swear to God that's not trying to just make this an ad for every episode I've ever done.
But ye know it's good though. There's going to be links to all the episodes referenced, yeah, and not so well.
You probably have to search them, but yeah, you're gonna search. It's okay. So the syndicalists were like, hey, the Socialists of England are ready to look after your kids because everyone's starving because everyone's locked out. But the Catholic Church was like, no, you can't do that. Your kids will become atheists and Protestants and that's worse than starving to death.
We're the Catholic Church. Yeah, So nationalism, or particularly in this case, the church, worked against internationalism that could have
helped the strike. The final seal of the not winning of this strike was that the English workers didn't go so far as to sympathy strike that was like, they were like, oh, maybe we'll sympathy strike and if they had managed to write, if the if the working class of the of Ireland and fucking England had struck together, it could have fucking changed more than this arising.
Yeah.
But in the end the English workers were like, that's not happening. We don't want to starve too, Yeah, and the strike collapsed. Most workers signed I won't unionize promises to get their jobs back and went back to work. I've read other accounts that say that this ended in more of a draw. I think those are kind of optimistic, but they point out that the status quo survived, but so did the union. This union is still around and
actually it's not even at its peak. I think it peaks s later I remember when nineteen twenties.
I guess in those terms, it's a bit of a draw. Yeah, I mean, they didn't get the gains that they wanted, but the union exists, so.
Yeah, totally. So during all of this, the workers did form an organization that is going to change the course of world history. They formed the Irish Citizen Army, and their slogan, which is sick, is people will only be free when they own the land they plow and the stars in the sky. Their flag is the most Irish shit ever. And that's saying something because there's already an Irish flag with a harp on it. Yeah, their flag
is a plow made out of stars. It's the Big Dipper. Okay, but in the US we call the Big Dipper and apparently in the UK it gets called the Plow.
Oh I didn't know that.
Yeah, I didn't either, and that's a that's a Wikipedia level knowledge. But when I looked up a lot more about this flag. So this flag's cool as hell. Before you run out and buy one, know that this flag has been used by everyone from the Irish Labor Party to various incarnations of the IRA, including some of the
bad ones. So you might not be saying like, hell, yeah the original synthicalists who fought in the East Arising or coolest shit when you rep it, and you might be saying something different.
You might be throwing supporter on something you don't want.
Yeah, this is a note to me and the fact that I almost by one of these flags immediately after me, I'm gonna do some assides about some of these ica fellow not even Fellows people. One of the founders of the Citizen Army was his man, Jack White. Imagine an adventurer with a fedora who had been in the British Army named Jack White.
I'm imagining it.
You've got this guy. He looks like fucking Indiana Jones. He is an archtypical nineteenth century adventurer.
I am actually picturing Jack White of the White Stripes.
Oh, I don't I know the white stripe. So I didn't know that dude's name. Huh oh man, Wait, his name's Jack White and that's why they named it. Yeah, I guess that makes sense. Yeah, So this Indiana Jones motherfucker is on the side of justice. He's a Protestant hero. He worked with our man Roger Caseman, who's the guy who brought down King Leopold and as gay as hell.
He worked with him to get Protestants to back Irish independence. Later, just to speed run this guy because I think he's neat teen thirties, he goes off to join the Connolly column in the Spanish Civil War in order to fight against Franco and fight against fascism in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. Right and then he gives up his officer position when in the like Russian controlled Internationalist brigades because he's like, well, the anarchists are way cooler and
they're doing way better work. So he like runs off and like stops being an officer to go join the CNT. So he's a cool guy. He's worth a side note. But then there's a main character, Constance Georgian Markowitz. The Irish Socialists were specifically feminist and were one of the first organizations to offer equal memberships to women. And this is a paramilitary organization. So this fucking countess born in London to an Anglo Irish landlord father goes class trader.
Her father, as a landlord, tried to be like actually kind of cool. He gave out free food to his tenants when everyone was like hungry and shit, you know, he didn't give them the land, so he's not that cool but not that cool, yeah, but like bare minimum standards, I don't know whatever.
Presumably she saw this and was like, okay, take it a step further.
Basically that was like she was raised with a little bit of a like help the poor attitude, but then she was like, what about like really help the poor, right, she has a Polish last name because later she's going to marry a wealthy Polish guy from what's now Ukraine, Okay, And her first political issue had been suffrage, right, she's a suffragette. So she's like living these two lives. She's
part of high society. She's hanging out with the rich people in Dublin and doing like landscape paintings and going to like balls and things, right, and then she's also fighting with the for the Gaelic League, the let's help people speak Irish thing. She becomes Fred with maud Gone and the woman who started the Daughters of Ireland, and
soon she joins the Daughters of Ireland. And she would do shit like show up to these like revolutionary and nationalist meetings still wearing it like she's like straight from the ball. So she's still in her gown with a diamond tamara cool and instead of people being like, oh that's cool, they were like fuck you, you rich bitch. And she's like, oh my god, people don't kiss my ass. This is the best thing ever.
Yeah, So she loves well, that's cool, I mean showing up. I think their appropriators, but both are cool.
Yeah, No, I think she's cool as hell. Soon enough, she's starting her own paramilitary organizations. She starts a youth scouting group called the Soldiers of Ireland that's like modeled after the Boy Scouts, which was actually kind of paramilitary at at start, and they actually pretty immediately are like you're a girl, you can't be in part of this. And then she's like fuck you, and they're like, oh, okay, fine,
and so it's like it's not magically easy. There's like a bunch of times, even in the middle of the rising, there's like women snipers and like ryan around doing all this shit, and then they're like one of the guys is like, oh, I wish you had been in my area. It could have given the boys break from doing the dishes and cooking, okay, you know, and she's like, I just shot a cop. What are you talking about?
Follow us?
Yeah, totally. And so there's like always this like tension right with those like wildly progressive ideals that sometimes are slightly harder to happen. But the Countess she's coole as shit. She gets arrested at one point for telling thirty thousand people to tell England to fuck off, and she's like hoists banners with say things like dear Land, thou art not conquered yet. Okay, because fucking Irish know how to do some poetry.
Yeah, this woman sounds awesome.
No, she's fucking great. And she sees the socialist Irish Citizen Army and she's like, oh, that sounds great too. I'm gonna be a socialist too, so she joins, She sells all her jewelry and goes into debt in order to feed people and run a soup kitchen.
Money where her mouth is.
Yeah. Absolutely, She designs the ICA's uniform and composes its anthem, which is based on the tune of a Polish song, because yeah, fuck yeah internationalist nationalism. You know. In her writing she told women, quote, dress suitably in short skirts and strong boots, leave your jewels in the bank and buy a revolver. Okay, and like I have jewels to leave in the bank. But like the fucking cool sentiment, you know.
It's like exchanging for practical things, the things you need to go fight this.
Yeah, this thing that's coming, you know. Yeah, And she's right, it's coming. I mean she's gonna help make it come. Yeah, She'll make sure it comes. Yeah, she's in the rising gun in hand. There is arguments about whether or not she shoots a cop, but she certainly gets in trouble as if she did. Later, she becomes the first woman elected to the UK House of Commons in nineteen eighteen, but she literally gets elected to turn around to turn
it down as a boycott of English politics. So the first woman elected to the UK House of Commons was like, I just ran as a fuck you. I'm not going to be used.
I mean incredible, incredible sub Yeah.
Anyhow, after the Dublin lockout and the Irish Citizen's Army forms during this, Oh and there's also this whole other thing where the Irish Citizen's Army is protecting feminist organizations that are like getting harassed, so like they would attach themselves to like bodyguard different women who are like getting attacked. After the Doublin lockout, Jim Larkin, he's kind of seen as like the main socialist guy behind me. He's the leader of this union and he's like, yeah, I got
to get the fuck out of Ireland. And there's a lot of arguments about why he did. It's like a little bit avoiding persecution, a little bit burnout a little bit. Everyone fucking hates him a little bit. He's just heartbroken, you know. So he goes to the US and he starts a jazz club. After first he spends the years traveling around supporting, raising support friers, independence and socialism. But later he starts a jazz club. James Connolly takes over
the Union and also the citizens Army. The Citizen's Army that changes the world is fucking tiny, as one participant put it again, way of words, with these people, it was a subject of amusing jokes and quiet laughter, and its actions were almost entirely ignored until the bud flowered redly on the second morning of Easter Week.
Yeah whale with words.
Yeah, unlike the ads which will be at completely different volumes from each other and have too many things and interrupt your your space in order to aggravate you into buying products in a horrible way, which is why God gave you the forward fifteen seconds and your how much does coolers on media cost a month? Selfie shrugs, confused, Look, and your dollars can get you into coolers on media where you don't have to listen to it at all.
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Or listen to these ads.
And we're back a great So that's the Irish Citizen's Army. It is not the only paramilitary organization that is going to do the Easter Rising. There's also the Irish Volunteers that formed the same year in nineteen thirteen. Why did they form, you, ask in or Margaret, I am asking, Well, most people start the Easter Rising story here, but I wanted to start it more with all the wild shit.
England was considering giving Ireland this thing called home rule, where they would give Ireland the right to be sort of a state, like kind of like one third independence. Yeah, and this was a big deal, and the Centrists in Ireland were all about it, and the political apparatus of Ireland was all about it. And this is like the
stranglehold on Irish politics. All of these like crazy rebels are absolutely a minority, and so there's all these elaborate political maneuvers that this is not the right podcast to get into where I just don't have it in me to talk about like how the House of Lords blocked it twice. But then if it did a third time, then it would work and et cetera. Right, there was one chunk of people, though, who really hated the idea of home rule, the Northern Protestants. Obviously not all of them.
Several of them are amazing Iris nationalists who are going to fight and die for Irish revolution. But overall, as a like voting block and an organizing block, the Northern Protestants not excited. They're not excited because they're like, well, if England gets home rule, the Catholics will be in charge, and then they'll take revenge on us for how we've been exploiting them for one hundred and some years. They might not a phrase it that way, but that's where they're hard.
To probably not, but you know, we can cut through the bullshit here and be honest at this point.
Yeah, absolutely So. They formed their own reactionary paramilitary organization called the Ulster Volunteers. And what's wild about this They formed this to fight England if England tried to make them free. Oh, they were like willing, that is wild.
You're correct.
They were willing to go to war against England to force England to rule them completely. You can't set us free. You got me in charge of us. There are the fucking Proud Boys of Ireland.
Yeah, it's a little bit of what's the thing where you're fall in love with your captor.
Boot licking Stockholms.
Oh yeah, Stockholm syndrome.
Yeah, shout out to me for doing that because of a wonderful song.
Oh yeah, it's okay. I did the thing where when I don't know something, I laugh as if I got it, and then I was like, fuck it, I'm just gonna admit.
It's a really good move and it works cool unless you admit it.
Yeah. I should have known that because of the bachelor's degree I have in psychology.
But no. So these Proud Boys of Ireland, the real smarty pants, they're like, there's one problem. They have money and connections and guns because they are the empowered minority.
Right.
So, in response, a bunch of Irish nationalist groups, including the Gaelic League, the Ancient Order of Hiberians, Shinfeane, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, they formed the Irish Volunteers and they're ready to fight back the ulcer Volunteers of our Home Rule. Basically, they're not necessarily like we're going to fight England they're like,
we're going to fight this other militia, you know. I have read a lot of different accounts of how many people are involved in the Irish Volunteers, and they vary by times twenty of each other. Oh, it's a wide range. At the higher end, I've read that there's two hundred thousand of these folks. There's ten thousand of them by another account, which is still a fuck ton of people.
I believe that this two hundred thousand is the sort of initial cores that is willing to fight the Ulster Volunteers, whereas the ten thousand is the people who are willing to do the fighting that's going to come later. That's my best guess. Yeah, or people just make up numbers, that's the other guess with the Irish Volunteers are not
nearly so well armed, but they're hopping mad. And the formation of the Irish Volunteers at peels off a lot of members from the already small Citizen's Army because they're like, well, they're a bigger deal, you know, there's more of them, and they're you know, have plunkets, land to go train on and shit, and so there starts to being these tensions between these two groups, and they're both armed, so that could go badly spoiler It doesn't, but it could have.
Well.
Yeah, Meanwhile, there's the Women's Council, which is Kumin Naman and they it's kind of interesting. Everyone else everywhere else you'll read like Irish Citizen Army and Irish Volunteers and they're always written in English. Kumin Naman is never written as the Women's Council. It is Kumin Toman and this grew out of the Daughters of Ireland. That and it's an all women's paramilitary organization. It both isn't isn't the Women's Auxiliary to the volunteers. It's complicated. A bunch of
them are suffragists and trade unionists. Mostly they're white collar like kind of middle class, but a lot of them are working class as well. So things are looking real spicy in Ireland. What could happen? I mean, I already told you at the top what ends up happening, but exactly how spicy they'll get. And you get to hear all of these pretty fucking cool stories and you get to hear about them next.
Week, oh, next week. Yeah, Oh, we got through this one fast. Well, I guess maybe not that fast. This is so enjoyable.
Thanks.
I can't wait to hear about these stories next week.
I can't.
I have been taking notes. I'm not well. See if they carry me through. We've got a few days before we're recording the rest. But I'm like, I'll be going like, oh, yeah, this one.
I do a lot of things where I like, because of my brain and how I don't remember names and things, well, just like even for myself, I just assume that the audience might have a similar method of brain work as me.
So I do a lot of things where like I'll give you the countess his name, and then from forever on she's the countess, and like she's the countess, and like that help I'll use a lot of like this is why, you know, i'd be like these guys, the socialists blah blah blah, you know, because because it's complicated, and like I don't like when people just assume that everyone can remember all of this shit.
No, So yeah, it's very helpful for me. Also me literally the activity of jotting down notes helps me as well. Yeah, but I've never become a great note taker. I mean, I'll have someone's name and then draw bubbles around it and then have arrows going to this person in that and then in their arrow coming back around. It's not something anybody else could ever look at.
And there's all these hards next to James Connolly and the Countess.
Yeah yeah, there are hearts next that. Uh huh.
Yeah. Well, if people want to see the other stuff you take notes about, like their events, they can listen to even more news.
Yeah, they sure can. You can listen to even more news. You can watch our YouTube show some More News, which you do with Cody Johnston. And that's it. That's where you can see my stuff currently. Hell yeah, hell yeah.
Well, if you want to see more of my stuff, I actually wrote if you want to almost like spoilers for next week, this week's substack. I posted it today as a recording, not today as when you listen to it, so it's actually last week substack for you all out
there in future land. I actually ended up writing a little bit more about the personal side of Easter Rising and my interactions with my family around my uncle who fought in the rising and stuff like that, and so it's beautiful and that's and that's that's a public post. It's just more personal than my usual public posts, and so you can read that for free. It's probably called The Rising or something. I don't remember the names of the things.
Should I read it this weekend or should I wait till after we record? I mean most I talked about Yeah, yeah, But so you can read that. You can follow me on substack for free. You can also follow me on substack for paid if you want more personal stuff. And you can listen to other cool Zone media shows. I really like them. There's a bunch of new ones that are going to be coming out also. I want to hood. Politics with Prop is sort of rebranded this year, just
literally in terms of like logo and stuff. It's still all the same great content and it's one of my favorite go to current event shows and I highly recommend it. And that's what I have for plugs. Sophie's are great plugs.
I want to plug an article that my business partner, Robert Evans wrote for Rolling Stone that came out recently.
It's called the Cult of AI.
We also have a two parter and Behind the Bastards that kind of covers it. The article is really, really, really incredible and I'm very proud of him, so check that out.
Yeah, it's unstoppable, isn't it.
It's my guy and we'll talk to you next week.
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