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Eamon
McCann's cloacal obscenities are an insult to the
reader, and to the subject, while his rhetoric ("lying
liar") is considerably less brilliant than he
obviously thinks it is.
So
is his politics. His position is not Connolly (though
he gives no reason for abandoning Connolly) but pure
O'Casey, if not Walker. The universal abstraction
"Nationalism" ("an ideology")
is the enemy.
Of
course leaders of national struggles may be or become
opportunistic. So may leaders of class struggles.
It is to a great extent a measure of the pressures
of defeat.
But
the seeds of the present debacle are in the internationalised
bourgeois (and, in the Irish context, in effect two-nation)
"conflict resolution" approach to which
McCann has been such a significant contributor over
the decades. Its uncritically accepted theatre is
entirely six county, territorially part of the British
state due to a long drawn-out process of imperialism,
deceit, sectarianism, and bestial violence. McCann
berates "nationalism" -- but not in its
armed British and loyalist sectarian forms. The successful
domination of both of these has to be accepted as
normalcy. Then a six county nationalist working class
must ask permission of a loyalist working class to
come aboard to pursue "bread-and-butter"
politics in the context of a secure United Kingdom.
The
Good Friday agreement is logically and historically
the result of McCann's kind of politics.
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