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Deághlan
Ó Donghaile’s recent collations of
Sinn Féin’s rhetorical legerdemain regarding
the destruction or preservation of corporate property
and British troops remind me of Eastern European versions
during the Soviet bloc-era. Lately, looking for parallels
to the continued hypocrisy revealed by damn near every
champion of the downtrodden ever elected or appointed,
I’ve been rifling memoirs, travelogues, and histories
of the Warsaw Pact’s members for cautionary tales
from which we Irish might take heed. How, after all,
can idealism curdle into institutionalism? As we all
know, for decades, party apparatchiks could sustain
unswerving loyalty mouthed publicly by the nomenklatura
contrasted with utter skepticism voiced by many in
the privacy (where still one risked whispering truth
to power, given bugs and informers) of one’s
home. Of course, behind the Iron Curtain, proclamations
issued forth on supposed behalf of the People’s
Republic in the name of the working class rather than
their enemies’ capitalistic class, but the discordant
song remains the same.
Improverishment
of one’s setting, physically, mentally, spiritually:
drab concrete flats replacing colourful if peeling
facades with postwar brutalism: in the East, not any
architectural caprice so much as a deliberate lack
of imagination, reified. Watching Krystof Kieslowski’s
Decameron from the decade of Solidarinosc,
you witness his attempt to capture life in all its
details-adulteristic, philatelic, pietistic-in the
apartments of a dreary Polish city ignored by sunshine
and rarely graced with smiles. Now, any of us in Western
cities might also look out our windows and peer out
from similar balconies, but here the pathetic fallacy
beloved by poets and filmmakers fades: somehow our
local clouds do part, even if, as Nietzche mused in
the aftermath of a battle the next morning, ‘Nature
is cynical with her sunrises’.
Brian
Hall and Monica Porter, traveling in early 80’s
to Eastern Europe often muse upon their sheer inability
to get straight answers; I suppose U.N. inspectors
to Iraq today meet similar frustration. How can that
nation’s people survive with so little mental
energy, unable to respond, according to Greek doctors
working at a Baghdad clinic, who testified in this
week’s news as they attempted to lead an antiwar
march there to resounding lack of success, that citizens
there refused to betray any hint about political issues
after thirty years of state surveillance? As with
travelers to Romania related--even after the fall
of Ceau?escu--the fear of the Securitate persisted,
capable of changing for at least two generations the
very posture Romanians assumed when walking on the
streets, fearful always of who lurked around the corner,
in the doorway, listening.
Again,
the well-founded Irish fear of informers proves a
more universal symptom under the diseased but remarkably
clear of the dictator. Like Tolkien’s unlidded
Sauron, the gaze from the Eastern wastes strikes fear
in previously complacent Westerners. Two Towers indeed.
If a regime based on oppression endures, it starves
the peasants, jails the intellectuals, recruits the
jobless, and persecutes the wavering urban masses.
Having won loyalty of the party caste through initial
appeals to inclusion and unity, once powerful, its
inspiring doctrines fossilize into formulaic cant.
As Ó Donghaile shows with Sinn Féin,
the slogans around which many of us rallied have solidified
into dogma, recited automatically by the faithful
yet having soured among many agnostics their early
fervor. Having faked for so long the mask of sincerity
to survive politically and practically, Communists
in the Eastern bloc and republicans in their north-eastern
niche share cynical proclamations repeated each May
Day or at each Bodenstown, pompous ritual replacing
a recusant faith. Such an ‘interior dislocation’-in
the phrase of Polish émigré Eva Hoffman-bodes
well for no leader. Not to mention a restive populace,
who, tired as they may be, still can wait. Imprisoned
after the 1956 Hungarian revolt, Sandor Kaposci (former
Budapest police chief) recalls how inmates manufactured
radios no bigger than coins, to listen to the BBC.
Print, the net, even founded rumour: opposition engineers
its own momentum. In Budapest, in Prague, in Ballymurphy
and the Bogside.
Remember
King Claudius, spied upon by Prince Hamlet as the
usurping and murdering monarch kneels vainly trying
to expiate his guilt while refusing to relinquish
the fruits of his sin? Certainly Shakespeare, one
of the few permissible Western voices heard behind
the Iron Curtain, proved ever adaptable to recurrent
political issues. Speaking as he did to the complexity
behind both killers and their victims, his plays comforted
Ernie O’Malley as he fought the British, inspired
the Polish and Czechs as they resisted the Soviets,
and instruct us as we watch the Middle East from our
Irish windows. Claudius, so smooth in public, in private
cannot shield himself from his soul. Hamlet had predicted
‘the play’s the thing, wherein I’ll
catch the conscience of the king’. Now, after
that play within a play, the trap sprung with the
mouse trapped. Claudius, realising at last his schizophrenia
when a leader cannot square his actions with his conscience,
finally falters. ‘My words fly up, my thoughts
remain below. Words without thoughts never to heaven
go’. Yet he refuses to give up the ghost. Determined
as ever to root out the palace malcontent, he dispatches
more informers, more intimates, more spies, until
‘hoist with his own patard’.
Martin
McGuinness may not have had much of the Bard while
under the tutelage of the Brothers, but as a butcher’s
apprentice he has also seen his share of blood. Not
to mention ‘patards’. How lasting have been
the lessons learned in decades of activism, in public
proclamation and private contemplation? If Claudius
succumbs to his own treachery, and if the Soviets
and their collaborators where brought down after cruelly
transforming noble dreams into deadly reality, how
will Ireland’s republicans survive this persistent
‘cognitive dissonance’ between opportunist
politicos and cynical constituents? How much longer
can we endure to the assurances from the castle, the
parliament, the assembly that fail to align the dreams
which gave them their power with the reality upon
which that power rests? We can learn from these accounts
of the failures of the last half-century in Eastern
Europe. So, then, what can we replace to survive the
next half-century here in the West? Republicans face
many specters: injustice lurks even more than informers,
and knows no borders. As we sally forth from shires
and flats against the armored troops and wily diplomats
of Mordor, we need night vision. Peering into the
darkness ahead, we rely upon clarity and insight for
illumination. Truth may prove only a simple compass
against an enemy from the East armed with high-tech
destruction and low-tech treachery, but it’s
reliable for the North.
[Books
referred to: Brian Hall, ‘Stealing from a Dark
Place’ (1988); Eva Hoffman, ‘Exit Into History’
(1994); Sandor Kopesci, ‘In the Name of the Working
Class’ (1987); Monica Porter, ‘The Paper
Bridge’ (1982).]
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