On January 30th, 1939, the day that W.B. Yeats was buried at Roquebrune, Cap Martin, Adolf Hitler addressed the 855 members of the Reichstag in a speech which was broadcast to the entire German people and was reprinted almost in its entirety in this newspaper. The Irish Times headlines carried the usual ration of Hitlerian lies: "Only war-mongers think there will be a war." "Hitler expects many years of peace." "Germany will support Italy in a war." "NO CLAIMS ON FRANCE OR BRITAIN EXCEPT FOR COLONIES." The final headline in this sequence on the front news page of this newspaper 60 years ago last January was not, as it turned out, a lie: "Annihilation of whole Jewish race in Europe."
"Shameful spectacle"
Headline writers sometimes get it wrong, sometimes seek a snappy precis of a complex sentiment. So what did Hitler say to the Reichstag, the German people over the radio and to the world in general that January 60 years ago? "In connection with the Jewish question, I have this to say. It is a shameful spectacle to see how the whole democratic world is oozing sympathy for the poor, tormented Jewish people, but remains hard-hearted and obdurate when it comes to helping them, which is surely, in view of its attitude, an obvious duty. We are resolved to prevent the settlement in our country of a strange people capable of snatching for itself all the leading positions in the land. . .I think that the sooner this problem is solved the better, for Europe cannot settle down until the Jewish question is cleared up.
"During my struggle for power first, the Jewish race only laughed at my prophecies when I said that I would one day take over leadership of the state, and that I should then, among many other things, settle the Jewish problem. Their laughter was uproarious, but I think for some time now the laughter has been on the other side of their face. If the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe succeed in plunging the nations once more into war, then the result will be not the Bolshevisation of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe."
How people have since repeatedly said that the Holocaust was something that they had no means of knowing about must surely be one of the great narrative fictions of this century, for few politicians have kept their publicly proclaimed promises with the scrupulous zeal with which Hitler kept that one. But it has become one of the great narrative fictions of the 20th century, and a necessary one, for it exonerates through ignorance. And, having failed to confront the genocidal promises of such a creature, an exonerated community might well relieve its conscience in other forms of parallel virtue. In Ireland, the great totem which achieves this and which stands four-square in the republican tradition, yet simultaneously opposes fascism, is that great national life-belt known as the Connolly Column.
Irish volunteers
The recent news coverage given to the death of Peter O'Connor, one of the last members of the Connolly Column, the Irish volunteers who served with the International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War, suggests a considerable need for this moral life-belt. We can be sure that the death of one of the considerably greater number of Irish volunteers who served with Franco's forces would not have attracted such publicity, though for the most part they were merely doing what their bishops and their priests declared was their duty: fighting the evils of communism. We have written these largely simple country lads out of our greater narrative, meanwhile consoling ourselves with the myths of the doughty anti-fascist warriors of the Connolly Column.
The Connolly Column conforms with a need to see that Irishmen fought fascism, using Irish symbolisms and within the traditional Irish continuities traceable through 1916. That the Connolly Column served under the International Brigade, which was in itself a tool of the Comintern, and therefore of Stalin himself, is an inconvenient little truth which is not allowed to get in the way of the perception that here were Irishmen serving in the international arena, against fascism and for world justice.
Ignorance of evil It is only human to want to see white knights bearing our colours, gallantly taking on the evil foe. It is only human to claim ignorance of evil, as much of the world has since claimed about the Holocaust. And when we have failed to confront evil, either through lack of political will or simple military weakness, it is only human to conceal that failure by contrived ignorance or carefully manufactured falsehood.
Peter O'Connor was, no doubt, a brave and decent man. Was a neighbour who, at the bidding of his church, might have fought the evils of communism in Spain, and whose death will most certainly have passed without journalistic notice, also not a brave and decent man? And what of those Irishmen who, having read Hitler's threats in this newspaper 60 years ago last January, accordingly took up arms against Hitler, but bearing insignia which owed nothing whatever to 1916 or the traditions which gave rise to the Connolly Column? As these men now go to their rest, where do they stand in the mythologies of the Irish people and in the priorities of obituary journalism?