I was 18 years old and in the first year of a prison sentence for being in the IRA and trying to 'free' Ireland. I had read Connolly and called myself a 'socialist-republican'. Years earlier, I had concluded that if there was a god we should shoot the bastard - which didn't make me popular in a jail full of patriotic godists! My mother sent me the collected poetry of Percy Shelley and only darkness brought me to close that book!
What is Freedom? Ye can tell
That which slavery is too well...
'Tis to labour for such pay
As just keeps life from day-to-day...
'Tis to let the ghost of gold
Take from toil a thousand-fold...
Paper coin, that forgery
Of the title-deeds which we...
Then it is to feel revenge,
Fiercely thirsting to exchange
Blood for blood and wrong for wrong.
DO NOT THUS WHEN YE ARE STRONG!
Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number;
Throw your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep hath fallen on you,
- we are many, they are few!
I immediately realised that the erstwhile socialist, James Connolly, has sold his principles for a Sam-Browne belt and a niche on the pantheon of vacant patriots. Some years later I read the old SPGB pamphlet 'Socialism' and an early version of Questions of the Day and realised that that fellow Marx must have read Shelley, too!
"Fenian Mc Prod"
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