The Shamrock and the Swastika: Notes on Irish Republicanism and National Socialism

Statue of Seán Russell
Fairview Park, Dublin

Oh here’s to Adolph Hitler / Who made the Britons squeal

Sure before the fight is ended / They will dance an Irish reel

I.

Whilst my knowledge of Irish history and politcs is rather limited, I was surprised to hear that Sinn Féin had polled almost a quarter of all votes cast in the recent general election; more than any other party, gaining them 37 of the 160 available seats.

A left-leaning republican party, Sinn Féin emerged in its current form during the Troubles, when it was linked to the IRA. Since the Good Friday Agreement (1998), however, they've successfully rebranded themselves as a populist movement and in 2018 they completed their transformation by announcing Mary Lou McDonald as party leader, succeeding the far more sinister figure of Gerry Adams.

However, whilst Ms McDonald might not carry the same paramilitary baggage as Adams, it might be noted that the other two main political parties in Ireland - Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil - continue to regard Sinn Féin as beyond the pale and have so far refused to consider any form of coalition with the latter.

We might also recall that Ms McDonald has also attracted criticism herself in the past; for example, for allowing her campaign office to sell IRA souvenirs and memorabilia and for speaking at a rally in Dublin in 2003 to commemorate Seán Russell -  an IRA leader with links to Nazi Germany.           

II.

I understand that, sometimes, it's strategically necessary and politically expedient to enter into alliances with the Devil himself. And the ancient proverb about the enemy of one's enemy being one's friend provides philosophical justification for such pact-making. But, even so, it's a bit shocking to discover just how far along a very slippery and dangerous slope Seán Russell was prepared to tread ...

In the summer of 1940, Russell occupied a villa outside Berlin where he was accorded every privilege possible by his Nazi hosts, including a chauffer driven car and the services of an interpreter. He was also, more significantly, given access to the Brandenberg military camp in order to study the latest techniques in sabotage and guerilla warfare. His liaison at this time was the SS officer Edmund Veesenmayer, who would later become an architect of the Final Solution in Hungary and Croatia.

It was Russell's hope that the German high command would enlist the services of the IRA to strike at British forces in Northern Ireland and on the UK mainland and that, following the planned invasion of Britain, he and his comrades would be duly rewarded. Unfortunately for him, on his return to Ireland aboard a U-boat, he suffered the rupturing of a gastric ulcer and this proved fatal. 

None of this, of course, proves that Russell was sympathetic to or in agreement with Nazi doctrine. But it should surely give us all pause for thought about the way in which romantic nationalism and political idealism can easily collapse into the black hole of fascism. At best, Russell was outrageously naive - though whether that excuses him of his active collaboration with the Nazis (who were busy at that time occupying Western Europe) is debatable.

It might also be noted that Russell wasn't the only one within the IRA supporting the Third Reich. In July of 1940 the leadership issued a joint statement declaring that German forces would be welcomed as friends and liberators should they land in Ireland. The public was assured that the Nazis had no interest in occupying the country or further frustrating the dream of independence, but merely wished to see Ireland play an active role in the new Europe.  

Worse still was the fact that the IRA's main publication - War News - began to adopt openly anti-Semitic language and expressed their satisfaction at what was happening on the Continent, as the cleansing fires of the Wehrmacht drove the Jews from Europe. Shamefully, the leaders of Sinn Féin at this time also indulged in such rhetoric, repeatedly attacking the alleged Jewish influence in Ireland.

One dreads to imagine what would have happened to Ireland's tiny Jewish community (numbering only a few thousand) had the Nazis chosen to invade the Emerald Isle and paint it black. As the Irish historian Brian Hanley notes:

"Across Europe a variety of ethnic and political groups collaborated with the Nazis in order to further their own agendas. Inevitably this meant active involvement in Nazi persecution of Jews and political opponents. It also meant becoming a part of the Nazi governmental machine. Does anyone seriously believe that the IRA would have avoided playing this role?"   

Ultimately, I don't like nationalisms of any variety: Irish, German, Scottish, Catalan ... even English. As Nietzsche pointed out, subscribing to such a politics in its vulgar modern form, is, for free spirits, profoundly mistaken; a deliberate deadening of our higher natures.    

See: Brian Hanley, "'Oh here's to Adolph Hitler" ... The IRA and the Nazis', History Ireland, Vol. 13, Issue 3 (May/June 2005): click here to read online.

Jews of the Wrong Sort: Notes on D. H. Lawrence and Anti-Semitism

Honor Blackman as Mrs Fawcett in The Virgin and the Gypsy 
dir. Christopher Miles (1970)

An angry email arrives in my inbox (not for the first time):

"Dear Stephen Alexander,

I was extremely disappointed to find the expression 'Jews of the wrong sort' appearing in one of your recent posts (Orophobia, 16 Nov 2017), without any word of commentary or any condemnation of this racist phrase borrowed from D. H. Lawrence, a well-known antisemite. This kind of indiscretion brings shame on you and what is, in many respects, an excellent blog."*    

There are several things I'd like to say in response to this ...

Firstly, like Sylvia Plath, I'm someone who writes and identifies as a bit of a Jew, as I make clear in an early post where I reveal that key influences on my thinking include Jacques Derrida, Malcolm McLaren, and Larry David: click here. I'm certain that, for some, these three figures would also represent Jews of the wrong sort, i.e. provocateurs who gaily deconstruct the metaphysical illusions and sentimental ideals by which the majority choose to live.

Secondly, Lawrence - if it is in fact Lawrence speaking in The Captain's Doll and not an anonymous narrator offering either an indirect rendering of the thoughts of the protagonist or their own (ironic) commentary - is, like me, clearly in favour of sardonic individuals who seek to curb the enthusiasm of Bergheil romantics, such as Hannele, and encourage the difficult descent into the what Heidegger terms the nearness of the nearest (even if this risks a fall into gross materialism).

Thus Lawrence's attitude with reference to this question, as to many others concerning race, is ultimately complex and ambiguous (sometimes outrageously inconsistent) and The Captain's Doll is a text that remains highly resistant to any final interpretation.

Personally, I would argue that, for Lawrence, Jews of the wrong sort are people very much of the right sort. That is to say, very much his sort (just as they are my sort). And this is so because his status as an outsider obliged him to identify with groups and individuals whom society often holds in contempt; not just Jews, but also Gypsies, for example.

Thus, in The Virgin and the Gipsy (1930), it's clear where Lawrence's sympathies lie; with a 36-year-old Jewish woman, Mrs Fawcett, who has abandoned her husband and two young children in order to be with a much younger man; and a good-looking traveller, called Joe Boswell, who takes a shine to the 19-year-old daughter of an Anglican vicar.

It's the narrow domesticity and mean-spirited authority of the familial regime that imposes moral restrictions on life in the name of propriety, which Lawrence despises and mercilessly lampoons throughout the novel. He instinctively sides with all those who are, due to their marginalization and difference, implicitly opposed to such. This makes him a far more radical figure than many of his critics wish to concede ...            

See:

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Captain's Doll', in The Fox, The Captain's Doll, The Ladybird, ed. Dieter Mehl, (Cambridge University Press, 2002).

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Virgin and the Gipsy', in The Virgin and the Gipsy and Other Stories, ed. Michael Herbert, Bethan Jones, and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 2006).

Ronald Granofsky, '"Jews of the Wrong Sort": D. H. Lawrence and Race', Journal of Modern Literature (Indiana University Press), Vol. 23, No. 2 (Winter, 1999-2000), pp. 209-23. 

Judith Ruderman, Race and Identity in D. H. Lawrence: Indians, Gypsies, and Jews (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
 
*Note: The author kindly gave me permission to quote from her email, but asked that she remain anonymous.

Jüdische Insekten or Himmler's Lice

Antisemitic poster from 1942 used in German occupied Poland to warn against the 

supposed connection between Jews, lice and typhus; for the Nazis, Jews infected 

with the disease were metaphysically indistinguishable from its insect carriers.  

To paraphrase Shakespeare, if I may: Some are born insects, some wish to become-insect, and some have insecthood thrust upon 'em. 

Take the Jews, for example, in Hitler's Germany. When not being described as a cancer to be cut out of the body politic, or portrayed as a plague of sewer rats, they were obscenely characterised as parasitic lice or giant cockroaches in need of extermination. For racism loves to dehumanise and to operate in terms of pest control and personal hygiene.

In a speech to his fellow officers in April 1943, SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler openly declared:

"Antisemitism is exactly the same as delousing. Getting rid of lice is not a question of ideology. It is a matter of cleanliness. In just the same way, antisemitism, for us, has not been a question of ideology, but a matter of cleanliness ..."

To be judenfrei was, in Himmler's mind, to be deloused - i.e. free of blood-sucking, disease-carrying insects that infest individuals and threaten to spread throughout the entire population; creatures that cause feelings of revulsion and which deserve to be eradicated. 

Of course, Jews are not actually insects; they're human beings. And there are moral and legal prohibitions on the premeditated killing of human beings; we even have a special term for it - murder. And it's difficult to persuade people to commit murder. Thus the Nazis had a problem ...

The solution, as the quotation from Himmler demonstrates, involves pushing a metaphor - the Jews are inhuman vermin; the Jews are disgusting insects - beyond its own limit, transforming it into a pseudo-scientific fact and a deadly piece of doxa. Genocide ends with a pile of corpses, but it always begins with an abuse of language that allows us to kill in good conscience. As Hugh Raffles writes:

"There is no doubt that this happened in the Holocaust. ... Explaining it is at the heart of understanding the fate of the Jews, who, after all, would be killed like insects - like lice, in fact. Literally like lice. Like Himmler's lice. With the same routinized indifference and, in vast numbers, with the same techologies."

Raffles also suggests - and one suspects this might very well be the case - that Himmler in his speech was "indulging in an intimate irony with his men"; making a little joke at the expense of those murdered in the gas chambers:

"As is well known, prisoners at Auschwitz were treated to an elaborate charade. Those selected for death were directed to 'delousing facilities' equipped with false-headed showers. They were moved through changing rooms, allocated soap and towels. They were told they would be rewarded for disinfection with hot soup. ... The prisoners massed uncertainly in the shower room. Overhead, unseen, the disinfectors waited in their gas masks for the warmth of the naked bodies to bring the ambient temperature to the optimal 78 degrees Fahrenheit. They then poured crystals from the cans of Zyklon B - a hydrogen cyanide insecticide developed for delousing buildings and clothes - through the ceiling hatches. Finally, the bodies, contorted by the pain caused by the warning agent ... were removed to the crematoria.
      In this grotesque pantomime, the victims ... move from objects of care to objects of annihilation. To diseased humans, delousing promises remediation, a return to community, a return to life; to lice, it offers only extermination. Too late, the prisoners discover they are merely lice."

One of the reasons that the language of National Socialism continues to fascinate (and to appal) is because of the way it conflates and confuses metaphor, euphemism and a brutal literalism into a witches' brew that is vague and void of meaning on the one hand, whilst paradoxically transparent and full of deadly intent on the other.    


Afterword

There are, thankfully, far happier and more positive associations between Jews and insects. In fact, several species of the latter have been named after celebrated Jewish figures; there is, for example, the Karl Marx wasp and the Sigmund Freud beetle - not to mention the Harry Houdini moth, the Lou Reed spider, and the Carole King stonefly.   

See: Hugh Raffles, Insectopedia, (Vintage Books, 2010); particularly the chapter entitled 'Jews', pp. 141-61, from where all of the lines quoted - including those from Heinrich Himmler - were taken. 

Those interested in knowing more about the insects (and other organisms) named after famous Jewish figures, should click here.  

In Praise of the Pig

Whilst the dietary injunction against eating pork first arose in primitive Judea, it is within the Islamic world where the pig itself has become truly taboo; i.e. both hated and feared. This horror of all things pig is often taken to ridiculous extremes in an attempt to eradicate all thought of an animal that is to the Muslim mind an abomination. 

This is, like all taboos, absurd and something of a shame. For pigs are extremely versatile and loveable creatures; intelligent, social, and, when living in natural conditions, fastidiously clean. They are also, of course, closely related to us. Indeed, according to the American biologist Eugene MacCarthy, who specializes in hybrid evolution, humanity is the result of interspecies breeding between chimpanzees and pigs. 

This is a sensational claim, obviously, which has received a good deal of criticism and scorn from the scientific community, but the fact remains that we do share a great deal of DNA with our porcine cousins and this has allowed for successful organ transplant between pigs and people.

Perhaps it is this closeness which lies at the heart of the religious belief shared by many millions that the pig is diabolical and that - in the words of Christopher Hitchens - heaven hates ham. In a provocative passage, Hitchens counters the modern 'secular' explanation of the original Jewish prohibition to do with health and safety: 

"According to many ancient authorities, the attitude of early Semites to swine was one of reverence as much as disgust. The eating of pig flesh was considered as something special, even privileged and ritualistic. The simultaneous attraction and repulsion derived from an anthropomorphic root: the look of the pig, and the taste of the pig, and the dying yells of the pig, and the evident intelligence of the pig, were too uncomfortably reminiscent of the human. Porcophobia - and porcophilia - thus probably originate in a nighttime of human sacrifice and even cannibalism at which the 'holy' texts often do more than hint. Nothing optional [like bacon sandwiches or sodomy] is ever made punishable unless those who do the prohibiting (and exact the fierce punishments) have a repressed desire to participate."

- Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great, (Atlantic Books, 2008), p. 40.

In sum, the pig is a noble beast, dear to the hearts and palates of Europeans, and we should ignore demands by Muslim zealots to remove all traces of the pig from our culture. We should also, however, seriously reconsider our own treatment of the pig and end the disgusting cruelty of factory farming. They deserve better than to be vilified by those who allow religious superstition to distort their relationship to the animal world and they deserve more than being confined, separated from their young, and forced to live in their own waste. 

How Murder of the Other Ends in Self-Destruction

Whilst an adversary is often accorded respect and even admiration, an enemy is always despised and frequently demonized. Because an enemy, unlike an opponent, is not merely set against us, but seen as fundamentally alien and other - culturally, morally, and even physically; they look repulsive and they smell bad. 

This long and shameful tradition of depicting our enemies as monstrous and inhuman - enemies who can never be defeated and assimilated into our world, only exterminated like vermin - is nowhere better illustrated than in Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda which displays an irrational (at times insane) level of racial hatred. What we might term the metaphysics of enmity clearly acted as the murderous dynamic of National Socialism, as well as the indispensable precondition that made genocide not only inevitable but, for many Germans, acceptable. 

Of course this hatred might be contextualized within the religious, cultural and social history of Germany. But it's never fully explained by placing it within such a context. For there is something else - something almost incomprehensible - about Nazi anti-Semitism for those who do not share this obsessive mania and the Final Solution results from a mystical as well as an ideological and biological fantasy to do with health, strength, and purity.

Ironically, of course, the idea of a master race is inconceivable without the Jews being assigned their role as the eternal Other whom it is necessary to annihilate, in order that the Aryan superman might live. But there is a further fatal irony all the time unfolding here: for this murderous fantasy is as suicidal as it is homicidal and war becomes not simply a means of eliminating a mortal enemy, but of regenerating one’s own blood via self-sacrifice. Ultimately, Hitler is as happy to shed the blood of those he promised to protect, as those he desired to exterminate. Indeed, it might even be argued that the objective of the Nazi Regime was not really the demonization and destruction of the Jews, but the idealization and subsequent sacrifice of the German people themselves.

In a brilliantly insightful passage, Michel Foucault writes:

      "The destruction of other races was one aspect of the project, the other being to expose its own race to the absolute and universal threat of death. Risking one’s life, being exposed to total destruction, was one of the principles inscribed in the basic duties of the obedient Nazi, and it was one of the essential objectives of Nazism’s policies. It had to reach the point at which the entire population was exposed to death. Exposing the entire population to universal death was the only way it could truly constitute itself as superior race and bring about its definitive regeneration once other races had been either exterminated or enslaved forever.

      We have, then, in Nazi society something that is really quite extraordinary: this is a society which has generalized bio-power in an absolute sense, but which has also generalized the sovereign right to kill. The two mechanisms … coincide exactly. We can therefore say this: the Nazi state makes the field of the life it manages, protects, guarantees, and cultivates in biological terms absolutely coextensive with the sovereign right to kill anyone, meaning not only other people, but also its own people.”

- Society Must Be Defended, trans. David Macey (Penguin Books, 2004), pp. 259-60.

And this is why the Third Reich ends not only with the Final Solution, but also the infamous Nero Decree [Nerobefehl] in which Hitler calls for the total destruction of German infrastructure in the face of impending defeat and occupation, regardless of the consequences to the population.