Read Fighting on all Fronts Online
Authors: Donny Gluckstein
O’Brien and the ITGWU aptly exploited this blind spot of the CP and the left Labourite union leaders, attacking the fact that the British Communist MP Willie Gallagher, for example, was willing to “shout and applaud for Churchill”.
48
By laying claim to his own conservative version of Ireland’s anti-colonial legacy, O’Brien gained a cover to cement his alliance with Fianna Fail. Soon after ITGWU-sponsored TDs split from the Labour Party, a split also took place in the trade union movement. A group of Irish-based unions, principally around the ITGWU, broke away from the Irish Trade Union Congress ostensibly over participation in an international event deemed a breach of Irish neutrality. Fianna Fail’s strategy of dividing the labour movement on nationalist lines had borne fruit. They responded to the formation of the Council of Irish Unions—which was formed to oppose British imperialism, British-based unions and communist influence—with enthusiasm. An internal circular within the government stated that “it will be our policy to build up the Council of Irish Unions and to treat it as the most representative organ of Irish union opinion”.
49
The war years saw a considerable degree of class struggle on both sides of the Irish border, which led to a short spurt of growth in left wing parties organising in these respective areas. This level of class struggle is often hidden in conventional accounts of the era, which treats nations as one in their desire to line up on one or other side of geopolitical divides.
However, class struggle in itself does not always lead to political clarity on the left. The tragedy of the period is that a small left was clearer than nationalist and Unionist forces in seeing the danger of Hitlerite fascism, but it decided to take an uncritical stance about Britain’s motive in fighting that war. In particular, the left ignored Britain’s attempt to shore up its empire against its German rival and so played down the genuine grievances that the mass of people in Ireland—or India—had with colonialism.
This blind spot was used by Fianna Fail and the union allies to forge a hegemonic alliance, which tied the labour movement to the 26 county state for decades afterwards
1
F S L Lyons,
Ireland Since the Famine
(Fontana, London, 1973), p558.
2
M Hastings,
All Hell Let Loose
(Harper, New York, 2011), p67.
3
R Fisk,
In Time of War
(Andre Deutsch, London, 1983), p470.
4
Irish Independent
, 27 December 2013.
5
B Tonra,
Global Citizen and European Republic: Irish Foreign Policy in Transition
(Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2012), p154.
6
Red C Poll, 11 September 2013,
www.pana.ie/download/Pana-Neutrality-Poll-September-2013-Pie-Charts.pdf
7
J Connolly, “Ireland and the War”,
Irish Worker
, 17 October 2014,
www.marxists.org/archive/connolly/1914/10/irewar.htm
8
Dail Debates, vol 35, col 478, 12 July 1928.
9
J Bowman,
De Valera and the Ulster Question
(Clarendon, Oxford, 1982), p209.
10
Sunday Times
, 21 March 2010.
11
Fisk, 1983, p80.
12
Basil Brooke Diary, 24 May 1941, PRONI D/3004/D/32.
13
Fisk, 1983, p80.
14
“Neutrality, Censorship and democracy”, State Papers Office, S11586A Aiken to Government.
15
JA Murphy,
Ireland in the Twentieth Century
(Gill and Macmillan, Dublin, 1975), p103.
16
Bowman, 1982, p208.
17
T Brown,
Ireland: A Cultural and Social History 1922-85
(Fontana, London, 1985), pp215-216.
18
P Ollerenshaw,
Northern Ireland in the Second World War
(Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2013), p145.
19
Fisk, 1983, p95.
20
Minutes of Fianna Fail Party parliamentary party meeting, 19 October 1944.
21
C Nic Daibhead,
Sean McBride: A Republican Life
(Liverpool University Press, Liverpool, 2011), p126.
22
P Ollerenshaw, 2013, p41.
23
J Boyer Bell,
The Secret Army: The IRA 1916-1979
(The Academy Press, Dublin, 1979), p177.
24
P Ollerenshaw, 2013, pp45-46.
25
B Hanley, “‘Oh, Here’s to Adolf Hitler’: The IRA and the Nazis”,
History Ireland
, no 3, May/June 2005.
26
A Hoar,
In Green and Red: The Lives of Frank Ryan
(Brandon, Dingle, 2004), p243.
27
Hanley, 2005.
28
Hanley, 2005.
29
ITGWU,
Fifty Years of Liberty Hall
(ITGWU, Dublin, 1959), p89.
30
Congress of Irish Unions,
Annual Report and Conference Proceedings
(1945), p54.
31
Cork Echo
, 15 May 1941.
32
McEntee to Secretary, Department of Industry and Commerce, 17 March 1940, McEntee Papers, P67/229, University College Dublin archives.
33
ITGWU,
Conference Proceedings
(1940), p21.
34
The Torch
, 2 September 1939.
35
Labour Party,
Conference Proceedings
(1941), p109.
36
E O’Connor,
A Labour History of Ireland 1824-1960
(Gill and Macmillan, Dublin, 1992), p146.
37
Memo, Department of Industry and Commerce, 28 April 1941, SPO file S11750, National Archives Dublin.
38
O’Connor, 1992, p145.
39
O’Connor, 1992, p144.
40
Labour Party,
Annual Reports
(1942 and 1943).
41
M Milotte,
Communism in Modern Ireland
(Gill and Macmillan, Dublin, 1984), p197.
42
McEntee speech, 4 June 1943, McEntee Papers P 67/364.
43
B Black, “A Triumph of Voluntarism? Industrial Relations and Strikes in Northern Ireland during World War Two”,
Labour History Review
, vol 70, (April 2005), pp1-19.
44
Milotte, 1984, p204.
45
Milotte, 1984, p205.
46
Milotte, 1984, pp193-194.
47
Labour Party,
Annual Report
(1941), pp106-107.
48
ITUC,
Annual Report and Conference Proceedings
(1945), p157.
49
Minister for Industry and Commerce Instructions to all Departments, 23 May 1945, Department of Labour Files, W63, National Archives.
Janey Stone
Never say there’s only death for you.
Though leaden skies may be concealing days of blue—
Because the hour we have hungered for is near;
Beneath our tread the earth shall tremble: We are here!
1
—Hersh Glik, song inspired by Warsaw Ghetto uprising
Hitler’s “Final Solution” meant genocide for Europe’s Jewish population: 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust, 3 million of them in Poland. Only 5 percent of the Jewish population of Poland survived. Anti-Semitism could take no more dreadful form.
Following the Hitler-Stalin Pact in August 1939, Germany invaded Poland. Russia invaded two weeks later and it was all over by 27 September. Hitler gained control of 48 percent of the country which was then divided into two parts. The Nazis annexed outright the western part of Poland, which became a part of “greater Germany”, and controlled the remainder of the occupied area through a regime called the General Government. Later a third region was added when Germany occupied the area previously occupied by Russia.
Immediately following the invasion Jews were subject to attacks and atrocities but following the Wannsee Conference in January 1942 the Nazis constructed the extermination camps at Auschwitz and Treblinka. From July 1942 Operation Reinhardt initiated the systematic annihilation of the Jewish population.
But we must not see the Jews simply as victims. There is a widespread misconception that the Jews went passively to the gas chambers.
2
Consider the following from Henri Michel, a historian of the Resistance in Europe:
Hundreds of thousands of Jews allowed themselves to be torn unprotestingly from their work and their homes, stripped of their possessions and
taken they knew not where; finally they climbed docilely and apparently without fear into the trucks which took them to the door of the simulated “bath-houses”; when to their horror, they discovered the fearful truth that they were in a gas chamber, it was too late either to escape or to sell their lives dear.
3
This chapter will prove that chilling and inhuman image wrong and outline the widespread resistance that did occur. It focuses on Poland as the epicentre of the Holocaust.
Yiddish speaking Jewish communities lived in Eastern Europe for hundreds of years among other populations which had not yet fully established modern nation states, creating a web of tensions and conflicts. Denied the legal right to own agricultural land until the 19th century, Jews concentrated in towns where exclusion from many economic fields led to a restricted range of occupations. The resulting competition laid the basis for hostility among ordinary people. At the top end of the class structure meanwhile, Jews historically played particularly important roles in finance and trade and owned between 60 and 90 percent of Poland’s banks by the end of the 19th century.
With the urbanisation of the 19th and 20th centuries the primarily religious Jewish communities of the Middle Ages were secularised and exposed to the phenomena associated with the rise of capitalism—the mass market and the rise of the industrial proletariat. They organised into trade unions very early compared to other workers in the region, beginning in the 1890s in the Pale of Settlement.
4
In 1938 there were 98,000 members of Jewish trade unions in Poland. In the inter-war period half the workforce in Poland was made up of self-employed craftsmen such as tailors and watchmakers. Jewish industrialists on the other hand were reluctant to employ Jewish labour and put their class interests first even amid the increasing anti-Semitism and high unemployment of the late 1930s.
5
Thus Jews in Eastern Europe were divided by class but the divisions were distorted by historical restrictions and repression. The relatively large proportion of the Jewish bourgeoisie in finance and trade appeared to the popular imagination as a global conspiracy. The relatively strong socialist and trade union ideas among the working class provided grist to anti-communist right wing nationalists.
In the 1920s there were approximately 2.8 million Jews in Poland, 10.5 percent of the population. There were three main political currents. On the right was Agudas Yisrael, the party of traditional orthodoxy, supported by about one third of the community.
6
They took the conventional position of loyalty to any regime that did not interfere with their religious activities. Although there were Jews in the Communist Party and the Polish Socialist Party, the main left wing Jewish party was the Jewish Labour Bund, numerically smaller than the Zionists until the mid-1930s, but dominant among the Jewish working class.
7
The third political current, Zionism, was strong enough to send representatives to parliament in Latvia, Lithuania and Poland. But its local base must be seen in the international context.
The Zionists have historically had a peculiar relationship with the imperialist powers. In the period before the Second World War most countries fell into one of two camps. On the one side were the major imperialist powers (the US, Britain and the Soviet Union) together with smaller imperialists and colonial settler states (Australia and South Africa). On the other side were countries which had been occupied as colonies in which anti-imperialist nationalist struggles occurred. Zionism was a political project without a national base but with nationalist aspirations. However, unlike the colonial based nationalist movements, and despite the position of Jews as an oppressed group in society, at no point did the Zionists side with the anti-imperialist camp. From the very beginning their strategic orientation was geared to winning support for their project of establishing a state from the major imperialist powers.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries they targeted the German Kaiser, the Russian Tsar, the Sultan of Turkey and the Austrian Habsburgs, despite their professed and active anti-Semitism. During the First World War most Zionists were pro-German
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but established a major alliance with British imperialism in the form of the Balfour Declaration in 1917. Britain’s nominal support for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine was purely propaganda; they had no power to act. But the Zionists were encouraged in their orientation to imperialist powers. Notoriously, Zionists offered themselves to the British as imperialist agents in the Middle East where they sought to form “an outpost of civilisation as opposed to barbarism”.
9
The Zionists soon found that support was only offered insofar as it suited the interests of imperialism. The period after Hitler came to power in 1933 was marked by increasingly virulent attacks on Jews. In 1938 US President Franklin Roosevelt initiated a conference at Evian-les-Bains,
France, supposedly to help Jewish refugees. At that time about 450,000 Jews had left Germany out of a total of 950,000. But the conference did nothing. The US delegates offered no place to settle Jews fleeing Hitler and passed the buck to the South American states. One by one the South Americans said no. The Australian representative announced: “as we have no real racial problem, we are not desirous of importing one”.
10
Genocide against Aborigines and the “White Australia” immigration policies went unremarked.