Diarmuid Breatnach

(Reading time: 3 mins.)

I received an on-line invitation to support a protest about the exclusion of Palestinian Studies from the California State high school curriculum on Middle Eastern studies. Aside from the obvious importance and relevance of Palestinian studies in any Middle Eastern syllabus, there is the glaring need for such options in a country that is the biggest supporter of the state of Israel, with which the Palestinians are in conflict. But then it is precisely its relevance that ensures its opposition, nor is it only with regard to Palestine that such exclusion occurs.

“After months of controversy, California has released the final version of a model statewide ethnic studies curriculum for use in high schools. The original draft curriculum rightfully included the histories and narratives of Arab Americans, including Palestinians, written by scholars in the field.

“Due to pressure from anti-Palestinian organizations, the Arab American lesson no longer includes content developed by Arab American ethnic studies educators, and has NO information about Palestine. Palestinian history and narratives should be central to any ethnic studies curriculum, and this attempted erasure is appalling. …..

“We’re not the only ones raising the alarm. All original curriculum drafters have asked for their names to be removed as authors because the revised curriculum no longer represents their work and vision. It no longer highlights contributions and struggles against structural racism and social, political, and economic marginalization. It has become an “All Lives Matter” curriculum.“

AND SO TO IRISH STUDIES ….

Some decades ago in London I was involved with a number of others in organising a course called Irish Aspects at Goldsmiths College¹. The course was composed of a series of weekly 2-hour evening meetings at the site, which was in the New Cross area of SE London. The sessions would cover, as its title indicated, different aspects related to Ireland, such as literature, politics, history ….

The course did fairly well but when it came to the following year, the College administration indicated they were considering closing it down. The course attendance, despite minimal advertising, was fair and the expense to the College, apart from the heating and lighting in the room we were using, was a mere two hours per week at tutor rate, with which we paid the speakers we brought in.

In discussion with the Director, he admitted that “The case for Irish studies is unanswerable”, by which I clarified that he meant “cannot be opposed”. Nevertheless, they did close down the course and would not even offer us a room in which to meet weekly without any paid tutor hours.

A few years later I applied to the Irish Studies course at University of North London² and got in a year later. In fact, only half the BA course was in Irish studies and one had to choose another section of the Humanities prospectus to make up the whole. Over the years of studying and engaging with the subject of Irish Studies, I learned that in the whole of Britain there was not one whole degree course available in that subject and the only thing close was Celtic Studies, at the University of Aberyswyth, in west Wales³. So a BA course based on the history, culture, literature, art and language of a neighbouring country, with which the British State had been politically and militarily engaged for 800 years, from which huge migration to Britain had taken place for centuries, was not thought appropriate to make available in any one of over 130 universities in Britain⁴.

It was of course the same as with the refusal of the Palestinian course in the state of California, USA – its very relevance and importance was the reason why it could not be provided.

It is well documented by many writers and historians that the colonialists and imperialists do not wish the indigenous of the colonised lands to have a good appreciation of their own culture and history and certainly Ireland under British rule provides an abundance of examples of that negation.

But the lack of such courses in Britain did not only deprive Irish migrants and their children of the opportunity of such study, it also deprived the host community, along with other migrant communities. And that too has its rationale.

In a long struggle with a colonised people it would be disastrous for the ruling class if the host of the ruling class to suppress “the natives”. And the potential with regard to Ireland was serious, since the Irish migrant and diaspora community in Britain was huge and some of it well integrated into sections of British society – particularly the working class and its trade union and political expressions.

In addition, the Irish had much to teach the host population about the real nature of the British ruling class, since they had seen and felt it with fangs and claws bared, a sight of which the workers in Britain in more recent times caught only an occasional glimpse⁵.

The people who manage the imperialist and colonialist systems occasionally do stupid things but they are not stupid. They control education as an important ideological process and product. Battles can be fought over course funding and available subjects and these are justified. Some will be won for the ruling class needs its moderates, liberals and revisionists to moderate the content and try to control the discourse and therefore the conclusions. Ultimately however workers and communities from oppressed nations and groups need to set up their own courses and rely on their own resources.

End.

FOOTNOTES

1 Now part of the University of London.

2 Now part of London Metropolitan University.

3 I note that Liverpool University now offers a BA (Hons) course in Irish Studies. However, even there, students in Year One are required to take other 30 credits of subjects outside that curriculum.

4 Ireland was invaded by colonisers from Britain in 1169 and the English occupation is counted from that date; currently Britain holds six counties in the north-east of Ireland as a direct colony. The Irish compose by far the largest ethnic group historically migrating to Britain and for most of its history, past and recent, have been the largest ethnic minority community present.

5 It can hardly be pure coincidence that the Irish in Britain supplied the working class there, as well as with many of its activists and prominent figures, two leaders of its first mass movement (the Chartists), its first classic novel (The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists) and its battle hymn (The Red Flag).

(Reading time: 5 mins)

Diarmuid Breatnach

We celebrate International Women’s Day on March 8^th but are we aware that on that day in 1917, women started the Russian revolution?  It was one of the many contributions of women the world over to the struggles of humanity.

BACKGROUND

          There were many causes of discontent with the ruling regime in Russia in 1917: it was monarchic, autocratic, repressive, incompetent. It had put the country into a war with Germany and Austria, which was in its third year. People were very hungry with food shortages for a number of reasons including the trains being used to transport war materials and soldiers rather than to bring food into the city. Nationalities within Russia and Greater Russia were denied self-determination.

Peasants were serfs to the aristocracy, who could beat, imprison and even hang them. Officers, always from the aristocracy or — to a lesser degree — from the professional classes regularly struck ordinary soldiers or had them whipped. The officers were also for the most part grossly incompetent.

The Christian Church (Russian Orthodox) was allied to the regime and corrupt. Free speech was suppressed and the secret police could be anywhere; the regular police were brutal and could not be challenged by ordinary people. Wages were often barely enough to live on.

START OF THE REVOLUTION

          Petrograd was the Imperial capital city of Russia (the name had been changed in 1914 from St. Petersburg, which sounded too German) and in February and March 1917 a number of factories there were on strike for better wages.   In particular, on March 7^th (February 22 according to the calendar in use in Russia then), workers in the large Putilov works went on strike. The factory owners sacked the workers but not had not yet replaced them; there were some clashes with police.

The following day, March 8^th (by our calendar), International Women’s Day, women in Petrograd organised a number of meetings and rallies. Led by no political party but in an atmosphere of deep discontent throughout the city, the women’s activities became increasingly energetic and militant. Demonstrations began to march, demanding bread and the women went to factories not yet on strike, calling on the workers to down tools and join the demonstrations. As as many as 50,000 did.

Two days later, a general strike had seized Petrograd’s manufacturing industries, much of the city’s services and even some commercial business, bringing clerks, teachers and students to swell the numbers in protests. Everywhere there were street meetings, marches; red flags and banners began to appear among the crowds. Slogans hardly considered before were shouted and became current, including calling for the monarch, the Tsar, to abdicate or to be deposed.

The Petrograd police were powerless to control the demonstrators who would have turned on them had they intervened. On the 11^th, three days after the women’s mobilisation, the Tsar called on the Russian Army to intervene and to shoot demonstrators.

Russia had the largest single army in the world and despite the war, thousands were still in Petrograd. They had been used in the past against the workers and in 1905 had massacred people on a demonstration to petition the Tsar. But now, after three years of war and shortages, they were not keen to do so and particularly reluctant to open fire on women. Soldiers began to mutiny and, when threatened by officers, often shot them instead.

On that day, the Chairman of the Duma, the parliament which the Tsar Nicholas had kept powerless, sent an emergency telegram to the Tsar, who was at the Headquarters of the Russian Army, asking him for urgent action. The Tsar’s reply was dismissive – his wife, the Empress Consort Alexandra, had written to him that the problems in Petrograd were being exaggerated.

But the garrison of Petrograd, including elite units, had mutinied by the 12^th, four days after the women’s marches and demonstrations. In addition the Cossack troops, usually reliable in shooting and sabring demonstrators and rioters, were disobeying the orders of their officers to attack the people (although they had not joined the mutiny). Officers began to go into hiding as more of them were being shot by soldiers from their own units. Symbols of Tsarist rule were being torn down in public places.

Two days later, on the 14^th, the socialist parties and organisations established the Petrograd Soviet, last seen there twelve years previously, in 1905, before it was crushed by the Russian army. The Petrograd bourgeoisie were frightened but were unused to ruling except as permitted to by the Tsar, who himself now seemed unable to control events. Their powerless Duma (parliament), although ordered closed down by the Tsar that morning, set up a temporary committee to restore law and order and later, their Military Commission as part of the Provisional Government they created.

Thus began a period of dual authority in the city – the revolutionary workers, soldiers (and later, sailors) through the Soviet on the one hand and the bourgeoisie through their Military Committee on the other.

The Petrograd Soviet set the tone for what was to come by approving a number of points in Order No.1, effectively the first law drawn up by the Soviet, point 4 of which stated:

“The orders of the Military Commission of the State Duma shall be executed only in such cases as do not conflict with the orders and resolution of the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies.”

The Soviet was making sure it could not be overruled by the new unelected body which the bourgeoisie had set up, the Provisional Government, or by its Military Commission.  

Senior Army and political appointees advised the Tsar to do what just over a week previously would have been unthinkable – to abdicate. On the 15^th, the Tsar abdicated on his own behalf and of his son, nominating instead his brother, the Grand Duke Alexandrovich, to be Tsar. But he in turn knew he had no support as things stood and refused the “crown”.

The Russian monarchy of centuries had been overthrown — only seven days after the women’s mobilisation in Petrograd.

Maneouvers by the different sides continued during May and June, including an attempted military coup by senior officers commanding army units away from Petrograd. The fortunes of the revolution swayed back and forth across the country until demonstrations in July supported by the Anarchists and the Bolsheviks were suppressed by army units loyal to the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries political parties in power.

Workers were being disarmed, soldiers re-submitted to the old discipline and revolutionary leaders were being hunted; the War was also ongoing.

In October, the Bolsheviks seized power, ended Russia’s involvement in the War and began to construct a socialist state.

Two years later the people had to fight to defend it against a right-wing military uprising supported by eight states, including the Allies but were successful in the end.

But it was the women who had started the ball rolling seven months earlier on March 8^th, with their rallies and demonstrations and calling the workers out from the factories. Henceforth too, they played their part in government, in building the country and in the armed forces, particularly during the war against fascism and in defence of the USSR from June 1941 to the fall of Berlin and Nazi Germany in 1945.

Nearly 200,000 women were decorated and 89 eventually received the Soviet Union’s highest award, the Hero of the Soviet Union. Some served as pilots, snipers (some of the ace snipers at the famous battle (or siege) of Stalingrad were women), machine gunners, tank crew members and partisans, as well as in auxiliary roles of nursing, construction, administration, factory work and of course food production.

end.