Irish Foreign Affairs

Irish Foreign Affairs Volume Six, Number 2 June 2013 “Every nation, if it is to survive as a nation, must study its own history and have a foreign policy” —C.J. O’Donnell, The Lordship of the World, 1924, p.145 Contents Editorial - Greece p. 2 JFK Conspiracy Theories Part 4 John Martin p. 8 Conor Cruise O’Brien: Diplomat or Dictator? - A Preview Pat Muldowney p. 14 Starving the Germans: the Evolution of Britain’s Strategy of Economic Warfare During the First World War—The French Connection Part 3 Eamon Dyas p. 15 ‘Emergency Czechmate’ or Wartime Dialogue? Dev, the ‘Irish Institute’ and the Masaryk Affair Manus O’Riordan p. 20 A Dangerous Delusion: Why The West Got It Wrong about Nuclear Iran Interviews with David Morrison p. 27 Documents A Pardon for Deserters - Letters p. 30 De Valera’s Reply to Churchill 16 May 1945 p. 31 Speech by Brendan Halligan on Europe p. 33 What If? —The start of WWII — 9/11 p. 34 Irish Soldiers Deployed Abroad Today p. 35 Mali’s Natural Resources p. 36 A Quarterly Review published by the Irish Political Review Group, Dublin Greece Editorial When the attempted coup against the Gorbachev regime USA spread westwards, clearing the ground of all obstacles as in the Soviet Union failed in August 1991, Problems Of it went, and treating the humans who were in the way as wild Communism (a forerunner of this journal) said that an era of beasts. intense nationalism around the world had begun. David Bailie Warden, a young, idealistic, Presbyterian Until that moment the world had been an arena of contention clergyman, escaped persecution as a United Irishman by fleeing between two incompatible socio-economic systems: Capitalism to America. He became a good American citizen, dedicated and Communism. Direct war between the two systems which to Progress. In 1819 he published a History Of The United aspired to dominate the world was averted by the fact that since States. He recorded the shameful fact of slavery in the southern 1948, when the Soviet Union caught up with the United States states. But the ongoing genocide he saw as a progressive work in the arms race by making a nuclear bomb, each had the power of clearing the wilderness. to destroy the other. The conflict between the systems was The genocide was not completed until the end of the 19th therefore confined to secondary areas of the world. Only proxy century. A soldier who took part in one of its final episodes was wars could be fought. The proxy wars were internal conflicts in an officer with the American Army in Europe in 1917. When, Third World countries in which each side had support from one after winning the World War for Britain, the USA sat back and of the World Powers and something like a ‘level playing field’ reviewed its situation in the 1920s, a number of books were was thus established. issued by mainstream publishers which contrasted the clean, When Mikhail Gorbachev brought about the collapse of the hygienic and eugenic, mode of Protestant colonisation in North Soviet Union with his simple-minded, starry-eyed, notion of America with the messy Spanish intervention in the South democracy, universalist capitalism dominated the world, at least where, under the influence of reactionary Catholic dogma, the in principle. By the late 1990s it was being stated authoritatively superior European stock sank into the inferior native stock that the primary function of all Governments was to facilitate through intermarriage. capital investments in their economies from Imperialist centres, And, during World War 2, while Himmler was handling the and safeguard those investments. Jewish problem in the way he thought was right, Hollywood International Capitalism, Globalism, had arrived. But so produced a Western in which John Wayne saw off a horde of had Nationalism as a phenomenon that popped up everywhere. natives, and a good citizen commended him with the words: “We need more men like you to exterminate these savages”. Capitalism had fostered Nationalism in its Cold War against So let’s admit the power of the Puritan conscience and the Soviet Union. But the collapse of the Soviet Union led to a see the North American Continent as an empty space for the spontaneous growth of Nationalism everywhere. development of capitalism free of all pre-capitalist influences. In causative terms the exterminations were without effect on Capitalism generates the nationalism which it seeks to capitalist development. There were no compromises—no override. appeasements. If there was ever a place where a pure form Arthur Griffith, the founder of Sinn Fein, put it this way: of Capitalism might settle down in contentment, it was North America. “Between the Individual and Humanity stands, and must But what did the US do when it reached the Pacific? It continue to stand, a great fact—the Nation.” crossed the ocean and compelled Japan, which had been living peacefully within itself for a couple of centuries, to open itself Arnold Toynbee, in his mammoth Study Of History came to to international market relations. And then, little more than a a similar conclusion that industrial capitalism and nationality generation later, it concluded that war with Japan would soon ran together. be inevitable—because Japan had become capitalist. Why could the United States not settle down in the immense Capitalism as a pure form of itself, untainted by Imperialism space which it had cleared of ‘inferior’ peoples for itself? The has never existed. The experience of the past twenty years, ideology of Aryan supremacism possibly had something to do during which it has had free rein in the world, does not suggest with it. But it seems likely that this ideology survived, after that it is capable of existing. Post-nationalist capitalism as a the domestic genocides had been completed, because it fitted world system appears to be a delusion. in with the expansionist dynamic that is intrinsic to capitalism, If it was possible, the place where it might have been realised and that must express itself unless it is subjected to strong social is the Northern half of the American continent. It was an ‘empty’ and political constraints. space, colonised in the first instance by English democrats, fleeing from the feudal/monarchical elements of English life. Capitalism is a British invention. Elements of it can be They took the free market with them across the Atlantic. They found in many places, but the combination of the elements asserted their independence from the Mother Country which into a system came about in England after a century and a half had hatched them. And the world was their oyster—or at least of spurious religious ‘Reformation’, Revolution and Counter- the ‘empty’ half of an immense Continent was. Revolution had shredded the traditional society and had destroyed Monarchy without establishing popular government. The fact that the half-Continent was not literally empty In Germany the Reformation was a development within is beside the point. It was empty in principle. Jefferson, as German culture. In England it was a destructive force. President, made an authoritative statement that US sovereignty Puritanism triumphant might possibly have established a stretched to the Pacific when in fact it had not yet got half-way settled state and society operating by Mosaic law. Cromwell there, and he gave the actual inhabitants fair warning that they prevented that development. He saved the Common Law, would probably be exterminated, actually using that word. The which by that time meant whatever the upstart gentry wanted it 2 to mean. Thereafter the Puritans were excluded from political Capitalism would not have flourished as well as it did office but were given their head in society by a ruling class without the help of Genocide and Slavery. They were helpfully of upstart gentry which had became a progressive aristocracy incidental to it. subject to nothing but itself and which had conceived the ambition of world domination. It was through that combination English Imperialism carried capitalism around the world, but of wild Puritanism and aristocratic Imperialism that capitalism it did so within the formal trappings of Empire. The USA in the as a freely operating system came about in England and it was 1940s had to save England in a World War which it had started through the same combination that it was expanded into a but was unable to win. But, by the time the Second Front was world system by the Puritan colonisation of North America and launched in 1944, what England needed to be saved from was the Slave Trade, of which England gained a virtual monopoly not the enemy but an ally. in 1712. Fascism had saved capitalist civilisation from Communism But, despite the vast contribution made by the Slave Trade in Central Europe in the chaos that resulted from the destructive and Slavery to English power, England was no more likely to Versailles Peace. Winston Churchill frankly acknowledged that become a slave society than was the Soviet Union. Forced labour to be the case. in the Soviet camps was an adjunct to socialist development, contributing to primary accumulation, as England’s great slave labour camps in the Caribbean contributed to primary The situation in 1944 was that Britain had again made a mess accumulation for capitalism. When industrial slavery in the of a World War. It had collaborated with Hitler to build up the Caribbean had served the purpose of fuelling the take-off power of Germany from 1933 to 1938. Then it declared war on of capitalism, a “moral sense” arose which found slavery Germany in 1939 on the indefensible issue of Danzig.

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