Protestant Communists in Kerry!
This is the week of 9/11, which means that we'll be taking a look at terror and how its many analysts interpret it. We'll be kicking off on Thursday with the Irish scholar, diplomat, politician, historian, biographer, intellectual, playwright, editor, prose stylist, political theorist and anti-IRA activist, Conor Cruise O'Brien. To whet the appetite, as it were, for O'Brien's style here's his hilarious account of electioneering in Ireland in 1969:
"The Labour party itself... had, fairly recently, taken to itself the designation of Socialist, and the distinction between Socialist and Communist is not clear to all Irish minds, and especially not to all Irish clerical minds, especially when they don't want it to be clear. My wife, shortly after this time, heard a priest in Dingle, County Kerry, deliver a sermon on 'Communism' and 'Socialism'. The priest gave Communism the expected treatment. Then he went on to Socialism. 'Socialism,' he said 'is worse than Communism. Socialism is a heresy of Communism. Socialists are a Protestant variety of Communists.' Not merely Communists, but Protestant Communists! Not many votes for Labour in Dingle!"
From States of Ireland (1972). There's a distinctive irony, there, in that excerpt and there's a reason for it. The one figure that has influenced O'Brien's thinking more another is Edmund Burke (1729-1797), the Anglo-Irish political philosopher, whose writings and speeches sparkled with irony. In his introduction to Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, O'Brien wrote:
"Irony is a marked characteristic of Irish writing; I have argued elsewhere that the Irish predicament with its striking contrast between pretences and realities has been unusually favourable to the development of this mode of expression."
Czeslaw Milosz in his poem Not This Way observed that irony is "the glory of slaves", while Christopher Hitchens in his "Letters to a Young Contrarian" noted that, "the sharp aside and the witty nuance are the consolation of losers and are the only thing that pomp and power can do nothing about." Burke, Milosz, Hitchens and Conor Cruise O'Brien... all fascinated by terror — French, Soviet, Islamist, Irish — and all sources to be called on in this anniversary week.
