Part 5 - DW63 DB101 003 005

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Even some of the more sympathetic of his panegyrists do not seem to realise that they dim his glory when they represent him as the victim of a protest against an injustice local to Ireland instead of as an Irish apostle of a world-wide movement for liberty, equality and fraternity. Yet this latter was indeed the character and position of Emmet, and as such the democracy of the future will revere him. ... He believed in the brotherhood of the oppressed and in the community of free nations, and died for his ideal. (Nov 1910) (On William Thompson:) Fervent Celtic enthusiasts are fond of claiming, and the researches of our days seem to bear out the claim, that Irish missionaries were the first to rekindle the lamp of learning in Europe, and dispel the intell- ectual darkness following the downfall of the Roman Empire; may we not also take pride in the fact that an Irishman also was the first to pierce the worse than Egyptian darkness of capitalist barbarism and point out to the toilers the conditions of their enslavement, and the essential pre-requisites of their emancipation? (Nov 1913) Eventually the Government seized upon the really dangerous man — the man who had foith of injustice deeply enough rooted to wish to destroy it at all costs, the man who had faith enough in the masses to trust a revolutionary outbreak to their native impulses, and who possessed the faculty of combining thought with action, John Mitchel. With his arrest the people looked for immediate revolution, so did the Government, so did Mitchel himself. All were disappointed. John Mitchel was carried off to penal servitude. ... The working class of Dublin and most of the towns were clamouring for their leaders to give the words for a rising; in many places in the country the peasants were acting spontaneously. ... The Young Ireland chiefs who had so fervently declaimed about the revolution were utterly incapable of accepting it when at last it presented itself to them. (Nov 1910) So wrote Mitchel when, burning with a holy hatred of tyranny, he poured the vitriol of his scorn upon all the pedants who strutted around him, pedants who were as scrupulous in polishing a phrase for a lecture as a sword for a parade — and incapable of advancing beyond either. (Nov 1910) Fintan Lalor, like all the really dangerous revolutionists in Ireland, advocated his principles as part of the creed of the democracy of the world, and not merely as applicable only to the incidents of the struggle in Ireland against England. (Nov 1910) Just as '98 was an Irish expression of the tendencies embodied in the First French Revolution, as '48 throbbed in sympathy with the democratic and social upheavals on the Continent of Europe and England, so Fenianism was a responsive throb in the Irish heart to those pulsations in the heart of the European working class which elsewhere produced the International Working Men's Association. (Nov 1910) The movements of Ireland for freedom could not and cannot be divorced from the world-wide upward movements of the world's democracy. (July 12 1913) A NATION WITH A STRONG SENSE OF NATIONAL DIGNITY AND REVOLUTIONARY PRIDE IS UNCONQUERABLE In order to establish Juche in thinking, it is necessary to possess a high sense of national dignity and revolutionary pride. Without the sense of national pride that one's nation is inferior to none, without the pride and honour of the revolutionary people, it would be impossible to live up to one's conviction in an independent manner, uphold national independence and dignity and emerge victorious in the difficult revolutionary struggle. A nation with a strong sense of national dignity and revolutionary pride is unconquerable, but a nation without this attribute is powerless. (OJI 38) 4

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