Australia and South Africa, having previously separated from the North (Ulster). But even this partial success was only possible as the result of the armed revolutionary struggle which had been inaugurated by the Easter rising.
The disunited, petty bourgeois nature of the leadership of the struggle was shown by the Republican consent to this compromise. Only the radical wing, consisting mainly of working elements, agricultural laborers, and the poorer petty bourgeoisie, refused to accept the compromise; these were led by De Valera. Then a fresh civil war ensued and the world witnessed the sad example. of the Irish Nationalists and Republicans, in the garb of the Free State, but really as the agents of British imperialism and of the Irish capitalists, slaughtering by hundreds Irish Republicans and fighters for freedom.
*Kernheitzer. "Revolutionary Ireland."
Today the Free State has become a respectable Dominion of the British Empire, Mr. Cosgrave, the President, on the occasion of the last attack on Mussolini's nose, sent a moving and servile telegram of sympathy.
But naturally the Irish question has not been solved thereby, nor have its workers been helped; the role of liberator falls to the workers of Ireland.
The Irish Labor movement after the Easter rising committed a number of serious errors. Up to that time it had taken the lead politically in the struggle against British imperialism, and in the struggle against conscription in 1917–1918 by means of the strike weapon. But now it resigned this leadership into the hands of the petty bourgeoisie. At the time of the 1918 elections it decided not to put forward any Labor Party or trade union candidates because of the Sinn Feiners. This was a suicidal manner of establishing the united front against British imperialism. But it served as only one example in a long political history of how the active elements of the working class were completely enmeshed in the petty bourgeois Republican movement, and how the workers and toiling peasantry again were taken in too by the
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