The Easter Uprising and Brexit

25 April 2016. A World to Win News Service. The heating up of the debate about a "Brexit" (a British exit from the European Union) has coincided with the centennial of the Eastern Rebellion against British rule of Ireland. What's the connection?

On 24 April, 1916, while hundreds of thousands of Irish were fighting in the British army to save the British empire from its German rivals in World War One, a few thousand Irish men and women organized an armed insurrection to free Ireland from British domination.

After five days of urban warfare, massive British troops surrounded the General Post Office and other rebel positions. Reinforced by a gunboat able to steam into the heart of Dublin, they set off the same kind of artillery barrage that made the war on the continent so murderous.

When the rebels surrendered, the British subjected 187 people to immediate, secret trials led by victorious British officers with no right of defence. All seven signers of the call for the Easter Uprising regardless of their actual role, and eight others, were executed immediately, including James Connolly, one of the leaders, so badly wounded that he had to be brought before the firing squad tied to a chair. Thousands of suspects were rounded up and about 1,800 sent to concentration camps. It took six years of war and civil war before Britain exited from most, but not all, of the island.

Today, it goes without saying, none of the authorized voices debating Brexit are calling for the UK to exit from the part of Ireland that remains its colony, nor for Britain to give up its continuing exploitation in former colonies and of the billions of human beings in countries dominated by imperialist capital in general.

Although the complex issues involved in the Brexit debate need to be analysed in their own right, to put it simply, they revolve around what is considered best for the interests of the same criminal British imperialist ruling class targeted by the Easter Rebellion, especially how best to partner and rival with the other other big power imperialist ruling classes who are, separately and together, responsible for the greater part of the misery of the world's billions, from two world wars to today's wars, repression and unbearable conditions from which tens of millions of people are fleeing in a humanitarian crisis that is no less criminal in its origins and consequences.
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