Quote:
Originally Posted by BML  Would anyone care to hazard a guess as to why, an Englishman T. Jackson wrote "Ireland Her Own". |
Have you read the work?
Jackson was a founder of British Communism who identified with the poor and working classes wherever they struggled against exploitation and oppression. His sympathies transcended nationalist boundaries.
In the forward to his book he said that he wrote
'frankly as a partisan' and stated:
'The most valuable parts of this book should be those which show with what anxiety and diligence the rulers of England have had to labour to avoid being caught ... between two distinct but converging emancipation struggles - those of the English and of the Irish common people respectively. The relations between the English rulers and the Irish ruled have been, throughout, imperialist relations, consequently, the history of the Anglo-Irish conflict - with its examples of every variety of imperialist aggression and of every form of resistance thereto - supplies an invaluable introduction to the critical study of Imperialism in general.'
His purpose for writing the book, then, was to redress the shortcomings of Irish historians who, he says,
'missed the real tragedy involved in Ireland's history - the manner in which the English and Irish common people, each of them struggling for freedom, have been time and again jockeyed into becoming weapons used by the exploiters, each for the enslavement of the other. ... The English and the Irish common people, each with its own splendid record of unyielding resistance to oppression, should, by rights, understand each other better than they do ... Both together should find reasons for solidarity with the democratic and working-class struggles in other lands.'
His later editor, the Marxist historian C. Desmond Greaves, described the work as
'probably the briefest, simplest, and most precise statement of the international case for Irish independence that is available today [1971].'
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