hydrarchist writes: This from the lovely Counterpunch.

"On
the Bicentennial of the Execution of Robert Emmet"

By Peter Linebaugh

Robert Emmet was executed two hundred years ago
this day. "Behold, the head of a traitor!" the hangman
held up his severed head dripping with blood onto the cobblestones
of Thomas Street for the dogs to lap up. On the anniversary of
this ignominy let's pause to consider the project for which he
died.

His is an example of revolutionary sacrifice
to be compared to the self-stabbing of Kwong Hae Lee last week
on top of the fence separating the people from the U.S. and European
planners of capitalism at the Cancun meeting of the WTO.

"I have but one request to ask at
my departure from this world; it is--THE CHARITY OF ITS SILENCE.
Let no man write my epitaph; for as no man who knows my motives
dare now vindicate them, let not prejudice or ignorance asperse
them. Let them and me rest in obscurity and peace, and my name
remain uninscribed, until other times and other men can do justice
to my character. When my country takes her place among the nations
of the earth, then, and not till then, let my epitaph be written."

His hands were chained together during
the whole speech. He was just found guilty of treason, or to
quote the romantic wording of the 1795 statute, guilty of imagining
the king's death. aving HTheTTThe glorious peroration to his
speech from the dock answered a precious formality, "what
have you now to say why judgment of death and execution shall
not be awarded against you according to law?" Emmet was
well practiced as an orator from years in college, debating such
questions as Was the discovery
of America of more advantage than injury to the human race? Was
the peasant a more useful member of society than the soldier?
Was it a good law of Solon's which declared neutrality in an
insurrection infamous? Ought a soldier to consider the motives
of a war before he engages in it? Whether a soldier is bound
on all occasions to obey orders of a commanding officer? Interrupted
several times by the intimidating hostility of the judges, this
seemed only to cause Emmet to take his rhetoric to an even higher
pitch.

The years in college were also years
of global struggle on the general principles of the rights of
man and the French Revolution. His character and justice to his
character, cannot be understood apart from the events which coursed
around it. The principles that were set into practice by the
revolts against slavery (Dessalines and the Haitians were driving
out Napoleon's armies), by the mutiny of the fleets of the Royal
Navy, by the revolts of the 'middle ground' or the American Indian
confederation, by the early Luddites against factory exploitation,
by the gross and cruel terror of the British suppression of the
United Irish in '98, and by the struggles in France itself which
reached one type of climax with the Babeuf 'Conspiracy of the
Equals' and another climax in Napoleon's coup d'état.

Emmet asked for silence, on the grounds
that his motives may not be known, and, even if they were known
to some, they could not be vindicated. It is this doubt that
I feel may permit us to question his project.

"Not yet," replied Robert Emmet
two hundred years ago when the executioner afforded the Irish
patriot a last courtesy on the scaffold, asking the 25 year old
whether he was ready to be hanged. After a pause he asked again,
"are you ready, sir?" and again Emmet replied, "not
yet." The third time and the hangman became impatient and
let the weight of the law swing into awful action launching Robert
Emmet into eternity and the memory of his countrymen. His cry
from the gallows was evidence of the creature in him--the desire
to live, the love of life, the refusal to die, unaccepting of
the horrid punishment.

Robert Emmet lives in the hearts of his
countryman for his last speech at his trial, a model of eloquence,
memorized by Abraham Lincoln, for instance. A hundred years ago
W.B. Yeats addressed four thousand people at the N.Y. Academy
of Music on "Emmet the Apostle of Irish Liberty" and
noted that "Ireland has placed him foremost among her saints
of nationality." Within twenty years the project of national
liberation was realized, but conservatively with partition, an
aspersion of Emmet's motives and the generosity of his ideals.

As everyone knows, the broad principles
of the French Revolution are liberté, égalité,
and fraternité, or as we might say solidarity. In light
of our own experience with terror, privatization, and war, let's
look again at Emmet's courage, dignity, audacity as "an
apostle of liberty." In relation to the meanings of liberty
he takes us to equality and solidarity rather than to private
property and trade because égalité opposes privatization
by enclosure or conquest, while solidarity, to use the Irish
phrase, is to be united, or unseparated from land, family, country,
or religion.

In his speech from the dock he spoke
of "the emancipation of my country from the superinhuman
oppression under which she has so long and too patiently travailed."
His older brother, Thomas, was a United Irishman, a prisoner
in Fort George, later attorney-general of New York. Thomas in
a series of Letters from the Mountains for the United Irish press
outlined the case for insurrection and described the forces to
carry it out. His brother explained that it was written "in
the blood of the Irish peasant" and it may be read "by
the light of the flames that consume his cottage." "Our
streets have been filled with famished crowds; our ears pierced
with cries of starving manufacturers. Multitudes have perished,
and are yet perishing in the silent retirement of despair."
Robert composed an allegorical poem of "Two Ships."

I know I have on board some men, That
seem rebellious now and then, But what's the cause? You know
full well--Allowance short--makes men rebel; And you have many
a hand of mine That on my crew's provision dine; Each day on
biscuit we must work, Forsooth to send you beef and pork.

Robert Emmet understood that oppression
was economic and political. He left Paris, disgusted with Bonaparte,
to return to Dublin in November 1802.

Engels in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
(1880) says socialism appeared as a logical extension of the
French Enlightenment but that it was not given good grounding
until the proletariat arose, and that was to be in 1802 when
utopian socialism ceased to be adequate response to a new class
of proletarians, the veritable storm and stress period of production.
Crime, prostitution, and cash payment rose together as twin indications
of capitalist advance of industry. Dialectics comprehends ideas,
things, and representations in their connection, concatenation,
origin and conclusion. Is modern industry and the world market
the origin or the conclusion? Is the commons and anti-globalization
the solution or the problem? The answer depends, Engels might
say, on whether you back the capitalists or the workers.

Emmet was in the middle of this dialectics
of ideal and actuality. He did not have a proletarian revolution
in mind. However, the insurrection he led counted on the proletarians
of Dublin. The international character of the insurrection reflected
the diaspora of Irish labor to the factories of England. Despard
was supposed to have initiated an insurrectionary campaign in
London earlier in the year. In Dublin itself, the wonderful James
Hope, the Belfast weaver, was to lead the workers of the south
Dublin "liberties." He had a long talk with Robert
Emmet, saying that there could be no peace in Ireland until "the
rights of the people in relation to the soil were recognized."

Emmet's answer in effect was "not yet." He did not
want to initiate the civil war as a reversal of the land settlement
would surely cause. Consequently, the proclamation of the provisional
government, while containing powerful clauses on the expropriation
of church tithes and the cessation of commerce in land until
the stability of the republic was achieved, also contained explicit
assurances to property holders. ope, the Belfast weaver

He was twenty-five years old when he
was hanged. His heart throbbed for Sarah Curran, the daughter
of Philip Curran, the eloquent Dublin lawyer, the Clarence Darrow
of his time. After he fled the bungled insurrection he found
temporary protection in the Wicklow mountains by a "bandit,"
Michael Dwyer. The masterful and wicked English spymaster, William
Wickham, was haunted by remorse for the rest of his life for
his part in the death of Emmet. Robert Emmet was served with
cunning and silence by Anne Devlin who refused to betray him
even though the Yeomany put her neck in the noose and hoisted
her up. Who were the men who lived in the house? thundered the
magistrate. She was only a servant maid and "so long as
her wages were paid she cared to know nothing else about them."
Her materialist emphasis on wages may indicate mere "trade
union consciousness" yet it was an economistic mask to conceal
her comrade.

I want to raise two aspects of Emmet's
attempt which are certainly not central to the story in its usual
tellings. One concerns the commons, or utopian thinking and the
ideal of égalité. Free trade, free labor, had not
yet totally perverted the ideal of liberty. Privatization and
its sacred position in the higher reaches of human thinking,
or as the single solution to human welfare, had not yet silenced
all else, such as the clachan in Ireland, the English commons,
the 'dish with one spoon' of the Iroquois, or the wild woods
of the whole world. Thus, equality was tied to the actualities
of production and human subsistence against the fencing out of
the enclosure movement or the expropriations of conquest or the
kidnappings of the children.

The other aspect of the Emmet revolt
which comes to the surface of historical consciousness after
the death of Kwong Hae Lee is its internationalism. I am not
referring to the diaspora that followed the revolt, the migrations
from the emerald isle, as a result of terrorism of the Empire;
I refer to the presence of insurgents with international experience
preceding the "business". Matthew Doyle, who took charge
of the training of the Dublin men, had served in the British
Army in Egypt; Hugh Boyd McGuckian, after the '98 went to Jamaica,
where he entered the French service and conspired to take over
the island. Several had served in India. The leading technician
at the lab in St Patrick street was Johnstone, a former soldier
in the East India Company who learned his rocketry in India.
Tipu Sultan, or the "Tiger of Mysore," employed five
thousand rocket men in 1799 against the British invasion of southern
India. After the battle of Seringapatam that year the British
captured rockets to send back to England. In 23 September 1803
Wellesley defeated the Mahratta confederation whose leader, Scindia,
allied with the French and employed the most advanced rocket
designs. Emmet, fascinated by mathematics and chemistry since
childhood, had brought rocket designs with him from Paris. The
defeats in India and in Ireland were incidents of conquest and
appropriations of knowledge. The"indigenous peoples"
possessed superior rocket scientists. The cosmopolitanism was
not abstract; the internationalism was hatched in the British
army and navy. When Americans sing of "the rockets' red
glare" they thus allude to Irish and Indian independence
as well.

Thomas Emmet sent Robert from Paris in
November 1802 a copy of Volney's Ruins as just translated by
Joel Barlow and Thomas Jefferson. Robert so valued it he kept
it safe at the St. Patrick street arms depot, where it was found
with fifty musket balls, a number of bayonets and handles up
the chimney, and the equipment of a rocket lab. This was the
basic text of European materialism and freethought. In his account
religion was "nothing more than a political engine to conduct
the credulous vulgar." More to the point, Volney imagined
the common classes of people, the "untaught men of all countries
and of every nation, without prophets, without doctors, and without
doctrine" assembling in a circle questioned the religious
leaders." "We ask you whether it be gospel charity
which has made you exterminate whole nations in America, to annihilate
the empires of Mexico and Peru; which makes you continue to dispeople
Africa and sell its inhabitants like cattle, notwithstanding
your abolition of slavery; which makes you ravage India and usurp
its dominions?"

"Not yet", then, are words
that apply both to the creature and to the realization of the
project immanent in the historical conjuncture which Emmet sought
to bring to birth. The ideals of equality and solidarity have
earthy roots and high loft. They combine abstraction and actuality.

Peter Linebaugh
teaches history at Bard. He is the author of two of CounterPunch's
favorite books, The
London Hanged and (with Marcus Rediker) The
Many-Headed Hydra: the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic.
He can be reached at: plineba@yahoo.com
"