Sinn Fein vs Sieg Heil - Spot the Difference

[sledge hammer]

Evil Genius, why do you bother?

why do you insist on coming onto this board and starting discussions with the sole idea of starting an argument. what do you wish to prove. do you aim to win converts to the unionist cause?

[Keyser soze]

Using a sledge hammer to crack a nut!! 

[stew]

EG spot on with your observations as usual.

Perhaps though [in order to stop you descending into Fearonesque behaviour of opening multiple threads on a single theme] you should change the thread title to include ALL the modern-day parties who honour statues of Irish gunrunners who imported guns from Germany in order to undermine the government of the day and at a period when it was clear that a war was inevitable. Then again I suppose the Kaiser wasn't that bad an aul spud.

If you cannot follow my logic I'll give you a couple of clues. The statue in question sits on the driveway to Stormont. It wasn't unveiled by Sinn Fein.

Love that post, hilarious stuff.

Ach everybdy needs to get off eg's back, shure it's full on marching season, the twelfth is just around the corner and whats wrong with a brit winding up the paddies a wee bit. I am sure he has an army of supporters over on owc egging him on, it is a pity that their mods are not as liberal as ours are on here.

[lynchbhoy]

so the Sinn fein that was set up in the 1980's is linked to nazi germany and facism, but at the same time are claiming to be socialists

No, Sinn Fein were set up in 1905, and the present leadership claims an unbroken line from that period.

(That's when their Department of Historical Revisionism isn't concealing eg the avowed anti-Semitism of founder Arthur Griffith on the one hand, or his espousal of a Joint Monarchy for Ireland and Great Britain, on the other.   )

ok tell that to the urban constituents of sf in Dublin and other urban places that support them !

The SF voters of Dublin, is it? I'd certainly tell them all right - if only I could find them!    Perhaps they should get Mary Lou Macdonald to (re-)educate them, seeing as she now has time on her hands!

if grasping at straws was ever introduced as an olympic sport, then youd win gold each time !

Hilarious.

your 'message' is unintelligible if not completly daft !

My message may be "unintelligible" to you, just don't judge the rest of this Board by your own inability to comprehend, reason or acknowldege etc.
As for its being "daft", well maybe it is, but you are the last one who will ever be able to demonstrate it thus, that's for certain.

You are spouting these things, how about you 'PROVE' them from credible sources and not your fantasy island wikipedia !

I have made my case, it is up to others to refute it as they may. I'll also let those others judge for themselves the success (or otherwise) of your efforts in that respect.

I think we all saw your failed attempt to argue against thefact that there was an aparthied system in the north for donkeys years !

Speaking for "all" now, are you?
Strangely I don't see too many of them speaking for you. Indeed, I suspect at least some may actually be highly embarrassed by your posts and wish you'd stop.
But if I'm wrong, no doubt they'll all ride to your rescue, just like a faithful, ahem, "cavalry" always does...

Must tear you up inside !

Yeah, that's me: so torn up I can hardly type...

1905
so you mean the same sinn fein that went on to become Fianna fail ?

unlike yourself I never needed anyones assistence to point out that your lengthy and verbose posts contain no substance or real content, just as your few posts on this thread thus far have proven. People have responded in the past to agree that an apartheid was prevalent - o your whinges are unfounded !

Go prove your stuff from a decent source - not that wikipedia rubbish that anyone can edit and contribute to ! !

Still waiting to see what your point and the point of this thread is other than grasping at straws !
.....again !

[Lecale2]

Russell got it wrong. He got it really wrong. So what? Many other people got it wrong at that time.

[mylestheslasher]

EG - I suggest you read some of the fine books on the history of the IRA to understand what was going on in the mind of the leadership at the time (Bowyer Bell and Tim Pat Coogan are two you should start with). I'm going to use the term IRA to talk about militant republicans of the time as there was really no formed political wing and what was there was a million miles from todays Sinn Fein. The IRA of the time had no knowledge of what was going on in Germany, all they knew was that Germany was at war with Britain and they were at war with Britain. In such cases it is normal for both of the enemies to colaborate. In 1798 the same happened with the Irish and the French, something similar for the Spanish Armada. It has happened before so no great shock it happened then. Now hindsight is a great thing and the people the IRA tried to get into bed with at the time were brutal mass murderers, I don't believe for a minute that if the IRA of the time had of known this that they would have proceeded to deal with Germany, especially since they were a deeply socialist movement as much as republican. I don't believe that it is a period of IRA history that republicans should be proud of. Saying that I think there is nothing wrong with remembering the sacrifice a man made to the cause of republicanism, even if in hindsight he and his organisation made an error of judgement dealing with the Nazi's.

[Zapatista]

The Nazi's should be ashamed of themselves collaborating with the Marxist Rebels in Ireland 

[A Quinn Martin Production]

Evil Genius, why do you bother?

why do you insist on coming onto this board and starting discussions with the sole idea of starting an argument. what do you wish to prove. do you aim to win converts to the unionist cause?

He can't help it...it's the Free Stater in him!

[deiseach]

Evil Genius, why do you bother?

why do you insist on coming onto this board and starting discussions with the sole idea of starting an argument

You say it like it's a bad thing

[Evil Genius]

No time today to follow-up some of the more recent posts on this thread, but I shall leave the following items without comment (Btw, the first one wasn't me - I have a cast-iron alibi!  )


Seán Russell statue vandalised - again
ON Tuesday night/ Wednesday morning the plinth around the newly erected statue to Seán Russell in Fairview Park, Dublin was sprayed with slogans implying that Russell himself and the National Graves Association who erected the statues, were Nazi supporters.
Russell was a veteran of the 1916 Rising and IRA Chief of Staff during the bombing campaign in England, launched in 1939.
The statue, which was badly vandalised four years ago, was only replaced with a bronze sculpture in the past two weeks.
The 2004 atack followed a year-long campaign in the Sunday Independent aimed at discrediting Russell's memory and was claimed by a previously unknown group claiming to  be anti-fascists.
Expressing abhorrence at the latest attack Matt Doyle of the National Graves Association told An Phoblacht on Wednesday: "We're shocked at the whole incident. The monument as it stands now in its desecrated state is actually a monument to gross ignorance.  These people describe themselves as anti-fascist but they won't even have the debate on the man. What Irish patriot will be targeted next?"
http://www.anphoblacht.com/news/detail/38492




Meanwhile, Kevin Myers ("Boo! Hiss! etc") has expressed much better than I can why it is repugnant that this individual be commemorated in this way, pointing out inter alia that Dublin is the only capital city in Europe to erect a statue to a Nazi-collaborator...

Eichmann would get a statue if he'd had an Irish grandmother

By Kevin Myers

Friday July 10 2009

It never entered my silly little head that anyone in authority would permit the re-erection of a statue to Sean Russell in Fairview Park, after the original was vandalised four years ago. And equally, in my utter ignorance of the unrepentant attitude of republicans towards their history and their heroes, I assumed that on this occasion, they would let bygones be bygones.

After all, Sean Russell was a Nazi collaborator, who died in a German submarine on his way to cause mayhem in Ireland in 1940.

The statue to him was unveiled in September 1951, when nationalist mythology, a hubristic neutralism, and a profound equivalence towards the Third Reich, were politically dominant in the grisly lunatic asylum that Ireland had become. Dublin Corporation even donated the land for the statue.

And frankly, you could have erected anything in those days, as long as it was anti-British.

Adolf Eichmann would have got a little statue, if someone could have shown he had an Irish grandmother.

For Ireland had turned its back on the world, and was sinking into an impoverished and heathen stupor, in which the primary government activity was to keep out foreign goods and foreign books: some 5,000 titles had been banned by the publications' censors up to 1954.

This was an Ireland which also gave sanctuary to Nazi war criminals, so a mere statue to one of the Third Reich's most dedicated Irish stooges was merely another part of the diseased isolationist culture of the time.

Over half a century on, and Ireland has changed more totally than it is possible to describe. On Sunday, the President will honour the Irish dead of the two world wars, who for the most part served with the British.

Most particularly this Sunday, minds will go back to that summer 70 years ago, before most of us were born, when Hitler's plans to conquer and subjugate Poland were taking final shape.

Over the next six years, thousands of Irish volunteers were to die opposing him. Just one -- Sean Russell -- died in his service. Yet he is the only Irish victim of the Second World War to have a statue in his honour in Dublin. For having earlier offered his services to the Abwehr, German intelligence, in February 1939, with the outbreak of war, he hurried from America to Germany to take his place in the Nazi battleline. Only a perforated ulcer prevented him doing a sovereign service to the Fuehrer.

You can present Russell's role in many lights.

You can say that he was caught up in the republican mood of the time. You can say that he was enraged at the treatment of nationalists in the North. You can say that many decent people sympathised with the IRA's objectives. All true. Comparable justifications can be offered for activists from different nationalist minorities in mainland Europe who sided with Hitler. The fact is that he -- and they -- took the side of the man who led Europe into a Dark Age unprecedented in history.

To raise a statue to such a collaborator with an absolutist evil is self-preening neutralism at its most toxic.

From 1970 on, with the start of the Troubles, Sinn Fein held an annual commemorative rally at the Sean Russell statue. This has continued ever since, even with Sinn Fein's transformation into a largely constitutional party in the European parliament.

This not merely made Dublin the only capital in the EU with a statue to a Nazi collaborator, but it made the Shinners the only party in the parliament to honour such a man. That they were able to get away with this was largely due to the compliance of other Irish parties in the European parliament, who never drew the attention of our fellow Europeans to the presence in their midst of this strange, strange group, who annually paid homage to Ireland's own Quisling.

Four years ago, "vandals" beheaded the statue, to commemorate the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. I disagree with that act. It is not up to individuals to decide on public statuary. But at least this deed gave Dublin City Council the opportunity to abolish from view a revolting insult to the millions of victims of the Holocaust.

Instead, the National Grave Association has been allowed to erect a new bronze statue, and it was this which was daubed with anti-Nazi graffiti the other day.

So, how did a statue to a traitor to Ireland, and an ally of the Third Reich, come to be erected as we approach the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War? Who approved this in Dublin City Council?

And what is the prevailing aesthetic which can rule that the destroyers of Nelson's Pillar in Dublin may permanently affect the streetscape of the capital, but that a statue to a Nazi fellow traveller should be restored?

I trust that all EU ambassadors to this country report back to their governments that Dublin has just raised a statue to a Nazi traitor. Maybe they will do what our own political class, either through cowardice or inertia, has failed to do -- namely, to cause it to be eradicated for ever.

kmyers@independent.ie
http://www.independent.ie/opinion/columnists/kevin-myers/eichmann-would-get-a-statue-if-hed-had-an-irish-grandmother-1815598.html



Meanwhile on the same topic, Jim Cusack adds a few home truths as well (with more than a nod to that well-known right-wing Brit, Eamonn McCann):
http://www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/shinners-set-to-fix-chip-off-the-old-block-121845.html

[A Quinn Martin Production]

Classic Myers and I must say a very entertaining polemic.  I would struggle to describe Russell as a "victim" of WW2.  A burst appendix is hardly the same as a bullet in the head on D Day.  But the Shinners need to learn that sometimes peace is more difficult to control than war.  Failure to think before erection has led many's the man into trouble

[deiseach]

If Myers expressed the same sense of outrage at the moving of the statue dedicated to the Unknown Soldier in Tallinn a few years back - known locally as the Tomb of the Unknown Rapist - then he might have a case. But in the Myers world view the Poles were "subjugated" in 1939 and liberated in 1945, so I doubt if any such missive exists

[Main Street]

The only crime committed here is the attempt to pervert history by academic morons.
The only thing Russell had in common with Germany was the fight against Britain.
Frank Ryan left the battlefied against Fascists (including Nazi germany) in Spain to get arms from Germany.

Same as Subhash Chandra Bose in India, started an army of liberation by also recruiting Indian pows, got help from Germany and Japan, waged war against the Brits with his Indian National Army during ww2 to liberate India from the Brits.
Subhash was not a fascist/racist.

[deiseach]

Same as Subhash Chandra Bose in India, started an army of liberation by also recruiting Indian pows, got help from Germany and Japan, waged war against the Brits with his Indian National Army during ww2 to liberate India from the Brits.

Yitzhak Shamir was a member of Lohamei Herut Yisrael, an organisation that was so determined to end the British mandate in Palestine that it fostered links with Germany during the Second World War. Somehow this man, clearly a virulent anti-Semite, ended up as Prime Minister of Israel

[lynchbhoy]

The only crime committed here is the attempt to pervert history by academic morons.
The only thing Russell had in common with Germany was the fight against Britain.
Frank Ryan left the battlefied against Fascists (including Nazi germany) in Spain to get arms from Germany.

Same as Subhash Chandra Bose in India, started an army of liberation by also recruiting Indian pows, got help from Germany and Japan, waged war against the Brits with his Indian National Army during ww2 to liberate India from the Brits.
Subhash was not a fascist/racist.

sure isnt gordon brown getting all cosy now with old Col Gadaffi !!
boo hiss indeed !!!!

obv this thread must actually have been started to point out historical irony !