South Africa -- an unprincipled compromise?

It is generally accepted by 'liberal' political commentators and observers that the South African peace process provided a role model for other liberation struggles and was therefore a 'victory' for the oppressed black population of South Africa. However, McKinley's book tells a rather different story.

McKinley has been a consistent activist in the anti-apartheid struggle for justice in South Africa since the early 1980s, whose critique of the ANC leadership is strongly based within a Marxist-Leninist framework.

The author begins with the historical background to the struggle by outlining British colonial/capitalist expansion in South Africa. He asserts that the Boer Wars (1899-1902) were the result of mutual greed in order to gain control of the gold mines. Brutal methods were used, particularly by the British who employed the use of concentration camps against the Dutch Afrikaner settlers. While the indigenous black population becmae mere economic pawns in an imperialist/colonial struggle between the interests of British imperialism and Afrikaner colonialism.

Despite a British victory, the Afrikaner community would eventually gain an ascendancy that would culminate in South Africa's 'independence' from Britain.

The reality of this so-called 'independence' was the creation of a ruling white minority whose existence and wealth depended on the subjugation of the indigenous black masses.

However prior to the British relinquishing control to the Afrikaners, repressive laws, such as the Native Land Act (1913), were already in existence in order to protect the interests of white farmers against the economic threat of the growing petit-bourgeois African community.

According to McKinley, it was from this social class, that the leadership of the ANC emerged. The ANC was formed in 1912 with a reformist agenda to protect the class interests of its petit-bourgeois leadership as well as what they perceived to be the general welfare of all Africans.

Initially, through constitutional means, the ANC vainly relied on the South African administration and on what they perceived as the British sense of 'fair play and justice' in order to have their grievances addressed.

The strategy of petitions, deputation's and delegations was a failure. Due to the narrow class interests of the leadership and its reformist agenda, the ANC had failed to attract sustained support from the indigenous masses. Therefore, by the 1930s, the organisation had become dormant.

The ANC remained relatively moribund until the late 1940s, when the leadership was replaced with a more radical and younger element who, appealing for a broad-based mass struggle, demanded not reforms but national freedom and self-determination. A close alliance with the SACP (South African Communist Party) was also established. This was set against the background of increased repression against the black population and the entrenchment of the apartheid state by the Afrikaner-dominated National Party.

In 1961, inspired by other liberation struggles, some leading ANC members formed an armed organisation called Umkhonto We Sizwe (better known as MK - Spear of the Nation). Despite calls for a mass-based struggle, the ANC's programme of mass struggle failed to materialise inside the country. Thus, MK leaders began to externalise the armed struggle by setting up launching pads and training camps in countries such as Tanzania, while SACP members linked to MK were particularly useful in gaining economic and military support from the USSR and other Soviet bloc countries.

Meanwhile in 1962, the SACP, who had a strong influence within the ANC, adopted a new programme known as The Road to South African Freedom. The new direction involved a united class movement but with the working class as the leading force in order to defeat apartheid. It had two stages; firstly, to bring about a national democratic revolution and secondly, a working class vanguard that would ensure a victory for socialism.

Despite the ANC's revolutionary rhetoric that the armed struggle would lead to a seizure of power, according to McKinley, the ANC's externalised strategy and the SACP's strategy of mobilising a united class front ensured that a 'negotiated solution' was the only logical outcome.

Although the armed struggle was unsuccessful, the ANC's anti-apartheid campaign was beginning to bear fruit due to growing support from abroad.

The ANC's call for South African goods to be boycotted and for international capitalism to dis-invest from the country made it clear, as early as the mid-1970s, to some sections of the ruling class that if capitalism was to survive then apartheid would have to be jettisoned. In other words apartheid would have to be replaced with a de-racialised, capitalist state that would accommodate a growing black middle class in a free market economy.

However, it was not until the mid-1980s that this process of accommodation could be properly initiated. During this period, there was a rebirth of mass struggle within the country. However, due to the ANC's externalised strategy and its growing process of accommodative policies with domestic and international capital, it was unable to provide a durable foundation for an internally-based, mass struggle led by the working class that would overthrow the state.

Nevertheless by 1990, the South African President, de Klerk, began to implement a process of coercion, co-option and compromise that would culminate into a 'negotiated settlement' with the ANC leadership. According to McKinley, the compromises made by the ANC to gain political power enabled the economic interests of the ruling elite in post-apartheid South Africa to remain virtually unchanged.

In addition, McKinley states: "An organisation that claims a liberation mandate from 'the people' should not be used as a conveyor belt for the strategic (or class) agenda of certain leaders. Similarly, people who answer the calls of those leaders to struggle, should not be used as pawns in the chess game of politics, no matter what the rationalisations."

McKinley's book is an informative account of how the leadership of South Africa's liberation struggle made fundamental compromises in order to reach power. Poverty and oppression is still the order of the day for South Africa's indigenous black population. Thus, illustrating that the South African 'peace process' was nothing more than an unprincipled compromise.
-- Eugene Egan
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Cromwell's Conquest

Oliver Cromwell has for most Irish people become the personification of barbarity, religious intolerance and English conquest. The conflict in the Balkans this past decade has given us a new term for describing the attempt by one nation or people to remove or exterminate another people on grounds of race, language or religion, 'ethnic cleansing'.

Ireland experienced 'ethnic cleansing' long before such a term existed, on a grand scale and in its crudest form, in what has become known as the Cromwellian Conquest.

However, according to Tom Reilly in his book, Cromwell: An Honourable Enemy Cromwell's only crime was perhaps excessive zeal in attempting to bring to the Irish people the benefits of the Puritan faith and free them from the power of the Catholic Church, to bring them from their "primitive" state into the modern age. Indeed, to read Tom Reilly's book one would be forgiven for coming to the conclusion that in fact Cromwell came to Ireland as a liberator rather than an oppressor who came to "Break the power of a company of lawless rebels".

Reilly loses all sense of objectivity with regard to his subject, totally disregarding any evidence or testimony which conflicts with his version of history. Throughout Reilly attempts to defend Cromwell's systematic murder of priests by assuming that they were probably bearing arms. He dismisses an account from the Bishop of Wexford, Nicholas French, describing the murder of his gardener and sacristan by saying they were both probably "armed defenders". Yet in the first chapter he writes: "Whether or not they [priests] were [armed] cannot, in fact, be proven one way or the other" (p 23).

Likewise Reilly constantly paints Cromwell's campaign in Ireland as one fought strictly within the rules of seventeenth century warfare. At one point he even refers to Cromwell's honourable dealings with the native population. This is contradicted in the opening chapter when he described Cromwell's campaign "as a vengeful mission of retributive justice" (p22).

Both Drogheda and Wexford present clear evidence that Cromwell departed from the norms of seventeenth century warfare. In the case of Drogheda there is ample testimony that in many cases 'quarter' [terms which offered soldiers and civilians their lives in return for surrendering] was offered then ruthlessly withdrawn following surrender. For two to three days Cromwell gave his troops free rein within the walls of Drogheda.

In the midst of this unrestrained slaughter Reilly would have the reader believe that not one civilian was killed, and any evidence or testimony to the contrary is dismissed out of hand as propaganda. In Cromwell's own despatch to the speaker of the English Parliament reporting the capture of Drogheda he writes: "I am persuaded that this is a righteous judgement of God upon these barbarous wretches, who have imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood and that it will tend to prevent the effusion of blood for the future, which are the satisfactory grounds for such actions, which otherwise but work remorse and regret."

The final sentence in the dispatch which refers to the fact that "many inhabitants were slain" is discounted by Reilly as a forgery added later. His evidence for such an assumption he draws from Thomas Carlyle and Charles Firth, both admirers and biographers of Cromwell, neither of whom produced any evidence to substantiate their claim.

Accounts of a massacre in Wexford are dismissed as the "Spiteful prattling of clergy". An appeal by the Governor of Wexford town for terms of surrender guaranteeing religious freedom and the preservation of Catholic church property is described by Reilly as bordering on the ludicrous. In reply Cromwell decreed that the practice of the Catholic religion would not be tolerated. And the fact that priests were a particular target of Cromwell's forces is shown when Cromwell's states that any clergy found would be "punished" for their alleged role in the Rising of 1641.

All of this would most certainly put both Wexford and Drogheda well beyond the "rules governing seventeenth century warfare", indeed even a battle-hardened veteran of the English Civil War as Edmund Ludlow described his shock at the "extraordinary severity" shown by Cromwell.

Indeed, if such widespread slaughter was the norm in the seventeenth century, one asks why have similar accounts not emanated from the English Civil War? The answer is clear and is one which even Reilly is forced to concur with. Whilst the English Civil War was a war fought between Englishmen, the war in Ireland was one of conquest against a people deemed inferior, "In a Nation we have an undoubted right to it".

What becomes clear by studying the available evidence is that the slaughter in Drogheda and Wexford was intended to strike fear into the native population, making clear the consequences of resisting English rule, thereby minimising the use of Cromwell's resources and time. Cromwell was anxious to return to England as quickly as possible as the political situation there was far from settled, thus making it essential from his point of view that the 'Irish Question' be settled as soon as practicable.

Reilly also pays scant attention to the opposition of the 'Leveller' faction within the New Model Army' to any invasion of Ireland. Instead of examining the motivation behind the 'mutiny', Reilly disregards it in a few sentences as simply a large army growing restless due to inactivity.

This of course is a totally simplistic analysis. In fact as Peter Beresford Ellis points out in his book Hell or Connacht, the Levellers had quite a substantial amount of support within the English New Model Army. The Levellers were formed in 1645 by John Lilliburn, on a programme that was Revolutionary, Republican and Democratic. The name 'Leveller' came from their desire to "Level Men's Estates".

They believed that the sovereignty of England should reside in a Parliament elected by "Manhood Suffrage", with redistribution of seats to make for fair representation in annual biennial Parliaments. They demanded that Government be decentralised to local committees. They also sought economic reforms, complete equality before the law, abolition of trading monopolies, security of tenure for all, the laying open of all enclosures, no conscription to the Army, the abolition of tithes, complete freedom of religious worship and drastic law reform.

So, whilst Cromwell and the other leaders of the English Commonwealth drew up their plans on invasion, the Levellers demanded to know why English soldiers should conquer another nation at the "behest of men who had enslaved England to a Government by will and not law".

The Leveller's journal Moderate Intelligencer of May 2-10 1649 justified the 1641 Rising as the attempt of a conquered people to free themselves, a pamphlet entitled The English Soldiers Standard to Repaire too on April 25 expressed similar sentiments. Cromwell, sensing the threat the Levellers posed to his proposed subjection of Ireland warned the Council of States of the English Commonwealth: "You have no other way [to] deal with these men but to break them in pieces, if you do not break them, they will break you."

The Leveller leaders, Lilliburn, Walwyn, Prince and Overton, were arrested. However, the Leveller movement in a pamphlet entitled An Agreement of the Free People of England reiterated the fact that England had no right in Ireland.

On April 27, 1649 a regiment in London mutinied. This was however quickly suppressed. One soldier, Robert Lockyer, was executed in St Paul's Churchyard, giving the Levellers their first martyr. On May 2 two regiments arrived at Burford, en route to Ireland. An officer named William Thompson took over, this mutiny was crushed by Cromwell personally. Thompson and two others were executed.

This effectively marked the end of Leveller resistance. However what is made clear is that even within his own army some could see Cromwell's campaign in Ireland for what it really was, a war of conquest.

In fact, Cromwell had much to gain personally from the invasion of Ireland. In 1642, following the passing of the 'Adventurer's Act' by the English parliament, the aim of which was to defray the cost of subduing Ireland by inviting contributions from the wealthy merchant class, in return for which they were guaranteed land in Ireland following the conquest. Cromwell contributed £2,050. He was subsequently granted land in the Barony of Eglish, Co Offaly.

The Cromwellian Conquest of Ireland was one of the most brutal and traumatic in Irish history, the effects of which resonate even today. The deaths, transplantation and transportation into slavery of a third of the population has had a long-lasting effect on the psyche of the Irish people.

The historian James Leyburn has said of Cromwell's campaign in Ireland: "What Cromwell did deserves to be ranked with the horrors perpetrated by Genghis Khan. His 'pacification' of Ireland was so thorough that it left scars on that country which have never been forgotten or forgiven."

Cromwell is famously reported to have instructed a portrait painted to paint him "warts and all". Tom Reilly, in a book which masquerades as history, has clearly failed to follow this advice.
-- Deasún Ó Daltún
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