George Russell writes on the destructiveness of civil war in open letter to republicans
Dublin, 29 December 1922 – An open letter to Irish republicans, penned by the writer George Russell, also known by his pen name Æ, has appealed for them to abandon their guerrilla campaign and accept a democratic solution to the current civil strife.
The open letter, published in Irish newspapers this morning, does not question the desire for complete independence, but rather takes issue with the ‘means to those ends’, namely the use of physical force, that is being pursued. The effects of civil war, Mr Russell says, are more destructive than those of other conflicts, because in civil war ‘more hateful passions are let loose’ owing to the ‘greater natural affections’ that had first to be overcome. In a civil war, he added, the effects can never be confined to the organism of the state ‘any more than a fever can be confined to one limb in the body.’
‘The whole body politic suffers, the people far more than the State...In sickness the germs which cause the illness multiply and run riot over the whole body. So when violence is relied on rather than reason, the impulse to violence is intensified on all sides, the most powerful mood evoking its likeness in characters with any affinity to it. Those who are normally restrained from violence in a settled order break out, and we have violence everywhere.’
‘It is not you and the Free State troops alone who employ force, but every rascal in the country, and many, alas! who were not rascals, but merely morally weak, and who are impelled thereto by the prevalent mood.’
‘The bandit, the bully, the lecherous, all use violence, and they do their deeds under the aegis of your ideal, and you cannot, while employing force in guerrilla warfare, evade popular attribution to you of responsibility for many of their acts. For some of the most terrible deeds done, whether your leaders approved or not, they must accept responsibility, for in this guerrilla warfare men are split up into small groups acting on their own initiative.’
Mr Russell tells the republicans that it is not demanded of them that they swear allegiance to the Free State or the ‘titular head of any empire’. ‘There are few in any nation who take such vows to the State or its rulers. It is not demanded. If they kill no man, violate no women, steal no person’s goods, they are free as you would be to live their own lives, worshipping such gods, heroes and ideals as they choose.’
[Editor's note: This is an article from Century Ireland, a fortnightly online newspaper, written from the perspective of a journalist 100 years ago, based on news reports of the time.]
