The Executions - 100 years ago today

[alcatel]

Night Night my little barnyard bigot.
Make sure to bring a glass of water to bed with you.
It will help with the hangover.

I'm here all night darling.

[alcatel]

So you do suffer fools gladly so.

Obviously, since I replied to you.

[Dalton23]

I'm here all night darling.

Thats great and all but i said night night to Barney not you.

[alcatel]

Thats great and all but i said night night to Barney not you.

Scraping the bottom of the barrel for responses now.
Freakazoid.
It's time
To say.
Good Morning.

[Cassandra]

After Vietnam the Americans have kept a tighter rein on media. Is is 'embedded"ie more controlled.
And they have not shown graphic pictures of wounded US soldiers since Vietnam-which turned many Americans against the Vietnam war.

No need, walk the streets, see these shell shocked individuals gleaming with pharmaceutical sunshine.
Technology and medicine have improved, more people survive. But even these surviours are sure they fought a righteous war...

[Forrest]

Right I wasn't gonna get involved in this discussion but feel that I have to make a comment.
Dalton 23 calls the leaders of the rising as terrorists. What the fuck is the definition of a terrorist?
Ulster was always the part of Ireland the English couldn't control so what did they do ?
They committed genocide killing the native people, their livestock, destroyed what crops they had so any survivors could not live there afterwards.
Then they created the plantation of Ulster bringing in protestants from England and Scotland.
They discriminated against the native people on the island of Ireland bringing in the penal laws making the practising of Catholicism a crime punishable by death. Hundreds of years of occupation,murder, genocide , theft, rape & pillage.
Yet Dalton 666 reckons that the leaders of the rebellion are terrorists?
When we have pricks celebrating the battle of the boyne over 320 years after the event then how can we ever move forward.?
As I said in an earlier post there is more than 1 view from the North, it's just whos view you prefer to listen to.
P.S. Thanks for this informative thread Forrest.

This thread was intended purely to mark the 100th anniversary of the execution of the Rebels following the 1916 Rising.
I didn't want it to descend into an argument after Dalton decided, firstly, to poke fun, and then be a hypocrite.
Thanks, Barney, for your brief history on the start the partition of Ireland. Glad you enjoyed the thread.

Terrorism = Oliver Cromwell, acting on behalf of the 'Commonwealth'
Cromwell is one of the most controversial figures in the history of the British Isles, considered a regicidal dictator by historians such as David Sharp,[3] a military dictator by Winston Churchill,[4] but a hero of liberty by John Milton, Thomas Carlyle and Samuel Rawson Gardiner, and a class revolutionary by Leon Trotsky.[5] In a 2002 BBC poll in Britain, Cromwell was selected as one of the ten greatest Britons of all time.[6] However, his measures against Catholics in Scotland and Ireland have been characterised as genocidal or near-genocidal,[7] and in Ireland his record is harshly criticised.[8]

[Clueless]

Sure history is laced with such acts of terrorism - many pograms against the Jews, the Romans wiped out Carthage and many more civilisations, Pol pot in Cambodia, Stalin in Russia, the Spanish conquistadors in South America, the American Indians, the Mauri in New Zealand and Australia to name a few- feel free to correct and expand

[alcatel]

No need, walk the streets, see these shell shocked individuals gleaming with pharmaceutical sunshine.
Technology and medicine have improved, more people survive. But even these surviours are sure they fought a righteous war...

Many Vietnam vets, in the end had doubts about the righteousness of their war and when when they start questioning the purpose and rightness of their war, and their public's large scale rejection of it, it can add to the psychological casualties.
The recent fiascos in Iraq and Afghanistan have had less of an overall impact on American society than Vietnam because less numbers overall were involved,(army and reserves made do more than one tour of duty unlike Vietnam, no dfaft of civilians to fill the ranks and less graphic images on TV than in the Vietnam era.

[Westsidex]

Just after the Easter Rising finished and the executions started, The Irish Times prophesised that the rebellion would “pass into history
with the equally unsuccessful insurrections of the past”.
What would have happened had the British not executed the leaders of the Rising is one of the great imponderables of history.
Would the mood of anger and dismay at the destruction and loss of life have remained?
Would the hostility towards the rebels evident on the streets of Dublin after the rebellion have persisted if they had not been executed?
Veteran Nationalist MP John Dillon was sure, even while the executions were going on, that they were “letting loose a river of blood”.
It was the first time the British had the bulk of the Irish population on their side in a rebellion, he told the British prime minister Herbert Asquith,
yet the executions had changed all that.

Disastrous aftermath
The blame for the disastrous aftermath of the Easter Rising lies firstly with Gen John Maxwell, who was given “plenary powers” to deal with the rebels as he saw fit.
The British government effectively washed its hands of responsibility. What demanded a carefully calibrated political response was dealt with instead by the brutal
instrument of martial justice.
The British used war-time regulations to deal with the rebels. The dreaded Defence of the Realm Act was invoked to stymie anything regarded as injurious to the
British war effort. Those involved with the so-called mosquito press or those making anti-recruitment speeches were dealt with by the Act.
Crucially, it allowed those regarded as having assisted the enemy to be tried by field court martial. It involved three army officers, irrespective of whether
or not they had legal training.

Affront to justice
Those British officers chosen to have the power of life or death over the rebels were chosen simply because they were available.
Even by the standards of the day, the executions were an affront to justice. They were held in secret, the accused were allowed no defence and the executions
were carried out without leave to appeal.
It is clear from the paucity of documentations surrounding them, and the sheer volume of trials processed, that they were designed with only one outcome in mind
– the execution of the rebels involved.
Many of the leaders, most notably Patrick Pearse and Seán MacDiarmada expected to be executed and, indeed, sought it.
They had, after all, invoked the aid of Britain’s mortal enemy, Germany.
But there were also precedents from another part of the British empire which suggested a more judicious process might have been appropriate.
In late 1914, Gen Louis Botha’s Union of South Africa faced an internal revolt from his fellow countrymen who had aligned themselves with Germany.
The revolt was suppressed but none of the leaders were executed lest they create martyrs for the cause.
The Irish Parliamentary Party leader John Redmond and his deputy John Dillon invoked the Botha example, but they had reckoned without the bovine
stupidity of Maxwell, who was given a free hand to do what he saw fit.

Historic mistake
In the end, he ordered 15 men to be executed and commuted the other sentences.
By the time Asquith had arrived in Dublin just after the last executions, the damage had been done. Britain had made a historic mistake.
As George Bernard Shaw said afterwards: “It is absolutely impossible to slaughter a man in this position without making him a martyr and a hero,
even though the day before the rising he may have been only a minor poet.
“The shot Irishmen will now take their places beside Emmet and the Manchester Martyrs in Ireland and beside the heroes of Poland and Serbia and Belgium in Europe,
and nothing in heaven or on earth can prevent it.”

Imagine fighting a war you know you cant win, know youll be executed for and 100 years later the place is far worse than when the brits had it? I love to wonder would they do it all over again. I doubt it.

Westside.

[alcatel]

Imagine fighting a war you know you cant win, know youll be executed for and 100 years later the place is far worse than when the brits had it? I love to wonder would they do it all over again. I doubt it.

Westside.

Maybe they were glass half full people, unlike you;-)