Roger Casement The View
City and county libraries, along with other cultural bodies, make a vital contribution to public education, not least in remembering and deepening understanding of important anniversaries.
The relatively new Lexicon on the seafront in Dún Laoghaire is hosting two exhibitions at the present time, co-sponsored by the Peruvian and the Polish Embassies respectively. Both use the relatively economical but effective technique of illustrated explanatory panels, with text that distils and incorporates some of the latest knowledge on the subject. Not involving much in the way of physical artefacts, the panels are easily reproduced, and can be exhibited in more than one venue or one country at the same time, as well as being easy to move around.
The first exhibition concerns a native of Dún Laoghaire from an Ulster family, and is entitled ‘Crossing Borders, Forging Republics: Roger Casement and his Experience in Peru’. Casement was a long-established member of the British Consular Service, who investigated and reported to the Foreign Office on gross humanitarian abuse of native workers in the rubber plantations.
On the first occasion, it was the Congo in 1904, which resulted in their owner King Leopold II of the Belgians having to surrender them as his personal demesne to the Belgian state.
Some years later, in 1910-11 he investigated similar activities on the borders of Peru in 1910-11 in the upper reaches of the Amazon Basin, which were ultimately the responsibility of a company quoted on the London Stock Exchange, where the victims were members of the Putumayo tribe. His officially published report contributed, according to the Exhibition, to the subsequent collapse of the Amazon rubber trade.
Report
It should be highlighted that Casement arranged for a copy of his report to be sent to Rome. A year later in June 1912, Pope Pius X issued a strongly worded encyclical Lacrimabili Statu on the Indians of South America addressed to the archbishops and bishops of Latin America, saying that “when we consider the crimes and outrages still committed against them, our heart is filled with horror”.
He asked “what can be so cruel and barbarous as to scourge men and brand them with hot iron, often for most trivial causes, often for a mere lust of cruelty” in turn derived from “the lust of lucre”.
Some six million Poles died during the war, of which three million were Jews”
Given that these things happened far from the seats of power, he urged his episcopal brethren “to give special care and thought to this cause”, and he enjoined on them to remember that Christian charity “holds all men, without distinction of nation or colour, as true brethren”. They should condemn any form of enslavement, as his predecessor Pope Benedict XIV had done in 1741.
The detailed accounts of Casement’s mission have been edited in two volumes by Angus Mitchell, the second one published by the Irish Manuscripts Commission. In a letter to his friend, the historian Alice Stopford Green, he confessed that he was looking at all this “with the eyes of another race – of a people once hunted themselves”, and at a people “whose instinct of life was not of something to be eternally appraised at ‘its market price’”.
In 1913, after his retirement, he was indignant at severe hardship that he found in Connemara, and at the lack of interest in the so-called ‘United Kingdom’, and wishing that “something could be done to remove the stain of this enduring Irish Putumayo from our native land”.
Casement’s idealism led him to seek succour from Germany as war broke out. Although he was executed in 1916 and his reputation cynically and gratuitously disfigured, he nevertheless remains one of the most important architects of the independence movement.
The one element that jars a little is a photograph of the Casement champion Dr Herbert Mackey with Captain Otto Walter, who landed Casement at Banna Strand, but who was earlier said to be responsible for firing the torpedo that sank the Lusitania in 1915. What is not said is that there was a large loss of life, and that it nearly brought the US into the war at that point.
Despots
The second exhibition at the Lexicon, ‘Fighting and Suffering: Polish Citizens during World War II’, marks the 80th anniversary of the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, the immediate cause of the outbreak of war. Poland disappeared from the map of Europe following three partitions between 1772-95, sponsored to their eternal shame by ‘enlightened despots’ so-called in Prussia, Russia, and Austria, but was reconstituted at the end of World War I, when those defeated empires were broken up. The western allies, Britain and France, provided no material help to the Poles, while the Soviet Union, having previously been staunchly anti-fascist, joined in the carve-up, while helping itself with German agreement in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939 to the Baltic States, which were extinguished for 50 years.
While an estimated 70,000 Poles died fighting the Germans in the five weeks of war, the Soviets massacred tens of thousands from the Polish élite in 1940 at Katyn, something long denied, and embarrassingly uncovered by the Germans, when the Soviet Union, having been invaded, was on the Allied side.
Casement’s idealism led him to seek succour from Germany as war broke out”
According to the Exhibition, some six million Poles died during the war, of which three million were Jews. The Warsaw ghetto uprising was brutally put down by the Germans, without hindrance from advancing Soviet troops in 1944.
The Polish Government in exile in England supplied military manpower to the allied effort, and reminded people by poster that they were ‘the First to Fight’.
At the end of the war Poland fell into the Soviet sphere of influence, and was communist-ruled till 1989.
However, the strong position of the Catholic Church, the election of a Polish Pope John Paul II in 1978 and the Gdansk strikes which brought Lech Walesa to prominence led to Poland playing a key role in the unraveling of the Soviet bloc. Current authoritarian tendencies are regrettable, but should be corrected, if at all possible, without creating ruptures.