A riposte to Kevin Myers latest "jingoistic paen to the status quo"

national | rights, freedoms and repression | feature Monday February 09, 2009 17:43 by Patrick Coyle

el pequeño generalisimo

There is a tendency to dismiss the rantings of Kevin Myers as mere guff designed to sell newspapers. However, this would be to ignore the collateral damage his phosphorous cluster bomb prose inflicts. He has confounded his critics yet again by managing to fill copious column inches of Friday's Irish Independent with another tired tirade, albeit couched in his usual purple prose. Just when we thought he must surely run out of steam, he has managed to dish up yet more of the kind of verbiage that displays a yearning for those mythical days when the croppies knew their place and were content to doff their caps to their betters. His litany of collateral damage includes single mothers, travellers, immigrants, the Irish language, 1916, Muslims in Ireland, Palestinians and prisoners in Guantanamo Bay. His salvo, attacking the legacy of Bob Doyle and his comrades who fought in Spain against fascism, should be a call to make next Saturday's commemoration in their honour a defiant rebuttal of all Myers' and his ilk stand for.

Related Links:
• Myers, Gaza and the BNP
• Mothers of bastards?
• Bob Doyle obit
• Bob Doyle commemoration
• Ireland and the Spanish Civil War

Meeting Saturday: 12:00 Garden of Remembrance
Meeting Saturday: 13:00 Liberty Hall
Those who march on Saturday will commemorate Bob Doyle and his comrades with pride. They will also be standing against everything Kevin Myers stands for. That would be reason enough to be there.

In a piece headlined 'The devil might indeed have the best tunes but it is the lefties who have easily the best myths', (Click Here) he displays once more his ability to spout twaddle cloaked in the language of realpolitik. The lefties may have the best myths but the righties have cornered the market when it comes to propaganda, historical revisionism and sweeping caricaturisation.

Myers is a professional peddler of myth - most of it glib and replete with generalisations. In keeping with his penchant for soft targets, Myers' latest victim is a man who is no longer around to defend himself. Much to Myers' dismay, there are plenty others around to do so on his behalf. Bob Doyle, the last of the Irish members of the International Brigade who fought to defend Spanish democracy against Franco's military coup, died on January 23. A march will be held this Saturday from The Garden of Remembrance to Liberty Hall in Doyle's native Dublin at 12 o'clock, where a wreath will be laid at the memorial to those Irishmen who gave their lives in that war against fascism.

We make no apologies for exercising our right to march in celebration of those who went to fight fascism against overwhelming odds. The so-called great powers sat on their hands while Franco, Hitler and Mussolini combined to subvert the democratically elected Spanish government. But perhaps that is not Myers' type of democracy. He no doubt yearns for the good old days of rotten boroughs and gerrymandering or for a dictatorship under Franco, when a defeated Republican Spain was carved up among the generals and the large landowners. At least the peasants knew their places then.

As a keen student of all things military, Myers is no stranger to the tired old tactic of the dawn salvo designed to soften up a stubbornly entrenched enemy. But those pesky Reds continue to prove resistent to the bombardments. Unfortunately for Myers, his scattergun approach continues to be so wide of the mark, it encourages the lefties to dismiss the bombasts as nothing more than well-written guff designed to maximise newspaper sales. However, his verbal phosphorus cluster bombs have wreaked their predictable collateral damage and it is time to counter.

Myers' ideology is a strange concoction. Posturing as the boy who dares to tell the king he has no clothes, his career is, in fact, nothing more than a jingoistic paen to the status quo. Rather than the so-called great and good, his litany of collateral damage includes single mothers, travellers, immigrants, the Irish language, 1916, Muslims in Ireland, Palestinians and prisoners in Guantanamo Bay. This is the man who supports the war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

A summary dalliance through his writings would include the following shameful episodes:

* Single mothers "Consciously embark upon a career of mothering bastards because it seems a good way of getting money and accommodation from the State".
* "A hugely disproportionate amount of rural crime is by a handful of Travellers ...they have generated an atmosphere of terror in rural areas unlike anything Ireland has experienced since the 1920s."
* "True pride of place in the European imbecility stakes must surely go to Ireland, which now has some 60,000 Muslims officially living here, though the figure is probably more like 100,000, the vast majority having arrived since 9/11. Now, just how stupid is that?"
* "The wide-eyed boy-child we saved, 20 years or so ago, is now a priapic, Kalashnikov-bearing hearty, siring children whenever the whim takes him."
* "Considering the act of treachery which the Rising constituted to their national survival, the British actually behaved with an almost indecent clemency in executing so few insurgents."

And, lest we forget, the immigrant Council of Ireland last year lodged a complaint to the Gardaí and the National Consultative Committee on Racism and Interculturalism about a Myers' piece entitled 'Africa is giving nothing to anyone - apart from Aids'.

We who will march next Saturday to remember Bob Doyle and his comrades who fought to defend Republican Spain will celebrate humanity, not myth. We were privileged to know some of these personally and we know what they stood for - we do not need to deal in the kind of snide half-truths propagated by Myers and his ilk. We know what side we are on.

The legendary orator of the Spanish Republic Dolores Ibarruri - La Pasionaria - summed up the importance of men like Bob Doyle, not just to the battle for Spain but as an inspiration for future generations in her farewell speech to the International Brigades in 1938. How prescient her words seem given the times in which we now find ourselves - and given the propaganda that commentators such as Myers and his cronies continue to rehash.

Ibarruri said: "You can go proudly. You are history. You are legend. You are the heroic example of democracy's solidarity and universality in the face of the vile and accommodating spirit of those who interpret democratic principles with their eyes on hoards of wealth or corporate shares which they want to safeguard from all risk."

Bob Doyle was the last Irish Brigadista; a link to that heroic struggle for Spain in the 1930s. He was an inspiration to all who met him or listened to his oratory, or heard his life story. His place in history is secure. But Mr Myers' place in history is equally secure. Your esteemed columnist's epitaph will be: 'Here lies Plausible Kevin Myers: Scourge of the weak, of the voiceless, of the poorest of the poor".

Those who march on Saturday will commemorate Bob Doyle and his comrades with pride. They will also be standing against everything Kevin Myers stands for. That would be reason enough to be there.