"Champions of Liberty in all lands, be strong in hope. You are calumniated in your day; I was misrepresented by the loyalists of my day. Had I failed, the scaffold would have been my doom. But now my enemies pay me honor. Had I failed, I would have deserved the same honor. I stood true to my cause, even when victory had fled. In that I merited success. You must act likewise."
- George Washington
Эамон де Валера, между прочим, был очень хорошим оратором. Ну это так, в порядке рекомендации.) А дальше - еще пачка цитат, из его речи перед обществом друзей Индии (Нью-Йорк, 1920 год). Общая идея - в родстве судеб Ирландии и Индии, но дело даже не в этом. Очень хороший инсайт в политику и идеологию - хотя и за более поздний период, чем Пасхальное Восстание. Это уже та стратегия, которая показала себя успешной и была широко признана. Кажется, есть о чем задуматься.
From a remark of one of the previous speakers it might have been inferred that Ireland was conquered by Britain. No, Ireland was never conquered. No nation, that, like Washington, stands true to its cause under all circumstances, ever is conquered. A nation is conquered only when it abandons its cause, and definitely gives way to despair. Ireland has never done that and her conduct in the past is a surety that she will never do it.
A British statesman once spoke of the increasing Irish population as a menace to Britain, and in a few years an artificial famine was brought about and they killed off our people by the million. Do we doubt that in full consciousness, they act likewise today in India? The people of India, we are told by the British apologists, are backward and ignorant, lazy and unable to rule themselves. They have made exactly the same pretense about Ireland at other times. The Indians are "mere" Asiatics, we are told. We were the "mere" Irish.
All peoples are necessarily backward when you deliberately debar them from progress. They are necessarily ignorant when you shut them out from education and withhold knowledge from them. They are necessarily lazy when you deprive them of the means or the incentive to work. They are necessarily unable to rule themselves when you deprive them of all opportunity for trying. One cannot swim if the water to swim in, or the opportunity to enter it, is denied.
More: about simplicity, morals, self-reliance, the problem of war and peaceAnother frequent pretense is that these questions, like the question of India and the question of Ireland, are in their very nature difficult and "knotty." My friends, you know well there is no peculiar difficulty in them. They are the same simple problems which, as individuals, we have to face whenever there is a conflict between our consciences directing us to do right and our selfish inclinations inducing us to do what we know is wrong.
There is little difficulty in solving these problems except the difficulty there is in doing what we know to be the right thing when our instincts make us wish to do something different. The British government, the British nation, the British laboring classes, cannot have it both ways any more than the individual can. They, no more than we, can compromise with justice and right.
We must not be satisfied simply with admiring the right and talking about it. We must nerve ourselves to do the right! and so must governments, and there is no justification for them if they refuse.
It is only through the influence of fear and the pressure of force that Britain has ever been brought to consider even partially the claims of Ireland. We have never been able to achieve anything except when we compelled England to rule us with the naked sword. It is, of course, always by the sword that she has maintained herself in Ireland, as in India, but she prefers to maintain herself with the sword in its scabbard if she can.
The English are very sensitive to what the world thinks of them. They have long played the hypocrite with success; they hate now to see the mask torn from them. Today they are more afraid of it than ever, for their conduct at the Peace Conference has made them suspect to the whole world. The great moral forces of the world are with India and with Ireland today. We must use them to the full, but we must never forget that we must ultimately rely upon ourselves if we are to be successful. The policy of Sinn Fein, precisely because it is ultimately this policy of self-reliance, has made Ireland stronger today than she has ever been. It must be reliance upon ourselves to endure everything, to brave everything which the advancement of our cause may require. Men who are ready to face death for what they know to be right cannot be beaten, cannot fail to be victorious.
And here I come to the policy of physical force. Can we, struggling for our freedom, afford to fling away any weapon by which nations in the past have achieved their freedom; any weapon by which, in conceivable circumstances, nations may win their freedom? We in Ireland hold today that we may not. On that account our opponents call us the physical force party. But we are not a physical force party only. The fact that we are making an appeal to the moral forces of the world is sufficient to show that we do not rely upon the sword as the only weapon.
If those who advocate the use of moral force only assist us now that we appeal to them, there will be no need of any appeal to the other forces. No one appeals to physical force except as a last resort when there is no hope of securing justice otherwise.
If ever the sword was legitimate, it is in a case such as ours. It can only be a question of prudence, when and where and how we should use it. Like Thomas Francis Meagher, we of today in Ireland will not stigmatize the sword, but there is no people upon the whole earth who so desire that a world condition should be brought about in which the sword should become unnecessary as we do.
Éamon de Valera,
President of the Republic of Ireland