THE PROSPECT of Sir Leon Brittan becoming president of the European Commission is one ripe with delicious irony and unbearable poignancy. The appointment of a Jew to the highest position within Europe is a perfect way to end the century of the Holocaust. Hitler and his numerous allies might have exterminated the greater part of Europe's Jewish population, but the cosmopolitanism which he saw as being most powerfully represented by the Jewish people is something we now call popular culture. It is everywhere triumphant; and the final solution to the Nazi problem would be the elevation of a Jew to the presidency of the emerging pan-European state, even as the Deutschmark is abolished.
It is not a question of Sir Leon being a nice or admirable man; he is a successful politician, so he is unlikely to be either. He probably has more ambition in his toenail clippings than most of have in our entire lives; and of all the vices, ambition can be the most dangerous, for it is bottomless and insatiable; little wonder Shakespeare had Cardinal Wolsey declare: "Fling away ambition; by that sin the angels fell."
Third Reich
So Sir Leon is not an angel; but he is a Jew, one of the species of whom Hitler said publicly on January 30th, 1939 that in the event of war, "the result will not be the Bolshevisation of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe." It would the most perfect riposte to the Third Reich that 60 years after it unleashed the awesome powers of its Holocaust machine, the ultimate refutation of Hitler's barbarities could be uttered by a free people of a free continent and the elevation of a Jew to a sort of European presidency.
I have beside me a copy of Hitler's tiresome and rambling manifesto, Mein Kampf, published in English with impeccable timing just 60 years ago. It was translated and annotated by one James Murphy, and his introduction suggests that he was an enthusiastic supporter of Herr Hitler. Was he Irish? I don't know; but what I do know is that there is still expiation to be made for what was not done at that time - for the Jews who sought refuge here but who were kept out of Ireland and who, denied the sanctuary of this place, were murdered.
I am not normally in favour of changing street names or removing statues to suit the mood of the time; I deplore Cathal Brugha's role in the start of the Civil War, but Cathal Brugha Street should remain as it is. It is part of history. But there are things which should revolt us, and those who freely served the Third Reich when under no obligation to do so should not properly be honoured in a society which respects itself and respects the essential dignities and freedoms of the human race.
Sean Russell
Sean Russell was an IRA man who freely served the Third Reich, for which he was smuggled into Germany from the US. In 1936 - the year after the Nuremberg laws - he had written to the German ambassador in Washington apologising for the Irish Government's refusal to grant the Nazis a seaplane base in Galway. His involuntary colleague in Germany, Frank Ryan, who had been captured serving with the International Brigade in Germany, probably spoke truly for the culture of the IRA at the time when he declared in 1932: "While we have fists, hands and boots to use, and guns if necessary, we will not allow speech to traitors."
Russell and Ryan were sent by submarine to Ireland, not because the Nazis were interested in starting a civil rights movement in Northern Ireland, but because such men were useful tools in Hitler's war against civilisation. Hitler did not particularly wish to subvert Irish neutrality, but Russell in particular could be seen as a stooge whose day would come, as Quisling's had in Norway, when Ireland was to be incorporated into the Third Reich.
What was the mood in Ireland? It was hardly pro-Allies. Clare and Sligo county councils objected to regimental insignia on the graves of British servicemen whose bodies had been washed ashore, and the Government assented to similar objections from the Department of Foreign Affairs "until the war was over" - i.e., when it was clear who had won. Had Russell, the most capable IRA leader of his generation, landed successfully, who knows what he might have achieved? But he did not, dying at sea, where he was buried.
Dublin Corporation
There is only one statue that I know of to an Irishman who died in the second World War. It is to Sean Russell, and stands on land at Fairview donated after the war by Dublin Corporation to the National Graves Association for that purpose, even though the true horrors of Nazidom were by then fully understood. We can have no doubts what a successful outcome to Russell's mission might have brought: a furtherance of Nazi war aims, and much bloodshed in Northern Ireland. That this man alone should be honoured of all the Irish victims of the second World War is a true abomination. Who has the courage to say that this statue is a gratuitously obscene insult to the Jews who perished in the Holocaust, and to the Irishmen and women who died for freedom, and should therefore be removed?