Charles Townshend

This is a fascinating, detailed (to the extent possible) history. It gets frustrating to read sometimes (as I'm sure it must have been for Townshend to write), as the actions of the leaders of the Easter Uprising were often inexplicable, and there was precious little put in writing at the time by the participants. Townshend, though, did have access to a trove of new material. In 1947, the Bureau of Military History began to gather accounts from the uprising's surviving participants. This show more activity went on for ten years, but then the material "disappeared into government archives" instead of being compiled and released to the public. Townshend, in his Preface, writes, "This 'miser's hoard' was at least opened to the public in March 2003 and suddenly, instead of a few dozen accounts, we have many hundred. They suffer from all the problems to be expected in accounts written thirty years after the event, but there are a remarkable source nonetheless."

At any rate, Townshend does an admirable job of assembling the history of the rise of the fractured Irish separatist movement at the beginning of the 20th century. There was a strong party urging Home Rule for Ireland as a first step toward independence, and several groups urging for a more immediate and total independence from Great Britain, obtained through arms if need be. The history moves through the decision for a country-wide armed rising, the damaging confusion caused when a countermanding order was sent across the counties that caused a day-long delay and sent many potential insurrectionists home, never to re-engage. In the end, the fighting took place mostly, and certainly most famously, in Dublin itself, with the most important and memorable (and horrific) action centered around the Dublin General Post Office.

The uprising was hindered not only by the confusion of contradictory orders, but also by the leaders' general lack of military expertise. In Townshend's account, many of the strategy decisions, in terms particularly of which buildings to occupy and which to ignore, are very hard to explain, and it's frustrating, as mentioned, that primary sources are so scarce. Many of the leaders were sure that the English would never use artillery in Dublin, which of course the English considered part of Great Britain. But the battle was put in the hands of the Army, not the politicians, and the big guns came out. It was the fires set off by incendiary shells that finally forced the Irish fighters out of their strongholds under the white flag of surrender.

Townshend goes on to artfully describe the incalculable damage done by the British military commander's decision to execute the uprising's leaders after only the most summary of trials, and action that created martyrs and ensured that even those Irish who were skeptical or even hostile to the Uprising (and there were many) gained a new and bitter resentment against the British throughout the country. Soon new regiments of volunteers were armed and parading once again, and the British thought it wiser not to attempt to disarm them. (The fact that England was considering an Irish conscription law to try to gain soldiers for the World War at that time raging on the continent was a crucial factor in this, as well.)

Townshend considers the questions of whether or not the Uprising did more harm than good. (One point that seems clear is that the Uprising went a long way to cementing the determination of the Protestant-majority northern counties to cut themselves off from Catholic-majority Ireland and remain within Great Britain, as all possibility of negotiation between the groups was instantly destroyed.) He does not come to a final determination on this issue, though, although it does seem that he considers the uprising in sympathetic terms all in all.

And, finally, Townshend portrays the role that the Easter Uprising has had in the narrative of Irish history and Irish national identity. The book is detailed and very well written. It's 360 pages went fairly quickly for me. For anyone with an interest in the topic, I highly recommend it. show less

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I very much enjoyed Townshend’s Ewart-Biggs-Prize-winning The Republic: The Fight for Irish Independence, 1918-1923, so had pretty high expectations here, combined with fairly fresh memories of Ronan Fanning’s Fatal Path: British Government and Irish Revolution 1910-1922. I don’t think you could read The Partition without also having read The Republic, or something similar – the story of how Northern show more Ireland came to be created is really a sidenote to the much bigger story of Irish independence, and Townshend has sensibly not repeated much from the previous book, which means that some important context is skimmed here.

But it doesn’t matter all that much, because this is a deep dive into archival sources and also (often neglected) contemporary newspaper accounts of the process of the partition of Ireland, which Townshend rightly puts as beginning in 1885 when the election results revealed that Nationalism was dominant everywhere in Ireland except in the north-east, and the question of how, or indeed if, Ulster could be incorporated into a future self-governing Ireland became a real one.

One part of the book was completely new to me: the confused and violent situation in Northern Ireland, especially Belfast, as the new government under James Craig was being set up and at the same time under ineffective but visible attack by Michael Collins from the south. There was a real intermixture of Loyalist militias of varying degrees of effectiveness and state support that would hold its own with many of today’s conflicts, including the bloody ethnic cleansing. Nobody comes out of this episode well, including the British government which was wilfully ignorant of events in Belfast, Derry and the border counties.

The last chapter, not surprisingly, looks at the history of the Boundary Commission, which started late and badly. The chairman was a South African judge, but from the imperialist side; the Northern Ireland government refused to appoint its commissioner, so London imposed a journalist who of course leaked proceedings to Craig; and the Irish Free State nominated Eoin MacNeill, the confused academic who had unsuccessfully countermanded the Easter Rising in 1916, by now Minister for Education.

Townshend spends some time wondering why Cosgrave did not instead appoint Kevin O’Shiel, who was an expert on boundaries and constitutions, but I think the answer is clear: MacNeill had the political heft and was actually an elected member of the Northern Ireland Parliament (though he never took his seat), whereas O’Shiel (despite his best efforts) was a mere political adviser. MacNeill, however, was thoroughly outmanoeuvred by the other Commissioners and secretariat, and only managed to exert some control of the process by resigning just before the report was due to be published, thus torpedoing the entire exercise. (I believe another book published this year is even more critical of him.)

Nationalists like to find villains for the crime of partition, but the fact is that Nationalist leaders failed to grasp the fact that the Ulster situation was a very serious impediment for their political project. Townshend doesn’t go into it, but much Nationalist rhetoric and indeed behaviour was intentionally offensive to those who they claimed as fellow citizens. Parnell, as a Protestant landlord himself, rather adopted the zeal of the convert, and no Nationalist leadership figure had credibility among Unionists. In the later stages, I think that Redmond missed a trick here, and in other respects, by refusing to accept a Cabinet position – it would have been tough going, but he would have had the threat of resignation in his dwindling armory. I very much agree with Townshend’s conclusion:

Almost nobody wanted it; but any implication that a better arrangement was possible, and somehow squandered through haste and carelessness, would be misleading. The intensity of Unionist hostility to home rule presented a political challenge of exceptional difficulty. Once Joseph Chamberlain had talked of a separate parliament for Ulster, it would have needed a major reconstruction of nationalist ideas to make a unitary home rule arrangement viable. That adaptation was not made, or even attempted, mainly because nationalists were doomed to believe that any resistance within Ireland to home rule was illusory. Even amongst others, partition was never embraced with enthusiasm. It was a negative concept, connoting at best failure, at worst abuse of statesmanship.

Townshend also looks briefly at why neither power-sharing nor UK-wide federalism could have flown. My own reflection on those points is that nobody ever suggested guaranteed positions in Irish government for the Unionists, at least not until the creation of the Free State in 1922 (when Collins basically gave them what they asked for, most importantly short-term over-representation in the new Senate). And the notion of ‘Home Rule all round’ failed to recognised the asymmetry between Irish demands on the one hand and Scottish and Welsh aspirations on the other. (And indeed between Scotland and Wales. Bear in mind that devolution was rejected by a 4 to 1 majority in Wales in 1979, and scraped through by just under 7,000 votes out of over a million cast in 1997.)

I don’t think this is a book for beginners, but those who already know a bit – even a lot – about the period will find some very interesting new information. show less

The author of this general history is at his best when examining the events that led up to the British defeat at the siege of Kut, which was all the more disastrous due to the run of of relative success the British expeditionary force had enjoyed to that point. The roots of failure being a combination of bad organization, bad logistics, and woolly strategic thinking that could not be overcome by relative tactical competence. Call it a case-book example of how simply stringing a series of show more victories together does not make a successful campaign.

I think the remainder of the book is somewhat less successful once past the climax of the initial British operation, but Townshend continues with his real subject, which is not so much the conduct of a secondary campaign that was won at too high of a price, but the anatomy of the British official mind. This being the examination of a decision-making process which could barely realize that the conquest of what is now Iraq was an exercise in strategic overstretch, and that had little clue as to the nature of the society being manipulated, until it was too late (the Iraqi uprising of 1920); we're still living with the consequences of those decisions. That Townshend doesn't hit you on the head with the obvious parallels to Operation "Iraqi Freedom" is a point in his favor.

Apart from the somewhat meandering nature of the last third of the work (though that is probably a reflection of the events being examined), my single biggest gripe is that this book really needed more than three maps. show less

Written almost immediately after 9/11, this 'very short introduction' cannot do much more than give us a basic history of what we like to place under the term 'terrorism' and to express a barely hidden frustration with the war on an abstract noun (Terry Jones of Monty Python fame).

There are two major points being made here. The first is that there is no satisfactory definition of what terrorism actually is except in terms of its political purposes. And the second is that media-driven show more hysteria around the subject threatens the very fabric of liberal society.

The book also debates whether terrorism as tactic (by whatever definition) is efficacious or not. The author suggests not and yet his examples sometimes tend to tell us the opposite especially if we take the long view.

We can agree that most socialist or anarchist terror within liberal democracies was a waste of energy but then the later manifestations of it in the Red Army Faction and similar organisations were somewhat narcissistic and even patronising expressions of middle class outrage on behalf of others.

However, the cases of the Soviet Union, Cuba, China, Venezuela and others tend to show that terror as a tool designed to eliminate opposition in the sea in which revolutionaries must swim did work and that national/socialist regimes did emerge and survive for decades - right up until the present day.

This, of course, is very different from the attempt at an 'ethical' terrorism by the Narodniki although anarchism descended into very unethical behaviours before too long. Whether ethical or unethical, these types of political excitability without a greater strategy certainly failed.

It could be argued, of course, that the failure of the Social Revolutionaries constructed the conditions for Communist ruthlessness as, if we want a symbol of this, Lenin's ideology emerged out of the State murder of his brother. This would certainly be taking the long view.

Townshend does himself great credit by not shying away from the existence of state terror and not only of the communist type. The Western empires have not been averse to it, again as part of a wider strategy of warfare, even if they like to cover it up as 'counter insurgency'.

Townshend could have gone further and deeper down this route but the danger would have been that the purchasing punter might have got confused if this commissioned attempt to explain what was then a new phenomenon to some had moved into Chomskian territory.

He is certainly right that terror within a revolutionary struggle that does not have a national resistance aspect is likely simply to mobilise the resources of the enemy into counter-strategies of great brutality (as in Chile and Argentina) and alienate populations uncommitted to the struggle.

Each case is different but Townshend is particularly good and honest on the cat-and-mouse terror tactics of Israel and the Palestinians where he unravels the self-serving Netanyahu narrative that drives American congressional opinion, a legislature of surpassing lack of sophistication.

In fact, Israel is an example of terrorism working because it was primarily ethnic and capable of being integrated into the survival strategies of an emerging ethnic State. That Jews never truly repudiated the massacres committed on Arab villagers as ethnic cleansing is a blot on their moral reputation.

He also looks at the IRA and ETA as national liberation movements making use of terror as a tactic and he judges, prematurely in the case of the IRA, that they were failures. This is probably true in the case of the Basques with the Basque territory still well locked into the Spanish State mechanism.

However, the Whitehall sell-out by stealth of the Unionists in a trajectory that was perfectly happy to abandon aspects of UK sovereignty in collaboration with the Irish in return for Washington's little scheme to get Ireland into NATO was also partly driven by Irish terrorism.

As each decade goes by the inveigling of Northern Ireland into an eventual referendum to get the Province off the back of the British budget and secure Ireland so that it was no longer a neutralist strategic risk factor in a European War could rely on Irish terror to make that job easier.

If the purpose of Irish terror was to unite Ireland then, although Irish terror did not in itself bring the unification about, the conditions it created have enabled the possibility of their aspirations to be met just as Unionist terror has slowed the process down. In that respect, terror works.

Terror, in other words, is a tool within a much wider political or military game. This is something the Israelis never forgot. When the Nazis called the French Resistance 'terrorists' they were strictly correct if we look at the term neutrally as a description of a 'practice'.

The FLN in Algeria will have watched French terrorism 'working' in this way - as a process linked to politics and conventional or guerrilla war - just as the OAS blunderingly tried to do the same and the Islamist insurgents of the 1990s even more brutally did the same again.

The claim that the 'terrorist' is someone else's 'freedom fighter' is trite because it separates the two as moral categories whereas the actual moral categories are a) the killing of 'innocents' on the one side set against b) the greater aims of, say, national self-determination on the other.

We live with this every day. Ukrainian car bombs are called partisan activity and their terrorist nature is glossed over in the Western media and yet these same Editors froth at the mouth when the same tactic is used by Afghans or Hezbollah on their own soil.

Townshend was also writing at that point where nearly all commentators found themselves thoroughly confused by the emergence of what appeared to be a nihilistic (from a liberal humane perspective) form of radical religious terrorism that looked to a supernatural end.

As always throughout the book he is sensible here, if possibly overly non-committal. Research into Islamic terror was in its early days. Western observers were no more successful in getting into the mind-set of the Islamist than they are today in getting inside the mind-set of a Russian or Chinese.

The overwhelming characteristic of the average Western policy wonk is a staggering lack of imagination which leads to simplistic and disproportionate, indeed hysterical, responses to what is generally far less of a threat to a population than exhausted doctors and truck drivers.

However, Townshend's wise insights into the tactics of Hezbollah suggest that even Islamist fanatics (if we can only get to understand how they think instrumentally) are instrumental in their approach with attitudes no different in this respect from the Narodniki or the Tupamaros.

One of the lessons of the book is that terrorism continues to have its instrumental logic and that we can soon begin to divine when it might be used ineffectively or effectively to achieve very long range ends in association with other strategies - military, political and economic.

The liberal moral outrage at the tactic is justifiable in the abstract but the liberal rarely sits where the 'damned of the earth' (Fanon) sits and easily turns a blind eye to state terror when it acts in his interest. Morality is a tool like any other in the brutal game of power.

Terror strategies tend to emerge when power is disproportionate so it was always likely that America as hegemon would face it because American power was and is disproportionately greater than anything else on the planet. We should really be surprised that there is so little of it.

We might go further and say that, while national liberation strategies (for all the nonsense talked about a Terrorist International in Washington during the Cold War) were located in specific territories, globalisation has created a new West/Rest dichotomy that increases the risks of terror.

Russian analyses of the nature of American power are far from incorrect. Russia has not been entirely isolated because non-Western elites connect with that analysis. The blocs that emerge in fact reduce the chances of terrorism because a countervailing non-Western bloc can imply sufficient resistance.

However, if the resistance bloc is eliminated as a traditional network of powers striving not to be subsumed within the Western imperium, Western dominion creates the opportunities for asymmetric 'terrorist' resistance amongst the powerless and not only overseas.

The same threat exists in the heart of the West from those who feel excluded from the imperium at home. So long as populist ideas and feelings have leg room, terrorism as a tactic is counter-productive but it becomes productive if the national populist or the deprived feel their back is to the wall.

Similarly, the potential unravelling of the cosy consensus between the corporate sector, states and eco-politicians over green issues because of crude energy security and more urgent socio-economic requirements might also threaten the system with what might be called a Green Army Faction,

The point here is that terrorism as a tactic is always a potential threat and increases to the degree that Western society behaves more like the old Russian Empire than the liberal democracy it purports to be - surveillance, social control, hunting down whistleblowers and so forth.

Townshend notes something important - the grim dialectic between terrorism and the media and the way that the media's excitability and hysteria drives public panic far beyond what reason would dictate and so creates inappropriate political decision-making and manipulation.

It could be argued (I would) that the most socially destructive force in Western society is not the potential terrorist but the Editor with his propensity for 'stories', fast news cycles, high emotion, moral posturing and attempts to manipulate power by the back door.

There is nothing we can do about this because liberal democracy defines itself in part by the freedom given to the Press. The benefits of good journalism (where it exists) should theoretically always outweigh the disbenefits although increasingly they do not as serious journalism decays.

Although now out of date by about two decades (especially in regard to Islamic terror), this very short book (139 pages) packs in a lot of information. If it does not do a great deal to help us define what the phenomenon is then that is because the phenomenon is not easily definable at all. show less