By Gerry Downing

The Dublin riots on 23 November 2023 raised serious questions for politicians and the Gardi around policing, public safety, and the threat of Irish anti-immigration campaigns, we are told.

Sonja Tiernan has written a one-sided review of the poetry and politics of Yeats, even if it is an accurate account of Daniel Mulhall’s book, Pilgrim Soul. So “Yeats was central in the fight for securing Irish independence through cultural nationalism”, but what did this consist of?

In 1933, in a letter to Olivia Shakespear, he set out his admiration for General Eoin O’Duffy’s fascist Blueshirts:

“A fascistic opposition is forming behind the scenes to be ready should some tragic situation develop. I find myself constantly urging the despotic rule of the educated classes as the only end to our troubles… Our chosen colour is blue, and blue shirts are marching about all over the country… all I can remember is that I have always denounced green and commended blue.”

Of course, this stands in contrast to his September 1916 poem:  

I write it out in a verse—,

MacDonagh and MacBride,

 And Connolly and Pearse,

Now and in time to be,

Wherever green is worn,

Are changed, changed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.

Lines from Yeats’ 1919 poem The Second Coming such as, “Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold” are quoted more often than any other poem. In 2016, as Trump slouched towards Washington, the Wall Street Journal wrote: “Terror, Brexit and US Election Have Made 2016 the Year of Yeats”, a reference to the last couplet of Yeats’s poem,  “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” The fascism of Nietzsche/Mussolini became that beast.

Yeats became disillusioned with Duffy’s Blueshirts not because they were fascists but were too vulgar and this meant that they could not bring proper “freedom”. Roy Foster, his biographer, wrote of him, “Their (the Blueshirts’) commitment to fascism, as he understood it, did not go far enough. But one must then add at once that his understanding of fascism was not like anybody else’s.”

The Dublin riots

The Dublin riots and previous stabbings has led famous boxer Conor McGregor to tweet that “Ireland is at war”, he retweeted calls for right wing action by Paul Golding, Britain First’s self-declared fascist leader. In March 2018 Golding, was sentenced to 18 weeks in prison, while his female deputy, Jayda Fransen, got 36 weeks. “These defendants were not merely exercising their right to free speech but were instead aiming religiously aggravated abuse at innocent members of the public,” the prosecutor said. McGregor tweeted:

“There will be change in Ireland, mark my words. The change needed. In the last month, innocent children stabbed leaving school. Ashling Murphy murdered. Two Sligo men decapitated. This is NOT Ireland’s future! If they do not act soon with their plan of action to ensure Ireland’s safety, I will.”

This was quoted on 1 December, in an article Double standards on hate speech following Dublin riots by the European Conservative who referred to “the supposedly conservative (woke?) Fianna Fáil” in the article.

So we need to take Yates in the round, not just look at where he stood in 1919 or 1923, confusing although his position then was, but what he had become by 1933 in his relationship with O’Duffy’s Blueshirts and fascism in general.

After Yeats became a fascist in the early 1930s he felt the Irish fascists, O’Duffy’s Blueshirts, weren’t fascist enough for him as Roy Foster commented. This is from approximately from the same standpoint that Martin Heidegger criticised Hitler’s Nazis.

Heidegger in Ruins

Adam Coleman argues that Heidegger’s champions wrongly presented him as a philosopher who was more adept at the intricacies of ontological hermeneutics (basically agnosticism) than the realities of politics.

But nonetheless, they claim, he recognized the malignancy of the Nazi agenda and withdrew before it was too late, thereby leaving his philosophy untainted.

The review of Richard Wolin, Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology by Emmanuel Faye, rejects that:

“It would be difficult if not impossible to mount such a defence of Heidegger’s philosophy today, in light of Richard Wolin’s revelatory Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology (2023). In a contextualized reinterpretation of Heidegger’s oeuvre that makes use of previously suppressed and doctored manuscripts to reveal the full extent of Heidegger’s sympathies with National Socialism, Wolin demonstrates the imbricated nature of Heidegger’s Existenz-Philosophie [1] and his politics, making it untenable to isolate the former from the latter.

“Heidegger in Ruins also shows how vile the philosopher’s politics truly were. He was the advocate of a profoundly antisemitic German nationalism who venerated Hitler and aspired to become the philosopher of the Volksgemeinschaft, on the conviction that his philosophy of Being [Sein] was uniquely suited to the German historical mission. This was a mission that supposedly justified the Holocaust and German territorial expansion.

“Wolin shows that whatever misgivings Heidegger may have had concerning particular National Socialist policies, he maintained his commitment to the movement’s “inner truth and greatness” until his death in 1976. He did so not as a matter of convenience, but “on philosophical grounds.” [2]

These revelations should seriously alter our approach to Heidegger’s philosophy, just as an appreciation of Yeats’s radical conservatism should determine our approach to his and McGregor’s work.

Notes

[1] Existence (Existenz) is for Heidegger a term of art that signifies the kind of being of human beings or of Dasein. Something that exists understands itself in terms of a distinctive possibility: the possibility of deciding to be itself or not be itself (SZ 12).17 Apr 2022. Pure nonsense, in other words

[2] Richard Wolin, Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology, Yale University Press, 2023. Reviewed by Emmanuel Faye, University of Rouen Normandie 2023.12.1 ▲