James Connolly, born on this day in 1868, was an Irish socialist revolutionary, founder of the Irish Citizen Army (ICA), and leader of the Easter Rising rebellion, for which he was executed by the British government.
Connolly was born in a poor Edinburgh neighborhood and spoke with a Scottish accent. He joined the British Army at age 14 to escape poverty and developed a hatred for the institution from firsthand experience. He deserted when his regiment was set to deploy to India.
He was also member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and founder of the Irish Socialist Republican Party. With labor radical James Larkin, he was centrally involved in the Dublin lock-out of 1913, after which the two men formed the Irish Citizen Army (ICA) the same year.
Connolly was opposed to British rule in Ireland and played a leading role in the Easter Rising of 1916, signing the "Proclamation of the Irish Republic" and serving as Commandant of the Dublin Brigade, the regiment that played the most substantial role in the Rising. Connolly was executed by firing squad following the Rising's defeat.
"If you remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organization of the Socialist Republic your efforts would be in vain. England would still rule you. She would rule you through her capitalists, through her landlords, through her financiers, through the whole array of commercial and individualist institutions she has planted in this country and watered with the tears of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs."
James Connolly
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Statistics can be used to make any arguments you want and are worthless without historical context or materialist dialectics so I don't bother citing cold stats outside of a few select ones.
I'm a child of Bangladeshi immigrants to the US so I can hit chalk demons with "China built a bridge in my country, the US funded Pakistani death squads to ethnically cleanse us" or how the DPRK has always been on the side of Palestinians since the occupation and they can't say anything I can't immediately use to call them racist (which is the biggest fear of the ham sandwich peoples which is to have their em_poc peer call them racist because they love respectability politics so much).
I'm guessing if you're white it might be harder. But honestly, I do it for the love of the game and not much else.
I appreciate the comment about stats. I (pretend to) do stats for a living and am aware of how they can be misused ;) And I'm surrounded by STEM people who tend to be very historically ignorant and arrogant. Maybe that's also why I think I need stats to convince them. But I'd feel more comfortable going the route of the USSR freeing it's population of homelessness and providing basic needs, and providing aid and assistance to national liberation movements the world over. But I guess I lack confidence in my ability to persuade, or maybe I'm being defeatist. I feel getting Americans to care about decolonization movements or to look past their ideological nonsense beliefs about China and the USSR is a tall order. I wish I had your gumption for the game ;)