Rampant Evil

“The great heights reached by men and kept, was not achieved by sudden flight, they while the others slept toiled upwards in the night”. While Saint Augustine was directly referring to an uplifting of society, society will fall from great heights without constant toil. The failure to oppose of unjust laws doesn’t merely allow things to remain the same over time, but causes a steady march into increasingly unjust laws. The acceptance of unjust laws allows [tyrants to] a structure that implements increasingly unjust laws until an intervening group pushes for reform.

A society tolerant of oppression can fall into a relationship referred to by Martin Buber as Ich-Es, or “I-It”, where an individual or a small group would seen as an object to be used, and take utilized to meet an objective without regard to their welfare. It is difficult to understand how a large group can accept oppression from a smaller, even less powerful group without understanding the benefits offered to the oppressed.

In the late 1500’s, England worked to conquer Ireland, and gain a legal right over her lands. England coerced the Lords of Ireland to give the rights of their lands to England in a program called “surrender and re-grant” with negotiations backed by military threats. The Lords had had all rights to their land, except that they weren’t permitted to transfer ownership. In exchange for safety a pardon of dubious war crimes, the Lords were demoted from petit kings to English-style Nobles that were little more than managers of their ancestral lands. The Irish choose the limited power of their new titles rather than fight for the rights they previously had. Soon afterwards, the Lord Deputy of Ireland, an English representative for Ireland, restricted the freedom of the Irish leadership and brought new threats against them as retaliation for resisting them in war they had been pardoned for in the “surrender and re-grant” program. A few years later, almost the entire Irish leadership secretly escaped from Ireland and never returned in an event called the “Flight of the Earls”.

With the elimination of the upper levels of Irish leadership, the English selected non-Irish non-Catholic immigrants to run and police plantations, and searched for defects in the land titles of the remaining Irish Catholic landowners to complete their conquest of Ireland. Before plantations, peasants had a right to make a decent living from the land they worked on, but now they where forced to relocate, although allowed to return to the land to work for minimal wages or rent the land at high rates. Title search businesses cropped up to search for land titles with flaws that resulted in forfeiture to the English crown, and a “finders fee” was made for the person that discovered the flaw. Non-Catholic immigrants were given the opportunity to buy and use the confiscated land. By 1701, 81% of the productive land had been taken away from the Irish. After the American Revolution, England gave Ireland a Parliament with limited power. The French Revolution caused renewed rebellion in Ireland and promises of assistance from the French, but the French either never showed up, or surrendered when they did arrive. By the turn of the century, the Irish Parliament agreed to cede their power by forming a Union with England.

The Union between Ireland and England came with the promise of emancipation for Catholics, but the English reneged on their promise. O’Connell became popular by pushing for emancipation. Even though the law prohited Catholics from becoming a member of Parliament, it did not explicitely forbid a Catholic from entering an election, so O’Connell declared himself as a candidate for Parliament in 1828, and won over 2/3’rds of the vote. Parliament quickly changed the laws and allowed O’Connell to join Parliament. O’Connell pioneered non-violent demonstrations, but unerringly refused to advocate an unlawful protest. His dedication to following the law severely limited his ability to hold protests when demonstrations were banned.

The potato famine in 1845 brought little help from England, even though the countries were supposed to be united. Laws could have been changed to reduce Irish food exports from the plantations that produced more than enough food to prevent starvation, but England increased corn imports, forced the starving Irish to pay for it at market rates, and called it aid. The potato famine forced the Irish to realize they needed greater awareness about the need for socially responsibility measures to protect their welfare. In the early 1900’s, the concept of an Irish Ireland began to take hold, and the Sinn Fein political

party took form. The Easter Monday uprising ended in defeat for Irish rebels, but the British mishandled the trials and executions of the rebels, and the public began