Come Out Ye Anti-trans
by Comrade Jane
The British occupation of Ireland is arguably the longest running colonial project in human history. As the British Empire’s first colony, Ireland was used as laboratory for developing methods of colonial domination. Apartheid laws used against Black South Africans and residential schools used in Canada and the United States against indigenous people were pioneered in Ireland. Later, as Ireland struggled for independence, the expertise Britain had gained in colonial violence returned to be used in crushing revolts not in India or the Middle East, but in the British Isles themselves.
This experience with, both in history and living memory, is one reason why the Irish people have so often been supporters other revolutionary or anti colonial struggles. When Irish civil rights leader Bernadette Devlin visited New York in 1969 and was given a key to the city by the mayor, she promptly gave the key to the Harlem chapter of the Black Panther Party. More recently, CNN called Ireland “the most pro-Palestinian nation in Europe”. One does not need to look far to find Keffiyehs in the Irish green and orange, honoring the shared history of struggle against ethno-religious settler-colonial oppression.
One classic expression of this solidarity comes in the form of a song written by Irish republican socialist Dominic Behan in the 1960s and covered repeatedly in the decades since. Come Out Ye Black and Tans tells of Behan’s memories of his father calling to the former agents of the British occupation and challenging them to fight. The song explicitly ties the Irish struggle for independence to the struggles of African and Arab peoples against British colonial violence, and carries a powerful message about how cops, though bold while wielding heavy weapons, are quickly revealed to be cowards when denied monopoly over the technologies of state violence.
The Black and Tans were a British auxiliary police force of British Army veterans made infamous by their reprisal killings of civilians in response to their inability to defeat the Irish Republican Army. If the concise definition of fascism as “the methods of colonialism turned inwards against the imperial core,” is taken as true, then brutality of these soldiers turned cops is one fascism’s earliest and most shining examples. Soldiers in the British Army served as enforcers of Britain’s global empire, wielding superior technology and an eagerness to commit ultra violence against resisting populations. As so often happens with young men returning home from war with no marketable skills except the ability to do violence, they found employment in the one profession where that skillset is most prized: policing.
At the outbreak of the Irish War of Independence in 1919, the Empire had an abundant supply of such young men, and haphazardly pressed them into service against the Irish people. Faced with tenacious Irish republican resistance, these Black and Tan police resorted to the exact same methods they had employed against resistance in South Africa, Sudan, Iraq, and China. When the IRA would carry out a successful operation, the Black and Tans would respond by randomly executing civilians or burning nearby homes as collective punishment. During the Bloody Sunday Massacre of 1920, after the IRA killed several British Army Officers, Black and Tan auxiliary police opened fire on a stadium during a football match, killing 14 and wounding 60. (The police claimed that the civilians had fired first, a claim that British authorities accepted without investigation.) Other methods employed by the Black and Tans that will be familiar to readers in fascist America today included requiring auxiliaries to live away from the neighborhoods they patrolled, carrying rifles and machine guns, wearing darkly colored military-style uniforms, and drilling in military tactics and maneuvers.
These parallels with modern-day Amerika are not coincidental, or even a result of shared culture with Britain. This illuminates a core aspect of how fascism works. Police violence and colonial violence work hand-in glove. As war on the Iraqi people waned, discarded military equipment flowed from Iraq to the streets of Baltimore, Detroit, and Kansas City. This equipment was not limited to the guns or armored vehicles that they used to beat protesters or the homeless or the victims of the pharma industry’s opioid epidemic. The discarded soldiers too were sent home as so much military surplus. Often injured or poisoned, but always traumatized, soldiers whose only working experience was kicking in doors or handcuffing kids in Baghdad or Kabul often went home to become police, or police consultants who trained the next generation of police. In this way even the police without military experience—the bullies, the cowards, the sadists—were indoctrinated by wraparound sunglass-wearing crew cut-sporting tacticool “operators” who taught police academy cadets to see everyone as an enemy, carrying the mindset of counterinsurgency to the streets of our cities.
The difference between Amerika and Britain though is that Amerika’s first colony is not an island apart from us, it is woven into the very fabric of the country, in the prisons, the reservations, the slums, and the rusted out mining towns. When the Amerikan empire shrinks, like the British before it, and the colonial tactics are brought back to the place where they were born, there won’t be a neat line between north and south, the line will run through our streets and cities. Within a generation of Irish independence, the British Empire was no more. It would take several decades and another world war, but there was no mistaking that an empire that couldn’t even maintain dominion over its own island chain could continue to rule the world. Likewise, the United States finds itself at a high-water mark and receding. Those of us here at home will increasingly be treated like colonized people as capitalism and empire fails, which is why solidarity with colonized people is vital. Those who fought for their own freedoms at home without also resisting imperialism abroad were not striking at fascism where it grows, but only biding time until it returned home.
Come Out Ye Black and Tans
I was born in a Dublin street,
Where the Royal drums did beat,
The loving English feet, they walked all over us,
And every single night,
When me da' would come home tight,
He'd invite the neighbours out with this chorus:
(Chorus)
Come out ye' black and tans!
Come out and fight me like a man!
Show your wife how you won medals down in Flanders!
Tell her how the IRA,
made you run like hell away,
from the green and lovely lanes of Killeshandra!
Come let us hear you tell,
How you slandered Great Parnell,
When you thought him well and truly persecuted!
Where are those sneers and jeers,
That you loudly let us hear,
When our leaders of '16 were executed!
(Chorus)
Come out ye' black and tans!
Come out and fight me like a man!
Show your wife how you won medals down in Flanders!
Tell her how the IRA,
made you run like hell away,
from the green and lovely lanes of Killeshandra!
Come tell us how ye slew,
Them poor Arabs two by two,
Like the Zulu they had spears and bow and arrows!
How bravely you faced one,
With yer sixteen-pounder gun!
And you frightened all the natives to the marrow!
(Chorus)
Come out ye' black and tans!
Come out and fight me like a man!
Show your wife how you won medals down in Flanders!
Tell her how the IRA,
made you run like hell away,
from the green and lovely lanes of Killeshandra!
The time is coming fast,
And I think the day is here,
To kill each yeoman that comes before us!
And if there be a need,
Where our kids will say "Godspeed!"
With a verse or two of singing this fine chorus:
(Chorus)
Come out ye' black and tans!
Come out and fight me like a man!
Show your wife how you won medals down in Flanders!
Tell her how the IRA,
made you run like hell away,
from the green and lovely lanes of Killeshandra!
References
Aziz Rahman, Mary Anne Clarke and Sean Byrne. The Art of Breaking People Down: The British Colonial Model in Ireland and Canada. JSTOR⇲
Irish Give Key to City To Panthers as Symbol. NY Times⇲
Lauren Frayer and Fatima Al-Kassab. Why Ireland is one of the most pro-Palestinian nations in the world. NPR⇲
Niamh Kennedy and Eoin McSweeney. Why Ireland is the most pro-Palestinian nation in Europe. CNN⇲