American-born Sixties Radical Tom Hayden Has Become an Irish Nationalist

The New York Review of Books reviews his 2001 book on his "realization" of his Irishness. Radical leftism and contemporary Irish nationalism are closely related. Sinn Fein, I am told, is largely driven by Marxist-Leninist ideology, and speaking from personal experience, in my first semester as a freshman at CU-Boulder I briefly attended meetings of the Democratic Socialists of America which morphed into an Irish Nationalist advocacy group.

I had just visited Ireland that previous summer to visit relations, also visiting both the mass graves of the Famine and the famous gaols where the revolutionaries were held and often executed. I had also been reading the prison memoirs of Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa, a distant relative imprisoned for fomenting rebellion. With this group, I briefly thought I had discovered a place where I could fit in. Conscious of having spent all of middle school and most of high school in a nearly-friendless, antisocial modus vivendi, at that time social relations were quite important to me as a way of self-improvement.

Fortunately, I was an internet-junkie even then, and a few web searches prevented me from entering any further into the ugly, ugly world of radical chic. I visited the DSA website, which at that time had a youth section, complete with songs. Such songs were removed after people with some sense of decency got wind of them, but they are available through the WebArchive.

Naively enough, I happened across this song page, only to discover a song of such barbarity that I made sure to avoid these DSA types for the rest of my college life. Sung to the tune of the innocent "Frere Jacques," one of my childhood favorites, were these words I still remember today:

Are you sleeping,
Are you sleeping,
Bourgeoisie? Bourgeoisie?

When the revolution comes,
We'll kill you all with knives and guns,
Bourgeoisie... Bourgeoisie...

And so were seeded my suspicions of all republican and nationalist ideologies.

Some years later, I was reading Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honor Trilogy, a World War II story. In the denoument, as the war was coming to a close, a minor character, a Central European woman, looks back at the beginnings of the conflict:

"It is too simple to say that only the Nazis wanted war. These Communists wanted it too. It was the only way in which they could come to power. Many of my people wanted it, to be revenged on the Germans, to hasten the creation of the national state ... Even good men thought their private honour would be satisfied by war. They could assert their manhood by killing and being killed. They would accept hardships in recompense for having been selfish and lazy. Danger justified privilege. I knew Italians - not very many perhaps - who felt this. Were there none in England?"

The protagonist replies:

"God forgive me," said Guy, "I was one of them."

Such words hit so close to home.

I can at least brush off my flirtation with radicalism as a "youthful indiscretion," but Tom Hayden is a grown man decades my senior.

May God forgive him.