An esoteric history of Ireland courtesy of We Are Change Ireland: Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Okay, further to smiffy’s post here which shines a light under that particular stone,

I’ve been listening to the interview on the WAC site between We Are Change Ireland and historian Michael Tsarion and have to say I’m profoundly unimpressed. One reason is, that I have a bit of an academic research interest in the issue of national identity and more than a passing acquaintance with the flag. And what Tsarion is saying, and what is being received and accepted entirely uncritically by the WAC members, is simply incorrect.

Firstly, and perhaps most importantly, it is necessary to consider his modus operandi. He starts with an uncontroversial or banal statement then shifts away at a rapid tangent drawing in links which may, or generally may not, be relevant or appropriate. Secondly he eschews any sense of history, or context, in favour of assertions. Thirdly by rapidly covering an area one group is elided with another, so that bizarre conjunctions, such as the proposition that the IRA and IRB were/are synonymous, appear.

Some examples?

He states flatly that a flag, any flag of any country, has to be registered at the Royal College of Arms in London, ‘These flags are basically applications made to the College of Arms in London and they’re disseminated to those countries accordingly…’ and asks why so many flags are tricolours, as if there is some great conspiracy behind that design. ‘What’s with the tricolours, hasn’t anyone got any imagination? If these flags are of the nation how come they’re so similar?’

Sigh. They’re tricolours because they emulate the revolutionary standard of the French Revolution and in the great wave of nation founding in the 19th and 20th centuries the states established were usually democratic secular Republics which sought to avoid monarchical and heraldic trappings and assume a more ‘modernised’ Republican gloss. It’s not a secret, it’s not a mystery (that the symbolism of the French flag is a bit more complex is neither here nor there, in this instance it is the form that is most important).

He’s simply wrong that the Royal College of Arms forces designs upon nations. In fact if he had investigated a little further he’d discover that most nations self-generate their imagery, or, as in the case of Ireland the Genealogical Office, formerly the Office of Arms – an office which was a subdivision of the RCA and held over after Independence – which is part of the National Library (which, again, has nothing to do with the design, now or then, of the Irish Tricolour) and was responsible for the design of the Presidential Flag – hardly our most widely used or even known flag. At best one might argue that the RCA has some oversight of some Commonwealth coats of arms and flags, a very different proposition from the one that is aired. That said it certainly didn’t in the case of the South African flag…

Secondly he argues that the Irish Republican Brotherhood by using the word “Brotherhood” was ‘another red flag for those who know, it means it wasn’t just a bunch of guys getting together for no reason, I mean who armed them, who funded them who created the IRA. The IRA was a wing of the the AOH at one point… a world-wide secret organisation and even though they weren’t secret themselves they had secret organisations within them…’

This is nonsense. The AOH was a nationalist organisation, entirely antagonistic to the IRB, and subsequently the IRA. I have no idea whether there was any crossover in the modern period between PIRA and the AOH, but if there was I’d suspect it was low level. The term “Brotherhood”? Well, here’s a wild idea, could the fact it was founded in the mid-19th century with all the social norms of that time as a context be a clue?

And what of our own dear flag?

The Irish Flag is particularly important because on the one flag is the symbols of the rival groups and people have to start asking who are they…

who represents the white part of the flag ‘white brotherhood’ in between who represent the neutral groups the hidden hand in between…

No. No. A thousand times no. It doesn’t ‘represent a white brotherhood’. It’s like the French Tricolour. It’s an emulation – in fact in truth that owes more to a visual symmetry than specific meaning, although it is argued that it represents a white field of unity or neutrality between the Orange and Green.

As the green symbol goes back through the United Irishmen, the masonic lodge of Wolfe Tone, in fact most of the UI… Henry McCracken, Thomas Russell, the name Russell rings a big bell, the Russell trust behind the Skull and Bones in the US… many of the original movers and shakers for Irish independence those who came up with the symbols we’re now using and certainly the ideologies… these people were Freemasons… many of them were Templers… there is a whole esoteric connection…

This again is wrong… To suggest that the symbols of Irish independence, and the Tricolour in particular, were somehow introduced by Tone is nonsense. The flag they used was one with a green field and a harp, occasionally surmounted by a cap word by the Irish. Green? Green for Ireland. Associated with the island for long before that – certainly before historical record.

As for the – natch – link to Freemasonry, well, so what? But then Tsarion, as noted previously believes in Lemuria, Atlantis, aliens and the existence of Tiamat (no, not the European goth/rock band, the other one, the water planet supposedly between Earth and Mars).

This is Dan Brown politics where a little knowledge goes a long way. And knowing, as Andrew Eldritch once sang, doesn’t mean so much… Because simply putting various facts together a thesis does not make.

Pull together some arcane information, string it in such a way that supposed links can be established, throw in some modish sub-intelligence agency jargon such as ‘false flag’ and hey presto! We have a conspiracy. That such conspiracies would entail massive energy to sustain across centuries (and in a context where we have (very) arguably only one or two pan-millennial organisations, one being the Catholic Church), that they would force individuals into frankly incredible and untenable choices as regards maintaining secrecy and suppressing any dissent, and that alternatives exist such as outright totalitarianism which would be both cheaper and more effective in terms of expenditure of human and other capital and the thesis is so absurd as to be untenable. But, this is not to dismiss the comforts of such ‘one size fits all’ approaches. It’s a lot more comforting to believe that there is some hidden hand behind the world than to recognise that chaos underlies it. It’s the same sort of comfort that some aspects of religion delivers, and it is in intellectual terms an equivalent trap. What’s most hilarious, or sad, is this bunch of supposed freethinkers in WACI  simply accept incorrect information entirely unquestioningly. And all this, all this rhetoric which the slightest investigation indicates is factually incorrect or misinterpreted, is hardly less than five minutes in on the recording…