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 "If
you remove the English army to-morrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin
Castle, unless you set about the organisation 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.
England would still rule you to your ruin, even while your lips offered
hypocritical homage at the shrine of that Freedom whose cause you had betrayed.
Nationalism without Socialism – without a reorganisation of society on the basis
of a broader and more developed form of that common property which underlay the
social structure of Ancient Erin - is only national recreancy.
It would be tantamount to a public declaration that our oppressors had so far
succeeded in inoculating us with their perverted conceptions of justice and
morality that we had finally decided to accept those conceptions as our own, and
no longer needed an alien army to force them upon us.
As a Socialist I am prepared to do all one man can do to achieve for our
motherland her rightful heritage – independence; but if you ask me to abate one
jot or tittle of the claims of social justice, in order to conciliate the
privileged classes, then I must decline." - James Connolly
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