The English Taliban

Last year I spent a week in Ireland and wanted specifically to visit Drogheda, a city on the East coast where my family used to spend a few days every spring and which is one of the most historic in Ireland. Drogheda is one of the only cities in Ireland which still has the remains of some of the old city walls but it is because of its role in the terrible massacre of  1649 during Cromwell's conquest of Ireland that it has passed into legend. 2,500 Irish soldiers and even more civilans were put to the sword in what was, even in its day, regarded as a bloodbath. I specially visited some of the main historic sites associated with that event , including St Peter's Anglican church, where many of the inhabitants of the city had taken shelter and where Cromwell's troops torched the church with all of the civilians inside. I also visited the Millmount, which was the main fortification in the city and where the garrison were massacred even after they had surrendered. The Millmount is now a museum and a must to see for a history of the city and the surrounding Boyne Valley, which has featured heavily in Irish history.

I was also aware that the Irish historian, Dr Micheal O'Siochru, had written a new book on Cromwell's campaign in Ireland with the title of 'God's Executioner'. The book formed the basis of a television series on the campaign made by Irish television, RTE. The work is eminently readable and excellently researched.

For my birthday this year I was given a gift of the book and also of another work on Cromwell's campaign in Ireland. It is interesting that in England, especially for English nationalists, Cromwell has a positive role in British history, and that his statue stands outside the British parliament. He is also regarded as one of the founders of parliamentary democracy and the liberty of the citizen, whereas in reality he dismissed parliament at the head of an armed troop and made himself dictator.

In Ireland Cromwell has no positive associations and is regarded as someone who most clearly carried out the colonialist and imperialistic project of ethnic cleansing and genocide. Even worse he regarded his project as driven by religious impulses and allied religious intolerance and racism as the driving forces of his campaign.

I was reminded of this again on Saturday, reading an account in the Independent by the journalist Robert Fisk, of a lecture he recently gave in St Canice's Cathedral in the Irish city of Kilkenny. Fisk is one of those whose writings on Iraq and the Middle East, as well as Afghanistan, and whose knowledge of those parts of the world is second to none. He also has mounted an excellent critique from the beginning of the disasters which have been the West's interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Fisk writes:

"Fresh from the slaughter at Drogheda, Cromwell would spare the citizens of Kilkenny, but not its Cathedral of Saint Canice whose stonemasons packed their bags in 1285. Cromwell smashed the stained glass windows, stole the bells, threw the baptismal font to the ground and turned the cathedral into a stables. His soldiers broke open the tombs and hurled the bones of their lords and ladies into a pit in the churchyard. The half-Irish writer Constantine Fitzgibbon noted almost 40 years ago: "If Cromwell and his people had possessed the technical ability to build gas chambers and drop Zyklon B upon the Irish Roman Catholic subhumans ... they would undoubtedly have used such methods."

So much, then, for the Great Rebellion of 1641. So much for the king's men. The New Model Army was the first ideological battle group since the Crusaders. Why, had not the Parliament of England passed a decree for the absolute suppression of the Catholic religion in Ireland? Traitors and infidels. Smash their graven images. Smash the Buddhas of Bamian, for that matter. The real Taliban used explosives. Cromwell's armed puritans used the sword. No dancing. No music. No films or television or kite-flying. Read the Bible – only the Bible. Read the Koran – only the Koran. What's the difference? Cromwell and Mullah Omar did everything in the name of God.

Thus did I reflect as – in those slightly grim moments that always precede a lecture – I prepared to bore a cathedral audience of hundreds with my usual paint pots. Treachery in the Middle East, Iraqi slaughter, Afghan bloodbaths, the connivance of governments and journalists, the lies inherent in our words of war, the need for our military – with their guns and tanks and Apache helicopters – to leave the Muslim lands."

Yes England had its own Taliban and has been pointed out before, most recently in the BBC television series on the history of the Normans, Ireland was England's first colony and the place where experiments such as ethnic cleansing, introduction of settlers, suppression of native language and culture and finally extirpation of its native people, would be practised assiduously over the centuries. Fisk, with his grasp of history and his contempt for the meanness of contemporary geopolitics in the halls of Washington and London, can see the big sweep of history. All political movements have had their Taliban and those who resisted their narrow and exclusionist views on both religion and politics. A lesson for all those involved in politics today.