I began the day by noting it was the 97th anniversary of the Easter Rising in Ireland, and posting a music video. It deserves a bit more of a tribute than that, so here’s Charles Pierce with the best brief summary I could imagine:
OK, as generals, they were pretty good bartenders, and schoolteachers, and pipers. They managed to station their out-manned and outgunned troops in the center of a densely packed urban area with no lines of communication, no lines of supply, and absolutely no lines of retreat — although it was said that many of them had no intention of coming out of the whole thing alive, which, alas, was not explained to many of their followers who might not have shared the views of martyrdom as a viable political program.
They lasted six days, surrendered, and their leaders were shot after facing…wait for it…military tribunals that were such a stench in the nostrils of the world that even the British gave up on them after a while. The Empire than set about making its most capital mistake; it shot most of the ones who made the best poets, and left alive most of the ones who made the best soldiers.
The rest, of course, is history.
