Tradition of the oppressed

An outsider could have the impression that Irish republicans are above all people who are "living in the past", a sect of "true believers" who are obsessed by history, a cult worshipping "martyrs" who died a long time ago; and that republican actions are explained by this obsession. If at the level of structure the memory of past has little or no explanatory value, at the level of agency, it helps to grasp how the social actors give meaning to their actions, and understand their place within a specific temporal-historical framework.

Just as it would be ridiculous to explain the French Revolution or the Reformation as the outcome of the behaviour of neurotic individuals obsessed by the Roman times or the Apostle Paul, it is absurd to say that republicans over the last thirty years have been re-enacting the battles of 1798, 1848, 1867, 1916, etc. because of their morbid obsession with the past. History is always made within a specific tradition, and it is only through this tradition that individuals are able to give meaning to present struggles though using past events.

The workers‘ movement for instance, gave meaning to socialist struggles by relating them to a tradition that started with slave insurrection. It is no wonder that the Bolshevik Revolution related itself to the Paris Commune. In a similar vein, the republican movement understands its actions historically by relating them to the whole tradition of resistance to British rule in Ireland. Broadly speaking, republicanism is related to what Walter Benjamin called ‘the tradition of the oppressed’ and their struggles. (But this does not mean of course that the struggle of the present-day IRA is necessarily of the same nature and taking place in similar conditions than those past struggles)

Some ideas of Walter Benjamin’s are of great help when trying to understand the place of memory within republican thinking. His ‘Angel of History’ is horrified at all the injustices of the past, to which a view of ‘history as progress’ is blind to. For Benjamin, revolutionaries should pay attention to the past. Benjamin`s thesis is that struggles against injustices of the present are also, at the same time, struggles for the redemption of all past injustices. Not only do insurgents find inspiration in their struggles by remembering their enslaved ancestors and the suffering of the past generations (the memory of the past injustices is an important factor which motivates revolutionaries); but through their struggle to end the injustices of the present, they also avenge the injustices of the past. Revolution of the present society is also the redemption of past oppressions.

It may seem somehow quite far-fetched to argue that the IRA volunteer planting a bomb or preparing for an ambush is also fighting for the redemption of the victims of the Famine. But a great principle of Gadamer’s hermeneutics is the importance of the ‘efficacy of history’ in influencing social action. The actions of the republican movement do not happen in some kind of historical-temporal void. They take their historical meaning by placing themselves within the "tradition of the oppressed".