On February 15 1898 the battleship USS MAINE visiting Havana, to protects American commercial interests in Spanish-ruled Cuba, blew up and sank in its harbour.
There was a war for Independence being waged in Cuba at the time. Without a shred of evidence that Spain or its agents had caused the explosion, but following yellow-press journalism by William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, the United States, under President William McKinley, declared war on Spain, seizing Cuba in the Caribbean and the Philippines in the Pacific.
In 1976 US Admiral Hyman Rickover came to the conclusion that the Havana explosion was caused by the spontaneous combustion of coal dust and absolved Spain of responsibility.
By that time Rickover, born in 1900, was known as the Father of the Nuclear Navy which dwarfed those of Britain and Spain which had previously dominated the world.
Amongst the sailors who perished on USS MAINE were some with Irish names, and Joseph C, Clarke wrote a vainglorious rhyme “THE FIGHTING RACE” featuring “Kelly and Burke and Shea” boasting of Irish fighters, matter-a-damn what they were fighting for, or against.” It was the favourite party-piece of Michael Collins, who died still a young man who never quite tempered his enthusiasms with more mature reflection. (Remind me to justify that remark.)
Anyhow I fear that too many of our countrymen and women are itching for a chance of shooting Chinese and Russians who are not threatening us.
The President of the US at the time was William McKinley, of good Ulster stock who explained that in the Philippines he was fighting pagans. When told that the inhabitants were Roman Catholics, he said “Same thing.”
Anyhow. although Cuba has bravely withstood American attempts to destroy her these past 60 plus years, the Americans have a base at Guantanamo, where they torture and reputedly murder prisoners held without trial after kidnapping in various parts of the world and stopovers in free, Independent Ireland.
The Philippines have fared less well under capitalism than Cuba under Communism. While Cuban doctors, loyal to their Revolution have done wonderful work in the “Third World” the people of the Philippines have been impoverished first by the kleptocratic dictators Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, later by the International Monetary Fund.
Anyhow the explosion on the USS MAINE was a handy excuse for American capitalism to build itself a World Empire.
Some of you will remember the so-called Gulf of Tonkin Incident. It was alleged that North Vietnamese Motor Torpedo Boats had decided to pick a fight with infinitely more powerful and heavily armoured United States vessels in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964.It was FAKE NEWS, but both US Houses of Congress passed a Resolution authorising the President, Lyndon Johnson, to do “whatever necessary in order to assist any member or Protocol State of the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty “. Only 2 Senators opposed the Resolution. According to the Constitution the US President cannot declare war without a Resolution by both Houses of Congress. But the President waged war without declaring it on the basis of a resolution concocted on the basis of a lie.
I was a young man at the time, and thank God and the “HOT HEADS” of Easter Week, a citizen of a country with a sane foreign policy. I wasn’t a pacifist but a volunteer part-time soldier. I am glad I wasn’t an American.
Nevertheless, like perhaps most of my Irish contemporaries, I was naively pro-American, had cheered JFK in Dublin some 14 months earlier and was not well-disposed towards communists.
A year later I was living in London . On a flight to Dublin, when Irish newspapers were on strike, I bought a copy of TIME magazine. Pictured on the cover was HO CHI MINH. Less than an hour later before we reached Dublin I decided that HO was at heart and head a Sinn Fein patriot who had dedicated his life to his people’s freedom.
It seems to me that Joe Biden and Boris Johnson and their friends are playing Russian roulette with nuclear weapons.
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