The 'Emigrants' who could not escape

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in great detail the reaction this programme of genocide its victims.

Source book

This book was published three years ago in the USA and it seems fairly clear that Gerald Green used it as his major historical source book.

• This accounts for the general accuraçy of Green's narrative as far as the order of the main events is concerned. • But it makes his falsification of the politics of the oppressed Jewish community even less forgiveable, since one of the many virtues of Dawidowicz's book is its open treatment of this question.

And it is a question which those who want to convert the whol historical record into either Zionist prop ganda or a simple moral issue would dearly like to forget.

Excellent Dawidowicz's history is not in itself much mc • su cessful than Green's novel t fitting the Nazi genocide into the broader political context of apitalism in its epoch of decay.

Hitler For that, readers must turn to Trotsky's Struggle against Fascism in Germany.

But Dawidowicz's book is an excellent and indispensable source of the details of this most horrific episode of modern It illustrates the literal truth of the stark alternative-socialism or barbarism-which faces mankind at a moment of acute capitalist crisis.

Partial awareness

The National Front and other similar organisations now threaten the world with a new holocaust.

• For all its historical and artistic faults the book and the films of Holocaust have done something to convey to a mass audience the inevitable• consequence of a fascist victory.

That partial awareness must be used by socialists in the struggle to mobilise the independent organised strength of the whole labour movement to fight to prevent another holocaust.

Bob Sutcliffe By lan Swindale Curindalo Pirate Jenny are currently touring the country with their latest production 'Emigrants'.

The play, written by Dublin-born Peter Sheridan, deals with the plight of the Irish peasantry in the first half of the nineteenth century.

The first Act of the play graphically portrays, through the fate of one family, the ruthless exploitation of the Irish peasantry by English landowners.

"Good" years

The effects of the anarchic workings of the capitalist system mean for this family that, in "good" years, they are unable to sell their crop at an economic price, and face the choice of starving or living on the money put aside to pay rent.

In bad years of famine they face the fate of those thousands upon thousands of peasants who starved to death.

The response of the husband is to bow and scrape to the English landlord. in the hope that the family will avoid eviction.

The wife on the other hand is completely contemptuous of the landlord and his son, "the half-sir"

Misplaced

And, of course, any hope that the landlord will put their plight before his profit is totally misplaced.

The response of some of the peasants is to fight back against their oppression.

Families who move into the property of evicted tenants have their crops burned and the absentee landlords face the threat of assassination should they set foot on their estates.

But the peasantry historically has been unable to go beyond this rudimentary resistance and organise as a class and their inability to do so in the case of the Irish peasantry resulted in attempts to find individual solutions to the unbearable poverty they faced. For many this meant emigration to Britain.

The second Act, with a touch of irony, is set on the section of the LondonHolyhead railway. Here Irish navvies are employed building the railway line that will facilitate British imperialist domination over The determination of the contractor to make as much profit as possible results in appalling safety standards, the sale of alcohol to men at work and the open robbery of the navvies through the company shops.

Chartists

On top of this the Irish navvies face the racialist taunts of English workers and are used by the employers to force down wage rates.

The response of the workers varies from individual acts of terrorism -blowing up the first train to run on the line-to the petitioning of Parliament, support for the Chartists, and attempts to organise a union.

'Do Yo - ITV, The author clearly restricts himself to portraying the conditions facing Irish workers and peasants in the nineteenth . century and the problems involved in fighting the employers rather than using the characters to map out the necessary political strategy for the fight against capitalism.

But coinciding as it does with the tenth anniversary of the renewed struggle in the north of Ireland for self-determination of the Irish people, and the military intervention of British imperialism to defeat that struggle, the play serves as a useful reminder of an earlier period of imperialist exploitation of the Irish people.