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I have just finished watching Season 1 & 2 of Rebellion (Thank you Lockdown). Concurrently I am reading Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy. I am not aware of anyone having posted on *Rebellion* on the List. I would be astonished if Lou had not. Phil may read this and he is an absolute encyclopedia when it comes to the Irish cause, so I will defer to his knowledge of the historical inaccuracies. But I mentioned Nietzsche for a reason. He was an evil fucker and I have no time at all for Left Nietzscheanism. None. But he did have a point about the Socratic critic who was essentially hostile to art. So I try not to demand that art works take the form of pamphlets. But I think we do have an ethical duty towards some truths. In the first series I enjoyed the stress on the role of women. I approved of the device of weaving the story of the rebellion around three fictional female characters (3 Little maids from school). Aside from this fiction the emphasis on women was historically accurate in a broad sense. Revolutionary feminism was central to the Republican cause in 1916 and it took the Catholic Church and De Valera many years to wipe it out from the historical memory. My favorite female character was the lesbian assassin. She was a magnificent brooding creation. Alas she was banished from the second season. Perhaps that was because there was no way at all a female assassin could be fitted into the Boy's Own operation that Collins ran. So what is the ethical duty that is owed? Both seasons fell down in their depiction of the historical characters. The writer(s) got De Valera right, I think, but cheated to do so. Connolly was a wooden figure who had not one line of substance to indicate what he believed. Pearse is of course a very difficult character to get right. He was depicted as someone who wrote a letter to his mother praising the Kaiser so he could have all the leaders executed for treason rather than rebellion. Bullshit. The difficulty about Pearse, and Phil will correct me here I trust, is that his brand of left nationalism is the least politically palatable at the moment. So he has to be framed as believing in the Blood Sacrifice. That reading we probably owe to Yeats who was a thorough disciple of Nietzsche btw. I will comment on the second season if there is any interest comradely Gary _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
