Sunday, March 17, 2024

Roger Casement Martyr

Once a Knight of the British Empire Roger Casement was led to his death before a firing squad.

His crime was treason.

He had plotted to have weapons delivered to the IRA to fight against the English during WWI.

The Germans had failed to supply the arms.

A lover sold him out to the Brits.

His friends rejected the revolutionary after the English published his Black Diaries professing his homosexuality.

He was hung dead and thrown naked into a grave to be covered with limestone.

A traitor and a queer.

In 1965 his remains were returned to Free Ireland and according to Wikipedia after a state funeral the corpse was buried with full military honors in the Republican plot in Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin. An estimated half a million people filed past his coffin. The President of Ireland, Éamon de Valera, who in his mid-eighties was the last surviving leader of the Easter Rising, defied the advice of his doctors and attended the ceremony, along with an estimated 30,000 Irish citizens.

Casement's last wish, to be buried at Murlough Bay on the North Antrim coast has yet to be fulfilled as Harold Wilson's government released the remains only on condition that they not be brought into Northern Ireland.

The BBC reported on his death. They tried to debunk his struggles against oppression in Brazil, the Congo, and Ireland. One thing remains true.

Free the world.

Roger Casement would have waned it that way.

Traitor, but only to end injustice.

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