Part Two: Roger Casement: The Gay Irish Anti-Colonial Knight

In part two of this week's episode, Margaret continues her conversation with author Wren Awry about Roger Casement, whose reporting helped end the brutal reign of Leopold II of Belgium.

Preorder Wren's book Nourishing Resistance: Stories of Food, Protest & Mutual Aid, out Spring 2023: https://pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=1321

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello, and welcome to cool people who did cool stuff.
I'm your host, Margaret Killjoy, and every Monday and Wednesday,
I tell you stories about people I think we're just
swell grand, the bees knickers, the cat's knees, and the
hearts potatoes with me today is my guest run Ran.
On a scale of swell to grand, how are you doing,
I would say, I'm well. Actually I'm still a little

(00:24):
bit sad about the episode we recorded a few days ago,
or that came out a few days ago, So I
don't know where I am on the scale from swell
to grand. I feel like I'm still sitting with that, okay, um,
But but otherwise I would say quite swell, okay yeah.

(00:44):
And then there's Sophie, the producer. Wait, what did I call?
Decided to call you the mad Wizard? No mean lord lord, um,
Hi Sophie, how are you doing? Swell? Grand? Upset about Norway? Yeah,
upset about Norway who murdered beloved walrus who they named Freya.

(01:05):
They named her and then they killed her so that
rich people and their boats could be you know whatever,
Like she was just lounging on peers and like being adorable.
And then humans had to ruin in so they killed her,
and I'm mad about it. The fuck the Norwegian government agreed.
That's what I was supposed to say, right, Yeah, I
mean I wanted you to say, what you what was

(01:27):
in your heart? What's in my heart? The Norwegian government
for killing Freya? Justice for Freya. She was a legend.
He and as our audio engineer on women did our music,
both are swell and grand. Hopefully I can't actually speak
to how they're doing, but as people as adjectives I
would describe them with, I would consider swell, grand the

(01:50):
heart's potatoes. This is part two of our two part
series and Roger Casement, the Irish humanitarian night trader who
brought down helped bring down Leopold the Second and got
ang for his guns for Irish people. Planned Oh that's
the spoiler. Ah, but you should go back to not you, Wren,
but everyone else should go back and listen to part one,
because this won't make any sense if you haven't heard

(02:11):
part one. So where we last left Roger Casement, he
had just secured permission to go explore Leopold Congo to
figure out if all the rumors were true. And it's
a it's a fucking apocalypse. M hm. He'd been there before,
right before it was Leopold's private kingdom. He saw, you know,

(02:33):
he went to a town he had been to before
that should have forty people. There were eight thousand people left,
with no trade, no canoes. Um, they were just enslaved
another village. They said they had to go farther and
farther every week to meet their quota. They were out
there dying of exposure. They were getting eaten by animals. Um.
If they were late, they'd get mmulated and murdered. And

(02:57):
when they ran out of rubber vines, the entire town
just fled. Um. He met them where they had fled to.
You know, they came and talked to him because I
think he had some personal connections with some of them.
He he gets sick on this journey, but he spends
a lot of time sick. It just like kind of
doesn't bother him, I think. I mean, I'm sure it
bothers him, but like he does what he continues to do.
You know, he turns thirty nine on this trip, just

(03:19):
to get a sense of where he's at in his
life at this point. Um. And when he first starts
meeting people and they're telling them all this awful ship.
He's like, maybe this is exaggerated, and then soon he's like, no, no,
this is not. There's a town of five thousand people,
it's not two people. They were killed out right, or
a lot of them were worked until the immune systems

(03:41):
failed them. One of the big things that Leopold claimed
about all the death was that it was an outbreak
of sleeping sickness, which is a tropical disease. Um. But
it wasn't It wasn't that, but a lot of people
were dying of sickness because their immune systems were failing them. Um,
And like what a dark line. He goes around and
he uses what authority can to set children free from prisons.

(04:04):
Everywhere he goes he tries to be like, I'm kind
of in charge a little bit. You've got to stop
at least doing that thing, right, Yeah, And I don't know,
there's just more bad stuff. Um. And rumor gets around
that he's actually trying to make it better once he

(04:24):
starts setting children free, because these people were not used
to a lot of white people who are trying to
make things better. So more and more people come to
talk to him, and they show him the ways in
which they've been wounded and mutilated and stuff. Um, and
he he gathers up a ton of information for this
report and then he like practically runs out of the area.
He gets out as fast as he can because he

(04:47):
feels so urgent to get it done. And also a
little bit I wonder whether he's like, are they going
to let me get away with this? They keep killing
everyone who does this kind of thing, you know. Um,
I don't know. That's that's my that an inference on
my part. But he gets out as fast as he can.
He stays up all night writing his report. Is before
he doesn't go back to Europe. He just gets back
to the coast. Um stays up all night writing the report.

(05:10):
He writes for days, and then he sends once again
he's still like a good bureaucrat. He sends letters to
the Free State officials being like, please investigate the following crimes.
And it's just like a list of every single crime
that he had evidence of it and had encountered. Yeah,
and then he also sends his initial report to England. Um,

(05:30):
and the people in England who are in charge of
his report, they're supposed to give it to the rest
of the Berlin people. This is still his preliminary report,
and they got it. They well, they don't got it.
They don't change much about it except they take out
all of the names and they replace them all with
like you know, if you read like old timey books,
it's like and then I ran across X, and it's
like X and A dash. Have you seen this, like

(05:52):
the naming convention, like like they it's like a censoring thing. Yeah,
it's like like I feel a lot of nineteenth century
books that I read for fun, we'll have like and
then I ran across gentleman M and it's like M
dash and so I know what you're talking about. Yeah,
replacing the names of code. And they do that, but

(06:14):
there's so many people in his book that it goes
like A B, C, D, E F G, and then
it's like A A, B, B and then it's like
A C D F is the name of someone or whatever,
and it's just like illegible to a lay reader who
isn't keeping very very careful attention. Um, so it gets ignored.
The Berlin signatories, the people would agree to carve up

(06:35):
Africa ignore it. It's in their best interests to ignore
it anyway. Um. In Brussels everyone makes fun of it.
Is it's British anti Belgian propaganda. He heads back to
London to write the rest of his report, and then
while he and then he gets back and he talks
to the press and then he sucks a guy with
a seven inch cock and writes about it in his diary. Um.
And then the government keeps delaying their request for the

(06:56):
finished report because the capitalists in England don't want the
finished report and there's like specific surname people or so
and so who just are like, don't write that report,
don't don't ask for it. So they need more public outcry,
and the newly formed Congo Reform Association works at it,

(07:18):
and eventually the report gets requested. He writes the report,
and slowly the sort of lumbering wheels of almost justice
gets set into motion. The powers of Europe are like,
oh really, actually this is maybe a bit too far. Um.
Belgium sets up an independent inquiry and confirm casements report,

(07:38):
and in Leopold the Second is forced to relinquish the Congo.
He didn't give it to the Congo, which is what
would naturally happen with one ceased controlling the country, he
gives it to Belgium. Um, because Europe is a place
of monsters. And Leopold also burned all of his fucking

(07:59):
record mm hmmm, so the world will probably never know
the true extent to his monstrosity. Um. Just and just
like people saying like, oh, the ovens were burning for days, um,
as he trashed all his records, Belgium got the congo
continued to suck it over for decades, which is a

(08:20):
story we don't have time to get into. But Leopold
was a fucking monster, and this is still good that
he got stopped. Um. And then Leopold died a year later,
and I can't figure out how the funk he died.
Do you know how he died? Do either of you
know how he died? Every source that I find to
be fair, I didn't go and buy a biography of

(08:41):
King Leopold to write and are to write a thing
about someone else. But I skimmed a ton of books,
and I skimmed a ton of articles. I found out
how his kid died in open heart surgery, and found
out his dad died. I completely forget because it was
irrelevant to the story. UM, I don't know who King
Leopold died, but he died. I mean, he's old, so
he just died. Don't know, UM, I like to think

(09:03):
because he was oh and then. But the cool part
is that when he died, at least according to the
BBC reports, UM, when he died people, his own people
booed him at his funeral. Incredible. I think I think it.
I think it was pneumonia based on search pneumonia and
three separate articles. Who could all be like I just

(09:24):
feel like about no, I'm now I just feel like
a bad researcher because okay, yep, let's go pneumonia. So
he gets booed at his funeral. It's probable that he
doesn't get booed for being like one of the worst
people to have ever been born, but instead because like
by the end of his life, he um he started
dating a sixteen year old sex worker and married her,

(09:50):
and UM disinherited his daughters and then gave his entire fortune. Two.
The the teenage sex worker who might not have been
teenage at that point when I don't know that, the
UM who was basically just sucking UM gold digging very effectively,
and so she inherits all of his money and then

(10:10):
marries the pimp who introduced her to Leopold. Um. I
think that's why he got booed at his funeral, But
I like to think it's because he was one of
the worst monsters in all of history. That's not even
what's so amazing, right, because as you're like, okay, Casement
to this thing, right, this amazing thing, and that is

(10:31):
the we're not done with Caseman because he did an
awful lot more. All right, So Caseman, he has successfully
stopped Leopold or been a large part of a multi
a huge movement, right, but an important part of it.
I'm not trying to downplay him, but I'm also not

(10:52):
trying to say he is the person who stopped Leopold,
right totally. Yeah, and maybe because he's seen some of
the worst aspects of colonialism up in front. It's around
this time he has really into being Irish and he
in nineteen o four he joined the Gaelic League the
Conra Na gelga Um, which is an organization that fights

(11:15):
for the preservation of the Irish language. And one of
the rn knows more about the thing that I'm now
talking about then I do. But it's it's possible that
this organization which UM, which he didn't start, right, but
it's it's it's spearheaded the movement that, as far as
I can tell, saved the language from extinction. In the
first decade of the nineteenth century, Irish people grew up

(11:37):
speaking Irish. By the last decade of the nineteenth century
was three point five of people were speaking Irish is
their first language. Yeah. So he worked in in Ulster
in Northern Ireland, where he was more or less from
and he basically was trying to help convince fellow Protestants
that the Irish language mattered and yeah, which is rarer UM.

(11:59):
But I do feel like you do see UM And
I don't know if I would be able to come
up with specific examples, but you do see a lot
of like Anglo Irish and Irish Protestants really sort of
being important players and in UM like fighting to free
Ireland from the English. But he's definitely not the only one. Yeah,

(12:20):
And that's one of the things that I kind of
like I came across more and more because you know,
my family is um is Irish Catholic, and so you
kind of have this this narrative that Ireland is the
loyalist Protestants and the you know, nationalists or Republican Catholics, right,
and it it does seem like it's way messier than
that than what people and like more of the Protestants

(12:42):
were actually down with a free Ireland, or at least
there were like some notable ones who just like had
a good analysis and we're, you know, we're down to
throw down. Yeah, and so and when I say fellow
Protestants that he was all trying to teach, it's like
it's hard to it seems like was not actually personally
convinced one way or the other between Protestantism and Catholicism. Um.

(13:05):
And but also it's like this is like what the
histories want to talk about, right, because like everyone's invested
in having him be their guy, you know, or having
him not be their guy if they think he's a
dirty trader or like had too much gay sex or whatever.
And I don't know, I think he was kind of
agnostic on spiritual matters, um. Not there was no part

(13:27):
of him that was atheist, but in terms between between
Protestantism and either way, what he is not confused about
is that he cares about Irish um and and while
he's working for it helps that at this point he
is Britain's and if not maybe the world's most prominent
human human rights activists at this point because of the

(13:48):
Ship that he just managed to do um and he,
as far as I can tell, lives in a way
that proves this. I keep kind of wanting to find
the like, yeah, but he was, actually I keep wanting
to find the wasn't quite as nice as everyone says
he was. Everyone says he was this nice. The only
thing they argue about is whether or not it made

(14:08):
him a bad person for being so nice, Like he
was either a fool or a saint. Okay, no one
was questioning that he like he He was not rich,
He had no capital assets, no inherited um. He lived
off his civil servant salary. He also hated landlords and ship.
I tried to, like pigeonhole, figure out whether he identifies

(14:30):
socialist or whatever. I didn't. I don't have an answer
to that. I do know he hated landlords, which is cool. Well,
landlords and if he's if he's getting into Irish nationalism,
they're all the landlord in in Ireland just like this
very specific okay thing right, because there were um during colonization,
and I talked a little bit about this. I have

(14:50):
this whole little potato sticked because he liked sponsored by
the concept of potatoes. But um, there was like a
huge amount of expropriation of land in Ireland during before, during,
and after um Cromwell's conquest and so um, there's this
long history of people getting evicted from their land by

(15:11):
these large like English ruling class, um landholders. So there's
this long history of eviction. It happened during the famine,
it happened before, it happened after. So I think of
landlords as a specifically they're they're terrible everywhere, um, but
but they were specific powerful group within Ireland that was

(15:31):
sucking people over. Okay, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah,
it's good that Okay. Yeah, Like I'm trying to figure
out how to picture him and um, so he's living
off his salary. He does not live off of capital assets.
I think basically everyone else in his field it made
their money by being crooked, you know, made their money
by setting up a little something on the side in

(15:53):
the place that they were colonizing or whatever. Um because
the salary was not great. I tried to on it
through calculators. It's very hard to calculate, like English pounds
in eighteen seventy two U s dollars now. But like
he he was not doing great, but he was doing
better than a lot of people around him in Ireland.

(16:13):
And so he does ship like buy cows for random families.
Like he'll talk to a family and they'll be like, yeah,
we're kind of starving to death, and it was like,
wouldn't be better I for you like a cow and
you could have some milk, And they're like, it would
be better, and he's like that, So he leaves and
he goes buys them a cow. He doesn't even go
back and bring them the cow himself, because he's not
there to like look cool, you know, yeah, well that's okay.

(16:34):
So then they have another tie. And I'm going to
grab a potato fact sheet, all right, all right, because
I think that people think of Irish cuisine and they
think of the potato, which of course is a product
of the so called Columbian exchange from from regions like Peru,
Northern South America. Actually like a very horrific and genocidal
conquest of the America's But potatoes get imported to Ireland. Um,

(16:58):
but they're there to feed people because the Irish were
originally cattle herders who mostly ate meat and dairy, and
the British came in and saw this hurting lifestyle as
really lazy and wanted to let me see what I
have here, so they made I was like, yeah, Wren

(17:21):
came prepared. I'm very excited about that. I did come prepared.
I'm like, exit, I'm not a great off the cuff person.
So I wrote it all down, even when it's like
stuff I know. Yeah. So the so the British came
in and they were like, these lazy Irish people who
are like pushing their cows around, we have to turn
them into farmers. And so in the sixteenth and seventeenth century,
British invaders still tens of thousands of heads of cattle

(17:43):
in an attempt to start the Irish out, and they
thought if they could turn them into farmers, they'd have
less time for activities like rebelling against the English right,
because it's like basically like, if you have a cow,
you don't need to plan any potatoes and you don't
even need to own land. You can kind of just
like wander around and hang out with your cow. I think.
So I don't feel welly understand like the like how

(18:04):
nomadic Irish people were before colonization, But I do know
they were herders, right, They mostly ate meat and dairy
with a little bit of vegetables um. And then it
was when the British came in that um that there
was a strong push to turn turn Irish folks into farmers.
And then the potato becomes really useful because it's an
easy crop to grow, and it grows underground. And one

(18:27):
thing that Cromwell does when he comes in UM is
he burns a bunch of crops. But it's really hard
to burn crops that are underground, so the potato i'm
still able to be harvested. So so it's interesting that
Casement is buying cows for people because probably Casement was
just like they need a cow, but there was this

(18:47):
strong tie into too, like earlier food ways on the island. Yeah,
but I wouldn't put it past him with every because
he's obsessed with Irish history, like people like, Yeah, he's
like deep into Irish language and stuff. Yeah, and people
are like, like literally the people who don't like him
are like, he's obsessed with Irish history basically mythology. He's

(19:09):
just he thinks he's living in Irish mythology. So okay, okay,
So that like maybe I mean the cow thing if
you want to talk about Irish mythology, which I'm not
really going to very much, but the cow comes up
over and over again. Could but I'm not. I don't
feel like I know enough. But but the cow is
very important. Like there's one of the most famous um

(19:30):
Irish mythological stories which I would say that most of
the people in it are not cool people who did
not do cool stuff. They're like very complicated and sometimes
bad mythological figures. The cattle Rate of Coolie, which is
all about stealing cows. Yeah, I can see him being
really into cows. Okay, Okay, I like this, um yeah, No,

(19:53):
we're just gonna decide, We're gonna right. It's it's so
much about him is mythologized, and he was also into
in mythology. I think he's actually would be okay with
being mythologized. So he bought cows. You've heard it here first,
or maybe you've heard it from other people to have
come to the same conclusions. This is why he bought
people of cows. He also um. He he rides third

(20:14):
class on trains. His friends make fun of him for
always giving way money to every beggar he saw, and
they say things that he like he is buying smiles
at a penny apiece and they like say this as
if he's gonna like feel bad about it, and so
he's just like, yeah, that makes sense. He refuses all
luxuries for himself. Sucks not being a luxury um. I

(20:34):
mean especially in the context of you know, having to
be secretly homosexual or whatever. Um. And he saves up
money to offer prizes in schools for the study of
the Irish language. Um. And he he organizes It's like
in amongst all of this other stuff, I feel like
this is such an This is an equally important part
of anti colonial struggle as like getting guns for people.

(20:56):
Right is He's organizing Irish gatherings for Gaelic songs and
dunces um. And his friend refers to him as his
happiest during such moments when he's like just like sitting
back and watching the kids like listen to Irish music
and dance. You know. He starts raising money. He uses
his international connections to raise money for Irish kids in

(21:16):
school basically like like Brazil sends a thousand pounds, which
is like a hundred thousand pounds and they sent a
lot of money, um to help feed Irish kids who
can't for food, you know. Um. And in nineteen o five,
chin Fain is founded UH, an Irish republican party that
wants Ireland as a republic. Imagine living in a country

(21:38):
where republican means wants a republic. Um. He joins right off.
He is one of the first people to join this um.
He's still a British civil servant, but whatever, fuck it,
I'm joining shin Fain because of his position. When he
wrote about Irish nationalism, he writes about it mostly anonymously,
and and he writes about Indo pen Is anonymously for

(22:00):
various newspapers. He calls himself the leprechn of Irish politics.
I think because he was like evasive, elusive, you know. Um.
So let's talk about potatoes, because we're switching to an
addition now so as everyone knows or maybe are learning
now this is your first episode. We're sponsored by good Things,
and we're sponsored most traditionally by the concept of potato.

(22:23):
But I'm hearing that there might be some complications that
we need to take into consideration. Um, because it sounds
like right, you have it as this colonial well robbed
from the people of South America in a really devastating way,
introduced the people of Ireland in a really devastating way,
but also provided a certain amount of resiliency because it

(22:45):
doesn't burn. I mean, like everything in history, it's complicated, right, Um. Yeah,
So so potatoes come actually all over europe peasants start
eating potatoes. It's sort of hailed as as a way
to prevent famine, which, as you will, does not actually happen,
but um, yeah, as to a way to cheaply feed

(23:05):
people who couldn't afford food in Europe. Um, And so
it gets introduced. It really takes off in Ireland though,
But yeah, it is complicated, right because then I think
if we're going to talk about Irish nationalism, there were
many famines, but the Great Hunger, which is what the
Irish Famine is typically called, I believe within Ireland. Sorry

(23:26):
to any Irish people if I'm getting that wrong. Um,
but that you know, that was a definitely an impact
on people wanting to independent Ireland, one of many impacts.
And in that case, um the lumper potato, which is
the potato that started being grown all over Ireland. UM.

(23:47):
It was not very tasty and it was not very
resistant to um sort of blight, which is what ended
up happening. But it grew very quickly and it grew
a lot, so it was really good for feeding people,
um until it wasn't. Until it wasn't and the famine
actually hit. I didn't actually go back into this research

(24:07):
when I wrote these notes, but it hit all over Europe.
But it really had I really badly because because of
what I was talking about before, right where people have
been pushed off their land, they were basically only being
able to grow potatoes and a few other crops. It
was actually a bad idea to grow a garden where
you would get like other delicious vegetables, because that would
be considered an improvement on your property and the landlord

(24:30):
could raise the rent what you could afford if you
would plant like a garden with like you know, greens
and tomatoes, and I don't know cabbage, kale. I'm trying
to think of things that that Irish folks back then
might plant. And they were also really easy to grow
because they could be grown in lazy beds, which the
Irish had grown crops in forty five hundred years um.

(24:52):
And it was really well adaptot to Ireland's thin, wet soil.
But of course the British didn't understand it and despised
it because it didn't take enough work. The British are
really in the Irish to be hard working farmers, so
once they were dug and planted, they needed little work.
But this did allow the Irish peasants to have time
for other tasks, which was really important since most of
them also had a farmer work on behalf of their landlords. Um.

(25:16):
It wasn't it like the great they made. They grew
potatoes from themselves and they grew everything else for exporter
to give to the landlord's pay rent. Totally right, And
that's so that's where the lumper comes in, because they
could just produce a lot of it and then I
have some stuff about. There was a population boom between
seven hundred and eighteen forty five that drove a demand
for land, but there actually would have been enough if

(25:37):
there weren't all these huge landlords expropriating the land, and
so instead many people were forced into a system called
the conaker, which was paying for the right to grow
potatoes on a piece of land, and forty one percent
of the Irish population didn't even have that. They consisted
of landless labors as of eighteen forty five, right, that's
the first year of the famine, and Ireland was almost

(25:58):
entirely agricultural, so land was super import written. There wasn't
a ton of industry there, and rents could be really
really high. Rents were eight higher than in England. Okay,
well ship basically so. But yeah, basically there's like just
a really bad situation where people are forced into a
system where they're paying to grow potatoes. I already mentioned
the thing where they couldn't grow kitchen gardens. So once

(26:20):
the blight gets hit, their hit really bad. The English
don't want to send aid because the Irish have a
reputation for exaggerating um and as every like every like
marginalized person is always You're not you're just complaining. You're
just you're always complaining. Why are you always complained because
you're starving to death every day a new complaint. Yeah, totally.

(26:42):
You didn't have food yesterday, Why are you complaining about
food today? Same completely idea yesterday. For sure. It's like
they weren't working hard enough, as their potatoes were like
rotting in their fields. Um. And they also there were
also a few people who make comments about it, like
controlling the Irish population, which is a lot more nefarious
um them. And then they had all these really really

(27:02):
silly ideas like straining the rotten potatoes, baking them so
the rotten part was baked off. None of these worked.
They like sent um corn. They wouldn't send grain because
grain would mess with the market forces of the capitalist market,
but they sent they sent flint corn, and the assumption
was that like in England, there'd be all these mills

(27:22):
and they can mail the flint corn and use it.
But there weren't mills in Ireland. Really to the same.
I think it's like a hard corn um that you
would have to mail to make into like a corn meal.
But I whoever is listening should probably fact check me
on that. So they couldn't mille it. So the English
told them to boil it, which didn't really work. So
basically they're sending useless food. Then you have other groups.

(27:46):
You have Protestant groups who are starting soup kitchens, but
you have to convert or attend services to receive the food,
which gave rise to the phrase taking the soup. Um.
But then we have our friends the Quakes, who were
some of the only people who set up relief efforts
that weren't tied at all to like trying to convert people.

(28:09):
Some of them actually died from illnesses related to the
famine doing the relief work. Um, and their efforts saved
thousands of lives. Sorry, I feel like I just went
off onto this famine. No, I mean this was like
literally the plan of the reason for anyone who's listening. Um.
One of the reasons I had, uh, I wanted potato facts,
and so Wren came up with hashtag potato facts. But

(28:29):
then they actually form an actual narrative about potatoes. Yes.
And then there are also funds that came in from
all over the world, including Mexic co Venezuela, India, the
Chalk Talk people, UM, Russia, Italy, and beyond individual British citizens.
You know, people like casement. I'm sure you know he
wasn't alive then, but right, we have one million Irish

(28:51):
people who died as a result of the Great Hunger
and one million who immigrated because of it, And so
the countryside was so empty that I've never had a
chance to go to Ireland, but I've read that even
today you can see the remnants of these lazy beds
where people grew potatoes, just like all the landscape because
they were like they were like cottages and farmhouses there,

(29:13):
and now it's just so um, I think that's the
end of potato facts. Yeah, and I feel like that
is like context to just like I think one of
the problems I always struggled with history is that, you know,
the dates didn't mean anything to me when I was younger,
before you could start connecting. The only point of knowing
all the dates in history is so you can start seeing,

(29:34):
you can start weaving the web and seeing the grander narrative.
It's like the dates of the points of connection. Because
and so it's worth thinking about the fact that he is,
you know, his parents lived through the Great Hunger, um,
you know, and like, so this is the context that
he's coming into is like, what was it the population

(29:55):
of Ireland went down by half or something like that.
I tried to look that up again and all I
found was that two million the one millions million immigrated,
so I don't think it was quite half. Ye, But yeah,
so he's I don't know is important context both for
Roger Casement and for fans of this show's primary sponsor, Potatoes.

(30:17):
We also have other sponsors. Um tap water, good healthy,
clean tap water is one of our sponsors. Um, Sophie,
do you have any good sponsors? The concept of a
always cool pillow? Mm hmm, yeah, that is a good um,

(30:39):
and that is what we're sponsored by, not any brand
of cool cooling pillow. They. Um, we are however accepting, uh,
we are ever accepting donations of cool pillow. Never mind.
We are yeah, okay, here's some advertisers. Okay, and we

(31:04):
are back and we are talking about how Roger Casement
is basically like getting really involved in not just Irish politics,
but Irish culture and actually at this point primarily Irish culture,
although also joined shin fein the Republican Organization and the
rest of the movement. They're not as sure about him. Um,
he's Protestant. He works for England. That's probably an even

(31:26):
bigger deal than the Protestant thing. I don't know. I
would trust this guy, um, but he he doesn't care
because he's not doing it for cloud. He is doing
what he believes is right. He's got a lot of
ideas about chivalry. A lot of his writing is about chivalry,
and he actually wrote about how imperialism was the death
of chivalry. I would argue that there's problems in the

(31:48):
you know, traditional ideas of chivalry as well. But this
is this is what's leading him. This is the fire
inside of him that makes him do what's right. And
he he's really into the Fianna, these heavily mythologized fans
of Irish warriors from the Iron Age in the early
Middle Age, And I don't know. And so the thing
that's really interesting me about it if I were into
myth making, and let's be realized, I am. He is

(32:11):
in his own way a night I mean, he ends
up knighted later in the story. But you know, if
you understand knighthood mythologically right, the like we are not
sponsored by the concept of knighthood. I want to be
clear about this, but the concept of knighthood divorced from
the actual historical existence of knighthood does seem to be
a motivating archetype in his life. So I've gone from

(32:35):
calling him gay James Bond to I don't know, okay,
sir Gowen, I don't know the knights of the round table,
fake geek okay. So he in nineteen o six, he
before I was just thinking about I got lost thinking
about swords. Um always in the back of my mind,
the bedrock of all fosses, swords and shields and armor.

(32:57):
But in nineteen o six he's off overseas again. He's
sent off a sees and this time he goes to
South America, to Brazil. He's there for three years, and
in he goes deep into the Amazon in Peru to
investigate a colonial operation that is using force labor to
extract rubber. It's basically is beat at this point is
um evil corporations that are using force labor to extract rubber.

(33:21):
It's just as bad as what he saw in the
Congo Uh. It's not at the same numerical scale, but
it is just as bad in terms of the atrocities
that are happening to people it's just sucking evil. He
writes a long report full of first person accounts from
the indigenous people who are actually were being enslaved people
at the time. It was like kind of a big
deal that he kept like using people's actual words, like

(33:43):
letting them speak for themselves, you know. And his damning
report comes out and the company is like, oh, sorry,
we'll be better, But he doesn't give up. He goes
back a year later and they are not better, so
he starts campaigning against them. It know, a really quick overviews.
Like he writes these reports and things fall. But he

(34:04):
writes these reports and then participates in large movements to
drive public opinion and impact, you know, the bottom line
of these companies and stuff. And so this he works
with this international campaign for years too. And he he
destroys the company or he participates in the campaign to
destroy the company. Many, but not all, the people involved
in the bad ship get prosecuted. Um. And this whole

(34:27):
story deserves more time than I'm giving it, but I can.
I picked two of his many many stories. I picked
h the Congo, when I picked the Easter Rising. Um.
This work makes him up. He's already like the most
famous humanitarian in the world. He's now just a fucking hero.
He gets knighted by England and I'm a little surprised

(34:49):
he accepted. He's not super keen on the English crown.
At this point, I fell down this rabbit hole of
the like, there's like, my favorite Wikipedia list is the
list of people who have refused knighthood. A ton of
people have refused knighthood because they've been like either they're like,
well that's a little bit silly, isn't it. Or they've
been like, no, I fucking hate you and everything you
stand for. What would I take knighthood? But he he

(35:12):
accepts knighthood. Later he tells his interrogators, because later he
gets interrogated, he says that he accepted it because refusing
it would have meant losing his job, and he couldn't
afford to lose his job. Um, and I don't know,
you know, I don't know exactly what that looked like

(35:32):
to him, you know, but basically it was like, if
I want to continue in the position that I've worked
my entire life in this career, I can't if I refuse.
If I start refusing these commendations. So he's sir Roger Casement,
Sir Roddy rod Sex okay so um. In nineteen thirteen

(35:58):
are you twelve? Okay? Anyway? So okay? He gets knighted
and in the nineteen thirteen he retires and he immediately
sets about his new job. His new job is kicking
the English the funk out of Ireland, peacefully if possible,

(36:21):
with guns if necessary. That is the full of his
his mission. In thirteen, he and several other people found
the Irish Volunteers, which is a military organization for the
freedom of Ireland, or at least the home rule of Ireland.
There was some argument within the ranks about exactly what
they were fighting for. You always shocked to know. And
it was explicitly open to people regardless of class or religion.

(36:44):
It wasn't quite a let's overthrow the government organization. Um.
It saw itself as a counter to the loyalist militia,
the Ulster Volunteers that was forming. And basically, I don't know,
take note, Americans. Militia's form and to counter other militias
is a sign that troubles comping for better or worse.

(37:07):
So you have these two, you know, So you have
this loyalist militia and this nationalist militia UM, and the
Ulster militia is well funded and shipped and so they
have a lot of advantages. UM. And the Ultar militia
does this whole thing where they like smuggle in a
bunch of guns and they send guns to like every
fucking loyalist in the country, totally illegally, and no one's
trying to stop them. So the Irish volunteers are like, well,

(37:29):
we need guns too. So Roger Caseman, he's like organizing
large things that involve international things. I'm your guy. And
so he and several others, including an American born Irish
woman named Molly Childers, who I'm literally just name dropping.
So we're not passing the back deel test right now.
This entire episode has so many men in it, but

(37:51):
there's some women involved. Um yeah, it was almost an
all male episode. But yeah, but I guess we're not men. Yeah,
that that helps. And then and then we have Molly
Childers but yeah, who's mostly written in all the history
books as Mrs Ermine childhood, mostly known by her fucking

(38:11):
husband's name because he was involved too, but so was
goddamn she. Um. I don't know. I I was thinking
about this and it was like, there is also and
maybe it's bad, but I'm like, I think when you
write about gay men in history, there's also a certain
amount of like, Um, I don't know, I'm not trying
to get myself off the hook for this, Okay whatever.
Anyway it happens. So Molly and Roddy they're like, let's

(38:36):
buy some guns from from the Germans and who are
not yet at war with all of Europe. And so
they raise a bunch of money through various means, including
Casement just giving up all his money always. I literally
don't understand how he like ate food. Um, he's always
giving up all of his money. Um. And he raises
money through his connections and they do all these like
fundraisers practically like bake sales to buy us some fucking

(38:58):
rifles and um. And they buy black powder rifles from Germans,
which are completely obsolete weapons. Uh. And these are some
of the weapons that later get used in the Rising. Um.
And when they show up to buy them, they're like, no,
these aren't for a we're not planning to violently evict
the English from our own country. There for Mexico, and

(39:21):
they smuggle them over to Ireland. And this this part
is not Casement. This is Molly and some other people,
and they smuggle them over to Ireland on two personal
yachts owned by Irish nationalists, including one yacht that was
called the Asgard, which means it is the second Germanic
paganism reference in a show about Ireland and the congo
um and I'm excited that the Germanic pagan reference shows

(39:44):
up on the good side in this case. The yachts
are so full of guns that the crew had to
like throw out all their food and ship and they
literally sleep on top of guns. Uh. They go through
storms and at one point they sailed through an entire
fleet of English and you can just imagine it in
the movie. It's the part where everything's like really silent
as the little personal yacht moves through all the warships

(40:05):
you know. Um, and they succeed. They land the yachts
in the middle of the day, very intentionally, right the
Ulster volunteers. They snuck it in at night and they
were like, as far as I could tell, They're like,
fuck you, this is our country that we're doing this
in the middle of the fucking day. They land as
close to Dublin as they can, um, and when they

(40:26):
show up there's a crowd, and the fucking people running
the docks were a bunch of snitch asses. And so
they call the cops, and the cops come. The crowd
riots and it drives back the cops by throwing stones
maybe shotguns towards the cops. No one seems to have
been injured during this part of it, um, but they
drive the cops off. The cops only managed to confiscate

(40:47):
like nineteen of the rifles, and then a judge makes
them give them back later anyway, just cool um and
the rest of you know. So the guns are all
secreted away by the revolutionaries and hidden, and the crowd
makes a mistake. The crowd follows the cops to basically
follow them down the street and laugh at them. It's
just like yeah, like fuck you cops. So the cops

(41:10):
open fire and run in with bayonets and injured people
and kill yeah. And they so four people die, thirty
people get injured, and it incites more nationalist fervor um.
The operation is overall of success. I don't know how
the four people would feel about it, probably actually okay,

(41:31):
with it, and the guns are whisked off to be
hidden in a Catholic school run by revolutionaries because Ireland.
Mm hmmm, it's fourteen and there's this important thing that
happens in fourteen. Speaking of the dates mattering and them
being the things that intersect and connect everything, World War
one starts yep uh, in which Germany decides to go

(41:56):
declare war and stuff. Um, this isn't a World War One.
Cast the Irish are like, fuck, yeah, Britain is going
to be busy, It's time to fucking go. Some of them. Yeah,
the Irish Volunteers actually end up split. The overwhelming majority
of them change their name to the National Volunteers and
are like we must go defend German fight against Germany. Um.

(42:19):
And then there's like this whole thing and there's this
whole falling out, and it basically means that the radicals
kind of take control the Irish Republican Brotherhood i RB
take control of the Irish Volunteers, and then a lot
of the National Volunteers like kind of comes sulking back
and are like never mind, can we come back? And
they're like yeah, But the radicals are kind of more
in charge and I'm like, okay, whatever. So this kind
of like lays a lot of the groundwork, um for

(42:41):
well for Ireland to do its thing where it sort
of gets independent later um Casement. In the meantime, I
think he's actually in New York City when the war
breaks out, because he's like, all right, we need guns
and money. I'm going to do the thing where I
travel around the world and sleep with people and get
guns and money. Um. And so he goes to New
York and he um his contact there is an Irish

(43:05):
guy named John Devoy, and he says, practical politics, he
did not understand. He was an idealist, absolutely without personal ambition,
ready to sacrifice his interests and his life for the
cause he had at heart. But he was too sensitive
about the consequences to others of his actions, which again,
like people keep saying this ship about Caseman as if
people are oh, he's a softie, and I'm like, good,

(43:28):
I like him more because he actually thinks about the
impact of his actions, like and I don't know whatever, um.
And now that he's done working for the British I
just like him unreservedly at this point. So he also
means with the German diplomat and they they smuggles himself

(43:48):
into wartime Germany from Norway, and the crown tries to
get his companion in his traveling companion to snitch him out,
offering in today's money the equivalent of millions of pounds,
but his companion and refuses, quite possibly because Casement and
his traveling companion were dating. But no one knows. But
you know what else, no one knows about the good

(44:12):
stuff that supports this pod podcast. Like, let's see now,
I just feel so complicated about the concept of potatoes.
I think that the it's okay, Like I think that
that really reflects how history is always complicated, you know. Yeah,
Like I love potatoes, I don't. We can eat potatoes later,

(44:34):
you know this, This podcast is sponsored by the concept
of fuzzy socks that make your feet just warm enough
but not too performs yeah, and give you that nice
little cushion that makes you feel like you're getting a
hug on your feet. Ye welcome listeners for that description.

(44:55):
Ads M okay, and we are back and we're talking
about Casement, who is now a spy again, and this
time he's like, actually, um, you know, in a country
that's at war with the country that ostensibly rules him.
He has smuggled himself into wartime Germany during World War

(45:16):
One to try to get the military aid of the
enemy power. I can't figure out why anyone thought he
was a trader. I mean, I think he rules, but like,
you know whatever, I could see how this looks badly.
So he has three goals. And so he's trying to
get Germany to help the Irish fighting. Yes exactly, Um, yeah,

(45:37):
he he has three goals. He wants German recognition for
an independent Ireland. He wants an Irish brigade made up
of the prisoners of war in Germany, basically all of
the people that have been captured in World War One,
all the Irish people who are fighting for Britain, Great Britain,
UM or for the UK or whatever. And and he
wants tons of guns. Those are three goals. He he

(46:00):
has this funk Off plan where he's going to raise
the Irish brigade right, and so the Germans start treating
the Irish prisoners better, and they start keeping them in
one place so that he can go and like proselytize
to them. Basically, this does not work. The Irish prisoners
of war are like, are you fucking kidding me, you
trader piece of ship? Um, only fifty one of the

(46:23):
two thousand or so agree to join an Irish brigade.
It could be that they were motivated by if we
do this, we'll get hanged. It could be that they
got motivated by we don't want to do that. We
were loyalists all along. There's it could be they were like,
we were literally just fighting against the Germans. Doesn't feel
good to switch sides. I can't even blame the people

(46:44):
who didn't join his idea. UM, but this plan fails,
except we guess fifty one. He's a fifty one strong
Irish brigade. He gets German recognition, sort of. Germany's like,
i'll tell you what, will write a statement that's like,
if we come to Ireland, it will be to free

(47:05):
you and recognize you as an independent nation and not
to conquer you. Um, just sort of the best he
can get. And he gets another boat full of rifles.
This time it's twenty thou most and agants, which are
not obsolete at this point, and ten machine guns, which
is not nearly what he was hoping to get. And
he is depressed he has. He's there for a year

(47:28):
and a half doing all of this work and he
gets this sort of pittance. From his point of view, Um,
he also knows that if this plan fails, he's going
to die. Like he's just like this is this is
the death of me. And as the plan is continuing
to not succeed because his only real hope of surviving
at this point is to win right to show up

(47:50):
a brigade and guns and kick out the English, and
that that's that's the only way he's getting out of
this alive. So he spends a year and a half
being like I dead, this is it, And he goes
about his work anyway, um and writing in his journal
about how he wishes he was dead and being very depressed.
But he and he finds out about the Easter Rising

(48:14):
while he's there, right, um, and I'm going to cover
the Easter Rising at one point, like in more detail
one of these days, because I'm really excited about it
because my my family fought in it. I met my
great uncle who who fought in it. Maybe a bunch
of my great uncles did, but I'm not sure so.
But the Germans agree to smuggle him back before the
rising um and he mostly wants to show up at

(48:35):
this point. He wants to show up and be like,
don't do it yet. We didn't get the stuff that
would make it work, you know, and he's like hoping
to get home in time to postpone it. But Germany
still sends the guns and they send him back and
he said he decides not to take his Irish brigade
with him. They offer him to bring his fifty one
people back, but he's like, no, the rising is doomed.

(48:56):
It is it's I will go back and tell them,
and by doing so, he actually saves the lives of
Irish brigade. Um. They might have been mad about it,
though I don't know. They might have been like whatever,
we'll do it anyway. I think that some of them
show up to his state funeral, like four years later.
We'll get to that. So the gun smuggling and Star
with the gun smuggling, it did not go well. To

(49:17):
be clear, nothing is going to go well for the
rest of his life at this point. Mm hmmm. The
German ship disguises itself as the Odd Org, a Norwegian
neutral ship. This is probably why it failed. Sophie is
that it was Norwegian and the Norwegian government, Um, they
kill Walruce's trash. Yeah, um, except all the sailors on

(49:38):
board were actually German um, and they had all of
their stuff, like their uniforms and their books and everything.
The German government has never done anything, you know, bad, right, No,
I don't think so. Okay, we would have heard, yeah,
or done podcasts about it. I'm not sure that's the
main way that people know about things for sure. Yeah.

(50:01):
The one thing that I can admit that American history does,
American educational system does teach people about It'd be clear, Bernie.
You know, this is World War One Germany, who are
not great, right, but it's not We're not among the Nazis.
So the ship, the Odd Norc or the fake Odd Norc.
They go sailing off with a whole bunch of guns,

(50:22):
but the English had intercepted some communications that and we're
on the lookout. And even worse, they completely just fucked
up the rendezvous point. They just like got the wrong
rendezvous point and so this whole thing falls apart. They
get there and they get to the wrong one and
basements not there, and so they were like huh, and
they just hang out for a couple of days and
then the English are like, hey, buddy, what are you doing?

(50:45):
And they're like, oh no, we're caught and they scuttle
the ship. And scuttle is a very fun word to say.
When do you want to try saying the word scuttle? Yeah? Yeah,
so if you do want to scuttle, scuttle, scuttle. Oh,
I was just gonna say. I also kind of felt
the need to say it like many times, so I
might have I might have covered Sophie up accidentally. What's okay?

(51:07):
It's such a good word. Um. Which between you blow
up your own ship? I love that there's a verb
for blow up your own ship. Um. So they had
preset explosives that like, if we get caught, we'll blow
up our own ship. They they surrender and then they
set off the the scuttle. I don't think it's annun
They scuttled their ship with explosives. Um. And the these

(51:29):
people who had tried to bring guns to the Irish
become POWs. And as for Casement, the Germans small him
back on in a U boat just submarine. A few
days before the rising, they show up to the rendezvous point,
but the boat's not there, so they're like, well, that's bad.
But the U boat captain is like, I'm not going
to hang out here for days, good luck, see you later,

(51:52):
and he like kicks them out in a rowboat and
he has two other buddies with him at this point,
and the U boat fox off. They rowed ashore. Later,
he wrote a sister about landing back in Ireland. When
I landed in Ireland that morning about three am, swamped
and swimming ashore on on an unknown strand, I was

(52:13):
happy for the first time for over a year. Although
I knew that this fate waited on me, this fate
being the fact that he's he's writing this while he's
waiting to be killed. Um. Although I knew that this
fate waited on me, I was, for one brief spell
happy and smiling once more. I cannot tell you what
I felt. The sand hills were full of skylarks rising
in the dawn, the first I had heard in years,

(52:35):
The first sound I had heard through the surf was
their song as I waded through the breakers, and they
kept rising all the time up to the old wrath
at Kershonne, where I stayed and sent the others on
and all around were primroses and wild violets and the
singing of the skylarks in the air. And I was
back in Ireland again. Who was happy to be home?

(52:58):
Locals saw them and there are a bunch of fucking
snitch ass ah. We are zero for two for the
coastal Irish people in this story for not being snitches. Um.
They call the cops and Casement is caught. He was
taken to England, thrown in the Tower of London. He
went to some other prisons in the meantime, but the

(53:18):
Tower of London is the one that I recognized the
name of, so I'm sticking with that one. While he
was waiting for trial, he tries twice tried to kill himself.
Once he took poison that he had smuggled with him
because he's James bond Um. But it was the kind
that needs to be introduced through blood and so he
like broke his own spectacles. He did not succeed. Uh.

(53:39):
The next time he swallowed nails um that also did
not kill him. Yeah, he has put on trial for treason.
It's a three or four day trial. It's prosecuted by
Edward Carson, who's the same absolute funk of an anti
Irish asshole, but previously prosecuted future friend of the Pod
gay Irish anarchist icon Oscar Wilde. Um so we guess

(54:01):
the same fucking prosecutors Oscar wild Casement wants to defend
himself because half of the people on the show wants
to defend themselves. That's like a running theme. His friends
talk him out of it. Um, it probably wouldn't have
mattered in the end. George Bernard Shaw, and Irish socialist
in playwright, was supporting him and offered to write him
a speech if he did defend himself. And incidentally, while

(54:23):
we're on the subject of people refusing knighthood, Shaw refused
a knighthood. Um. He hated all awards and once he
was set to refuse the Nobel Prize in Literature, but
his wife was like, you fucking asshole, you need to
accept that for Ireland. If you're not doing it for yourself,
do it for Ireland. Um So George Bernard Shaw listened

(54:43):
to his wife accepted the Nobel Prize in Literature. Anyway,
he was the one that he was the one that wrote.
I mean, he's written a lot of things but he
wrote the play about jenn of Art right, St. John,
I will take your word for it. I do not know.
I think that he did. Um, it's it's a cool play. Um.

(55:05):
Speaking of queer icons, there's yes St Joan by George
Bernard shaw there's a lot of Joanna Barkus is one
of those people where some people will be like, she
definitely wasn't queer, and then there's a lot of evidence
that she was certainly gender nonconforming. Yeah. I feel like
that part's hard to argue with. Yeah, at the very least,

(55:27):
wasn't a big like stick to your gender lane person. Yeah,
but it's a good I've seen a filmed version of
the play. It's ok Now. I want to cover Joan
of Arc at some point on this show. I don't
know when, and so I'm excited if I get to
watch a Shawl play in the process. I like the

(55:48):
people who like we've through. I don't know whether all
of are like specifically talked about shaw or something, but
I like the people who like weave in and out
of the background of all these stories. So Casement, he's
accused of violating the thirteen fifty one Treason Act. It's
hard to imagine being accused of breaking a law that's
like six years old or whatever, five years old at
this point, um, six fifty years or whatever. And he's

(56:10):
the first night of the realm to be tried for
treason in centuries, which also really goes with the whole
chivalry mythologized thing. From my point of view. His defense,
he had two defenses. There was the one that he liked,
and there was the one that his lawyer liked, and
they used both. His defense was, fuck you, I'm not
fucking English, it's not fucking treason, and I would do
it again. Um. He said it a little bit more

(56:32):
nicely sometimes and a little bit kind of almost like that.
I don't think he cussed very much. But his other
defense that his lawyer was more fond of was that
the act, the Treason Act, was ambiguously written. It was
written in French, like Old French or something, I don't know, French,
and it um, it didn't have any punctuation in it.

(56:55):
Uh So if you wanted, you could read it as
basically you could you could read it as it's only
treason if it happens in England or the United Kingdom,
or you could read it as anything that impacts England
no matter where it happens. It's just literally depending on
where you'd want to put a comma, which at the

(57:15):
time there was no comma, and so where to put
commas killed him. Later, awaiting death, he wrote, God deliver
me from such antiquity antiquitaries as these, to hang a
man's life upon a comma and throttle him with a
semi colon um and use a good poet sometimes. Yeah,

(57:35):
some of the stuff you're reading from him is actually
very beautiful. It's funny because like all of his prose
is beautiful, and and I whatever, like his poetry is
actually fine. I think people are snobs, um, I mean whatever. Anyway,
So Roger Casement knows his days are up. A month
earlier the other prisoners from the Rising had all been executed,

(57:57):
and so on the stand, he said, where all your
rights become only an accumulated wrong, Where men must beg
with bated breath for leave to subsist in their own land,
to think their own thoughts, to sing their own songs,
to garner the fruits of their own labors, and even
while they beg to see these things inexorably drawn from them.
Then surely it is a braver a singer, and a
truer thing to be a rebel and act indeed against

(58:19):
such circumstance as this, than tamely to accept it as
the natural lot of men. And he also said, I
think in the same speech Ireland that has wronged, no man,
that has injured, no land that has sought no dominion
over others. Ireland is treated today among the nations of
the world as if she was a convicted criminal, if
it be treason to fight against such unnatural fate as this.

(58:42):
That I am proud to be a rebel, and I
shall cling to my rebellion with the last drop of
my blood. Um. Because he's fucking cool. That's that's a
A ton of people came out to support him. They're like,
this is our guy. This is the guy who brought
down Leopold. He's a knight. Like we shouldn't there be
like some leniency. He's like our guy, right. Joseph Conrad,

(59:05):
his old friend, disavows him as a trader, and he's like, no, no,
not a guy. But Joseph Conrad anyway, um h G. Wells,
who I was. History remembers him as a socialist, but
he was super anti Irish, and when asked to sign
a petition on Casement's behalf, he wrote back, certainly not.
He ought to be hung. A whole bunch of literary

(59:25):
and scientific types around Europe and the U S signed
a petition for him, though, and at least one Black
American organization organized his own petition for his freedom, saying
they couldn't stand aside while someone who had done so
much for Africans was hanged. And so all of the
work he had done was like, you know, thinking about
saving him or whatever. But so the British Crown had
one ace up its sleeve to silence his support. They're

(59:49):
called the Black Diaries, in contrast of his other diaries,
the White Diaries. Um they release Casement's secret diaries to
the press, the ones that talk about sec He's not
a trader, He's a gay trader. All the notes about
the sex he had, about the size of every dick
that he took. The public support dies down, uh one

(01:00:11):
right up. On the gay website Romeo dot Com argues
that part of this was that worse than just being gay,
he was a bottom. If he'd fucked Native men in
the places he went, he could have been forgiven, but
he was fucked by native men and it was just
a step too far for everyone. It's like the worst degeneracy.
He's an invertise blah blah blah blah blah blah. And

(01:00:31):
I want to I want to point out a specific
contrast that came up to me while researching this in
the in the context. Now we live in this atmosphere
where grooming is accusing LGBT folks, especially trans people, of
grooming his back end style. Right. Um, I haven't read
the whole Black Diaries. I read a bunch of excerpts
from them, and I've read some analysis of them. He
sleeps with young men and people he calls boys. I

(01:00:53):
don't exactly know what that means, um, but at one
point he's talking about sleeping with someone he considered very young,
who was eighteen. And in contrast, you have King Leopold
the Second who's using money from the Congo to literally
buy a season past to an English brothel that provides
them girls as youngest ten. And so this is the degeneracy,
this is the whatever. I doubt anyone who's listening to

(01:01:14):
this is like anti gay or whatever, but it just
it really sticks out to me that, um whatever, I
get real mad about it. Yeah, and the whole Black
Diaries thing is controversial even today. A lot of the
Irish people, a lot of Irish rebels, are like, these
are forgeries. Absolutely no way that our guy did this.

(01:01:36):
And there are storians who still believe that their forgeries. Um.
Sometimes they're like, no one can have that much sex,
and every like yes story and that I listened to
about it is like or read about it, It's like what, yeah,
you can, what do you talk about? I think they're real.
I acknowledge I have a lot of bias here. Um.
But they had only three weeks between his arrest and
his trial to create the forgeries, and they're full of

(01:01:57):
phrases from like way upriver and congo that would have
been really hard for Forger to come up with, including
like inside gay congo slang. You know, um so whatever. Um.
I would like him even if he was secretly straight
this whole time. On August two, nineteen sixteen, the day

(01:02:20):
before his execution, Roger Casement converts to Catholicism. When I
first started researching this, I assumed it was like a
final funk you to England. But but he meant it.
The more I understood Roger Casement and also read about
his conversion in more detail, he he did nothing out
of spite. Um. He was always earnest, literally to a fault. Um.

(01:02:43):
He went back and forth for months trying to decide
what he believed. On the eve of his death, like
what he should do, and he um, he converted to
Catholicism on on August thir And there's this whole thing
where like a lot of parts of the English Church
didn't order the Catholic Church didn't want to let him
convert to Catholicism because he was a terrible you know,
gay person or whatever, right, um. And then like Irish

(01:03:06):
Catholic priests were like, what do you fucking the whole
point of Catholicism You can forgive people for ship, you know. Um,
I don't think there's anything to forgive, but whatever. August third,
nineteen sixteen, he was hanged at fifty two years old,
after taking Mass for the first and last time in
his life. One convict who saw him march through the
prison said he had a visible aura around him. The

(01:03:30):
priest who attended him said, basically, like this guy is
a saint. We should be praying. We shouldn't be praying
for him, we should be praying to him. His executioners
said he was the bravest man I ever killed. Um Again,
this is all in mythologizing, but I also don't have
any reason to doubt these particular accounts. Um And. He

(01:03:51):
was the last of the rising prisoners to die, and
he was the only one who was murdered outside of Ireland.
His last wish, which was communicated to his sister, was
that to be buried in a in the graveyard of
a chapel on Merlough Bay in County Antrim, which is
currently in northern Ireland. Um And he begged for a
Christian burial. Instead, his body was thrown unceremoniously into a

(01:04:12):
pit in the prison yard in an unmarked grave and
covered with quicklime to decay it quickly. It took fifty
years before his remains were moved back to Ireland in
the nineteen sixties, where he was buried in a state
funeral um and attended by thirty thousand people. But his
remains were granted to Ireland under the specific condition that

(01:04:34):
he not be allowed to be buried in Northern Ireland
because it's still part of the UK, and so his
last wish literally can't be fulfilled m into Ireland as united. Yeah.
Shortly after he died in eighteen, a Dublin press called
Talbot Press put out a chap book of his poetry,
and the introduction is like, Roger Casement wasn't a poet. Um,

(01:05:01):
They're they're perfectly passable poems. They're okay, you know, they
don't like linger in the brain forever necessarily, but they're
like they're fine. Yeah. I mean I feel like Ireland
is also an island of poets, like it is, like
I feel like different cultures have different sort of strengths,

(01:05:22):
and there's a long tradition of oral and written poetry
in that country, so I could imagine even a decent
poet they're like not good enough, you know, No, that
makes a lot of sense. I had thought about. Um. Actually,
Yates writes a poem about him that's really good. I'm
not a huge fan of Yates on like you know,
some like political levels and stuff, right, but I totally

(01:05:44):
like some of his poetry. And he wrote a poem
called Roger Casement is Beating at the door. That's basically
just about the horrors that continue and the ghost of
Roger Casement is like here to haunt all of that.
Um and okay, and as a final vignette about his legacy,
I'm going to quote the least academic source I will

(01:06:05):
ever quote the comments of a YouTube video, but hear
me out. There's this video called the Execution of Roger
Casement on YouTube. It's a historian talking about his execution,
and the comments are really interesting to me. One person
says he was my great great uncle and I'm very proud.
Another person says, my grandfather is an Irishman who helped

(01:06:27):
catam paraphrasing here, my grandfather is an Irishman who helped
capture him and was forced to testify against him. Another
as an Englishman who says he was a traitor, he
got what he deserved. And then the final comment will
not the final comment. But in this, in this interesting
string is a Congolese person who says he is one
of the two men who saved my country from Leopold,

(01:06:48):
the other being the journalist moral And I just think
that's like those four perspectives of him are really interesting
to me, and that's how people view him. He's a
trader or a hero. Yeah, it's easy for me to
pick totally, Um, what would you pick? What? I'm like

(01:07:10):
the worst person to ask this because I'm like, well,
he's definitely not a trainer, obviously, but I feel like
he's a complicated Carrocter and so it's hard for me
to say he's a percent a hero. But earlier you
said some people thought he was a saint, some people
thought he was a fool, And it kind of feels
like maybe he's both, you know, yeah, all the complexity

(01:07:30):
of that. Yeah, but definitely someone that like I'm really
glad I know about now, you know, and who did
some really interesting, really amazing things. Yeah, he like almost
like stumbled by having this very strong moral compass. He
like stumbled out of a really bad thing he was
doing and into like better directions. He didn't succeed actually

(01:07:53):
succeeded a lot of stuff, right, because I think people
like will focus on like, oh he failed at the
like raising the Irish Brigade, and like this motherfucker did
way more than anyone I've ever met, you know. Yeah,
but no, you're right, and like and and I never
wanted if I ever present a truly uncomplicated hero I
should be fired and someone else should take this job. Um,

(01:08:15):
but no, I don't know. Yeah I think that those yeah,
those comments really sum it up well. Um, the YouTube
comments that you that you share. Yeah, I was like
so surprised when I ran across that, and I was
just like, oh, this feels really telling, you know, just
like these four perspectives, um, and yeah, well that and yeah,

(01:08:44):
I was just gonna say, like I feel like this
this is like a zooming out into like how history
is told, right because so many people, especially these characters
that are minor figures in the grander historical narrative are
constantly contested. I don't know, Sorry you can cut that out,
but yeah, that's just yeah, no, totally. Um. And it

(01:09:05):
took a long time, like he was basically like kind
of like cut out of martyrdom for a long time
because of his homosexuality totally. And then like some people
like I know, there's just so many ways people talk
about him. It's such an easy figure too to believe
things about, you know, totally and either like see yourself

(01:09:25):
in or see as this like arc type of good
or bad or Um. Yeah, I don't know the gay
Irish Knight who was more of a mythological night than
a English one and is the world is better for that? Totally? Well? Uh,

(01:09:46):
the only books coming out that people could read if
they want to know more about food and good potato facts. Um.
I actually don't think there are any potato facts in
the anthology. Unfortunate, they're not actually any post effects either.
I ran out of food. Those are the two foods
I know. I'm trying to Well, there's there's a really
amazing piece on the women rice workers of Northern Italy. Right,

(01:10:10):
that's also food. Okay, yeah, that's in it that I
did not write. I'm just the editor of the anthology. Um.
But it's called Nourishing Resistance, Stories of Food Protests and
Mutual Aid um. And it'll be coming out from PM
Press sometime in ear available for pre order now. It
should be available for pre order now, yeah, um yeah, Sophia,

(01:10:36):
do you have anything you want to plug? Uh? Check
out hood Politics by prop on the Cool Zone Media
Network wherever we get your podcast and um, bye bye
bye both Ren and Margaret's books. Please yeah, we will
see you soon. By everyone. I Cool People Who did.

(01:11:04):
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