Robert Burns, insurrectionary poet by Brent Kennedy Every year the narrow-minded, conservative Robert Burns establishment ritually recite the same few poems and repeat ancient propaganda myths about him (invented by his political opponents after his death) and get drunk. Yet the real Burns opposed all they stand for. He listed their traits: Ignorance, superstition, bigotry, stupidity, malevolence, self-conceit, envy - all bound in a massy frame of brazen impudence! A poor farm labourer and later public sector worker (today hed be on working tax credit and denounced as a scrounger), he was a radical, independent minded, fighter for democracy and equality who was hounded by political police spies. He died not from drink and debauchery but from poverty and hard toil in the fields in all weathers since childhood, compounded by the fear of unemployment and eviction. Although government agents and propagandists assassinated the dead poets character and then sanitised him (burning much of his writings), enough of his passionate hatred of injustice shines through to make him a voice for working class folk today. Anyone feeling exploited by long hours, or zero hours, today will readily understand Man was made to mourn. If you want to know about racism, read The slaves lament; on republicanism, The Washington Ode or A dream. Burns supported the American and French Revolutions and opposed the Hanoverian monarchy and the corrupt, undemocratic Parliament of bankers and landowners. When a spy reported him for singing a French revolutionary song he was threatened with the sack from his excisemans job and told to be silent and obedient. But recent books by Patrick Scott Hogg (The Lost Poems, The Cannongate Burns and The Patriot Poet) prove he then went underground, building a secret network to get his seditious, anonymous poems and articles published in radical papers in Edinburgh and London. He was a member of the Friends of the People in Dumfries and personally sent four cannon to the French revolutionaries. This was his answer to Pitts Tory dictatorship and its wave of repression, including martial law and the outlawing of trade unions. When Burke, the father of modern Conservatism, supported Frances feudal aristocracy and opposed votes for 99% of ordinary Britons, dismissing the people as the swinish multitude, Burns wrote: Burke, both passionate and rude, Calls us a Swinish Multitude, Which some think defamation, But I his meaning thus define - That, if the People are all swine, Hog-drivers rule the nation. And then theres the best anthem to an internationalist, classless society ever written in English - A mans a man for a that.
Posted on: Fri, 24 Jan 2014 05:07:47 +0000
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