Fascists and Gaeilge

Among the original Nazis was a far keener Irish-language scholar than any of Éire’s own tribute acts. Early fascism adopter Ludwig Mühlhausen joined the Nazi party in 1932, and later the SA and SS, and was rewarded with two academic posts in Celtic studies after the regime had his Jewish predecessors fired. He learned fluent Irish during this time. There’s a BBC Gaeilge documentary by the extraordinary title of ‘Nazi sa Ghaeltacht’ on his time in Tír Chonaill studying the dialect there. The writer Leon Ó Broin shared accommodation with him and later wrote: ‘I, conscious of the demands of Irish hospitality, began by passing things to him, but I gave that up too, because he never passed anything to me, so that meals would end with an accumulation of dishes at his side of the table, and little or nothing at mine’.

For the first two years of the war he broadcast Nazi propaganda to Ireland on the Irland-Redaktion station. He insisted on doing it through Irish, a language only a minority understood — albeit a larger one than would today, the Free State having since merrily done further damage to Irish with policy disasters so multifarious and so consistent that I struggle to believe it wasn’t on purpose. Another documentary, Glaoch ón Tríú Reich by TG4, deals with Irland-Redaktion; the German Celticist they interview has killer pronunciation (those palatised consonants!) and spends the programme investigating the man who taught him, Hans Hartmann, who was a protegé of Mühlhausen’s. For all Mühlhausen’s standing in academia — gained in part through the removal of Jewish rivals — the small matter of his Nazism eventually caught up with him; the Celticists dropped him after the war.

I say all this to arrive at: we will not beat Irish fascists by pointing out — however correctly — that their Gaeilge is non-existent or bad. It does expose them as hypocrites, so it’s worth saying — just not as a primary strategy. (Saying anything to them at all is not a primary strategy; they do not care about truth. The primary recourse should be organising our communities to keep people physically safe from them.)

Anecdotally, I have never encountered a far-righter who speaks good Irish. It’s rare to see them even try to, and when they do it’s a mess. I think this is unlikely to change because learning Irish properly would require humility and patience, qualities not notably discernible in neo-Nazis. There are, to put it mildly, better reasons to oppose them; in the unlikely event — let’s say sub 1% chance — that some of them actually learned Irish, they would still be neo-Nazis and this would still be bad. Also, people all across the political spectrum can be sensitive about potentially being perceived as ‘less Irish’ for not speaking the language. I don’t think any actual Irish-speaker does perceive them that way — certainly I don’t — but it’s important to be clear that we’re not conflating Irish-language ability with Irishness. Still, the fact that fascists speak it barely if at all is one signal of a broader phenomenon: their total lack of anything positive to stand for.

That’s the other reason debating them is a dead end. They’re not trying to convince you of a world view constructive enough to be falsifiable. You can disprove them on individual lies, of course, and these grow ever more grandiose and more outrageous as mainstream media indulges them with platforms. But whatever you say, their premises just generate more lies because, as I said, they don’t care about truth.

With the Irish fascists, this happens to show up as a lack of any discernible interest in the Irish language and culture, despite their claiming that this is the animus behind everything they do. The reason this is important isn’t that every Irish person has a sacred duty to learn about these things; it’s important because it reveals their hating immigrants isn’t a vessel for somehow ‘restoring Irish culture’, but is actually the point itself. You can also see it in how colonially imported their ideas and even their language are. They copy their frameworks and terminology wholesale from the Yanks. Recently I’ve noticed an uptick in Irish fascists calling me a ‘liberal’. I’m offended, but not for the reason they think. Even funnier is when they think I will be offended at being called a Marxist.

Ultimately what I’m saying is: Irish, like all languages, is a means of communication. The context in which it is learned, taught and used is absolutely political, as were the contexts in which its grammar and vocabulary were first shaped, but the Irish language itself is not automatically a vector of any particular political ideology. For me, its importance is mainly emotional; I feel more like myself when speaking Irish, in ways I can’t quite articulate through English. I do not think it would make much difference to my overall politics if I suddenly lost the ability to speak Irish. I would just feel a dreadful absence.

In other words: the fact that Irish fascists are useless at Irish exposes that they don’t care about the things they purport to. But even if they all spoke excellent Irish, they would still be an utter embarrassment to the rest of us.