[speech] Sir Roger Casement – after convicted as a traitor

Primary Documents: Sir Roger Casement’s Speech Following his Conviction as a Traitor, 29 June 1916
As I wish my words to reach a much wider audience than I see before me here, I intend to read all that I propose to say.

What I shall read now is something I wrote more than twenty days ago. There is an objection possibly not good in law but surely good on moral grounds against the application to me here of this English statute, 565 years old, that seeks to deprive an Irishman to-day of life and honour, not for “adhering to the King’s enemies” but for adhering to his own people.

When this statute was passed, in 1351, what was the state of men’s minds on the question of a far higher allegiance – that of man to God and His Kingdom?

The law of that day did not permit a man to forsake his Church or deny his God save with his life. The heretic then had the same doom as the traitor. Today a man may forswear God and His Heavenly Realm without fear or penalty, all earlier statutes having gone the way of Nero’s edicts against the Christians; but that constitutional phantom the King can still dig up from the dungeons and torture chambers of the Dark Ages a law that takes a man’s life and limb for an exercise of conscience.

Loyalty is a sentiment, not a law. It rests on Love, not on restraint. The government of Ireland by England rests on restraint and not on law; and, since it demands no love, it can evoke no loyalty. Judicial assassination today is reserved only for one race of the King’s subjects, for Irishmen; for those who cannot forget their allegiance to the realm of Ireland.

What is the fundamental charter of an Englishman’s liberty? That he shall be tried by his peers. With all respect I assert that this court is to me, an Irishman, a foreign court – this jury is for me, an Irishman, not a jury of my peers.

It is patent to every man of conscience that I have an indefeasible right, if tried at all under this statute of high treason, to be tried in Ireland, before an Irish court, and by an Irish jury.

This court, this jury, the public opinion of this country, England, cannot but be prejudiced in varying degree against me, most of all in time of war. From this court and its jurisdiction I appeal to those I am alleged to have wronged, and to those I am alleged to have injured by my “evil example,” and claim that they alone are competent to decide my guilt or my innocence.

This is so fundamental a right, so natural a right, so obvious a right, that it is clear the Crown were aware of it when they brought me by force and by stealth from Ireland to this country. It was not I who landed in England, but the Crown who dragged me here, away from my own country, to which I had returned with a price upon my head, away from my own countrymen, whose loyalty is not in doubt, and safe from the judgment of my peers, whose judgment I do not shrink from.

I admit no other judgment but theirs. I accept no verdict save at their hands.

I assert from this dock that I am being tried here not because it is just, but because it is unjust. My counsel has referred to the Ulster Volunteer movement, and I will not touch at length upon that ground, save only to say that neither I nor any of the leaders of the Irish Volunteers, who were founded in Dublin in November, 1913, had quarrel with the Ulster Volunteers as such, who were born a year earlier.

Our movement was not directed against them, but against the men who misused and misdirected the courage, the sincerity, and the local patriotism of the men of the North of Ireland. On the contrary, we welcomed the coming of the Ulster Volunteers, even while we deprecated the aims and intentions of those Englishmen who sought to pervert to an English party use – to the mean purposes of their own bid for place and power in England – the armed activities of simple Irishmen.

We aimed at winning the Ulster Volunteers to the cause of a united Ireland – we aimed at uniting all Irishmen in a natural and national bond of cohesion based on mutual self-respect. Our hope was a natural one, and, if left to ourselves, not hard to accomplish.

If external influences of disintegration would but leave us alone, we were sure that nature itself must bring us together. It was not the Irish Volunteers who broke the law, but a British party.

The Government had permitted the Ulster Volunteers to be armed by Englishmen to threaten not merely an English party in its hold on office, but to threaten that party through the lives and blood of Irishmen. Our choice lay between submitting to foreign lawlessness and resisting it, and we did not hesitate. I for one was determined that Ireland was much more to me than empire, and that if charity begins at home so must loyalty.

Since arms were so necessary to make our organization a reality and to give to the minds of Irishmen menaced with the most outrageous threats a sense of security, it was our bounden duty to get arms before all else.

I decided with this end in view to go to America. If, as the right honourable gentleman, the present Attorney General, asserted in a speech at Manchester, Nationalists would neither fight for home rule nor pay for it, it was our duty to show him that we knew how to do both.

Then came the war. As Mr. Birrell said in his evidence recently laid before the Commission of Inquiry into the causes of the late rebellion in Ireland, “The war upset all our calculations.”

It upset mine no less than Mr. Birrell’s, and put an end to my mission of peaceful effort in America. War between Great Britain and Germany meant, as I believed, ruin for all the hopes we had founded on the enrolment of the Irish Volunteers.

I felt over there in America that my first duty was to keep Irishmen at home in the only army that could safeguard our national existence. If small nationalities were to be the pawns in this game of embattled giants, I saw no reason why Ireland should shed her blood in any cause but her own, and if that be treason beyond the seas I am not ashamed to avow it or to answer for it here with my life.

And when we had the doctrine of Unionist loyalty at last, “Mausers and Kaisers and any King you like,” I felt I needed no other warrant than that these words conveyed – to go forth and do likewise. The difference between us was that the Unionist champions chose a path which they felt would lead to the Woolsack, while I went a road that I knew must lead to the dock.

And the event proves that we were both right. But let me say that I am prouder to stand here today in the traitor’s dock to answer this impeachment than to fill the place of my accusers. If there be no right of rebellion against a state of things that no savage tribe would endure without resistance, then am I sure that it is better for men to fight and die without right than to live in such a state of right as this.

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 fruit of their own labours – and even while they beg to see these things inexorably withdrawn from them – then surely it is a braver, a saner, and a truer thing to be a rebel in act and deed against such circumstances as this than tamely to accept it as the natural lot of men.

My Lord, I have done. Gentlemen of the Jury, I wish to thank you for your verdict. I hope you will not think that I made any imputation upon your truthfulness or your integrity when I said that this was not a trial by my peers.

drama reading list

PLAYWRITING

MODERN

Ibsen: The Master Builder, The Wild Duck, A Doll’s House,
Hedda Gabler
Chekov: Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard, The Seagull
Strindberg: Dance of Death, Ghost Sonata, The Father, Miss Julie
Pirandello: Six Characters in Search of an Author, Henry IV
Genet: The Balcony, The Maids
Brecht: The Good Woman of Setzuan, Puntilla Arturo Ui, The Caucasion Chalk Circle
Wilde: The Importance of Being Earnest
Shaw: Heartbreak House, Major Barbara, Mrs. Warren’s Profession
O’Neill: Long Day’s Journey into Night, Desire Under the Elms,
The Iceman Cometh. Hairy Ape
Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Tin Roof,
The Glass Menagerie
Odets: Waiting for Lefty, Awake and Sing
Miller. Death of a Salesman, The Price
Pinter: Homecoming, The Birthday Party
Beckett: Waiting for Godot, Endgame
Ionesco: The Bald Soprano, The Chairs
Shepard: The Curse of the Starving Class
Synge: Playboy of the Western World
Eliot: Murder in the Cathedral, The Cocktail Party
Albee: Zoo Story, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf
O’Casey: Plough and the Stars, Juno and the Paycock
Gelber: The Connection, Sleep
L. Wilson: The Gingham Dog, Hot L Baltimore

GREEK

Sophocles: Oedipus series
Aristophanes: Lysistrata
Aeschylus: Seven Against Thebes

ROMAN

Plautus: The Menaechmi
Terrence: The Brothers
Seneca: Medea

ELIZABETHAN

Shakespeare: Hamlet, King Lear, Measure for Measure,
Twelfth Night
Janson: Volpone
Webster: The Duchess of Malfi
Ford: ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore

RESTORATION

Dryden: All for Love
Otway: Venice Preserved
Farquhar: The Beaux’ Stratagem
Moliere: The School for Wives, The Miser

CRITICAL TEXTS

Francis Fergusson: The Idea of Theatre
Albert Bermel: Contradictory Characters
Eric Bentley: The Lite of the Drama
Artaud: The Theatre and its Double
Peter Brook: The Empty Space

Under Pressure

It’s the terror of knowing
What this world is about

가사 들으며 “Under Pressure” 벨소리에 6시에 일어나곤 했다. 눈꼽 떼면 잠시 묵상의 시간을 갖고 오늘 하루를 어떻게 보낼까, 공부 스케쥴에 큰 차질 없을까, 내가 제대로 된 커리어를 밟아가고 있을까, 나도 모르는 사이에 시대에 뒤쳐지는 것은 아닌가에 대한 고민으로 하루를 시작했다. 하루의 시작을 이리 우울하도록 경직된 사고하는데 쏟는다는 것이 처음에는 피곤하게 느껴졌지만 외국 한번 나가지도 않고도 토플 만점 받으며 온갖 자격증을 갖춘 후배들이 몇년 후 경쟁자로 나타날 생각하면 침대에서 마냥 뒹굴고 있을 수도 없는 노릇였다. 정신줄을 질끈 다시 동여매고 삶을 돌이켜봐야 했다. 쌩쌩한 후배 경쟁자뿐만 있으면 그나마 낫지, 인생 선배들이 “세상이 그리 만만한줄 아냐?” 식의 후기를 술자리마다 들려주니 불안의 씨앗이 꿈틀 꿈틀… 그래서 언젠가부터 삶을 돌이켜보기(=고민하기)가 일상생활이 되버렸다. 내 삶을 관리하고 있다는 느낌 부여받기 원했다. 하지만 최근 나라가 겪고 있는 사태를 통해서 알 수 있는 것은 죽는다는 사실 알고 있으나 언제 죽을지 아무도 모르듯이 미래 일에 대한 타이밍 재기란 무척이나 어려운 일이란 사실이다. 결국 공부에 큰 뜻을 둔 것이 아닌 이상 시국을 관망하며 타이밍을 잰다는 것은 결국 나중에 실패했을 때 나 자신에게 “임마, 너 나름 철저하게 준비했었잖아! 충분히 노력했어” 라며 뒤통수 맞지 않았다고 자위할 때 유용할 뿐이다. 자기 자신을 믿지 못해 plan B 마련하는데 소중한 아침 시간, 아니 몇년을 투자해야한다니 슬픈 노릇이다.

요즘 사교육 멈;들 얘기를 들어보니 자녀들 교과 과정을 함께 공부하면서 자녀들의 약점을 짚어주는 개인 코치 역할마저 감수한다. 이분들은 단순히 애들을 돈으로 키우는 것이 아니라, 온 몸을 바쳐 등 뒤를 돌본다는 점에 자부심을 갖는다고 하신다. 이리하여 지구 역사상 가장 심각한 과보호 세대의 탄생이다. 데이트 코치도 천박하다고 생각했건만, 인생도 코치 받아야하는 대상이며 “사랑으로” 부를 때 살아가며 해야할 일 하나였던 것이 어느덧 1199가지가 되었다.

-_-

실패에 대한 병적인 두려움으로 인해 억압받는 우리 삶을 되찾을 방법이 있기나 할까? 대체 우리가 어떤 죄를 지었기에 이토록 쉬지 않고 달려야만 하는 것일까?

Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul?

-John Keats

Keats는 슬픔을 통해서 영혼이 정화된다고 믿었으며 Hemingway는 (젊은 후배 작가에게 말하길) 작가가 되기 위한 필수 요소는 불우한 어린 시절이라 말며 구약 성경 시편 84편 6절 “그들이 눈물 골짜기로 지나갈 때에 그 곳에 많은 샘이 있을 것이며 이른 비가 복을 채워 주나이다” 통해 고난은 훗날 낙담한 나를 소생시키는 힘의 원천이 될 것임을 약속한다. 문학, 역사, 경험이 이 모든 것을 말해주는데 저 1199가지 자기개발서는 이를 저버리고 눈물 골짜기를 쉽게 쉽게 지나갈 수 있도록 시멘트 포장해버린다.

거의 언제나 인간은 낙심하고 패퇴하고 삶의 생동력 넘치던 모습은 쥐어짠 레몬같이 쓸모 없는, 아무도 관심 안 갖는 낙오자가 된다. 그토록 긁힌 이면 밑에는 섬세한 영혼이 상처 받았고 아물려고 발버둥치는 것이 느껴진다. 세상에 대해서 알면 알수록 두렵지만 타협하기에 자신의 모습을 역겹게 느끼는 인간의 섬세함,그리고 솔직함이 인간을 인간으로 만든다. 그런 인간을 앗아버린다. 인간의 생명력, 꺾이지 않는 정신을 믿지 않는 죄가 우리의 죄이다.