Reaction Paper 1996 Movie Michael Collins Essay Example

he participated in the Easter Uprising in 1916; whereas the leaders of this rebellion were executed, Collins along with many other ordinary insurgents was imprisoned. It was there that he discovered his leadership qualities and set up an underground network of informants and armed fighters called “Irish Volunteers”, who struggled against the British rule, for Ireland to be independent.

However, this struggle boiled down to a civil war, where Collins came into conflict with the president of “Irish Volunteers”, Eamon De Valera, who sent him as negotiator to the British. As a result, the war, which has come to a blind alley on both the British and the Irish sides, was ended by a peace treaty, according to which Ireland became a dominion. This was an important step towards independence, yet this treaty led many Irish believe that Collins’ was collaborationist. Consequently, Collins was soon assassinated, whereas Valera became the president of the Irish republic for many years.

If we regard Collins from the historical point of view, he appears to be a true patriot, who gave his life for the sake of independence of his country and applied all his charisma, talent and life to rousing people to rebel, struggle and win. Without Collins, history of Ireland might have been very different. His frequently criticized negotiation of the peace treaty indicates that he was more of a people’s leader and warrior than an experienced politician; thus, unaware of all tricks and diplomatic refinements, he was made to agree with these conditions of the treaty.

However, the most important contribution of Collins’ contribution was organization of Irish Volunteers, who waged guerilla warfare against the government. After the failure

of the Easter uprising, Collins formulated his understanding of the tactics: they didn’t have to capture large buildings, which were nearly impossible to protect (like General Post Office in Dublin) and concentrate numerous troops. Instead, Collins resorted to small squads (called “flying columns”), which attacked British soldiers and escaped before any action could be taken.

In terms of military tactics, this kind of guerilla warfare was extremely successful, for it minimized losses in guerillas’ manpower and maximized the damage they could do to the enemy. However, in terms of ethics, this tactics can be regarded as a display of terrorism. Collins organized a group of roughnecks called “Twelve Apostles”, who applied murder and terror to demoralize the British. The film adequately reflects this aspect of Collins’ life as well, which is far from being heroic. Quite vivid in this respect is the scene, when the policeman is killed by the bomb, slipped into his car by the rebels.

Thus, in fact, Collins’ tactics envisaged killing innocent people just because they were British. In its turn, this led to escalation of violence on the British part, who also started to kill Irish for no reason. This leads us to the idea that from the point of view of ethics, Collins was a ruthless villain who disregarded the sacred value of human life for the sake of his “patriotism”, i. e. devotion to abstract ideals of independence and freedom. As “Times” film critic K. Turan noted, one of the strengths of this movie is that “it doesn't shirk from its protagonist's cold and ruthless streak, his facility for "bloody mayhem. Nothing is glossed over, not Irish killing nor Britain's

opposing torture and murder, and as the scale of violence escalates, we get an inkling of why the passions run as deep and brutal as they do to this day” (Los Angeles Times, 1996). A similar tactics was used by the Latin American revolutionary Che Guevara, who also held that armed revolution was the only way to fight back the imperialist power (in Collins’ case it was Great Britain, whereas Guevara helped Cubans fight against the U. S. -supported government). Guevara, just like Collins, believed in fighting in small mobile partisan groups.

Both leaders were ruthless; Guevara and Collins are both known to have killed many people, accused of espionage or being informants. Guevara also organized the “suicide squad”, analogical to Collins’ Apostles, to carry out special operations. Despite the fact that Guevara created his theory for rural guerilla, and Collins waged warfare both in villages and in cities, Collins’ tactics is closer to Guevara’s than to the doctrine of Carlos Marighella, a Brazilian revolutionary, who formulated the guidelines of urban guerrilla.

Collins actions bordered on terrorism, whereas Marighella in his “Minimanual of the Urban Guerilla” pointed out that one of the sins of revolutionary is his rash actions and lack of patience, which can lead to uncontrolled violence and make guerilla a criminal who explodes bombs and kills innocent people. Collins’ tactics fits into this description of what the urban guerilla should not do, for in the long run the Irish Volunteers’ actions only escalated violence between both parties.

Nevertheless, despite its anti-ethical implications, Collins’ model of political violence appeared to be effective in that moment of Irish history, for he managed to rally the people and

made the British government to take into the account the opinion of the Irish population. Thus, we cannot definitely claim that he was a villain or a patriot: as the film aptly shows, he was both a passionate fighter for his native land and a ruthless soldier who organized terrorist attacks and took no count of human life.