This typical Ken Loach movie follows the story of a young man named Damien O'Donovan (Cillian Murphy) during the Irish War of Independence and Civil War from 1920 to 1922. In the opening scenes, Damien is about to emigrate to London to become a doctor; but after seeing one of his friends killed by the Black and Tans, he joins the IRA, along with his brother and other local men and women, to fight for Irish independence. As their struggle progresses, the ideological differences between Damien and his brother become more pronounced, and soon they find themselves fighting on different sides of a civil war.
As in every other Loach movie, the actors here have a thankless task. They are asked not to portray characters, but mouthpieces for various simplistic political views. Before our eyes, the characters degenerate into mere types, abstract symbols on the screen. It's impossible to imagine them for a moment as real people; Loach certainly doesn't. Despite his 'naturalistic' style and his extensive use of improvised dialogue, the drama is forced and stilted. Loach seems to care so little about dramatisation that one wonders why he bothers making movies at all. Barley is merely an orthodox Socialist Workers Party interpretation of Irish history from 1920 to 1922; it could just as well have been delivered in pamphlet form, at much less expense and much more quickly. But then, I suspect the banality of the work would become all too obvious.
As it happens, I agree with Loach's historical interpretation pre-treaty, and disagree with it post-treaty. In the first half of the film, we see how the British government, in an hysterical overreaction to the IRA's guerrilla campaign, rounded up a load of unemployed ex-army men in irregular uniforms, most of whom were mentally unhinged after fighting for years in the trenches of WWI, and let them loose on the country, with violent results. We see how the atrocities they committed spurred more and more people to take up arms in the name of a free Ireland. People with more than one brain cell can possibly see parallels to the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan today.
We also see how some ideals of the nationalist cause were being corrupted from the inside. We hear a reference to Irish socialist leader James Connolly's speech of 1913, in which he said that unless a free Ireland was also a socialist Ireland, then the Irish people would still be servants of the British crown, only under a different flag. (Which is more or less what happened.) But then, we see how justice in the Sinn Fein courts becomes perverted in favour of the local bigwigs who support them financially. We see how certain sections of the IRA are in the pocket of those with the money.
Then the film gets to the treaty, and things start to go downhill. In late 1921, a Sinn Fein delegation signed a treaty with the British government which partitioned Ireland into North and South, and gave the South -- the "Irish Free State" -- the status of dominion of the British Empire, which is in theory the same level of independence as is now enjoyed by Canada. The treaty split both Sinn Fein and the IRA in two; the anti-treaty forces kept up their armed struggle and refused to sit in parliament, even when a large majority of Irish people voted in favour of the treaty.
For Loach, the anti-treaty side represents all that is good and progressive, and the pro-treaty side all that is corrupt, treacherous and backward. (And besides, in his film all the chicks are against the treaty, so it must be bad.) This view is more or less endorsed by most British socialists. But while I have socialist sympathies myself, here we have one area where I must wildly depart from the party line. British socialists like Loach don't understand, and never understood, certain realities about the character of Irish nationalism. They have a hopelessly romantic view of the Irish masses, then and now.
Only a minority of Irish socialists at the time were anti-treaty (the Irish Labour Party founded by James Connolly came out in favour of the treaty), and only a minority of anti-treaty people were socialists; it's utterly false to suggest the anti-treaty cause was the embodiment of socialism. Indeed, the leaders of the anti-treaty side, such as De Valera, were about as far from being socialists as is possible. Socialism was never big in Ireland, and especially not in rural Cork, where the film is set. Ireland had an insignificantly small working class; Ireland was a peasant country, and peasants have little time for nationalised wealth and egalitarian social structures. Peasants follow the money.
The fact is, hardly any of the volunteers who kept fighting after 1922 were doing so in the hope of creating a socialist paradise. So why did they keep fighting? No doubt many of them were idealistic nationalists who genuinely wanted the whole island to be independent and free. Many others were less idealistic. I suspect they had other reasons to continue the struggle -- reasons which might cause some distress to Loach and the more sentimental lefties out there.
Ireland was a peasant country, and the vices of the anti-treaty side were the vices of peasants: begrudgery, resentment, and a hatred of everything refined and civilised. The pro-treaty crowd may have contained Ireland's proto-bourgeoisie, but these were the Irish people whose lives on the whole were the closest approximation to civilisation. They didn't just have property worth defending, but also something of an intellectual life. They were the nearest example of what the peasants hated, and the Civil War was their opportunity to lash out at them. To be blunt, many of the anti-treaty forces were thugs who revelled in thuggery, who itched for a chance to break some windows and burn some books, who wanted to bring anyone who had a few airs back down to their level. They didn't care about abstracts and ideas; they had found a lifestyle they liked and wanted to continue it.
To imagine the mindset of rural Ireland in the 1920s, imagine the mindset of rural Georgia today, and take it a few steps backward. And to imagine the kind of revolution that came from rural ireland, imagine the kind of revolution that would come from rural Georgia. The anti-treaty forces were, on the whole, xenophobic bigots and ultra-conservative Catholics. They massively outnumbered and easily outmanoevred the "left" elements on their side. The policies of the anti-treaty party when they came to power, ten years afterwards, are a matter of record: De Valera and his constitution turned Ireland into a de facto Catholic theocracy, run by bishops, in self-imposed isolation from the rest of the world.
One can remain entirely opposed to the atrocities committed by the British Empire in Ireland, and the atrocities committed by empires everywhere, without throwing in one's lot with this crowd. It's as if for Loach it's insufficient to point out the acts and consequences of American imperialism in Afghanistan; one must also side with the Taleban, and paint them as light years more progressive than they really are. But such is the way of Loach's fellow-travellers; the SWP in particular has a history of cosying up to any mass movement which opposes the status quo, however retrograde its politics.
Loach's idyllic treatment of rural Ireland is rather cliched and tiresome: stick on a different camera filter, and some of the scenes could be straight out of The Quiet Man. This is the same rural Ireland from which anyone with a smattering of culture ran as far as possible! (Indeed, Loach probably misses a hint of this in the script. Why was Damien about to emigrate at the start of the film? As a doctor, it can hardly have been an economic necessity; jobs in Ireland were never scarce for the professional classes.) But the hills-and-Blarney image of Ireland was always the orthodoxy among left-leaning Anglos: even at the start of the last century, when J.M. Synge dared to portray rural Ireland as rife with ignorance, backwardness and superstitious Catholicism (which it was and is), he caused a near revolt among his contemporaries. At least some artists who fought on the anti-treaty side, such as Frank O'Connor, had the honesty to admit this backwardness in their writing. Loach's vision just looks quaint and irrelevant.
Loach is also less than honest about some facts. The film claims that the breakaway Irish government in Dublin was in fact the legitimate government of Ireland, since it was democratically elected by the people in 1918, which is correct. But then the film claims that the pro-treaty government elected in 1922 was not the legitimate government of Ireland, even though it received many more votes, and was supported by many more people, than the Sinn Fein government of 1918. Like a lot of lefts, Loach only invokes the name of democracy when it suits him. When they're on his side, the masses are always right; when they aren't, the masses are misinformed and deluded.
The film is also somewhat conservative with the truth about the treaty. We are not told how De Valera and company betrayed the signatories of the treaty, and scored political points, by sending them off to bargain for a deal they could never win. We are not told how the loyalist paramilitaries in the North were amassing and organising, armed and heavily backed by British conservatives, who would have crippled a united independent Ireland with a civil war far more debilitating than the one which eventually resulted. We are not told how certain economic realities meant that an independent Ireland was never going to be more than a British vassal state (as it was until the 1970s) or an American vassal state (as it is now).
The treaty was obviously far from ideal, and its problems are still felt to this day, but I think it was about the best that could be hoped for at the time. After years of violence, a large majority of people in the country wanted to get all the fighting over with, and actually start building a state instead of dreaming about one. I respect their decision to endorse the treaty. And in a stricly political sense, the treaty did provide "the freedom to achieve freedom", as its supporters advocated. All of the Free State's formal ties to the British crown were quietly dropped in subsequent years, without a whimper of protest.
Ideals are well and good, but there are times when what is most needed is a pragmatic response. George Orwell -- who lived and died a socialist -- saw in 1940 that there were two groups with a realistic chance of running his country in the immediate future: the British Empire and Nazi Germany. And so he decided to throw in his lot with the lesser of two evils -- unlike most of his 'left' contemporaries, who sat hoping for a revolution that would never happen, and couldn't possibly have happened. In Ireland in 1922, a revolution was never going to happen, and the only realistic choice was between two different strands of Sinn Fein: pro-treaty and anti-treaty. And I would have chosen pro, for the same reason I'd vote Democrat in the USA, for the same reason I would have supported the British Empire in 1940, for the same reason I stick up for "Old Europe" today: when given a choice between ignorance and civilisation, however compromised, I go with civilisation every time. (Neocons like to portray the so-called War on Terror as a clear choice between terrorist fundamentalism and American civilisation, but this is a false dichotomy.)
Loach is often praised in left-wing circles for his artistic courage, in always dealing with the difficult issues, in looking at the big political questions, in sticking to his principles. But I just see a cagey artist who always stays safely within his limits, making one formulaic movie after another, filling up the screen with the same old archetypes, preaching the same old message to the converted. Loach's socialist polemics enlighten no one, least of all himself. One can't imagine him learning or discovering anything through his art; one gets the feeling everything has been fixed and decided, long long ago. (In this respect, Loach is very similar to John Sayles, though Sayles' liberal polemics are even more tiresome and irrelevant.)
One would have to look hard to find any moment of genuine humanity in Loach's oevre; a moment which reaches into the core of human experience, a moment which captures what it is to be alive, a single moment which might make the viewer feel less alone in the world. Loach might want to rouse the viewer into positive action, but the most he can elicit from me is a shrug. If he wants me to fight for humanity, then he'd be better off making me care about humanity, and believe it is worth defending. The best artists can do this regularly; but such a thing is entirely beyond Loach's abilities.
A pivotal and rather revealing scene of Barley is the one where Damien has to execute his half-witted friend, accused of spying, on party orders. Damien grits his teeth and pulls the trigger, swearing that he will make sure the goal he is fighting for is worth such sacrifices. Amazingly, the killing is not portrayed with any evident disapproval! I'm reminded of the lines from W.H. Auden's Spain:
To-day [...] the conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder;which were mocked so memorably by Orwell as describing the day in the life of a "good party man", who grimaces through a political murder before lunch, and then hands out leaflets in the afternoon. I can only imagine that Damien, who remains saintly throughout, is Loach's ideal of the good party man. How pathetic.
To-day the expending of powers On the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting.
But then, Loach has been churning out good party works for decades. He's a sad, shrill relic who keeps preaching his limited and simplistic brand of socialism, unchanged, year on end. I don't want him on my side.