(not a lot but bear with me)
Sometime last year, I found myself asking where the expression ‘WISE Islands’ comes from. I came across it in material produced by the Zapatista Solidarity Network in the united kingdom (e.g., here), who prefer not to call it ‘the united kingdom’. ‘WISE Islands’ stands for Wales, Ireland, Scotland, and England. It’s not a very common term, and I don’t think I’ve seen other groups on the left using it.
Even so, it piqued my curiosity. On the one hand, I definitely understood the felt-need for the linguistic shift. No socialist on these islands can (or, at least, should) support the perpetuation of “the united kingdom”, and I personally think it’s pretty dubious that there is some core of ‘england’ that would survive a serious reckoning with capitalism and imperialism. And that such a linguistic shift might become an even greater necessity when trying to coordinate struggle alongside the EZLN, better known as the Zapatistas, who following their sudden revolt against NAFTA and the Mexican government in 1991 have been almost poster-children for alter-globalisation and international solidarity beyond the nation state, makes a lot of sense.
On the other hand, I was simply curious, because I’d never heard the term before. Where had it come from? Who came up with it? I wasn’t exactly suspicious, though I did wonder at how wise it was (no pun intended) to lump those four nations together as a kind of amorphous unit given the competing histories and trajectories involved (how would Irish Republicans feel about this, for example?). But I did a little googling, and so did a curious friend, and all we found was some hippy gatherings also using the term, and one odd but seemingly guileless letter to the Irish Times.* So I mostly just forgot about it.
(* I’ll return to this letter later)
Flash forward maybe three months. It’s early January of this year, and in the midst of various discourse, I saw somebody shared a link to a map, created by The Forward, of all the monuments worldwide to Holocaust collaborators. It is a badly kept secret that after the war, Western governments rehabilitated hundreds of Nazi collaborators to facilitate and aid their machinations against the Eastern Bloc and against national liberation projects of various kinds across the global south. Though I was surprised to see that there was only one monument to these individuals in the uk - I expected there would be more than that.
The one uk Holocaust collaborator monument is labelled as follows:
Bradford, UK - Yaroslav Stetsko and Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations plaque in Bradford Cathedral
Honoree: Yaroslav Stetsko a leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), an anti-Semitic Nazi-collaborationist group which participated in the Holocaust, killing tens of thousands of Jews both by aiding the Nazis as well as on its own volition.
Stetsko headed OUN’s 1941 Nazi-collaborationist government which pledged to “work closely with National-Socialist Greater Germany under the leadership of Adolf Hitler.”A vicious anti-Semite, Stetsko had written “I insist on the extermination of the Jews and the need to adapt German methods of exterminating Jews in Ukraine.”
Honoree: the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN), an organization led by ex-Nazi collaborators and Holocaust perpetrators who fled to the West at the end of WWII. They rebranded themselves as anti-Communist “freedom fighters” and were welcomed by Western governments who sought to use them against the USSR.The ABN was created by Alfred Rosenberg, a leading Nazi who was hanged for crimes against humanity at Nuremberg. In addition to Stetsko, ABN officers included Ferdinand Ďurčanský, who was a minister in the Nazi puppet government of Slovakia and was deemed complicit in the death of Jews by the UN. Another officer was Radasłaŭ Astroŭski, who led Belarusia’s Nazi puppet administration and organized local auxiliary police that participated in the Holocaust.
A further root around on the wikipedia for the ABN reveals that in 1950, they held a conference sponsored by MI6, that apparently attracted a lot of publicity in the british press. It was perhaps then that they caught the eye of Baroness Jane Birdwood. Baroness Birdwood is not well-known today - at least not in my experience - but in her lifetime she was notorious as one of britain’s most prominent far right figures, who helped fund the ABN’s activities here and from here, in western europe more broadly. Her great fear was that too much Commonwealth migration would “dilute Britain’s Anglo-Saxon essence” and result in a takeover by the Communist Party of Great Britain.[1] Baroness Birdwood is a possible link between the ABN and Bradford Cathedral; though born in Canada, her family came back to britain in 1923 and “settled in Yorkshire”. There, the trail runs cold - but i’m no investigative journalist, and i’m sure there is plenty of material on this waiting to be discovered by somebody willing to find it. Surely, there is something worth investigating in a possible relationship between Bradford Cathedral and an aristocrat promoting the blood libel as late as the 1990s.
By this point, I was deep in a particularly grim wikipedia rabbit hole. You can imagine my surprise at suddenly stumbling on this;
In 1974, [Birdwood] was a founding member of WISE (Welsh Irish Scots English) group led by Jason Mason, a former civil servant and Monday Club member. WISE was fiercely opposed to non-white immigration; called for the "reparation", by force if necessary of the all non-white people from Britain; and sought to "defend" British culture which it equated with whiteness from "alien" influences. Conservative MPs, most of whom were Monday Club members, spoke at WISE's rallies, but the tendency of neo-Nazis to attend WISE's rallies caused the group to lose influence
Quite unintentionally, I had found what was probably the origin for that unusual formula now being used by the Zapatista Solidarity Network. ‘WISE’, it seems, originated as a product of the distinctive concerns of Birdwood and the far-right tory Monday Club; a defence of british imperialism (most explicitly, the open claim of Ireland as united fully with britain), border violence, and whiteness, integrated as a single project.
Knowing this, the odd elements of that letter to the Irish Times now began to seem a lot less odd, and a lot less guileless. The letter pitches itself as responding to the problem of how to name the relationship between Ireland and britain - "Now [driving North] we are entering part of that so-called British Commonwealth." Might ‘so-called British Commonwealth’ here be directed less at northern Ireland, and more at the independent nations of the ex-british empire? The letter appeals to the spiritual heritage of the unity of britain and Ireland, stressing ‘celtic’ elements, perhaps to appeal to an Irish audience, as the basis of a global role for the nations of the region. Without having to explicitly name migration, empire, or race, it touches upon all the central themes and issues of the regional far-right. It is worth noting that the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations’ generally operated by infiltrating or collaborating with liberal institutions to build momentum for their lobbying for sanctions of the Soviets and other Communist states, a tactic that served them very well in the Cold War era. It is unsurprising that the Monday Club appear to have pursued similar tactics.
The national dimensions of Zapatista politics is, it seems to me, not often well understood. Subcommandante Marcos, spokesperson for the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, is clear that the ‘national’ in ‘Zapatista Army of National Liberation’ is, in fact, the Mexican nation.
The neoliberals want to kill Mexico, our Mexican Patria. And the political parties - all the political parties, not just some of them - not only do not defend it but are the first to put themselves at the service of foreigners, especially those from the United States […] They do not in fact have a Patria; they have only bank accounts.[2]
The Zapatistas’ struggle for indigenous liberation, then, articulates itself as part of the long history of national liberation movements in the global south, as part of a struggle against imperialism and neo-colonialism. However, this should not be taken to mean that Marcos is uncritical about the place of indigenous peoples in ‘the nation’. In a speech made during the March of Indigenous Dignity in 2001, Subcommandante Marcos, spokesperson for the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, said;
We, the Mexican indigenous, have painted this [the Mexican] flag.
With our blood, we painted the red that adorns it.
With our work, we harvested the fruit that paints it green.
With our nobility, we painted its centre white.
With our history, we included the eagle devouring the serpent [referring to the origin myth of the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan: link], so that Mexico would name the pain and hope that we are.
We made this flag, and nonetheless we have no place in it.
[…]
For almost two hundred years this land has walked, calling itself nation and Patria and home and history.
For almost two hundred years it has been harvesting our blood and pain, our misery, so that Mexico can be a patria and not a disgrace.
¡YA BASTA! says - and says again - the very first voice, we indigenous who are the color of the earth.[3]
Here, Marcos highlights the place of indigenous peoples as the material basis for Mexican nation-building, from the literal accumulation of economic resources and political power, to the symbolic regalia of national mythmaking. Mexico is made entirely from the pain and hopes of indigenous people, extracted, absorbed, and transformed such that no place for the indigenous themselves remain. It is on this basis that the Zapatistas lay their claim to the entire nation. In so doing, Marcos effects what Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar, in a different context, calls the ‘inversion of the mestizo and Creolle left’[4]; the mestizo appropriation of indigenous life and politics is transformed against itself, and indigenous struggle becomes the orienting force of national liberation as such. The sophistication of such an approach is dramatically exemplified in this passage, in which a rhetoric of ‘inclusion’ in the nation suddenly becomes a call to insurrection;
The oldest elders of the Oaxacan lands tell that the first man was born from a tree. The first man grew, and he took good care of the tree that was his mother and father. Then one day he realized the tree was head-down, and he worked to put it where its roots should be, and thus the tree grew and never had to dry up and never had to die.
We are all part of that tree that is the Mexican nation.
But some of us are leaves, others flowers, other trunk, other branches, others fruits, and others root, which nurtures and provides a foundation.
We are different, then, but we have one single life.
Tomorrow is possible only if it is inclusive.
But this country is upside down. It has been determined, for almost 200 years, to destroy its roots. How will it be nurtured and have a foundation if it destroys its roots?
The entire country must be turned right-side up, so that it can grow and never dry up and never die.
And so, if anyone asks what this March of Indigenous Dignity, the March of the Color of the Earth, wants, here is the answer;
To turn the entire country right-side up so that it will finally be the tree where all of us who are different will have a common tomorrow as a nation, which is also the only possible tomorrow.[5]
Britain is a very different place than Mexico, however. The use and misuse of ‘WISE islands’ as an attempt to move beyond our nation states illustrates the foolishness of attempting to copy and paste a strategy designed for national liberation to a nation that exists by its exploitation of the entire world. One exercise in solidarity might be using a little bit more imagination.
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[1] To me, this fear seems significantly overstated, considering that by this point the CPGB was assuring voters that;
The enemies of Communism declare that the Communist Party, by underhand subversive means, is aiming at the destruction of Britain and the British Empire. But it is a lie
This line is part of a document that became the basis of the struggle over ‘revisionism’ in the CPGB, with the Euro-Communists (which, as the name might suggest, have their own forms of euocentricism and racism going on) seeking to reject it, and the ‘anti-revisionists’ seeking to preserve it. When you know this, the general state of Marxist parties in britain today begins to make a lot more sense.
[2] ‘The Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle’, in The Speed of Dreams: Selected Writings 2001-2007 (City Lights Books: San Francisco, 2007), p. 275.
Elsewhere, Marcos ridicules the idea of a ‘separatist project’ in pursuit of ‘a Mayan nation’ as a myth invented by the Mexican Army to discredit the Zapatistas and legitimate the war on them as ‘defending Mexico’. See, ‘Chiapas, the Thirteenth Stele; Part Four’, in ibid., p. 221-227.
[3] ‘A Place in this Flag’, in ibid., p. 47.
[4] Rhythms of the Pachakuti: Indigenous Uprising and State Power in Bolivia (Duke University Press: Durham, NC, and London, 2014), p. 84.
[5] ‘The Tree That Is the Mexican Nation’, in The Speed of Dreams., p. 87-88.
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This essay has been a brief attempt to expand on a line of argument I pushed briefly in my essay for Ebb on the Non-Aligned Movement, which you can read here: link. Sorry for the endless self promotion.
I am grateful to my friend who would like to remain anonymous for help trying to get to the bottom of where the expression ‘WISE islands’ came from.
If you liked this, please consider buying me a coffee via Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/ignatz_maria.