Word: casement
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From the Congo to Connemara, the lesson to Casement was writ plain. He had been raised a Protestant in Ulster, and his next cause, after retirement from the foreign service, was to be his native Ireland, the very exemplar of colonial misrule. In 1913 war clouds were lowering and, as Sinn Fein Guru Tom Clarke prophesied, "England's difficulty is Ireland's opportunity." For years, while a servant of the crown, Casement had nourished a hatred of the English that was to become, in Inglis' word, a "monomania." Now he proclaimed on the eve of World...
...young British consul in Africa, Casement doggedly uncovered and exposed the plight of Congolese natives whom King Leopold of the Belgians had promised to deliver from slavery but instead through torture, amputation and the lash, forced into the production of rubber. As a result of Casement's crusade-obstructed at every step by the "abject pifflers" of the Foreign Office -the Congo Free State, a private monopoly, was pried from ruthless Leopold's personal grasp and placed under the more or less civilized control of the Belgian government...
Posted as a consul in South America, in 1910 Casement again investigated the exploitation of rubber, and reported that Amazonian Indians were being as cruelly abused as if their masters had studied sadism in the Congo. This time, though, the villain was an English-owned company. Despite foot dragging back home and prevarication by the Peruvian government, it was forced to moderate its practices. In 1911 Casement was knighted for his effort, though he was now openly convinced that empire, left in the hands of commercial entrepreneurs, inevitably debased and destroyed the primitive communities whose land and labor they controlled...
...Englishman who met Casement in Chicago, during an American tour to raise funds against Britain described him as "a fanatic of the type of Mazzini ... great in the beginning of Italy's risorgimento, and so greatly mistaken in the end." His Irish American host in New York said flatly that Sir Roger had become "mentally unbalanced." Cracked or not, Casement was confident that a victorious Germany would benignly liberate Ireland. He made his way to Berlin, where he soon found that the German government consisted of "swine and cads." His attempt to recruit Irish soldiers captured by the Germans...
...Reputable Barrister. The guns were bad-captured Russian Krukas, the worst in Europe-and so was the navigator of the freighter transporting them. Missing his rendezvous off Tralee and surrounded by the Royal Navy, the skipper scuttled his ship, arms and all. Casement, who had been landed from a German U-boat, was ignominiously arrested by a local constable...