Robert Wilbur of Truthout writes in a book review:
Picture it: A cadre of 150 revolutionaries, armed with bolt-action rifles, revolvers and homemade grenades, seize Westminster Abbey, run up a flag sporting a picture of Che Guevara and proclaim Great Britain a workers’ paradise. Would the Coalition government pound London’s most holy place with artillery in Hyde Park, barrage it from a gunboat on the Thames and set the cathedral’s upper reaches afire from howitzers pitching incendiary shells from surrounding rooftops, until there was little left of Westminster Abbey but a steaming shell? Would Great Britain do such an outrage to one of the Church of England’s most sacred sites just to evict a ragtag band of wannabe revolutionaries? Bloody well not! But that is exactly what they did to the elegant and historic General Post Office in Dublin during the 1916 Easter Rising, which started on Easter Monday and ended in unconditional surrender by the Irish insurgents the following Sunday - followed by drumhead courts martial and encounters with the firing squad, or deportation to jail in Mother England. By the time the British were finished, Dublin was a shambles.
