Having viewed the 1996 film, Michael Collins, and examined a limited sample of scholarly literature on the life of the Irish radical activist himself, the purpose of this report is to discuss who and what Michael Collins was and to assess his model of political violence and its congruence with later models developed by Che Guevara and/or Carols Marighella. It will be argued that Collins, as a leader of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, was an urban guerilla fighter who used intelligence regarding the activities of the British in Ireland to target various military units or actors for attack and who succeeded in utilizing a complex intelligence network to execute effective campaigns against the British -- a position affirmed by Mike Burns (1996), who stated that Collins the man (as well as the film character played by Liam Neeson) was instrumental in negotiating the Anglo-Irish peach treaty of 1921.
Collins is depicted in the film as a political activist who turned to terrorism in the belief that overt violence in urban areas was needed to make it clear to the British that their tyranny would no be tolerated indefinitely by the Irish people (Blake, 1996). Collins is seen as having recognized the futility of attempting to defeat the British in open armed combat; the British had superior military and other resources and the Irish were lacking in the kind of support needed for an overt war. Consequently, the model of violence developed by Collins relied heavily upon urban guerilla tactics -- selected bombings, kidnappings and midnight, trial-less executions of British military officials, and hit-and-run attacks on vulnerable military convoys and installations. Collins recognized that these tactics would disrupt British government and create a state of siege warfare that would make it difficult for the British to retaliate against the actual Irish terrorists (or, alternatively, freedom fighters).
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