What made the Irish famine so deadly
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
This is a fascinating point:
> In 1837, two years after Alexis de Tocqueville published the first volume of “Democracy in America,” his lifelong collaborator, Gustave de Beaumont, went to Ireland, a country the two men had previously visited together. The book de Beaumont produced in 1839, “L’Irlande: Sociale, Politique et Religieuse,” was a grim companion piece to his friend’s largely optimistic vision of the future that was taking shape on the far side of the Atlantic. De Beaumont, a grandson by marriage of the Marquis de Lafayette, understood that, while the United States his ancestor had helped to create was a vigorous outgrowth of the British political traditions he and de Tocqueville so admired, Ireland was their poisoned fruit. America, he wrote, was “the land where destitution is the exception,” Ireland “the country where misery is the common rule.”
> In its first full year, 1846, Robert Peel’s Conservative government imported huge quantities of corn, known in Europe as maize, from America to feed the starving. The government insisted that the corn be sold rather than given away (free food would merely reinforce Irish indolence)
Compare this to the 1876 response in which "relief work" camps had workers doing strenuous labor in order to receive a meager ration of far fewer calories than would have been expended in the work.
> ... this 'Temple wage' consisted of 450 grams (1 lb) of grain plus one anna for a man, and a slightly reduced amount for a woman or working child,[12] for a "long day of hard labour without shade or rest."[13] The rationale behind the reduced wage, which was in keeping with a prevailing belief of the time, was that any excessive payment might create 'dependency' ...
Now where have I heard that recently
2. focusing on the "assistance" without mentioning the circumstances which create the crisis is missing a big part of the picture. In the case of British policy in India, some important components leading up to that famine were:
a. favoring a bunch of non-food cash crops, including opium production for export to China, tea for export to Britain, and materials for industry like jute and cotton. All of this diverted land away from food production which only set up for the famine to be a larger and more deadly crisis.
b. of the food that was produced, as in the Irish context, the British exported a lot of it. And didn't stop exporting it when there was a local famine.
c. in some areas imposing extremely high taxes, and in others switching farmers to owe taxes to be a percentage of land rents rather than as a percentage of their production -- i.e. if your crops failed you became insolvent and were pushed off the land, _preventing you from working_.
"Mukerjee and others also point to Britain’s “denial policy” in the region, in which huge supplies of rice and thousands of boats were confiscated from coastal areas of Bengal in order to deny resources to the Japanese army in case of a future invasion."
On the topic of brahmins, they were the elite, but mostly not the rulers. All castes discriminated against castes lower to them, even within scheduled castes. Blaming just brahmins for all ills of the society is an uninformed position.
Doing what? Starving people to death? Do you have any sources or made it up?
Blaming the British for their misfortunes. You'll find the articles yourself if you read about this subject. They're also fond of claiming that they were deindustrialized by the British, that British industrial development was predicated upon a theft of wealth from India (the figures here range from the bizarre to the impossible), and that the British created the caste system.
The rest is irrelevant for this thread.
You could feasibly make the argument that they exacerbated the Bengal famine. I don't think the scholarship supporting this argument is very good, but you could make the argument. As for the famines that occurred throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, no. There is no compelling reason to think that those famines occurred as a result of British mismanagement; they were the result of natural disasters.
Amartya Sen makes the argument that famines stopped occurring after India was granted independence, which alongside Churchill's general disdain for Indians is one of the more compelling reasons to think the British had anything to do with the 1943 famine, but this also coincides with the introduction of modern farming technologies (mechanization, chemical fertilizers, etc.), which complicates things.
These correlations are hard to parse apart. There wasn't any famine in the USSR in the early 1950s either, but that does not mean that Stalin, compared to the 1930s, suddenly became a humanist leader interested in prosperity of all subjugated people.
And this continues even today. Colonialism is alive and well, and rapaciously exploits the global south every day. Every company that exports jobs overseas because they can pay shit wages is part of it, every government that saddles newly-freed nations with unpayable debt is part of it, every environmental regulation that shoves polluting industry or waste disposal there, where their own voters don't have to look at it, is part of it. And yeah, paying office buildings full of workers barely making starvation wages to remove kiddie porn from Facebook is also part of it. We just traded guns for money, and sure, being exploited to near-death is better if you're getting paid than if you simply earn the right to not be shot, but that's a fucking low bar there.
No they aren't. The case for colonialism is that it improves the country so colonized and benefits the people therein by providing them with wealth and the trappings of civilization. For the most part, actual colonies failed in this ideal by doing more to exploit the people being colonized than to help them. But a company providing jobs to those overseas, even at a shit wage, is definitely providing benefit to those people by giving them a better opportunity than they would otherwise have.
The lesson of the "white man's burden" should be that you, the white man, do not know better than a people themselves what is good for them. Take that lesson.
This is not the truism as implied and saying that is not "white man's burden." Us filling beaches in developing countries with ships slated to be scrapped by people who work with plasma cutters while barefoot is not charity of any sort. Us polluting lands we do not own with waste we cannot dispose of under the environmental laws we ourselves have created in our own country is not "providing" anything, it's exporting misery. We demand our own people "earn" a living and by the same logic, demand thus of nations who do not necessarily agree, but we hold them hostage to it nonetheless.
If you want to uplift developing nations, tear up the agreements that give Western corporations the rights to plunder them, shred the documents of the "debt" they supposedly owe other nations for their own, deserved and far too delayed freedom, and treat their leaders with the respect they deserve and let them determine the destinies of their own countries, FOR ONCE, including and dare I say especially if said destinies are not the preferred ones by global colonial capitalism.
Everyone deserves freedom. No one deserves the freedom to be exploited, and it's long passed time we all started noting the difference. Freedom to be under the boot of capital is not freedom.
Why are "we" responsible for occupational health and safety in India? These shipbreaking yards aren't owned by British interests. Their conditions are reflective of a broader attitude of neglect across the entire subcontinent. "So cut off the supply of ships," you say; the attitude exists even in industries where "we" couldn't possibly change the working conditions (e.g. textile manufacturing) without engaging in what I'm sure you would call neo-imperialism.
Because we reap the rewards of it?
> "So cut off the supply of ships," you say
Yes, I do.
> the attitude exists even in industries where "we" couldn't possibly change the working conditions (e.g. textile manufacturing) without engaging in what I'm sure you would call neo-imperialism.
Imperialism is not as simple as "when you make people elsewhere do a thing." And more to the point, no activist on earth would state that it's Imperialist to say "your workers need PPE." There is no cultural stance on keeping your goddamn fingers. Poor as shit workforces scrapping ships are not forgoing protective gear because they simply enjoy the thrill of making sure their toes don't get hit by falling slag. They're people for Christ-sakes, just like you, trying to earn a living, and they can't afford to quit that job, nor can they afford a pair of boots to do it more safely, and no established organization is in their country making sure they do. Just like we did before we had things like OSHA and child labor laws made cheap business bastards do the right thing here, they deserve the same.
And while we can't make them form an OSHA, what we can do is tell our own corporations they are not permitted to dump ships on foreign soil where people working incredibly unsafely for slave wages will take them apart. That, we very much can and should do.
I have spoken with a Bangladeshi woman who made this exact argument. Granted, her father owned (what she swore wasn't) a sweatshop, so she wasn't impartial. This is also something you see a lot in Brazil. The westerners want to protect the Amazon rainforest, and the locals want to develop it. It's very common for Brazilians to resent this attitude, because westerners are effectively trying to have input on Brazil's economic development, leveraging their status as purchasers of Brazilian exports.
> There is no cultural stance on keeping your goddamn fingers. Poor as shit workforces scrapping ships are not forgoing protective gear because they simply enjoy the thrill of making sure their toes don't get hit by falling slag.
I've watched probably upwards of thirty hours of footage of factories on the Indian subcontinent and have also observed a similar work culture in Latin America. There absolutely is a cultural problem in both regions not taking occupational health and safety seriously, and it's not just a management issue (though this certainly plays a role, and I'd say is probably a factor if we consider the shipbreaking example). If you've ever worked in construction or manufacturing, it isn't rare at all to find employees who will mock each other for wearing PPE or abiding by safety protocols. This has thankfully been changing as the boomers have aged out, but even among young guys it's not particularly rare, and this is in the west. There was never a widespread adoption of workplace safety in the countries we are talking about. There is often a feeling among both management and employees that it isn't affordable, as well as ignorance on the part of the employees who simply view many of these workplace hazards as inevitable. This sounds absurd to you and I because we know that they are not inevitable and that most can be avoided simply by wearing PPE, but that's because we attended shop class and had various government PSAs reminding us of our rights to refuse unsafe work.
Think of something like our approach to trash: Both India and Latin America have significant problems with public littering. Some will protest that this occurs as a result of poverty, because no one can afford to ship their trash out of the city - but this problem was also common in America up until very recently. It took the implementation of fines and a series of public service announcements to change people's behavior.
Let's suppose this extraction had an appreciable impact on the development of Britain: Could you explain why the British are not as wealthy as the Germans or the Swedes, being that the British possessed colonies, and the Germans and Swedes did not? This pattern holds for almost all North European countries, so take care that your explanation does not fixate on the two I have chosen.
Surely there are proofs, then? And I mean, other than white papers from right-leaning think tanks or "it is known" pseudo-common sense.
Saying that we need to consider opinions on the same level as actual observations because “political” is fundamentally wrong.
What is political, and must be, is how we act on those findings, the answer to the question “considering those facts, what do we do?” There are many possibilities that are worth discussion, from doing away with welfare entirely to UBI. But this must be based on facts, not ideology. Think tank opinion pieces belong here, in the political discussion.
If political bias means we shouldn’t look at scholarship, we should also ignore papers from uniformly left-leaning university academics, correct?
If your point is that no academic study can be trusted because academics are raging socialists, then I don’t know what to tell you. We clearly do not live in the same reality.
In the UK benefits are reduced as earnings rise, you then start paying taxes at an income (as an employee) of just over £1,000 a month (the employee NI threshold is £241/week). You lose 55% from the benefits reduction, then lose with taxes, then you lose various concessions such as lower rates of/exemption from the tax paid to your local government and help with utility bills, you may have to pay travel costs - so for some people working leaves them barely, if at all, any better off.
Would you work under those circumstances?
> Help must be conditioned to effort and have a limit, so recipients have an incentive to improve their conditions under some timeline.
So what do you do when people fail to meet that deadline? Let them starve?
So what is your solution ? To smash the robot, so busy-work can be restored?
It's been proven with children of rich families who become dependent.
It's been proven with poor communities who become dependent.
Most people don't do anything productive if they don't have to, and as this goes on they lose the capacity to do anything productive.
I have to disagree that you won't become dependent on assistance given too freely. Obviously these crises leaned way, way too far in the other direction to avoid it, however.
Scattered points - but during the famine to earn 'wage' of insufficient grain ration, you had to work. This happened in work houses and camps, not necessarily in their homes or home areas. Workhouses existed in most towns where labourers lived, leaving their homes and families or after being evicted. Families were split up, Men, Women and Children did not live together. The workhouses and camps had terrible conditions, and the work was hard enough to have injuries and deaths even ignoring the illnesses that spread and grew worse from conditions. The work was often pointless - famine roads for example, roads to nowhere, so the work effort did nothing to improve the situation.
Those that had been evicted for failing to pay their rent, as they couldn't afford food or had not potato crops to sell, were considered convicts. As they were paid for their labour in food and sometimes lodging, they could not work their way out of situation or pay for healthcare when they got sick or injured. Many immigrated as things worsened year-on-year, on famine ships, but were refused and rejected from docking in multiple countries due to fear of the infectious illnesses they carried and burden they would inflict - and those stuck on ships became more unwell.
There was enough food, in fact a surplus in Ireland - but the "excess" was exported and cheaper questionable alternatives were imported for the soup kitchens and workhouses. Potatoes were such a single point of failure not by coincidence - many lived as tenants on landlords land, on tiny holdings but were expected to produce their own food. Potatoes were the only crop able to do this, or rather the holdings had sized down because Potatoes allowed it.
To me, that all screams of a systems failure and would not have been fixed with simply larger rations. Even ignoring the morality part to how the system was formed, how Ireland was ruled and Landlord system worked - the Potato Famine exposed the problems and limitations of the system with urgent crisis. The system did not adapt, did not act proactively or even react, and did not seem to learn in time to respond to a growing crisis.
One of the learnings surely was how terrible the concept is of worrying about people becoming too dependent on assistance in a crisis - debating the morale hazard and long-term dependency concerns runs the risk for short term death, disease and collapse.
It isn't said in Ireland that the famine was caused by the Potato, or by the meagre rations - It's said it was caused by the British, really the system in place rather than the British race but that doesn't simplify as well.
That is, of course, ridiculous. You get the site back up and stop losing $BIGNUM. Once you've stopped the bleeding, then you can go back and do things the right way.
"We're giving the assistance too freely! Ah, maybe a little more work would be good for them, not me of course, but them, they are the ones not working hard enough, who are dependent, me? no I work hard for my money, that's why I get to decide who lives or dies because they are not working hard enough!"
The far bigger problem is creating entitled masters, not entitled slaves.
The question then is do you agree (certain) people are wild animals.
If so are you too not a wild animal and if not, what makes you special?
It has made many countries refuse to create robust healthcare/education/military (etc.) systems with local resources and instead depend on foreign resources that can be zapped away anytime and are often used to control local leaders to do the donor’s bidding.
Many locals in aid-dependent countries (including mine) say the same thing, yet it seems do-good Westerners want to force people to collect their aid.
All the aid to Haiti, Afghanistan, and many other countries…their only achievement is now needing even more aid.
Yes, a famine is a special case where aid is necessary in the short term, but it’ll be a disaster and destroy local agriculture output if continued in the long term..
These investments can be provided by foreigners, but it’s ultimately the locals that need to rise up to the occasion and use it well. Unfortunately, Haiti is rooted in endemic corruption, stemming in part from aid dependency.
There’s no point of giving aid to Haiti while maintaining the status quo of the country being a little more than a raw material supplier to richer countries.
My exact complaint is that many countries give aid to feel good…and also for the recipient to do the donor’s bidding instead of what’s right for their countrymen.
Whoever pays the piper calls the tune. If Haitian leaders remain more accountable to foreign donors than their local population, there’s no incentive to improve.
It’s not the responsibility of foreigners to feed other countries’ populations. Those countries have governments made up of adults (often voted in by the masses) who can take decisions for themselves…it’s their fault if their citizens are left to starve, not foreigners.
> Or you mean the Haitian leaders are paid exactly to keep the population half-starving?
It’s not intentional, but that’s what inadvertently happens. There’s little incentive to find unique domestic solutions to long-running issues when foreign saviors are willing to cover for the Haitian government repeatedly.
At some point, we should admit that it’s arrogant for foreigners thinking they’re responsible for another country’s problems and should be the ones solving them, not the locals.
The above reasoning is what caused the U.S. to spend trillions of dollars on wars and so-called nation-building in Afghanistan and Iraq, all to no avail.
It helped neither the locals nor the U.S., where these wars have contributed to political turbulence with dire consequences.
"do-good"? No, you are confusing legitimate aid with "the first one's free". The fake aid is often designed to create dependency and send large part of the money back to the donors.
So foreign aid may make governments less accountable to their people. But colonial governments don't start off being accountable to their people. The "aid" that the British ruling class said would create dependence can only be understood in the context of the intense extractive practices that were already in place.
> Yes, a famine is a special case where aid is necessary in the short term, but it’ll be a disaster and destroy local agriculture output if continued in the long term.
... but because Ireland was still exporting food to Britain, "aid" in the form of keeping Irish food to feed Irish people would clearly still have supported local agriculture. Not evicting farmers would have supported local agriculture. This is structurally different from shipping American grain to Afghanistan.
I don’t think it’s fair to apply the modern concept of aid to previous eras of colonialism, wars, and frequent famines. It was a different ballgame I feel I wouldn’t be qualified to comment on except I experienced it first-hand.
They deliberately never accepted help from outside for that exact reason. It worked for them.
The above is from a recent speech by Singapore's foreign minister; https://www.mfa.gov.sg/Newsroom/Press-Statements-Transcripts.... I think it's a reason why a handful of Westerners detest Singapore: that it developed without being dependent on them. "How dare they?!"
A fitting example is that Europe is currently learning a lesson about the implications of depending on an external partner (the U.S.) for defense. It means being bullied at will by that country and having no say.
A bit of dependence that would need reducing later is a very small price to pay to avoid a million starved.
Just let the people eat dudes.
Also Russell's party during the famine was the Whigs. O'Toole gets that wrong, referring to them as "The Liberals."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_who_does_not_work,_neither_...
6 Now we command you, brethren, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that ye withdraw yourselves from every brother that walketh disorderly, and not after the tradition which he received of us.
7 For yourselves know how ye ought to follow us: for we behaved not ourselves disorderly among you;
8 Neither did we eat any man's bread for nought; but wrought with labour and travail night and day, that we might not be chargeable to any of you:
9 Not because we have not power, but to make ourselves an ensample unto you to follow us.
10 For even when we were with you, this we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat.
11 For we hear that there are some which walk among you disorderly, working not at all, but are busybodies.
12 Now them that are such we command and exhort by our Lord Jesus Christ, that with quietness they work, and eat their own bread.
13 But ye, brethren, be not weary in well doing.
14 And if any man obey not our word by this epistle, note that man, and have no company with him, that he may be ashamed.
15 Yet count him not as an enemy, but admonish him as a brother.
- 2 Thessalonians 3:6-15
I never claimed that it said that.
> Also the KJV version is a pretty inaccurate translation
It's the version I am familiar with and thus the version that I used.
Of course any form of intelligence, university educated or former bourgeoisie suffered way more, got menial or at least underpaid jobs that paid barely for survival.
Both my parents had good university degrees in engineering (back when less than 5% of their peers managed to get to uni, economics and mechanical engineering/welding), and were paid maybe half of what some trench diggers or field workers got and barely scrapped to make ends meet.
[edit: somebody elsewhere in this comment section has (apparently seriously) proposed Malthusianism as the root cause. In the Year of Our Lord 2025. With all of human knowledge available at their fingertips. You can't keep a bad idea down]
He is also a hero solely based on the defamation case he lost raised by Ruth Dudley Edwards, where he (correctly) posited that Ruth had 'grovelled to and hypocritically ingratiated herself with the English establishment to further her writing career'.
Uh, this is the Bengal famine the parent comment refers to, right? Ireland has never had 58M people in it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943
The famine of 1876-8 in addition to being worse from the percent-causalities view, and a lifetime earlier (65 years), was also not centered in Bengal but in other regions of India generally further south and west. Different in time, place and severity, and different in the policy response in part b/c the 1943 famine was during WW2.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_of_1876%E2%80%931...
There’s another word for this, not a famine…
For anyone else who doesn’t know, Ireland was exporting grain and meat during the famine at the orders of the British. They explicitly let the Irish die if someone else could order the food because Free Trade was perfect and if it wiped out a bunch of undesirables to boot, even better[1]
As you had groups with a wildly different wealth as the Ottaman Sultan and the Choctaws on the Trail of Tears scrounging for anything to spare to feed the starving Irish, their British overlords were shipping away food to anyone who could pay them a penny more.
If it wasn’t an engineered genocide then it’s close as you can get to one imo
[1] https://ireland-calling.com/irish-famine-ireland-exported-fo...
I think that’s a misconception-yes, there were a significant number of absentee landowners from England, but they were never the majority - the majority of wealthy Irish landowners lived in Ireland. Only around a third of large Irish landowners lived outside of Ireland.
One issue was that the land-owning upper classes were near exclusively Protestant, while the vast majority of the poor were Catholics-which is not to say no Protestants died in the famine, many did-but, while at the time Ireland was 80% Catholic 20% Protestant, famine deaths were 90% Catholic only 10% Protestant-so a Catholic was 2.25 times more likely to perish in the famine than a Protestant. Even though by the time of the famine, most of the formal legal discrimination against Catholics had been repealed, the consequences of it were still very evident.
Although there were many poor Protestants, the average poor Protestant was still better off (and hence more likely to survive) than the average poor Catholic, having benefited from generations of anti-Catholic/pro-Protestant discrimination.
Protestants also benefited from the greater wealth of Protestant charities - even though many Protestant charities were willing to help Catholics too, most Catholics were fearful to accept their help, viewing it as an inducement to conversion
Consider for example, Edmund Burke (the famous conservative philosopher) - he was born in Ireland to a Roman Catholic mother and a Church of Ireland father; his parents raised him Anglican and his sister Catholic - this was not an uncommon compromise for middle class Irish families of the time, discriminatory laws limiting career and education opportunities for Catholics largely didn’t apply to women who were excluded from careers and higher education irrespective of their faith. It is unclear whether or not his father, a lawyer (at a time when Catholics weren’t allowed to practice law) had converted from Catholicism, or if one of his ancestors had - but given Burke’s paternal line came from an old Hiberno-Norman family, descendants of the 12th century English invaders who over the following centuries assimilated to a Gaelic identity, it is obvious that one of his patrilineal ancestors must have switched from Catholicism to Protestantism at some point.
> It lead to the Revolutions of 1848.
Too bad politicians today don't read the history books they want to burn, they might save their own skins.
Fact: in 1847, nearly 4,000 vessels carried food from Ireland to British ports while hundreds of thousands of Irish people died of starvation and related diseases. There was PLENTY of food in Ireland.
FACT: The government refused to intervene in the market to prevent food exports, even as the Irish population faced severe food shortages. Why?
While crop failures were happening across Europe, the impact in Ireland was particularly devastating because of the population's heavy reliance on potatoes. The suggestion that food was only unaffordable for the poor overlooks the fact that the potato blight left many people without any access to their primary food source. WHY was it the only source of food in an abundant growing environment??
Fact: Wages paid on “work programs” for those (un)lucky enough to get on them were too low to purchase food at inflated "famine" prices, leading to widespread starvation.
The export of food from Ireland during this period was a significant factor in the suffering of the Irish people, and it is important to acknowledge the role of British economic policies and the prioritization of profits over humanitarian needs which seems to be a struggle for you.
You seem to contradict yourself as well, you say plenty of food, and then it was because of the reliance on potatoes, and then it was the only food source?
Maybe I just dislike comments that insist on saying FACT multiple times.
Workers got either in priority to farmers and further others. Except politicians and connected people got theirs first beyond workers. And some were able to buy it ahead of the queue.
The magical development in the West was driven by really heavy handed subsidies industrial development on already richer area, which USSR just could not afford, and especially not after funding the high military spending. That notwithstanding some completely broken experiments done in large scale like attempts to farm the steppes in the middle of nowhere, a lot of which was funded by export from the few basket countries which would have otherwise had enough food. And after a relatively short while, the industrialization effort stalled, a variety of farming related problems appeared due to both mismanagement, bad weather and plagues, countries involved got indebted on bad terms...
So yeah, it was "free".
The scarcity that made food and housing not free in practice is why monetization (capitalism) ended up being better, which I assume was MikePlacid's point.
Capitalism has problems for sure, but it eliminates scarcity more efficiently than any other system we have tried so far.
Capitalism may share the abundance unevenly, but it still creates it in the first place, which is key.
This famine happened from the concentration of power, not because food costs money. Democratic land reform solves it, keeping the monetary impetus in play.
The Holodomor was a very similar genocide where farms were collectivized. That didn't stop millions of people from dying from hunger as their own food was taken at gunpoint and exported to other countries.
We must judge harshly, but on the proper aspect.
The problem was not exactly that, there wasn't food export when there was famine. Communists are not that stupid. All they wanted was to overcome the corporate greed of the peasantry, who often sold food to workers at 2, 3, or 5 times the price, so they fought price gouging on food, determining fair prices, that would allow all the country to be well-fed.
But for some unknown reason in response to that beautiful and righteous policy the peasantry reduced food production, which caused the famine.
So to be clear: Communists exported food, stolen from the people who grew it, which is very well known, here's one citation from Wikipedia:
> In regard to exports, Michael Ellman states that the 1932–1933 grain exports amounted to 1.8 million tonnes, which would have been enough to feed 5 million people for one year.[16]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1930%E2%80%93...
Further it wasn't "stupidity" of Communists but rather a deliberate genocide of those considered inferior. They sent groups of soldiers around the countryside to steal more grain as children starved in the streets. It is one of the more horrific acts of brutality in the 20th century, all in service of authoritarianism.
That is blatant manipulation. Most of those grain de facto didn't left the country and were used to fight famine. From 1930 there was massive grain import. Moreover, import was considered by Stalin from 1928, but at that time all the statistics showed, that food situation will be fully fixed by fair share from upper parts of peasantry.
>deliberate genocide of those considered inferior
This is literally a conspiracy theory on the level of the Jews starting World War II to exterminate the Europeans.
>They sent groups of soldiers around the countryside to steal more grain as children starved in the streets.
Yeas, and they did that exactly to give that grain to those children.
The fact is, communists with all honesty tried to achieve a fair distribution of necessities to the poorest. But as always leftist's "fair" implies market incentive distortion and as a result hindered production.
The cause of the famine is not the evil communists who took grain from hungry peasants, communists simply tried to take excess food from the rich and give it to the poor. The cause of the famine is the 7-fold drop in food production. And when you have that drop - there inevitable will be mass famine.
Besides we still call these events "famines"? Interesting. I thought genocide would be the word, isn't it?
The Irish people mentioned appear to actually be part of the plantation class of British people who arrived into Ulster. I don't think the framing should be taken sincerely.
Every meal is a gift from Harber & Bosch + the world order allowing international trade.
A glimps can be had, when looking at countries going bankrupt who can not import these basics: Sri-Lanka https://www.wfp.org/news/food-crisis-sri-lanka-likely-worsen... or Pakistan.
Let's not forget Norman Borlaug
There were other crops in Ireland at the time that were exported under armed guard. A lot of the policy was driven by the fact that some British politicians saw the famine as a natural way to ‘thin the herd’ of the Irish populous.
Of course, Houses of Parliament records show that there were British politicians that were morally aghast at this, but unfortunately they couldn’t have enough of an impact.
Yes, absolutely. But at least for me it was shocking to learn that Ireland, right next door to Britain, was suffering from similar famines to India.
I'd be more shocked to find out that Britain in the 19th century made things better in a region with famine.
There's a historical grey area here. India had experienced the conditions of their famine before, as you might expect, things happen more than once and so they had a social structure agreement between villages where ones who's crops were stricken and lost would have their food stocks supplemented with those of neighboring villages, and every village grew more than they needed to facilitate this. This worked excellently for probably thousands of years, until the Brits arrived and insisted taxes be collected, and they took crop yields in lieu of money the Indians didn't have.
Either they were unaware because they assumed the brown people had no idea what they were doing, or they were aware and didn't give a shit because the people were brown, or some combo of the two, who's to say. But they did the very same to the Irish. Landlords were entitled to the yields of their land, and they took whatever it produced, which exasperated the already dire situation.
If that recollection is correct, then while the english might not have lit the metaphorical fire, they definitely gathered the kindling.
> The problem was not that the land was barren.... But almost none of this food was available for consumption by the people who produced it. It was intended primarily for export to the burgeoning industrial cities of England. ... In the mid-nineteenth century, Scanlan notes, fewer than four thousand people owned nearly eighty per cent of Irish land. Most of them were Protestant descendants of the English and Scottish settlers who benefitted from the wholesale expropriation of land from Catholic owners in the seventeenth century. Many lived part or all of the year in England. They rented their lands to farmers, a large majority of whom were Catholics. Scanlan points out that, whereas in England a tenant farmer might pay between a sixth and a quarter of the value of his crops in rent, in Ireland “rent often equalled the entire value of a farm’s saleable produce.”
A snippet from the snippet you apparently neglected to read.
Yes, that's generally how power works.
Moreso than that, they exacerbated it. The British farmer barons refused to lower their demand on their crops to allow the Irish to consume them in lieu of their lost crops. In addition, they were the ones that pushed heavily for a monoculture on potatoes and a few oats over a diverse agricultural landscape; which allowed the famine to get so widespread.
In other words, the Irish Famine wasn't any worse than most contemporary famines. However, it was a death toll for the Irish because all of the grown food was shipped over the North Channel (or you were imprisoned/killed for refusing to cede it).
There's a reason the (catholic) Irish hated the British so fervently and it was 100% due to liberal involuntary servitude punishments, Cromwellian policies, and the Black 47.
That doesn't mesh with what I've read. The English were generally derisive of the Irish's reliance on potatoes. But the Irish became reliant on potatoes because of the shrinking size of the average tenant farmer's allotment. Potatoes are labor intensive but produce a higher number of calories per area of land than others staple crops, especially on marginal land.
The British demanded specific oats and other crops, which required large allotments; this left the Irish farmers with a small portion of land to grow their own subsistence on, in turn leading to Potatoes as the only option (ending in a monoculture). When the potatoes started dying, the Irish had no access to the other crops (as they were grown for the tenant holders).
Where does this come from?
The article we are discussing mentions various bits of helping, as does the wikipedia page.
It looks like a complex mix of various entities doing different things they think would help, some effective, some not.
As a matter of law, the Irish were not allowed to own land. They could only rent a limited amount from landowners -- 0.5 acres at most, if my memory serves. And the only culture with a sufficient yield per unit of surface that the Irish could both make rent and feed themselves was the potato.
The rest of the land served to produce other crops for the benefit of British landowners. As a result, the island of Ireland was in fact producing enough food to feed its population through the Famine. It was just exported to Britain instead.
The Irish were not "white" back then
The Irish were coerced into the UK and were officially British citizens, that is ostensibly, co-nationals. They weren't treated as such because those in power regarded them as subhuman. If that isn't racism the word is devoid of meaning.
> I feel with them that it is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people. We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.
In 1835, it's quite progressive to posit that you can, through education, create a class of Indians who are "English in tastes, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect." Arguably, it was too optimistically progressive--history showed that Oxbridge educations could go only so far in turning Indians into English.
The Belgians, the Dutch, the Germans, the Portuguese, the Italians and the Spanish also did horrible things during their colonial periods. Are these taught a schools in these countries? Genuine question - I'm curious.
I did not hear about in school.
It was made very clear that millions of civilians died (even when not counting the concentration camps) due to the war of extermination (Vernichtungskrieg)
In the 80s, the Wehrmacht was still presented as a morally decent army. That changed in the 90s, partly due to the Wehrmacht exhibition.
And in New Zealand they also didn't teach us about the way our ancestors holocausted the Māori.
Holocausts happen with alarming regularly in history, and the side doing one usually ends up winning, except, you know, that one time. I wish I understood what factors make people so unable to reason about them or even acknowledge them. Business as usual bias? Ego defense? I think the German teaching that there was only one and there will never be another falls under denial.
The way you can't talk about Palestine in Germany feels like the way you can't talk about Hacker News moderation on Hacker News, except, you know, the life and death of about 6 million Muslims are at stake.
(the Scots diaspora as a result of Land clearances, and the Irish independence struggle and its links (and opposition) to Scots Protestantism and Irish migration to the mainland might have driven this. We have both Irish independence fights at football matches and orange order parades)
American person on social media (and, yes, I would claim HN is social media) claims "They never taught us this in school!!!" with many agreeing emphatically.
... and 90+% of the time I remember specifically being taught it. Most people don't remember much of their educations.
But yes, most people have a really bad memory of what's taught in school (and that probably isn't entirely their fault, the system clearly doesn't lead to sticky knowledge).
Also, time changes things. I did school during a period where school history was in ferment and the teacher said at some points we were learning a new curriculum which rejected "great men of history" theory and focussed on mass movements. I suspect after Thatcher this was revised, it was almost overtly marxist. The textbooks on post colonialism were pretty clear.
I hasten to add I had no problem with this, and I read "the 18th Brumaire of Louis Buonaparte" as revision for the history exam in the library, with much pleasure. This was because we'd done a lot on the revolutions across Europe in 1848. Strangely we did very little on Chartism. When I went to uni I found out this was a really active field of study, especially in the midlands because so many Chartist pamphlets are held by places like Leeds university, the working class towns. Maybe thats why Scots History ignored it: it was a south of the border story! If they'd done the emergence of the British Labour party I bet we'd have had a lot given the origins of Labour in Scotland, and the Red Clyde story. That was probably done in year 12 and I left school early to go work in a Marine Biology lab.
I probably remember this because I enjoyed it. A lot of history doesn't excite everyone, perhaps I was lucky. I am buggered if I can remember the Maths, which isn't very helpful given I work in CS. Like Arnold Rimmer in "Red Dwarf" I am acceptably meh at colouring in the crinkly bits in Geography but not much else.
This actually isn't true in general. Baltimore (poor city) city schools, eg, spend twice as much as Carmel Indiana (wealthy city) does per pupil.
The link between education outcomes and spend is extremely weak.
They didn't teach this in high school!!!
Looking back, it's also kind of amazing to think that the Northern Ireland Conflict was largely glossed over in English schools while it was going on, but the news coverage was pretty one-sided also.
US and Eurocolonial treatment of the Native Americans was covered extensively in regular courses though, often alongside and explicitly compared to the Holocaust which is also covered extensively.
I don't think we were really taught at all about European/Asian history or the Soviet Union. I think I could have taken some classes related to those in highschool (secondary school), but for anyone working towards a non-history bachelor's degree those courses were generally not something that you could fit in your timetable.
I believe there was also one in Africa committed by Belgium in the Congo? I remember seeing some photos of something cruel from there to this effect.
There's just so much history to cover, and to be charitable to those who exclude events deemed important it can be that other events are deemed more important (especially by the local population) and there's only so much class time.
History instruction seems to be of two minds, either grand narratives (great men in the past, metrics-driven narratives like agricultural productivity now), or the case study approach where you sample some episodes from a variety of times and places and study each in depth. In both cases the approach must involve leaving some stories on the editing floor.
When I was a kid in the 80s colonization was very lightly mentioned, mostly in the vontext of punitive comonies quch as Guyana.
Otherwise these territories were shown to children in mainland France as normal departments.
Today it is different. Colonies are part of the cirriculum but teachers have more leeway in appproching the topic. One of my children had the "we are genocide makers" version, when the other one was "colonization was a blessing for them" (I am overdrawing the picture)
Most of them didn't get those farms back after the war either.
I had to check the veracity of this, and it seems to be true. By 1945, Japanese American farms were responsible for 30%+ of the agricultural output of California.
Must be said the knowledge/interest of historical knowledge among my fellow Dutchies isn`t all that great.
https://www.historischnieuwsblad.nl/slavernij-en-kolonialism...
> figures from article above: percentages of total history subject matter: colonialism 9% Slavery 4 % Holocaust 2 %
We have the same expression in Russian.
Russia learned a lot from Dutch during Peter the Great's time, but I can't make a connection to literature from that.
Perhaps, just similar national characters?
I asked the toasters, they said this about it:
Yes, Russian literature tends to translate well into Dutch, and there are a few reasons for that:
1. Linguistic Similarities in Syntax and Tone – While Dutch and Russian are from different language families, both can handle long, complex sentences without losing clarity. Dutch, like Russian, allows for a mix of formal and informal tones within a single text, which helps maintain the nuance of Russian literature.
2. Cultural Compatibility – Dutch readers appreciate introspective, philosophical, and existential themes, which are common in Russian literature. Authors like Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov resonate well with Dutch audiences because of their deep psychological exploration and social critique.
3. Strong Translation Tradition – The Netherlands has a long history of translating world literature with high quality. Dutch translators often work directly from Russian rather than relying on intermediary languages like English or French, preserving the original style and meaning.
4. Directness and Emotional Depth – Russian literature is known for its raw emotional depth and directness, qualities that align well with Dutch communication norms. This makes Russian novels feel more natural in Dutch than in some other languages that might soften or rephrase certain expressions.
Many Dutch readers have a strong appreciation for Russian classics, and some Dutch authors have even been influenced by them.
Arnon Grunberg comes to mind as a more contemporary writer, but couldn`t find a Russian translation.
There are Russian translations of some books by Arnon Grunberg[2][3], namely De heilige Antonio, Fantoompijn, Tirza, De geschiedenis van mijn kaalheid and a few very short stories. Which one of these would you recommend?
[0] https://annas-archive.org/search?q=Герард+Реве
[1] https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Реве,_Герард#Избранная_библиог...
[2] https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Грюнберг,_Арнон#Публикации_на_...
I read a ton of Usborne and Dorling Kindersley books and these were exactly the sorts or subjects they fixated on. I suppose it's probably part of some long-established national curriculum.
Where I live, people often (conspiratorially) complain that more serious subjects were not covered in school, but the only things I can't ever really remember covering involved South-and-4th-of-July-American history. We didn't really cover Africa outside of the 20th century, either.
To be honest I think American schools are the only ones who really give colonial history the attention it deserves because it's the basis of their entire country and then goes on to fill out the comparatively boring eighty or so years between the end of the Civil War and the start of World War II. I find most people I talk to from the UK who are aware of some aspect of colonial history are either apologists for the British Empire or have this imported view common in North American (and especially Canadian) universities that the British were this uniquely nefarious force of evil. I suppose the historically curious ones just spend their time studying the Norman conquests.
Even one of the most anglo-friendly and prosperous former colonies, the USA, didn't have very nice things to say about the Empire when they were a part of it.
The Maori were eating each other before the British arrived - that's not hyperbole, they practised cannibalism. Upper caste Indians were throwing still-living women into fires so they could join their husbands in the afterlife. If the British arrived in these places as marauding pirates (and they did), they still come out ahead on these metrics alone.
> Even one of the most anglo-friendly and prosperous former colonies, the USA, didn't have very nice things to say about the Empire when they were a part of it.
Ironically that is where some of the worst atrocities occurred.
I've never seen any convincing evidence that it was one of the richest countries in the world. What are you basing that off of?
> India experienced deindustrialisation and cessation of various craft industries under British rule,[12] which along with fast economic and population growth in the Western world, resulted in India's share of the world economy declining from 24.4% in 1700 to 4.2% in 1950,[13] and its share of global industrial output declining from 25% in 1750 to 2% in 1900.[12]
It was more industrialised than many or likely most western countries at the time with more advanced and valuable crafts, so in relative terms this seems rather suspect as a reason for dismissal. The original claim in the GP comment was that it was "one of the richest", which seems more than plausible given that it was likely higher than average GDP per capita pre-global industrialisation.
> The attached source even mentions deindustrialization started in the waning years of the Mughals. Due to industrialization, the West’s GDP per capita simply outpaced India and China significantly, to the extent western nations even had higher nominal GDPs.
The article mentions the 18th century, which is when the East India Company began its campaign to take over more land and resources. There is a significant amount of evidence that the EIC and later the British systematically deindustrialised areas that they colonised [1], and it's thought that the European industrial revolution depended on this rebalancing. I agree that the West's GDP per capita outpaced India's as a result of that, and this massive reduction in wealth and resources was the original point.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-industrialisation_of_India
I would guess that the British Army et al. killed at least as many people in India as were burned alive as part of funerary rites. How does one effectively compare those two actions? It's easy to take the coloniser perspective of "they were savages and we stopped them from doing X". But the colonised are telling their own stories "these savages came from across the sea and they committed the most horrible atrocities".
I'm not trying to defend burning people or eating people. But killing people to take their stuff and calling it civilisation is not better. It's certainly not civilised.
Interesting. What is this based on? When it comes to killings done by the British forces in India one of the most renowned, bloody and regrettable incidents in colonial history in India was the Massacre of Amritsar where British forces lost control and fired on a crowd of protesters. This resulted in around 400 deaths (many more injured). The reason this was such an infamous event is because of how uncharacteristic it was of British rule in India.
Dyer gave explicit orders to fire into the crowd.
Coming out of prion studies, laughing sickness, the Fore people in PNG, mad cow disease was a greater understanding of the defences everywhere in humans against prion related brain diseases .. these defences wouldn't exist if eating other humans wasn't relatively commonplace in human evolution.
In recorded European history we have "Corpse medicine" and eating bituminised mummies as a fad.
* https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-gruesome-history-...
> This book led me onto even stranger topics still: ghosts and poltergeists. As a lifelong rationalist and agnostic, I had no interest in these until I came across vampires behaving like poltergeists. What could this mean? After a lot of reading, of cases seemingly so impossible they made your head hurt; and after talking about poltergeists to many people, and having a surprising number of them say, Yes – that’s happened to me, I came to suspect that poltergeists were actually real. Not only that, but I also realised that the poltergeist is a master of disguise. Across centuries and continents, when people talk about vampires, witches, demons, ghosts, and even fairies, they are often clearly describing poltergeist outbreaks.
You'll excuse me if I find it hard to take these claims seriously.
You can do better than searching reddit - eg. drilling back through references used by Volker in https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2189571/ and other papers.
I assuming the throw away part about corpse medicine is what you refer to?
The Egyptian mummy snacks were a thing and documented in multiple places. The writings in England on eating parts of humans as medicine are considerably more loaded, there are pre Henry VIIIth references and then there's a whole body of anti-Catholic propaganda spread about by protestants following the reformation.
Still, the guts of my comment was that canabalism was more common than thought, it appears to have been commonplace across all branches of human evolution:
* https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.1083320
* https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.300.5617.227a
are links to a paper (2003) and commentary that goes down that path looking at genetics.
The more troubling to some is recent history during which attitudes towards using body parts have changed, even in Europe.
Many accept evidence of cannibalism 1,000 years past in the Americas: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691637396/pr...
Some are uncomfortable about contempory reports of human flesh used in Asian medicines: https://abcnews.go.com/Health/chinese-made-infant-flesh-caps...
People can be forgiving of survival cannabilism in European famines (even in the 1930s) and among castaways: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannibalism_in_Europe
A number are just unaware that human bones were used to make beet sugar: https://www.thetimes.com/uk/article/skeletons-from-battle-of...
> You'll excuse me if I find it hard to take these claims seriously.
You're excused.
The word "Europe" does not appear in that paper. I'm not contesting that cannibalism occurs, I'm contesting the idea that it was occurring at rates that were at all comparable to the Maori at the time of colonization. The original article you posted seemed to imply that the consumption of human body parts was common practice in Europe during the Renaissance. If the trade in human flesh and bones had been as common as the article was implying, why were anatomists robbing graves to find cadavers?
> The Egyptian mummy snacks were a thing and documented in multiple places.
I will concede on this. Most of the citations I was finding in the Wikipedia article you linked to ultimately only pointed to two sources (all the other articles it cited ultimately led back to Richard Sugg), but based on the article you linked to in this comment, I was able to find this article [0] on JSTOR which gets to a primary source describing the trade. I will have to do more reading about this as I wasn't able to find any indication of how this trade was viewed.
There were only a few instances of cannibalism listed during the colonial period in the Wikipedia article you linked to - most seem to have involved sailors lost at sea. I don't want to sound like I'm minimizing this given what I just learned about the trade in powdered mummies, but I still don't think there is a convincing case that the problem was occurring at anywhere near the scale seen in the South Pacific.
I never claimed that it did.
I did strongly assert that "digging back through references used by Volker in (one random paper) and other papers" would serve you better than 'researching' via reddit.
There's an entire crowd of respected researchers in history, literature, anthropology, genetics, and disease that I dug into some 15 years past (and going back further, I knew the Alpers family since the 1970s) and while I'm not about to unearth that crate ATM I can promise there's better material "out there".
> I'm contesting the idea that it was occurring at rates that were at all comparable to the Maori at the time of colonization.
Perhaps you should have said that in your first reply to me then? I was honestly scratching my head a little as to what specific detail you had seized upon.
On that note, however, the Maori were exo-cannibals who delibrately descrated the bodies of their enemies in order to shame them and as an act of revenge.
How should we describe the act of digging up the fallen and grinding their bones in order to make sugar beet (as happened in Europe)? Is that on the scale of Maori battlefield desecration or at an even greater scale (given the numbers involved)?
All the recent references to cannabalism aside, my main point is that defences against disease related to cannibalism appears to be baked into human evolution .. we (all human evolutionary branches) have all practiced cannibalism in our past and the traces are still in our current makeup.
That Quentin Question video made me cringe from the beginning to the eventual end when I closed it for being insufferable.
Patronizing kids does not hold sway in the long term. They don't stay young. I think it's better to treat them more mature than they are, to speak to the people they become.
I feel that this is a major source of why Britain (and Europe to a larger extent) is unable to come to terms with reality on a majority of issues today - immigration, foreign policy, economic policy etc. They simply have not come to terms with the loss of their empires and the wealth they brought. So they choose to not teach it. This leads British institutions today to have a serious colonial hangover whether they know it or not. The operating paradigm is still an outdated one in many cases.
They teach students what they think made Britain great -- the Romans, the Norman invasion, the World Wars, Churchill etc. -- while actually glossing over what made them great: Empire. It really brings to mind a line from the Thor: Ragnarok movie - "Proud to have it; ashamed of how they got it". The British people today might not have an idea of their Empire but the effects still linger on in their former colonies.
I think that is a tacit assumption that a lot of British people make.
It's just going to be the default view if one does not have further information.
I would be so bold at to assert that no millennial really taught that a) Britannia had an empire and b) Britain ruled the waves.
Two world wars, and slavery is pretty much all we were taught, unless you specialised.
"modern" immigration was/is much more driven by our former membership of the EU than empire.
Empire is why our friends had Caribbean grandparents. WWII for polish grandparents, and Idi Amin why they also might have had indian parents born in Uganda.
But they were all pretty British to us. They sounded like us, dressed the same.
"modern" immigration when I was growing up was mostly Portuguese and Polish, later more baltics when that opened up to schengen.
But those later countries were also a product of another empire: USSR.
Millenial here from the US. I was taught about the British Empire, extensively, in both high school and college. My high school teacher played "Rule, Britannia" (lyrics include "rule the waves") for us to hammer home the point.
Maybe you meant no millennial in Britain?
Additionally my history classes all ended around the 60s-70s - roughly when the teachers were kids. Seemingly from their perspective "history" didn't include anything they experienced.
The rule of law, parliamentary democracy, the English language, ending Sati etc.
The empire wasn't all good, but was more benevolent than a lot of colonial empires. See the work of Nigel Biggar for reference.
Neither. While colonialism didn't _create_ generational poverty, the systemic genocides of the British were new. Colonial policy of prioritizing exports directly led to the deaths of millions. That's a fact.
A similar comparison would be between Roman slavery and the chattel slavery of the Americas. They are both abhorrent practices (just like the genocides caused by Indian rulers in the pre-British period), but it pales in comparison to the scale and horror of antebellum slavery.
But there is never a critic of it, it's mentioned as matter of fact for the first, and only in positive for the second.
I had to grow old to realize "wait, napoleon was basically our hitler...".
However, considering the available governments in Europe at the tail end of the 18th century, I think a time-traveller such as myself would be more interested in spending a few years in France than any of her neighbours. I imagine I would think differently if I came from an aristocratic background!
Given that those deaths were basically because of his lust for territorial extension and disregard for human life, I would say we are in a similar ballpark as Mao, Hitler, Stalin, etc.
Of course, our history books are quick to state he made reforms, particularly legal and administrative ones, that benefitted our country a lot and still echo benefits today.
But again, I think if you a responsible for millions of deaths because of your desire for conquest, any arguments you can make in the other way are instantly moot.
You may, however, made the argument that it would have been better to be a French citizen at the time than somewhere else, depending on where and how you were born. But it's a different point.
There is a very good documentary about Italian war crimes which include the Ethiopian campaign, as well as the treatment of the Balkans by the Italian troops.
Germany's role in colonialism was always limited compared to the other European powers. We were late to the game and lost them after WW1, so it was more of a footnote. It did mention our colonies in East Africa and South East Asia but only mentioned the genocide against the Herero without a mention of details. The Atlantic Slave and trade was covered in great detail both in history and English lessons. Same for the Spanish and Portuguese exploitation of South and Middle America.
There's a _lot_ of British history, and world history. There are several (5?) competing exam boards offering GCSEs and A Level's in history, and generally schools are free to choose between exam boards on a subject-by-subject basis. Each of these will offer an absolute multitude of historic periods, crises, etc, that again schools are free to choose from; history exam papers will offer students choices of questions depending on what they actually studied.
What you get taught in your history class at school in the UK is down to your school's Head of History, rather than a complex government-led conspiracy. If your school's Head of History wants to teach "Empire is Bad", they will have no trouble finding approved materials to do so!
When I went to secondary school from about 1997-2001 Indonesia in particular was covered fairly extensively. From what I recall it wasn't white-washed either: I remember one chapter describing how a young Indonesian woman was punished with hot chilli pasta (sambal) on her vagina. Pretty graphic stuff to teach a 14-year old.
Experiences seem to differ though, because I've heard other people describe that it's barely covered and/or white-washed. Maybe it depends on the school? I don't know. Also the schooling system completely changed since then.
- Most land were controlled by large land owners. Most peasants had very small farm land, which couldn't feed the people if normal crops were planted so they had to plant the higher yield potato to have enough food. When the disease wiped out the potato crop, most people went without any food.
- The land controlled by the large land owners were planted with cash crops for export. They were unwilling to stop the export to help the locals.
- The ruling class consisted of large land owners and British transplants in the Northern Ireland after the conquering of Ireland by Britain could care less about the shortage of food. They actively hid the problem from the central government in Britain. The governor/duke/whoever tried to sweep the problem under the rug to avoid appearing as incompetent.
- When the central government in Britain learned of the famine, they acted too late and too little, unwilling to spend money to deal with the emergency. Britain at the time looked down on the Irish people in general.
This led to great animosity of the Irish people to Britain, driving the subsequent independent movements.
Fun fact, about 10% of the U.S. population are of Irish descent, due to massive immigration from Ireland in the following years after the famine.
Edit: Just looked up the Irish population in U.S., about 11%. https://uscanadainfo.com/irish-ancestry-in-america/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conolly%27s_Folly
https://www.amusingplanet.com/2017/10/irelands-famine-follie...
Blindboy did an interesting podcast on this:
Being poor was considered a major personal failing.
FTA (for anyone's benefit):
> In London, the realization that this was not a temporary crisis coincided with the coming to power of a party with a deep ideological commitment to free trade. The Liberals, under Lord John Russell, were determined that what they saw as an illegitimate intervention in the free market should not be repeated. They moved away from importing corn and created instead an immense program of public works to employ starving people—for them, as for the Conservatives, it was axiomatic that the moral fibre of the Irish could not be improved by giving them something for nothing. Wages were designed to be lower than the already meagre earnings of manual workers so that the labor market would not be upset.
> The result was the grotesque spectacle of people increasingly debilitated by starvation and disease doing hard physical labor for wages that were not sufficient to keep their families alive. Meanwhile, many of the same people were evicted from their houses as landowners used the crisis to clear off these human encumbrances and free their fields for more profitable pasturage. Exposure joined hunger and sickness to complete the task of mass killing.
(To make it clear for the pedant literal crowd - I'm not saying it's a good thing, nor do I want it to happen. I'm simply commenting on how poetic it would be.)
That particular peak is probably much older. Charity at a non-negligible scale to distant (meaning "not literally in visual range") people has been very rare throughout history.
Btw "Gaelic" alone typically refers to either the language family - Scottish, Irish, and Manx - or specifically to Scottish Gaelic. Irish Gaelic, in English, is simply referred to as "Irish" or "the Irish language". And it's largely the source of the way the Irish use English.
Hyperbole is a common facet of humour (to make a point) in the British Isles.
But it also says that the year before the shit completely hit the fan, the Ireland population topped out at 8.18m. 10 years later it was down 1.6m, and another .6m after another 10. And it just kept trending downwards until the 1930's, (4.21m) and bottomed out again in ~1960 before it started growing again.
The idea that such a brutal disease could have been prevented by eating fresh fruits and meats sounded more like a folktale than reality. And early experiments to try to demonstrate this were also not that conclusive since vitamin c tends to break down rapidly in the conditions it was stored in (prejuiced - metal containers). For instance during Vasco de Gamma's journey from Europe to India he lost more than half his crew, mostly to scurvy.
This is still happening in parts of the world.
"The English".
Since seeing your comment, I thought oh no, maybe I missed some context or something, so I went and read the article. It's a fine article, but as I expected, nothing new to me.
My guess is that you thought I was posting my cheeky response as a "counter" to the article - I wasn't, and I see the article agrees (in more words, of course) with what I said.
> Rice yield per acre had been stagnant since the beginning of the twentieth century;[25] coupled with a rising population, this created pressures that were a leading factor in the famine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943
Add to that transport impact (floods, war), the drop in imports from Burma and other factors.
[edit] I should point out that I am not commenting on the cause of that lack of diversity, just the result of it.
Win a free trip to Australia!
get me right: I love diversity, diversity is a "must have". but greed is unrelated to diversity, isn't it?
I am 50 and my understanding has changed over time. Like every teenager I wanted to be proud of who I was but fortunately being a mongrel creates a note of discord in one's head - who to be proud of?
The need to feel proud is a driver of all sorts of shit. We shouldn't feel ever more than a little proud or proud of what we personally have done but I'm not even sure of that. It's always a simplification. One should not have to call on history to respect oneself.
Irish people made use of the Empire too and went to the colonies to seek their fortunes. My dad was one. I was born in one and saw the recent Irish immigrants behaviour - they were a mixed bag like everyone else. Most were sort of ok and one or two were atrocious but not more or less than anyone else.
As a gross over-simplification, I think history is about people conquering other people and building larger and larger groups which become kingdoms then nations then empires or federations or unions. I get this feeling that it's mathematical. Whoever can organise on a large scale will absorb whoever is smaller.
So if we want to have a reasonable future, we must learn to organise on a large scale with negotiation and rules/laws so that someone can't absorb us by doing it the violent way.
Queen Victoria, upon learning of this, requested that he reduce his donation to a more modest £1,000, so as not to embarrass her own relatively meagre offering of £2,000. Reluctantly, the Sultan agreed, but bolstered his contribution by secretly sending five ships loaded with food.
https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Britain-refuse-Ottomans-aid-to...
My conclusion is that the famine was as much political as it was environmental. (as they often are)
The English already owned all the land so they figured let the Irish die out. In essence.
> The claim that he had wanted to give £10,000 first appears in Taylor & Mackay's Life and Times of Sir Robert Peel (1851), but the book is not referenced and no source is given. A second source, dating to 1894, is more explicit: the Irish nationalist William J. O'Neill Daunt claimed to have heard from the son of the sultan's personal physician that he "had intended to give £10,000 to the famine-stricken Irish, but was deterred by the English ambassador, Lord Cowley, as Her Majesty, who had only subscribed £1000, would have been annoyed had a foreign sovereign given a larger sum…"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ireland%E2%80%93Turkey_relat...
The 1,000 Pound claim at least can be sourced from this website.
It very much was policy that killed the Irish and not the lack of food. Ireland exported enough food to feed the country four times over -- during the Famine.
I mean we could look at British spending (govt and crown) in the period 1845-52. Or note that Queen Victoria was one of the wealthiest women in the world, and Parliament granted her an annuity of £385,000 per year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_Victoria#Marriage_and_pu...
(Didn't know there were attempts to assassinate her in 1840, 1842, 1849 and 1850. Mostly by English people, btw.)
I honestly have no clue what you're trying to argue here: No one is actually arguing with any of your points, nor did either of us give any indication that we would disagree with them in comments before you came. What you're bringing up is essentially a non-sequitur to what this subthread is actually about.
(We have multiple threads on this, if you want to respond let's pick one to make primary.)
It’s like slipping in an anecdote that she also ate children for breakfast. It’s right to call out incorrect stuff added even if it’s “supporting” the larger argument.
OP does not bring up any additional donations besides the purported attempted donation from the sultan, so I'm not sure why you're bringing that up as some kind of controversial thing: You're literally the first person to mention it here.
As I've said in my other comments, there's plenty of evidence that the British government both did far less than they should have to help with the famine and there's also evidence that they willfully exacerbated it. I fully accept and appreciate that. I have no clue why you're waving that evidence at me as some kind of gotcha when the only thing I'm disputing is this single specific story.
So under all circumstances her behavior wasn't impressive. Ok? I'm suggesting that disputing the anecdote about allegedly pressuring the Sultan to reduce his donation is an unnecessary sidebar to reaching the same conclusion.
With such bad evidence for such an incendiary claim, I think we're better off sticking with the enormous amount of other evidence that policy caused the famine and letting this particular story die.
(What is true and backed up by evidence is that the sultan sent £1k. The rest has no reliable source.)
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ireland%E2%80%93Turkey_relat...
They're (verified) anecdotes showing the British Crown was embarrassed that their own charitable donations to a famine that killed 1 in 8 Irish people, were not that much and could be rivaled or outdonated (Calcutta) by private groups, even groups like the Choctaw who had just survived the Trail of Tears forced displacement/genocide 16 years before. (This is commemorated today by sculptures in Midleton, County Cork, Ireland "Kindred Spirits" and a companion sculpture in Tuskahoma, OK "Choctaw Ireland Monument"). By implication the Crown wasn't at all exercised about changing the setup in Ireland where most of the population were tenant farmers on the 90% of the land was foreign-owned. The landlords made a lot of money on exporting grain (esp. during the Napoleonic Wars until the price crashed). The tenants had essentially zero political representation in Westminster.
Nearly two centuries later, Ireland's population (all-island, Republic + NI) has still not recovered to the pre-Famine peak (1841, 8.175m est.) [3]. Predicted to finally happen sometime in the 2050s.
Curious if anyone has documented the massive imbalance in ownership in land in pre-Famine Ireland and compared it to other historical situations (Russia, colonial Americas, Africa, India, 1930s Ukraine) and their eventual outcomes.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)#Charity
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choctaw_Nation_of_Oklahoma#For...
[2]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-40304645
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_population_of_Irela...
Again, to be clear, this anecdote is not verified. It is extremely poorly sourced, not much more than an urban legend. The only attribution for the story dating to the 19th century is a claim that someone heard it from the sultan's physician's son, and that claim is put forward more than 40 years after the events.
The existence of donations, verified or otherwise, does not independently show that the British government attempted to prevent aid from reaching Ireland because they were embarrassed about how little they had contributed. That is the claim that OP puts forward with their story, that is the claim that I'm responding to. I'm not questioning that others did send donations or that some of those donations exceeded those put forward by the British government.
All of that is true, but it being true does not justify perpetuating unsubstantiated stories that happen to support the same conclusion. As you have amply demonstrated, there's enough good evidence in favor of the conclusion that we don't need to rely on bad evidence.
"They" in my sentence clearly refers to "(or the Choctaw US$170/£111"... or Calcutta 1846 £14,000 donations" - not the Ottoman Sultan's generous donation or the anecdote about being pressured by the Crown to reduce it.
> The existence of donations, verified or otherwise, does not independently show that the British government attempted to prevent aid from reaching Ireland because they were embarrassed about how little they had contributed. That is the claim that OP puts forward with their story, that is to claim that I'm responding to.
But it's also claimed the Sultan's ships had to sail secretly, and north of Dublin to Drogheda, instead of simply unloading in Dublin, which would be faster and infinitely more logical (because the famine areas were in the west/southwest/south, not the northeast). So no, that would be a second piece of corroboration that he had needed to make the donation secretly (Why? Unless he had a fetish for being the Bruce Wayne of the 1840s. It makes no sense unless there was a reason.)
If I ever get a time machine I guess I'm dialing it to Sultan Abdülmecid's and Queen Victoria's residences in 1847 to plant listening devices to settle this for once and all. :)
But either way, even if the Ottomans never existed, the British Crown response was embarrassing, everything else is a sidebar. This all feels like it needs an AI treatment starring Joan Sims as Queen Victoria in one of the British "Carry On" comedies, and Syd James as the Sultan, and Paul Whitehouse ("Ralph and Ted") as token Irish tenant farmer. "Carry On Famine Relief".
Oh, I was interpreting your comment as relevant to mine rather than completely tangential. My mistake, as you were.
Further I showed you an independent piece of corroboration about whether the Sultan had to donate in secret, so it's absolutely not single-sourced to "one anecdote forty lears later by the Sultan's son."
Here's more corroboration by Drogheda people (and former President McAleese) that the Ottoman famine relief ships did in fact land in Drogheda (and inexplicably, not Dublin): https://www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/ireland-remembers-how-19th-c... Since there is zero reason to waste time sailing urgently-needed food aid ships north past Dublin to a smaller port (Drogheda) from which it would take longer to distribute, that raises the obvious question why they did that. Go look at any map of Ireland to verify that, instead of mocking that.
https://books.google.co.id/books?id=GnksAQAAQBAJ&lpg=PR4&hl=...
> He had originally offered £10,000 to the British Relief Association and some ships laden with provisions, but had been advised by British diplomats that British Royal protocol meant that nobody should contribute more than the Queen. It was suggested that he gave half the sum contributed by Victoria.
(The Google book has a lot of footnote 64s at the bottom, but it's impossible to see which corresponds to which chapter or to know if the 64 we're looking for is even there at all.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZIB6MslCAo
OK, I want to talk about Ireland
Specifically I want to talk about the "famine"
About the fact that there never really was one
There was no "famine"
See, Irish people were only allowed to eat potatoes
All of the other food, meat, fish, vegetables
Were shipped out of the country under armed guard
To England while the Irish people starvedThis makes the struggle to keep the Irish language feel like such a vital urge today. Those of you who live in SF be sure to check out the Unite Irish Cultural Center by the zoo.
Reading about the export of so much food while people starve reminds me also of the Holodomor, a famine where farmers grain was stolen from them and exported from the country while children starved in the streets. I have never seen a precentage of the population represented as here, but the estimates are 3M to 7M died from famine in the Ukrainian SSR, and today the population is 40M. And it's not as if nobody knew what was going on, when Stalin's second wife confronted him on his actions causing so much death, she was met with such a verbal assault that she committed suicide [ https://archive.is/xsCpP ]. The greed and lust for power and money to cause the death of millions is not limited to capitalism. I know of many strong connections between Ukrainians and Irish people, and have no doubt that this rhyming history may play into it.
The cause of these famines may be proximally blamed on a shortage of one type of crop, but when food is being exported from adjacent farms, as happened in both An Gorta Mor and the Holodomor, the true cause is not the lack of growing, the cause is the lack of control of the fruits on ones laber. People not being able to control their own land, not having a widespread group of smallholders of land that can benefit from their own work, from not having administrative control by the majority of people. There's a lesson for us who farm digital land; do we own the land or are we sharecropping?
We must fight autocracy in all its forms, lest many of us starve. Those who oppose democracy have killed millions and will do so again if given the chance.
They then take you out to tour the ship.
We lost a real giant.
The British forced Ireland to rely on their overpriced grain, banned direct imports from the U.S. and Europe, and kept tariffs high with the Corn Laws — all while millions starved. That’s not laissez-faire. That’s imperial economic control designed to keep Ireland dependent on politically connected domestic producers.
O’Toole’s omission of this amounts to deception. He’s twisting history to fit a narrative, blaming capitalism while letting British trade restrictions, protectionism, and outright exploitation off the hook.
The Irish Famine was a disaster of Britain's mercantilist policies. Whitewashing that to score political points for his illiberal domestic agenda is an insult to history.
The mercantilist economic policy of the UK was an abject failure that made its people poorer and prevented the import of cheap food.
But the UK’s unwillingness to provide sufficient aid once the famine had already started was motivated by laissez-faire politics and a Malthusian belief that the famine was the Irish’s own fault for overbreeding.
Remember that the government with the support of the Whigs and Radicals actually repealed the Corn Laws, it was just too little too late. Ironically the Whig’s free market beliefs if enacted in policy much earlier might have prevented the famine from happening in the first place, while simultaneously meaning they weren’t interested in properly mitigating it once it did happen.
I personally believe most articles about the famine shy away from the horror of it, and also from a frank discussion.
Going to give some subjective opinion here: people generally downplay the role of the British government and ruling class in it.
Why? One personal theory - growing up in the 80s in Ireland there was a lot of violence in the north. (Most) Irish people who were educated or middle class were worried about basically their kids joining the IRA, and so kind of downplayed the historical beef with the British. That's come through in the culture.
There's also kind of a fight over the historical narrative with the British, maybe including the history establishment, who yes care a lot about historical accuracy, but, also, very subjectively, see the world through a different lens, and often come up through British institutions that view the British empire positively.
It's often easier to say the famine was the blight, rather than political. (They do teach the political angle in schools in Ireland; but I think it's fair to say it's contested or downplayed in the popular understanding, especially in Britain.)
However that article is written by a famous Irish journalist and doesn't shy away from going beyond that.
Perhaps a note of caution - even by Irish standards he'd be left leaning, so would be very politically left by American standards; he's maybe prone to emphasize the angle that the root cause was lassiez-faire economic and political policies. (I'm not saying it wasn't.)
I personally would emphasize more the fact that the government did not care much about the Irish people specifically. The Irish were looked down on as a people; and also viewed as troublesome in the empire.
Some government folks did sympathize, of course, and did try to help.
But I personally do not think the famine would have happened in England, no matter how lassiez-faire the economic policies of the government. A major dimension must be a lack of care for the Irish people, over whom they were governing; and there are instances of people in power being glad to see the Irish being brought low:
"Public works projects achieved little, while Sir Charles Trevelyan, who was in charge of the relief effort, limited government aid on the basis of laissez-faire principles and an evangelical belief that “the judgement of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson”." per the UK parliament website!
It's not an easy thing to come to terms with even today. I recently recorded a video talking about how fast the build out of rail infrastructure was, in the UK, as an analogy for how fast the AI infra build out could be; and I got a little quesy realizing that during the Irish potato famine the UK was spending double digit GDP percent on rail build out. Far sighted, yes, and powering the industrial revolution, but wow, doing that while mass exporting food from the starving country next door, yikes.
The Indian economist Amartya Sen wrote a book in 1999, _Development as Freedom_ which argues, relatively convincingly, that famine's don't happen in functioning democracies among their own citizens. The book makes the observation that famines happened regularly in British colonial India, every few decades, but basically stopped in democratic, self-governing India. (1) And, as far back as the Romans, Egyptians, and Chinese many of the stories told about what good governance looked like involved beating famines- either because they were able to organize shipments of food from unaffected areas or because they stored up enough grain in the good times to survive the crop failures.
It is the general consensus among people who study this sort of thing that, as the United Nations OHCHR wrote in 2023, "Hunger and famine did not arise because there was not enough food to go around; they were caused by political failures, meaning that hunger and famine could only be addressed through political action." (2) Yes, a particular crop failure can be a natural disaster, but a famine happening requires a political failure on top of that (and the research does seem to indicate causation: the political failure is not caused by the crop failure but was pre-existing, and caused the crop failure to turn into a famine).
So, basically, yeah, the general consensus of people who study famines today and in the past is that the British government made choices that turned a crop failure into a famine. The same with the Great Famine of India, the Bengal Famine, the Soviets and the Holdomor, etc.
1: Generally, my understanding is that people who look at this think that Sen was basically correct. There might be a couple of occasions where a democracy failed to govern and suffered a famine, but, the way that democracies distribute power makes it far more unusual for them to fail so catastrophically that they can't deliver food to an area experiencing crop failure. This is one of the reasons that democracies are better than authoritarian governments!
2: https://www.ohchr.org/en/news/2023/03/conflict-and-violence-...
I think it was taught quite well, and people around me while I was growing up didn't downplay it. It's still a significant event in the Irish psyche, especially in the parts of the country most deeply effected at the time.
The things it's, though, it's a fairly distant historical event at this stage, and I don't think it's healthy or helpful to the Irish collective psyche to hold on to it as strongly as we still do - not just the famine but all aspects our being "the oppressed". We're no longer oppressed, we're a privileged and filthy rich country (even if it doesn't feel like that right now, but we have no one to blame for the housing crisis except our own politicians and capitalists).
While we should be mindful of the English tendency to play down and rewrite history, I know many Irish people who are straight up racist towards the English - defended with the tired caveat the "oppressed people can't be racist towards the oppressors". Yes, they can. Maybe it's a less harmful form of racism, but it holds back the psychological development of the person with racist views nonetheless.
In secondary school "Up the Ra" was a common slogan shouted by my classmates. There's still pubs in Dublin and other places around the country where you wouldn't want to go with an English accent.
I'm not saying any of this to defend the English - they did terrible things in history, and those must not be forgotten or rewritten. There's also a fair few English people who are racist towards Irish too, not to mention a lot of "harking back to the glory days of Empire", mostly from older English men whose ancestors were probably peasants back then.
But for us Irish, holding onto this old identity of "the oppressed" is a part of our collective psyche which I struggled with a lot growing up, and it holds back out country. It's time we moved on.
Yes, I know that's hard when a quarter of the geographical landmass of Ireland still belongs to the old oppressors. But that's another thing we need to let go off. The people living in the North voted, several times, to remain in the UK. It's their choice, not ours. If they look like they're leaning to vote differently in the future we can restart the conversation.
The famine was a huge event in our history. Our population still hasn't recovered from it and the mass emigration it triggered still has an impact on our relations with other countries, particularly the US. We shouldn't be (and aren't) consumed by it but it would be madness to forget it. The same goes for our broader struggle for independence, which is literally the origin story of our country.
> Yes, I know that's hard when a quarter of the geographical landmass of Ireland still belongs to the old oppressors. But that's another thing we need to let go off. The people living in the North voted, several times, to remain in the UK. It's their choice, not ours. If they look like they're leaning to vote differently in the future we can restart the conversation.
The Irish position on the North is clear and has been since 1998. We don't lay claim to it so there is nothing to "let go". No one questions the right of the North to choose its own way, but equally we have a relationship and a history with that part of the island that we cannot just ignore.
I'm Irish. I've spent a lot of time in the countryside and the cities. This is not true. It's very rare to find an Irish person who is racist towards the British
> secondary school "Up the Ra" was a common slogan shouted by my classmates.
These days its justa catchy rebel chant. It does not necessarily mean the people chanting it support the IRA
> There's still pubs in Dublin and other places around the country where you wouldn't want to go with an English accent.
No there's not.
I can think of maybe 2 pubs in Dublin you might get an unfrindly welcome. On a bad day.
> But for us Irish, holding onto this old identity of "the oppressed" is a part of our collective psyche
You're really really over stating how prevalent this is
> a quarter of the geographical landmass of Ireland still belongs to the old oppressors. But that's another thing we need to let go off.
We did. Remember the referendum? The one where we collectively voted to remove the territorial claim from our constitution?
Your whole comment is vastly exaggerated.
There's Americans reading. Don't be giving them the wrong ideas, they've enough to be dealing with.
Thanks for making me laugh for a bit before I went back to staring at my screen in disbelief.
Oh come off it. No it's not. Unless you're in deep denial about what constitutes racism.
> Your whole comment is vastly exaggerated.
Maybe we have different lived experiences? We can both be Irish and have very different lives and experiences, small country though it is.
For me, nothing I said is exaggerated. Irish people do hate to state things directly though, and I'm used to be told to be quiet whenever I speak out about our issues.
> There's Americans reading. Don't be giving them the wrong ideas, they've enough to be dealing with.
Ok can't argue with that one.
>> It's very rare to find an Irish person who is racist towards the British >Oh come off it. No it's not. Unless you're in deep denial about what constitutes racism.
The Irish that are racist against the British are, in my experience, the American who have things to say about other groups, ethnicities, religions.
Not uncommon, not prolific, but not the crowd you’d go hang out with either.
If you hike around and see them, it's stunning. They were handmade. The rocks weren't insitu, they were carried in. It's not the pyramids, but in a relatively contemporary time they were made rather than just providing assistance.
Ireland was the prototype for the British empire starving millions to death because they were poor.
>Militant Irish nationalism would follow Jane Wilde in seeing the famine as mass murder and thus as what would later be categorized as a genocide. Under pressure from Irish Americans, this even became an official doctrine in New York, where a state law signed in 1996 by then governor George Pataki required schools to portray the famine “as a human rights violation akin to genocide, slavery and the Holocaust.”
>Pataki announced that “history teaches us the Great Irish Hunger was not the result of a massive failure of the Irish potato crop but rather was the result of a deliberate campaign by the British to deny the Irish people the food they needed to survive.” But this is not what history teaches us. A much more accurate conclusion is the one drawn by the Irish historian Peter Gray, who wrote that there was “not a policy of deliberate genocide” on the part of the British. Instead, Gray argued, the great failure of the British government was ideological—“a dogmatic refusal to recognise that measures intended to ‘encourage industry, [and] to do battle with sloth’ . . . were based on false premises.” The British did not cause the potatoes to rot in the ground. They did launch, by the standards of the mid-nineteenth century, very large-scale efforts to keep people alive, importing grain from America, setting up soup kitchens, and establishing programs of public works to employ those who were starving. But they were blinded by prejudice, ignorance, and a fanatical devotion to two orthodoxies that are very much alive in our own time: their belief that poverty arises from the moral failings of the poor and their faith in the so-called free market. The famine was so devastating because, while the mold was rotting the potatoes, mainstream British opinion was infected with a cognitive blight.
I’m sure that high minded distinction would be appreciated by the barely self-sufficient tenant farmer, banished to the west when his ancestors were ethnically cleansed a few generations past, when he was evicted and left to starve.
This wasn’t capitalism any more than the depredations in India or Africa. It was a colonial state, which existed to extract considerable wealth to build and support a vast empire.
I suppose that this fallacy comes partly from the fear that people guilty of criminal negligence or hateful prejudice would escape punishment. Like that person who mentioned Nuremberg in his response. Well, no of course, that many circumstances are necessary for a genocide to happen beside just the will of the criminals, do not free anyone participating in it from the responsibilities of their actions (or lack thereof).
But I also suspect this is coming from a deeper, darker psychological bias. This belief that there are "villains" behind every crime may just be the necessary belief to justify our own wrong behavior. We do not intend to cause any harm to anyone, yet we let a lot of unjust things happen every day. We walk past some people in need for assistance every day, but we can't help everyone right?, on our way to work in some IT corporation that's also helping build bombs or military IA that's going to be used in yet another unfair war but a good defense industry is necessary right? So in order for this thought to work as justification, we need to believe that, as long as we do not intend to cause harm, then we are in the green.
The machinery we need to prevent the system we all play a small part into from causing such crimes of historical scale is that we should acknowledge and learn about the system. That's not enough to learn history ; in an advanced democratic society we would learn some sociology from middle school.
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43326908
This is the story historians and people of Irish extraction (almost 12% of the US population, including myself) pay more attention to. Lots of people fled during the Famine and found their way to the US.
That's the difference, btw, between your GP comment and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43326908, which I agree was a good post. Your post and that one are taking more or less the same position but one is snarky and lacks information, while the other is snark-free and provides plenty of information.
The British actively exported grains meats and other food leaving the local population to starve.
It was a famine only because they made it one.
I very much doubt it would have been possible to grow sustainable amounts of maize up until recent decades
I think this is what we witness today too, with some massacres and genocides going on. People from those colonizer countries just can't relate to the victims. Maybe deep down they acknowledge that those genocides are good, or at least necessary, because those things are what brings them prosperity they enjoy today.
Further, in the 19th century state capacity was small and massive modern style relief programmes were not possible. Despite this, Britain managed to spend a large degree of GDP on relief. Proportionately more than it did on covid response recently, for example.
The reason people deny british culpability for “genocide” is that there was no “genocide” and britain did what it was able to do, to an unprecedented degree in fact. If anything, we should be proud of britain’s response, especially knowing that it would never get aby kind of gratitude for it.
Some examples of Britain's response:
* Establishing soup kitchens for the starving, where, to acquire food one must renounce your religion, anglicise your name, and abandon your native tongue.
* Provide maize for the starving and destitute but not for free for fear it would generate a sense of self-importance amongst the millions who are dying of hunger
* Maintaining the exportation vast amounts of food to Britain throughout the Great Hunger
* Requiring the starving who couldn't afford to buy food from the British to build pointless walls in order to earn that food
* Forcibly evicting the starving and dying from their homes because they couldn't pay their rent for some reason
* Denying aid to anyone who owned more than a quarter-acre of land, forcing starving farmers to give up their land and become destitute in order to qualify for relief
So, on behalf of all those before me in Ireland; go raibh maith agat.
The Soviets built a similar system a century later in Ukraine, it's product was called the Holodomor.
Canada alone approved over a million applications from Ukraine, numbers that have actually come are more in the 300,000 range.
A certain large country to the north had a policy of destabilizing economic, covert action and direct military action in place to save these nations from the horrors of socialism.
When you build empire, there’s always a pull of your subjects to the center.
Let's not argue semantics here: The fact that latin american countries did not turn into Puerto Rico does not mean the imperialist action was not executed.
Sometimes it spills over. The domination of Chile transitioned from pulling the levers of banking and capital access to a full on CIA sponsored coup, followed by the Pinochet experience. NAFTA was great for the top-line numbers for the US and Canada, but nuked the Mexican agricultural economy. (Repeating what we did within the US)
Critical thinking is a good thing. When you read about people packing up their family and meager belongings to walk through hostile Mexico, to then pay a gangster to smuggle you across the Sonora, so you can work some menial labor job in the US… the question “why?” should come to mind.
Google's automated result on "irish immigration to america during the potato famine" suggests ~1.5 million Irish folks resettled in America during the famine, though the first source I checked[1] claimed ~2M. No automated google result came back for "total latin american immigration to america 2015-2025", but this article[2] claims that the immigrant latin american population was ~2.73M in 2010 and ~3.91M in 2020, an increase of 1.2M people over 12 years. That feels like it could be low, so a second check over on Wikipedia[3] claims that total immigration from "the americas", including Canada, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, etc., totaled ~4.22 M from 2012-2022, the most recently included year. Technically that is more in absolute numbers, if you also stretch the definition of Latin America, I guess?
So, what the heck are you talking about? Can you back those claims up?
1 - https://www.museum.ie/en-IE/Collections-Research/Folklife-Co...
2 - https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/south-american-immig...
3 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_racial_and_ethnic_d...