Irish Holocaust

I'd say that all the Irish that moved to the US because of a potato
shortage have now died and their offspring are too busy making big bucks to be bothered with that aspect of History.


Besides, the big things today are DNA, cell cloning, and technology.

No time for potatoes.

The following course will be taught at Harvard University, this Fall:

HIST E-1572 The Holocaust: History, Representation, and Reaction (12843)

Kevin Madigan, PhD, Professor of the History of Christianity, Harvard Divinity School.
Graduate seminar.

Saturday, Sept. 16, 10 am-12 noon, Sever Hall, Room 303. Fall term.

Please note: this course begins earlier in the term on Sept. 16.

This seminar approaches the Nazi persecution of European Jewry from several disciplinary perspectives. Initially we examine a variety of historical materials dealing with the history of European anti-semitism, German history from Bismarck to the accession of Hitler, the evolution of anti-Jewish persecution in the Third Reich, and the history of the Holocaust itself. Primary sources produced by the German government 1933-1945, by Jewish victims-to-be or survivors (like Victor Klemperer's diaries), documentary films, and secondary interpretations are analyzed. Students then ponder religious and theological reactions to the Holocaust, using literary and cinematic resources as well as discursive theological ones. They consider the historical question of the role played by the Protestant and Catholic churches and theologies in the Holocaust. The course concludes with an assessment of the role played by the Holocaust in today's world, specifically in the United States. Prerequisite: some background in modern European history desirable.

So? I see only references made about the Jewish Holocaust in this class- yet again. Prof Madigan is neglecting millions of non-Jews around the globe who have suffered ethnic cleansing/holocaust. What is your point?

I realize today's youth are only interested in the here and now. The Jewish Holocaust occurred from 1942-3 - some 60+ years ago. How long ago a Holocaust occurs is not what is important. That the Irish Holocaust (the delibrate starvation of millions of Irish by the English) occurred some 160 years ago is still felt as keenly by the Irish as it is the Jews; perhaps because it has been swept under the rug by academia and the media, or delegated as a lesser Holocaust, presumably because if one is Irish, one is worth less than another race. That is the message that the Irish receive.

And yes, we do know who controls the media.

The larger question is - what causes ethnic cleansing? Politics, religion, ignorance, lack of trust, culture, family, language, population growth? All of these? Is it a method of population control?

Miller, you missed the point completely. If you're in college or high school I hope you pay better attention to your instructor.

This thread is not about potatoes. Anyone with 1/2 a brain can see that.

Point: People are labeled anti-Semitic if they speak against Jews.

Point: People are not labeled anti-Russian, German, etc etc if they speak against those races. Why?

Point: People are jailed if they dispute the number of Jews killed in Germany. It is against the law there to question the holocaust. Nice PR going there, I'd say. The Germans must feel occupied and repressed in their own country.

Are they jailed if they dispute the number of Japanese killed? Are Japanese less important?

How about 30 MILLION Chinese? That it was done by Chinese doesn't detract from the tragedy one iota.

Are the people, listed below, less important? Why is it that so few people know the exact number of, say, Chinese killed? But it is common knowledge -because it is in our faces all the time- that supposedly 6 million (according to the Jews) were killed.

Each number represents a human being. Can you even imagine the carnage?

FROM NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC JANUARY 2006:

Germany: 11,400,000
Japan: 10,000,000
USSR: 20,000,000
India: 1,000,000
China: 30,000,000
S. Vietnam: 500,000
Nigeria: 2,000,000
Pakistan: 3,010,000
Cambodia: 1, 700,000
Afghan: 1,800,000


Additionally, for the poster 'Miller' the Irish Famine/Holocaust is very much a part of Ireland's current history. She/he is obviously not Irish and appears to have a small knowledge base. Only the current 'technology and DNA & cloning' have any validity with this person.

********************************************

Blair blames Britain for Irish famine deaths (Tony Blair)

Nicholas Watt, Chief Ireland Correspondent

'Those who governed failed people,' Prime Minister tells 150th commemoration of tragedy.

In the strongest statement by any Prime Minister on the disaster, Mr Blair said that the Government of the time "failed their people" while the famine ravaged Ireland between 1845 and 1850. His statement, read out to a weekend concert in Co Cork marking the 150th anniversary of the tragedy, was hailed last night by John Bruton, the Irish Prime Minister.

Mr Bruton said: "While the statement confronts the past honestly, it does so in a way that heals for the future. The Prime Minister is to be complimented for the thought and care shown in this statement."

Mr Blair's message of reconciliation was read by the Irish actor Gabriel Byrne to more than 15,000 people at the Great Irish Famine Event in Millstreet, Co Cork. In his statement Mr Blair said: "The famine was a defining event in the history of Ireland and of Britain.

"It has left deep scars. That millions of people should have died in what was then part of the richest and most powerful nation in the world is something that still causes pain as we reflect on it today.

"Those who governed in London at the time failed their people through standing by while a crop failure turned into a massive human tragedy. We must not forget such a dreadful event."

************************
Some people think that Ireland has not suffered as much as some other races (who will remain unnamed - we don't want to be labeled anti-you-know-who).

It is presumptuous and insulting to infer than other races are less important than another. It is also dangerous, as we witness the killings in Lebanon that can be labeled ethnic cleansing. Sunni, Moslem and Christian have been killed along with the Shiites indiscriminately, all driven from their homes because they are Lebanese, not Hezbollah.

Those who do not read history are doomed to repeat it.

Its been quite funny reading Pachelbells anglophobic rants leading him into the even hotter water of anti semitism.

Whatever the misdeeds or callous indifference of the British government, there was NO[/i] deliberate attempt to eliminate the Irish from the face of the earth, and any attempt to equate what happened in Ireland during the potato famine with the planned extermination of European Jewry is as misleading as it is offensive.

Whereas it is certainly true that there is no known plan to have exterminated the Irish, it is hard to escape the facts of what happened to them because they were Catholic, and often simply because they were Irish. Cromwell took an entirely different attitude toward the Irish in arms than he did toward the Scots in arms, and he showed indifference to the fate of the Irish as a result of his invasion. He certainly allowed a different standard of discipline among his "Ironsides" among the Irish than he did in either England or Scotland.

Dickens makes racist remarks about the Irish, despite his otherwise universal concern for the lot of the poor and down-trodden in London. Many other authors have deprecated the Irish, and lampooned their speech and their social condition in England--as recently as John Galsworthy in the sixth novel of his Forsyte series, Swan Song. One of our English members at this site made deprecating remarks about the Scots and the Irish just last week, with particular emphasis on his low opinion of the Irish.

Certainly it is ludicrous to compare what happened to the Irish with the concerted attempt at extermination of the Jews which was the object of "the final solution." It cannot be ignored, however, that throughout the history of the relationship of the Irish to the English, and especially after the Protestant Reformation, and continuing to the present day, casual racism toward the Irish coupled with disregard for their condition and the relative justice and meris of their claims have been evident. After the Act of Union with Scotland in 1715, the economic prospects of the Scots improved immensely, although they often had to leave their homeland to realize those benefits. No such opportunity was ever offered to the Irish, and they have only come to prosperity through their own efforts, and in despite of their relationship to England. "To Hell or Connaght" is hardly a slogan consistent with finding a modus vivendi.

I dont disagree with any of that Set. The attitudes of the British ruling elite towards colonial peoples around the empire was nothing short of disgraceful, and Ireland being Britain's first colony, the Irish came pretty near the bottom of the heap. But Pachelbells assertion that the potato famine was a deliberate attempt at extermination of the Irish race is just wrong.

I agree with that. The mythos of the "potato famine" arises from the "radicalization" of the Irish people. The famine in the mid-eighteenth century was far worse than that in the mid-nineteenth century--but by the mid-nineteenth century, the Irish were conditioned as they had not previously been to object to their condition. After all, Ireland produced enough food to feed the population, but the Irish stood at the road side and saw it carted away to be shipped to England, while they starved because the potato had failed. Additionally, many Irish were now in the United States, and were becoming politically active as the Irish had not previously been. Wolfe Tone and the United Irish of 1798 were largely well-educated Irish Protestants with a political greivance, as opposed to starving Catholic peasants with an ethnic greivance. The Fenian Brotherhood in the United States eventually invaded Canada, and created the IRA, which was returned to and took root in Ireland.

The other objection I have to the title of this thread is its sheer illogicality. If as the colonial master, you have a passive and compliant workforce who work on your land for a pittance and live in your tied cottages paying rent to you...why would you want to murder them all? It makes about as much sense as an ancient Roman having to buy more slaves to replace the ones he had just had killed in a fit of pique.

The situation is far more complex than is implied in simply referring to it as a holocaust, and to that extent, i agree that the title is unnecessarily inflamatory. However, there is a religious and an ethnic prejudice which has worked against the Irish which was not present in the relationship of the English to the Scots and the Welsh. Edward I conquered Wales in 1272, and they were effectively a part of England thereafter. However, to that extent, the Welsh were as able to take advantage of economic and public opportunities as were the English among whom they were by then numbered. Ironically, Oliver Cromwell was descended from a Welshman--Morgan ap William--who changed his name to Williams (or had it changed for him, as was the English custom) and then married the sister of Henry VIII's powerful minister Thomas Cromwell, and was canny enough to take the name himself.

The Elizabethan and Jacobite plantations in Ireland and the concomitant land laws worked to the prejudice of the Irish Protestants almost to the same extent as they did in regard to the Irish Catholics. By the time of the civil wars in England, the Irish Protestants were as prepared to rebel as were the Catholics, and the Butler clan--the Marquess of Ormonde--was able to lead a coalition of Protestants and prosperous Catholics. With the defeat of Ormonde in the Cromwellian invasion, however, the worst excesses of the roundheads feel upon the Catholic population, who were largely not in a position to get out of the way, and so many of whom did not speak English as to be readily identifiable. Speakers of the Gaelic were despised, and were automatically (and usually justifiably) taken for Catholics, and therefore the enemies of all mankind. After all, the Royalists who opposed Parliament in the civil wars were overwhelmingly Protestant, even if English Catholics supported the monarchy as well.

As the Irish were pushed more and more onto marginal land, and were still obliged to pay their rents (to landlords who were usually absentee), they devised what was actually a brilliant means of assuring their subsistence. This was the "lazy bed" (so called by contemptuous English land agents because they required so little labor). These were raised beds of peat which were layered with seaweed as a fertilizer. Potatoes grew well in them, and that cultivation method was actually ancient, known in souther England and Scotland as well. But because of the situation in Ireland, in which tenants were often obliged to devote the entirety of their arable land to cash crops to meet the rent, which was also often paid in kind, the kitchen gardens and the lazy beds behind the cottage were the sole means of their subsistence production. The potato blight meant that they were facing starvation, literally, because if they could not meet their rent, they'd be turned out, and the redcoats would knock down their cottages so that they would not creep back in to the only home available to them. The famine in 1760 (?, i believe that is the correct date) was actually much worse, more widespread. But the incidence of absentee landlordism was much less then, and the enmity between Catholic and Protestant not as great, as the old Protestant families actually tried to feed the "peasants." But that famine and the economic depression of the later 18th century (England was at war for much of that century, and although the City often boomed, agriculture was dying all over England, and the Corn Laws assured a grain supply without preventing the abuses of enclosure and absenteeism) put many of those Protestant landlords out of business, and their land, bought for a song, became a cash cow for absentee landlords. So the situation looked a good deal bleaker in the 1840's then it did in the 1760's.

After Cromwell defeated the Scots as Dunbar in 1650, and then the invading Scots army under Charles II in 1651, Scotland became a pawn of England, and economically, languished. Opportunity was still there, though for the Scots, because they were Protestants, even if non-conformist sectarians from an English point of view. The "Glorious Revolution" which turned out James II and made a power of the Whigs of the City in Parliament also saw another invasion of Ireland, with the Anglo-Dutch army of William III. The result was the passage of the Acts of Suppression, which removed the debilities which had made allies of the Irish Protestants and Catholics, and which saw large-scale immigration of a few English and a great many Scots families--while measures against Irish Catholics became stricter. The United Irish of 1798 were the last gasp of the old Protestant families to get a parliament of their own. After the Act of Union in 1715, the Scots had retained their parliament. Although often described as a rubber stamp, and not without justification, that fact meant that there was still opportunity for Scots at home, because the Test Act and the Occasional Conformity Act did not apply in Scotland, and the Scots, almost all of whom were non-conformist sectarians (largely members of the Kirk, and what we would call Presbyterians), were able to take part in the public life of their nation.

The Test Act required that anyone who was to be a member of government must participate in the rites of the estalished church, and espouse the creed. Many non-conformists who were not actually Catholic, were willing to attend divine service, and pay lip service to the Anglican creed for sake of a place in government or the army or navy. The Occasional Conformity Act was devised to prevent this, but it largely failed. Therefore, anyone who was not notoriously Catholic, Quaker or Unitarian, had a good chance of participating in the public life of the nation. Ireland, bereft of a parliament, and with the Test Act and Occasional Conformity Act in full vigor, was denied the ability to provide such opportunities for her sons--only the scions of Protestant families with a long history of conformity had any real opportunity in government, and then it was as a distinct minority in a Parliament who though little of Ireland, and thought ill of it if it thought of it at all.

From the time of John Knox and Mary, Queen of Scots, Scots Catholics and even quite a few Scots Protestants who were not members of the Kirk, had left Scotland to seek their fortunes elsewhere--they took places in business and the military throughout Europe. But after the Act of Union, they were able to find those opportunities at home, or in England or in the colonies. The Irish, after the "flight of the wild geese," were left in much the same situation, but there was to be no Act of Union, no separate parliament, and no such opportunities. So they left, as the Scots once had done, and they left mostly for Catholic nations in Europe. This was not only a loss for Ireland, but it squandered valuable human resources which could have benefited England, as well, had they only known it. The liberator of Chile was Bernardo O'Higgins, whose father Ambrose (Ambrosio) O'Higgins, had left Ireland for Spain to study for the clergy, and then ran away to join the Spanish army. The two core regiments who were brought over by Rochambeau to join the other French troops in America in 1780, and who participated in the seige of Yorktown, were the Irish Regiment, and the Welsh-Irish regiment of the French Royal Army. And, of course, the Irish flooded into Canada and the United States.

Throughout the history of English-Irish relations, the most striking characteristic is the inflexible ethnic and religious prejudice of the English, which were not present in their reltionships with the Welsh and the Scots.

I just now notice that this joker is using "Noraid-dot-com" as a source. That means this thread started in the Twilight Zone, rather than migrating there.

thanks for the essay!

your knowledge of just about any aspect of history never ceases to amaze.

Gotta pack now...wedding in Chambrey (France)

"The philosopher Rousseau spent some of his happiest years in the town during the 1730s, proclaiming; "If there is in the world a little town where one tastes the sweetness of life in pleasant and certain commerce, it is Chambéry.""

Insults are not needed if you really have a solid argument, are they?
While your remarks in most of your posts are correct, you fail to accentuate the delibrate starvation by the Brits. Proof of this is contained in my paste from wikipedia, a source I assume you do not sneer at.

There are many sites about the Irish 'Holocaust'; you should look before you shoot off your mouth.

BTW, to digress a moment ---the word 'holocaust' was not created by the Jews and can be used by any race: Dictionary of Word Origins: ..was translated by William Tindale in 1526....it comes via Old French and Latin from Greek holokauston......and Leitch Ritchie in Wanderings by the Loire 1833 refers to Louis VII making 'a holocaust of thirteen hundred persons in a church". So, as you see, Jews do not own the word and it may be applied to describe mass murderings, starvations and delibrate deprivations of any race.

WIKIPEDIA:

The potato's benefits also led to a dangerous inflexibility in the Irish food system. The majority of food energy was being provided from a single crop. That alone is not unusual, and is still the case today for many subsistence farmers around the world. British penal laws, specifically the Popery Act, forbade Irish Catholics to pass the family landholdings on to a single son. As a result of this law, the practice of subdividing plots among the male children of a family, though diminishing, was still widely practised in the poorer areas of the country. The use of the potato and subdivision produced two interlinked side-effects; with increased food energy the number of surviving male heirs was quickly increasing, while with the prospect of inheriting a landholding, heirs married young and produced large families ?- hence increasing subdivision into smaller estates for their own heirs.

Irish landholdings
The Famine was the product of a number of complex problems which affected nineteenth-century Ireland. One of the most central was the nature of landholdings. From the Norman invasion in 1169 Irish ownership of the land of the island had been in decline. However, the assimilation of the Hiberno-Normans into Irish society rendered this land transfer of less importance by the end of the sixteenth century. Then, under Mary and Elizabeth, plantations of the country were undertaken. These plantations- in Laois, Offaly and Antrim respectively- did not survive. Landholding was, however, fundamentally altered by the Plantation of Ulster and the consequences of the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland.

A practice of consolidation of lands into large estates was widespread in Europe, but, in Ireland, it was complicated by the discriminatory laws applied to all faiths other than the British imposed Church of Ireland, but which most directly affected native Irish Roman Catholics, the religion of the overwhelming majority of Irish people.

Under the Penal Laws, Irish Catholics faced the threat of confiscation of property. While the enforcement of the law fluctuated both in terms of period and geography, and though by the time of the Great Hunger the laws had in any case been repealed, the cultural effect of the discrimination they embodied helped shape Irish attitudes towards land. As a result of all of this, by the time of the Great Hunger most Irish Catholics were restricted to holding small, frequently impoverished tenancies, lacking what came to be known as the 'Three Fs'; fair rent, fixity of tenure, and free sale.

Many Irish were quite angered by this situation, causing a lashing out against the governement by an independent vigilante group known as the Freedom Patrol. Many IRA members have counted this early group as a major influence upon them.

This was further complicated by a cultural tradition known as 'subdivision', whereby lands and property, instead of being inherited by the first-born son (primogeniture) was divided equally among male heirs, both legitimate and on occasion illegitimate. The Penal Laws had decreed subdivision among the conquered Catholic Irish, in the hopes of forcing conversion to Protestantism. In its nineteenth-century landholding form, it meant that, over each generation, the size of a tenant farm was reduced, as it was split between all living sons, though by the 1840s, subdivision was increasingly only found among the poorest people on the smallest farms.

In 1845, for example, 24% of all Irish tenant farms were of 0.4 to 2 hectares (one to five acres) in size, while 40% were of 2 to 6 hectares (five to fifteen acres). This included marshland and bogland that could not be used for food production. As a result, holdings were so small that the only crop that could be grown in sufficient quantities, and which provided sufficient nourishment to feed a family, was potatoes. A British Government report carried out shortly before the Great Hunger noted that the scale of the poverty was such that one third of all small holdings in Ireland were presumed to be unable to support their families, after paying their rent, other than through the earnings of seasonal migrant labour in England and Scotland. 1

As a result, the Irish landholding system in the 1840s was already in serious trouble. Many of the big estates, as a result of earlier agricultural crises, were heavily mortgaged and in financial difficulty. (10% were eventually bankrupted by the Great Hunger). Below that level were mass tenancies, lacking long-term leases, rent control and security of tenure, many of them through subdivision so small that the tenants were struggling to survive in good years, and almost wholly dependent on potatoes because they alone could be grown in sufficient quantity and nutritional value on the land left to native ownership, while many tons of cattle and other foodstuffs from estates were exported by absentee British landlords to foreign markets. Furthermore, efforts of tenants to increase the productivity of their land were actively discouraged by the threat that any increase in land value would lead to a disproportionately high resulting increase in rents, possibly leading to their eviction.

In a final disastrous twist, local relief was paid for through the Poor Law Union, which was funded by rates (local taxes) paid by landlords, on the basis of an estate's tenant numbers. This produced the perverse farce of increasing local reliance on the poor law leading landlords to evict impoverished tenants in order to control their rapidly rising rates bills, only to see those evictees, now reliant on the Poor Law Union pushing up rate bills further, leading to more evictions. But if they kept on tenants unable to pay rents, they then might be unable to meet their rates bill (many estates were already in financial trouble), meaning the Poor Law would not be able to offer local relief, leading to more starvation. 5 Only central funding of Poor Law Unions from the exchequer could solve this conundrum, but Russell's government was opposed to this. Some landlords, to avoid ex-tenants relying on the Poor Law, provided passage to other countries, on what became known as coffin ships. Many emigrants, already weak, some with cholera, died during the passage to North America.
Ireland experienced a massive number of evictions for financial reasons, and infamously to 'clear' their lands to allow cattle grazing (see Ballinglass Incident), similar to the Highland Clearances, which were happening in Scotland around the same time. Some evicted reluctantly because of their climbing rates bills, others with notorious brutality to take advantage from the Famine. 90,000 people were evicted in 1849 alone.....END QUOTE

Whether it's from wikipedia or irishholocaust.org, here is the proof, again, that the English DELIBRATELY starved out the Irish to clear their lands for cattle grazing. But the Brits had not been known for being charitable or kind to those they had conquered.

Whether you have the internal fortitude to stomach the truth is up to you. It doesn't change the facts.

The English didn't have to starve anyone to save themselves. The English were not reliant upon the potato, and the potato blight did not threaten their food supply. By 1840, the English were long past the time in which they produced themselves the food they needed to survive. They routinely imported grain from a variety of sources, and not simply Ireland. The famine in Ireland resulted from the dependence of the Irish upon the potato.

Although i find Wikipedia a good fact-checker when i already know the subject but want to find dates or spellings of names, i don't consider it an authoritative source. It's a good place to start. As for Noraid.com or Irishholocaust.com--sources with an obvious axe to grind fail the test of cui bono, and can't be relied upon to provide unbiased and well-vetted information.

As for having enough guts for the truth--i'm of Irish descent. My mother was descended from the Irish, because her mother and father were, descended from the Irish, because, etc. My father was descended from the Irish, because his mother and father were descended from the Irish, because, etc. Of my eight greatgrandparents, seven were of Irish descent (meaning both parents) or they were born in Ireland--the eighth was Scots, and she married an Irishman in County Cork. I've known about this and carefully read about for more than forty years--for nearly fifty years. That's longer, i suspect, than you've been alive.

Frankly, i doubt if you'd know the facts if they snuck up and bit you in your rosey red ass.

Really? The English didn't have to starve anyone to save themselves?

from www.historyplace.com

After the Famine

Hunger continued to be a problem for Ireland in the years after the Famine. The poor still lived as tenants-at-will, subject to the whim of the landlord. Any improvements they made to the land still became the property of the landlord upon eviction.

Making matters worse, the Encumbered Estates Act of 1849 allowed estates in severe debt to be auctioned off upon petition of creditors or even at the request of bankrupt landlords. Land values tumbled as hundreds of estates with huge debts were auctioned off at bargain prices to British speculators interested solely in making a future profit. These new owners took a harsh view toward the penniless Irish tenant farmers still living on the land. They immediately raised rents and also conducted mass evictions to clear out the estates in order to create large cattle-grazing farms. Between 1849 and 1854 nearly 50,000 families were evicted.END QUOTE

If you can read and comprehend what you read you should be able to see that my statement about the English starving the Irish is backed up in not only wikipedia (which you like only when it supports YOUR views) but historyplace and also www.answers.com - who has articles on cattle grazing displacing the Irish. Displacing meant starving for millions of Irish. The ones who didn't die in Ireland perished on the coffin ships.

You must be from Northern Ireland. No true Irish would defend what the English did during and after the Famine.

I have an Irish passport because my grandfather was born in Ireland, as was his father, and so on. My people are from the Republic and never did like the bloody orangeman.

Shame on you for defending the English.
Teigh trasna ort fein.

Go figure that one out, if you can.