“...an appalling viewpoint but let’s face it, in many ways it is a viewpoint that many of us share today...”
I appreciate your historical response. Well-written, and thank you.
As far as the viewpoint goes, my disagreement is that a government’s first - and ONLY - fundamental job is to protect it’s citizens.
A famine on the scale that hit the Irish is akin, to my mind, of a Hurricane Katrina magnitude. Except hurricanes eventually end. The famine went on and on.
If the citizenry is starving due to some natural disaster or catastrophe, the government has the obligation and duty to move heaven and hell to find a way to help stop it. Otherwise, what good is government?
“...When the potato crop collapsed the new Whig government couldn’t be seen to intervene and stop exports of other crops from Ireland to feed the starving...”
That’s the EXACT moment they should have intervened. Their own PEOPLE were dying; you take care of your own people first; or you are worthless.
You can compare years of famine caused by your overseers in order to lessen the population to a storm that wasn’t taken seriously enough by a mayor and a governor of Louisiana. George Bush warned the governor at least 3 days ahead of the storm. The president has no authority for city or state evacuations.
I of course agree, there is no point in running a country if you can’t feed the population. The British insisted that Ireland be ruled by them, well then, when the harvest of the basic food crop of that country fails it’s their job to fix the problem.
But of course that’s not how it was seen then by the British, in their narrow-minded world the Irish were a shiftless lazy lot, too useless to feed themselves and dependent on handouts from Mother England all the time.
It never seemed to cross their mind to ask themselves why the Irish were starving in the most infertile land in the west while the bread-basket of the east and south were continually producing vast food surpluses that were being shipped to feed the teeming masses of England’s industrial cities.
That would require examining the history of Ireland and finding out why the mass of the population was impoverished and why a small minority held ownership of all the best land in the country.