Firstly, you start with no credibility when you quote the Irish Famine Committee. I am well aware if that organisation and its founder James Mullen. I have read his articles and his ‘history’. Mullen and the IFC are Irish-Americans sympathetic to the likes of NORAID. They are frankly the type of Irish-American who sees the IRA as justified and the British as akin to the Nazis. Irish-American fanatics, as their unceasing attempts to get the Famine taught as outright genocide akin to the Nazis, Gulags and Armenian genocides. (notably I dont see Mullen and the IFC getting AMERICAN genocide against the Native American on school teaching lists, or is it genocide only when the Limeys do it?.)
I have read their Famine history. And it is a mixture of myth, half-truth and distortion. By all means, quote me very critical history against the British, but do so from a credible academic source. BTW, Peter Duffy is a journalist, not a historian.
Perhaps the state of NJ is not quite as great if it fell for that. A victory not for real history, but for history promoted by biased and bitter fanatics. Thank god, most of America will learn the Famine properly. They may also dislike the British for it, but at least it will be the true history, not simplistic nonsense from men and women who could find Ireland on a map and couldnt name one Irish political leader after De Valera if you put a gun to their head.
‘While estimates vary, the consensus seems to be that around one million men, women and children died as a direct result of British policies, and even more were forced from their homes, all over about five years in a row. That’s not stupidity. That’s state policy.’
Yes, the Famine was shameful. No one here would disagree. BUT the argument is whether it was deliberate. Did the British actually try to murder the Irish?. And the answer is no. They allowed men, women and children to die who need not have died. The British did not react quickly enough, and yes, overall, perhaps they did not do enough. BUT the idea that it was the deliberate attempted murder of millions of Irish is a nonsense.
What people like yourself ignore is that many of the worst acts or mistakes made by Britain were made by local British-Irish politicians. It was the local landlords and gentry who made fatal decisions. The idea that a genocide was ‘run’ from Downing Street and Whitehall is ludicrous.
You ignore, as has been pointed out, that Britain in fact made huge efforts to STOP the famine. Peel, the Prime Minister, bought millions of tons of grain from America and Canada at the nation’s expense, and had it sent to Ireland. Laws were repealed, existing laws loosened. There was a public outcry in Britain at the deaths. If the genocide was deliberate, why do this?. Why try and save the Irish?.
Simple answer: the Famine may have hardly been Britain’s finest hour, but the idea it was deliberate is simply a historical lie.
You ignore, as I said, the fact that the Protestants in Ireland suffered just as badly as the Catholics. If the policy was one of murdering the Irish, why murder the people who made up the majority in the North?. Why murder the very people you transplanted into Ireland just 200 years earlier?. The people who ruled Ireland, worked its lands and factories, populated its army battalions.
If the British policy was one of deliberate murder, then NOT ONE Protestant would have ever died. All Catholics would have been starved to death and the island left solely to Protestants and Jews.
Another reason why the idea of genocide is an utter nonsense and a fairy story.
Take another famine: the 1943 Bengal Famine. Now, that happened under British rule. And it killed and starved millions. So surely it is another case of British murder?. No, because the famine was caused by the Japanese invasion of Asia and by internal shortages. The British reacted as quickly and as well as they could and in fact saved millions of lives. Funnily enough, postwar Indian psuedo-nationalists tried to claim it was deliberate too. Except, like 1845, the evidence does not support such a conspiracy theory.
Why bring up 1943 and Bengal?. Simple, because its shows that on first glance, the human reaction is to see the rulers of a country as culpable, even deliberate murderers of, millions of people. But look at the whole history and you see history is more complex. Those murdering rulers may be wrong, they may have incompetent, even callous, but even callousness does not equal deliberation. Does not equal murder.
‘Irish depopulation fitted in with their agricultural polices, the similar experience of the Highland Clearances,’
Please dont try and argue the Highland Clearances to a Scotsman and one who is a qualified historian at that. If you really knew the HC from the myth, again, much of the suffering and decisions came from landlords. It was they who drove the people off the land. Again, not a policy micromanaged from London. And again, modern Scottish nationalists try to argue its was the ‘English’ who are ar fault for the Clearances, when anyone who actually knows the history knows the misery and suffering was caused by Scots.
‘You seriously want to in any way justify the actions of the British in Ireland during the famine. If you can do that, you can justify anything, because there clearly is no standard for your “justice”, falsely so called.’
Again, I will not and have not justified the Famine. What we are arguing about is the notion that it was a deliberate act, as opposed to a tragedy where Britain made mistakes, could have done more, and yes may have been callous, but was not a deliberate act of murder against a people.
‘I can tell you that no matter what the lawyers and historians decide, the Irish people know to the marrow of their bones that Chesterton was right - England, or at least its rulers at the time, really did try to kill them all. And that implies a great deal of moral latitude for the Irish in terms of their methods of resistance. Any doubts on that score surely must be construed in favor of the Irish and against the British.’
Translation:
The IRA were justified.
You seem like a bright fellow, so I'm having a hard time imagining that you don't know this in your heart.
Your refusal to accept the obvious bespeaks a terrible moral obtuseness. You're really bending over backward to justify actions every bit as hideous as those of the Soviets in the Ukraine in the late 1920s. Actually, those two events were similar in many ways; they were just done under different ideological banners. But the result was the same in kind, if not in appalling number.
The arguments that you're making are much like the arguments the Russians make to Ukrainians. "Sure, six million of you died in forced collectivization, but hey, we didn't mean it! It was an accident!!" Yeah, right. As my Southern friends might say "quit pi$$ing down my neck and telling me it's raining."
And you're doing it for similar reasons. Like the Russians in regard to Ukraine, you find it unpalatable that your country waged centuries of aggressive war on Ireland, and that Irish cause of freedom and national self-determination was and remains just.
While I don't condone all IRA methods, their cause was just, at least most of the time. You need to look into your own heart and cop to that one, man. Peace can only come when we've dealt with the injustices of past. British culpability for the horrors of the Famine is patently true, and it will continue to lie "as a flaming sword" (as Wodham-Smith put it) between Ireland and Britain until this is discussed honestly and publicly.
Stop trying to weasel out of it, dude. Face up to it, and let's all put it behind us.
And one other point you roundly ignore - there have been no famines in Ireland since the British left the South. It's impossible to imagine that the Irish would have allowed the horrors of those years transpire, even without British resources. And the fact is that they didn't. The lesson is clear: No Brits, no famine. No Brits, no murdering thugs kicking in doors and torturing innocents. No Brits, and Ireland is open to the world economically. Get rid of the Brits, and the poorest and most backward country in Europe, Ireland, reaches parity with the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world, Britain, in per capita share of GDP within a couple of generations.
Britain's occupation of Ireland was not only criminal, it was against the interests of both peoples. Why do you resist this?