to put it into perspective:
During the war, few people knew the extent of Hitler’s atrocities, but the Irish people still remembered the potato famine that some claim killed half the population.
No the Brits didn’t start the potato famine: but they did export local wheat and grain during the famine, and they allowed landlords to destroy the homes of those who couldn’t pay the rent.
As one Irishman lamented: If only they had been kind...
But they weren’t, because they were influenced by Malthus.
Well put. Add the fact that Irish soldiers were poured into the front lines during the first World War, and you’ve got a pretty good reason to fight on Germany’s side in the next war. But the Irish still attempted to remain neutral, probably because of pressure from their U. S. relatives who made up the largest immigrant contingent of American forces.
As late as 1916 the British navy pounded Dublin with naval gun fire killing 10’s of thousands of innocent Irish to punish them for the nerve of not wanting to remain their slaves. The British kept the Irish in slavery for hundreds of years. The Irish owe Britain nothing except contempt at best. The British were some of the biggest no good bastards in modern history. They invented the concentration camp in South Africa. They committed genocide in Africa and East Asia. Murder, slaving, and looting are what characterized the British Empire. All else is just propaganda. The best thing that has happened to the Western world in centuries is when millions of young English were killed in WWI and they lost their manhood. Americans knew this well until JP Morgan teamed up with the Bank of England right before WWI and suppressed dissent violently and wrote all of the British misdeeds out of American history books however the Irish have not forgotten since so much of the British evil was shoved down their throat. There is every reason to see what those several thousand Irish soldiers as consorting with the enemy.