Posted on 02/04/2010 3:37:09 AM PST by Clive
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BTTT
I think I saw parts of this on U tube. The USSR & Uncle Joe killed 11 million Ukrainian’s in the Holodomore. Not only does it rival the Holocaust, it far out does it in both numbers and terrible efficiency. Mass starvation that lasted only a year yet worked to ruthless perfection.
BTTT
Britain imposed a famine on Ireland quite a bit before 1932.
That is an offensive and completely untrue distortion of historical fact.
The worst that can be said of Britain’s role in the famine is that they badly mishandled the relief effort. The famine itself was triggered by natural causes (the Phytophthora infestans fungus) and excacerbated by Ireland’s unique economic circumstances.
Ireland was an extremely densely populated country, similar to England, but far less industrialised. Unfortunately, people didn’t know what to do to rectify this. Except for a Linen industry based predominantly in the North, Ireland hadn’t really industrialised like the rest of the UK due to a lack of resources (particularly coal) which meant that the Irish economy was predominantly rural and poor, which meant that Irish labourers came to be overly dependent on the cheap and easy to grow potato, which was a disaster waiting to happen should something ever happen to affect the potato crop. This fact was a cause for concern even before the famine. What happened afterwards was not a deliberate act of genocide, but a combination of unavoidable disaster and an incompetent attempt by the British Government to mitigate the crisis, in many ways similar to the US Government’s attempts to deal with the after effect of Hurricane Katrina in 2005...
Were there, or were there not other food products grown on the island.
Did the british through any means cause those foodstuffs to be exported rather than fed to starving Irish?
A happy coincidence, if you will.
Yuck.
Thank goodness for cultural diffusion.
MrEdd, I don’t know if this was intentional or not, but it is a classic example of a technique often used by the left. The subject is Soviet genocide and the discussion is about potatoes.
The other crops tended to be grown for sale to pay rent or for export. The landowners (who were predominantly Irish) wanted their rent same as always, and they wanted it sold for profit, and it was much more profitable to export it than hand it over to feed the starving poor in Ireland.
The prevailing political ideology of Britain in that period was one of lassaiz faire free market economics, and they did not want to interfere with the free market by forcing the Irish Landowners to use their property to feed the distressed people of Ireland. Ironically, this non-interventionist approach would probably gain much ideological sympathy from many members of this board, but as a result, the famine was excerbated because the Government felt it did not have the right to intervene and force people to use their property as welfare for other people...
Noting an incorrect statement in the source article is honest debate, not lefty nonsense.
Hmmm sounds like lib propaganda to me. If that is the case then explain the role of Parliament in passing the notorious Corn Laws??
Suggest buying it to get the full effect. http://www.sovietstory.com/
Related YouTubes:
“The Soviet Story”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqEf2FSbrdY
“The Soviet Story - Why killing is essential to communism”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3uFUxMwA1w&feature=related
“The Soviet Story - trailer (napisy PL)”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cU4Dc5Z8TUw&feature=related
The Soviet Story PL (2008) 8(9)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Wn59A-1RcE&feature=related
Hitler and Stalin admired each other. In fact, had Germany defeated the Soviet Union, Hitler would have installed Stalin as the leader of the Nazi-Puppet Russian state.
While Hitler frequently mocked FDR and Churchill, he never did any such thing with Stalin.
You mean the Corn Laws which were repealed at the beginning of the Famine in 1846, in keeping with the emerging lassaiz faire free market liberal philosophy of the age?
In fact it has been said that Peel repealed the corn laws to save his tail from all the bad propaganda of starving Irish (The famine started in spring-summer of 1845 and was making headlines by 1846). The repeal of the corn laws came too late to save the Irish as they were too cash poor to pay for either the relief supplies or the food that their landlords shipped to Britain.
A cynic could argue that American grain interest (those evil capitalists again!!) wanted the famine so they could make money on those exports to the UK
Gotta love liberals....
Good point. Appreciating your putting things in prejudiced perspective, Byron
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