George Washington named Britain's greatest ever foe

The Telegraph ^ | 14 Apr 2012 | Jasper Copping

[Gluteus Maximus]

I am aware that Protestants suffered in the famine. What you’re missing here is that the Famine was inflicted by the ruling class of Britain. They didn’t have any love for Protestant Ulstermen. In fact, the loyalty of NI Protestants has changed several times over the centuries. That said, there is no doubt that the ruling elites of the British Empire saw the famine as an opportunity to rid themselves of the Irish and their many problems once and for all. See “The Great Hunger” by Cecil Wodham Smith. She shied away from the descriptive “genocide” but by today’s standards what Britain did in Ireland 1847-1850 clearly constituted genocide.

[the scotsman]

No it did not.

Genocide is deliberate. The Irish Famine was characterised by British arrogance and incompetence, but as Vanders and Winnie pointed out, Britain made great efforts from 1846 onwards to alleviate the suffering. Buying huge stocks of American grain for example. Passing laws. Revoking restrictions on existing laws.

I know my Famine history thanks, I AM a qualified historian.

[dfwgator]

Before it’s all over, Barack Obama may very well wind up taking George’s place on that list.

[Bellflower]

Before it’s all over, Barack Obama may very well wind up taking George’s place on that list.

If push ever comes to shove in this Country, do you think that we will be able to fight an honorable war against such a vast war machine? Or would an "honorable war" mean that we would be simply smooshed like bugs, and all that we believe to be good with us? Is there a moral argument for a dishonorable war if that which is almost pure evil and extremely powerful is being fought by a small group who are very under armed?

[Gluteus Maximus]

Many historians would disagree with you. As does the great State of New Jersey. From Wikipedia:

"In 1996, Francis A. Boyle, a law professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, wrote a report commissioned by the New York-based Irish Famine/Genocide Committee, which concluded that the British government deliberately pursued a race and ethnicity-based policy aimed at destroying the group commonly known as the Irish people and that the policy of mass starvation amounted to genocide per the Hague convention of 1948.[fn 11] On the strength of Boyle's report, the U.S. state of New Jersey included the famine in the "Holocaust and Genocide Curriculum" at the secondary tier.[fn 12]

Historian Peter Duffy writes that "The government's crime, which deserves to blacken its name forever ..." was rooted "in the effort to regenerate Ireland" through "landlord-engineered replacement of tillage plots with grazing lands" that "took precedence over the obligation to provide food ... for its starving citizens. It is little wonder that the policy looked to many people like genocide."[139]

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.

There comes a point where human stupidity isn't an explanation. We are, after all, talking about the most advanced society in the world at the time that for five years in a row watched with malevolent eye the slow starvation of countless numbers of their "subjects." Given the sneering contempt in which the Imperial elites held the Irish, and the way Irish depopulation fitted in with their agricultural polices, the similar experience of the Highland Clearances, and the way it came essentially on the heels of Repeal, it's simply not reasonable to see the Famine as anything but genocide.

And really, trying to hide behind insufficient intent doesn't even pass the laugh test as far as I'm concerned. I am an attorney, and I can tell you that in any court of law the British Empire would have a very hard time proving lack of specific intent to kill, under the circumstances. One is presumed to intend the consequences of one's actions, especially when the same result pertains repeatedly over time. Given the number of deaths and displaced over the time frame involved, the resources available to the British elites, their tepid response, and the sneering animus against the Irish that was shot through the record, any jury would laugh them out of court.

In fact, the international court of public opinion laughed them down when they had the gall to reproach the Ottomans with their Bulgarian atrocities with reference to their unspeakable crimes in Ireland. I mean, really, give me a break, man. 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.

G. K. Chesterton said as much - with the Irish compared to a fellow stuck in a train coach car with another fellow who just tried to kill him.

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.

[Gluteus Maximus]

I am aware of the various bloodlines that make up the population of Ireland. But that has little to do with the ethnic identities that emerged from all of that into modern times. I mean, do any of you seriously think that the Welsh-Normans, Olde English and Gallowglasses, much less ancient Celtic cattle raids, have much to do with the modern ethnic identity that makes up the great majority of the Irish Republic and a large minority of NI? Such blather. Are you guys sure you're not Irish? This all sounds like some nonsense I'd hear at a wake when I was a kid - after a few bottles of Jameson.

The simple fact is that there are two major ethnic identities in Ireland now, with a couple of smaller ones. We know what they are. You're simply obfuscating the real issue, which is that a large majority of the Island as a whole shares a single ethic identity (with a few regional differences) and they mostly dream of sharing a polity. The significant minority, British, identity is concentrated mostly in NI, and they are violently opposed to sharing a polity with the other ethnicity.

What's so hard about all of that? Why on earth are you talking about Vikings?

[the scotsman]

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.

[the scotsman]

You have missed my point.

Yes, it does have relevance, as such history should always be a guard against the calcification of national and cultural identity into rigid identities, identities which seek a religious, cultural or nationalistic purity. Think I am exaggerating?. Remember that modern Catholic Irish identity comes a great deal from narrowminded men like O’ Donnell, who saw Irishness and Irish identity PURELY in terms of Catholicism. That leads to the idea that the Protestants in Ireland cannot ever ‘really’ be Irish, even after 405 years.....

It is a noxious idea at best and a dangerous one at worst.

My point was that the ‘native’ Irish are the descendants of men and women who oppressed, subjugated and conquered. When talk in our times of oppression leads to the car bomb, the Armalite and decades of terrorism, decades of killing, suffering and heartache, then its is recumbant upon us to use that history to topple those who would sit on their ivory nationalistic tower and press buttons to set off car bombs from it.

[Gluteus Maximus]

I'm sure that the genes of whomever the Celts, Vikings, Norman-Welsh etc. conquered still predominate among the Irish. These are cultural transformations; they are not primarily a matter of blood, as it were. Actually, I read recently that about 75% of the ancestors of the English are the pre-Celtic, late-stone-age inhabitants. The waves of conquerors left their mark, to be sure, but they didn't supplant the original gene pool. They did, however, establish a new ethnic identity.

My point is that as things now stand, the ethnic identities "British" and "Irish" are mutually exclusive. One cannot be both, at least in the mind of the (I would think rather large) majority of the Island's inhabitants. Maybe that's a good thing, maybe it's a bad thing, maybe it's neither, and maybe it'll change. I'm just saying that's the way it is now.

[Gluteus Maximus]

There is an axiom in tort law called "res ipsa loquitur" meaning roughly "the thing speaks for itself." You can't have millions starved and displaced in your own country over a period of years with resources to prevent it and avoid an imputation of intent, anymore than you can claim to own a piano that fell on another man's head and deny liability. The thing really does speak for itself.

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.

[Gluteus Maximus]

As to the starvation in Bengal, this happened far, far from the British homeland in a difficult time. While the British deserve much of the blame for those horrors for the simple reason that they were occupying a foreign country and had no business being there in the first instance, other mitigating factors may have applied. But this wasn't true of Ireland in 1847-1851 or thereabouts. Ireland was politically as much the British homeland as, say, Lancashire.

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?

[Winniesboy]

I note that your repeated, evidence-free assertions of British intent have nothing to say about phytophthora infestans. I take it you believe that the British authorities were engaged in biological warfare, their agent an organism whose effects had been first observed - in the U.S., as it happens - less than a decade before the outbreak in Ireland. Those early Victorians must have been even cleverer than we thought...

[Vanders9]

Ireland may have been politically tied to the UK, but there are lots of economic and particularly infrastructural considerations that certainly mitigated. Ireland was then (and to surprisingly large extent still is) a very rural country. It lagged behind the rest of the UK in the development of rail and road links, and communications generally. This made it difficult to move goods around, which in turn meant the economy remained far more based on agriculture, which in turn made it more vulnerable to the collapse of agriculture. Also, poor commununications made it difficult to get assistance to where it was needed quickly. A similar situation exists in famine ridden parts of Africa to this day. There is no shortage of food in the world. The problem is getting it to the people who need it.

There have been no famines as bad as the great one since the British left the south, but to link the two events is logically bizarre, because you have not established a causal link. I might equally say that I owned a cat for the last five years, during which time I didnt get a pay rise. But I got a pay rise last week, and the cat died on new years eve. Therefore cats are bad for my financial well being.

Ditto Brits are "murdering thugs kicking in doors and torturing innocents". You can say such things, but it doesnt make them true. Ditto Britain's "occupation" of Ireland was criminal. Why was it an occupation? You have to offer some kind of proof.

Ireland's overheated its economy. It's not looking so good now.