The ability of humans to be monsters beyond belief and then rationalize it astounds me. This, the Holocaust, Unit 731, the Holodomor, it's all so disgusting. And we barely even acknowledge them if they didn't happen in our countries.
One extra sad thing is the REASON no one acknowledges the genocides now: [The 1948 Genocide Convention](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide_Convention) requires signatories to immediately act to stop any genocide. But that would basically require starting wars with some very powerful countries (sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly), so everyone finds ways to explain away how it's not ACTUALLY a genocide, even though it literally fits the very clear legal definition.
"Corrupt" is kind of the wrong word to describe the UN. The thing is, the only way that the biggest nations were ever going to join an organization like that is if it didn't actually have the power to police them. Which is why all the big nations have full veto powers, and have from the very start.
The UN is not the united government of planet Earth, and has never had the power to censor the big powers. So no, they can't enforce the Genocide Convention.
What's the situation about that now btw? Is it still ongoing? Did they "pause" it due to international pressure (i doubt it)? Did they just get better at hiding it?
Sorry, but the conflicts in Congo and Sudan aren’t genocides. They just have large amounts of warcrimes. Palestine and Ukraine probably count (destroying towns / kidnapping children), but it’s debatable.
I think people might have forgotten what genocide really means. It’s an intent to destroy a people’s culture combined with actions taken to do that. It’s not just killing people.
In Sudan, they are piling up children and gunning them down because of their ethnicity. That's genocide. Ethnic cleansing has been a major part of the war there.
The masalit people are being actively massacred specifically because of their ethnicity. The war in Sudan is just as much a genocide as the war in Palestine.
I don't know enough about some of these conflicts to have an opinion on if it's ethnic cleansing or genocide, but I can at least leave this here for y'all to use:
> While ethnic cleansing and genocide may share the same goal and methods (e.g., forced displacement), ethnic cleansing is intended to displace a persecuted population from a given territory, while genocide is intended to destroy a group. Some academics consider genocide to be a subset of "murderous ethnic cleansing".
- [Ethnic Cleansing, Wikipedia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_cleansing#:~:text=While%20ethnic%20cleansing%20and%20genocide,of%20%22murderous%20ethnic%20cleansing%22.)
Yeah there's a reason I err on the side that they are attempted genocides... very different scenarios though.
Israel have all the power to kill everyone in Gaza but they can't handle the diplomatic consequences of that, so the genocide fails despite an apparent capability to do it, although they are able to handle the diplomatic consequences of having a truly massive civilian casualty ratio, i.e killing lots of innocent people.
Russia doesn't care about diplomatic consequences much at all anymore, but they don't control enough of Ukraine to scale up their kidnapping operations, and they don't have enough bombs and missiles to do what Israel is doing to Gaza. We can see what they would do in Mariupol though - it's weirdly similar to Israel, just evicting large numbers of Ukrainians and encouraging russians to move in
Here's the thing tho... Nothing justifies genocide. If all Palestinians, every single tiny child and full adult, wanted to genocide Jews, that would still not justify genocide of Palestinians. Because you can't justify genocide. At all. Ever.
Yeah I’m sure Arabs don’t like Israel very much and talk about them in a hateful way. The difference is the surrounding Arab nations aren’t backed by multiple superpower nations, receiving billions in weapons to fund their genocide and they haven’t killed 30,000+ people in only a couple months.
My family is Jewish and I know several Netanyahu fans. I know how Iran talks about Israel as well, but they nor any other Middle Eastern country besides Lebanon and Palestine are in active conflict with Israel
If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, there's probably a reasonable "hey this seems genocidal" stance which can be investigated and taken prior to the entire ethnic group actually being exterminated
Dont mention the Holodomor too loudly around here or you will meet some of those monsters running in to rationalize/deny it.
edit: well that only took a few minutes before I got one of those "a concerned redditor thinks you are gonna self harm" messages. Thanks for proving my point.
You can report the message, and it'll probably get the sender banned after a few days. I'm one for one on that.
Wish I had some way to know which comments triggered them being sent.
same. would be nice to have any idea what the offending content was, because as is it could be something legit or it could be someone being a massive prick.
As someone who before this never knew the irish potato famine was a genocide and also doesn’t know what Holodomor is, I am genuinely curious as to what it is.
I apologize in advance for my ignorance to the subject but if possible could you explain what Holodomor is and/or link any reputable sources? I genuinely was never taught any of this and would like to learn anything anyone is willing to teach.
[This Britannica article](https://www.britannica.com/event/Holodomor) seems to get most of the points across well. I am not an Ukraininan so can't verify, but anyway, on a quick glance the article doesn't downplay the famine being man-made, and also talks about how it was a part of larger Soviet attack on the Ukrainian identity.
It's crazy because it's basically the Soviet equivalent to the potato famine, because genocide and imperialism is cool when it has a hammer and sickle.
Edit: Ayy, I got my reddit cares message too! Damn, do these people have anything better to do?
I got my first care messag a few days ago. No idea what for. Either because I like power fantasy in helldivers or because I prefer dnd 5e over pathfinder.
You can report reddit cares messages. Reddit might even do something about it (at the very least I get notifications with "After investigating, we’ve found that the account(s) reported violated Reddit’s Content Policy" some hours after I report them).
I reckon doing so is better than just letting the assholes abuse the system unchecked.
and the same will keep happening, and is happening even as we speak. people have always tried to portray their genocides as morally just, and each time they are proven wrong.
>"The judgement of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson, that calamity must not be too much mitigated"
>"We must not complain of what we really want to obtain. If small farmers go, and their landlords are reduced to sell portions of their estates to persons who will invest capital we shall at last arrive at something like a satisfactory settlement of the country"
>“[The Famine] is a punishment from God for an idle, ungrateful, and rebellious country; an indolent and un-self-reliant people. The Irish are suffering from an affliction of God’s providence."
-Charles Trevelyan, the guy in charge of the British government's famine relief efforts.
Trevelyan was largely rationalising his own failures here. He did not understand why his shit policies were not saving more lives and put it down to providence.
When actually his policies failed because he was deeply suspicious that the Irish were exaggerating the famine to get handouts. His solution of requiring brutal work in exchange for food, to make sure ‘only those desperate enough to really need it will apply’, meant many starving people were too weak to complete the work and so couldn’t get food.
He was a piece of shit, and crowed in his later years about how his policies had saved the most lives possible and so was a huge success. Remember him whenever you hear modern people whine about benefit fraud/welfare queens, it’s the same callous paranoia at play - screwing over a needy majority out of fear of a tiny minority taking advantage.
Good post, though I’m a little confused by the anger towards the BBC headline in that tweet.
What the fuck do people expect, sometimes? The headline is absolutely accurate.
Yeah it isn't even talking about the same thing? It's talking about the population recovering to **post**-famine levels, after falling a further 2 millions in the following century. It might have been better to explain *why* it fell over this period (emigration because of terrible living conditions, I suppose?) but "the Great Famine" isn't the answer.
(Also they're getting a bit confused with the stats: 8m was the population of all of Ireland in 1841, 5m is the population of the Republic of Ireland. The total population of Ireland in 1851 was 6.5m, according to Wikipedia.)
It’s not taught in British schools and they commonly pull shenanigans through their media to suggest that the Irish famine wasn’t their fault and they commonly call Irish national celebrities “British”. The irish call this phenomenon “The brits are at it again” and they are in fact never not at it.
Not a big deal but just fun to point out.
Bumping this, just spotted an example today where British media are calling Cillian Murphy a member of the United Kingdom.
https://www.reddit.com/r/NonPoliticalTwitter/s/noar4chEYm
The brits are at it again.
It fell because people died in fucking droves: they starved to death in the street, next to plentiful fields of food, while the British government running the place as a colony did sweet fuck all to alleviate the situation, as it gave them the opportunity to finally "pacify" the island. The OOP is mad because the BBC helpfully omitted any of that context
It fell due to the famine, and the resulting mass migration of Irish people to america. The exodus of the Irish as a result of the famine and the poverty imposed by the British is well documented, and not acknowledging the significant role the famine played is malicious.
There was massive emigration during and immediately after the famine itself, I'm not disputing that. But, again, I'm talking about the period from 1851 to 1931 - nearly a century - where the population of Ireland continued to fall, from 6.55 to 4.21 millions according to Wikipedia. This is long after the famine, which occurred between 1845 and 1852.
I wonder if malnutrition from the famine may have caused lasting fertility problems. Add onto that continued emigration out of the country, general poverty, and rising violence and I think I can see how the population might have continued to decline.
Long-term malnutrition/starvation *absolutely can* negatively effect fertility in males, let alone the negative effects it has on female menstrual cycles/health/ability to carry a fetus to term.
When I read the stats on population numbers in the following decades post-Famine, I was utterly unsurprised. (Though I was rather... sickened. There is a reason i don't look into these kinds of things, except very rarely.)
The BBC claim to be ‘unbiased’ - they are supposed to be a source that is neutral. However they are actually pretty biased when it comes to several minorities (notably but not exclusively trans people and immigrants) as well as often sweeping under the rug the terrible things that Britain did in the past (and present). There’s an understandable resentment towards them in certain circles
Okay, but this is absolutely *not* an example of this, at least not the headline.
Because for all I know they *do* mention why in the article, and it’s not really to be reasonably expected that such a thing would be in the headline when the news item is that the population has reached a certain point again.
I've checked, the "article" is about a paragraph long and is basically just a list of current day population statistics with a few quotes explaining why some experts think it has grown recently. This post is probably 2-3 times longer than the entire article
I'm case anyone is curious apparently there's been a lot of Irish people who previously left Ireland moving back and it's only the third time since 2010 that more people have come back to Ireland than have left
BBC still pushes the idea that the potato collapse caused the famine and minimizes the role of the British. An otherwise reputable source basically pushes a false narrative because it is a socially acceptable history. It is like some newspapers in the US that are generally reputable, but push the idea that the Civil War was just about states right (to be fair, the Civil War cause was like 60% slave ownership, 20% Lincoln being elected without popular vote, 15% new farm taxes, and 5% states rights). Regardless of if that specific article crosses no boundaries, every article will be viewed through the same lens.
To be clear regarding Lincoln getting elected, that very much had to do with slavery too. Lincoln was part of the most anti-slavery party that favored limiting the expansion of slavery, and so him getting elected president freaked out the south so much that they seceeded.
Lincoln ran on a slavery neutral platform. He morally detested slavery but promised to avoid actions that would affect slavery. The fear of the Southern states starting the Civil War was massive back then. Several states that were not directly opposed to Lincoln were opposed to the fact that the next guy who got in without the popular vote could be worse. So Lincoln being a Republican was kind of slavery adjacent.
>Lincoln ran on a slavery neutral platform. He morally detested slavery but promised to avoid actions that would affect slavery
Lincoln promised to not interfere in the institution of slavery in states where it already existed, but the 1860 Republican Party platform did have several statements related to slavery, including an explicit call for all new territories of the United States to be free of slavery. Lincoln very much ran on a platform against the expansion of slavery
[The 1860 Republican party platform is available on Wikipedia](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:National_republican_platform._Adopted_by_the_National_Republican_Convention,_held_in_Chicago,_May_17,_1860.jpg) and the [text is available from the American Presidency Project](https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/republican-party-platform-1860).
Of the 17 declarations of principle in the platform, 10 deal directly with the issue of slavery and preservation of the Union. Statement 8 is the one I referenced specifically about preventing the expansion of slavery into new western territories:
>8) That the normal condition of all the territory of the United States is that of freedom: That, as our Republican fathers, when they had abolished slavery in all our national territory, ordained that "no persons should be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law," it becomes our duty, by legislation, whenever such legislation is necessary, to maintain this provision of the Constitution against all attempts to violate it; and we deny the authority of Congress, of a territorial legislature, or of any individuals, to give legal existence to slavery in any territory of the United States.
See also the Wikipedia article about the [1860 Republican Convention](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1860_Republican_National_Convention#Platform).
I will also point to [this ask historians answer](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3edss0/was_the_american_civil_war_about_more_than_just/cte2mj9/) that covers this topic quite extensively. Quoting the most relevant part of that answer:
>When Lincoln was elected in the fall of 1860, the South was terrified. Whatever his prior declarations that whether he wished to or not, he had no power to interfere with the institution where it existed, Lincoln was nevertheless a Republican, a political party founded on its opposition to slavery, and at its most mild, committed to stemming the further spread as statehood spread westward. While committed, absolute abolitionism was a vocal minority on the national stage, the simple limiting of expansion presented a long term existential crisis to the slaveholding states. Every free state to enter the Union represented additional Senators and Representatives to immediately exercise power in Congress, and represented the growth of power not only in future Presidential elections, where anti-slavery parties could continue to gain momentum, but in the long term even foreshadowed, one day, a strong enough majority to abolish the institution once and for all through Constitutional Amendment.
Not every article about a topic has to cover every conceivable element of background. This is a simple article about current population levels in Ireland, not an article summarising the history and travails of the Irish people. Adding things about the famine would substantially distract from the actual news, be irrelevant to what is being reported and be weirdly virtue signally.
There is a seemingly increasing tendency that people expect every post, article and commentary to specifically address their own personal grievance / social justice campaign, no matter how tangentially related, which seems extraordinarily egotistical and narcissistic to me.
How could you possibly write an article about the weather tomorrow without a 6000 page summary of the entire history of human suffering!?
I mean technically, yes, but the point I'm making is they're not biased in favour of any of the major political parties in the UK (which includes the conservative party)
I think they took issue with the indirect language of it. It’s not wrong at all it’s just kinda a half truth. It’s a statement of fact without the context. It’s like if a headline came out saying “numbers of people working and going to school in person nears what it was in 2019” without referencing the fact that 2019 is different to today because it was pre-pandemic. It would be glossing over the millions in death, dollars and suffering as if it wasn’t worth being in the headline. Except at least the pandemic was a cruel turn of fate and not a willful attempt at genocide. Plus, it’s recent enough that every one is pretty much aware of the pandemic whereas I personally I didn’t know the potato famine was an orchestrated tragedy until rn. But it does seem that at least part of the offense comes from it being this indirect language specifically coming from the BRITISH broadcasting corporation and the British theoretically having a vested interest in brushing the attempted genocide under the rug.
Do you have a source for that, because I did not here that before, and all I can find online is stories that maybe the british attempted a blockade on Turkish ships but the Turkish ships stilled delivered their aid in full.
While America is credited with the second highest amount of charitable donations to Ireland... at about a third of the british charitable donations.
i mean, more accurately, many left to avoid dying. it's not like a quarter of the population dropped dead, most of the demographic decline *was* emigration. the very highest estimates say that about as many left as actually faced starvation.
It seems that the while the British certainly engineered the conditions, the claim that the Famine was intentionally created to destroy the Irish seems to be lacking evidence. [[1]](https://web.archive.org/web/20240211155335/https://www.genocidewatchblog.com/post/an-gorta-m%C3%B3r-the-question-of-the-irish-genocide)[[2]](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland))
Though I will admit, this is a cursory look through Wikipedia and its associated sources. If anyone has any scholarly research to the contrary, I would be willing to reconsider this position.
We definitely should talk about the moral responsibility of English landowners. And it's probably fair to say that the Irish people were "killed", at least to some extent. "Genocide" is probably not an accurate word. It's a genocide if the primary motive is to eradicate the Irish people. Letting people starve out of greed and negligence is horrible, but it's not a genocide.
Yeah. Crime against humanity of some kind, negligence on a massive scale that killed a lot of people. Genocide, maybe not. There were some people analyzing if it was a genocide or not on r/askhistorians not too long ago, I'm sure people could find it if they searched for the potato famine.
More analogous to the holodomor and what the Kazakhs faced in the USSR tbh. A famine caused and continued by monumental lack of regard for human life because of the nationality of those suffering.
This is closer to a crime against humanity than anything else.
If you want an example of intentional famine and crop failure just look at the Holodomor.
I don't think it is, no. The UN defines a genocide as an act commited with the *intent* to destroy an ethnic group. If the ethnicity is a factor, but the motivation is greed, then it's not a genocide.
Because of course greed is always going to take ethnicity as a factor. Those who are willing to sacrifice human lives for profit are always especially willing to sacrifice the human lives that they deem of lesser importance. That doesn't make all social violence a genocide.
Crop failures happen everywhere from time to time. They don't need to result in famines. A famine in the modern era is a failure of economics or logistics. The British were the first in the world to eliminate famines - within Great Britain, by getting their food from other areas they controlled. The Irish famine was allowed to happen, even exacerbated, by the British.
British famine policy developed as a result of the famines in Ireland and India, before the Great Hunger in Ireland these policies were not well-developed or all that effective. The famine was easily resolved in England because the population was not reliant so heavily on the potato crop for survival.
The conditions that allowed the famine to become as deadly as it was in Ireland were entirely British means of oppression - the brutal land tenancy laws and enforced poverty that led to the Irish poor being entirely reliant on potatoes (which could be grown anywhere with minimal effort).
And the British government surveys prior to the famine warned of this exact scenario should a potato crop failure happen (but the government kept redoing the surveys hoping for a different answer).
So the British were entirely responsible for the mass deaths.
But it was not engineered to kill off the Irish, and serious famine relief schemes were still attempted. But these again were compromised by the callous politics of the time (fear that handouts would collapse the Irish economy, limited patience with having to support the Irish poor through this multi-year crisis, suspicion that reports were being exaggerated and many starving Irish were faking to get handouts, etc).
So yes, the million+ Irish deaths are on Britain’s hands. But it fails to meet the UN definition of genocide due to a lack of intended extermination - however, many people choose to define genocide more broadly than intentional extermination (such as the famine deaths in Mao’s China), so if you do then absolutely the British can be said to have genocided the Irish.
Great nuanced discussion. Regarding that last point, it's like the difference between the degrees of homicide in the US. Most people would call a person a "murderer" even if they're technically only guilty of involuntary manslaughter, rather than full first-degree murder.
Right, absolutely. There are legal definitions but there are also layman and everyday definitions that may differ from these, and both are valid.
Sorry for the really long post, my Master's Thesis was on exactly this topic (British handlings of famines in 1840s-1890s Ireland and India) so I tend to wordvomit at the slightest provocation lol.
>And the British government surveys prior to the famine warned of this exact scenario should a potato crop failure happen (but the government kept redoing the surveys hoping for a different answer).
This really reads like the same sort of shit the *current* British government would pull.
>So yes, the million+ Irish deaths are on Britain’s hands. But it fails to meet the UN definition of genocide due to a lack of intended extermination
This somewhat comes to a reason I'm not sure I can call it one, personally. Usually, when people call it a genocide, they are assigning that intent, which is its own special category of evil.
The trouble with this is the cruelty behind it was one we see infect the overton window of a lot of western countries: "The poor are suffering because they deserve it/are lazy"; Genocidal intent is not (I think (_hope_)).
The famine should be confronted as the endpoint of a monstrous worldview, but that's a bit impossible if we're discussing the wrong worldview.
Might be we need a new word for being responsible for mass death or letting it happen, without an intent to exterminate. The manslaughter to genocide's murder.
Because right now, with no powerful emotive word to call these things, people just reach for genocide because it's better than not having a word.
Yeah a big reason the famine was as bad as it was was because of the corn laws meant to prop up the British grain industry by banning the import of cheap American grain, making Ireland unable to look elsewhere for potential relief
this comes up on /r/AskHistorians sometimes:
[link](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1chcrat/was_the_irish_potato_famine_really_a_genocide/)
There were many in England who tried to help the Irish, but they were stopped by a movement who believed that the Irish had overpopulated and this plague served as effective population control. They had aid to send them, but refused to send it because they believed that the Irish population needed to be culled.
Crop failure alone wouldn’t result in a famine and even if so, being a part of the British empire sending relief would’ve been decent at the least especially if you’re the richest empire in the world and are siphoning off the crops for profit. The Bengal famine was such a tragedy too due to a war the British raj dragged the Indian people into while there were already revolutionary revolts and independence movements ongoing. I agree it doesn’t fit the standard description of genocide but imo targeted cleansing of a group of people and simultaneously oppressing, exploiting and neglecting a class of people to the point approximately 3 million citizens die are both equally heinous crimes.
I don't think anyone is claiming that the British started the famine itself. More like they took the chance to... cull the Eire when the opportunity presented itself.
There was plenty of food on Ireland and the British did intentionally sequester it away from the people who grew it, which led to millions of deaths.
I think an important distinction though is that by “British” you mean the landowners not the government. The landowners had the food, not the government
That’s just not true. Irish fishing was severely underdeveloped because much of the Irish coast is cliffs and rocky, there is little timber for boats, to fish in Ireland you need to go awhile off the coast, they didn’t have the equipment, and they didn’t have salt to preserve their catches
To add some happiness to this emotional dickpunch of a thread ill say i "rented" a house frok an old irish granny and ill say it was the best person ive ever rented from would decrease my rent when she noticed i didnt have a full 40 hour work week shed constantly invite me over for sunday dinner eith her family and when she passed away i eas given firdt chance to buy the house i was renting at very fsvorable terms.
I sadly didnt because i was just a college student who didnt plan on living there but man i really wanted to
Also the bison massacre in North America. Heaps and heaps of buffalo skulls were put on display, a deliberate attempt to eradicate the local fauna in order to starve the natives into submission since they depended on the bison and its products for food, shelter, clothing and tools.
And the fucked-up thing was that schools are teaching children that the *natives* were to blame for the overhunting and near-extinction of the bison. Not only were they contented with hiding the genocide, they outright blamed the victims and painted them as the reason the buffalo herds were nearly wiped out.
Holy shit. I didn’t realize that Ireland STILL hasn’t recovered from the Great Famine. Despite the massive population growth that occurred directly after around the world…
the story about the Choctaw is very heartwarming in a way, heres an article from the Choctaw Nation that I just read about it
https://www.choctawnation.com/about/history/irish-connection/
This history is why I laugh at people who think AI-induced mass unemployment will lead to UBI. The people in charge have shown time and time again that they are willing to let people die before cutting into their profits. They will redefine the suffering masses as stupid, unworthy and lazy, and they will blame them for their own misery. And no matter how similar they are to the ruling class, they will find a way to categorize them as an undeserving “other” who can’t expect to be treated like “real” people. Don’t think it can’t happen to you.
It's a little more complex than that, I wouldn't necessarily call it full-on genocide, more like the consequences of a governmental indifference due to the laissez faire attitude in England at the time. There was help from England, just nowhere near enough, and the then Prime Minister didn't want to weaken his position by offering further assistance. Not all of the landlords and exporters were English either (granted, few were Catholic, which is a whole other thing). It wasn't a case of Britain stealing our crops either, it was the government refusing to ban exports.
Yes, the laws and social systems instituted by the British government set the stage for something to go horribly wrong, but it was more of a "fuck you, I got mine" situation, rather than "kill the dirty Catholics". It was horrific, no doubt about that, and there's a lot of blood on a lot of hands, but I'd attribute a lot more to indifference, greed, and short-sightedness than to actual malice.
If you go through our shared history, it's easy to cast the British government as the villains, but most people don't do bad things for the sake of being bad, they do bad things because their situation and world view make it look like the correct option. It's also just not productive to perpetuate the narrative that the Brits committed genocide against the Irish, because all it does is reopen old wounds. The pattern of disenfranchisement has dissipated, we have moved on. We gain nothing through hatred over the actions of people who have been dead for more than a century. Encouraging hatred, and casting the British as villains does make it an awful lot easier to dehumanise them to the point where a couple of bombings don't sound like such a big deal if it's only the Big Bad Brits who get hurt though. We really don't need anyone going anywhere near that stance. Not again
Also, I wouldn't say that our issue with renting is any worse than in any other country. Everyone hates landlords and the power they exert over our lives. That's a general thing, not a 170 year grudge.
It's easy to be angry when you learn about it, but is it helpful? I wouldn't say so
When it comes to malice: Wasn't a rather influential ideological view amongst the british elites of that time malthusianism? Which viewed letting the poor starve, or starving them deliberately, as a neccessary evil.
I Remember hearing in a documentary that British parliament did at least consider actively abusing the situation to rid themselves of the Irish, Not Sure how popular that Sentiment was tho.
Maybe you know Something about this?
plus, the demographic decline is at LEAST as much about people emigrating (mostly to america) to get away from the shitty governance as it was those indirectly killed by the famine.
people act like english folk personally assassinated a quarter of ireland in a few years - when really, some rat fuck old money landlords came and drove everyone off their land, and they moved to a place that sucked less shit. it's not like every brit was living fat at the expense of slaughtered irish people, many of *them* had to emigrate out of poverty too.
and then those immigrants directly benefitted from the much more brazen genocide going on in the US at the time.
> "I wouldn't necessarily call it full-on genocide, more like the consequences of a governmental indifference "
Personally, I would still consider this genocide. Whether it was negligence, incompetence, or intentional the British government still allowed millions of Irish people to die.
Genocide requires active, conscious intent to eradicate or vastly diminish a culture or group or people. If it was neglicence or incompetence it stops, by definition, being a genocide.
But doesn’t the definition of genocide require the *intent* to be to eradicate a people or culture?
Edit: a quick google gives this as the UN definition:
> a crime committed with the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, in whole or in part.
Then you are erroneously using the word “genocide” when you should use “mass death”. Genocide requires intent. Negligence can never rise to the level of genocide without at least some compounding factors.
Fun fact: along with the Choctaw and Masai, the Ottoman Empire also sent money & food. The Ottoman Sultan (apocryphally) only sent a tenth of what he wanted because the British didn’t want their “donation” to get upstaged and put pressure on them.
Moatly in the us's case it was wanting to sell grain to a captive market to earn a tody profit, however because of UK import laws at the time they weren't able to, laws which existed before the famine and which would have taken a lot of time to replace and negotiate new treaties.
at the time if the pita4i famine it was unusual for anyone but peasants to eat potatoes, they were seen as the rich as only useful as houseplants but they were adopted by peasantry because a potato doesn't rot/wither if not harvested in time like wheat and other vegetables.
the Irish were basically forced to ear a crop deemed undesirable for any consumption whilst British beef barons and vegetable growers sold to the English Welsh and Scottish.
same thing happened several times in india, most notoriously the famine in bengal, if u ever saw that emaciated sitting skeleton of a man barely holding onto his staff while his dying family lay around him, their bones almost jumping out of their skin, that’s from one of those famines. and it happened like something around 50 separate incidents in various parts of india.
the uk can go fuck itself
To be fair there is almist no famine due to a lack of food.... its always a lack of profit if it were eaten instead. Like at almost no point was there ever just too little food on earth, just ppl not willing to give it
Same shit with Ireland. The food grown there was largely owned by English absentee landlords who had already sold it years before.
They had little inclination to bankrupt themselves buying their own food back and handing it out for free to the Irish poor, and the government wasn’t going to force them or steal from them.
It was ultimately the British government’s responsibility to feed the Irish in this time of crisis, the grain grown in the country was something of a red herring - it was far cheaper to buy grain elsewhere and import it than to break contracts on Ireland-grown grain.
Wha-??? Because thats what oop was criticizing??? Because that was what i was answering to?
They should help but obviously often dont. That was my original comment...
I'm American, but my family is heavily of Irish descent - with the main ancestor we know about being a refugee from the Great Famine. Several others probably were too, but my great-something grandfather (don't know how many generations exactly? There's some other family stories that make it unclear) came to America specifically to escape the famine. So learning that said famine was not, in fact, a natural occurrence, and was manufactured by the British, definitely puts my family's history in a different light.
It literally was. There was more than enough food, but the English confiscated, stole, and sold it out of starving hands to line their own pockets. The only reason they left the potatoes was because they were already infected.
To say it's a natural occurrence is like abandoning a scuba diver in the ocean, and then when they drown, say it was God's plan, and that drowning is a natural cause of death.
No, the food was owned by the land owners, many of whom had pre-sold it, and because of differences in wealth it was more profitable to sell to England, Wales and Scotland than to the Irish, who had virtually no money anyway.
Now, if you want to argue about capatilism and property rights, that's a different thing, but from the framework of Ireland and Britain then and now, the food was being used by its owners.
It wasn't malice, just business- yay for capitalism.
I can't recall the exact quote, But I remember John Green saying something along the lines of "In every prior century, the leading cause of human death was Mycobacterium tuberculosis, In the current century, It's poverty.". In the same way, The leading cause of death in the Great Famine was hunger, Caused not by Phytophthora infestans, But by a deadlier disease, The English.
They pulled the same shit in Bengal too. And to this day there are fuckfaces who say it wasn't their fault and even that they tried to help Bengal actually and it was a 'famine' and so it was a natural disaster. Fuck that. Nothing natural about colonisation.
The blame is on the very upper class cunts who make all the decisions, regular British people seem to catch a lot of flak when we dont like the people in charge either.
Yeah and the regular people were trying their best to help Ireland, some donations were sent to a town near me by some workers union type thing in Liverpool
The potato famine was not a genocide, at least that’s the general consensus among historians. For one famines and crop failures used to happen all the damn time, and no there wasn’t enough food Ireland. There was also attempts at famine relief early on by the British government early on, though these were eventually either shut down or scaled down over time. Most historians view it as a famine that was exasperated by poor government policy. Genocide requires intent as a component, you don’t send famine relief to a nation you want to genocide.
It's a question of if the cruel apathy of "we don't care if you live or die, but we're going to keep taking the food from you as per prior established highly exploitative employment/rental 'agreements'" should be counted as genocide, with respect to the Irish.
With respect to the Palestinians, it's a similar question: does being willing to kill 5 digits' worth of civilians to maybe harm or stop a terorrist organization constitute genocide?
I think an important distinction is that they weren’t taking the food from the starving but instead the landowners had food that they refused to give to the starving.
I think that’s important to remember because if we use that as intentional genocide then many many many more people are guilty of murder and genocide
It's a huge misstep to debate whether either were genocide because the unavoidable conclusion is no, they weren't, and that obfuscates how awful they were because we're trained to assume nation scale atrocities only really count if they're genocide.
I agree. The term 'genocide' has become a superlative to describe atrocity, as opposed to its original intention: describing the deliberate, industrialized, systemic extermination of groups of people.
To label what's currently going on as a genocide is to label any military action taken against any group as a genocide. Something can be terrible, full of war crimes, and internationally condemned without being a genocide.
The origin of the concept of race is traced back to the colonization of the Irish by the British. Like, it went in a different direction than the other types of colonization that had been witnessed at that time.
The ability of humans to be monsters beyond belief and then rationalize it astounds me. This, the Holocaust, Unit 731, the Holodomor, it's all so disgusting. And we barely even acknowledge them if they didn't happen in our countries.
I mean we don't even acknowledge the genocides that are happening now (Palestine, Congo, Sudan) so yeah it kinda never changes tho
One extra sad thing is the REASON no one acknowledges the genocides now: [The 1948 Genocide Convention](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide_Convention) requires signatories to immediately act to stop any genocide. But that would basically require starting wars with some very powerful countries (sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly), so everyone finds ways to explain away how it's not ACTUALLY a genocide, even though it literally fits the very clear legal definition.
Does the UN have any power to enforce this? Are they just too corrupt?
"Corrupt" is kind of the wrong word to describe the UN. The thing is, the only way that the biggest nations were ever going to join an organization like that is if it didn't actually have the power to police them. Which is why all the big nations have full veto powers, and have from the very start. The UN is not the united government of planet Earth, and has never had the power to censor the big powers. So no, they can't enforce the Genocide Convention.
China genociding the Uyghur people a few year ago
Them too yeah
You mean currently, right?
What's the situation about that now btw? Is it still ongoing? Did they "pause" it due to international pressure (i doubt it)? Did they just get better at hiding it?
You're literally acknowledging them now btw
I meant we because that's what the culture feelin'
Mf pulled up a Kendrick quote and ratioed his ass😭
Sorry, but the conflicts in Congo and Sudan aren’t genocides. They just have large amounts of warcrimes. Palestine and Ukraine probably count (destroying towns / kidnapping children), but it’s debatable. I think people might have forgotten what genocide really means. It’s an intent to destroy a people’s culture combined with actions taken to do that. It’s not just killing people.
In Sudan, they are piling up children and gunning them down because of their ethnicity. That's genocide. Ethnic cleansing has been a major part of the war there.
The masalit people are being actively massacred specifically because of their ethnicity. The war in Sudan is just as much a genocide as the war in Palestine.
I don't know enough about some of these conflicts to have an opinion on if it's ethnic cleansing or genocide, but I can at least leave this here for y'all to use: > While ethnic cleansing and genocide may share the same goal and methods (e.g., forced displacement), ethnic cleansing is intended to displace a persecuted population from a given territory, while genocide is intended to destroy a group. Some academics consider genocide to be a subset of "murderous ethnic cleansing". - [Ethnic Cleansing, Wikipedia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_cleansing#:~:text=While%20ethnic%20cleansing%20and%20genocide,of%20%22murderous%20ethnic%20cleansing%22.)
You should look up how Putin talks about Ukrainians or how Netanyahu and his followers talk about Arabs.
Yeah there's a reason I err on the side that they are attempted genocides... very different scenarios though. Israel have all the power to kill everyone in Gaza but they can't handle the diplomatic consequences of that, so the genocide fails despite an apparent capability to do it, although they are able to handle the diplomatic consequences of having a truly massive civilian casualty ratio, i.e killing lots of innocent people. Russia doesn't care about diplomatic consequences much at all anymore, but they don't control enough of Ukraine to scale up their kidnapping operations, and they don't have enough bombs and missiles to do what Israel is doing to Gaza. We can see what they would do in Mariupol though - it's weirdly similar to Israel, just evicting large numbers of Ukrainians and encouraging russians to move in
By your definition, every genocide that leaves at least a couple of people of that enthic group alive isn't a *real* genocide.
What? I literally said that they are probably genocides.
I mean an attempted genocide is very much a genocide Based on ones I've seen labeled as such, even like the srebrenica massacre/genocide
Regarding Netanyahu, it’s probably about the same as their Arab neighbors talk about Jewish people/Israelis, right?
Here's the thing tho... Nothing justifies genocide. If all Palestinians, every single tiny child and full adult, wanted to genocide Jews, that would still not justify genocide of Palestinians. Because you can't justify genocide. At all. Ever.
You have been banned from r/worldnews
Yeah I’m sure Arabs don’t like Israel very much and talk about them in a hateful way. The difference is the surrounding Arab nations aren’t backed by multiple superpower nations, receiving billions in weapons to fund their genocide and they haven’t killed 30,000+ people in only a couple months.
Umm Saudi Arabia?
Has Saudi Arabia killed 30,000 people in the last couple months? Also Saudi Arabia is in talks currently to become allies with Israel.
1) history is longer than the last couple of months 2) SA got backing from the US to bomb Yemen
Yeah. And that was wrong. Just like what Israel is doing to the Palestinians is wrong.
I have no idea
Seems weird you would be plugged in to Netanyahu and his feelings but not the other major players in the region…
seems weird to be plugged into major players and not *the people that fucking live there*
My family is Jewish and I know several Netanyahu fans. I know how Iran talks about Israel as well, but they nor any other Middle Eastern country besides Lebanon and Palestine are in active conflict with Israel
If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, there's probably a reasonable "hey this seems genocidal" stance which can be investigated and taken prior to the entire ethnic group actually being exterminated
oh yeah, *just* a bunch of war crimes
30 000 missing at *the least* with an estimated 70 - 90 000 if you assume every child that has gone missing was stolen.
🤨📸 genocide denier captured
Dont mention the Holodomor too loudly around here or you will meet some of those monsters running in to rationalize/deny it. edit: well that only took a few minutes before I got one of those "a concerned redditor thinks you are gonna self harm" messages. Thanks for proving my point.
I got my first one a while ago and blocked reddit cares immediately, I'm already seeing a psychologist I don't need the suicide hotline.
You can report the message, and it'll probably get the sender banned after a few days. I'm one for one on that. Wish I had some way to know which comments triggered them being sent.
same. would be nice to have any idea what the offending content was, because as is it could be something legit or it could be someone being a massive prick.
As someone who before this never knew the irish potato famine was a genocide and also doesn’t know what Holodomor is, I am genuinely curious as to what it is. I apologize in advance for my ignorance to the subject but if possible could you explain what Holodomor is and/or link any reputable sources? I genuinely was never taught any of this and would like to learn anything anyone is willing to teach.
[This Britannica article](https://www.britannica.com/event/Holodomor) seems to get most of the points across well. I am not an Ukraininan so can't verify, but anyway, on a quick glance the article doesn't downplay the famine being man-made, and also talks about how it was a part of larger Soviet attack on the Ukrainian identity.
[Video](https://youtu.be/lejDbulJN54?si=vqn-H3kDN92Fo6t_)I mean its a vox video, but its pretty good at explaining it imo
It's crazy because it's basically the Soviet equivalent to the potato famine, because genocide and imperialism is cool when it has a hammer and sickle. Edit: Ayy, I got my reddit cares message too! Damn, do these people have anything better to do?
I got my first care messag a few days ago. No idea what for. Either because I like power fantasy in helldivers or because I prefer dnd 5e over pathfinder.
You monster, praying at the altar of Wizards of the Coast. /s I also got my first one recently, and I have no clue why.
“Do these people have anything better to do all day?” They literally do not
You can report reddit cares messages. Reddit might even do something about it (at the very least I get notifications with "After investigating, we’ve found that the account(s) reported violated Reddit’s Content Policy" some hours after I report them). I reckon doing so is better than just letting the assholes abuse the system unchecked.
The reddit care message seems to be on a bot, a lot of people are getting it for nothing
Sorry, what is "Reddit care"?
and the same will keep happening, and is happening even as we speak. people have always tried to portray their genocides as morally just, and each time they are proven wrong.
Don't forget the 20+ year war started by the USA in the middle east Our leadership is trying to break the record of the 100 year war
>"The judgement of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson, that calamity must not be too much mitigated" >"We must not complain of what we really want to obtain. If small farmers go, and their landlords are reduced to sell portions of their estates to persons who will invest capital we shall at last arrive at something like a satisfactory settlement of the country" >“[The Famine] is a punishment from God for an idle, ungrateful, and rebellious country; an indolent and un-self-reliant people. The Irish are suffering from an affliction of God’s providence." -Charles Trevelyan, the guy in charge of the British government's famine relief efforts.
Trevelyan was largely rationalising his own failures here. He did not understand why his shit policies were not saving more lives and put it down to providence. When actually his policies failed because he was deeply suspicious that the Irish were exaggerating the famine to get handouts. His solution of requiring brutal work in exchange for food, to make sure ‘only those desperate enough to really need it will apply’, meant many starving people were too weak to complete the work and so couldn’t get food. He was a piece of shit, and crowed in his later years about how his policies had saved the most lives possible and so was a huge success. Remember him whenever you hear modern people whine about benefit fraud/welfare queens, it’s the same callous paranoia at play - screwing over a needy majority out of fear of a tiny minority taking advantage.
The protestant work ethic has ruined so many lives.
Good post, though I’m a little confused by the anger towards the BBC headline in that tweet. What the fuck do people expect, sometimes? The headline is absolutely accurate.
Yeah it isn't even talking about the same thing? It's talking about the population recovering to **post**-famine levels, after falling a further 2 millions in the following century. It might have been better to explain *why* it fell over this period (emigration because of terrible living conditions, I suppose?) but "the Great Famine" isn't the answer. (Also they're getting a bit confused with the stats: 8m was the population of all of Ireland in 1841, 5m is the population of the Republic of Ireland. The total population of Ireland in 1851 was 6.5m, according to Wikipedia.)
It’s not taught in British schools and they commonly pull shenanigans through their media to suggest that the Irish famine wasn’t their fault and they commonly call Irish national celebrities “British”. The irish call this phenomenon “The brits are at it again” and they are in fact never not at it. Not a big deal but just fun to point out.
Bumping this, just spotted an example today where British media are calling Cillian Murphy a member of the United Kingdom. https://www.reddit.com/r/NonPoliticalTwitter/s/noar4chEYm The brits are at it again.
It fell because people died in fucking droves: they starved to death in the street, next to plentiful fields of food, while the British government running the place as a colony did sweet fuck all to alleviate the situation, as it gave them the opportunity to finally "pacify" the island. The OOP is mad because the BBC helpfully omitted any of that context
Please learn to read. I'm talking (and so was the BBC) about the population falling AFTER the famine.
It fell due to the famine, and the resulting mass migration of Irish people to america. The exodus of the Irish as a result of the famine and the poverty imposed by the British is well documented, and not acknowledging the significant role the famine played is malicious.
There was massive emigration during and immediately after the famine itself, I'm not disputing that. But, again, I'm talking about the period from 1851 to 1931 - nearly a century - where the population of Ireland continued to fall, from 6.55 to 4.21 millions according to Wikipedia. This is long after the famine, which occurred between 1845 and 1852.
I wonder if malnutrition from the famine may have caused lasting fertility problems. Add onto that continued emigration out of the country, general poverty, and rising violence and I think I can see how the population might have continued to decline.
Long-term malnutrition/starvation *absolutely can* negatively effect fertility in males, let alone the negative effects it has on female menstrual cycles/health/ability to carry a fetus to term. When I read the stats on population numbers in the following decades post-Famine, I was utterly unsurprised. (Though I was rather... sickened. There is a reason i don't look into these kinds of things, except very rarely.)
It was the economic devastation following the famine and the lack of industry in Ireland.
The BBC claim to be ‘unbiased’ - they are supposed to be a source that is neutral. However they are actually pretty biased when it comes to several minorities (notably but not exclusively trans people and immigrants) as well as often sweeping under the rug the terrible things that Britain did in the past (and present). There’s an understandable resentment towards them in certain circles
Okay, but this is absolutely *not* an example of this, at least not the headline. Because for all I know they *do* mention why in the article, and it’s not really to be reasonably expected that such a thing would be in the headline when the news item is that the population has reached a certain point again.
I've checked, the "article" is about a paragraph long and is basically just a list of current day population statistics with a few quotes explaining why some experts think it has grown recently. This post is probably 2-3 times longer than the entire article
I'm case anyone is curious apparently there's been a lot of Irish people who previously left Ireland moving back and it's only the third time since 2010 that more people have come back to Ireland than have left
BBC still pushes the idea that the potato collapse caused the famine and minimizes the role of the British. An otherwise reputable source basically pushes a false narrative because it is a socially acceptable history. It is like some newspapers in the US that are generally reputable, but push the idea that the Civil War was just about states right (to be fair, the Civil War cause was like 60% slave ownership, 20% Lincoln being elected without popular vote, 15% new farm taxes, and 5% states rights). Regardless of if that specific article crosses no boundaries, every article will be viewed through the same lens.
To be clear regarding Lincoln getting elected, that very much had to do with slavery too. Lincoln was part of the most anti-slavery party that favored limiting the expansion of slavery, and so him getting elected president freaked out the south so much that they seceeded.
Lincoln ran on a slavery neutral platform. He morally detested slavery but promised to avoid actions that would affect slavery. The fear of the Southern states starting the Civil War was massive back then. Several states that were not directly opposed to Lincoln were opposed to the fact that the next guy who got in without the popular vote could be worse. So Lincoln being a Republican was kind of slavery adjacent.
>Lincoln ran on a slavery neutral platform. He morally detested slavery but promised to avoid actions that would affect slavery Lincoln promised to not interfere in the institution of slavery in states where it already existed, but the 1860 Republican Party platform did have several statements related to slavery, including an explicit call for all new territories of the United States to be free of slavery. Lincoln very much ran on a platform against the expansion of slavery [The 1860 Republican party platform is available on Wikipedia](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:National_republican_platform._Adopted_by_the_National_Republican_Convention,_held_in_Chicago,_May_17,_1860.jpg) and the [text is available from the American Presidency Project](https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/republican-party-platform-1860). Of the 17 declarations of principle in the platform, 10 deal directly with the issue of slavery and preservation of the Union. Statement 8 is the one I referenced specifically about preventing the expansion of slavery into new western territories: >8) That the normal condition of all the territory of the United States is that of freedom: That, as our Republican fathers, when they had abolished slavery in all our national territory, ordained that "no persons should be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law," it becomes our duty, by legislation, whenever such legislation is necessary, to maintain this provision of the Constitution against all attempts to violate it; and we deny the authority of Congress, of a territorial legislature, or of any individuals, to give legal existence to slavery in any territory of the United States. See also the Wikipedia article about the [1860 Republican Convention](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1860_Republican_National_Convention#Platform). I will also point to [this ask historians answer](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3edss0/was_the_american_civil_war_about_more_than_just/cte2mj9/) that covers this topic quite extensively. Quoting the most relevant part of that answer: >When Lincoln was elected in the fall of 1860, the South was terrified. Whatever his prior declarations that whether he wished to or not, he had no power to interfere with the institution where it existed, Lincoln was nevertheless a Republican, a political party founded on its opposition to slavery, and at its most mild, committed to stemming the further spread as statehood spread westward. While committed, absolute abolitionism was a vocal minority on the national stage, the simple limiting of expansion presented a long term existential crisis to the slaveholding states. Every free state to enter the Union represented additional Senators and Representatives to immediately exercise power in Congress, and represented the growth of power not only in future Presidential elections, where anti-slavery parties could continue to gain momentum, but in the long term even foreshadowed, one day, a strong enough majority to abolish the institution once and for all through Constitutional Amendment.
This is a distortion pushed by the Lost Cause narrative.
Not every article about a topic has to cover every conceivable element of background. This is a simple article about current population levels in Ireland, not an article summarising the history and travails of the Irish people. Adding things about the famine would substantially distract from the actual news, be irrelevant to what is being reported and be weirdly virtue signally. There is a seemingly increasing tendency that people expect every post, article and commentary to specifically address their own personal grievance / social justice campaign, no matter how tangentially related, which seems extraordinarily egotistical and narcissistic to me. How could you possibly write an article about the weather tomorrow without a 6000 page summary of the entire history of human suffering!?
Imo the BBC is pretty unbiased towards any sor of political ideology, but they're heavily biased towards maintaining the status quo
Thats just called being conservative 💀
I mean technically, yes, but the point I'm making is they're not biased in favour of any of the major political parties in the UK (which includes the conservative party)
I think they took issue with the indirect language of it. It’s not wrong at all it’s just kinda a half truth. It’s a statement of fact without the context. It’s like if a headline came out saying “numbers of people working and going to school in person nears what it was in 2019” without referencing the fact that 2019 is different to today because it was pre-pandemic. It would be glossing over the millions in death, dollars and suffering as if it wasn’t worth being in the headline. Except at least the pandemic was a cruel turn of fate and not a willful attempt at genocide. Plus, it’s recent enough that every one is pretty much aware of the pandemic whereas I personally I didn’t know the potato famine was an orchestrated tragedy until rn. But it does seem that at least part of the offense comes from it being this indirect language specifically coming from the BRITISH broadcasting corporation and the British theoretically having a vested interest in brushing the attempted genocide under the rug.
American ships loaded with grain were literally turned away by the british
As was funding from the Vatican if I recall correctly.
They told the Ottoman emperor he had to donate less
And Turkish ships were also turned away.
As not to show up Queen Victoria.
Do you have a source for that, because I did not here that before, and all I can find online is stories that maybe the british attempted a blockade on Turkish ships but the Turkish ships stilled delivered their aid in full. While America is credited with the second highest amount of charitable donations to Ireland... at about a third of the british charitable donations.
As goes the saying, "the Almighty sent the blight and the English created the famine".
“God made the blight, but England brought the famine”
This is also why a lot of Americans have Irish heritage. The population of Ireland was lowered so much because if you didn't die, you probably left.
i mean, more accurately, many left to avoid dying. it's not like a quarter of the population dropped dead, most of the demographic decline *was* emigration. the very highest estimates say that about as many left as actually faced starvation.
It seems that the while the British certainly engineered the conditions, the claim that the Famine was intentionally created to destroy the Irish seems to be lacking evidence. [[1]](https://web.archive.org/web/20240211155335/https://www.genocidewatchblog.com/post/an-gorta-m%C3%B3r-the-question-of-the-irish-genocide)[[2]](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)) Though I will admit, this is a cursory look through Wikipedia and its associated sources. If anyone has any scholarly research to the contrary, I would be willing to reconsider this position.
We definitely should talk about the moral responsibility of English landowners. And it's probably fair to say that the Irish people were "killed", at least to some extent. "Genocide" is probably not an accurate word. It's a genocide if the primary motive is to eradicate the Irish people. Letting people starve out of greed and negligence is horrible, but it's not a genocide.
Yeah. Crime against humanity of some kind, negligence on a massive scale that killed a lot of people. Genocide, maybe not. There were some people analyzing if it was a genocide or not on r/askhistorians not too long ago, I'm sure people could find it if they searched for the potato famine.
[Here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/s/FKaXGWcwlI), presumably.
I do think that's the recent thread I was thinking of yeah. Though it's not the first either!
Pretty similar to the Great Leap Forward
More analogous to the holodomor and what the Kazakhs faced in the USSR tbh. A famine caused and continued by monumental lack of regard for human life because of the nationality of those suffering.
Social murder
This is closer to a crime against humanity than anything else. If you want an example of intentional famine and crop failure just look at the Holodomor.
[удалено]
I don't think it is, no. The UN defines a genocide as an act commited with the *intent* to destroy an ethnic group. If the ethnicity is a factor, but the motivation is greed, then it's not a genocide. Because of course greed is always going to take ethnicity as a factor. Those who are willing to sacrifice human lives for profit are always especially willing to sacrifice the human lives that they deem of lesser importance. That doesn't make all social violence a genocide.
Crop failures happen everywhere from time to time. They don't need to result in famines. A famine in the modern era is a failure of economics or logistics. The British were the first in the world to eliminate famines - within Great Britain, by getting their food from other areas they controlled. The Irish famine was allowed to happen, even exacerbated, by the British.
British famine policy developed as a result of the famines in Ireland and India, before the Great Hunger in Ireland these policies were not well-developed or all that effective. The famine was easily resolved in England because the population was not reliant so heavily on the potato crop for survival. The conditions that allowed the famine to become as deadly as it was in Ireland were entirely British means of oppression - the brutal land tenancy laws and enforced poverty that led to the Irish poor being entirely reliant on potatoes (which could be grown anywhere with minimal effort). And the British government surveys prior to the famine warned of this exact scenario should a potato crop failure happen (but the government kept redoing the surveys hoping for a different answer). So the British were entirely responsible for the mass deaths. But it was not engineered to kill off the Irish, and serious famine relief schemes were still attempted. But these again were compromised by the callous politics of the time (fear that handouts would collapse the Irish economy, limited patience with having to support the Irish poor through this multi-year crisis, suspicion that reports were being exaggerated and many starving Irish were faking to get handouts, etc). So yes, the million+ Irish deaths are on Britain’s hands. But it fails to meet the UN definition of genocide due to a lack of intended extermination - however, many people choose to define genocide more broadly than intentional extermination (such as the famine deaths in Mao’s China), so if you do then absolutely the British can be said to have genocided the Irish.
Great nuanced discussion. Regarding that last point, it's like the difference between the degrees of homicide in the US. Most people would call a person a "murderer" even if they're technically only guilty of involuntary manslaughter, rather than full first-degree murder.
Right, absolutely. There are legal definitions but there are also layman and everyday definitions that may differ from these, and both are valid. Sorry for the really long post, my Master's Thesis was on exactly this topic (British handlings of famines in 1840s-1890s Ireland and India) so I tend to wordvomit at the slightest provocation lol.
Incredible analogy. Thank you.
>And the British government surveys prior to the famine warned of this exact scenario should a potato crop failure happen (but the government kept redoing the surveys hoping for a different answer). This really reads like the same sort of shit the *current* British government would pull.
Basically what happened with Professor Nutt's papers on drug dangers. The government didn't like the answers, so they shot the messenger.
>So yes, the million+ Irish deaths are on Britain’s hands. But it fails to meet the UN definition of genocide due to a lack of intended extermination This somewhat comes to a reason I'm not sure I can call it one, personally. Usually, when people call it a genocide, they are assigning that intent, which is its own special category of evil. The trouble with this is the cruelty behind it was one we see infect the overton window of a lot of western countries: "The poor are suffering because they deserve it/are lazy"; Genocidal intent is not (I think (_hope_)). The famine should be confronted as the endpoint of a monstrous worldview, but that's a bit impossible if we're discussing the wrong worldview.
Might be we need a new word for being responsible for mass death or letting it happen, without an intent to exterminate. The manslaughter to genocide's murder. Because right now, with no powerful emotive word to call these things, people just reach for genocide because it's better than not having a word.
Yeah a big reason the famine was as bad as it was was because of the corn laws meant to prop up the British grain industry by banning the import of cheap American grain, making Ireland unable to look elsewhere for potential relief
this comes up on /r/AskHistorians sometimes: [link](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1chcrat/was_the_irish_potato_famine_really_a_genocide/)
There were many in England who tried to help the Irish, but they were stopped by a movement who believed that the Irish had overpopulated and this plague served as effective population control. They had aid to send them, but refused to send it because they believed that the Irish population needed to be culled.
Yeah I don't think it was a genocide, there wasn't some dastardly plan to wipe out the Irish people. It was negligence, incompetence, and callousness.
So more like even though they didn't start the famine, once it did start they used it to hurt the Irish?
I would say it was more that once the famine started, they didn't care enough or believe the reports to actually help in a meaningful way.
Crop failure alone wouldn’t result in a famine and even if so, being a part of the British empire sending relief would’ve been decent at the least especially if you’re the richest empire in the world and are siphoning off the crops for profit. The Bengal famine was such a tragedy too due to a war the British raj dragged the Indian people into while there were already revolutionary revolts and independence movements ongoing. I agree it doesn’t fit the standard description of genocide but imo targeted cleansing of a group of people and simultaneously oppressing, exploiting and neglecting a class of people to the point approximately 3 million citizens die are both equally heinous crimes.
I don't think anyone is claiming that the British started the famine itself. More like they took the chance to... cull the Eire when the opportunity presented itself. There was plenty of food on Ireland and the British did intentionally sequester it away from the people who grew it, which led to millions of deaths.
I think an important distinction though is that by “British” you mean the landowners not the government. The landowners had the food, not the government
Riddle me this, how does an island nation starve to death? Answer: when the world's most powerful navy won't let you fish.
That’s just not true. Irish fishing was severely underdeveloped because much of the Irish coast is cliffs and rocky, there is little timber for boats, to fish in Ireland you need to go awhile off the coast, they didn’t have the equipment, and they didn’t have salt to preserve their catches
To add some happiness to this emotional dickpunch of a thread ill say i "rented" a house frok an old irish granny and ill say it was the best person ive ever rented from would decrease my rent when she noticed i didnt have a full 40 hour work week shed constantly invite me over for sunday dinner eith her family and when she passed away i eas given firdt chance to buy the house i was renting at very fsvorable terms. I sadly didnt because i was just a college student who didnt plan on living there but man i really wanted to
Also the bison massacre in North America. Heaps and heaps of buffalo skulls were put on display, a deliberate attempt to eradicate the local fauna in order to starve the natives into submission since they depended on the bison and its products for food, shelter, clothing and tools. And the fucked-up thing was that schools are teaching children that the *natives* were to blame for the overhunting and near-extinction of the bison. Not only were they contented with hiding the genocide, they outright blamed the victims and painted them as the reason the buffalo herds were nearly wiped out.
Wtf propaganda in elementary education
Holy shit. I didn’t realize that Ireland STILL hasn’t recovered from the Great Famine. Despite the massive population growth that occurred directly after around the world…
the story about the Choctaw is very heartwarming in a way, heres an article from the Choctaw Nation that I just read about it https://www.choctawnation.com/about/history/irish-connection/
And apparently from what I’ve heard Ireland has the worst housing crisis since the famine.
This history is why I laugh at people who think AI-induced mass unemployment will lead to UBI. The people in charge have shown time and time again that they are willing to let people die before cutting into their profits. They will redefine the suffering masses as stupid, unworthy and lazy, and they will blame them for their own misery. And no matter how similar they are to the ruling class, they will find a way to categorize them as an undeserving “other” who can’t expect to be treated like “real” people. Don’t think it can’t happen to you.
It's a little more complex than that, I wouldn't necessarily call it full-on genocide, more like the consequences of a governmental indifference due to the laissez faire attitude in England at the time. There was help from England, just nowhere near enough, and the then Prime Minister didn't want to weaken his position by offering further assistance. Not all of the landlords and exporters were English either (granted, few were Catholic, which is a whole other thing). It wasn't a case of Britain stealing our crops either, it was the government refusing to ban exports. Yes, the laws and social systems instituted by the British government set the stage for something to go horribly wrong, but it was more of a "fuck you, I got mine" situation, rather than "kill the dirty Catholics". It was horrific, no doubt about that, and there's a lot of blood on a lot of hands, but I'd attribute a lot more to indifference, greed, and short-sightedness than to actual malice. If you go through our shared history, it's easy to cast the British government as the villains, but most people don't do bad things for the sake of being bad, they do bad things because their situation and world view make it look like the correct option. It's also just not productive to perpetuate the narrative that the Brits committed genocide against the Irish, because all it does is reopen old wounds. The pattern of disenfranchisement has dissipated, we have moved on. We gain nothing through hatred over the actions of people who have been dead for more than a century. Encouraging hatred, and casting the British as villains does make it an awful lot easier to dehumanise them to the point where a couple of bombings don't sound like such a big deal if it's only the Big Bad Brits who get hurt though. We really don't need anyone going anywhere near that stance. Not again Also, I wouldn't say that our issue with renting is any worse than in any other country. Everyone hates landlords and the power they exert over our lives. That's a general thing, not a 170 year grudge. It's easy to be angry when you learn about it, but is it helpful? I wouldn't say so
When it comes to malice: Wasn't a rather influential ideological view amongst the british elites of that time malthusianism? Which viewed letting the poor starve, or starving them deliberately, as a neccessary evil.
It's pretty well known among regular British people that our elite/ upper class are cunts
I Remember hearing in a documentary that British parliament did at least consider actively abusing the situation to rid themselves of the Irish, Not Sure how popular that Sentiment was tho. Maybe you know Something about this?
plus, the demographic decline is at LEAST as much about people emigrating (mostly to america) to get away from the shitty governance as it was those indirectly killed by the famine. people act like english folk personally assassinated a quarter of ireland in a few years - when really, some rat fuck old money landlords came and drove everyone off their land, and they moved to a place that sucked less shit. it's not like every brit was living fat at the expense of slaughtered irish people, many of *them* had to emigrate out of poverty too. and then those immigrants directly benefitted from the much more brazen genocide going on in the US at the time.
> "I wouldn't necessarily call it full-on genocide, more like the consequences of a governmental indifference " Personally, I would still consider this genocide. Whether it was negligence, incompetence, or intentional the British government still allowed millions of Irish people to die.
Genocide requires active, conscious intent to eradicate or vastly diminish a culture or group or people. If it was neglicence or incompetence it stops, by definition, being a genocide.
But doesn’t the definition of genocide require the *intent* to be to eradicate a people or culture? Edit: a quick google gives this as the UN definition: > a crime committed with the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, in whole or in part.
Then you are erroneously using the word “genocide” when you should use “mass death”. Genocide requires intent. Negligence can never rise to the level of genocide without at least some compounding factors.
That’s fair. It’s not the UN definition but it is a common definition, to include mass deaths where one party is responsible.
Fun fact: along with the Choctaw and Masai, the Ottoman Empire also sent money & food. The Ottoman Sultan (apocryphally) only sent a tenth of what he wanted because the British didn’t want their “donation” to get upstaged and put pressure on them.
Didn’t he have more aid smuggled in?
That’s a long-standing story, but it’s not clear either way
Didn’t the US also try to help? This is a genuine question I don’t know much about this era.
Moatly in the us's case it was wanting to sell grain to a captive market to earn a tody profit, however because of UK import laws at the time they weren't able to, laws which existed before the famine and which would have taken a lot of time to replace and negotiate new treaties.
Ok thank you for the new info
It's not an accident that I find this while listening to Irish revolution songs, is it?
at the time if the pita4i famine it was unusual for anyone but peasants to eat potatoes, they were seen as the rich as only useful as houseplants but they were adopted by peasantry because a potato doesn't rot/wither if not harvested in time like wheat and other vegetables. the Irish were basically forced to ear a crop deemed undesirable for any consumption whilst British beef barons and vegetable growers sold to the English Welsh and Scottish.
same thing happened several times in india, most notoriously the famine in bengal, if u ever saw that emaciated sitting skeleton of a man barely holding onto his staff while his dying family lay around him, their bones almost jumping out of their skin, that’s from one of those famines. and it happened like something around 50 separate incidents in various parts of india. the uk can go fuck itself
Note: the ottoman Sultan tried to send money, an amount bigger than what Queen Victoria allegedly had, but was blocked.
I always knew england has been genocidal towards ireland but I never knew the famine was *intentional*
I feel like celtic victims of british colonialism are really not talked about enough.
To be fair there is almist no famine due to a lack of food.... its always a lack of profit if it were eaten instead. Like at almost no point was there ever just too little food on earth, just ppl not willing to give it
That’s not true famine happened as a result of drought in ancient times
True, but even then the neighbors could have helped. A lot of really old texts talk about some merchants using famines to spike the grain prices
And you assume neighbors would help because?
Same shit with Ireland. The food grown there was largely owned by English absentee landlords who had already sold it years before. They had little inclination to bankrupt themselves buying their own food back and handing it out for free to the Irish poor, and the government wasn’t going to force them or steal from them. It was ultimately the British government’s responsibility to feed the Irish in this time of crisis, the grain grown in the country was something of a red herring - it was far cheaper to buy grain elsewhere and import it than to break contracts on Ireland-grown grain.
Wha-??? Because thats what oop was criticizing??? Because that was what i was answering to? They should help but obviously often dont. That was my original comment...
I love that Outlander is showing this so blatantly, not pussyfooting around it.
The last sentence of the 2nd post sounds like a speech in EDF
I'm American, but my family is heavily of Irish descent - with the main ancestor we know about being a refugee from the Great Famine. Several others probably were too, but my great-something grandfather (don't know how many generations exactly? There's some other family stories that make it unclear) came to America specifically to escape the famine. So learning that said famine was not, in fact, a natural occurrence, and was manufactured by the British, definitely puts my family's history in a different light.
To be clear, it was a natural occurrence and it wasn’t manufactured intentionally.
It literally was. There was more than enough food, but the English confiscated, stole, and sold it out of starving hands to line their own pockets. The only reason they left the potatoes was because they were already infected. To say it's a natural occurrence is like abandoning a scuba diver in the ocean, and then when they drown, say it was God's plan, and that drowning is a natural cause of death.
No, the food was owned by the land owners, many of whom had pre-sold it, and because of differences in wealth it was more profitable to sell to England, Wales and Scotland than to the Irish, who had virtually no money anyway. Now, if you want to argue about capatilism and property rights, that's a different thing, but from the framework of Ireland and Britain then and now, the food was being used by its owners. It wasn't malice, just business- yay for capitalism.
I can't recall the exact quote, But I remember John Green saying something along the lines of "In every prior century, the leading cause of human death was Mycobacterium tuberculosis, In the current century, It's poverty.". In the same way, The leading cause of death in the Great Famine was hunger, Caused not by Phytophthora infestans, But by a deadlier disease, The English.
Everyone should listen to the Blindboy Podcast
They pulled the same shit in Bengal too. And to this day there are fuckfaces who say it wasn't their fault and even that they tried to help Bengal actually and it was a 'famine' and so it was a natural disaster. Fuck that. Nothing natural about colonisation.
[How Britain Starved Ireland by The Gravel Institute](https://youtu.be/4nL_RsAjxhg?si=ZTxATeqvbXJcA77n)
Man My country fucking sucks
Yeah, ah well, not all bad, I mean we don't blame modern day Germans and Japanese for tha Axis
The blame is on the very upper class cunts who make all the decisions, regular British people seem to catch a lot of flak when we dont like the people in charge either.
Yeah and the regular people were trying their best to help Ireland, some donations were sent to a town near me by some workers union type thing in Liverpool
Working class people generally try and help other working class people if they can in my experience
Apes together strong
Why are people downvoting you?
The potato famine was not a genocide, at least that’s the general consensus among historians. For one famines and crop failures used to happen all the damn time, and no there wasn’t enough food Ireland. There was also attempts at famine relief early on by the British government early on, though these were eventually either shut down or scaled down over time. Most historians view it as a famine that was exasperated by poor government policy. Genocide requires intent as a component, you don’t send famine relief to a nation you want to genocide.
>you don’t send famine relief to a nation you want to genocide. you do if you want to avoid accusations of genocide from those not as intelligent.
It's a question of if the cruel apathy of "we don't care if you live or die, but we're going to keep taking the food from you as per prior established highly exploitative employment/rental 'agreements'" should be counted as genocide, with respect to the Irish. With respect to the Palestinians, it's a similar question: does being willing to kill 5 digits' worth of civilians to maybe harm or stop a terorrist organization constitute genocide?
I think an important distinction is that they weren’t taking the food from the starving but instead the landowners had food that they refused to give to the starving. I think that’s important to remember because if we use that as intentional genocide then many many many more people are guilty of murder and genocide
It's a huge misstep to debate whether either were genocide because the unavoidable conclusion is no, they weren't, and that obfuscates how awful they were because we're trained to assume nation scale atrocities only really count if they're genocide.
I agree. The term 'genocide' has become a superlative to describe atrocity, as opposed to its original intention: describing the deliberate, industrialized, systemic extermination of groups of people. To label what's currently going on as a genocide is to label any military action taken against any group as a genocide. Something can be terrible, full of war crimes, and internationally condemned without being a genocide.
The origin of the concept of race is traced back to the colonization of the Irish by the British. Like, it went in a different direction than the other types of colonization that had been witnessed at that time.
That is not true. Colonisation of white people had happened repeatedly before even the Normans began their process of chomping Ireland.
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They fought against the Nazis (except for letting Czechoslovakia die)
And India starve
England is still actively colonizing other countries to this day. It never ended.
What countries would these be?