by Chris Fogarty
“FAMINE” VS. HOLOCAUST
On the Doolough-to-Louisburg, Co. Mayo “famine” walk back about 1997, Mary and I were distributing my MASS GRAVES OF IRELAND; 1845-1850 pamphlet when a woman asked if we would help her publisher promote her “famine” book in the States, we answered; “Of course.” I promptly added: “But your book identifies all seventy-five food removal regiments, doesn’t it?” When she said; “No,” I asked; “But why would you bother adding to the pile of cover-up books?” Her mouth was forming her answer when someone shouted; “John: when will you write the book that everyone is waiting for?” “John’s” answer: “It’s too soon. The publishing industry will still kill any book that tells the truth about the starvation of Ireland.” Why would anyone say such a thing? “John” proved to be John Pilger, the eminent human rights advocate from Australia, one or more of whose books I already had in my home library. Pilger is possessed of a towering integrity, but his claim that publishers will kill a book that proves Britain’s 1845-50 genocide of Ireland sounded strange.
THE FOOD REMOVAL is undeniable—nobody even tries to deny my irishholocaust.org map that, for the first time (other than in Britain’s National Archives where I discovered it in 1983), identifies all seventy-five British perpetrating regiments and the Irish district each was assigned to strip of edibles. The more than five million eliminated were Ireland’s most Gaelic, and when they were murdered, Gaelic died as Ireland’s main language. They were the noncollaborators with the invaders, and they died in their thatched cabins on the land they tilled the product of which the landlord seized (with the aid of the British army) to maintain his lordly lifestyle in England. Tens of thousands of other Irish were evicted by the same British army that had robbed their ancestors of it. Landlords’ wrecking crews used battering rams to broach house walls and sawed or pulled down the roof ridge beams, thus collapsing the thatched roofs, so that the evicted families died under trees, in scealps, in the bogs, along the roads, in cemeteries, and in the rain and snow. Whoever would interfere with that sentence of death by starvation and exposure by granting them shelter even in a cow-house would, themselves and their entire family, suffer the same fate. The landlords’ purpose in evicting was to rid “his” land of the Irish, and when so many of Ireland’s landlords were doing likewise, the effect was ethnic cleansing. The genocide wasn’t total. Nearly all of us are descendants of the more Anglicized, surviving half of Ireland’s population.
“FAMINE” BOOKS focus nearly exclusively on the failure of a minor crop—potatoes. Some go so far as to call it a “potato famine.” They leave the impression that the Irish grew only one failure-prone crop from the Atlantic coast to the Irish Sea and thus have only themselves to blame. It is to keep that lie going and to cover up one of history’s deadliest genocides that they conceal the fact of the far greater acreage planted in grain crops—crops that didn’t fail and would have kept their cultivators abundantly fed but for the seventy-five British regiments that removed them at gunpoint. The cover-up artists remain active; they continue to exploit, for money and/or British thank yous, the murders of millions by covering up for the genocidists.
WHERE ARE the truth-telling books? John Pilger’s comment about the publishing industry’s killing of any truth-telling book on this subject seems borne out. Not for a century has a book truthfully recounted Ireland’s Holocaust. When, in the 1960s, Cecil Woodham-Smith’s THE GREAT HUNGER took a new approach by seeming sympathetic to the victims, it sold like wildfire into many reprints. Her cover-up of the food removal, and understating of the death toll while over-reporting blight and charity food distribution, made it pure British propaganda. Her approach has been adopted by all subsequent “famine” writers. But there is wonderful news. An older, truth-telling book has been reprinted: Michael Davitt’s THE FALL OF FEUDALISM: OR THE STORY OF THE LAND LEAGUE REVOLUTION (1904). Only one chapter covers the Holocaust (which Davitt witnessed), but the entire book exposes the English landlord system that created it. Like the Irish Examiner newspaper in 1847 (then the Cork Examiner), when Davitt wrote his book in 1904 he, too, described Ireland’s starvation as ”holocaust.” Thus Jews’ exclusive claim on “holocaust” is unwarranted. Prior usage establishes Ireland’s superior claim. “Genocide,” being of WW2 coinage, is hardly applicable to 1845-50 Ireland despite its aptness otherwise. Another book on Britain’s holocaust-creating policies is John Stuart Mills’ ESSAYS ON ENGLAND, IRELAND, AND THE EMPIRE (1860s). A sample: “The difficulty of governing Ireland lies entirely in our own minds; it is an incapability of understanding. When able to understand what justice requires, liberal Englishmen do not refuse to do it. They understood the injustice of the religious disabilities of Catholics, and they removed them. (Mill refers here to the Penal Laws, that were mostly abolished in 1829.) “They understood the injustice of endowing an alien Church, and have made up their minds that the endowment shall no longer continue.” (From 1869 onward Ireland’s Catholics were no longer forced to tithe to the [Anglican] “Church of Ireland.”) “Foreign nations and posterity will judge England’s capacity for government by the ability she now shows to overcome the difficulty of seeing what justice requires in the matter of Irish landed tenure.” (Here he refers to the fact that some 95% of Ireland’s land and crops were still claimed by mostly-absentee English landlords). “To her it is a difficulty. Other nations see no difficulty in it. To the Prussian Conservative, Von Raumer, and the French Liberal, Gustave de Beaumont, it was already, thirty years ago, the most obvious thing in the world. It will seem so to future generations.” (Beaumont, a colleague of Tocqueville who wrote DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA, toured Ireland in the 1830s and wrote a scathing indictment of British rule there.) Mill again: “Hostile feeling, too much of it, still remains between England & the United States, more than eighty years after separation; & Ireland has actually suffered from England for many centuries, evils compared with which the greatest grievances of the Americans were a mere fleabite.”
THE AWAITED BOOK, the truthful one about Ireland’s Holocaust, nears completion. A Kilkenny-born professor wrote one chapter; a Cork-born, retired civil servant in London wrote another. Both are published authors. The rest is by me, fully documented by official data compiled by Mary and me for essentially a lifetime and more intensively this year. People distributed my Mass Graves of Ireland pamphlets at “famine” book promotions across the US and UK. Their subsequent books abandoned some 90% of their earlier falsehoods but they still cover up the Food Removal. Thus this book speaks for, bears witness for, the murdered millions who cannot defend themselves against those who still slander them. They were murdered; they didn’t die of “terminal stupidity,” of their own “dirty negligence.” Watch for upcoming ads in the IAN.
WHO ARE THE TERRORISTS regarding Occupied Ireland? See terrorismireland.org.
GOOD FRIDAY AGREEMENT; beneficial? See www.friendsofcolinduffy.com and www.michaelmckevitt.com.
Reach me at 312/664-7651 or This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .
