In his book The Famine Plot, Irish historian Tim Pat Coogan brings to light how the British monarchy essentially drove the Irish people of that time to their grim fate by engineering the food shortage that would eventually capture more than one in eight Irish lives. Based on the definitions outlined by the United Nations as to what genocide actually is, the way the Irish were treated by the Royal Crown during the mid-19th century serves as a clear example of genocide through food.
According to Coogan's account, the British government of the time purposely did nothing to help the Irish people when an unusual fungus began to wipe out much of the potato crop. With tensions high between the Protestant and Catholic elements of the two countries, England used the famine as an excuse to neglect and mistreat the Irish, claiming that they brought poverty on themselves by clinging to Catholicism.
The English already owned much of the land in Ireland prior to the famine, with the Irish as their tenants. They taxed the Irish heavily and charged them exorbitant rents, even as times began to get tough in the early days of the famine, and forced them to export most of their corn, wheat, barley and oat crops to Britain. This left only potatoes, which were slowly eaten up by the fungus, resulting in no food for the Irish.
"While other regions were able to turn to alternative food sources, the Irish were dependent on the potato and the results of the blight were disastrous," explains a resource published by American University in Washington, D.C.
British government forced suffering Irish people into starvation
Rather than help the Irish in their time of need, the British continued to turn up the heat, arguing in essence that God was judging the Irish for their misdeeds, which included rejecting the national religion of England. As explained by Coogan in his book, many local organizations sought to provide food and other forms of aid to the Irish, but the Crown made sure that almost none of these efforts were successful.
"The damned Irish were going to get what they deserved because of their attachment to Catholicism and Irish ways when they were refusing to toe the British line," reports IrishCentral.com, reflecting the contents in Coogan's book. "Every possible effort by local organizations to feed the starving were thwarted and frustrated by a British government intent on teaching the Irish a lesson and forcing market forces on them."
The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide clearly delineates that such actions constitute genocide. Article 2 of this chilling document lists "deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part" as one definition. Another definition includes "causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group."
If you want to control a population, control its food
Though England may not have engineered the potato fungus itself, it did forcibly remove from the Irish virtually every other food crop on which this people group subsisted, leaving only one crop that it knew had the potential to collapse. It is the same scenario that is occurring in the U.S. today, sadly, with mass plantations of genetically modified (GM) corn and soy that are spurring the formation of resistant "superweeds" and "superbugs."
The forces behind the food genocide that is quickly taking form in America today seem to be pulling from the playbook of the Great Irish Potato Famine, though with more stealth and considerably more technology. But it is the same endgame -- to target a people with mass destruction by destroying its food supply and leaving it with nothing.
Many would contend that Native Americans already suffered this fate at the hands of early British colonists, who considered their food crops and traditional medicines were considered "evil." Some historical accounts suggest that Native Americans were eradicated, at least in part, by the intentional destruction of various plants and herbs that they used for both food and medicine.
"One of the most substantial methods [of genocide] was the premeditated destructions of flora and fauna which the American Indians used for food and a variety of other purposes," explains one report.
More on Coogan's book about the Great Famine of Ireland is available here.
Sources:
http://www.irishcentral.com
http://www.irishcentral.com
http://www1.american.edu
http://www.iearn.org
Available at this [Link] is the 117 page course material book, The Great Irish Famine," Approved by the New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education on September 10th, 1996, for inclusion in the Holocaust and GenocideCurriculum at the secondary level. Revision submitted 11/26/98.
On page 10 we can read:
"Although the potato crop failed, the country was still producing and exporting more than enough grain crops to feed the population. But that was a 'money crop' and not a 'food crop' and could not be interfered with." (30.)
According to John Mitchel, quoted by Woodham-Smith, "Ireland was actually producing sufficient food, wool and flax, to feed and clothe not nine but eighteen millions of people," yet a ship sailing into an Irish port during the famine years with a cargo of grain was "sure to meet six ships sailing out with a similar cargo.
"One of the most remarkable facts about the famine period is that there was an average monthly export of food from Ireland worth 100,000 Pound Sterling. Almost throughout the five-year famine, Ireland remained a net exporter of food. (31.)
Dr. Christine Kinealy, a fellow at the University of Liverpool and the author of two scholarly texts on the Irish Famine:
"This Great Calamity and A Death-Dealing Famine, says that 9,992 calves were exported from Ireland to England during "Black'47", an increase of thirty-three percentfrom the previous year. In the twelve months following the second failureof the potato crop, 4,000 horses and ponies were exported. The export oflivestock to Britain (with the exception of pigs) increased during the"famine".
The export of bacon and ham increased. In total, over three million live animals were exported from Ireland between 1846-50, more than the number of people who emigrated during the famine years. Dr. Kinealy's most recent work is documented in the spring 1998 issue of "History Ireland". She states that almost 4,000 vessels carried food from Ireland to the ports of Bristol, Glasgow, Liverpool and London during1847, when 400,000 Irish men, women and children died of starvation and related diseases. The food was shipped under guard from the most famine-stricken parts of Ireland: Ballina, Ballyshannon, Bantry, Dingle, Killala, Kilrush, Limerick, Sligo, Tralee and Westport.
During the first nine months of "Black '47" the export of grain-derived alcohol from Ireland to England included the following: 874,170 gallons of porter, 278,658 gallons of Guinness, and 183,392 gallons of whiskey.The total amount of grain-derived alcohol exported from Ireland in just nine months of Black'47 is 1,336,220 gallons!
A wide variety of commodities left Ireland during 1847, including peas, beans, onions, rabbits, salmon, oysters, herring, lard, honey, tongues, animal skins, rags, shoes, soap, glue and seed.The most shocking export figures concern butter. Butter was shipped infirkins, each one holding nine gallons. In the first nine months of 1847,56,557 firkins were exported from Ireland to Bristol, and 34,852 firkins were shipped to Liverpool. That works out to 822,681 gallons of butter exported to England from Ireland during nine months of the worst year of"famine". If the other three months of exports were at all comparable, then we can safely assume that a million gallons of butter left Ireland while 400,000 Irish people starved to death!
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Available at this [Link] is, " "Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland: The Extent of the Potato Crop in Ireland at the Time of the Famine." Read before the Society on October 30th, 1959" which documents the -actual- potato production during the years of the British genocide.