The Great Famine of Ireland, in which mass potato crop failures resulted in more than 1 million men, women, and children dying of starvation, is now recognized by some as one of the first historical examples of the dangers of monoculture. But what few people realize about this grave time in Western history is that it is also one of the earliest examples of food being used as a weapon of ethnic cleansing and genocide.
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. “[E]very 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.
“[O]ne 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:
IrishCentral.com.
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