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Fake Indians invade Dublin!

The British role in the Irish potato famine

I was doing come research on the Potato famine, and I was surprised to find suggestions of a British Genocide in Ireland, an allegation of horror that trumps the Holocaust for its sheer inhumanity.

sign in Belfast accuses the British of a Holocaust

To learn more about these allegations of de-humanizing the Irish, I was guided to the book Paddy’s Lament: Prelude to Hatred.

This book has convincing evidence on how the English dehumanized the Irish, with striking parallels to the systematic dehumanization of the Jews by the Nazis.

This is right from Adolph Hitler’s playbook "Mein Kamph". If you want to do ethnic cleansing, you must start by depicting the victims as something less than human.

Like the Nazi’s dehumanized the Jews, the British de-humanized the Irish, depicting them as monkeys.

The Irish were depicted as sub-human by the UK

This carton says it all, the regal British Lion by the Irish Monkey:

At first I did not believe it, treatment so horrific that it was hard to believe that the English could be so cruel:

It is clear from periodicals that the United Kingdom treated the Irish as animals, as shown in this racist cartoon depicting an Irishman in a circus monkey cage:

Just like with Hitler, dehumanization was critical lest the citizens come to the aid of their starving fellow humans.

I visited the Irish famine memorial in Dublin, very moving, but there was never a mention of how the English contributed to the genocide. I did learn that Queen Victoria only donated 1,000 pounds to feed the starving Irish while the the impoverished American Indian's (The Choctaw Nation) raised over $700 to help the dying Irish.

Francis A. Boyle, a professor of International Law at the University of Illinois, finding that the British violated sections (a), (b), and (c) of Article 2 of the CPPCG and committed genocide, issued a formal legal opinion to the New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education on May 2, 1996.

Law professor Charles E. Rice of Notre Dame University likewise issued a formal opinion, also based on Article 2, that the British had committed genocide.

Professor Daniel Ritschel of the University of Maryland notes:

The most important historiographical debate revolves around the issue of British responsibility for the Famine. (4) Irish nationalist have long charged the British with the crime of genocide. Among more recent examples of such views, the New York-based Irish Famine/Genocide Committee commissioned in 1996 a report by F.A. Boyle, a law professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which concluded that


Clearly, during the years 1845 to 1850, the British government pursued a policy of mass starvation in Ireland with intent to destroy in substantial part the national, ethnic and racial group commonly known as the Irish People.... Therefore, during the years 1845 to 1850 the British government knowingly pursued a policy of mass starvation in Ireland that constituted acts of genocide against the Irish people within the meaning of Article II (c) of the 1948 [Hague] Genocide Convention.

If you want to understand the roots of the hatred between the Irish and the British, check out the great book "Paddy's Lament".  Once you understand how the British treated the Irish as a sub-human species, you can start to appreciate the hatred that is seen in Belfast.