IRISH FAMINE EDUCATION AND THE HOLOCAUST "STRAW MAN"
James Mullin
American Chronicle
July 8 2008
CA
When I first contacted Dr. Paul Winkler, Executive Director of the New
Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education, and asked him to consider
adding the study of the Great Irish Famine to the state curriculum,
he asked me if I was claiming Genocide. I said I wanted the teachers
and students to make up their own minds. He agreed with that approach.
On Feb. 11th, 1996, a full seven months before New Jersey became the
first state to approve a curriculum on the Irish Famine, the Sunday
Telegraph of London published an article, "US Schools Say Irish Famine
was Genocide".
As expected, the Telegraph article was filled with misrepresentation,
willful errors, and sentences like: "Hard-line Irish-American
Nationalists have been increasingly vocal in their demands that the
Famine be recognized as a Genocide".
Still, it was surprising to read that, "the issue has divided the
Irish-American community, with some moderate groups concerned that
comparing the famine with the Nazi-inspired Holocaust will cause
offense to Jews." I had not made, nor had I heard of any such
comparisons; in addition, I had an excellent working relationship
with the Commission, some of whose members were death camp survivors
and former hidden children.
The Holocaust comparison theme appeared again in an October 16th,
Sunday Times article, "American Pupils Told Irish Famine was Act of
British Genocide". It said that, "British diplomats in America are
dismayed at the portrayal of the Irish famine as a genocide comparable
to the mass extermination of six million Jews by the Nazis." Who was
responsible for this "portrayal"?
Since I subscribed to the Irish People, Irish Voice, Irish Echo, (New
York) Irish Edition, (Philadelphia) and the Irish Democrat, (London)
and had not read or heard of anyone making any such comparisons,
I concluded that analogy was a propaganda device called the "straw
man". Rather than answer to credible evidence of genocidal acts during
the mass starvation, the British would argue that the "Famine" was
not a genocide because it was not Holocaust.
In October, 1996, New York Governor George Pataki signed an education
law mandating instruction on the mass starvation in Ireland. He was
attacked in a Sunday Times of London editorial entitled, "An Irish
Hell, but not a Holocaust".
Here was the propaganda masterstroke full blown. The Times editorial
said, "It is true the British government does not come out particularly
well from the tale…but to compare, as Mr. Pataki has done, its
policy with that of Hitler toward the Jews is as unhistorical as it is
offensive. (Not least to the Jews, the tragedy of whose Holocaust is
necessarily lessened by comparison with an Irish catastrophe that was
neither premeditated nor man-made.) To mistake these human errors and
shortcomings for a Nazi-style policy of deliberate racial extermination
is absurd." So absurd that the "straw man" can be easily knocked over.
Governor Pataki had not mentioned the Holocaust in his speech on
signing the bill into law, nor had his subsequent press release. The
comparison was based on the simple fact that the newly signed Act
added the words, "the mass starvation in Ireland from 1845 to 1850",
to state education law which mandated instruction on "human rights
issues, genocide, slavery and the Holocaust."
British Ambassador John Kerr then carried the misrepresentation
to the highest diplomatic levels, by attacking Governor Pataki in
a letter he released to the press. It said: "It seems to me rather
insulting to the many millions who suffered and died in concentration
camps across Europe to imply that their man-made fate was in any way
analogous to the natural disaster in Ireland a century before. The
Famine, unlike the Holocaust, was not deliberate, not premeditated,
not man-made, not genocide."
On March 10th, 1997, the Washington Times Magazine, Insight, carried a
full-page editorial, "You say Potato, They say Holocaust", illustrated
with a photograph of a potato wrapped in barbed wire. It attacked
Governor Pataki and the whole idea of Irish famine education: "The
Holocaust was Hitler´s inhuman policy to eradicate Jews in Germany
and from his Thousand-Year Reich. To equate the potato famine with
that barbarism makes Pataki a contender for the title of "The Greatest
Liar in America." The British-fabricated analogy was proving itself
stronger than the truth because it made better copy.
On Aug. 26th, 1997, the Boston Globe opposed Irish Famine education in
a staff-written editorial entitled, "Unnecessary Curriculum Bill". It
said, "As the Tolman bill is now worded, teachers might be encouraged
to treat the Irish famine on the same level of moral depravity as
the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust. That would be a misreading
of the historical record. While the British approach to the mass
starvation was often brutal, arrogant and unfeeling. No state-run
death camps disfigured the Irish countryside." Did tens of thousands
of homeless, starving people, their ruined hovels and mass graves
"disfigure the countryside"?
The argument that classroom discussion of the mass starvation in
Ireland should be discouraged because British criminality did not match
the barbarity of the Nazis during the Holocaust, is a pervasive and
virulent virus imbedded in every dose of propaganda against Famine
education. The perpetrators hope to convince everyone that because
the Famine was not the Holocaust, it could not have been genocide.
Instead of the British being forced to explain massive commodity
exports and evictions during mass starvation, Irish Famine education
activists were left to defend a "Famine is Holocaust" argument they
never made.
On September 17th, 1997 the Washington Post published "Ireland´s
Famine Wasn´t Genocide" It was written by Timothy W. Guinnane,
associate professor of economics at Yale University, and author of
The Vanishing Irish: Households, Migration, and the Rural Economy in
Post-Famine Ireland. It said, in part:
"Several states have mandated that the Great Irish Famine of 1845-1850
be taught in their high schools as an example of genocide, sometimes
in courses originally intended for the study of the Holocaust… The
reinterpretation of the famine as genocide has not been well
received by scholars who study the Irish famine. Those who view the
famine as genocide claim either that the government engineered the
crisis or that its reaction to the blight promoted as many deaths
as possible. …But does the government´s inadequate response to
the famine constitute genocide? The contrast with the Holocaust is
instructive. The Nazis devoted considerable resources to finding and
murdering Jews. The regime´s stated intention was the elimination
of the Jewish people. Nothing like this can be claimed against the
British government during the Irish famine. The British government´s
indifference to the famine helped cause thousands of needless deaths,
but it was indifference nonetheless, and not an active effort at
systematic murder… To call the famine genocide cheapens the memories
of both the famine´s victims and the victims of real genocides."
While the Holocaust is the best documented, most systematic, ruthless
and brutal genocide of the 20th century, it is not the definition of
genocide. Since the United States and Britain are parties to the 1948
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,
the definition that applies is contained in Article II: ´In the
present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed
with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical,
racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated
to bring about its phyisica1 destruction in whole or in part; (d)
Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e)
Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.´
Francis A. Boyle, Professor of International Law at the University
of Illinois, has experience arguing matters of genocide before the
International Court of Justice in The Hague. He wrote to the New Jersey
Commission on Holocaust Education on May 2, 1996, saying, in part:
"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, ethnical, and racial group commonly
known as the Irish People, as such. In addition, this British policy
of mass starvation in Ireland clearly caused serious bodily and
mental harm to members of the Irish People within the meaning of
Genocide Convention Article II (b). Furthermore, this British policy
of mass starvation in Ireland deliberately inflicted on the Irish
People conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical
destruction in substantial part within the meaning of Article 11(c) of
the 1948 Genocide Convention. 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."
In December, 1848 (one hundred years before the 1948 Genocide
Convention was signed) Cholera began to spread through many of
the overcrowded workhouses, pauper hospitals, and crammed jails
in Ireland. On April 26th, 1849, the Earl of Clarendon, the Lord
Lieutenant of Ireland, wrote to Prime Minister Russell: "…it is
enough to drive one mad, day after day, to read the appeals that
are made and meet them all with a negative…At Westport, and other
places in Mayo, they have not a shilling to make preparations for the
cholera, but no assistance can be given, and there is no credit for
anything, as all our contractors are ruined. Surely this is a state
of things to justify you asking the House of Commons for an advance,
for I don’t think there is another legislature in Europe that would
disregard such suffering as now exists in the west of Ireland, or
coldly persist in a policy of extermination." No advance was granted.
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