American Chronicle, CA
April 29 2006
Irish Famine Education and the Holocaust ‘Straw Man’
James Mullin
April 28, 2006
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.
The Holocaust comparison theme appeared again in an October 16th,
Sunday Times (Dublin) 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,
Irish Edition, and Irish Democrat, (London) and I had not read or
heard of anyone making any such comparisons, I concluded that the
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 the 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 this `straw man’ argument could easily be 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.’ Who drew the analogy, and for what
purpose?
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, and it made
better copy.
On Aug. 26th, 1997, the Boston Globe opposed Irish Famine education
in a staff-written editorial entitled, `Unnecessary Curriculum Bill’.
`As the Tolman bill is now worded’, the Globe said, `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
thousands of homeless, starving people, ruined hovels, and mass
graves `disfigure the countryside?’
The argument that classroom discussion of the mass starvation 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 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, with experience arguing on matters of genocide before the
International Court of Justice in The Hague, 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.’
Professor Boyle’s legal opinion concludes that Britain’s actions
violated sections (a), (b), and (c) of Article II, and therefore
`constituted acts of genocide against the Irish People.’
On April 26th, 1849, one hundred years before the Genocide Convention
was signed, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, the Earl of Clarendon,
wrote to the Prime Minister, John Russell, expressing his feelings
about the lack of aid from Parliament:
`I do not 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.’
Clarendon’s words make it clear that Britain would also be guilty
under the definition of Genocide provided by Richard L. Rubenstein in
his book The Age of Triage: Fear and Hope in an Overcrowded World: “A
government is as responsible for a genocidal policy when its
officials accept mass death as a necessary cost of implementing their
policies, as when they pursue genocide as an end in itself.”