Ireland had plenty of food at the time. They even continued to export food to England. It's just that due to systematic oppression, Irish natives couldn't afford anything that weren't (now blighted) potatoes.
That's where the parallel comes from with the Native Americans.
[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/victorians/famine_01.sh...
Blaming the whigs for a technical agricultural policy point they were probably right about [1] while waving off the background of extractive colonialism that created the dependency on the potato crop is a little convenient
[1] when there's famine due to economic shortfall in a country with an agricultural economy, agriculture policy interventions like food dumping and banning exports can make things worse by collapsing the economy. if you want to help, don't send rules send money
It's pretty sickening to consider how often man-made starvation has been used as a weapon against particular nations/ethnic groups. Especially since it so often gets hand-waved away as an "act of god" later.
In a modern state with well developed central government, the state would have been able to step in and take appropriate actions. But governments of the 1840s simply didn't have the scope of action available to a modern government, or the necessary vision of their role to accompany that. The result was a tragedy of truly enormous proportions, and which certainly more could have been done to avoid; but to suggest that it was simply due to 'systematic oppression' is to greatly simplify the divisions that existed within Irish society at the time, or the motivations of those involved.
>As they would have seen it, stopping the export of food stuffs would have caused economic collapse.
They knew very well that it would have caused economic collapse only for the people in power who were at no risk of dying. And they knew very well what they could do to save the lives of people they saw starving all around them. To say they could do nothing because 'it's the system' is ridiculous. The people with power were the system. The people who starved had no real representation and that's they way it was designed by the people in power, namely the landlords and the government.
Even before the famine the reason a lot of the tenant farmers emigrated was because if they managed to be in any way extra productive and make some profit for themselves it was immediately taken from them in the form of some tax (see for example the 'window' tax). This was systematic and the people in power were responsible.
There were a number of interventions accessible by the government. As parent points out there was ideological resistance to employing them, and where employed they were done so weakly and without enthusiasm. Sir Charles Trevelyan used the same argument you do - that there was ample actions Irish landlords could take directly - as an excuse for the government not to take action. Given he described the famine as a Godly judgement on the Irish, that argument is not a reasonable explanation for his approach.
> Ireland of the time was a state
As another (currently flagged?) sibling commenter has already pointed out, Ireland was not an independent state in the 1840s, it was ruled from London. This is, I think, pretty indisputable.
> Despite what's believed from the common narrative, most of the landlords, middlemen and exporters facilitating the trade and export of food from Ireland at this time were Irish, and many were Catholics
This is the one I have issue with. As someone only familiar with the "common narrative", could you elucidate with some links to sources on this? Everything I've read indicates that the majority of landlords were absentees from Great Britain, primarily Scottish & English Protestants.
It's certainly well-documented that Protestant landlords were not universally oppressive in Ireland at the time: there are plenty of accounts of wealthy families setting up soup kitchens and other nominally philanthropic acts, but I was unaware of the narrative of most landowners being Irish.
The potato blight hit all of Europe, yet there were roughly a hundred thousand deaths in Europe compared to a million in Ireland with two million more emigrating. While Ireland certainly was more reliant on the potato than other countries, the rest of Europe seemed much more capable of addressing the crisis.
...and I say that as someone who recognizes the value of property laws. They’re all still a myth entirely created by society, so if it’s the system of debt and ownership that caused these people to starve, that is absolutely still what you can call “systematic oppression,” particularly when these terms of oppression were created by colonial masters...
(And the key to maintaining colonial power and oppression is always to make the colonial system in the interests of local power brokers like the local landlords you mention... but this sort of laundering of guilt does not absolve the colonial masters...)
In previous famines (both in Ireland and elsewhere) the government stepped in and halted exports. Governmental behaviour during the great famine was a shift.
>> A more accurate portrayal of the situation
By which measure? Because:
>> Ireland of the time was a state
No, no it was not, it was under direct rule of Westmminster as part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain & Ireland
>> most of the landlords [..] at this time were Irish
In that _some_ were born on the island of Ireland? Like the earl of lucan[1] who owned some 63,000 acres - is that what we mean when we go with the 'irish did this to themselves' narrative?
>> they were operating within an economic system were these actions made sense
Words actually fail me. Yes, i suppose it probably did make sense to those who were making money, yes.
>> But governments of the 1840s simply didn't have the scope of action available to a modern government, or the necessary vision of their role to accompany that.
This is ridiculous, The British government spent less than half a percent of the GNP at the time on relief for ireland, Lord Clarendon called it a 'policy of extermination'. The truth is that at best the british government at the time was not concerned by what was happening, at worse they saw it as a catalyst for change to tighten their grip.
I hold absolutely no truck with those that claim the great famine to be a genocide, but this 'ah well, actually if you look closely, you'll find the irish did it to themselves' is even more irksome.
[1] http://www.askaboutireland.ie/reading-room/history-heritage/...
"In 1985 Ethiopia could justly lay claim to the greatest suffering and privation in the world. Its economy was in ruin. Its food supply had been ravaged by years of drought and internal war. Its inhabitants were dying by the thousands from disease and starvation. Under these circumstances, I would not have been surprised to learn of a five-thousand-dollar relief donation from Mexico to that wrenchingly needy country. I remember my chin hitting my chest, though, when a brief newspaper item I was reading insisted that the aid had gone in the opposite direction. Native officials of the Ethiopian Red Cross had decided to send the money to help the victims of that year’s earthquakes in Mexico City...Despite the enormous needs prevailing in Ethiopia, the money was being sent because Mexico had sent aid to Ethiopia in 1935, when it was invaded by Italy."
Disturbing pictures on the news are now so routine as to be ignored .. or vanish altogether.
Hong Kong protests took over the news for a while, but then there was the Coronavirus and suddenly the Hong Kong protests seem to no longer be a thing and the people forgotten.
We're also aware 'Choctaw' and 'Hopi' and 'Navajo' are all different tribes and Native Americans aren't a monolithic group. It's just hard if not nigh on impossible to give back to the exact people that helped us. It's the sentiment that counts in this sense.
'Up Vote' privileges requires minimal karma(2), 'Down Vote' privileges are rather high(20).
Karma is visible only to the owner and the moderators.
Rationale being, people shouldn't be discouraged to post their problems however small or trivial it may sound and others to share possible ideas to solve that problem or existing solutions without any prejudice.
Ofcourse this raises the issue of people not willing to part their karma to maintain forum sanctity, but as of now that's manageable when compared to discouragement from down votes.
There's good and bad here (there's a tendency to see the world as 'oppressor' and 'oppressed'), but it comes from good intentions.
https://medium.com/@JohnWight1/celtic-football-fans-and-why-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kindred_Spirits_(sculpture)
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/kindred-spirits-sculptur...
What impressed me this time, however, is the quick read / deep read switch articles on this website have. It's the first time I see such and I bloody freakin wish every website had it!
https://www.irishcentral.com/roots/history/generous-turkish-...
But the Irish/Choctaw friendship is one of my favorite uplifting stories if only because it's about those who have little giving it away to people in a similar predicament. It's still sad but there's so much kindness in that gesture.
I think I remember a similar story where an Indian or Shri Lankan city sent some livestock to a starving European city, but can't find anything at the moment.
