As an African American university professor of Africana Studies and history (Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, USA) I find it unsettling to recognize how universal the experience of African Americans really is. First, so many other ethnicities, nations, and peoples have experience slavery, oppression, and genocide, not just African Americans. And second, most disturbing, everyone who suffers abuse at the hands of the monarchist, imperialist, corporate, and religio-fascist power experiences the same sort of 'second death' of false history, mythologies, and outright lies about their experience that gets told as actual truth. An example of this is the Irish Holocaust.
My students, journalists, television, film, and even textbooks continually repeat the outrageous lie that there was an Irish 'potato famine' in the 1800's (1846-1860?). This is a lie, and a not very sturdy lie at that--it takes only a little research to call it into question. I teach African American and diasporic African history and culture and so I often teach the history of the Irish holocaust (genocide) both in any general curriculum of history (the genocide against the Romany or 'gypsy' peoples, the genocide against Native Americans and against other indigenous peoples of the Western hemisphere), and also as a means of discussing the African holocaust (the transatlantic slave trade, African American oppression in the United states).
No matter what subject in history I teach I always encounter great shock from students who say they had no idea that the Irish died of anything other than 'potato famine'. Of course, any real historian or scholar of European history knows only too well that this is a lie. Why would a country of people who have fed themselves on a great diversity of foods die in such great numbers because of the loss of one single crop?? No, the truth of course is that the British did the same thing to the Irish that they'd done to Indians, Africans, and Chinese: they stole the natural resources, food, labor, and lives of the Irish; the British and their landlords took the land so that farmers couldn't grow crops--potatoes and otherwise; they prevented commerce, appropriated various crops that were grown, and they interrupted centuries old patterns and traditions of maritime culture, thus preventing adequate harvesting of seafood that had for centuries fed the Irish people (they did the same thing to coastal towns and villages in Africa and in Hong Kong). So, the Irish starved because of the 'failure' of one crop? It makes no sense. One must discuss the long history of British imperialism, expropriation, theft, and brutality to make any sense of the deaths and the scattering of Ireland’s sons and daughters. I challenge all historians to take the responsibility we should be taking but are not, of teaching the truth about world history.
Though "The Troubles" go back as far as the 1400's and even reach back to the 1100's when the first settlement of Ireland by Nearly 100 Irish Clan leaders fled from Ireland and sought the Pope's protection in 1607 when King James I imposed English law upon all of Ireland, with no legal or political justification other than the one used to do the same to Scotland: Royal Fiat (the whim of the King).
The lands of the Clan leaders, six northern counties, was confiscated: these were the six counties of Northern Ireland. The same tactic of 'Settlement' long used in modern times by the Israeli occupation against the Palestinian people was used against the Irish in the 1600's as it was also used against the Scots: English settlers were sent to settle in the confiscated counties of The North.
During a series of wars throughout the 1600's, the English carried out scores of terrorist campaigns against the Irish, seeking to crush any and all native resistance to this overt domination of the British empire. Ulster's villages, food stores, homes, schools, churches, crops, and livestock were destroyed, as were Irish shipping, farming implements, cottage industries, and economic life, along with thousands of Irish people's actual lives: citizens were tortured, arrested, intimidated or executed in order to sustain an atmosphere of terror. Historians note the irony that the resulting famines that swept across the island due to these totalitarian abuses led to more Irish deaths than several of the wars and terrorist campaigns did.
So much for the myth of the 'hand of God' revealed in a so-called 'potato famine'.
As for the so-called 'religious conflicts of the Irish' that led to so much internecine violence that the British, so they claimed, were 'forced' to 'impose order' militarily in order to keep the 'warring sects' apart, the 1600's marked The English use of religion as a weapon: the English Anglican Church was forcefully imposed upon the Irish, and became a symbol of the English dictatorship. In response, the long tradition began of Irish rebellion being associated with Irish Catholicism. As in other situations of occupation, partition, and expropriation across history, the natives of Ireland used religion as a form of resistance to occupation, while Irish citizens loyal to England used their sharing Protestant religious belief with the British as a means of affirming their desire for political union with the British occupier.
As an African American, how could I not automatically be interested in the suffering of other peoples on this planet who have been victimized in the same ways I have, and in many cases by the same oppressors? What Europe did to Africa, Asia, Latin America, and India, it also did to Ireland (the British oppression of India went hand-in-hand economically with its oppression of Ireland!) I am beginning a brand new semester of a course I teach periodically at Wayne State, "Anglophone Caribbean Politics, History, and Culture" and I plan to do my first night's opening class meeting next Monday with a lecture about corporate and government exploitation and colonization of nations such as Ireland which I always do as a way to contextualize the horrible exploitation of the Caribbean nations by Europe and America. I will be directing my students to this page and discussion board. I will also be showing them some video about Bobby Sands and talking about the history of "The Troubles" in Northern Ireland.
I grew up in Detroit seeing reports on television news about the modern day suffering of the Irish people under British occupation, and in Jr. high school I read of "Bloody Sunday," which took place in 1972 in Derry, where innocent Irish civil rights protesters were attacked by British PARATROOPERS(!) who were in the course of supporting the ongoing occupation of Derry. The fact that the British were using SOLDIERS to 'police' Irish civilians, (one group which desired union with Britain--the Irish Protestants, and another, seeking complete independence in the North--the Irish Catholics) is a sure sign that they were not 'keeping order' between 'warring religious groups' but were conducting an illegal occupation.
The victims of the Derry massacre were run down by British military vehicles, and shot in the back by British soldiers. I also remember how, nine years later, how Maze Prison political captive Bobby Sands died during a hunger strike that focused world attention on the cruelty and human rights abuses of the British, who had turned Northern Ireland into a virtual prison (with communities surrounded by walls and barbed wire, under constant video surveillance, patrolled by military personnel). As an African American how could I not see the similarities between Derry and the Edmund Pettis Bridge in the American South where vicious racists attacked peaceful Black civil rights demonstrators?
How could I not see the similarities between Bobby Sands and Mumia Abu Jamal, a black political prisoner held since 1995 on death row here in the state of Pennsylvania, USA? Bobby died for ONE EXACT REASON: he and other prisoners demanded that the British government restore their status as political prisoners of war after the Brits had stripped them of that dignity, reclassifying them instead as common criminals. The fight to simply have our suffering seen honestly and legitimately, free of lies, distortions, and myths, is the greatest fight of all for the oppressed on this planet.
So, as an educator, writer, journalist, and Black man, I push to educate students in America about the truths of history. I do call this history we are discussing "The Irish Holocaust" because that is exactly what it was. Its about time the history books be rewritten to reflect the truth.
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