The Real Irish American Story Not Taught in Schools

[AlicetheKurious]

Anybody ever read "Angela's Ashes"? I've had a copy for many years, never got around to reading it, because someone told me it was depressing.

[AhabsOtherLeg]

Yeah, it is good Alice, the film is pretty good too. It doesn't go much into the political situation or the famine as such, since it is told through the eyes of Frank McCourt when he was a young boy. A lot of it is actually quite funny, the Irish always having had a knack of laughing at hardship and adversity without minimizing the reality of it.

This one's for you SLAD, specifically about the exile experience of those driven abroad by the famine. I don't know why the lyrics say a million died, though - it was significantly more than that.



Searcher, there was a great docu on about Celtic music not too long ago, made by a Scottish folk musician (can't remember his name unfortunately). He spent a lot of time with the Basques and said he originally fell in love with the place because: "I already knew all the instruments and tunes." Aren't the Welsh known as Celt-Iberians too? There was clearly massive amounts of cross-pollination, Europe wide at least, and now of course world wide, which is cool.

[Searcher08]

It is, no doubt, quite possible that persons entirely ignorant of the Irish and Arabic languages, may have confounded the two from the similarity of pronunciation, especially as they both abound in guttural sounds not heard in our cultivated western tongues.

a7a.

(a very rude sound in Arabic often made in response to statements like the above)

Part of a documentary North African - Irish links

Lots of Berber women look straight outta Galway


The Berbers are the most 'Irish' culture outside of Ireland I have met. They refer to Ireland as 'The Land of Sorrowful Songs'.... loved them to bits - they were as open, fun, really nutty and every encounter could be an adventure, like the Irish on a good day - they sometimes have sing-a-longs on their buses - think a surreal Atlas mountains version of... John Candy singing 'Meet The Flintstones' in Planes, Trains and Automobiles. Epic!

[Nordic]

[Searcher08]

Yeah, it is good Alice, the film is pretty good too. It doesn't go much into the political situation or the famine as such, since it is told through the eyes of Frank McCourt when he was a young boy. A lot of it is actually quite funny, the Irish always having had a knack of laughing at hardship and adversity without minimizing the reality of it.

This one's for you SLAD, specifically about the exile experience of those driven abroad by the famine. I don't know why the lyrics say a million died, though - it was significantly more than that.



Searcher, there was a great docu on about Celtic music not too long ago, made by a Scottish folk musician (can't remember his name unfortunately). He spent a lot of time with the Basques and said he originally fell in love with the place because: "I already knew all the instruments and tunes." Aren't the Welsh known as Celt-Iberians too? There was clearly massive amounts of cross-pollination, Europe wide at least, and now of course world wide, which is cool.

Thanks AHOL, I'll look for that - sounds great.
Yes, I just didnt want to mention the Welsh because they are sheep shaggers.
More of the Celts came from.. the Balkans, which explains the Orthodox Celts from Belgrade

[Searcher08]

Perhaps one of Alexander The Great's descendents?

[Stephen Morgan]

Perhaps one of Alexander The Great's descendents?

He didn't have any. After his death all of his relatives were quickly wiped out in the power struggles, his unborn son, his wife, his idiot half brother, his witch mother, even his eunuch catamite. Both wives. Bastard. All dead, very quickly. No surviving descendants at all.

[Nordic]

Perhaps one of Alexander The Great's descendents?

He didn't have any. After his death all of his relatives were quickly wiped out in the power struggles, his unborn son, his wife, his idiot half brother, his witch mother, even his eunuch catamite. Both wives. Bastard. All dead, very quickly. No surviving descendants at all.

On further googling, turns out that photo above is of a Kalash girl, from Pakistan. Found some more photos of them -- quite fascinating. Apparently there's this whole enclave of them in Pakistan and it is speculated that they could be from Alexander the Great's soldiers (not necessarily him).

Anyway, my mistake, she isn't a Berber even though my google search originally indicated that she was.

[Searcher08]

Perhaps one of Alexander The Great's descendents?

He didn't have any. After his death all of his relatives were quickly wiped out in the power struggles, his unborn son, his wife, his idiot half brother, his witch mother, even his eunuch catamite. Both wives. Bastard. All dead, very quickly. No surviving descendants at all.

On further googling, turns out that photo above is of a Kalash girl, from Pakistan. Found some more photos of them -- quite fascinating. Apparently there's this whole enclave of them in Pakistan and it is speculated that they could be from Alexander the Great's soldiers (not necessarily him).

Anyway, my mistake, she isn't a Berber even though my google search originally indicated that she was.

Yes, I meant from his entourage rather than Alexander specifically.

[AhabsOtherLeg]

Thanks AHOL

How rude!

I can't find any details about the show unfortunately, except that the presenter was Phil Cunningham. Well worth watching, though.

As for the Welsh:

[Searcher08]

There's an old gaelic saying "love hides disgust." I grew up understanding the big parade day was more an American than an Irish invention in that, as a certain Harrington explained it to me, "on this day, all people get to be Irish, it isn't just what's in your blood, but what's in your eye." Everyone has to have some form of distinction. Shane McGowan, after all, is not exactly unheard of wherever the reels may echo; Indeed, I've known some that stayed afloat well into their '80's. False pride is a cheap trinket sold outside the baptistrey when the bells can't stop ringing in all those swollen, whiskey soaked brains. But there are these moments, you know, when all the barriers seem to break down. Yes, it is an illusion, and yes, I remember children dancing on the plank. But for an instant here and there it seems like everyone is reflecting everyone, and the old ladies who only go out once a year say stoof like "donna get me wrong sonny, I love the old country, but I wouldn't trade a yard a where I stand now for an acre of that misery over there." Things change. They claimed it as their own that which mystifies and curses since the times of the Nile. The Hibernians will sing of Ragland Road, and toss one back for Bobby Sands. Me, I celebrated reading Heaney to my son whom I named after him...then drank a pint of Guiness. For the road is long and wet and hard to see and it is important to reflect on how one may fall.

blackberry picking
Late August, given heavy rain and sun
For the full week, the blackberries ripen.
At first, just one a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green hard as a knot.
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it
Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger sent us out with milk cans, pea tins jam pots
Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.
Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills we trekked and picked until the cans were full, until the tinkling bottom had been covered with green ones and on top big dark blobs burned like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered with thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's.


We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.
But when the bath was filled we found the fur, a Rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.The juice was stinking too.
Once off the bush the fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would soon turn sour.
I always felt like crying. It was not fair that all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.
Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.


Ahab, as a fellow Celt, please accept my grovelling apologies. I feel like this guy.


Love the vid

[TheDuke]

Has anyone read this?



I had a ring bound copy and it was great fun. He correlated Irish and Hebrew words and drew fire on both the British and Roman Empires. It's from about 1923 I believe. I can't imagine there was a huge market for this kind of publication then. I would love to know the story behind Conor Macdari, I'm assuming he was a member of some sort of lodge (probably not an Orange one)

ahh yes

Conor MacDari was an Irish American mason and occult author, best known for his eccentric claims regarding Ireland's ancient history.

Macdari subsequently became known as the "Irish Comyns Beaumont" for his idiosyncratic eccentric claims, some of which were:

Adam and Eve were both born in Ireland.

The Bible was originally written in Irish, not Hebrew.

The events of the Old Testament took place in Ireland.

The so-called Hebrew is but an artificial sacerdotal dialect of an ancient Irish priesthood.

The most ancient code of laws on earth were established in Ireland.

The origin of the pope traces back to the Irish Druids.

Ancient Greek history is mostly fiction and her classical personages are merely mythical characters taken from Irish culture.

The Irish built the Great Pyramid of Giza.

All the ancient British kings derived from Ireland.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conor_MacDari

http://www.scribd.com/leon_garber/d/592 ... vilization

[seemslikeadream]

bump

The Slaves That Time Forgot

Ireland quickly became the biggest source of human livestock for English merchants. The majority of the early slaves to the New World were actually white.

From 1641 to 1652, over 500,000 Irish were killed by the English and another 300,000 were sold as slaves. Ireland’s population fell from about 1,500,000 to 600,000 in one single decade. Families were ripped apart as the British did not allow Irish dads to take their wives and children with them across the Atlantic. This led to a helpless population of homeless women and children. Britain’s solution was to auction them off as well.

During the 1650s, over 100,000 Irish children between the ages of 10 and 14 were taken from their parents and sold as slaves in the West Indies, Virginia and New England. In this decade, 52,000 Irish (mostly women and children) were sold to Barbados and Virginia. Another 30,000 Irish men and women were also transported and sold to the highest bidder. In 1656, Cromwell ordered that 2000 Irish children be taken to Jamaica and sold as slaves to English settlers.

Many people today will avoid calling the Irish slaves what they truly were: Slaves. They’ll come up with terms like “Indentured Servants” to describe what occurred to the Irish. However, in most cases from the 17th and 18th centuries, Irish slaves were nothing more than human cattle.

As an example, the African slave trade was just beginning during this same period. It is well recorded that African slaves, not tainted with the stain of the hated Catholic theology and more expensive to purchase, were often treated far better than their Irish counterparts.

African slaves were very expensive during the late 1600s (50 Sterling). Irish slaves came cheap (no more than 5 Sterling). If a planter whipped or branded or beat an Irish slave to death, it was never a crime. A death was a monetary setback, but far cheaper than killing a more expensive African.

The English masters quickly began breeding the Irish women for both their own personal pleasure and for greater profit. Children of slaves were themselves slaves, which increased the size of the master’s free workforce. Even if an Irish woman somehow obtained her freedom, her kids would remain slaves of her master. Thus, Irish moms, even with this new found emancipation, would seldom abandon their kids and would remain in servitude.

In time, the English thought of a better way to use these women (in many cases, girls as young as 12) to increase their market share: The settlers began to breed Irish women and girls with African men to produce slaves with a distinct complexion. These new “mulatto” slaves brought a higher price than Irish livestock and, likewise, enabled the settlers to save money rather than purchase new African slaves.

This practice of interbreeding Irish females with African men went on for several decades and was so widespread that, in 1681, legislation was passed “forbidding the practice of mating Irish slave women to African slave men for the purpose of producing slaves for sale.” In short, it was stopped only because it interfered with the profits of a large slave transport company.

England continued to ship tens of thousands of Irish slaves for more than a century. Records state that, after the 1798 Irish Rebellion, thousands of Irish slaves were sold to both America and Australia.

There were horrible abuses of both African and Irish captives. One British ship even dumped 1,302 slaves into the Atlantic Ocean so that the crew would have plenty of food to eat.

There is little question that the Irish experienced the horrors of slavery as much (if not more in the 17th Century) as the Africans did. There is, also, very little question that those brown, tanned faces you witness in your travels to the West Indies are very likely a combination of African and Irish ancestry.

In 1839, Britain finally decided on it’s own to end it’s participation inSatan’s highway to hell and stopped transporting slaves. While their decision did not stop pirates from doing what they desired, the new law slowly concluded THIS chapter of nightmarish Irish misery.

But, if anyone, black or white, believes that slavery was only an African experience, then they’ve got it completely wrong.

Irish slavery is a subject worth remembering, not erasing from our memories. But, where are our public (and PRIVATE) schools???? Where are the history books? Why is it so seldom discussed?

Do the memories of hundreds of thousands of Irish victims merit more than a mention from an unknown writer? Or is their story to be one that their English pirates intended: To (unlike the African book) have the Irish story utterly and completely disappear as if it never happened.

None of the Irish victims ever made it back to their homeland to describe their ordeal. These are the lost slaves; the ones that time and biased history books conveniently forgot

[seemslikeadream]

Welcome to Holocaust Education Trust Ireland
Holocaust Education Trust Ireland aims to teach about the Holocaust and its consequences. HETI designs educational and cultural programmes suitable for all ages and all walks of life.

that's ok wintler....here in the states people still don't know about the Native American holocaust either

[seemslikeadream]

Irish Holocaust Denial and the campaign against "Sinn Féin/IRA" national | rights and freedoms | opinion/analysis Dé Luain Lúnasa 28, 2006 16:35 by Donnchadh donn2010 at hotmail dot com
The denial of genocide as a modern political weapon
Irish Holocaust denial, or genocide denial, which refers to itself as revisionism, has evolved over three decades of propagandising as an important "cutting edge" ideological weapon in the ideological war against the IRA after 1969.
"The political commentator, the ballad singer and the unknown maker of folk-tales have all spoken about the Great famine, but is there more to be said? If man, the prisoner of time, acts in conformity with the conventions of society into which he is born, it is difficult to judge him with irrevocable harshness. So it is with the men of the famine era. Human limitations and timidity dominate the story of the Great Famine, but of great and deliberately imposed evil in high positions of responsibility there is little evidence."

Editors R. Dudley Edwards and T. Desmond Williams writing in "The Great Famine: Studies in Irish History 1845-52"

"Firstly the Great Irish Famine is not a generalised illustration of the dangers of "unrestrained" capitalism, rather it was a freak natural occurrence that was in many ways exacerbated by flawed government policies. Secondly, the Irish Famine was very different from the tragedies which have recently being witnessed in Sub-Saharan Africa. Thirdly, the fundamental cause of famines in the late twentieth century is not Western "injustice" and "indifference" but are rather the actions of third world governments and their armed political competitors.

On a superficial level the proximate cause of the famine can be readily identified; the fungus phytophthora infestans which destroyed a large portion of Ireland's potato crop over the period 1845-9. Indeed it has been convincingly shown that the pre-famine Irish economy did not contain the seeds of its own destruction and that there was nothing inevitable about the famine had the potato blight not occurred. The famine was an unpredictable ecological freak; in words of the Dutch historian and scientist Peter Solar it was a case of "Ireland as having been profoundly unlucky" rather than being the inevitable product of market forces run wild (or of unrestrained population growth)."

Learning the Wrong Lessons: Governments, Hunger and the Great Irish Famine By Gareth G Davis

Irish Holocaust denial, or genocide denial, which refers to itself as revisionism, has evolved over three decades of propagandising as an important "cutting edge" ideological weapon in the ideological war against the IRA after 1969. While appearing on the surface as a scholarly challenge to the well-established record of English genocide against the Gaelic nation since the Norman invasion, Irish Holocaust denial serves as a powerful theory uniting otherwise disparate groups (e.g., Ulster Unionists, Southern Neo-Unionists, 26 county free staters, the British establishment, British public opinion, etc.).

On the surface, Irish Holocaust deniers portray themselves as individuals and groups engaged in a legitimate, dispassionate quest for historical knowledge and "truth." Dressing themselves in pseudo-academic garb, they have adopted the term "revisionism" in order to mask and legitimise their enterprise. After all, the ongoing challenge to and revision of previously accepted historical interpretation is one of the hallmarks of the professional historian's craft.

These so-called revisionists assert that the premise that the British Empire engaged in a premeditated campaign of genocide against the Gaelic people of Ireland is one that does not stand honest scholarly scrutiny.

They do not deny that the British government engaged in persecution of and discrimination against the Gaelic population. They even admit the frequency of famine and prevalence of discrimination in occupied Ireland. They assert, however, that the anti-Irish actions of the British government were in large part a legitimate response to Irish misdeeds and disloyalty. As such, the measures taken were not qualitatively different from similar actions of European powers of the time.

Irish Holocaust deniers seek to plant seeds of questioning and doubt about the Irish Holocaust in their mass audiences. While Holocaust denial has become an article of faith among many in the 26 county establishment, its success does not depend upon conversion to that faith among the general public. The spread of scepticism about the scope and historicity of the Irish Holocaust among a critical mass of public opinion would be considered to be a significant ideological triumph in and of itself.

Genocide denial has been widely embraced within the otherwise disparate contemporary Neo-Unionist movement because it serves as an ideological cement that meets a very contemporary political need. In particular, it provides a sanitized envelope for the latter-day occupation of the six counties of north eastern Ireland by seeking to show that the heinous crimes ascribed to British rule in Ireland never took place. As such, much of the barrier preventing the legitimisation of contemporary British rule in Ireland from making a strategic breakthrough by appealing to a more mainstream audience would be removed. Accordingly, Holocaust denial provides contemporary legitimisation through posthumous rehabilitation. It is no accident that some Southern establishment parties are avid propagators of genocide denial ideology. The core message of the Irish Holocaust deniers is even more insidious.

They recognize the fact that most people believe that the Irish Holocaust / Artificial Famines were man made. (There were nine "famines" between 1740 and 1880. And incredible amount of pure incompetance, timidity, or profound bad luck?) How can it be, they ask, that the great majority have come to accept as truth an historical assertion which is in actuality a total falsehood?

They answer that most people have come to accept uncritically the story of the Irish Holocaust because they have been systematically propagandised with deliberate lies for over one hundred and fifty years. These lies include materials inserted by De Valera into the educational curriculum; the content of Holocaust-related folk lore and song; a vast Irish Holocaust literature; public rituals of genocide remembrance etc.. They picture a vast shadowy conspiracy, led by Sinn Féin/IRA and Fianna Fáil dupes that manipulate the institutions of culture in order to disseminate a false mythology.

The purpose of this genocide mythology, they assert, is the delegitimisation of the British state in Ireland and a legitimisation of the IRA campaign. This legitimisation is used to advance the IRA agenda of Irish Unity and total independence from England.

An interesting article
by Donnchadh Tue Aug 29, 2006 17:30
Here is an interesting article by James Mullin with makes the point more clearly:

Ireland's Revisionist Historians: A Generation of Vipers

James Mullin
May 11, 2006

The traditional view of Irish history is based on the premise that the Irish people had a moral right to fight for their political, economic, social and cultural independence from Imperialist Britain.

According to Dr. Christine Kinealy,(A New History of Ireland, This Great Calamity, etc.) an opposing view began to emerge in Ireland in the 1930s, when a number of leading Irish Academics, following the lead of earlier British historians, set an agenda for the systematic revision of traditional Irish History, which they claimed was rife with "nationalist myths". Their declared mission was to replace this so-called mythology with objective, "value-free history".

In her essay, "Beyond Revisionism", Dr. Kinealy says that the revisionist movement gained a new prominence in the battle for Irish hearts and minds during the 1960?s when the IRA campaign intensified: "Challenging nationalist mythology became an important ideological preoccupation of a new generation of historians".

A strong opponent of the revisionist school is Peter Berresford Ellis, author of Eyewitness to Irish History, and A History of the Irish Working Class, and many other historical works. In his essay, "Revisionism in Irish Historical Writing", Ellis argues that a more correct term to describe revisionists is "neo-colonial" or "anti-nationalist".

"In its mildest form, this school of thought apologizes for English imperialism, and in its strongest form it supports that imperialism," he wrote. These anti-nationalist historians accept the thesis that Englands invasion and conquest of Ireland is not a matter for moral judgment. It is simply a fait accompli.

One of the most popular arguments of the revisionist school is that there was no Irish national consciousness when the invaders arrived. Ireland was a land of divided, warring factions, '"and the arrival of one more such faction is not a matter of importance nor of moral speculation."

They argue further, that English colonial rule in Ireland was beneficial to the Irish people, although their imparting of civilization was at times, a bit too brutal.

Finally, these revisionists use their interpretation of history to justify the status quo in Ireland today: "The Six Counties of North-East Ulster are depicted as a democratically formed unit in which the political majority is represented by Unionists. Partition, imposed by bloodshed and violence, and threats of bloodshed and violence by Britain against the democratic wish of the Irish nation is not considered in such histories." (Ellis)

Two books emboldened the revisionist movement in the early 1970's: States of Ireland by Conor Cruise O'Brien, and Towards a New Ireland by Garrett Fitzgerald. Both books made peace with British imperialism, maintaining that the real Irish independence tradition was a '"home rule" philosophy.

"The lesson they attempted to hammer home", according to Ellis, "was that separation from England was never a popular concept in Irish historical development - that the republican tradition was a minority view." These revisionist authors would have us believe that the Irish People simply "wanted a greater say in their domestic affairs within English colonial structures." (Ellis)

O'Brien wrote that the 1916 rebellion was despotic: "a putsch with no pretense of popular support." His words are echoed by a contemporary revisionist, Ruth Dudley Edwards. In her book, Patrick Pearse, The Triumph of Failure, she portrays Pearse as a deluded romantic obsessed with a desire for revolutionary "blood sacrifice" and heroic martyrdom.

Pearse "glorified war", she says, and "sanctioned the sacrifice of self and others." He was "part of a despotic tradition" and "acted and died for a people that did not exist."

Dr. Marianne Elliot's book, Wolfe Tone, Prophet of Irish Independence, continues in the same revisionist vein. One reviewer, Dr. Anthony Coughlan, called her work, '"a fundamentally hostile interpretation of Tone", saying, "the author evidently has little sympathy for the ideal of an All Ireland Republic which Tone and his fellow Protestants came to adopt in the 1790s."

The work of these anti-nationalist historians has been accurately described as, "the historiography of the Irish counter-revolution", yet they want the public to believe that they hold the moral high ground above all nationalists and unionist factions. "They disguise their partisanship under the cloak of academic objectivity," says Ellis.

Today, the unchallenged demigod of the anti-nationalist school is Roy Foster, head of the Irish History Department at Oxford University. Born in Waterford in 1949, he burst on the academic scene in 1989, with the publication of the 600-page revisionist tome, Modern Ireland: 1600-1972.

The book was hailed as "a work of gigantic importance" by the Irish Times, "a revisionist milestone" by the Irish Literary Supplement, and a "masterwork" by many historians who reviewed it. Foster has read these press clippings, and now believes he has been given a divine gift of historical interpretation.

Desmond Fennell, an Irish critic, said the underlying message of Modern Ireland was Foster's revisionism, which he called, "A retelling of Irish history which seeks to show that British rule of Ireland was not, as we have believed, a bad thing, but a mixture of necessity, good intentions and bungling; and that Irish resistance to it was not, as we have believed, a good thing, but a mixture of wrong-headed idealism and unnecessary, often cruel violence."

Discussing the aftermath of the Easter Rising, for example, Foster wrote: "The draconian reaction of the (British) authorities to the rebellion should be understood in terms of international war and national security."

Maybe the execution of 16 Irish Republican leaders had nothing at all to do with the history of Britain in Ireland!

Foster is the author of The Oxford History of Ireland, and the Oxford Illustrated History of Ireland, and other quasi-historical works. His fluid writing style and talent for omitting entire periods of Irish history because they do not conform to his revisionist thesis, have made him an author much in demand.

In his strangely titled work, The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making it up in Ireland, he adopts the patronizing position that the Irish have "misused" their own history. It seems that the mischievous Irish have taken the great events of their history - the 1798 Rising, the Famine, the Celtic Revival, Easter 1916, the Troubles - and dropped them into a fanciful narrative that includes elements of myth, folklore, ghost stories and romance.

The result, according to Foster, is nationalist fiction - the "Story of Ireland" - complete with the novelistic elements of plot, drama, suspense, and a heroic victim. One review of the Foster book concluded that traditional Irish history is "manipulated for political ends, and Irish poverty and oppression are sentimentalized and packaged."

In The Irish Story, Foster claims that "the new modernized and liberated Irish consciousness feels a sneaking nostalgia for the verities of the old victim-culture, which was also, in its way, a culture of superiority. The concept of a perennial victim produces a very emotionally powerful and emotionally coherent story, but it also leads to a kind of denial that any other elements in the Irish Story have any part to play."

Christopher Shea of the Boston Globe obviously bought into Foster's attack on the simple, myth-filled narrative about Ireland. In his review, Shea wrote: "That story stars a holy island nation. It suffered under English rule for centuries, nearly died, and then rose, liberated and reborn, in 1922, with partial independence. The story, in its basic shape, mirrors the life of Christ. And the story, in Foster's view, has bred boatloads of sloppy thinking and historical myopia - and a whole lot of wallowing."

One of Foster's acolytes is Irish author Colm Toibin. In a 1993 piece for the London Review of Books he recalled the heady days of his youth when he first read Foster:

"I became a revisionist, I remember feeling a huge sense of liberation. I was in my late teens and I already knew that what they had told me about God and sexuality wasn't true, but being an atheist or being gay in Ireland at that time seemed easier to deal with as transgressions than the idea that you could cease believing in the Great Events of Irish nationalist history. No Cromwell as cruel monster, say; the executions after 1916 as understandable in the circumstances; 1798 as a small outbreak of rural tribalism; partition as inevitable. Imagine if Irish history were pure fiction, how free and happy we could be! It seemed at that time a most subversive idea, a new way of killing your father, starting from scratch, creating a new self".

Then he gets to the real heart of historical darkness: "This revisionism is precisely what our state needed once the North blew up and we joined the EC, in order to isolate Northern Ireland from us and our history, in order to improve relations with Britain, in order to make us concentrate on a European future. Foster and his fellow historians' work became useful, not for its purity, or its truth, but its politics."

Here is a revisionist historian who puts politics on a higher plane than the truth. Foster's disciple makes it clear:"value-free history" is nothing more than a euphemism for partisan political propaganda.

The Great Irish Famine Was Genocide

By Francis Boyle
Global Research, March 16, 2010
17 March 2010
Region: Europe
Theme: Crimes against Humanity
Some controversy has surrounded the use of the word “genocide” with regard to the Great Irish Famine of 160 years ago. But this controversy has its source in an apparent misunderstanding of the meaning of genocide. No, the British government did not inflict on the Irish the abject horrors of the Nazi Holocaust. But the definition of “genocide” reaches beyond such ghastly behavior to encompass other reprehensible acts designed to destroy a people.

As demonstrated by the following legal analysis, the Famine was genocide within the meaning of both United States and International law.

The United States Government is party to the 1948 Convention On The Prevention And Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (“Genocide Convention”). As a Treaty of the United States , the Genocide Convention is therefore “the Supreme Law of the land” under Article VI of the U.S. Constitution. The U.S. Government has also passed implementing legislation which substantially adopts the Genocide Convention and makes any violation of the Convention punishable under federal law. 18 U.S.C. § 1901.

Article II of the Genocide Convention provides:

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 physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within a group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

(emphasis supplied)

From 1845-50, The British government pursued a policy of mass starvation in Ireland with the intent to destroy in substantial part the national, ethnical and racial group known as the Irish People. This British policy caused serious bodily and mental harm to the Irish People within the meaning of Genocide Convention Article II(b). This British policy also deliberately inflicted on the Irish People conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction within the meaning of Article II(c) of the Convention. Therefore, from 1845-50 the British government knowingly pursued a policy of mass starvation in Ireland which constituted acts of Genocide against the Irish People within the meaning of Article II(b) and (c) of the 1948 Genocide Convention.

While there are many legitimate subjects of debate surrounding the Famine, there is no doubt that the British Government committed genocide against the Irish People. This particular “debate” should therefore come to an end.

(See Irish Echo, Feb.26-March 4, 1997 at page 7 for the list of 125 distinguished signatories)