Irish Famine Education and the Holocaust "Straw Man"

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.

Visit the Irish Famine Curriculum: http://www.nde.state.ne.us/SS/irish_famine.html