Opinion

What the ‘Irish famine’ genocide teaches us about Palestine

A few evenings ago I watched the 2018 film, Black 47. It tells of the Irish Famine through the story of one traumatized Irish returned soldier. The main character, Martin Feeney (played by the young Australian actor James Frecheville), returns to Ireland from India (another British colony) after fighting for the Empire, only to find the devastation brought on Ireland by the British colonizers, enforced by the very same army he fought for.

This film is painfully well made in every way and is not easy to watch, but watching it honors the memory of the victims and ensures we do not forget crimes against humanity. The film’s main story is fictional and so are the characters. But the context in which the story unfolds, the time and events of the Irish Famine, are devastatingly real.

One of the most important messages from this film is that big historical events that affect a lot of people are not some abstract thing that happens ‘out there’ that has nothing to do with us. Everything that happens to human beings is personal both to victims and perpetrators, albeit in different ways. For those looking at significant historical events from outside or from the distance of time, it can be too easy to perceive them in the abstract. In fact, the way history is written and taught makes it too easy for all of us to view things with detachment. This film warns us against that. It makes history personal.

The victims of the famine were people, human beings like us. We don’t have to know them personally to be able to put ourselves in their shoes. What would it be like to be so poor that you have nothing, to have no shoes, no warm clothes, to not be able to feed yourself and your children, to watch your children die of starvation? How frightening and how desperate would this be? We all know what it feels to be afraid. We all know what desperation feels like, even if we have never experienced the particular conditions the film shows.

What would it be like to be stripped to the bare bones of survival because of the deliberate and calculating actions of someone more powerful than you who views you with contempt because of who you are? What would it be like to be treated like you are piece of garbage, a nothing, by someone who is so much more powerful than you that he can do anything he wants to you? It isn’t that hard to imagine and right now this is life and reality for many people around the world, including the Palestinian people. There are degrees of suffering, yes, but in my profession, we do not compare suffering. Every human being’s suffering matters to them and those around them and it should matter to all of us.

The events between 1845 and 1849 that devastated Ireland are called the ‘Irish Famine’. This is a descriptive title, and yes there was a terrible famine. But such a title makes it sound like this was an unavoidable natural disaster, a force of nature, when it was anything but. The so-called ‘Irish Famine’ was really a genocide committed with intent by the colonizing British Empire. It saw millions die of starvation, disease and exposure and millions leave Ireland never to return.

Britain took advantage of a natural disaster that caused a devastating failure of potato crops not only in Ireland but elsewhere in Europe to reduce the population of Ireland and break its resistance to British colonial rule. The potato blight that swept through Ireland left millions starving. The genocide saw the Brits ship food out of Ireland deliberately, while the local people were starving. Starving people were cold-heartedly evicted out of their dwellings into the harsh and cold countryside because they were too poor to pay rent to well-nourished English and English-sponsored landlords who stole and colonized Irish land and lived in comfort and warmth. Millions, entire families, were made homeless for no reason at all and no fault of their own. They were victims of the cruelty of the ruling classes of an Empire that wanted their land. They were thrown out with nothing, starving and barefoot like useless bits of rubbish with nothing to eat, and many died.

Britain felt contempt for the indigenous Irish. It chose not to see them as fellow human beings. Charles Trevelyan, the assistant secretary to the Treasury who was effectively in charge of Famine relief in Ireland said:

“The judgment of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson, that calamity must not be too much mitigated . . . the real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the Famine but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people.” (From Tim Pat Coogan. *The Famine Plot: England’s Role in Ireland’s Greatest Tragedy*. 2013)

This quote does not need interpretation. It speaks for itself. Dehumanization is a common tactic all colonizers and settler-colonizers have been using throughout human history. All colonizers and genocidal regimes convince themselves (and all the bystanders out there) that they are not committing any crime, that in killing millions of their fellow human beings they are in fact doing something virtuous, essential and even godly. It is necessary to dehumanize victims so the job of harming, killing and displacing them is not only made easier but is in fact possible at all. Most people would not harm one another when they feel empathy and relate to each other’s experience. Colonizers do a good job convincing large sections of their own population and outsiders to turn off the empathy switch. They would not be able to carry out atrocities otherwise.

Britain managed to reduce the indigenous population of Ireland by half, and even after the worst of it was over, the population of Ireland kept declining. Britain did fail in the end. Ireland eventually freed itself from British colonialism in 1937, just under a century after the famine genocide. The entire journey however took hundreds of years of ongoing resistance to horrible cruelty, brutality, injustice, internal divisions fostered by the colonizers, a civil war and an unbelievable amount of suffering of an untold number of people.

Halving the population of a country that you colonize is one effective way to try to prevent resistance. The British ruling classes wanted Ireland not for natural resources but for strategic advantage. But regardless of the reasons that might lead one group of people to invade the land of another, colonizers and settler-colonizers are always abusive and parasitical opportunists. They invade, they take over, they turn people against one another, they suck the land and its population dry, they steal from and discard the host, or at least try to.

We see one such case unfolding in Palestine right in front of our noses and no one is doing anything about it. Most of the world looks on as it always has done. It views what is being done to the Palestinians either with the indifference of detachment, or with contempt toward the victims fueled by the choice to believe the perpetrators’ (predictable) dehumanizing propaganda. The perpetrator, the exclusively Jewish state of Israel created by the Zionist movement – itself a product of the colonialist mindset of 19th Century Europe – is still, incredibly, perceived as legitimate rather than as the crime that it is. It is as if we have learned absolutely nothing from history.

It took this long for such a painful, uncompromising and realistic film to be made about one of the many crimes of British colonialism in Ireland. I wonder when someone will finally make a film like this about the Nakba.

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Black 47 – Official Trailer – HD – IFC Films
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pSGZt-mhSY
P.S. IMDb (6.9/10) – https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3208026/

Only wanted to say thank you for your clear thinking and for this post about the movie, and more importantly about colonialism, which is at least as “painfully well” written.

Very powerful piece, extremely well written and emotionally honest.

History as it is taught, does a marvelous job of whitewashing the enormous suffering that afflicted the human race, as the most powerful among them would rise and obliterate the weaker, only to be presented later as a perfectly normal state of affairs.

Should some more enlightened aliens visit us some day, (aliens as a symbol for ones not subjected to our tales of tortured history as normative) they might well regard our species on the whole as psychotic. Deeply scarred by collective pathology and neurosis – the direct result of the fact that all those now living are the descendants of the survivors of unspeakable brutalities in some forgotten or “repackaged” glorious past, that was anything but glorious for many.

Of course, my aliens are all trained in psychology, but they have moved beyond the personal and into the collective., recognizing that toxicity can be a collective trait that goes beyond any one individual part thereof.

What happened in Ireland was not so long ago. On some vast historical tapestry, some would even say that the success of America as a country owes much to the Irish famine that sent over so many good and hard working people. But it takes movies like the one Avigail describes to pull off the veil of historicall “tapestries” to reveal the price paid by a multitude of individuals. Individuals who never got asked whether they wanted to pay the price for some grand historical scheme.

Perhaps, some day, someone will be brave enough to make a movie about the conquest of Canaan from the Philistines’ or the Amorites’ viewpoint. May be they did not enjoy god’s plans for a land of milk and honey all that much?

I keep thinking of what we were and are taught in a typical Israeli school where years of reading through the Tanakh are mandatory. It is taught to children before they reach the age of reason so it is accepted as normative, because well, the teacher presents it so. Yet, looking at the countless massacres, misdeeds, tortures and what not, justified by a god for whom cruelty was apparently second nature, it’s hard not to believe that this has hada lasting effect on the psyche of genrations of Israeli children as they grew into adulthood. They have, effectively, accepted cruelty and inhumanity of man to man, as a normal state of affairs, because that’s how they were taught. In their minds, even as they become thinking adults, Israel is justified by whatever it does to the Palestinians, because the lesson of history is that the powerful prevail upon the weak and it is the victors who wrote history. That before we even bring up things like holocaust justifies everything or the fact that the children I speak of, are the ones who grew and are growing secular, meaning they don’t even take “god” all that seriously. Yet still they believe in the biblical god’s word, because, well, it turned out OK for them.

Funny how the Mongolian conquests of Europe are rarely depicted positively. May be because they were not clever enough to come up with a god – or the “Rule of law” or “manifest destiny” to give “spiritual” purpose to their pillaging? the Mongol hordes did their conquests on the “raw”, justified by the power of the sword alone. They killed left and right because they could. Yet without a “godly” hand to guide them, and intellectual scribners to excuse them, history finds them lacking.

The british had “Law” on their side. The Jews of Israel have both “god” and “turns about fair play + a little guilt on the side” on theirs.

But those of us on the sidelines and therefore have the luxury of thinking for ourselves, would do well to always remember the individuals who are caught in the twists of turns of wanton cruelty. glad this movie was made (though i doubt I have the stomach to watch it) and glad Avigail shared with us her impressions and lessons.

PS Cloud Atlas, a book I read not long ago, expresses well, through fiction rather than wordy missives, the dreariness of the human condition of which I tried to speak, much better than me. I won’t deny the influence, even if all I have are chains of words.

A powerful analogy, thank you.