A rchive Date
[ 12-03-2004 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Russia ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/gleeson.html
Shall we compare genocides?
By JOHN GLEESON - Winnipeg Sun
March 12, 2004
Back in November, I asked the question: How could the world not know about the murder of seven million Ukrainians by forced starvation and state-sanctioned terror under Stalin?
Henri Chevillard of Pimichikimak First Nation sent in this reply: "How can the world not know about the murder of 20 million Aboriginals? Remember smallpox, the first biological weapon?"
Other readers wrote in similar rhetorical questions about "their" forgotten genocides - especially after the Canadian Museum of Human Rights came into the picture and the comparisons between the Ukrainian Holodomor and the Jewish Holocaust became a sort of contest for museum floorspace.
Envisioned to make Winnipeg a national magnet after it opens in 2008, the proposed museum is not dedicated to the depiction of human "wrongs" - though it will put Canada's human rights record on display, warts and all, while paying homage to our evolution into a fair and caring society.
But it's the inclusion of a Holocaust gallery in the museum plan that has so far attracted the lion's share of public attention to the project.
So, for the love of St. Patrick, let's throw one more genocide on the table and see what it does.
Because, more than the Holocaust or the Holodomor, the Irish Famine of 1845-50 touched Canada directly, and remains a prime exhibit in the case that has to be made, if we are to stand up as an independent nation, against the very imperialism that "created" Canada.
IRELAND'S GREAT Hunger has been part of the Holocaust and genocide curriculum in American secondary schools for almost a decade. The accepted version is that about one million Irish died in the famine and a similar number fled the country. Attempts to include the Irish who died aboard "coffin ships" or shortly after landing, and to correct faulty census data from the period, have led some scholars to raise the death toll as high as 5.2 million.
What makes the "potato famine" a genocide?
"Ireland did not starve for potatoes; it starved for food," writes Chicago-born civil engineer Chris Fogarty, whose groundbreaking research is now accepted in universities across the U.S. "Ireland starved because its food, from 40 to 70 shiploads per day, was removed at gunpoint by 12,000 British constables reinforced by the British militia, battleships, excise vessels, Coast Guard and by 200,000 British soldiers (100,000 at any given moment).
"Bayonets, cannons, rifles, the lash, eviction and the gallows were freely used to seize Irish food."
Grain, livestock and dairy products - enough to feed the island three times over - were removed by force, and the people starved. As with Stalin's regime, the British government cited ideology - in this case, the doctrine of laissez-faire capitalism, or non-interference in market forces - to rationalize a policy of genocide toward a people who had been made into virtual serfs.
To some British officials, the famine was a means to a specific end. Just as Stalin's terror succeeded in forcing the independent Ukrainian peasant on to collective farms, the famine in Ireland wiped out small holdings, consolidating agricultural production under absentee-landlord ownership.
Nassau Senior, Queen Victoria's economist, was disappointed the famine "would not kill more than one million people, and that would scarcely be enough to do any good."
As with Hitler's Nazis, leading British thinkers justified the removal of food and subsequent mass starvation on the basis that the Irish, popularly depicted as crazed immoral beings with simian features, were an inferior race, just as Africans and Indians and Arabs were deemed inferior.
The British historian Edward Freeman, who visited the U.S. in 1881, wrote after his return: "This would be a grand land if only every Irishman would kill a Negro, and be hanged for it." His obituary said "he gloried in the Germanic origin of the English nation."
Both the Irish and Ukrainian "famines" resulted in about a 25% drop in population, and both "taught lessons" to unruly peoples who stubbornly clung to their culture and religion. In that sense, the Holocaust was different. Neither Stalin nor the British government set out to exterminate the Ukrainians or the Irish to the last man, woman and child (although one British prime minister, Peel, mulled it over). In fact, their official position was one of duplicity and denial.
Taking 19th century "scientific racism" to its ugly extreme, the Nazis' "final solution," carried out openly as wholesome public policy, was an act of unique depravity. And with whole nations still buying into global Jewish conspiracy theories, no wonder Jews fear the Holocaust can be repeated if it isn't dutifully remembered.
But genocide is far from unique. The U.S. curriculum on the Irish famine rejects the notion put forward by some British scholars that the empire's treatment of the Irish was an aberration from an otherwise clean imperial record.
In fact, the British starved tens of thousands of prisoners during the Boer War, were a leading nation in the slave trade and forced China to import opium. Britain is also blamed for more than two dozen famines that cost millions of lives in India and Bengal. As late as 1943-44, according to Australian academic Gideon Polya, a "man-made" famine in Bengal killed an estimated 3.5 to 5 million people.
"An extraordinary feature of the appalling record of British imperialism with respect to genocide and mass, worldwide killing of huge numbers of people (by war, disease and famine) is its absence from public perception," Polya writes.
Which brings us back to the museum. If Canadians want to enshrine "the good and evil men do," then there can't be any whitewashing of British imperialism. Of the 100,000 Irish who fled to Canada in 1847 alone, only 60,000 were still alive one month after landing.
This is a Canadian story and it needs to be told in Canada.
John Gleeson is the editor of the Winnipeg Sun. He can be reached by e-mail at jgleeson@wpgsun.com Letters to the editor should be sent to editor@wpgsun.com
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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