An Overview of the Irish Holocaust

Between 1845 and 1855 Ireland lost a third of its population—1 million people died from starvation and disease and 2 million emigrated. The decimation of the potato crop in the 1840s brought on the danger of mass starvation, but it was Britain's calculated response that perpetuated the tragedy.

Contrary to popular opinion, the conditions of a famine did not truly exist in Ireland during this time. During the ten year period, researchers have estimated that the island produced enough food to feed 18 million people, more than double its population at the time.  English protestant landowners had access to a varied diet and the Irish economy as a whole remained a profitable exporter of grain, pork, beef and fish.

The problem for the Irish people was that they had limited access to these native food resources. British penal law, first instituted in 1695, made it illegal for Irish Catholics to own land, apply for fishing or hunting licenses or to enter trades or professions. This forced the Irish to remain as sharecropping farmers subsisting on small rented farms owned by English Protestants. They relied almost exclusively on the sale of potatoes to pay rent to their landlords and buy food.

When a devastating water mold (phytophthora infestans) struck the potato harvest in 1845, the Irish were deprived of their only cash-crop. Many tried to eat the rotten potatoes and fell ill to cholera and typhus. Landlords evicted the starving tenants, or sent them to workhouses where overcrowding and poor conditions led to more starvation, sickness, and ultimately death. More sympathetic landlords paid the passage for their tenants to emigrate to America, Canada, and Australia. Ship owners took advantage of the situation and wedged hundreds of diseased and desperate Irish into ships that were hardly sea-worthy. These ships became known as "coffin ships" as more than one-third of the passengers died on the voyage.

The belief that the famine was God’s intention guided much of Britain’s policy in their management of the crisis. They viewed the crop failures as “a Visitation of Providence, an expression of divine displeasure” with Ireland and its mostly Catholic peasant population.

The British government in Ireland, led by Sir Charles Trevelyan, was far more concerned with modernizing the Irish economy and reforming its people’s “aboriginal” nature than with saving lives. Trevelyn described the famine as an "effective mechanism for reducing surplus population" and that "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".

Trevelyan and other leading British officials had a direct hand in filling newspapers with the idea that the famine was the result of a flaw in the Irish character. Punch, a satirical magazine, regularly portrayed 'Paddy’ as a simian in a tailcoat and a derby, engaged in plotting murder, battening on the labour of the English workingman, and generally living a life of indolent treason. The result of such dehumanizing propaganda was to make unreasonable policy seem more reasonable and just.

Trevelyan never expressed remorse for his policies even after the full scope (approximately 1 million lives) of the Irish famine became known. 

Sources: John Kelly's 'The Graves are Walking: The Great Famine and the Saga of the Irish People' and Tim Pat Coogan's 'The Famine Plot: England’s Role in Ireland’s Greatest Tragedy'

One Part Black, 127 Parts White

In Haiti in the eighteenth century there existed a classification of physical types based on the notion that each individual was divisible into no less than 128 separate parts (rather like genes):

Thus a blanc (white) had 128 parts white, a nègre (Negro) 128 parts black, and the offspring a mulâtre (mulatto) 64 parts white and 64 parts black. The full list of classifications includes:

• Nègre (0 parts white)
• Sacatra (8 to 23 parts white)
• Griffe (24 to 39 parts white)
• Marabou (40 to 48)
• Mulâtre (49 to 70)
• Quateron (71 to 100)
• Metif (101 to 112)
• Marmelouque (113 to 120)
• Quateronné (121 to 124) 
• Sang-mêlé (125 to 127)
• Blanc (128 parts white)

From Peter Worsley, The Three Worlds: Culture and World Development, 1984

Bowling Alone

The most whimsical yet discomfiting bit of evidence of social disengagement in contemporary America that I have discovered is this: more Americans are bowling today than ever before, but bowling in organized leagues has plummeted in the last decade or so. Between 1980 and 1993 the total number of bowlers in America increased by 10 percent, while league bowling decreased by 40 percent. The rise of solo bowling threatens the livelihood of bowling-lane proprietors because those who bowl as members of leagues consume three times as much beer and pizza as solo bowlers, and the money in bowling is in the beer and pizza, not the balls and shoes. The broader social significance, however, lies in the social interaction and even occasionally civic conversations over beer and pizza that solo bowlers forgo.

From Robert Putnam’s 'Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital'

An Unwatched American Classic

Killer of Sheep is a 1970s American drama film written, directed, produced, and shot by Charles Burnett.  The drama depicts the culture of urban African-Americans in Los Angeles' Watts district. 

Killer of Sheep was shot on a budget of less than $10,000 over roughly a year's worth of weekends in 1972 and 1973, with additional shooting in 1975. In 1977, Burnett submitted the film as his Master of Fine Arts thesis at the School of Film at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Burnett stated that he also intended to make the film a history of African-American music and filled it with music from a variety of genres and different eras. Unfortunately, for this reason, the film could not be released because he had not secured rights to the music used in the film.

Shown sporadically after it's completion in the late 1970s, its reputation grew until it won a prize at the 1981 Berlin International Film Festival.

Since then, the Library of Congress has declared it a national treasure as one of the first fifty on the National Film Registry and the National Society of Film Critics selected it as one of the “100 Essential Films” of all time. Even with these enormous accolades, due to the expense of the music rights the film was never shown theatrically or made available on video. It was only seen on poor quality 16mm prints at few and far between museum and festival showings.

In 2007, three decades after it's completion, the music rights were finally purchased at a cost of US $150,000. The film was restored and transferred from a 16mm to a 35mm print and given a limited theatre release. 

Could You Buy All the Silver in the World?

In the early seventies, amidst political upheaval, inflationary pressures and stagnant economic growth, the richest family in America (at the time), the Hunt family of Texas, tried to corner the market on precious metals. As a way to hedge themselves from the rampart printing of dollars the US government was doing, the Hunts decided to accumulate large amounts of hard asset investments. Since gold could not be held by private citizens back then, the Hunt brothers focused on silver.

In 1979, the Hunt brothers, along with a group of wealthy Arabs, formed a pool buying silver and silver futures. The Hunt brothers used their positions in silver futures to acquire more of the physical metal. As cash was continually losing value due to inflation, the Hunts decided to settle their long silver futures contracts with delivery of silver, instead of cash settlement. Before too long, they had amassed over 200 million ounces of silver which was about half of the world’s supply.

Prices soon started to appreciate. When they started, the price of silver was below $5/oz. By late 1979  prices had increased tenfold and were trading near $55/oz.  As prices went higher and new buyers got into the market, the exchanges became increasingly fearful of defaulting. As the Hunts owned 77% of the world’s silver, either in physical form or futures contracts, the market had been cornered. The Hunts’ $1 billion investment was now worth around $4.5 billion. 

The U.S. government became concerned over what it saw as a clear attempt at manipulating the nation’s silver reserves.  Federal commodities regulators introduced special rules to prevent any more long position contracts from being written or sold for silver futures. This stopped the Hunts from increasing their positions by temporarily suspending the fundamental rules of the commodities market. 

The Hunt name, however, kept them afloat with easy terms on more short-term capital. The Federal Reserve then took an unusual step: it strongly encouraged banks to stop making loans for speculative activity. When it became clear that the government was after the Hunts’ scalps, their credit dried up. Concerns that the Hunts might not be able to meet margins with new loans and would go under (pulling several brokerages and banks with them), put further downward pressure on the price of silver. On March 27, 1980, the Hunt brothers finally missed a margin call and the market plunged; silver led the way, dropping to under $11 from its high of $48.70. 

Government officials considered a bailout to prevent systemic chaos. The action was vetoed, however, because the government agencies didn’t want to be seen as underwriting dangerous financial speculation. In the end, the Hunt name held true, and the brothers arranged a private bailout from a consortium of banks and companies. The Hunts were dragged in front of Congress, scolded, charged with manipulation, fined, fined again and forced into bankruptcy. It took nearly a decade for them to unwind all their silver holdings and satisfy creditors, and the final bill left them billions poorer.

Contributed by Taylor Cook