Note to the National Conference of Catholic Bishops

I posted this at the website of the Catholic Bishops, offering my services: (now the ball's in their court)

"I'm a historian (modern Europe & U.S.) with in-depth training in fascism, Holocaust studies, and communism and so I am offering my services as an educator in those areas (pro bono) to the Catholic Bishops because they have repeatedly demonstrated a colossal and breathtaking ignorance about the Church's persecution under both Hitler and Stalin.

The repeated comparison of President Obama to two of the most heinous dictators in modern history demonstrates either profound stupidity or craven disregard for responsible honest speech. If these idiotic comparisons are the result of legitimate ignorance, which is hard to believe when dealing with allegedly well educated people, then we can correct that ignorance by a course in historical truth. I am willing to work with the Bishops to that end. However, if the Bishops do not accept this offer to educate themselves and persist in making ludicrous comparisons then I will be forced to conclude that they have deliberately chosen to speak falsely and irresponsibly without any regard for the consequences of such sins.

I've conducted many educational seminars on The Holocaust and will gladly put one together specifically for the Catholic Bishops any time. Just let me know when and where. Thank you."

John Calvin and the American Cowboy

Between 1847 and 1860 nearly a million Irish Catholics arrived in the United States; they represented the first huge wave of poor refugees to immigrate. Until these Irish Famine survivors arrived, Catholics were an extreme minority in a Protestant dominated land. 

Culturally and politically America was hostile to Catholicism. This hostility had its roots in the Reformation which began when Luther nailed his complaints about Rome on a church door in Wittenberg in 1517. Before that there was only one Christian Church and it was Roman Catholic (there had been a schism before but the Reformation was a game changer like nothing that had come before).  

Soon more Reformation leaders emerged, creating new denominations and challenging Catholicism as well as each other. One of the most powerful of these was John Calvin and he became the intellectual and theological force behind the pietistic movement that shaped the Puritan movement – the same men who saw themselves as religious reformers and became a powerful force in America.  

Calvinist-Puritan thinking was centered in Biblical literalism (which Catholicism is not) and an ethic of austerity, frugality and hard work that stressed salvation rests in overcoming the flesh and glorifying God. This movement shaped the Anabaptists (Baptists), Presbyterians, Methodists and Congregationalists and indeed all of the early colonies. At the time of the Revolution, all 13 colonies had established one or another of these churches as an arm of law in their territory.  

By the time Jefferson, Franklin, and Adams gathered to form a new union they had seen the choke hold Calvinism exerted on the colonies and also understood the disastrous history created by the marriage of church and monarchy in Europe. Being further influenced by the philosophy of the Enlightenment they embarked on creating a national government free of the reach (so they thought) of any religious power.  

Eventually, the entire nation shed these “state churches” and by the mid-to-late 1800s no state boasted a “state” church. However, the influence of Calvinism had been intricately woven into the cultural fabric and influenced the nation in other ways. 

One of the most profound tenets of Calvinism is “predestination,” a belief that God determines who is saved or damned. This created a deep psychological need for clues about whether one was saved and Calvinists found affirmation of their salvation in the outward signs of material success.  

Max Weber, in “The Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism,” wrote about the relationship between the ethics of ascetic Protestantism and the emergence of the spirit of modern capitalism. Weber argues that the modern spirit of capitalism sees profit as an end in itself, and pursuing profit as virtuous so that worldly success is often seen as affirmation of God’s grace and pleasure. 

Couple this with the emergence of a frontier mentality about individual worth and you really begin to understand America’s culture wars. America’s early unlimited spaces and open opportunities suggested that anyone who was willing to work hard could be successful.

“Pulling oneself up by the bootstraps” and “applying a little elbow grease” to life became snappy formulas for success. The iconic cowboy and Calvin merged and Americans became deeply infatuated with the idea that strength of character alone made a man successful and his success was then proof that he was in with the Lord. Alternatively, non-conformity, cultural aberration, conflicts with the prevailing mores, or even just bad luck suggested a lack of character and a fall from grace.  

Famine Irish came from an entirely different reality. They knew Grandma Rooney and a million others starved to death not because of personal lack of character or Divine displeasure but simply because some greedy bastard held the reins of power. They also came from a religious tradition richly nuanced by 1500 years of theological thought that had given rise to a vastly different world view than the one embraced by Protestantism. When Luther threw out the papacy and its many sins he also threw out Aquinas, Augustine, Benedict and Jerome and a much more contextualized understanding of scripture -- but the Irish brought even more than their church and its saints to America: Along with their strong backs and pugnacity they came with a historical tradition of resistance and defiance to oppression.  

Irish Catholicism more than any other form of Catholicism was starkly different than Protestant Calvinism and the tragedy of America may well be that both the Irish and the other Catholics who came to America have forgotten these differences. For a time Irish Catholicism modified the least compassionate pietistic influences of Calvinism in our national policies.  

I suggest America would do well to ditch the national motto “In God We Trust” for those wise words of my Irish grandmothers: “There But For The Grace of God Go You.”

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First published 4/18/12 in my OpEd column in the Journal Tribune  http://www.journaltribune.com/articles/2012/04/19/columnist/doc4f8edc00e6456871289579.txt

Health Care and its Very Strange Bedfellows

Seldom discussed in conversations about the health care law (the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act or ACA) is the fact that the insurance industry has a significant stake in the law’s individual mandate provision. Insurance companies understand the ACA’s importance to their own salvation and have invested untold millions incorporating relevant provisions of the law into their own policies and practices.

To understand how the insurance industry came to embrace Obama’s health care law after it fought so hard sixteen years ago to derail the Clinton Administration’s efforts at reform, it’s helpful to understand what’s happened in the intervening years.

During the merger and acquisition days of the 1990s insurance companies were in a shark feeding frenzy to hunt and subsume smaller companies. Companies like Aetna and Cigna emerged as voracious giants able to churn out fat quarterly profits for their shareholders. These companies never played any legitimate role in holding down health care costs as they promised they would when they waged war against the Clinton Administration’s attempt to reform health care. There really was no need: As long as they were able to pump up shareholder profits by aggressively excluding an ever growing number of Americans from insurance coverage and forcing policyholders to shoulder ever larger percentages of their own medical costs all conversations about holding down health care costs were specious at best.

Eventually new economic realities reshaped the insurance marketplace as an increasing number of Americans simply chose to opt out of purchasing any health insurance. Very often, even when insurance was made available through employment, Americans found the spiraling cost of insurance premiums and ever higher deductibles totally untenable. In an era of stagnant wages, decreasing benefits and increasing inflation, more and more Americans simply could not afford health insurance.

Soon insurance carriers realized squeezing policyholders ever more dry in order to increase the bottom line only strangled the geese laying all those golden eggs.

Insurance companies created new strategies to offset their losses in the sales of insurance products. They diversified by acquiring hospitals, physician groups and other related medical care management and delivery systems. How Aetna and Cigna rebranded themselves with new mission statements is instructive. Cigna identifies itself as a “global health service company” and Aetna claims it’s one of the “leading health care benefits companies.” Did you get that? They are now health “service” and health care “benefits” companies. The word “insurance” is barely in their corporate vocabularies. The fact that insurers are also health care providers is of growing concern to medical ethicists, health care professionals and consumer advocate groups – but that’s a story for another day.

So it’s logical that insurance companies played a dominant role in assuring that Congress chose the individual mandate option as a cornerstone of the ACA. There would be no better way for the large insurance companies to not only survive but thrive than to have an expansion of health care via the mandate that all Americans must purchase insurance coverage.

The other option, of course, was a single-payer system which is essentially a vastly enlarged version of Medicare and would be run by the government. A single-payer system would have the benefit of being clearly constitutional and is also the model most employed by other nations. However, it would leave the health insurance industry out in the cold.

But the issue impacts all of us. Without the individual mandate the ACA may still stand but the number of people willing and able to purchase health insurance will continue to shrink as has happened for a decade. The remaining pool of insured individuals will age and become sicker while younger people and families will become increasingly less likely to buy insurance. This gap will cause premiums to soar, Medicare will become ever more strained, and the number of uninsured will continue to create stress on the economy in catastrophic ways. All people well versed in the crisis in health care realize America has to do something to make health care accessible and affordable for all and unless the government takes over healthcare the only way an alternative system can survive is if it requires the participation of all Americans. The individual mandate was a compromise Obama was forced to make but if the ACA unravels under the judicial scalpels of the Supreme Court single-payer may yet be the way we go.

Which brings me to the grand irony of this battle: devotees of free market capitalism created the constitutional test about the individual mandate in an effort to destroy the ACA (and let’s admit it: also Obama) but the mandate they attack is a safety net for the largest for-profit free market industry in the nation.

Proving rather brilliantly how political interests can sometimes murder their own strange bedfellows.

“Broccoli?” Let’s Get Real.

In 1943 President Roosevelt proposed a Second Bill of Rights declaring “freedom from want” to be an essential human right that included “the right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health.” The United Nations embraced FDR’s vision in 1948 and  drafted The Universal Declaration of Human Rights which states “everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of oneself and one’s family, including food, clothing, housing, and medical care.”

America rejected Roosevelt’s vision, making us the only powerful nation to deny universal access to healthcare until recently when, in March 2010, President Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“ACA”). The Obama Administration has been fighting to preserve ACA ever since and it is now before the Supreme Court. I’m not optimistic about the outcome since the current Court is one of the worst in our history, second only to the Taney Court that gave us the Dred Scott decision (which legalized segregation until it was overturned by Brown v. Board of Education 50 years later). Last week Justice Scalia created a bizarre analogy between eating broccoli and the ACA’s mandate to purchase health insurance.

Yep: broccoli. Taney would be proud.

Certainly the ACA is not perfect. I hoped for nationalized healthcare; instead we have a government partnership with insurance companies. However, the ACA is a step in the right direction: before it became law Americans experienced some of the poorest health indicators among all industrialized nations, despite spending more per capita on healthcare than any country in the world. Over fifty million Americans, 19 million of whom were children, lacked access to adequate healthcare and those who had access didn’t always receive the best care.

America has been insanely bogged down in arguments that healthcare is a non-essential discretionary commodity rather than a basic human right necessary for life. As I already mentioned, even Scalia has gotten lost amidst the kale and leeks in the produce aisle. The debate has been further muddied by fear-mongering arguments about efficiency and cost, neither of which holds water.

The debate should turn on one issue and one issue only: whether a minimal level of healthcare is a basic human right. If we agree it is, then everything else is merely process.

Edmund Pellegrino, M.D., insists healthcare is a right: “Americans have made healthcare a commodity when it should be primarily a human service. Healthcare cannot be left to the vagaries of the marketplace. Sickness is a universal human phenomenon that ultimately afflicts all of us. That is why economics, while important, should not drive health care. Caring for the sick, the poor, the elderly and the very young are societal obligations – not opportunities for investment and profit making.” 

Pellegrino has written over 600 articles and books in medicine and ethics. He’s founder of the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, a Master of the American College of Physicians, Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, Professor Emeritus at Georgetown University, and recipient of 52 honorary doctorates.  

Arthur L. Caplan, Ph.D., also believes healthcare is a human right. Caplan is Professor of Bioethics, Chair of the Department of Medical Ethics and Director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania. He’s authored 25 books and over 500 papers in medicine, bioethics and health policy.

Caplan states “… health insurance is not a luxury, it is a right...This nation espouses a belief that there will be liberty, justice, and opportunity for all. Are we succeeding when we deny basic healthcare coverage to the vulnerable, the frail, or the working poor? And what kinds of opportunity exist for those who cannot walk, eat, drive, or speak because they have suffered strokes, heart attacks, or loss of limbs that could have been prevented with better access to primary and preventive care? Many object to calls for universal coverage on the grounds of cost, intrusion into freedom of choice, abhorrence of paternalism, and a demand for more individual responsibility, among other reasons... many of those raising these objections…already support another system that has many parallels to universal health insurance coverage: universal education.”

Caplan writes that “It is the right of all Americans to obtain a basic education. It is also their responsibility to obtain it. One cannot simply “opt out” of being educated, because we as a society consider it… too important to have an educated populace. While it is true… many of our public schools are dismal failures, that does not lessen the national commitment to try and ensure a decent education is available to all…”

Pellegrino and Caplan are only two of many ethicists who argue healthcare is a right. These are the leaders who should help us shape the debate, not judges who compare healthcare to vegetables, paid lobbyists for drug companies or politicians playing ideological games. We need to center social welfare policy inside moral philosophy, not toxic ideology.

Thanks for sticking with me. We’ll continue this discussion next week.
Enjoy your holiday.

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This article was first published 3.28.12 in my OpEd column at the Journal Tribune
http://www.journaltribune.com/articles/2012/04/04/columnist/doc4f7c65c647d00754485170.txt

Theatre of the Absurd: "Obamadeath"

Aren’t we getting tired of nothing coming out of the Republicans but a bunch of nonsensical and mendacious huff & puff? America’s drowning in serious issues requiring intelligent discourse, political compromise and reasonable resolution but what’s coming out of the right is pure Theatre of the Absurd; it’s killing them and, frankly, it’s so preposterous it’s not able to hold the Democrats accountable for the things they need to explain or work harder to accomplish.

If President Obama found a cure for cancer his opponents would scream “Obama’s warring on your God given right to die and go to heaven!” Pat Robertson would praise the manifest virtues of death bed conversions and Hannity would interview Orly Taitz who’d offer demented proof that the forger who signed Obama’s birth certificate also forged certificates for Rosemary’s Baby and a kid called Damien. No one, including Hannity, would have a clue what she’s talking about but O’Reilly would jump on it and interview Tim LaHaye, author of the “Left Behind” series. LaHaye would say “Yes; people who accept Obama’s cure for cancer will be left behind after the Rapture.”

The Catholic bishops would denounce Obama for attacking the sacraments of Reconciliation, Communion, and Anointing of the Sick, and probably also St. Jude. “We cannot allow any action that will threaten our religious right to miracles,” Cardinal George of Chicago would warn.

Congressional leaders would claim cancer’s a job creator. Boehner will say it will cost America “240 gazilliontrillion jobs”because coffin makers, embalmers, florists and Hallmark sympathy card artists“will flee to third world countries where the death industry still thrives.”The insurance industry, smarting over being denied its traditional role screwing sick people, will spend millions lobbying against Obama’s socialist attack on life insurance agents.

Palin will have seen this coming from her front porch. “It’s as obvious as a pit bull with lipstick! Well, Mr. President, we reject your socialism, fascism, Islamic North Korean Hitleresque assault on God! You cannot tell Americans of this great nation how they will die!” Warming to her subject, she’ll throw in a few “Drill! Baby Drill!” cheers for good measure.

Of course, Republican wannabees for the presidential nomination will chime in too. Mitt will say “Well those aren’t exactly the words I might have used Tuesday or the words I would have chosen Thursday but that was before I denied the words I said last month about what I’ll say tomorrow.” Trust him to add “I believe in letting the free market determine what kills us. Curing cancer robs the drug industry and its investors of their right to make billions off human suffering and that, my friends, is not what this country is all about! Cancer is people too!”

Santorum will be furious. “This infanticide of cancer cells before they’re even born will not be tolerated when I’m elected pope… err, excuse me, president. If we allow the president to cure cancer pretty soon we’ll have man-on-dog sex in every hospital in America. There’s a clear logical progression here, a true moral slippery slope. I can’t explain it to you but trust me it’s there and it’s Biblical. Cancer is a gift from God. If you have cancer you should thank God for the gift and learn to live with it.”

Newt, never to be outdone, will remind us he’s the only electable candidate with real experience in Washington and then say “When Hillary Clinton warred on cancer I was there to stop her. As the only professor of history in this primary I can assure you I understand the history of death. No president has the right to tell you or your family how you should die. If people allowed someone to eradicate plague in the early 1300s we wouldn’t have had the Black Death and as the smartest guy in the country I can assure you there’s some historical relevance here somewhere and if you elect me as president I’ll bamboozle our enemies in Iran with the same academic flim flam I’m telling you tonight.”

Ron Paul would be out to lunch but eventually he’d issue a statement that he’d never use tax dollars to cure cancer -- but that’s no surprise because he’d never use tax dollars for anything.

At least thirty states would legislate against“Obamadeath.” Mississippi and Texas would be quick to ban federal funds to cure cancer in their states and others would quickly mandate that before you receive a biopsy some opening in your body (no one cares which) is probed, photographed, and becomes a part of your permanent record with the Secretary of State. To placate critics, however, some bills would allow voters to use these medical records as their valid ID’s when they try to vote… proving once again there’s an upside to everything.

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This article was first published 3.28.12 in my OpEd column at the Journal Tribune http://www.journaltribune.com/articles/2012/03/28/columnist/doc4f7324af73d17430387716.txt

Want to Vote? Better Check if U Can

Republican-sponsored bills eroding voter rights are now law in thirty-two states. These laws could have a chilling effect this November – which is exactly why they were passed. Just as Jim Crow politicians used poll taxes and literacy tests to keep Southern blacks from voting, current GOP governors and state legislators have drafted laws to prevent millions of students, minorities, immigrants, ex-convicts and the elderly from casting ballots – people most likely to be concerned about GOP attacks on social policies and individual rights who usually vote as Democrats.

Republicans dispute these laws represent a political agenda but the facts prove otherwise. The far right has been talking about curbing voter rights since at least 1980 when the influential conservative activist, Paul Weyrick told a gathering of evangelical leaders he didn’t want everybody to vote. Weyrick said “As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down." And that’s exactly true.

Efforts to suppress voters’ rights kicked into high gear after the 2010 midterm elections when the American Legislative Exchange Council, funded in part by the Koch Family Foundation, began to steamroll legislation specifically designed to impede voters at every step of the electoral process in at least 38 states. Judith Browne-Dianis is the co-director of the Advancement Project, a civil rights organization based in Washington that monitors attacks on voters’ rights. She calls these laws the “most significant setback to voting rights in this country in a century." 

Kansas and Alabama now require would-be voters to provide proof of citizenship before registering. Florida and Texas made it harder for groups like the League of Women Voters to register new voters. Five states, Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Tennessee and West Virginia, shortened their early voting periods. Florida and Iowa barred ex-felons from the polls, disenfranchising thousands of previously eligible voters. Six states controlled by Republican governors and legislatures (Alabama, Kansas, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin) require voters to produce a government-issued ID before casting ballots. Maine tried, but fortunately failed, to repeal Election Day voter registration. These laws have been sprouting all over the nation. It certainly cannot be merely coincidental.

Republicans insist they’re waging war against an epidemic of voter fraud, an irony lost on no one who still remembers how they seized control of the White House in 2000 despite having lost the popular vote. After taking power, the Bush administration declared war on voter fraud, making it a "top priority" for federal prosecutors. In 2006, the Justice Department fired two U.S. attorneys for refusing to pursue trumped-up cases of fraud in New Mexico and Washington. Karl Rove called illegal voting "an enormous and growing problem” and told the Republican National Lawyers Association that parts of the country "are beginning to look like we have elections like those run in countries where the guys in charge are colonels in mirrored sunglasses." It was utter nonsense; classic far wing hyperbolic dishonesty.

The truth is something vastly different: a major probe by the Justice Department between 2002 and 2007 failed to prosecute a single person for going to the polls and impersonating an eligible voter, which the anti-fraud laws are supposedly designed to stop. Out of 300 million votes cast in that period, only 86 people were convicted of other forms of voter fraud. That’s right: 86 out of 300 million. So it’s no wonder that the prestigious Brennan Center for Justice, a leading advocate for voting rights at the New York University School of Law, offered an excellent reality check in this sea of insanity when it announced that a voter is more likely to be hit by lightning than impersonate another voter in order to commit election fraud.

Nothing about these laws makes any sense until you begin to put all the pieces together. Also watch how aggressively Republicans work to discredit any effort at pushback; that’s when they bring out the long knives, whether Rush or the commentator whose snide article ridiculing Attorney General Eric Holder’s efforts to protect voters’ rights was published in this paper last week. It was a classic propaganda piece using flawed history, clever sarcasm, and the usual false equivalencies to unrelated over-generalized facts that people already show photo IDs to cash checks, enter secure areas, and maybe buy beer -- clever but specious arguments because none of those activities are Constitutional rights nor applied equally around the country. Remember also that those particular ID requirements guard against legitimate harms: financial crimes, safety, and underage drinking. Voter suppression laws are necessary only if there’s an equally compelling need to protect the nation from the harm of voter fraud -- but there is not.

The laws themselves are the danger.

Or put another way: there’s about as much voter fraud as there were weapons of mass destruction.

______________

This article was originally published 3/21/12 in my weekly column in the Journal Tribune. Here's the link:

http://www.journaltribune.com/articles/2012/03/21/columnist/doc4f69dd63d9d2a461096955.txt

The Great Hunger

Tomorrow is St. Patrick’s Day and since Irish Catholics played a significant part in America’s politics and culture – a culture that is swiftly dying or at least severely under attack — it’s fitting to share with you some facts about Irish history that you may not know much about. Let me assure you that they are very timely today.

And no, this is not going to be a damn recipe for Irish Whiskey Cake.

Tomorrow I’ll post another article that will specifically address how the Irish Catholic ethos changed America. Today I’m concentrating on how that ethos was forged out of pain and misery and came to define a people.

It will tell you why a real Irishman will say “there but for the Grace of God go I” and not “that man’s in trouble because he deserves to be…”

And therein is the heart of the difference between Irish Catholicism and the Protestant Calvinist ethos and why they are in continual battle for the American soul.

We need to start with the story about an Gorta Mor which is Gaelic for “The Great Hunger” and sometimes also called “The Starvation.” You may know of it as the Irish Potato Famine. It was a period of mass starvation, disease and displacement that permanently changed Ireland’s demographic, political and cultural landscape – and also America. Approximately 1.5 million Irish died as the result of starvation and starvation-caused disease. Another million emigrated (the Irish “diaspora”).

Cataclysmic events in history have both remote and proximate causes and the Irish famine that began in 1845 was no different. The proximate cause of this disaster was a fungus commonly known as “potato blight.” The blight ravaged potato crops throughout Europe during the 1840s and caused widespread suffering but the consequences of the blight were significantly more devastating in Ireland than other countries. The blight, of course, was not caused by the English. The ensuing disaster, however, was – both by their oppression before the blight and because of their reaction to the blight.

Let’s look at the remote causes first: Ireland suffered an anguished, bloody history evolving around English invasions, English colonization, and multiple uprisings and civil wars for roughly 600 years before the potato blight. The country was repeatedly devastated by brute force and English law, as well as forced deportations. It is estimated that over 50,000 men, women and children may have been sent to Bermuda and Barbados in the 1700s as slaves. Most well known of all the English laws were the infamous Penal Codes. The laws were designed to obliterate Irish culture, Catholicism, and in the end human dignity.

Here is a sample of the Penal Laws imposed against Irish Catholics; if you know anything about the infamous Nuremberg Laws enacted in the Third Reich against the Jews you’ll see a chilling resemblance between the two:

Under the Penal Laws an Irish Catholic was forbidden to: receive an education, practice a profession, hold public office or vote, own firearms, live in a corporate town or within five miles thereof, own a horse of greater value than five pounds, purchase land from a Protestant, receive a gift of land from a Protestant, or inherit land or chattel from a Protestant. Irish Catholics were also forbidden to educate their children in their own homes, send them to a Catholic teacher, bring a Catholic teacher into come to the home, or send them abroad for an education. The laws were not always rigorously applied and sometimes were even ignored; but the point is they give grim evidence to the brutal realities of English domination over Ireland.

English policies toward the Irish during the famine years exacerbated the famine crisis and turned a natural crop disaster into a disaster of epic proportion. When the Irish call the famine the Starvation or The Great Hunger or an Gorta Mor it contextualizes the disaster as less of a recurring natural tragedy or act of God and more accurately as the consequence of deliberate national policy. Throughout the famine, the English never stopped importing massive amounts of crops and livestock from Ireland. Christine Kinealy, the author of Irish Famine: This Great Calamity and A Death-Dealing Famine, documented that Irish exports of calves, livestock (except pigs), bacon and ham actually increased during the famine. The food was shipped out of Ireland under British armed force from the most famine-stricken parts of Ireland.

British policies toward Ireland during the famine were greatly influenced by a refusal to allow the crisis to harm the English economy and English business interests. There is debate about whether British policies toward the Irish during the famine were merely callous or deliberately sinister. Cecil Woodham-Smith wrote in The Great Hunger; Ireland 1845–1849 that no issue has provoked so much anger and embittered relations between England and Ireland as “the indisputable fact that huge quantities of food were exported from Ireland to England throughout the period when the people of Ireland were dying of starvation.”

England had long talked about the “Irish Problem” and during the famine it became more than a political metaphor; historians have found statements in newspapers and Parliament about how the starvation of the Irish could finally free England of its unfortunate problem. What was the problem? Apparently, a stubborn refusal to die off and give the English absolutely every inch of Irish soil. To give a measure of what they had lost over a hundred years, the Irish owned 45% of Irish land in 1760. In 1850 they owned less than 5%. At the time of the famine they were squatters in their own land.

These discussions of fact are not inconsequential. At issue is whether an Gorta Mor represents the first genocide in modern history. International law defines “genocide” as certain specified acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”

In 1996, Francis Boyle, professor of law at the University of Illinois at Urbana, wrote a report commissioned by the New York-based Irish Famine/Genocide Committee, which concluded that the British government deliberately pursued a race and ethnicity-based policy aimed at destroying the group commonly known as the Irish people and that the policy of mass starvation amounted to genocide per the Hague convention of 1948. Famine stories have burned deeply into the Irish cultural consciousness – an effect seen in cultures that have survived genocide. Based on Boyle’s impressive scholarly research, New Jersey now includes the famine in its “Holocaust and Genocide Curriculum” at the secondary education level.

The English had long viewed the Irish as a separate and inferior race. They were likened to swine and monkeys and called every other abominable name. The racial aspects of Irish oppression are very interesting.

After the Reformation and the devastating religious wars that followed, Catholics and Protestants learned to live side by side each other in their respective nation states, such as in France and Germany. This never happened in Ireland. The English oppression of Ireland, which reached its most devastating period after Cromwell invaded in 1649 during the Counter-Reformation, incorporated a racial component that transcended religious intolerance.

In order to justify its continued political oppression of Ireland, which became increasingly more difficult to do for religious reasons alone, it became necessary for the English to think of the Irish as racially inferior. Race hate needed to be layered over their denominational differences – which were, after all, very limited. The Anglican Church and the Catholic Church are barely distinguishable in doctrine and practice. An Anglican has more in common theologically with a Catholic than with a Lutheran or a Methodist. Therefore, hatred based on religion alone would not seem logical. Defining the Irish as racially inferior and incapable of civilized behavior made oppression more reasonable.

The English definition of the Irish as a separate and loathsome race followed the Irish to America and easily fit within a culture that was already severely racially divided by law and custom. Toward the end of the nineteenth century pseudo-scientific beliefs about race and the rise of eugenics, as well as social-Darwinism were also in place. Vilifying and discriminating against the Irish was as easy for the nativist WASPs in America as it had been for the English.

The Irish, however, weren’t buying it. Like post-Holocaust Jews they said “Never Again.”

Some references:

http://www.preventgenocide.org/genocide/officialtext.htm)

http://www.irish-society.org/home/hedgemaster-archives-2/history-events/the-penal-laws-era

http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Irish_Potato_Famine_(1845%E2%80%931849)

http://www.historyplace.com/worldhistory/famine/

http://www.authenticireland.com/irish+famine

http://adminstaff.vassar.edu/sttaylor/FAMINE/