to me that is the gist. Genocide by the system without the people in the system intending it to happen (with those people even trying to mitigate its damage) It has been happening again and again - a system follows orthodoxy/ideology despite its subjects mass dying as a result, and we still don't have a machinery in place which should serve as emergency brakes on any system once that system, for whatever, and frequently even good sounding reasons at that, starts to cause such pain and suffering and deaths:
>Militant Irish nationalism would follow Jane Wilde in seeing the famine as mass murder and thus as what would later be categorized as a genocide. Under pressure from Irish Americans, this even became an official doctrine in New York, where a state law signed in 1996 by then governor George Pataki required schools to portray the famine “as a human rights violation akin to genocide, slavery and the Holocaust.”
>Pataki announced that “history teaches us the Great Irish Hunger was not the result of a massive failure of the Irish potato crop but rather was the result of a deliberate campaign by the British to deny the Irish people the food they needed to survive.” But this is not what history teaches us. A much more accurate conclusion is the one drawn by the Irish historian Peter Gray, who wrote that there was “not a policy of deliberate genocide” on the part of the British. Instead, Gray argued, the great failure of the British government was ideological—“a dogmatic refusal to recognise that measures intended to ‘encourage industry, [and] to do battle with sloth’ . . . were based on false premises.” The British did not cause the potatoes to rot in the ground. They did launch, by the standards of the mid-nineteenth century, very large-scale efforts to keep people alive, importing grain from America, setting up soup kitchens, and establishing programs of public works to employ those who were starving. But they were blinded by prejudice, ignorance, and a fanatical devotion to two orthodoxies that are very much alive in our own time: their belief that poverty arises from the moral failings of the poor and their faith in the so-called free market. The famine was so devastating because, while the mold was rotting the potatoes, mainstream British opinion was infected with a cognitive blight.
This is very clever and an interestingly adversarial (the unjust steal from the just) take on the quote that came to my mind:
“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.”
I didn’t have a Hacker News thread where George Pataki is held up as some fenian and British sailors shelling a starving mob are misunderstood, well-intentioned chaps on my bingo card.
Yet here we are. Should you ever find yourself up against the wall during the revolution, take solace that the boys don’t take it personally at all.
> I don't think the officers ordering to fire cannons explicitly wanted those people to starve.
While I take your broader point about it being a system level issue - when you’re firing cannon at starving people so you can continue to export their food, you’re complicit, laws be damned.
That is the point - after countless deaths we produced the principle of "carrying out a criminal order is a crime", yet we still see the people committing atrocities and going unpunished because they were just carrying out the orders. And that makes me think that we're still missing something important.
Apparently we don't like this idea that a "system" can cause a genocide. Instead, we rather want to believe that only people with bad intentions are doing bad things, and that if something dramatic happen it must be because some people wanted it that way, despite the enormous amount of evidence showing that our individual volition adds almost no weigh in the course of history.
I suppose that this fallacy comes partly from the fear that people guilty of criminal negligence or hateful prejudice would escape punishment. Like that person who mentioned Nuremberg in his response. Well, no of course, that many circumstances are necessary for a genocide to happen beside just the will of the criminals, do not free anyone participating in it from the responsibilities of their actions (or lack thereof).
But I also suspect this is coming from a deeper, darker psychological bias. This belief that there are "villains" behind every crime may just be the necessary belief to justify our own wrong behavior. We do not intend to cause any harm to anyone, yet we let a lot of unjust things happen every day. We walk past some people in need for assistance every day, but we can't help everyone right?, on our way to work in some IT corporation that's also helping build bombs or military IA that's going to be used in yet another unfair war but a good defense industry is necessary right? So in order for this thought to work as justification, we need to believe that, as long as we do not intend to cause harm, then we are in the green.
The machinery we need to prevent the system we all play a small part into from causing such crimes of historical scale is that we should acknowledge and learn about the system. That's not enough to learn history ; in an advanced democratic society we would learn some sociology from middle school.
> the British government was ideological—“a dogmatic refusal to recognize that measures intended to ‘encourage industry, [and] to do battle with sloth’ . . . were based on false premises.”
I’m sure that high minded distinction would be appreciated by the barely self-sufficient tenant farmer, banished to the west when his ancestors were ethnically cleansed a few generations past, when he was evicted and left to starve.
This wasn’t capitalism any more than the depredations in India or Africa. It was a colonial state, which existed to extract considerable wealth to build and support a vast empire.
It isn't apologetic. It is a statement of "we're still not able to fix/avoid it or similar to it" almost 200 years later.
> At some point you need to hold the people who perpetuate the system accountable for the devastation it causes.
Naturally, that beyond the debate. Unfortunately we still fail to effectively unwind the system behavior back to responsible people (and there is whole theory on whether in general it is possible at all and to what extent)
>Militant Irish nationalism would follow Jane Wilde in seeing the famine as mass murder and thus as what would later be categorized as a genocide. Under pressure from Irish Americans, this even became an official doctrine in New York, where a state law signed in 1996 by then governor George Pataki required schools to portray the famine “as a human rights violation akin to genocide, slavery and the Holocaust.”
>Pataki announced that “history teaches us the Great Irish Hunger was not the result of a massive failure of the Irish potato crop but rather was the result of a deliberate campaign by the British to deny the Irish people the food they needed to survive.” But this is not what history teaches us. A much more accurate conclusion is the one drawn by the Irish historian Peter Gray, who wrote that there was “not a policy of deliberate genocide” on the part of the British. Instead, Gray argued, the great failure of the British government was ideological—“a dogmatic refusal to recognise that measures intended to ‘encourage industry, [and] to do battle with sloth’ . . . were based on false premises.” The British did not cause the potatoes to rot in the ground. They did launch, by the standards of the mid-nineteenth century, very large-scale efforts to keep people alive, importing grain from America, setting up soup kitchens, and establishing programs of public works to employ those who were starving. But they were blinded by prejudice, ignorance, and a fanatical devotion to two orthodoxies that are very much alive in our own time: their belief that poverty arises from the moral failings of the poor and their faith in the so-called free market. The famine was so devastating because, while the mold was rotting the potatoes, mainstream British opinion was infected with a cognitive blight.