Famine, holocaust, Irishness

Frank and Paul have been having a long, drawn out battle on the famine, the holocaust & irishness. The sheer scale of the debate is almost too much for two lone bloggers to enage in. I fear they may each exhaust themselves trying to outpoint each other in this rock-em sock-em bout.

I don't really want to get drawn into this one, but I'd like to make a few points:

1. The famine was a calamity and the response of the British government was insufficient. I don't believe the government set out to kill a million people, but they didn't make much of an effort to prevent it from happening either. I don't think that is the equivalent of the Endloesung.

   In addition, considerable effort was expended over the course of the Holocaust to find increasingly efficient means of killing more people, for example, by switching from carbon monoxide poisoning to the use of zyklon B in the Reinhard death camps of Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, as well as Maidanek, and Auschwitz--gas vans using carbon monoxide for mass killings were used in the Chelmno death camp. In addition to mass killings, Nazis conducted many experiments with prisoners, children inclusive. Dr. Josef Mengele, one of the most widely known Nazis, was known as the "Angel of Death" by the inmates of Auschwitz, for his experiments.

2. Both Frank and Paul denigrate Irish-Americans in their respective pieces. If any group today "owns" the famine, it's Irish-Americans. Most of them are descended from famine immigrants. After those who died during the famine, the people who had to leave were the next biggest losers from the famine. This collective "memory" is the last one most Irish-American families have of Ireland. Although time may have distorted it somewhat, there is still plenty of essential truth in that collective memory. That is, the people were driven out by hunger and the British government of the day under Lord John Russell was ultimately responsible for this.
3. The Famine was a primary motivation for the independence movements in Ireland that arose from the 1850's just as the Holocaust was the primary motivation for the eventual modern state of Israel. The parallels are often ignored in modern Ireland.