The Great Dying: Ireland as a Distant Mirror
After a series of six posts on the “age of exterminations” (one, two, three, four, five, and six) I wrote that I was moving to different subjects. But then I stumbled into this video on the Irish famine of mid 19th century. It is so fascinating (in a certain sense) that I can’t avoid sharing it with you.
You may know something about the great Irish famine that began in 1845. History tells us of millions of deaths, but the whole thing for us remains remote. We don’t really realize who the victims were, how, why, what exactly happened. But I strongly suggest you set aside 50 minutes and watch this movie. “Hunger” from 2020.
It is a hit direct to the stomach. After having seen this movie, I don’t know how to describe what happened in Ireland from about 1845 to 1850. A nightmare? A horror movie? A Flemish painting of the triumph of death? Munch’s Scream multiplied by one million? Just imagine for a moment what it might have been like to live in those years for the Irish. No food, no money, no possessions, no power, no friends, and no hope. Even burying the dead became impossible: you can still see in Ireland the mass graves of the time where the bodies were thrown in thousands. The film doesn’t mention cannibalism, but there are reports that it happened at least in two cases. Surely there were many more.
What’s really horrifying is how the British government treated the Irish. Think about it for a moment: the Irish were citizens of the United Kingdom, at least theoretically. You could define them as “second-class” citizens. But they were not treated as such. Not even as non-citizens, they were treated as not belonging to the human race…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
