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The Washington Times
December 20, 2012 Thursday
Book Review: When death stalked Emerald Isle
By Aram Bakshian Jr. SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Book: THE GRAVES ARE WALKING: THE GREAT FAMINE AND THE SAGA OF THE IRISH PEOPLE
Author: John Kelly
Henry Holt & Co., $32, 397 pages
The English have always had trouble deciding just how far the human
race extends beyond their own borders. Thus, after a terrorist bomb
took the lives of a pair of foreign visitors, Margaret Thatcher
angrily declared, "The IRA are indiscriminately killing men, women and
children and now they have killed two Australians." A similar attitude
was embraced by early Victorian Englishmen when the great potato
famine struck John Bull's other island, Ireland, beginning in 1845:
Something bad was happening on a piece of imperial real estate to
distinctly un-English "others."
By the time the miserable cycle of blight, starvation, disease and
mass emigration was over, Ireland's population had shrunk by a third.
In the words of Sir William Wilde, a prominent Irish physician and
humanitarian whose own son, Oscar, left Ireland to pursue literary
opportunities in England, what remained was a population
disproportionately "poor, weak, old, lame, sick, dumb, imbecile and
insane." Thereafter, for generations to come, as the modern Irish
historian, R.F. Foster, has pointed out, the "hemorrhage of emigration
settled ... to a steady flow, sustained by complex mechanisms."
The great famine began as an all-too-perfect storm that no human
agency could have prevented. The same potato blight that already had
inflicted hunger and suffering on the European Continent and elsewhere
descended on a uniquely vulnerable island population, one-third of
which depended on the potato alone for its basic food. Thus, a crop
blight that had been painful in other countries with more diverse
agriculture at both the commercial and subsistence levels was fatal to
the mass of poor Irish peasantry dependent on small potato patches for
their daily survival.
If nature dealt Ireland this deadly hand, it was a stiff-necked,
self-righteous clique of English politicians and bureaucrats, rigidly
adhering to the politically correct economic and social views of their
time and place, who botched the relief effort and worsened a trauma so
deep that even today, many historians divide modern Irish history into
pre-famine and post-famine epochs. The full story of the famine, the
conditions leading up to it and its tragic consequences was told by
Cecil Woodham-Smith in her masterful 1962 history, "The Great Hunger."
It remains the definitive work for the general reader, but enough time
has passed since its publication to justify a retelling of this
gripping historical event.
John Kelly, the American author of the best-selling "The Great
Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death," a scourge that
devastated medieval Europe, is admirably suited to the task, telling
the tale of a disaster that, while confined to a much smaller part of
the world, was all the more devastating to those experiencing it.
English relief policies, he argues, were "parsimonious, shortsighted,
grotesquely twisted by religion and ideology," and produced "tens of
thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of needless deaths. The
intent of those policies may not have been genocidal, but the effects
were."
Here one may quibble with Mr. Kelly's choice of words while agreeing
with his overall indictment. Just as later politicians would talk
about taking advantage of the "opportunity" that the Great Recession
offered the Obama administration to "reform" health care, the dominant
faction in Westminister and Whitehall at the time of the Great Famine
saw it as an opportunity to "reform" a backward, ruinous Irish
agricultural system, largely by thinning the ranks of the rural poor
by allowing nature to take its course and coercing emigration. The
results were abominably inhumane, but they fell short of genocide, the
"deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political or
cultural group," as defined by Merriam Webster.
What happened in Ireland was not quite the same thing as the organized
wholesale massacres, death marches and internments that characterized
the Nazi-driven Holocaust or the systematic Armenian genocide carried
out by the Ottoman Empire in the next century. Nevertheless, it was
bad enough as it was, and Mr. Kelly's moving, powerfully narrated
account of the tragedy and its aftermath brings it alive in all its
horror.
Aram Bakshian Jr. served as an aide to Presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan.
December 20, 2012 Thursday
Book Review: When death stalked Emerald Isle
By Aram Bakshian Jr. SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Book: THE GRAVES ARE WALKING: THE GREAT FAMINE AND THE SAGA OF THE IRISH PEOPLE
Author: John Kelly
Henry Holt & Co., $32, 397 pages
The English have always had trouble deciding just how far the human
race extends beyond their own borders. Thus, after a terrorist bomb
took the lives of a pair of foreign visitors, Margaret Thatcher
angrily declared, "The IRA are indiscriminately killing men, women and
children and now they have killed two Australians." A similar attitude
was embraced by early Victorian Englishmen when the great potato
famine struck John Bull's other island, Ireland, beginning in 1845:
Something bad was happening on a piece of imperial real estate to
distinctly un-English "others."
By the time the miserable cycle of blight, starvation, disease and
mass emigration was over, Ireland's population had shrunk by a third.
In the words of Sir William Wilde, a prominent Irish physician and
humanitarian whose own son, Oscar, left Ireland to pursue literary
opportunities in England, what remained was a population
disproportionately "poor, weak, old, lame, sick, dumb, imbecile and
insane." Thereafter, for generations to come, as the modern Irish
historian, R.F. Foster, has pointed out, the "hemorrhage of emigration
settled ... to a steady flow, sustained by complex mechanisms."
The great famine began as an all-too-perfect storm that no human
agency could have prevented. The same potato blight that already had
inflicted hunger and suffering on the European Continent and elsewhere
descended on a uniquely vulnerable island population, one-third of
which depended on the potato alone for its basic food. Thus, a crop
blight that had been painful in other countries with more diverse
agriculture at both the commercial and subsistence levels was fatal to
the mass of poor Irish peasantry dependent on small potato patches for
their daily survival.
If nature dealt Ireland this deadly hand, it was a stiff-necked,
self-righteous clique of English politicians and bureaucrats, rigidly
adhering to the politically correct economic and social views of their
time and place, who botched the relief effort and worsened a trauma so
deep that even today, many historians divide modern Irish history into
pre-famine and post-famine epochs. The full story of the famine, the
conditions leading up to it and its tragic consequences was told by
Cecil Woodham-Smith in her masterful 1962 history, "The Great Hunger."
It remains the definitive work for the general reader, but enough time
has passed since its publication to justify a retelling of this
gripping historical event.
John Kelly, the American author of the best-selling "The Great
Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death," a scourge that
devastated medieval Europe, is admirably suited to the task, telling
the tale of a disaster that, while confined to a much smaller part of
the world, was all the more devastating to those experiencing it.
English relief policies, he argues, were "parsimonious, shortsighted,
grotesquely twisted by religion and ideology," and produced "tens of
thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of needless deaths. The
intent of those policies may not have been genocidal, but the effects
were."
Here one may quibble with Mr. Kelly's choice of words while agreeing
with his overall indictment. Just as later politicians would talk
about taking advantage of the "opportunity" that the Great Recession
offered the Obama administration to "reform" health care, the dominant
faction in Westminister and Whitehall at the time of the Great Famine
saw it as an opportunity to "reform" a backward, ruinous Irish
agricultural system, largely by thinning the ranks of the rural poor
by allowing nature to take its course and coercing emigration. The
results were abominably inhumane, but they fell short of genocide, the
"deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political or
cultural group," as defined by Merriam Webster.
What happened in Ireland was not quite the same thing as the organized
wholesale massacres, death marches and internments that characterized
the Nazi-driven Holocaust or the systematic Armenian genocide carried
out by the Ottoman Empire in the next century. Nevertheless, it was
bad enough as it was, and Mr. Kelly's moving, powerfully narrated
account of the tragedy and its aftermath brings it alive in all its
horror.
Aram Bakshian Jr. served as an aide to Presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan.