Rowan!rowan wrote:Republican John Mitchell: ‘How families, when all eaten up and no hope left, took their last look at the sun, built up their cottage doors, that none might see them die or her their groans, and were found weeks afterwards skeletons on their hearths. How every one of those years, ’46, ’47 and ’48, Ireland was exporting to England food to the value of 15 million pounds sterling.’
He accused the British government of deliberately starving the Irish people, of making use of the potato blight to ‘thin out these multitudinous Celts.’ While the potato crop might have failed, there was, Mitchell insisted, still more than enough grain, cereals and live-stock in the country to have fed the population, but it was exported to England.
‘Insane mothers began to eat their young who died of famine before them; and still fleets of ships were sailing with every tide, carrying Irish cattle and corn to England.’
British involvement in the West Indies slave trade is estimated to have killed upward of 2 million - by the most conservative estimates. A manual for slave-owners advocated 'terror' tactics to combat rebellion, with slow-burning a favorite method of execution - ensuring plenty of screaming to traumatize the other slaves.
I presume the John Mitchel (Only 1 l) that you are quoting here is the John Mitchel of Young Ireland who was condemned, transported, escaped to America and became a vocal editorial proponent of the pro-slavery Confederate States of America during the Civil War. A man who wrote that negroes were, "... an innately inferior people," or that slavery was inherently moral, good in itself, and who promoted it for its own sake?
Are the rest of your sources as 'selective' in their opprobrium?
And yes, I know that you will claim that this is argumentum ad hominem, but it serves as a perfectly sound example to show that judging events of two centuries ago by the standards of today can expose very inconvenient contradictions.
