A Response to Cynical Propaganda Disguised as Irish History from the Novara Media

 

            Being of mostly Irish ancestry myself, having visited Ireland, and having walked through the Famine Memorial composed of six life-size victims of the Great Hunger, the tragic events in 1845-1852 Ireland have always been a subject close to my heart. All that being said, I find people today who cynically exploit the tragedy in order to push their politico-economic agenda of abolishing capitalism to give off much the same energy as those English Protestants who said that God had sent the famine to the Irish Catholics to “teach them a lesson”. In both cases, people had their conclusions, capitalism needing to be abolished by leftists and Irish Catholics being the scum of the earth by English Protestants, ahead of time, and used the tragedy beginning with the potato blight as the ad hoc “evidence” to support that after the fact. While such blatantly bigoted English Protestants seem to be largely a thing of the past, leftists seeking to exploit the tragedy, as shown by a recent Novara Media YouTube video, are clearly not. All the more insulting that these leftists are themselves British with posh-sounding English accents. Keeping a long and proud English tradition of not actually caring about the Irish, this Novara Media video was very clearly made as a cynical attempt to display the market economy as being the moral equivalent of Stalin and Mao’s dictatorships. Even if all the nonsense presented were true, the massive numerical differences between the deaths under socialism and those (ostensibly) under capitalism, the numbers would still overwhelmingly favor capitalism, but let us not get ahead of ourselves.

            Now, the video’s title, “How Britain Starved Ireland” is actually a surprisingly accurate one. One would think that the video might showcase how Oliver Cromwell brutally conquered the Emerald Isle and proceeded to divvy out its stolen lands to his compatriots and that, two centuries later, the feudal system was still effectively in place and that thus, for their lack of ownership of their lands, the Irish weren’t even really living under capitalism yet. Rather a system of state-sponsored bondage similar to the latifundia system to be found across Latin America at this time was in place and thus, the Irish could not run their farms as enterprises with property rights and were thus totally at the mercy of their potato crops and the reckless decisions of feudal lords, many of whom were absentee and might have never even been to Ireland. Including all of that information would have been totally compatible with the Novara Media’s socialist outlook and would have fit with the title of Britain starving Ireland, but it might have implied that the market economy that us advocates of it now support did not yet exist on the island as it (more or less) did in Britain at this time, so such information could not appear in this video. No, the viewer had to be under the impression that the market was responsible for the situation the Irish found them in. Landlords who had often not even been to the island had apparently homesteaded the land according to Lockean principles and the Irish were just stuck paying the rent.

            The video begins innocuously enough. It explains how Ireland’s population has never recovered from the pre-famine population of eight million and how across Europe, not just in Ireland, the potato blight was causing hardships. The only seemingly honest omission in this video was not saying how the potato allowed the population of Europe in the 19^th century to increase as much as it did alongside the mentioned Industrial Revolution. But from here on out is where the accidental historical omissions end and the half-truths and outright lies begin. The presenter claims the potato blight was made worse by “English politicians and Irish landlords”. Already, we’re hearing half-truths. The unfamiliar will not know about the English absentee landlords or the fact that the Irish landlords who did exist were Anglo Protestant landlords and would have viewed themselves as British people loyal to the crown and not at all related to the Roman Popery filth native to the island. They would have seen themselves as “Irish” in the same way later British settlers in Kenya saw themselves as “Kenyan”. Indeed, Catholics were largely forbidden from even owning land, let alone being landlords. A brief mention of this would have been fitting, yet it is nowhere to be found. No one can deny that English politicians made the situation worse, but far from the reasons listed in this video. They then baselessly claim that this was “arguably Europe’s worst ever famine” that Europe had seen. The five million of victims of the 1921-22 Volga River Famine and the up to five million victims of the 1932-33 Holodomor famine might contest this statement, but that’s another story.

            So, here is where the video goes off the rails and what is presented as a history lesson becomes outright propaganda aimed at attacking supporters of the market economy more than showing any sympathy for the plight of the Irish. We hear how at the start of the famine in 1845 to John Russell becoming Prime Minister in June 1846, everything was going great, actually. Proto-FDR, Prime Minister Robert Peel and his government, were apparently saving the day, as they “imported corn, set up a relief commission, and created a public works program to provide employment”. No mention of the fact that this “importing corn” measure was a result of repealing the infamous Corn Laws in 1846. This is a leftist YouTube video after all and leftists can never make themselves out to be supporting the free trade policy that Britain had for nearly a century afterwards. Setting up a relief commission doubtless crowded out private charity, but a government upholding a feudal and colonial order in Ireland certainly had no right to be speaking about small government, so this one can be let slide. As for public works to provide employment, this was a majorly problematic response. Paying starving people small amounts of food to build winding roads to nowhere, many of which still scar the land in the west of Ireland, is hardly something to be seen as compassionate.

            In a bait and switch, the video moves on to the first ministry of Lord John Russell, wherein the narrator implies, but doesn’t outright state, that the intervention of Peel’s government suddenly ended and the free market was left to take care of everything and this was responsible for much of the deaths from the famine. Whoever was writing this script must have realized that a quick Google search would prove that that was incorrect and that the aforementioned proto-Keynesian relief measures did indeed continue under the supposedly ultra-laissez-faire Russell, so instead, the video starts discussing how food continued to be exported from Ireland to Britain at a time when it could have been used to feed the Irish. This was indeed a horrific event in Irish history, but again, it more shows the problem of British colonialism in Ireland in the first place. If Ireland had never been conquered by Britain, the land would have not been subject to absentee landlords in Britain and easily might have been much better looked after once better farming techniques were introduced. Irish farmers could have owned their land and would not have depended only on the potato for sustenance and, in the midst of the Industrial Revolution, surely would have still exported food to Britain. This would be the classical liberal ideal. Everybody who did not depend on land rents from a conquered people would have benefited. Again, no mention of this idea by the video.

            We then move on Charles Trevelyan, who the video rightly characterizes as an anti-Irish maniac, but with who they inadvertently undermine their whole implied premise that Russell’s response was laissez-faire. They mention that the Irish came to rely on soup kitchens and suggest, without evidence, that this was less effective than the relief that came under Peel. What that relief consisted of goes unmentioned. What they don’t tell you is that much of the deaths in Ireland actually came from disease, due to the crowding of people in workhouses, or that these workhouses and the previously praised public works continued under Trevelyan and that the soup kitchens were actually ended in 1847.

            Another glaring omission in this video are the active efforts of the British government to avoid private relief being allowed in, as well as legislation that made private relief less forthcoming. To give one example, people in Massachusetts sent a ship full of grain explicitly for the purpose of feeding the Irish, but the British colonizers were having none of it. They seized the ship and placed it in storage, with the justification that it would “disrupt trade”. So free market of them. As for legislation by the British, the Irish Poor Laws in the 1830s removed the incentive for people to donate, as in previous potato blights, as why donate to something the government is taking over? This left-wing organization is so ready to deflect blame from the British government, that they even neglect to mention how the Ottoman Sultan wished to donate 10,000 pounds for aid, but in order to avoid embarrassing Queen Victoria, who only offered 1,000 pounds, had to reduce his donation to a tenth the original size.

            Anyway, from there the video starts (rightfully) lamenting the racist attitude held by the British public against the Irish, but then goes on a conspiratorial tirade about how this racism was necessary in order to justify the ostensibly laissez-faire policy Britain was using in their management of the famine. To an Irish delegation requesting food relief, Prime Minister John Russell is said to have read aloud from Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations as a way of saying doing nothing (which he wasn’t doing) was the right course. One wishes the delegation had responded that the same book said to tax the rents of land and how that would have ended the feudal system and allowed private ownership by tenants. This is also never considered by the narrator, as even Georgism is apparently too far to the right for Novara Media. We’re told that Trevelyan was also a fan of Smith. Great. All of this was thus the result of “free market liberalism”, which, as indicated by a picture of Rishi Sunak holding a red briefcase, apparently still rules the day in Britain today. I’m sure.

 It is the next part where things get really interesting. The narrator inaccurately claims that Thomas Malthus was not just a classical economist, but a liberal one, whose ideas of a “surplus population” and “carrying capacity” was influencing Russell’s government. This is just patently ridiculous, as Malthus supported the protectionist tariffs that the Corn Laws imposed and thus was not even a liberal. He was a hack who thankfully has been completely tossed into the dustbin of history. This section is less offensive, then it is funny, as it shows that the Novara Media just heard that capitalism caused the Irish Famine and truly just combed through anything in history they could find to justify that claim. They bet on the wrong horse choosing Malthus as a bit of cherry-picked history.

From here, the video turns out to be mostly alright again. The narrator apparently remembers that the Irish were indeed colonial subjects and that insane Englishmen did expel people from their lands via coffin ships because it was a conquered province of Britain and not a self-governing country and that they indeed even considered ethnically cleansing Ireland in a similar fashion as happened to Aboriginals in Australia. No libertarian would contest that the British Empire was a horrible enterprise. They did indeed seem to have been guilty of genocide in Ireland. What any of this has to do with the free market, which by definition, involves only private actors, is anyone’s guess. “Capitalism is when the government does stuff.”

Going back to the insanity, the narrator speaks directly to us supporters of the market economy and says, as hard as it is for us to admit, the Irish Famine ostensibly was done in the name of our ideology. It then cuts to Ben Shapiro praising the market. Why a Jewish American is responsible for what Protestant Brits did is left unexplained. Then, there is the single most-offensive statement in the whole video: that the actions of Stalin and Mao, who together may have collectively killed 90 million people, largely by man-made famines, are the moral equivalent of the British government, who did not create the famine, but assuming everything else said in the video is true, were responsible for the deaths of 1.1 million people. That was 1.1 million too many and could have been avoided if Britain never invaded Ireland like how Russia invaded Ukraine recently, but it would show, at worst, that capitalism is around 1/90^th as bad as socialism. So, there goes that argument. Then the fact that poverty still exists is attributed to liberal economics and is said to still exist, unlike socialist dictatorships. Cuba and North Korea don’t exist anymore? The whole world is as laissez-faire as Hong Kong or Singapore? Again, quoting a Jewish American praising free market economics, Milton Friedman, the audience is made to believe his ideology is presently responsible for poverty that exists today. It is beyond parody at this point. Finally, the video ends by mentioning British political power to have played a part. The title seemed to suggest that was what the whole video would be. Instead, it was a sad attempt at a cope about the deaths and failures caused by and from socialism in the 20^th century by pointing at a tragedy in a largely feudal Ireland to shout “No, you!” at capitalism. It was a chore to sit through.