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Why is Hidden History hiding ?

category limerick | history and heritage | opinion/analysis author Wednesday November 26, 2008 22:22author by Jack - none Report this post to the editors

The Irish Holocaust

Why is Hidden History hiding ?

Last evening, Tuesday, 25th November, I flicked through the TV listings for something
worthwhile to watch. I came across a docudrama on RTE one at 10.15 pm. It was entitled, ‘DEATH OR CANADA’. I switched on RTE one at 10.15 and discovered that the docudrama was actually another of those terrible Hidden History programmes. I was surprised to see that it was Hidden History and though it unusual that it was not advertised as so on the TV listings. I immediately checked last Saturday’s Irish Times TV guide. The programme was listed on RTE at 10.15pm under the title DEATH OR CANADA, no mention of Hidden History. On the top of the page under the heading, TV CHOICE by David O Dwyer I see a review of the docudrama, it reads as follows.


Why is Hidden History hiding ?

Last evening, Tuesday, 25th November, I flicked through the TV listings for something
worthwhile to watch. I came across a docudrama on RTE one at 10.15 pm. It was entitled, ‘DEATH OR CANADA’. I switched on RTE one at 10.15 and discovered that the docudrama was actually another of those terrible Hidden History programmes. I was surprised to see that it was Hidden History and though it unusual that it was not advertised as so on the TV listings. I immediately checked last Saturday’s Irish Times TV guide. The programme was listed on RTE at 10.15pm under the title DEATH OR CANADA, no mention of Hidden History. On the top of the page under the heading, TV CHOICE by David O Dwyer I see a review of the docudrama, it reads as follows.

DOCUDRAMA DEATH OR CANADA RTE one, 10.15pm. A two-part docudrama from the markers of CROMWELL IN IRELAND about the emigration of Irish people to Canada during the Famine. Set in 1847, the darkest year of the famine, it follows true the story of a protestant family, John and Mary Willis and their five children, who abandoned their home in the west of Ireland and gambled everything on finding new lives in North America.

Is it my imagination or are they deliberately not mentioning Hidden History ? If you did not see Cromwell in Ireland I’m sure you might be wondering who the markers of this programme actually are. Would it not be simpler to just say from the markers of Hidden History’s ‘Cromwell in Ireland’. It appears to me that for some reason Hidden History is trying to hide, maybe escape the recent history of its own past. First we had Hidden History about the Pearson brothers and the so called ethnic cleansing of the mid lands during the Black and Tan War. See link below

http://www.indymedia.ie/article/84547

Pat Muldowney exposed that one as an sinister attempt to rearrange the facts given and take them out of context to present a picture of land grabbing and sectarian slaughter by the IRA.

They where at it again on Tuesday November 13th 2007, when Hidden History returned with another one of their historical concoctions. This one was entitled ’ figures of hate’. On this occasion they where spot on with their title. Make no mistake about it, William Martin Murphy is without doubt a figure of hate because of the brutal way he treated his employees during the 1913 Lock Out . After watching the programme it was obvious that the nature of this documentary was to try and convince Dubliners that maybe it was time to bury the hatchet and view him in a different light. See link below for Lock Out 1913.

http://www.indymedia.ie/article/85137

More recently we had the one about Cromwell who was not really such a bad bloke after all, even though he was responsible for the death of nearly a quarter of the Irish population.

Last nights HIDDEN HISTORY was part one of a two part programme about the Irish ‘Famine’ or to be more accurate, the Irish Holocaust. It is misleading to call it the Famine when tons of food such as beef, mutton, wheat oats etc, was actually been transported out of the country under British arm guard. See below for more detail on this.

So far the programme has skirted around the real reason why over a million people starved to death on the door step of the wealthiest empire in the world at that time. The programme implied that Ireland was a wonderful place to live in before the ‘Famine’. The viewer is told that ‘We have greatly increased access to land, people are getting access to small plots of land to build their cottages on, to raise their families on.
That’s nice considering that they originally owned all the land in the first place and where disposed by the butcher Cromwell. Secondly, we are told ‘ the availability of the potato , this wonder food, which feeds more people per acre than any other food stuff available in Ireland‘. The Irish people where solely dependant on the potato for their survival. Irish people did not eat the potato because it was a wonder food, they had no choice, they where forced into this position by their tyrannical masters who took everything away and left them with nothing else.

A DR Christine Kinealy of the University of Central Lancasire then tells us that ‘in 1800 Ireland had the fastest growing population of any country within Europe. A feature of that population growth was that Irish people where the healthiest, tallest, and most fertile people within Europe, so they where not people that fitted a traditional famine profile‘. We must have been the envy of all Europe until the blight came. The Irish people suffered long before the so called ‘Famine‘, they suffered their maximum during the ‘Famine‘, and continued to suffer after the ‘Famine’ purely because of British exploitation and domination.

Hidden History tells us that Protestants like the Willises have until recently been written out of history , but as modern historians have discovered, the ’Famine hit everyone with equal vigour. Hidden History centred the programme on the true story of this family, the willies. It tells us that ‘everyone suffered with equal vigour’. What a blatant misrepresentation of the truth. We see a reconstruction of the Willis family locking up house and setting out on a horse/cart for Limerick, for the propose of emigrating. They have sold all there earthly possessions to pay for the journey. As they travel along the road they see corpses lying in ditches and fields. Others in the process of dying, people with absolutely no hope or chance of survival. A great number of people did not have any earthly possessions to sell for a ticket to America. This is where the inequality lies, the poorest families who had been previously evicted where left on the side of the road with nothing. The story of the Willis is horrendous, they lost 4 of their five children because of disease on the coffin ship. Why does Hidden History seems to think that we should focus on this protestant family who lost 4 children on route to Canada ? Like all Hidden History docudramas there is an undercurrent downplaying the barbaric role of the British ruling class who regarded this country with pure contempt. Hidden History has a habit of watering down the cruelty and injustice that was dished out to Irish people. They distort facts and turn things around in the quest of letting the British off the hook and make them accountable for 800 years of murder and torture.

Hidden History had a micro biologist by the name of DR Donald Low tell us that ’Starvation was not the greatest killer in the Irish Famine. Hidden History’s historians agree that ‘disease caused far greater death’, so why bother call it a Famine ? Why not call it the great plague of 1847 ? Where dose Hidden History get it experts from ? We had to listen to a DR Patrick Fitzgerald as he threw in his pennies worth, he say’s
’With the Willis I think that it is very much a story of the Famine, parents in relation to their children were used to and had an expectation of a higher level of mortality, they expected children to die, to be honest if you had 6,7, 8 children it would be anticipated if you came from the lower echelons of Irish society in the mid to nineteenth century that a number of those would die’.
At last we get a little bit of balance, John Watters comes on and says ‘To look back and decide they where different times, they where different values, that you know eh ! Oh they had bigger familes and they expected to lose 2 or 3 children, bla bla bla bla.
Watters continues… ‘That is to apply to there lives the same logic which the British authorities applied and which caused the problem in the first place. We are applying the same racist perception to that history and we have been doing that and its time we stopped’.

I wont hold my breath to see what Hidden History has to say in part two next week, it will no doubt be more of the same, skirting around the real causes and avoiding any blame. The Irish Holocaust would be more suitable a title for the so called Famine. I have cut and pasted with full permission some more information on the Irish Holocaust. See below.

http://www.nga.ie/irish_holocaust.htm

THE (IRISH) HOLOCAUST*
Chris Fogarty, 21Dec07
Ireland's Holocaust of 1845-50 was one of history's greatest crimes. Its toll was well over five million innocents comprising the most gaelic, least anglified, of the people. Their bones are strewn in mass graves across Ireland. They are also along the routes fled by the desperate starvelings - the canal tow-paths and roads to Dublin, in and around England's cities especially Liverpool; also along the routes to and sites of Australian death camps, along the sea floor below the coffin-ship routes to Canada and the U.S. and along the shores of both and of the St. Lawrence river. Untold thousands were cremated at home by neighbors who, upon finding the entire family perished, would torch the thatch rather than risk contagion.

Only During the past two decades have growing numbers of newly-undeceived persons begun to speak for the murdered dead. Thus, its millions of victims are, at long last, being publicly vindicated by the truth of what actually occurred - the Food Removal - the at-gunpoint removal of Ireland's abundant foods by seventy-five British army regiments. (To learn which regiment starved your relatives see my irishholocaust.org and click on its map.)

The Cover-Up had been essentially total**. For more than 150 years until about 1997, its universal, official label was "Irish Famine" (frequently including "Potato"). It was taught as such in all schools.That label, "famine," obviously could not survive the growing awareness of the Food Removal. For example, a Cause of Death listed as "Asphyxiation" or "Lack of Oxygen" must be replaced by "Strangulation" upon discovery of a perpetrator. Otherwise one becomes complicit in a cover-up, especially if one is already in progress.

November 3rd has become Irish Holocaust Commemoration Day. It was on that date in 1845 that an alarmed group of twenty-two Irish notables visited Lord Heytesbury, Britain's envoy in Dublin, urging him to avert the growing calamity; to close Ireland's ports against removal of its food. He ignored their pleas and read to them from his prepared reply of two components; 1) he expressed no intention of stopping or slowing the food removal but did cast doubt upon the extent of the resultant hunger, and 2) spoke of one crop only - the potato. He then showed them the door.

Thus, November 3rd is the anniversary of two commemorated events; 1) the official start of the Holocaust, and 2) the start of the cover-up of the Food Removal and of the "famine"*** story. To Honor the Starvelings we promise to never forget, to erect memorials over their mass graves and to do all in our power to stop governmental policies of genocide. We also commemorate the beginning of the cover-up, observing how covering up genocides tends to ensure more of them. We also discern how the cover-up could not have succeeded without corrupting the language. Thus, indispensable to the genocidists were the false and diversionary insertion of words such as "Famine," "Great Hunger," "Gorta Mor," and "potato," It was these words, used in this context despite the Food Removal, that, even today, serve abettors of the cover-up, whether they intend it or not.

* "Holocaust" has precedence. In 1847 the Cork Examiner newspaper described it as such. So did others, incuding Michael Davitt in his two-volume works published about 1899. I remember that it was in the 1960s that Shoah publicizers adopted "Holocaust." Author Norman Finkelstein confirms this in his writings.
** Liam O'Flaherty's "The Famine" and Woodham-Smith's "The Great Hunger..." both briefly mentioned the at-gunpoint food removal.
*** Phytophthora infestans destroyed potato crops everywhere, but had no effect whatever upon Ireland's abundant livestock, poultry, grains, meal and flour, vegetables, fruits and dairy products. It was the at-gunpoint removal of these that created the genocide

http://www.irishholocaust.org/

The Mass Graves of Ireland
Introduction
Irishmen and Irishwomen!
Read this site and weep. Weep for the agonies and deaths of your people at the hands of genocidists. The authorities who imposed the curriculum, the teachers and professors who funneled it into you, have carefully kept you uninformed as to which British regiment, or that any regiment, murdered your people. Until now, that information was kept from you. You had no access to it. You do now - you read it on your computer screen! Commit the regiment's name to memory.

Never, ever, forget it!
Learn its British HQ town. As no Jewish person would ever refer to the "Jewish Oxygen Famine of 1939 - 1945", so no Irish person ought ever refer to the Irish Holocaust as a famine.
Continue

(Click Map Above)
Page List:
Introduction
Britain's Cover Up
The Food Removal
Voices in the Wilderness
Official British Intent
Toll of Holocaust
Complicity
What We Must Do
Lisnabinnia Memorial
Liverpool, Great Hunger
Sister Jean Marie
New Info

© 1995 Fogarty
At least 950,000 copies of this are now in circulation. This website, in pamphlet form, has been adopted as history course material in scores of universities, colleges and high schools. Right to photocopy this work is hereby granted but only in its entirety, with no change(s), and only for gratis distribution for educational purposes.

author by Jimpublication date Thu Nov 27, 2008 09:44author address author phone Report this post to the editors

Mass murder through famine is a tactic as old as civilisation.
Armies burned crops and raided stores and lived off the land as they criscrossed the continent during centuries of endless conflict.
Cities under siege fell to invaders when the inhabitants starved behind their high walls.
Following the Black Death, the surviving peasantry for once had the upper hand with aristocrats who needed labourers to work their fields.
All across Europe aristocratic elites regularly performed mass evictions, massacred peasants and created famines to clear lands to take advantage of more productive agricultural methods and to crush political dissent.
When the Soviets came to power in Russia they targetted kulaks and other rich peasants who they deliberately starved to death by preventing the movement of people out of regions like the Ukraine and prevented the movement of cereals that could have feed millions of people.
Today the regime of Robert Mugabe uses starvation as a weapon against the people of Zimbabwe.

author by paulpublication date Thu Nov 27, 2008 11:11author address author phone Report this post to the editors

And the UK /US starved a million children under age five to death through the 'economic sanctions, and Haughey opens an embassy in baghdad to sell Sadam beef to feed his military..
RTE are revisionists.
You could write till your death countering the daily propaganda or countering the messages being put out by our National Broadcaster.
RTE is part of the managed media to keep us buisy with 24 hr nonsense. Just listen to Duffy, Kenny, Ryan,Turbidy, finnucane, Doyle. The masters of mediocraty. Your right, hidden history is a misnomar.

author by Jimpublication date Thu Nov 27, 2008 13:54author address author phone Report this post to the editors

The Catholic Emancipation movement threatened the power of the landowning Anglo-Irish Protestant class who took full advantage of the remnants of the Penal Laws to keep the Catholic Irish peasantry ignorant, powerless and cowed.
The empowerment of the peasantry and the loosening of Protestant ascendcy meant that new upwardly mobile Catholic Irish Nationalist society would emerge to replace them and eventually undermine and break with the Union which is what eventually did happen in the early twentieth century.
Allowing a million Irish to starve and millions more to emigrate put an end to the immediate threat.
The mass emigration that occured for the rest of the century which denuded the country of its population meant that support for political independence from London was patchy and episodic at best.
A population that was fearful and embittered by famine readily sought solice in the Catholic Church which was hostile to secular Irish Republicanism that once threatened to unite Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter and usurp the power of the bishops.
The era of the Great War prevented emigration temporarily creating a pool of restless young men was responsible for the overthrow of British rule in Ireland.

author by Frank Adam - private citizenpublication date Fri Nov 28, 2008 14:31author address author phone Report this post to the editors

I am continually surprised by people who complain they were not told things in school history and can only conclude that at school they took the attitude that they were not going to bother much with subjects with which you can't make cash on the counter.

I distinctly remember at school in fifties London that we did do the 1840's Irish potato famine, and that the original Irish nationalistss were all landlords one way or another: Wolfe Tone with pretensions to a re-run of the US War of Independence; O'Connell another landlord who stuck Catholicism onto Irish Nationalism so deeply that it alienated of the Protestant lobby; and Parnell who like Dilke tripped over Victorian fashions in sexual hypocrisies after Wellington's "publish and be damned" earlier half of the century.

On a technicality: the potato blight was an accident of the then non- standards of public health control of plant diseases. It started out from peelings from ships from the Americas being throw overboard and affected England and other countries too. The fragility of Ireland was undue dependence on the one crop in a country by then containing eight million poor on morcellised rented holdings, and the new economic theory of not only internal, but external free trade so grain was still exported to England for the higher local prices there, while the imported US maize of the government aid (male run) programme came without elementary cooking instructions.

author by Adam Frankpublication date Fri Nov 28, 2008 15:12author address author phone Report this post to the editors

"I distinctly remember at school in fifties London that we did do the 1840's Irish potato famine"

And you found that it was all caused by the Irish (including, oddly enough, Wolfe Tone who was long dead) and the potato blight. Shame.

No surprises there then.

I guess that's why it's called a 'the Irish Potato Famine', rather than the colonial starvation of Ireland, which would be WRONG, wouldn't it?

author by Frank Adam - private citizen publication date Fri Nov 28, 2008 16:32author address author phone Report this post to the editors

If Adam Frank puts harping on old wounds above trying to understand and defuse antagonisms, he is not going to progress the relationship in a hurry nor encourage the "ever closer union" of €urope. Further Marxist analyses are best used and not turned into unquestioned faith, especially as there are 35 million US citizens of Irish descent many of whose ascendants shot Red Indians - or elsewhere Australian aborigines to settle their lands for themselves.

Look up on potatoes and other plants that changed humanity's survival such as barley, rye and oats and wheat; maize now as "mealies" the African staple; and tea, coffee, tomato - the "love apple" because vitamins make you healthy and frisky - and tobacco, cotton and pimento with no doubt Jojoba and Jatropha to follow for bio-fuels; you will discover the Irish potato famine of the 1740's - only then there were no steam presses for the news to scandalise London and for railways to spread the press scandal across the country as a stick to beat government, as much as a problem for government.

No government deliberately starves its population unless there is a severe rebellion or civil war on. The 1840's potato famine was not - is not - spoken of in UK as, "colonial starvation of Ireland," because in the 19th and 20th centuries Ireland under the Younger Pitt's Act of Union was not seen from Britain as a "colony" even if some Irish then and now see/saw it as such. Even so it made no sense governmentally nor economically to destroy population: not in Ireland, not in India where famines in the Raj still occasionally surface in books and photos; and my generation were told to eat up in gratitude because there were Indian children with less - an irrritating logic when faced with an indifferent school dinner but that is how things were. The well fed but still resentful would be better occupied discovering why the cooking instructions for maize were delayed in diffusion in 1848; and why with famine and food control in other parts of 1840's Europe before American grain poured in by steamship the matter has been shelved there, but is still cultivated in Ireland - and for what purpose?.

author by Crazy Horsepublication date Mon Dec 01, 2008 14:14author address author phone Report this post to the editors

Of course Red Indians were killed by Irish-Americans. And by African-Americans, and by ...

The indigenous peoples, from Massachusetts and Virginia, all the way to Oregon and California, were in turn robbed, displaced ("ethnically cleansed"), poisoned, burned out and murdered. As they fled westwards they encroached on the agricultural lands and hunting lands and fishing areas of other indigenous peoples with whom they may or may not have enjoyed peaceful relations over the previous ten thousand years or so.

So they were squeezed from both sides. In other words, Red Indians killed Red Indians.

It is not surprising that Irish people and others, driven out of their own country by conquest and starvation, came into new conflict as they sought survival elsewhere.

The point is, that violent, aggressive, racist, genocidal colonial powers and governments make decisions and policies on conquest and exploitation, now as in the past, which cause untold misery to relatively helpless human victims consumed and destroyed by these policies.

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