bluestflame
12th September 2012, 04:22
http://www.schillerinstitute.org/food_for_peace/kiss_nssm_jb_1995.html#link
"Kissinger’s 1974 Plan for Food Control Genocide
by Joseph Brewda
Dec. 8, 1995
On Dec. 10, 1974, the U.S. National Security Council under Henry Kissinger completed a classified 200-page study, “National Security Study Memorandum 200: Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests.” The study falsely claimed that population growth in the so-called Lesser Developed Countries (LDCs) was a grave threat to U.S. national security. Adopted as official policy in November 1975 by President Gerald Ford, NSSM 200 outlined a covert plan to reduce population growth in those countries through birth control, and also, implicitly, war and famine. Brent Scowcroft, who had by then replaced Kissinger as national security adviser (the same post Scowcroft was to hold in the Bush administration), was put in charge of implementing the plan. CIA Director George Bush was ordered to assist Scowcroft, as were the secretaries of state, treasury, defense, and agriculture.
The bogus arguments that Kissinger advanced were not original. One of his major sources was the Royal Commission on Population, which King George VI had created in 1944 “to consider what measures should be taken in the national interest to influence the future trend of population.” The commission found that Britain was gravely threatened by population growth in its colonies, since “a populous country has decided advantages over a sparsely-populated one for industrial production.” The combined effects of increasing population and industrialization in its colonies, it warned, “might be decisive in its effects on the prestige and influence of the West,” especially effecting “military strength and security.”
NSSM 200 similarly concluded that the United States was threatened by population growth in the former colonial sector. It paid special attention to 13 “key countries” in which the United States had a “special political and strategic interest”: India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, Turkey, Nigeria, Egypt, Ethiopia, Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia. It claimed that population growth in those states was especially worrisome, since it would quickly increase their relative political, economic, and military strength.
For example, Nigeria: “Already the most populous country on the continent, with an estimated 55 million people in 1970, Nigeria's population by the end of this century is projected to number 135 million. This suggests a growing political and strategic role for Nigeria, at least in Africa.” Or Brazil: “Brazil clearly dominated the continent demographically.” The study warned of a “growing power status for Brazil in Latin America and on the world scene over the next 25 years.”
Food as a weapon
There were several measures that Kissinger advocated to deal with this alleged threat, most prominently, birth control and related population-reduction programs. He also warned that “population growth rates are likely to increase appreciably before they begin to decline,” even if such measures were adopted.
A second measure was curtailing food supplies to targetted states, in part to force compliance with birth control policies: “There is also some established precedent for taking account of family planning performance in appraisal of assistance requirements by AID [U.S. Agency for International Development] and consultative groups. Since population growth is a major determinant of increases in food demand, allocation of scarce PL 480 resources should take account of what steps a country is taking in population control as well as food production. In these sensitive relations, however, it is important in style as well as substance to avoid the appearance of coercion.”
“Mandatory programs may be needed and we should be considering these possibilities now,” the document continued, adding, “Would food be considered an instrument of national power? ... Is the U.S. prepared to accept food rationing to help people who can't/won't control their population growth?”
Kissinger also predicted a return of famines that could make exclusive reliance on birth control programs unnecessary. “Rapid population growth and lagging food production in developing countries, together with the sharp deterioration in the global food situation in 1972 and 1973, have raised serious concerns about the ability of the world to feed itself adequately over the next quarter of century and beyond,” he reported.
The cause of that coming food deficit was not natural, however, but was a result of western financial policy: “Capital investments for irrigation and infrastucture and the organization requirements for continuous improvements in agricultural yields may be beyond the financial and administrative capacity of many LDCs. For some of the areas under heaviest population pressure, there is little or no prospect for foreign exchange earnings to cover constantly increasingly imports of food.”
“It is questionable,” Kissinger gloated, “whether aid donor countries will be prepared to provide the sort of massive food aid called for by the import projections on a long-term continuing basis.” Consequently, “large-scale famine of a kind not experienced for several decades—a kind the world thought had been permanently banished,” was foreseeable—famine, which has indeed come to pass.
To read the entire NSSM 200 document, click here.http://schillerinstitute.org/strategic/NSSM200.htm
¤=[Post Update]=¤
seems to be a recurring theme in history (remember the irish "potato famine"? )
http://www.schillerinstitute.org/economy/nbw/pot_famine95.html
CHILLER INSTITUTE
How British Free Trade
Starved Millions
During Ireland's Potato Famine
by Paul Gallagher
May, 1995.
"This article was originally published in the New Federalist newspaper, American Almanac section, on May 29, 1995, while the author, a researcher, writer, and political associate of Lyndon LaRouche, was a political prisoner in Virginia's prison system. He has written on numerous topics, from the poetry of Keats and Shelley, the drama and method of Shakespeare, to studies on population in the Renassiance. Please click here for related articles.
150th Anniversary of Genocide:
How British Free Trade Starved Millions
During Ireland's Potato Famine
The May 24-26, 1995 White House Conference on the economic development of Northern Ireland, continues an important policy initiative by which President Clinton has already helped bring a season of peace to Ulster after 25 years of civil war. Further success would come by starting to connect Ireland, by tunnel, to new transport grids all the way across Eurasia: the "Eurasian Land Bridges" first proposed six years ago by Lyndon LaRouche and now under planning by leading governments. This would lead to development of new rails, power, and roads in Ireland, the country (North and South) with the least transport infrastructure and the most underdeveloped economy in Europe. This transport integration of Ireland would pass through Ulster and also help the wrecked British economy, if there were a British government which wished to do so.
But the British Tory government of John Major, the moribund successor to Maggie Thatcher's 10-year rule of ruin, should not be allowed to contaminate President Clinton's Ireland development conference with the "free trade" ideology that has turned the British Isles into a post-industrial junk heap. A British "free trade" government can do nothing but more harm to its own economy and that of Ireland. The road to a stable peace in Ireland, as in other economically collapsed regions of the globe, will be built only on the foundation of government-directed infrastructure development.
Beginning 150 years ago this fall, British "free trade" policy--the same policy Thatcher and her imitators still fanatically insist upon--caused the genocide of 2 million out of 8 million Irish subjects in four years. In contrast to the Nazis, the British perpetrators of this 1845-1849 genocide were not punished for their policies, nor did they change them in any way afterwards. In their quoted statements on that episode of genocide, presented below, you will recognize precisely the dominant British "free trade" policies of today, parroted by such as Milton Friedman and the "neo-Conservative revolutionaries" in our Congress.
Ireland has never recovered from Britain's nineteenth century "free trade" rule. It has only 5 million citizens today, and its scant industrial and agricultural progress in the twentieth century is due entirely to the national institutions built by the Sinn Fein movement of 1902-1924, which explicitly opposed British free trade dogma.
Contrary to the demands of John Major's government--breathing scandals and corruption when it breathes at all--Sinn Fein should participate fully in the White House conference. Major's government, and any British "free trade" government, in fact, has a good deal to learn from them.
Not Potatoes, But Slavery
Any historian who has studied the subject further than former Vice-President Dan Quayle, knows that potatoes (or the lack thereof) did not cause the Irish famine and genocide 150 years ago. The potato blight which struck the harvest in autumn 1845, had begun in North Carolina, and spread to destroy potato crops throughout the Northern Hemisphere for several years; it did not cause famine or mass death anywhere except in Ireland. Nor were potatoes the only major produce of Irish agriculture at the time; they were just the only produce which the Irish--75 percent of whom were feudal tenants of British landlords, fanatical preachers of ``free trade"--were allowed to eat or to feed to their livestock. The historian Arthur Young had written, like many others, that the Irish tenant farmers were slaves in effect:
"A landlord in Ireland can scarcely invent an order which a laborer, servant, or cottier [tenant farmer] dares to refuse .... He may punish with his cane or his horsewhip with the most perfect security. A poor man would have his bones broken if he offered to lift a hand in his own defense."
Free trade exported or sold all the corn, wheat, barley, and oats Irish farmers grew, in order that they should pay their rents. All crops became cash crops--and there was nothing left for the farmer and his family to eat. British free trade tolerated no change in this situation while a million Irish starved to death, heavily deploying troops to protect the export ships. Free trade evicted instantly all farmers who stopped paying their rents, and the large landlords, led by British Foreign Minister Lord Palmerston, evicted their tenants more rapidly than before as they were starving in the 1840s, even evicting many who were still paying rent. Free trade decreed that no money would be spent on infrastructure projects such as drainage, harbors, fisheries, etc., though a committee of prominent Irish subjects led by Thomas Drummond had quickly surveyed what was most needed. Ireland at that time had 164 miles of railways; England had 6,621 miles.
Free trade decreed that no government surplus food--"no welfare"-- be given to the starving, in order to leave the market for food undisturbed. "We do not propose," Prime Minister Lord John Russell told the House of Commons, "to interfere with the regular mode by which Indian corn and other kinds of grain may be brought into Ireland." Free trade insisted that the destitute work on the Public Works or in the workhouses, and that these hundreds of thousands should receive wages below the miserable levels prevailing, in order not to distort the labor market. Thus laborers died in large numbers "on the works" and in the Poor Law houses. Free trade gave the Irish farm families three choices when the potato crops failed: starve on their farms, while selling their grain crops and paying their rent; report to the Public Works or the Poor Law workhouses to be worked/starved to death as the Nazis did to the inmates of Auschwitz; or emigrate and take a 50 percent chance of surviving the passage across the Atlantic.
The Irish population was officially 8.1 million in 1845. Some 1.5 million human beings died of starvation and disease in Ireland in four years, while more than one million attempted to emigrate; of these, about 500,000 died--usually of typhus--in passage or in quarantine camps in Canada and New England. The Montreal Board of Health stated of those in the camps in 1847, ``It may well be supposed that few of the survivors could reach any other than an early grave." In that period, among the Irish emigrant population of Massachusetts, average life expectancy was estimated by Lemuel Shattuck at 13.4 years, with 60 percent dying by the age of 5: a level characteristic of Stone Age human societies.
When it was "over," the British officials directly in charge of "Irish famine relief," particularly acting Treasury Minister Sir Charles Trevelyan, congratulated themselves and were decorated as Queen Victoria made her gala 1848 visit to Ireland. As 1847 ended, Trevelyan wrote:
``It is my opinion that too much has been done for the people. Under such treatment the people have grown worse instead of better, and we must now try what independent exertion, and the operation of natural causes, can do.... I shall rest after two years of such continuous hard work in public service, as I have never had in my life."
Then, having vacationed in France, he added: "[The] problem of Irish overpopulation being altogether beyond the power of man, the cure had been supplied by the direct stroke of an all-wise Providence."
The British historian Charles Kingsley, who accompanied the Queen on her gracious and glorious visit, wrote:
"I am daunted by the human chimpanzees I saw along that 100 miles of horrible country. I don't believe they are our fault. I believe that there are not only many more of them than of old, but that they are happier, better and more comfortably fed and lodged under our rule than they ever were. But to see white chimpanzees is dreadful; if they were black, one would not feel it so much."
However, Lord Clarendon, the British viceroy in Ireland during the famine, saw the situation more clearly. He wrote to Prime Minister Lord John Russell: "I don't think there is another legislature in Europe [other than the British] that would coldly persist in this policy of extermination."
How It Was Done
British free trade had been working to create this disaster for a long time previously. The crucial period was the 1785-1845 policies of William Petty, the second Lord Shelburne, and Prime Minister William Pitt, who took over the British governments after the American Revolution, and for whom Adam Smith wrote his Wealth of Nations and other "free trade" tracts.
The great Irish writer and leader Jonathan Swift had written already in 1730: ``One-half of all Irish rents is spent in England ... with other incidents, (it) will amount to full half of the income of the whole kingdom, all clear profit to England.... The rise of our rents is squeezed out of the very blood, and vitals, and clothes, and dwellings of the tenants, who live worse than English beggars."
During the same period, a Lord Chancellor Bowes in Dublin made a published ruling that ``the law does not suppose any such person to exist as an Irish Roman Catholic."
However, in the eighteenth century, the condition of the Irish had improved for the first time since the Elizabethan and Cromwellian invasions (which explicitly intended genocide, but with less effective means than ``free trade" proved to be). This improvement was due in large part to the organizing efforts of Swift and his Leibnizian networks. In particular, the Irish merchant marine had been revived, her ports improved, effective taxes lowered, and the clothing, linen, and glass industries developed, and agriculture had been improved. The Penal Laws of the 1690s had been intended to insure that Irish Catholics would be reduced to potato culture on rented land. [fn1] But effective organizing of the large number of Scottish Protestant immigrant landlords, had allowed some development and led to a united Catholic-Protestant movement which gained the Constitution of 1782, during the American War of Independence. The Irish population had begun to grow rapidly.
Prime Minister William Pitt's policy was described by Sinn Fein's founder and Ireland's first President, Arthur Griffith.
"On the 12th of May, 1785, Pitt's new proposals were introduced in the English Parliament. They provided, among other things, that Ireland should not trade with any country where its trading might clash with the interests of England's mightiest corporation--the East India Company ... and that the navigation laws which the British Parliament adopted should be accepted by Ireland."
To impose this "free trade" policy, Pitt eventually sponsored and repressed the Irish Uprising of 1798, to disarm the Irish Volunteers and introduce large numbers of British troops, and to force the 1801 Act of Union which annulled the Irish Constitution. (During the same period, the same policy of the same Pitt and Shelburne also reduced and impoverished Scotland, which had begun to industrialize at the time of the American Revolution.) In his political pamphlets, Arthur Griffith described in detail how Pitt after 1801 destroyed Ireland's new manufactures, particularly linens, by dumping British goods there, and rapidly eliminated independent Irish shipping. Even worse, was the collapse in land use under Pitt and Shelburne's "free trade" policy. By the 1820s, 80 percent of all Ireland's land was owned by British and Scottish landlords, and 25 percent of all land was completely unused for any purpose except real estate speculation. Some 75 percent of what was used, was in grain or horse/cattle pasture, most of this for export by merchants under London's domination. On the remainder, the Irish grew their potatoes; on perhaps two acres of rented land for each large family.
All nineteenth-century accounts of those who saw both the Irish tenant farmers and African slaves in America and the Caribbean, agree that the Irish were far worse off. In 1845, a British government commission headed by the economist Nassau Senior counted up what free trade had done: Except during the brief potato harvest, there was no work at all for 2.4 million Irish adults; by today's calculations, 60 percent unemployment. Woolen, linen, poplin, furniture and glass manufacture had disappeared; fishing had nearly disappeared for lack of capital for boats, storage, etc. Even water-powered grain mills had disappeared, in the country which had introduced them to Europe 1300 years earlier. There were only 39 hospitals serving 8 million people. The famous Duke of Wellington wrote in 1829 that "there never was a country in which poverty existed to the extent it exists in Ireland."
Senior's was not the first such commission, so the British government knew exactly what its "free trade" policies were creating in Ireland. In 1824, a previous commissioner was asked in Parliament: "Looking ahead to 15 years or more, what must this increase in population in Ireland, without any employment, end in?" He answered, "I don't know. I think it is terrible to reflect upon."
Once the famine was underway, the same Nassau Senior wrote that he feared it would not kill more than a million people, which would scarcely be enough to eliminate the unemployment.
But in 1842, 6 million pounds Sterling in rents were remitted out of Ireland to England, and a very large amount of real estate lending speculation in the City of London was based upon those rents. Much later, in 1898, an Irish commission calculated that, during the entire century of ``free trade" since Pitt's Act of Union of 1801, the net flow of wealth from Ireland to England had totalled 250 million pounds Sterling."
"Kissinger’s 1974 Plan for Food Control Genocide
by Joseph Brewda
Dec. 8, 1995
On Dec. 10, 1974, the U.S. National Security Council under Henry Kissinger completed a classified 200-page study, “National Security Study Memorandum 200: Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests.” The study falsely claimed that population growth in the so-called Lesser Developed Countries (LDCs) was a grave threat to U.S. national security. Adopted as official policy in November 1975 by President Gerald Ford, NSSM 200 outlined a covert plan to reduce population growth in those countries through birth control, and also, implicitly, war and famine. Brent Scowcroft, who had by then replaced Kissinger as national security adviser (the same post Scowcroft was to hold in the Bush administration), was put in charge of implementing the plan. CIA Director George Bush was ordered to assist Scowcroft, as were the secretaries of state, treasury, defense, and agriculture.
The bogus arguments that Kissinger advanced were not original. One of his major sources was the Royal Commission on Population, which King George VI had created in 1944 “to consider what measures should be taken in the national interest to influence the future trend of population.” The commission found that Britain was gravely threatened by population growth in its colonies, since “a populous country has decided advantages over a sparsely-populated one for industrial production.” The combined effects of increasing population and industrialization in its colonies, it warned, “might be decisive in its effects on the prestige and influence of the West,” especially effecting “military strength and security.”
NSSM 200 similarly concluded that the United States was threatened by population growth in the former colonial sector. It paid special attention to 13 “key countries” in which the United States had a “special political and strategic interest”: India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, Turkey, Nigeria, Egypt, Ethiopia, Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia. It claimed that population growth in those states was especially worrisome, since it would quickly increase their relative political, economic, and military strength.
For example, Nigeria: “Already the most populous country on the continent, with an estimated 55 million people in 1970, Nigeria's population by the end of this century is projected to number 135 million. This suggests a growing political and strategic role for Nigeria, at least in Africa.” Or Brazil: “Brazil clearly dominated the continent demographically.” The study warned of a “growing power status for Brazil in Latin America and on the world scene over the next 25 years.”
Food as a weapon
There were several measures that Kissinger advocated to deal with this alleged threat, most prominently, birth control and related population-reduction programs. He also warned that “population growth rates are likely to increase appreciably before they begin to decline,” even if such measures were adopted.
A second measure was curtailing food supplies to targetted states, in part to force compliance with birth control policies: “There is also some established precedent for taking account of family planning performance in appraisal of assistance requirements by AID [U.S. Agency for International Development] and consultative groups. Since population growth is a major determinant of increases in food demand, allocation of scarce PL 480 resources should take account of what steps a country is taking in population control as well as food production. In these sensitive relations, however, it is important in style as well as substance to avoid the appearance of coercion.”
“Mandatory programs may be needed and we should be considering these possibilities now,” the document continued, adding, “Would food be considered an instrument of national power? ... Is the U.S. prepared to accept food rationing to help people who can't/won't control their population growth?”
Kissinger also predicted a return of famines that could make exclusive reliance on birth control programs unnecessary. “Rapid population growth and lagging food production in developing countries, together with the sharp deterioration in the global food situation in 1972 and 1973, have raised serious concerns about the ability of the world to feed itself adequately over the next quarter of century and beyond,” he reported.
The cause of that coming food deficit was not natural, however, but was a result of western financial policy: “Capital investments for irrigation and infrastucture and the organization requirements for continuous improvements in agricultural yields may be beyond the financial and administrative capacity of many LDCs. For some of the areas under heaviest population pressure, there is little or no prospect for foreign exchange earnings to cover constantly increasingly imports of food.”
“It is questionable,” Kissinger gloated, “whether aid donor countries will be prepared to provide the sort of massive food aid called for by the import projections on a long-term continuing basis.” Consequently, “large-scale famine of a kind not experienced for several decades—a kind the world thought had been permanently banished,” was foreseeable—famine, which has indeed come to pass.
To read the entire NSSM 200 document, click here.http://schillerinstitute.org/strategic/NSSM200.htm
¤=[Post Update]=¤
seems to be a recurring theme in history (remember the irish "potato famine"? )
http://www.schillerinstitute.org/economy/nbw/pot_famine95.html
CHILLER INSTITUTE
How British Free Trade
Starved Millions
During Ireland's Potato Famine
by Paul Gallagher
May, 1995.
"This article was originally published in the New Federalist newspaper, American Almanac section, on May 29, 1995, while the author, a researcher, writer, and political associate of Lyndon LaRouche, was a political prisoner in Virginia's prison system. He has written on numerous topics, from the poetry of Keats and Shelley, the drama and method of Shakespeare, to studies on population in the Renassiance. Please click here for related articles.
150th Anniversary of Genocide:
How British Free Trade Starved Millions
During Ireland's Potato Famine
The May 24-26, 1995 White House Conference on the economic development of Northern Ireland, continues an important policy initiative by which President Clinton has already helped bring a season of peace to Ulster after 25 years of civil war. Further success would come by starting to connect Ireland, by tunnel, to new transport grids all the way across Eurasia: the "Eurasian Land Bridges" first proposed six years ago by Lyndon LaRouche and now under planning by leading governments. This would lead to development of new rails, power, and roads in Ireland, the country (North and South) with the least transport infrastructure and the most underdeveloped economy in Europe. This transport integration of Ireland would pass through Ulster and also help the wrecked British economy, if there were a British government which wished to do so.
But the British Tory government of John Major, the moribund successor to Maggie Thatcher's 10-year rule of ruin, should not be allowed to contaminate President Clinton's Ireland development conference with the "free trade" ideology that has turned the British Isles into a post-industrial junk heap. A British "free trade" government can do nothing but more harm to its own economy and that of Ireland. The road to a stable peace in Ireland, as in other economically collapsed regions of the globe, will be built only on the foundation of government-directed infrastructure development.
Beginning 150 years ago this fall, British "free trade" policy--the same policy Thatcher and her imitators still fanatically insist upon--caused the genocide of 2 million out of 8 million Irish subjects in four years. In contrast to the Nazis, the British perpetrators of this 1845-1849 genocide were not punished for their policies, nor did they change them in any way afterwards. In their quoted statements on that episode of genocide, presented below, you will recognize precisely the dominant British "free trade" policies of today, parroted by such as Milton Friedman and the "neo-Conservative revolutionaries" in our Congress.
Ireland has never recovered from Britain's nineteenth century "free trade" rule. It has only 5 million citizens today, and its scant industrial and agricultural progress in the twentieth century is due entirely to the national institutions built by the Sinn Fein movement of 1902-1924, which explicitly opposed British free trade dogma.
Contrary to the demands of John Major's government--breathing scandals and corruption when it breathes at all--Sinn Fein should participate fully in the White House conference. Major's government, and any British "free trade" government, in fact, has a good deal to learn from them.
Not Potatoes, But Slavery
Any historian who has studied the subject further than former Vice-President Dan Quayle, knows that potatoes (or the lack thereof) did not cause the Irish famine and genocide 150 years ago. The potato blight which struck the harvest in autumn 1845, had begun in North Carolina, and spread to destroy potato crops throughout the Northern Hemisphere for several years; it did not cause famine or mass death anywhere except in Ireland. Nor were potatoes the only major produce of Irish agriculture at the time; they were just the only produce which the Irish--75 percent of whom were feudal tenants of British landlords, fanatical preachers of ``free trade"--were allowed to eat or to feed to their livestock. The historian Arthur Young had written, like many others, that the Irish tenant farmers were slaves in effect:
"A landlord in Ireland can scarcely invent an order which a laborer, servant, or cottier [tenant farmer] dares to refuse .... He may punish with his cane or his horsewhip with the most perfect security. A poor man would have his bones broken if he offered to lift a hand in his own defense."
Free trade exported or sold all the corn, wheat, barley, and oats Irish farmers grew, in order that they should pay their rents. All crops became cash crops--and there was nothing left for the farmer and his family to eat. British free trade tolerated no change in this situation while a million Irish starved to death, heavily deploying troops to protect the export ships. Free trade evicted instantly all farmers who stopped paying their rents, and the large landlords, led by British Foreign Minister Lord Palmerston, evicted their tenants more rapidly than before as they were starving in the 1840s, even evicting many who were still paying rent. Free trade decreed that no money would be spent on infrastructure projects such as drainage, harbors, fisheries, etc., though a committee of prominent Irish subjects led by Thomas Drummond had quickly surveyed what was most needed. Ireland at that time had 164 miles of railways; England had 6,621 miles.
Free trade decreed that no government surplus food--"no welfare"-- be given to the starving, in order to leave the market for food undisturbed. "We do not propose," Prime Minister Lord John Russell told the House of Commons, "to interfere with the regular mode by which Indian corn and other kinds of grain may be brought into Ireland." Free trade insisted that the destitute work on the Public Works or in the workhouses, and that these hundreds of thousands should receive wages below the miserable levels prevailing, in order not to distort the labor market. Thus laborers died in large numbers "on the works" and in the Poor Law houses. Free trade gave the Irish farm families three choices when the potato crops failed: starve on their farms, while selling their grain crops and paying their rent; report to the Public Works or the Poor Law workhouses to be worked/starved to death as the Nazis did to the inmates of Auschwitz; or emigrate and take a 50 percent chance of surviving the passage across the Atlantic.
The Irish population was officially 8.1 million in 1845. Some 1.5 million human beings died of starvation and disease in Ireland in four years, while more than one million attempted to emigrate; of these, about 500,000 died--usually of typhus--in passage or in quarantine camps in Canada and New England. The Montreal Board of Health stated of those in the camps in 1847, ``It may well be supposed that few of the survivors could reach any other than an early grave." In that period, among the Irish emigrant population of Massachusetts, average life expectancy was estimated by Lemuel Shattuck at 13.4 years, with 60 percent dying by the age of 5: a level characteristic of Stone Age human societies.
When it was "over," the British officials directly in charge of "Irish famine relief," particularly acting Treasury Minister Sir Charles Trevelyan, congratulated themselves and were decorated as Queen Victoria made her gala 1848 visit to Ireland. As 1847 ended, Trevelyan wrote:
``It is my opinion that too much has been done for the people. Under such treatment the people have grown worse instead of better, and we must now try what independent exertion, and the operation of natural causes, can do.... I shall rest after two years of such continuous hard work in public service, as I have never had in my life."
Then, having vacationed in France, he added: "[The] problem of Irish overpopulation being altogether beyond the power of man, the cure had been supplied by the direct stroke of an all-wise Providence."
The British historian Charles Kingsley, who accompanied the Queen on her gracious and glorious visit, wrote:
"I am daunted by the human chimpanzees I saw along that 100 miles of horrible country. I don't believe they are our fault. I believe that there are not only many more of them than of old, but that they are happier, better and more comfortably fed and lodged under our rule than they ever were. But to see white chimpanzees is dreadful; if they were black, one would not feel it so much."
However, Lord Clarendon, the British viceroy in Ireland during the famine, saw the situation more clearly. He wrote to Prime Minister Lord John Russell: "I don't think there is another legislature in Europe [other than the British] that would coldly persist in this policy of extermination."
How It Was Done
British free trade had been working to create this disaster for a long time previously. The crucial period was the 1785-1845 policies of William Petty, the second Lord Shelburne, and Prime Minister William Pitt, who took over the British governments after the American Revolution, and for whom Adam Smith wrote his Wealth of Nations and other "free trade" tracts.
The great Irish writer and leader Jonathan Swift had written already in 1730: ``One-half of all Irish rents is spent in England ... with other incidents, (it) will amount to full half of the income of the whole kingdom, all clear profit to England.... The rise of our rents is squeezed out of the very blood, and vitals, and clothes, and dwellings of the tenants, who live worse than English beggars."
During the same period, a Lord Chancellor Bowes in Dublin made a published ruling that ``the law does not suppose any such person to exist as an Irish Roman Catholic."
However, in the eighteenth century, the condition of the Irish had improved for the first time since the Elizabethan and Cromwellian invasions (which explicitly intended genocide, but with less effective means than ``free trade" proved to be). This improvement was due in large part to the organizing efforts of Swift and his Leibnizian networks. In particular, the Irish merchant marine had been revived, her ports improved, effective taxes lowered, and the clothing, linen, and glass industries developed, and agriculture had been improved. The Penal Laws of the 1690s had been intended to insure that Irish Catholics would be reduced to potato culture on rented land. [fn1] But effective organizing of the large number of Scottish Protestant immigrant landlords, had allowed some development and led to a united Catholic-Protestant movement which gained the Constitution of 1782, during the American War of Independence. The Irish population had begun to grow rapidly.
Prime Minister William Pitt's policy was described by Sinn Fein's founder and Ireland's first President, Arthur Griffith.
"On the 12th of May, 1785, Pitt's new proposals were introduced in the English Parliament. They provided, among other things, that Ireland should not trade with any country where its trading might clash with the interests of England's mightiest corporation--the East India Company ... and that the navigation laws which the British Parliament adopted should be accepted by Ireland."
To impose this "free trade" policy, Pitt eventually sponsored and repressed the Irish Uprising of 1798, to disarm the Irish Volunteers and introduce large numbers of British troops, and to force the 1801 Act of Union which annulled the Irish Constitution. (During the same period, the same policy of the same Pitt and Shelburne also reduced and impoverished Scotland, which had begun to industrialize at the time of the American Revolution.) In his political pamphlets, Arthur Griffith described in detail how Pitt after 1801 destroyed Ireland's new manufactures, particularly linens, by dumping British goods there, and rapidly eliminated independent Irish shipping. Even worse, was the collapse in land use under Pitt and Shelburne's "free trade" policy. By the 1820s, 80 percent of all Ireland's land was owned by British and Scottish landlords, and 25 percent of all land was completely unused for any purpose except real estate speculation. Some 75 percent of what was used, was in grain or horse/cattle pasture, most of this for export by merchants under London's domination. On the remainder, the Irish grew their potatoes; on perhaps two acres of rented land for each large family.
All nineteenth-century accounts of those who saw both the Irish tenant farmers and African slaves in America and the Caribbean, agree that the Irish were far worse off. In 1845, a British government commission headed by the economist Nassau Senior counted up what free trade had done: Except during the brief potato harvest, there was no work at all for 2.4 million Irish adults; by today's calculations, 60 percent unemployment. Woolen, linen, poplin, furniture and glass manufacture had disappeared; fishing had nearly disappeared for lack of capital for boats, storage, etc. Even water-powered grain mills had disappeared, in the country which had introduced them to Europe 1300 years earlier. There were only 39 hospitals serving 8 million people. The famous Duke of Wellington wrote in 1829 that "there never was a country in which poverty existed to the extent it exists in Ireland."
Senior's was not the first such commission, so the British government knew exactly what its "free trade" policies were creating in Ireland. In 1824, a previous commissioner was asked in Parliament: "Looking ahead to 15 years or more, what must this increase in population in Ireland, without any employment, end in?" He answered, "I don't know. I think it is terrible to reflect upon."
Once the famine was underway, the same Nassau Senior wrote that he feared it would not kill more than a million people, which would scarcely be enough to eliminate the unemployment.
But in 1842, 6 million pounds Sterling in rents were remitted out of Ireland to England, and a very large amount of real estate lending speculation in the City of London was based upon those rents. Much later, in 1898, an Irish commission calculated that, during the entire century of ``free trade" since Pitt's Act of Union of 1801, the net flow of wealth from Ireland to England had totalled 250 million pounds Sterling."