Ce a făcut Stalin în Ucraina făcuseră deja englezii în Irlanda, cu un secol înainte, printr-o combinație de laissez-faire dogmatic și discriminare sistematică bazată pe șovinism. Dar vorba lui Patapievici, expertul local pe relația dintre creștinism și capitalism: "Regimurile liberal-capitaliste nu torturează, nu ucid".
"The Famine was our Holocaust. During the mid-19th Century, Ireland experienced the worst social and economic disaster a nation could suffer. A quarter of the island's population starved to death or emigrated to escape truly appalling conditions (...)
Coogan's work is a damning indictment of Charles Trevelyan, the assistant secretary to the Treasury, who was effectively in charge of Famine relief in Ireland.
Trevelyan, today, is remembered more in sorrow than in anger in the classic song 'The Fields of Athenry', but he surely ranks alongside Cromwell as one of the greatest villains in Irish history.
Trevelyan was motivated by racialism, laissez-faire dogmatism and anti-Catholicism. Coogan highlights in a variety of ways how Trevelyan's policies consigned a generation of Irish people to death or exile.
Trevelyan was motivated by racialism, laissez-faire dogmatism and anti-Catholicism. Coogan highlights in a variety of ways how Trevelyan's policies consigned a generation of Irish people to death or exile.
But Trevelyan is most conclusively condemned in the dock of history by his own words.
The man whose policies held sway over the fate of a starving population wrote : "The judgment of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson, that calamity must not be too much mitigated . . . the real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the Famine but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people."
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