Part One: That Time Britain Did A Genocide in Ireland examines the Great Hunger, debating whether the potato blight was a natural disaster or a calculated genocide engineered by British elites. Hosts analyze how Norman invasions and English land laws created a brutal middleman system that impoverished peasants while destroying Irish industries to fuel the Industrial Revolution. The discussion covers violent resistance groups like the Rockites and White Boys alongside Daniel O'Connell's successful nonviolent campaign for Catholic emancipation in 1829. Ultimately, the episode argues that systemic dispossession and monoculture dependence set the stage for the catastrophic famine of 1845, challenging traditional narratives of simple agricultural failure. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Women vs The Con Artist00:02:37
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My dad gave me the best advice ever.
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If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
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Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
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My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
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Ireland's Forgotten Genocide00:15:47
All right.
Mario's and yours.
I love this.
For one thing, I have not been to a club in a while, so I do miss that reggaeton sound.
My shut up.
Yes.
Prop, how you doing today?
This is behind the bastards.
I feel like my.
I'm already going through stuff, but I feel like you're about to make it increasingly worse.
So I'm.
Well, yeah.
I'm anticipating being very sad at this point.
This isn't going to be a happy one.
Prop.
How do you feel about Ireland?
I have a lot of feelings about Ireland.
I feel like, I feel like Ireland probably got the greatest slang in the whole wide world.
Incredible slang.
Like, y'all just, y'all just hate everybody.
You know, I like the pissiness.
I like the you don't take the irreverence.
Y'all don't take nothing serious.
You know.
Yeah.
It's the, yeah.
You know, when you're doing a contest of like islands where a lot of bad things have been done to them, there's a lot of competition, you know?
Really?
But, but, but boy, Ireland really up up in the, let's say the top quarter of that pack.
They're high up.
They pretty up there, especially because, like, they wasn't drafted into white people until much later.
You know what I'm saying?
It did take to be white until, like, that's cold.
That's cold as ice.
You know what I'm saying?
Like, we the northern part of the same island, and we can't get to be white people.
You know what I'm saying?
It's, it's, it's quite a, it's quite a tale.
Um, now, prop, how do you feel about the English?
Well, I will say this: they have a track record of just shitting on the rest of the earth for like just the most efficient, just the with the greatest efficiency.
Like, I've never like, I don't know how that little island was able to shit on the whole earth as well as they have.
It'd be fair to say they're like the New England patriots of nations.
It really is just the Tom Brady of countries.
Yeah, that's right.
Just can't lose.
I will say, though, I am going.
Yes, I am in the midst of finishing Top Boy.
So, as of right now, I'm like, East London, isn't it?
You know what I'm saying?
Like, selling the food.
So, right now, I'm like, now, granted, I will say this.
I've noticed what made London cool is what made everything else cool, which is the presence of black people.
Because why Top Boy is so dope?
It's the Jamaican immigrants that like created this whole type of slang.
It's calm, bro.
It's that.
Yeah.
So, the only reason I'm enjoying this because I'm just like, hey, black people make everything cool.
That's a, yeah.
It's a big part of why London Calling is such a good album.
Now, Prop, today, first off, I'm glad you've been scoping that because we're really going to need to lean on the English accents here for comedy relief because we're going to have to do a lot of that.
I've been practicing my posh, so we'll give that a shot.
We're talking today about the thing that is most commonly called the potato famine.
One thing that Irish people will point out is that there was no such thing as a potato famine.
And the argument they will make is that, like, well, there was a potato blight, but Ireland had plenty of food.
The famine was entirely caused by, it was a famine caused by English people, right?
It was a famine caused by the ruling class of the British Empire.
It was not a famine caused by a potato bug.
And that is accurate.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, no, they don't.
Leave it to the Brits to like do a genocide and blame it on a vegetable.
Hey, listen, y'all.
I've tried to tell you, we was just doing minding our own business and then the potato decided to die.
Yeah.
What do you want us to do?
The potato made the call.
It's calm and all that.
It is, it is.
There's a lot of different takes you see from empires that commit genocides.
You know, Turkey just decided to pretend that nothing bad ever happened to Armenian people.
The Germans seem broadly to have embraced that they did some bad things, but yeah, they're down to at least say guys.
The British are pointing to produce in the grocery store and being like, no, that's what you got to be angry at.
I don't know if you ever dated somebody who was just ferociously never wrong.
Like would say stuff that's like, there's being right and then there's being less right.
And I think in this situation, I'm just less right.
Yeah.
That's England again.
Yeah, that's old John Bull, which is the thing people used to call England.
So have you ever been to Ireland, Prop?
No, man, it's on my bucket list.
I've been there a bunch.
I love going to Ireland, particularly, I really like Dublin.
And if you go to Dublin, which is a beautiful town, Galway's pretty great too.
I like, there's a lot of great places in Ireland, but if you go to Dublin and you head to Custom House K, you will see a series of statues.
And they're kind of, there's like this street, you know, with a sidewalk next to it.
And there's a bunch of statues of like wraith-like human beings marching along this little chunk of sidewalk.
There's a one of them has a mother clutching a dying baby to her breast.
The other is like carrying either just like a passed out or the corpse of a starved child over her shoulders.
And it's, it's, it's the famine memorial, and it's a really, really affecting memorial.
And it's just kind of like in the middle of things, you know?
Yeah.
And they're, it's one of those, one of the reasons I really appreciate that memorial is if you do spend a lot of time, as I have in parts of the world where you come across like starving people and refugees, it's whoever made the memorial knew what they were doing.
And I think there was like a conscious attempt to like there was an understanding of like how that looks.
It's pretty affecting.
So that's what we're going to talk about today.
And what's the great hunger?
Yeah, yeah.
The not a potato famine.
Yeah.
And it is interesting that these and I think what's kind of so compelling about this to me is that like all of the people who died in the thing we're about to talk about, this was, I think it's fair to say, an act of genocide.
That's certainly something that like one of our main sources today, Tim Pat Coogan, will claim.
But it was not a genocide that kind of usually when you have something like this, it comes as the result of like a civil war or at least a bloody conflict of some, there's some sort of like fight, and then there is kind of an ethnic cleansing or a killing.
That's not really the case with the Great Hunger.
It's more a genocide that's kind of the result of pure venal greed and free market ideology taken to the status of a religion.
And it's quite a tale.
We're going to discuss the death toll a little bit later.
For now, I'm just going to point out that the pre-famine population of Ireland was a little bit less than 9 million people.
Today, there are just north of 5 million people in Ireland.
And in fact, last year is when Ireland first reached 5 million in population since the famine.
It is probably the only nation on earth to have fewer people today than it did in the 1840s.
Wow.
Yeah.
Mountains is proper wicked, bruv.
They needed the peas for the food.
I'm sorry, y'all.
Like, I'm really deep into top boy right now.
That's fine.
I'm very deep into I'm still gearing up to try out my English accent.
We dusted it off for one of the Kissinger episodes.
You were going off into Kissinger.
We were going off a little bit.
We were trying to do that posh yaya thing.
And so, yeah, the thing about my, like, I know it's bad, but the best part about like how to do this one is because it's part Jamaican.
So you can kind of like, if you lean to Patois, it's like, it's okay because they're Jamaican immigrants.
You know what I'm saying?
So like, that's my only out.
But at the same time, bruv, it's calm, bruv.
Like, it's not good.
I know it's not good.
The best I can do is, well, I don't see why we have to have people who aren't English on the planet.
It doesn't seem really particularly feasible, but they're a part of it.
That's a lot of people.
You both owe Hannah Hannah Paul an apology.
I apologize.
I mean, yes.
At the same time, for a number of reasons.
This is great, though.
I do apologize ahead of time anytime I do a British accent to Jake.
Yes.
My greatest, my good, my, my posh, my posh British is give them the old what for.
There we go.
Okay, I like that though.
Nailing it.
The old what for.
I will say this, though.
I had noticed after touring through the UK enough, like doing music, like I finally figured out like that there, and of course, duh, that there's like regional accents.
So like I get it now when you're like in Birmingham, they do the Birmingham.
Like they got that, that, that thing.
Well, I think what we can certainly say is that we will be getting revenge for all of England's crimes by doing a variety of bad acts.
I feel like that's the only.
Yeah, you was able to conquer the world.
The least you can do is have to tolerate.
Yeah, you're going to get angry when I mispronounce Northampton or whatever.
Whatever.
To explain how all of this happened, how like so many people were killed or were allowed to die.
We're going to have to go back in history quite a bit to the very birth of the British Empire.
Because in a lot of ways, Ireland was kind of the first colonial possession of the empire.
Now, prior to English conquest of Ireland, the island maintained a history of pretty ferocious independence.
It was never even close to being colonized by the Romans.
They kind of like stop at Scotland more or less, like they're trying to get up north, but they build that wall.
Like it's a mess, you know, trying to trying to get up that far.
As you might know, yeah, England, not super close to Rome.
Ireland.
Do you even further?
Yeah.
It was already far enough.
This far enough.
Yeah.
So, you know, Ireland pretty much doing its own thing for that period of time.
And then in like 1066, you get the Normans, which are kind of like basically the French conquer England.
And then after that point, you know, the English kings are Norman kings, right?
So not that long after the Normans conquer England in Ireland, there's this guy, Brian Baru, who is a high king.
And the Normans try to invade Ireland and he defeats their armies and throws them back.
Or at least that's kind of how history is often summarized.
The reality is a lot more complex, but you know, this is not that in-depth an Irish history podcast.
So like most parts of medieval Europe, Ireland, you know, you've got a bunch of little kingdoms, you've got a bunch of like different kings and they're all at war with each other pretty often, like most places in the world.
You got a bunch of people who are fighting with each other all the time.
And so while the Normans are in charge in England, there's this Irish king named Jarmiden McMurray.
And he gets into a little bit of a scrap with some of his neighbors.
So he kind of accidentally on purpose kidnaps the wife of one of his rivals.
And that doesn't go great for him.
So he winds up inviting the Normans to Ireland to help him deal with this little squabble.
Oh, which will prove to have been a mistake.
Don't invite the English ship.
Mistake number one.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So all this is happening in like the mid-1100s, right?
This Irish king is like, hey, Normans, come on over, help me out.
I kidnapped a lady and it didn't go great for me.
And when the Normans get invited over to Ireland, there's a pope, right?
You know, popes are a big deal in the 1100s.
There's not really like that's kind of the only game in town, unless you're going Orthodox, right?
Like if you're Christian, it's pretty much the Pope's or nothing.
And the Pope at this time was a guy named Adrian, and he's actually the only English person they've ever let be pope, which might key you in on how bad an idea it was to let an English person be the pope.
We're already in the 1100s.
This is the last time they try that shit.
They bring a Nazi in to be pope before they let another British person do it.
I'm like, and them tracking, they got a pretty spicy track record.
And for them to be like, I don't know about them, I don't know about it.
You know, that didn't work out at all.
Yeah.
So Adrian, this English pope, the Normans kind of come to him and they're like, they work out a deal.
And so he gives the king of England at this point, Henry II, a papal bull, which is like, you know, a pope announcement law type dealie, right?
When the Pope declares a thing that's a papal bull, kind of.
My Catholic audience is screaming at me for inaccurately describing what a papal bull is.
But whatever.
He issues this papal bull that legitimizes their invasion of the Ireland.
And so there's this basically what has happened here is the English crown have made a deal with the papacy to colonize Ireland, which is seen as wild and still pretty pagan.
So that's what happens at this point.
When the Normans get invited over, they make this deal with the Pope to Christianize the pagan Irish.
And to discuss what kind of thing.
That's a good practice for the Americas.
For the Americas, for I mean, that's one of the points that, like, there's a pretty good book called The Invention of the White Race that goes into this in more detail.
But like, most of the techniques that the British Empire would use in places in Southeast Asia, in Africa, in the Americas were kind of tested out in Ireland, right?
In the Ireland.
Yeah.
And for what comes next here, I'm going to read a quote by Irish scholar Tim Pat Coogan in his book, The Famine Plot.
From the Vatican's point of view, the attraction of this arrangement lay in the fact that Rome would exert its authority through the appointment of hand-picked bishops rather than having to struggle to assert its influence over powerful Irish abbots, who hitherto had often been appointed by the families who controlled the extensive church lands and monasteries.
The attraction for the Normans was straightforward.
It gave them access to Irish land, which, with their advances in agriculture, they were able to exploit far more profitably than were the cattle-herding Irish.
And so Christ and Caesar came to be hand in glove.
Unfortunately, when Henry VIII defied the Pope by divorcing his wife to marry Anne Boleyn, the gloves came off between king and pope, with disastrous results for the Irish.
From the time of Henry VIII's breaking with Rome, England became a Protestant nation and Ireland remained a Catholic one.
Thus, apart from the inevitable attempts by a large country to subordinate a smaller country, England's religious wars became superimposed on Ireland also.
Not alone would the Catholic Irish lose their lands, they would also be forced to pay for the upkeep of the Protestant clergy.
Centuries Of English Conquest00:13:05
Not surprisingly, in a land where the poet is both feared and revered, native Irish resentment at the superimposition of Protestantism found its expression in a bitter verse by Rafferty, the famous blind Irish poet.
Don't talk of your Protestant minister or his church without temple or state, for the foundation stone of his religion was the bollocks of Henry VIII.
Pretty good little poem.
That's a good little book.
That's a good solid.
I would love to see, like, man, I wish there was like an alternate, like, sort of multiverse timeline where the Irish just rejected the idea of joining whiteness.
It's so just, yeah.
If they were just like, you know what, man, nah, fam.
Nah.
You know what I'm saying?
Like, I just wonder where we would be at now.
Obviously, our understanding of race being so intermixed with like colorism and stuff like that.
But what if them fools was just like, fuck y'all, nah, we ain't one of you.
I mean, you know what I'm saying?
Because of shit like this, where it's like, not only did y'all try to colonize us, you even tried to like, I mean, y'all sprayed y'all faith on us too.
You know what I'm saying?
Which was like, and then you realize actually not.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's like, first of all, like, y'all just, you a subversion of our own faith.
You acting like you invented something.
You know what I'm saying?
So like, man, that'd have been, I would have loved to have seen some sort of like alternate timeline where Irish were just like black people.
We were just like, well, and there's, I mean, there's a lot that, like, because one of the things that happens, you know, you've got Oliver Cromwell who invades Ireland.
And like, if you look at the Irish countryside, one thing you might notice is that like, there's weirdly not a lot of like old growth forests or wild animals because they got murdered.
Like, like Cromwell kills the land to a significant extent.
It's like pretty, there's a lot of like horrible, terrible, fucked up war crimes that go on in this period.
And a lot of it's seen as like I said a little earlier that like there is this attitude of like there's a lot of like pagan wildness in Ireland.
That doesn't mean that like Christianity isn't there, right?
The Normans and the Catholic Church don't bring Christianity to Ireland.
It's been there for quite a while.
But there's also this attitude that like there's something kind of like feral about the Irish people.
You see that a lot in kind of the way in which these people write about Ireland in this time.
And there is, I think, an extent, like, again, a lot has been written, and that's really not the focus of this episode on like how the Irish became white.
And I'm fairly certain there's actually a book by that title.
Yeah.
I learned a lot of that in like my like undergrad studies, like that the process of like disenfranchising slaves and like when they and all this good stuff and like Shay's Rebellion and all this stuff that like kind of tied Irish to whiteness, at least in the Americas.
Yeah, but it is important.
Like a lot of that does happen in the Americas because when you actually look in Ireland, there is, as much as there's histories of other things, there is a significant history of like rejection of aspects of that identity.
And you see little signs of that in a bunch of things, including the fact that if you go to like a football game in Ireland today, there's a decent chance you're going to see a lot of Palestinian flags.
There's a long history of like kind of solidarity and whatnot that comes with being a colonized people.
That's not the only thing because also it's worth noting that as with like the Scots, a shitload of the soldiers of the British Empire who were doing this whole making an empire thing are Irish people too.
So it's a bunch of stuff's happening.
So English domination of Ireland was not a clean process.
It didn't happen all at once.
This is going on for a period of kind of centuries.
It's being sort of ironed out.
As a rule, Irish lords ruled most of the land in Ireland through the 1200s to the early like 1600s.
And, you know, it's the stuff we've been talking about.
There's fighting in between these different lords.
There's alliances.
Some of them are like backing the English to like fuck over their neighbors.
Pretty normal feudalism stuff.
Celtic Ireland, as it's generally called, was divided between four or five lords at any given time, the bulk of the land.
And they distributed like the land that was under their control to lower chiefs and to like septs in what were called land usages.
And in exchange for this land, basically, again, it's the pretty normal feudalism deal.
You've got to hand over a portion of your agricultural produce for the lord.
And if there's a war, you've got to like help, you know, give him bodies, basically.
Standard.
Yeah.
You got these guys and they got their, they got their guys.
It's pretty normal, pretty normal feudalism stuff, which is not all that different from organized crime, but with better outfits.
Yeah.
Like most government.
So Henry VIII becomes king, as we discussed, and he kind of staggers dick first into the history of religion.
That's crazy.
Like, there was a way...
I would love to be there for the Henry VIII story.
Maybe we'll get to that at one point.
That's a little further back than we usually do.
I'll probably do Cromwell.
Probably do Cromwell before we do Henry VIII.
I mean, Cromwell's after, but, you know.
Yeah, I'm just like, listen, if there's any like sort of if you are, if you are Christian or Protestant in any way, shape, or form, like you, there's no way, I don't care what your theology is.
Your hat has to go off to Henry VIII.
It's an incredible flex.
Like in completely different things.
That was amazing.
He got to start a denomination just because he needed the punami.
He invented the, what is it, the Anglican nation?
Yeah, because he wanted to fuck differently.
Incredible.
Respect, dog.
Yeah.
Human to human.
Sit your theology down for a second.
Respect, dude, bro.
Yeah.
It's pretty cool.
So one of the things that Henry VIII does, because he's not happy that the Irish aren't willing to give up their religion because he wanted to fuck.
And there's other stuff, like there's a lot of Irish raids on the English coast.
There's kind of fighting within Ireland.
So anyway, he decides Ireland's been troublesome for quite enough time.
And he makes a declaration that all Irish lands, whether they're owned by Gaelic Irish or English transplants, have to surrender their land to the crown.
And then the crown's going to give them back, right?
So what he's doing, he's not actually trying to take their land away, but he's trying to make it clear that everyone who owns land in Ireland owns it through the king of England, right?
That's pretty gangster.
That's pretty mobster right there.
He wants everybody to bend the knee, you know?
Yeah, it's both both of ours.
Yeah.
So the Irish, a lot of people in Ireland, I should say, aren't super happy with this, right?
And so they rebel.
And this kicks off a series of wars that go throughout like the early 1600s.
There's a number of rebellions.
One of them's led by a guy named O'Doherty.
And in 1608, he loses this rebellion.
And he had owned, like, he was one of these guys who's owned a shitload of Irish land.
And because he loses this rebellion, all of the land he's owned is granted to the Lord Deputy, a guy named Sir Arthur Chichester, which is weirdly Chichester's a name.
It both has a first and a last name that you're going to hear a couple of times in this story.
I had never heard it before this.
Terrible name.
Wow.
Terrible name.
Not like O'Doherty, which is a good name.
I like it.
It's always fun.
Always fun saying Irish names.
So England had only kind of, I mean, part of how England wins the victories in these wars they're finding, it's not just them coming in, as will be the case with like all of their colonial wars.
They're not just sending in an army and crushing the local opposition.
They are allying with Irish rebels, right?
And they're kind of playing these different chieftains, or not with rebels, but they're playing these different chieftains off each other.
So some of these Irish chieftains stay loyal to the crown and they fight on behalf of the crown against other Irish people, right?
And that's how it's going to be the same in Africa, right?
With these groups like the King's African Rifles and whatnot.
You know, that's where we get our idiomines and whatnot is these colonial soldiers who are getting played against other indigenous peoples.
Yeah, it's a bummer.
It's a real bummer.
And this is not, I had said previously that Ireland's kind of the first colony of England.
That doesn't mean it's the first place that the English like conquer that's not England, right?
Because they take Wales and they take Scotland first, right?
But those, again, there's people probably in both places who will argue, but I think there's a difference with what happens in those places and what happens in Ireland that makes Ireland more of a colony situation.
Because people always are conquering each other, right?
They do it everywhere.
They do it in Africa.
They do it in China.
Every group of human beings, there have been some who have like conquered others.
What we start to see happening in this developing colonial period is different.
And one of the things that's really different is that when the English fight their fights with Scotland, the same thing happens where there's groups of nobles in Scotland who side with the English crown and help crack down a rebellion.
And there's groups that rebel.
Same thing happens in Wales.
But once those wars are over, the Welsh and Scot lords who had sided with the English crown get a piece of the pie, right?
Yeah.
Like they get integrated to a pretty significant extent in like the ruling class of this forming thing that's going to become the United Kingdom.
And so a lot of these Irish chieftains who side with the crown think like, well, something like this is going to happen with us, right?
Which seems like a good deal.
You know, it's not going bad for these folks.
Yeah, it's like it's when assimilation works.
Yeah.
Right?
It's like, we'll just assimilate you into the culture and everything's everything's fine.
Yeah.
And it seems like this is, I mean, yeah.
And that's kind of what a lot of these folks who have sided with the crown expect to happen in Ireland.
That's not how things work out.
And I want to quote next from the book, The Invention of the White Race by Theodore Allen.
The option for racial oppression left no room in the ranks of the colonial upper class for Catholic Irish chieftains, for all that some of them might wear the title sir.
The English, therefore, proceeded systematically with the repudiation of their promises to their Irish wartime allies.
Whether they had been enemies or allies in the Tyrone War, whether they flew to arms or merely protested at court, the Irish of chieftain class were to be demoted socially to the status of no more than small landlords, politically excluded from posts of authority and placed socially beyond the pale of British respectability.
Tannistry and gavel kind, the Celtic forms of succession and inheritance, were outlawed.
Irish chieftains might be expropriated and put to death for making an appeal based on Celtic law, and the practice of the Catholic religion was outlawed.
Britons were forbidden to acquire land from Britons, that is, English or Scots.
They were to get it from the Irish.
In the six esheeted Ulster counties, only a score of the deserving Irish were allowed to keep as much as 1,000 acres of land.
They're just.
Yeah.
It's so bad.
And it's like, I know I'm looking back at history.
You know, I'm kind of like Monday morning quarterback in here, but like, it just seems so arbitrary.
Well, a lot of this is wrapped up in the Catholicism-Anglican split.
It's got to be that, right?
Because I'm a huge chunk of it.
I mean, like, because again, like to this day, like, you know, with the way these people feel about Italians, where I'm like, why not them?
I'm like, is it why they don't count?
I'm like, is it, is it the anyway?
Yeah, it, it has to be the religion thing and then being able to fold that into your construction of yeah, yeah, because it, it starts.
It does, and it's just that, like, these initial divisions and the kind of conflicts they spawn just keep deepening over time.
Because it doesn't, until the Irish are even more than just sort of a subject, a subject people seen as like a conquered people who have to be kind of brutally kept in their place.
Like, this is kind of an evolving understanding.
None of this happens overnight.
And I'm like, by and large, I'm like, relatively speaking, the space between the British and the Irish is like LA in the valley.
Like, it's yeah, there's suburbs in the United States that are closer to their cities of origin than like or further than like Dublin is from London.
I'm like, it's not even, it's not even like to San Francisco.
It's not even LA to San Francisco.
I'm like, yo, like they, they round the corner.
Like, there's a, I think like Kanye's farm in Wyoming is a significant chunk of the landmass we're talking about here.
Yeah.
I'm just like, it's only yeah, they're not far away.
But like in terms of like the cultural differences, it is pretty vast.
And it's growing over this period in part because English elites really come to despise the Irish as a race.
Lord Chichester, who wound up, I'm probably pronouncing that wrong.
I'm sure it's something like Jerry or some shit because it's English names.
It's always like, no, of course you don't pronounce Chichester, Chichester.
Pronouncing Lester Wrong00:05:07
It's pronounced, you know.
Yeah, I'm okay.
I'm so excited for reading the letters on the page.
Like, I apologize for reading the letters on the page.
I apologize for trusting the way you wrote this.
That's all.
I mean, I'm sorry.
Yeah, I'm sorry I didn't.
I didn't realize it was pronounced Lester because it's not at all spelled like Lester.
Because there's not an L anywhere in here.
That's why I thought there wasn't pronounced Lester.
It's one of those things like whales.
You look at the way things are spelled in Welsh and it makes like I can't, I would never even try to pronounce those, but at least they don't, they aren't pretending to be something.
You look at a Welsh word and you're like, okay, well, I don't know how to say that.
You look at the word for Lester and it's like, oh, well, that looks like a thing that I should be able to just read.
But nope.
Exactly.
Nope.
Anyway, whatever.
Why we don't trust y'all?
We'll talk about this racist asshole in a second.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one: never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends, oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's gonna get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modern.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through, and I know it's a place they come look for up-and-coming talent.
He said, If it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, But there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, Just give it a shot.
He goes, But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be right.
It wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Yeah.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired, city hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach.
Murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that, Jeffrey Hood did.
July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
Serfdom And Chattel Slavery00:15:43
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Ah, we're back.
So Lord Chichester, who winds up in possession of that rebel O'Doherty's land, he writes shortly thereafter, quote, I have often said and written, it is famine which must consume the Irish.
Our swords and other endeavors work not for that speedy effect which is expected for their overthrow.
So even in this period of time in the 1600s, you have English lords being like, there's too many Irish.
They're too quarrelsome.
We got to engineer a famine, right?
They should just...
There's too many of y'all.
There's too many of y'all.
Some of y'all should starve.
Starvation's going to be the best way to deal with these people.
British Thanos.
And a lot of English nobility are going to spend quite a bit of time engineering really what's a series of disasters because before the Great Hunger, there are a couple of other pretty terrible famines, one of which kills hundreds of thousands of people.
We just don't talk about it much anymore because the Great Hunger is even worse.
But, you know, I want to talk about like how they did this because it's all wrapped up in kind of this landlording system that arises over the course of a couple of centuries in Ireland.
Now, we chat on this show pretty regularly about serfdom, which is a social situation that existed in a lot of Europe throughout the medieval period and existed in Russia until the 1860s, right?
Russia doesn't free their serfs until right around when the Emancipation Proclamation is signed.
They're within a couple of years of each other.
And serfdom is a type of slavery.
It's not nearly as bad as like chattel slavery in North America, in part because obviously one of the worst things about chattel slavery is families get split up, right?
You can like sell individuals from families and separate them from their loved ones.
Serfs are bound to the land, so they are part of the property parcel that you own.
So you can't like split up families outside of like drafting people to go fight in wars, which absolutely does happen and is pretty unpleasant.
But it does mean like the downside of being a serf is that you're not really free.
You can't leave.
You can't really do anything but be a serf.
The upside is that, number one, you're not really paying rent, you know, like you can't get kicked off the land because you're part of that.
Yeah, I've always explained it like, okay, you know, when you, when you, like, if you were renting an apartment and the apartment has a stove, washing machine, like it's already there.
Yeah.
Like it just, it kind of comes with the apartment.
You know what I mean?
It's like, it's a serf.
Yeah.
It's a serf kind of like, you just come with the land when I buy it.
You know?
Yeah.
I'm sure this will happen in like another three years, but imagine if your landlord owned you and that meant that you had to do what your landlord said and work in whatever job they wanted you to work, but you also couldn't get evicted.
Serfdom.
Yeah, kick you out.
Yeah.
But you also can't move.
Yes.
Yeah, exactly.
So it sucks, but also it's really where I'm bringing all this up to say that like as bad as serfdom was, it is vastly superior to what Irish peasants are enduring throughout the 1600s and 1700s.
I think it's important too, like for, you know, future reference for any, any listener, especially like the type of listeners that you and I have, to, when you talk about slavery, to understand sort of the gradient of types of slavery.
Yeah.
And I think, yeah, like on one end of the spectrum is sort of like, yeah, like a like a conquered village, you know what I mean?
And you're taking the warriors to do something or some sort of like serfdom, if you will, all the way to this.
Yeah.
Well, the humans are prop where humans are cattle.
Like, so that's like chattel slavery.
You know what I'm saying?
Like there's a scale, you know what I mean, if you will.
It's really important because a lot of the, especially folks who want to minimize chattel slavery that exists in the United States, they'll be like, well, slavery exists everywhere and it's always bad, which is like saying war exists everywhere and it's always bad.
It's like, yeah, but different kinds of wars are worse than others.
Yes, like Desert Storm.
Yeah.
War is bad, but Desert Storm was not as bad as, for example, the German invasion of Russia.
But it's different.
One is worse than the others.
Yes.
And it's like, yeah, like Roman, and there's often gradients.
Like we talk about ancient Roman slavery.
There were slaves in ancient Rome who would have felt very similarly about their situation to chattel slaves in North America.
These would have been slaves working on the Latta Fundia, which were these massive agricultural plantations or in the mines.
And these are terrible lives for these slaves and they're worked to death and it's really a miserable situation.
But a lot of slaves in ancient Rome would have been more or less were working internships.
And they're not even unpaid.
Like they're getting paid a lot.
Like when you get freed and you had a, you would get freed generally before too much time as like a household slave or like people would, people, particularly educated Greeks would sell themselves into slavery to become teachers for rich people because it was like a better life.
So it's not like if you're like, you can't just say like slavery in Rome was this because there were a bunch of different types of slaves.
Anyway, we're getting off the subject.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But yeah, but I think that's a very important distinction, especially like when you're trying, like you said, having a cultural dialogue with somebody about, like I said, minimizing the experience of one person sort of playing like this oppression Olympics to where you're like, it really is different though.
Yeah, and it's worth understanding that because the Irish in this period, they're not slaves in any way.
But also there's a degree to which they're certainly worse off in most ways than serfs.
And it's because of this landlording system that evolves.
So throughout the 1600s, like this period, there's this process of the Celtic feudal system being dismantled piece by piece and ownership of the land being transferred to English landlords, most of whom were what you'd call absentee landlords, right?
They don't live in Ireland.
Thankfully, that doesn't exist anymore.
Nobody here pays rent.
Nobody listening to the show pays rent to somebody who lives far away and is just kind of collecting a check.
That doesn't happen anymore.
But it did in this period.
Yeah, it never happened.
So first I couldn't follow you.
I was like, wait, is it that?
Oh, he's making a joke.
Yeah, I'm just being a little asshole.
So throughout the 1600s, England confiscates more than 3 million acres of land.
And yeah, during this period of time, Irish peasants change from being more or less in a similar position to peasants in a lot of Europe to being renters.
And this winds up being a lot worse under what can be called the middleman system.
And there's a couple of different ways that this kind of works.
It's not the same across all of Ireland, but one of the ways in which this works is called the middleman system.
And in this, English people acquire land, which they then let to a fixed rate to a single English person who lives in Ireland.
So the land is like owned by an English person who lives outside the island.
And then they basically lease it to an English person who lives in Ireland and works as like a property manager and he sublets the property to Irish peasants.
This is a very modern system in a lot of ways.
A lot of this is going to sound very familiar.
Not to like, I'm not trying to compare this to like rental situation people living in San Francisco.
It's obviously like not to minimize the horror of what's happening in Ireland, but like legally on paper, there's some real similarities between, in part because like what is figured out in this period of time spreads in a lot of ways.
Like a lot of the different attitudes towards how leasing and renting and stuff should work are kind of being invented in this period.
So the middleman system allows landlords to profit handily off of Irish land and labor without actually seeing the people they're exploiting.
You know, that's up to the middleman to do the direct exploiting.
So you can just kind of take the cash.
Another system that is popular in chunks of Ireland is called land tenure.
And in this system, absentee landlords rent small tracts of land directly to peasants without a middleman.
And over the course of 200 years or so, there's kind of some different ways that this works.
But the ultimate result is that most Irish peasants, like 3 million people by the time the Great Hunger starts, wind up living on these very, very small plots of land.
We'll talk about this more later, but they keep getting divided up more and more over time.
Wow.
In his 1962 text, The Great Hunger, historian Cecil Woodham Smith, which is a very English name for a guy who's writing a very critical book about The Great Hunger.
Man's a proper British.
Cecil Woodham Smith.
I just can't get over some of these names.
Anyway, the land, I'm going to quote from Cecil, who I think is actually a pretty good historian.
The land system thus introduced was a method of government, a badge of conquest, and a means of holding in subjection of the common people.
Ireland was a conquered country, the Irish peasant a dispossessed man and his landlord an alien conqueror.
Whoa.
So while it is tempting and to some extent worthwhile to, again, note some similarities with our modern landlording system, it's also important to see how unique this system was.
The English crown is essentially using a really decentralized network of landholding arrangements to dispossess the Irish peasantry.
And this ensures if you don't own your farm, you can't ever make anything extra, right?
Like, you know, we'll talk, again, this a bit more, but like it ensures the fact that nobody owns anything and the fact that people don't have any permanent ties to the land that they're born and raised on makes it very hard for peasants to put together the resources or have the stability that could lead to organized resistance.
It doesn't make it impossible.
There is organized resistance at periods, but it makes it a lot harder.
It also makes it, it's very another thing that's very familiar.
Yes, exactly.
And obviously, when aspects of this system get taken over to other parts of the world, they get a lot worse, right?
It's definitely worse for other people outside of Ireland when some of these things are like morphed.
But you can see shades of the tactics that the British Empire will use everywhere here.
Yeah.
And shades of like what the United States is going to do to Indigenous people, you know, right?
Like it's not, there's elements of that in here.
Uh-huh.
Because it's, you know, a lot of things being tested.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So English land laws are imported to Ireland.
And these laws, quote, pushed to their extreme the rights of landlords and conceded nothing to the occupiers in respect of their customary rights under the old Irish customs.
Irish renters did not get to lease the land they lived on.
There are no leases in this period.
So everyone is at will, which means you can be evicted at any moment for any reason or no reason at all.
There's no warning that has to be given.
It doesn't like you can be paying your rent and they can still kick you off.
It doesn't matter.
Tenants also receive no kind of compensation for improving the land that they farmed.
So a big part of farming, if you've ever farmed, is to like do things over time that make your land more productive and like increase your yield and make what you're on more valuable and also more capable of more easily providing more food, both for money and for taking care of yourself and the people who live there.
There's no point in doing that if you're an Irish tenant farmer.
We'll get into that a little bit more too, but like because you own nothing, it's good for people to have a sense of ownership in the things that they live in and on.
Like it's broadly positive.
So yeah, I was just like, now I'm curious as to like, why do they, why would you think that this like would be successful?
Well, it is that, yeah, but I'm like, just in the initial thinking of like, I would want, if I own the land, I would want, and I, and own a land in a place that I don't even live and I probably ain't seen in years.
I would want to make sure that that land is getting better.
So I'm like, so I'm like, make my land better just because I'm telling you to, or just like, I just thought, maybe I'm just, again, modern eyes where I was like, man, I would want to incentivize, like, yo, you keep avocado.
You know what I'm saying?
Like, hey, if you could fix my soil, want to take one of your avocados for yourself.
Like, I would think to me, I don't know what I'm talking about.
There are some landlords, because again, we're talking in broad here.
There are certainly landlords who like offer better deals to people and who do try to encourage, you know, like, I'm never going to kick you guys off.
Like, you can improve your land.
That happens too.
Okay.
But, but broadly speaking, it does not happen on a wide scale.
And we're going to talk about why, but this is very much a conscious decision that people are making.
And it's a mix of ideology.
We're going to talk about some aspects of like free market capitalism are being invented.
So a big part of the fear here is that if you create a situation by which people would want to improve their land, that's by definition a situation in which they have more control over the land they live on, which means you are violating the sacred property rights of the landlord, right?
That's a big chunk of why they don't want that to exist.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We're going to get Adam Smith is going to come into this story in a big way, not too long from now.
Okay.
So, but obviously we're not there yet.
1690, Adam Smith is just a glimmer in, I don't know, some other Smith's eye at this point.
So William of Orange in 1690 beats the Catholic king James II at the Battle of the Boyne.
And this spells the end of organized Catholic power in Ireland and is seen by Protestants in Northern Ireland as kind of like an Independence Day sort of situation.
Battle of the Boyne is a big thing for the Protestants in Northern Ireland.
And again, it's often seen as like, yeah, you have this like fight between the Catholics and the Protestants and the Catholics lose and it leads to a lot of tragedy.
It's again, as is always the case with Irish history, much messier than that.
Because the reality is that the Pope in Rome actually backs William of Orange against the Catholic King James as part of a strategic scheme to fuck with King Louis of France.
Whoa.
And he secretly funnels the modern equivalent of 3.5 million pounds sterling to William, money that's spent on swords and muskets to kill Catholics.
Cross of peas, isn't it?
Yeah.
And we don't find it.
We didn't learn this until documents were uncovered in 2008.
To give you an idea of like how good the fucking Catholic Church is at both documenting shit and keeping it locked down, this happens in 16 fucking 90.
And it doesn't drop until 2008.
Dog.
The U.S. government's bad at FOIA requests.
Do you understand what I'm saying?
I just heard today.
I just heard today Trump out there hiding seven hours of like phone content.
Like, okay, see if you can keep that hidden for 400 years.
Pope's like, that's JV shit.
Yeah.
Pope's like, rookie cookies, red shirt.
It wasn't even the United States when we started covering up war crimes.
Come on, you wouldn't even a country.
Yeah, we're hiding shit older than your concept of society.
We got dudes' own secrets older than your constitution.
Gotta love it.
Dog.
So throughout the early 1700s, the Irish peasantry languished.
Agricultural Investment Traps00:10:43
Better off than slaves, but worse off in a lot of ways than serfs.
The fact that landlords could increase rent whenever they wanted meant it was pointless, again, to try and farm for cash crops worth much more.
Like there's not a lot, there's not a point in massively increasing your yields or improving the land because they can change your rent at will.
So if they see, oh, they doubled their productivity this year, I'm going to double rent.
So why would you do that?
Why would you put in that?
Yeah, why would you?
Exactly.
Yeah, exactly.
So you pay in produce?
Yeah, generally, basically, right?
Because you're farming.
You are a farmer.
So you're farming both to feed yourself and you are farming to pay your rent.
And if you got this middleman, you can't just be like hiding corn somewhere.
Right.
It's harder because he's.
And there's obviously there's always local collaborators whose job is to like, you know, and there's also there people always do get away with shit, right?
Of course.
You know, we're flattening things a little bit because there's a lot of history to cover here.
Of course.
What's a head of lettuce between friends?
But there's, there's also, so not only, there's no point in like massively increasing your yields as a farmer because they'll just up your taxes, but there's also not much of a point in improving the land because if you make the land a lot better, then your landlord will kick you out and will rent it to someone else for more money.
Yep.
You know, like, why would you?
Now, historians have noted that one major issue with achieving progress under the feudal system, and this is everywhere that there is a feudal system, is that like this is broadly a thing that happens in feudalism.
Feudal lords in a lot of Europe throughout the medieval period have fairly little incentive to invest in or improve their lands.
If you make like a region a lot more agriculturally productive or whatever, then number one, it looks more enticing for your rivals to attack and try to take, but also the money that you invest in improving that land is less money that you're spending on your military.
You know, if you're smart and careful over time, it can work out for you, but it's like a risk.
You're taking a gamble if you divert resources for that.
And this is one of the reasons why feudalism doesn't, you know, people find other things to do because it's not great for all kinds of progress, right?
And one of the things that's interesting is England has, even though there's a king still, they've moved beyond this system in this period.
That's part of why they conquer the world, right?
As they develop kind of new systems that are more conclusive to the kind of progress that is beneficial.
Yeah.
But with this system of absentee landlords that they put in place over Ireland, they find a way to deny the Irish any benefits of modernization.
When enterprising Irishmen try to make a life for themselves in other ways besides farming, the crown cracks down on their ambitions.
In the famine plot, Tim Pat Coogan writes, Irish trade was crippled by the partial conquest.
Instead of being developed, valuable cattle, fishing, and woolen industries were taxed out of existence when they came into competition with either British trading interests or her military concerns, which led her to disrupt Irish trade with both France and America.
So like not only is it a shit situation for farmers, but whenever people try to do anything else, try to go into business or whatever, that gets destroyed via like taxing or via like different, there's different ways the government has of fucking this over in order to protect English businesses.
You know, you don't want to, so there's no way out for the Irish, really.
Yeah.
There's even this brief period in the early 1800s where they're starting to industrialize more.
And the number of Irish people who are kind of like working in these factory jobs, industrial jobs, the dawn of the Industrial Revolution is increasing.
And then it plummets right before the Great Hunger.
And part of that is that like, well, we don't want Irish industry to compete with British.
Like we want to sell them that stuff for one thing.
Like that's not why they're there.
They're not there to develop their island into a modern society.
Okay.
Yeah.
And we're talking, like, are we, we're still talking like Ireland as a whole.
Are we talking Northern Ireland?
Yeah, it's just Ireland at this point.
I mean, it's all under the control of the crown, right?
So there are like what you've got up in the north, like places like Ulster in particular.
Ulster is basically founded as a colony of English people in Ireland.
So yeah, you do, and again, this is kind of like Ulster is founded right along the same time.
It's like 1600 or so that like the English are founding colonies in the east coast of North America.
So they're actually kind of colonizing Ireland in similar ways to how they're colonizing the Americas at around the same period of time.
So obviously all this, the fact that England is kind of hamstringing Irish growth has impacts beyond just keeping the Irish downtrodden.
English landlords could have improved this situation while remaining into control, in control, if they'd agreed to enter into contracts with their tenants like leases that would maybe limit their ability to increase rent or evict people.
But they weren't willing to do this.
And that's part of why there can be no progress.
In a paper for the Marquette Law Review, Cynthia Smith writes, Because the landlord's goal was to extract as much money from the land as possible, any contractual agreement with tenants would have been an obstacle to this rent-seeking.
In addition to rent-seeking, there were a number of reasons why English landlords neglected to invest in their holdings in Ireland.
The small size of holdings, the uncertain political situation, general economic conditions, and the availability of more lucrative investment alternatives, all of these factors may have contributed to the landlord's reluctance to improve.
Landlords were further deterred from investing because they were already making a substantial profit on the rent collected on the unimproved land.
Finally, landlords neglected to make improvements because they feared that tenants would use the investment so intensively that the value of the improvement would depreciate at too high a rate.
Misuse of an improvement was likely to occur when tenants had no security of tenure.
However, if tenants had been given some security, misuse would not have been a problem because tenants would have been in the process of maximizing their net income and use the improvement optimally.
So there's like a number of different ways this could work.
And this is how things work in a lot of other parts of Europe that are modernizing.
But the absolute slumlording shit on the scale of an entire people, right?
Yeah.
Like England has turned Ireland into a slum so that they can lord over it.
Now, the backwardness of pre-famine agriculture in Ireland caused by the inefficient investment, this becomes apparent when Ireland's labor productivity in 1845 is compared to English labor productivity.
Like British people are like twice as productive as Irish people in 1845, like on a, if you're kind of like looking at them as economic units.
And this is because there's just been no development that's been allowed to occur.
Not none, but very little.
Yeah, but even that scale or comparison is like, it's so infuriating.
It's like, well, look, we're more productive than y'all.
Like, I wonder why.
Yeah.
You know what I'm saying?
Yeah.
Well, and this is going to justify, going to be used to justify a lot of racism against the Irish.
Because like, well, look, they're not very productive.
Like they just can't keep up with the modern society or whatever.
Oh my God.
So landlords find that the easiest way to increase profits from generation to generation is to further subdivide their lots, which allows them to rent to even greater numbers of the growing Irish population.
And these peasants, again, these people who live in these renting situations, they make their living by growing different grains and other kind of like export crops.
And then those crops are exported and that's what pays their rent.
Since rent raises constantly, but their amount of land is fixed and in fact often shrinking, Irish peasants are caught in this unwinnable cycle of increasing poverty.
And the desperation of their situation leads them to embrace a recent import from the new world, potatoes.
Now, we talk a lot.
I mean, there's a lot of like talk in popular culture about Ireland and the potato.
Obviously, the potato comes from, again, the new world.
It's not like a native to Ireland.
The reason why they adopt it so quickly is that the potato is one of the very few single foods on earth that can be, you can live off of nothing but potatoes.
If that's all that you have, you can, you can, especially different kinds of potatoes.
There's all sorts of different strains.
Some of them have different kind of nutritional values, but potatoes have like vitamin C and stuff.
Like they have what you need to note.
I ain't going to hold you.
I think I got through a year in college on French fries.
And like, yeah, nah, I ain't going to hold you.
I could live off a potato.
Yeah.
And they also grow in, you can grow it in really bad soil.
Yeah.
So the way in which these plots are subdivided, each like family, you know, whatever farming unit, however you want to phrase it, has like a small chunk in the land that they live on has a small chunk of like good land and then usually like bogs and stuff and like hillsides that's less good for growing.
And so one of the things you can do with potatoes is in the good land you have, you can grow shit like corn that you're going to export and sell.
And in your shit land, you can just sow potatoes and those will keep you alive, right?
Potatoes also aren't worth anything as an export crop.
They're just not worth selling, really.
So it also, it's what you eat because you can't profit off of it.
It's just bad.
That seems like a win-win, man.
Like, it does.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Especially because I'm like, I will, okay, this is a bit of a tangent, but I will defend to my grave in and out fries.
I know everybody talks about.
Oh, they're not bad.
They're not bad.
I like them.
I think it's because.
Yeah.
You know why?
Because they taste like potatoes.
I feel like everybody arguing over fries.
Like, I'm like, you eating wax and salt.
And you think, of course, that's going to taste great because it's potatoes.
Now, look, look, who's your top five fry?
Don't lose your place.
Top five fries.
I have strong opinions about this.
I mean, I really like, I'm a waffle fry guy and I haven't eaten there in a long time, but I do, I did love Chick-fil-A back in the day when I was a younger man.
I haven't had their fries in like 10 years, so I don't know.
Maybe they're not as good as no, they're still, they still slap.
I'm a little less, that's a good choice.
Wing stops.
Wing stops fries are one of my friends.
I was like, no, I was about to say, I was just about to say wing stop.
We had them yesterday.
One thing that they're gonna do is fries are incredible.
Because they taste like potatoes and are actually seasoned.
They taste like seasoned potatoes.
Here's a little tip that I do sometimes.
I'll get those five guys fries.
And then this is key.
You know that like spicy chili oil you can get from Trader Joe's?
Yeah.
Yes.
I put a bunch of them in like a baking pan.
I get like a tablespoon of chili oil, dollop it over there, smear it all around the potatoes, pop them in the oven at 350 for like 10 minutes to crisp them up with the potatoes.
Oh, it's fucking, it slaps.
Yeah.
Dog, it's good.
You just changed my life because I'm like, I am definitely the like, don't leave your fries around me.
Seasoned Potato Fries Tip00:05:03
You know what I'm saying?
Don't like, don't walk away from your plate.
Don't look away.
I'm taking your fries.
We all love potatoes.
Now, the problem is, and also, it's worth noting.
It may not sound like eating nothing but potatoes is a very healthy diet.
Irish people, one of the things that is noted in this period is that they tend to be larger and seemingly healthier than English people of a similar socioeconomic class.
And it's because they're eating a lot of potatoes, which compared to like a lot of the diets available to people at the time without money is one of the better options for being relatively healthy.
Also, the English cuisine just...
Ah, man.
Yeah, we don't need to talk about British food.
Yeah.
Like, I was like, man.
I do like Irish breakfast, though.
I think the Irish are one of the better breakfast-making peoples of the world.
You know who else makes good breakfast?
Well, I was going to do a joke.
Yeah, I was like, well, about that island where you hunt.
Okay.
Sophie's angry at me now.
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1798 Rebellion Failure00:15:00
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All right, so we've been talking about how wonderful potatoes are, and they are.
And how, like, it's actually not, again, compared.
I'm not trying to say in objective modern terms, but based on the kind of diets available back then, living off potatoes in this period is not a bad way to make a go of it.
But one of the issues is that over time on Ireland, everyone gravitates to growing just one single strain of potato because it's the best one for the, it produces the best yields and it's the most nutritious.
It's called the lumper.
It's not particularly tasty, but it is the biggest bang for your buck in tours of like calories you can grow per square, whatever.
So this works for a while, right?
Like while the lumper is growing well, this is great because people get a lot of food and people like not starving to death.
The problem is that if everyone is growing one kind of potato, then you have what's called a monoculture.
I was just about to say, it is on the top of my tongue.
It's not like that.
It's not like monocultures ain't good.
I just left a coffee farm in Columbia and they were talking a lot about biocultures and monocultures.
And like, just to add to your existential dread, according to these like expert coffee farmers, they're like, look, we got about maybe 30 more harvests in us unless we start doing more like bioculture, you know, multicultural.
This is a problem with every kind of agriculture, right?
Whenever you do, it's that we there's a few monocultures.
If I'm not mistaken, people will point out that like one reason why banana flavored candy tastes so unlike bananas is that it was based on the flavor of a banana that basically doesn't exist anymore because they all got wiped out and now we eat a different kind of banana.
Dang.
You look into the history of farming bananas.
It's wild, but the good thing about when a plague wipes out all of the bananas is that like for a while, people don't get bananas.
Like it's an economic problem for people.
But I don't think many people have commercially farmed bananas as the vast majority, if not the entirety of their nutritional existence, right?
Totally.
Not to minimize the problem that a banana blight causes.
Yes.
But you can see how this works great for a while, but when you get a disease that's going to fuck over the potato, it's going to be a problem for Irish people.
But also, again, to go back to what we were saying at the start, it's not a problem that like there's no food in Ireland because Irish people are only growing potatoes on a fairly small chunk of the land they have.
Most of the land they have is going to grow food that they're going to export in order to make their rent, right?
It's important to keep that in mind.
So near the turn of the 18th century, resentment and anger over the suffering under English domination leads to another rebellion in Ireland.
This one is aided by the French, who are in like, you know, France and England have been fighting for like a century almost by the point at which this happens.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Oh, it's France.
And France actually tries to land troops in Ireland twice.
They land an army once, but it doesn't go great for them.
It's not real easy to like, if you're France, land an army in Ireland that's going to be capable of...
And this actually keeps happening for forever.
In World War I, the Germans try to land a ship full of guns in Ireland.
It did a little bit, but the rebellion that comes afterwards doesn't work great.
I don't know.
There's a whole story there.
A lot of people try to land armies or guns in Ireland in order to, not because they particularly care about Irish liberation, but because like, fuck the English, and this seems like an easy way to screw them up.
It never quite works.
So when these French guys, you know, they have their fight, and this kind of the fact that someone's fighting the English leads a lot of Irish people to be like, well, we might have a shot at like doing something here.
So there's a rebellion.
Tim Pat Coogan writes, However, rebellion, spearheaded by the United Irishmen, was bloodily suppressed.
At the time, it was frequently said that the 1798 rebellion was secretly encouraged by direction of the English Prime Minister William Pitt, so that it would go off half-cocked before the Society of United Irishmen could succeed in their aim of uniting Catholic, Protestant, and dissenter against the crown.
Certainly, English policy seemed directed at fermenting rather than aborting rebellion.
Troops were forcibly billeted on unwilling Catholic farm owners in the yeomanry.
The Protestant militia was given a free hand in oppressing their Catholic neighbors.
Fair-minded Protestants were outraged at what they saw.
On Easter Tuesday, April 10th, at Newton Mount Kennedy in County Wicklow, a Protestant farmer named Joseph Holt, attending the town fair, was sickened to witness the ancient Britons cutting the haunches and thighs of the young women for wearing green stuff petticoats.
So like pretty brutal stuff happening here, like slicing ladies at the market because they're wearing green and that's Irish stuff.
Also, it's worth noting, like one of the things that the British do to piss people off is force them to quarter soldiers in their homes.
We joke a lot about the Quartering Act and about like the Third Amendment, like that you can't quarter soldiers in people's homes.
There's a reason why people felt that needed to be in the end of Bill of Rights.
The English love quartering soldiers in your fucking house.
Sometimes I'll just drive down the street past National Guard bases or military bases and just heckle.
Just be like, come into my house, motherfuckers.
That's right.
That's right.
I don't give a shit, Marine Corps.
You don't get to stay in my house.
Yeah.
I've got an amendment, motherfuckers.
Hey, this, hey, number three say I ain't got to let you in.
Sometimes I'll invite like a, like a, like a Lance corporal into my house and be like, you know what?
Get the fuck out.
Never mind.
That's right.
Go.
Get out of here.
Get out of here.
I'm going to continue that quote from Tim Pat Coogan.
A respected historian of the period has written, 1798 is the most violent and tragic event in Irish history between the Jacobite Wars and the Great Famine.
In the space of a few weeks, 30,000 people, peasants armed with pikes and pitchforks, defenseless women and children, were shot down or blown like chaff as they charged up to the mouth of the cannon.
One of the militia's tactics was pitch capping.
A canvas crown was placed on the head of an insurgent or alleged insurgent and boiling tar was poured into the canvas around.
After this had time to set, the cap was torn off, taking with it much of the crappie's scalp.
The term crappie came from the habit of some insurgents of cropping their hair in the fashion of the French revolutionists.
The hatred of Protestants for the Catholics was such that the commanding English general Abercrombie became so revolted by the people he was defending that he had as little to do with them as he possibly could.
And you'll see this again later in the famine, where like British soldiers are horrified at some of the things being done to Irish people.
They never really do anything about it, but they're really, really concerned.
So that'll help.
I wonder how Amber Crombie feels about his legacy now.
Oh, I think pretty good.
I mean, what he thinks of it.
No, I'm saying in the sense that he's just some sort of douchebag frat boy style of dressing now.
Look, if you are at the head of an army that is burning people's scalps off with pitch and you get to be remembered by shirtless dudes hanging out in a mall in 2006, that's not the worst way that I guess that's not the worst thing to do, but I'm just like, do you think your little shirtless guys, your frat boys are like, you don't think they soft?
Like they not as hard as you were where you was melting fool's scalps?
Or are you just like, that's right.
Look at my son.
Yeah, I don't know.
To be fair, Abercrombie and Olister caused lots of trauma to lots of people.
It's like if in very 200 years there was like a sexy tight jeans brand called Himmler's.
Yeah.
Everybody was like, oh, you got some of those Himmlers?
Those are good.
It's like that.
Their models are hot.
Yeah.
I'm like, oh, word.
Yeah.
You got, you got the new, you know what I'm saying?
You got this.
You wearing them Mussolinis.
You know what I'm saying?
I got these Mussolini air Mussolini 11s.
Yeah, those look great.
I got the Mussolini 11s.
Like, oh, word.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Incredible.
So for a decade or so prior to the 1798 rebellion, there was actually Ireland gets a parliament briefly, I think for like 12 years, which on paper gives them a small degree of autonomy from England, but not really, because the parliament in Ireland is only supposed to basically do what the parliament in England tells them to.
But after the 1798 rebellion, the English are like, well, we can't even let them have this fake degree of autonomy.
So William Pitt the Younger bribes Irish parliamentarians to vote for what he called the act of union.
And this is what makes Ireland a part of the United Kingdom.
So again, Ireland votes to join the UK if you ignore all of the things about it that are not legitimate, you know?
Yeah.
Like a lot of votes in history, right?
Yeah.
Like probably most votes in history.
Yeah.
I mean, the history of voting is mostly the history of bribery.
Basically.
It's crazy, though.
Like you mentioned earlier how you go to like a lot of like Irish like football events and they got like Palestinian flags.
I'm like, I hope people seeing like how that picture is coming into play now, like why they would like understand and empathize with the Palestinian plight in Ireland.
Like they're like, I hope it's coming together now.
Like the picture's getting pretty clear, you know?
Yeah, this goes on.
Again, we're hundreds of years into, and we're still at the, we're at like the middle point, right?
Yeah, this is right.
If you can even say that it's over, right?
Because there's a lot of people in Ireland, not as many as there used to be, but you can still find folks who will be like, look, man, I mean, the island's still not united.
There's still some like shit going on we're not thrilled about.
Yeah.
That said, most people I know are broadly like, yeah, you know, it's certainly a lot better than this period for sure.
That's a little bar, though.
Whatever.
Yeah.
I mean, it is, I think a lot of folks did take some joy when like Brexit hit and England, English passports suddenly were worth a lot less.
And suddenly English people are like going over to Ireland to try and get Irish passports.
Yeah, that's right.
Come crawling back, baby.
You know what I'm saying?
Play the long game, guys.
So with their own imperial propaganda, superior British productivity served as evidence that the Irish were a lesser race and they deserved to languish under the guidance of an English power.
They were lampooned as a lazy and shiftless people.
Much was made of the method by which they planted potatoes and which were called lazy beds, right?
Like, because again, you don't have to, like, you're just kind of like dropping them in the dirt, right?
Like, that's how potato farming works.
But, like, the English are like, look, the Irish are so lazy that they don't want to put in a hard work.
They just want to grow potatoes and turn them into liquor and smarter.
Yeah.
Well, and also just because, like, well, if they were to make more, you would just take it from them.
You just get why?
Yeah.
Like, yeah.
You guys, again, yeah.
It's infuriating, dude.
Like, it's pretty not great.
Yeah.
I'm like, it reminds me of, which may feel like a stretch, but like, follow me here.
It's like we all went to, we all went to, we were in school during the time, which is the same as everybody else's time.
I was just like, every class you took in like history and social studies was telling you about how socialist countries just don't work.
Right.
And I'm like, you telling me this while we're actively paying millions of dollars to destabilize them and then being able to like, we spending millions and millions of dollars to make their governments not work and then come tell our kids, hey, see there, their governments don't work.
And it's like, well, fool, that's, you know, why?
Like, you're, you're, just like, as anybody like connecting these dots here, it ain't working because you making it not work, right?
So when you, you, yeah, it's like, oh man, they're only growing potatoes.
Look at them.
They're just, they're lazy to grow potatoes and they only grow so much.
You know why we only why we growing potatoes?
That's, I mean, it's like you promise people who have been enslaved that they're going to get farmland and uh uh uh what is it 40 acres and a mule acres and a mule.
And then you don't give it to them.
And then you develop like a legal system that arrests huge numbers of them and locks them out of the best jobs.
And then a bunch of them are very impoverished.
And you go, why, why don't these people, why aren't they better at making money?
Well, maybe you didn't give them a lot of options.
Here's the thing, man.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You steal from a group of people all of the land that they had lived on and force them onto tinier and tinier chunks of land while killing the vast majority of them.
And then you're like, boy, why are they having such trouble adapting to the modern economy?
Jeez.
They seem so depressed.
Why are they so sad?
Yeah.
Well, it's all, again, it's all variations of the same story, you know?
So, yeah.
So, English media focuses a lot on how little effort the Irish put into farming, while ignoring the fact that Irish people are growing cash crops that are exported for the profit of English landlords and provide a lot of the food that England is growing.
And in fact, despite a lot of their backwardness in terms of like agricultural techniques and whatnot, Ireland is continuously increasing productivity in this time.
And it becomes England's breadbasket.
It's also a growing source of animal products.
Ireland supplies by 1800, Ireland supplies English cities with 83% of their beef, 79% of their butter, and 86% of their pork.
Just to name a few things.
So again, the degree to which all of this is absolutely central to the Industrial Revolution in England can't really be overstated because when the Irish are providing so much food for English people, that again, that among other things, frees up English labor to work in like this growing factory system and to industrialize, you know?
Yeah.
So the misery of life under English domination allows most peasants just two outlets: fucking and fighting.
The former explains why the Irish population triples from the mid 1700s to the early 1800s.
Tim Pat Coogan claims that a lot of peasants basically make the decision, like our lives can't get worse and birth control is not a thing, right?
So we might as well, might as well fuck, you know, like what else is there?
And this is part of why there's a birth explosion.
There's also like potatoes are a pretty good thing to eat.
And so there is calories, right?
There's food for a while too.
So for a number of reasons, the Irish population just blows up from about 1700 to about 1800.
Again, it like triples.
Wow.
Population Explosion Explained00:15:18
And the other thing that develops over time is like a very weird kind of fighting culture.
And this is like, there's a lot of racial stereotypes about like the Irish people as like quarrelsome and wanting to fight.
But there's like.
There's reasons why that stereotype develops.
And it's because in Ireland, again, people are very poor.
They have a history of rebelling against the crown and they don't have any kind of options for social advancement in a lot of cases.
And what do your young men do when like shit's rough?
They like, they fight.
This happens everywhere.
Yeah.
I respect it.
Like, I mean, y'all, y'all, y'all drink, you, you drink like alcohol is like this is the last day on earth that there'll be alcohol.
And y'all go home and you smashing and then you're just pissy for the rest of the day because all we're going to have is potatoes.
So let's fight.
Yeah.
You know what I'm saying?
Like this, this happens all over the place.
Like this is the same shit.
People talk about like the Appalachia, right?
Like Appalachia and it's like honor culture and like all of the.
And in Ireland, kind of their version of that is called faction fighting, which is, there's, this is a fascinating thing.
I had no idea it was happening.
But it starts in the county tipperary in the early 1800s and it quickly spreads all over the island.
And in the famine plot, Coogan explains, sometimes several hundred participants took part on either side.
The most famous fight at Ballyvay Strand in County Kerry in 1834 involved some 3,000 contestants, of whom over 200 were killed.
The fighting gangs were based on extended families or on parishes.
And normally fights took place either at fairs or on feast days or public holidays.
The weapons were chiefly seasoned blackthorn sticks whose lethal properties were sometimes added to by the insertion of lead in the butts.
These killing instruments were the origin of the shillales carried today by today's leprechaun dolls.
An even more deadly weapon was the whitethorn stake, a cut from which could prove fatal.
Sometimes scythes and slash hooks were used.
So there's just like this, again, I respect it.
Like, I know it's like, it's like, you know, you don't have MMA, but you can get a couple thousand people together to fight in a field.
Hey, just like, look, me and my cousins, you know what I'm saying?
Me and my cousins, couple homies down the street, we get to be this block.
We're going to scrap with that block.
And it's all in fun.
If you die, you die.
I don't hate you.
Some people are going to die.
Some people are going to die.
You better muscle up.
We talk about like, this shit's happening.
And like, like we talk in our Stalin episodes, like this is happening in like Georgia.
Like there's different kinds of like, like all over the world, people find excuses to get it in big groups and beat the shit out of each other.
In Ireland, I think.
We would be, look, when you, you, you living in, you living in the inner city of LA, you sitting on the porch.
One of your uncles will be like, hey, you think you could beat that fool up?
And you like, I don't know.
Like, hey, come here.
Hey, fight my nephew.
And then now y'all just in the street fighting.
You know what I'm saying?
Okay.
You know, it's just like, we're bored.
I don't hate them.
They're bored.
We're just bored.
You know what I'm saying?
And yeah, I tell you what, let me tell you what I learned in those days.
If somebody hits you in the middle of your nose, you're going to go blind from tears.
So don't let nobody hit you in the middle of your nose.
That was one of the greatest lessons I ever learned.
Head down, hands up.
Head down, hands up.
Now, again, so there's a lot going on here.
But this is not like the English make a lot of this in their propaganda about like how uniquely fighty the Irish are.
But like we, this happens all over the world.
Everywhere in the world.
Everywhere in the world.
It's just what happens when like you have a bunch of young men without much in the way of options for the future.
You've ruined any sense of purpose and destiny for them.
And you've also like, they're angry because the situation is unfair, but it has become very clear that we're not going to beat the British military.
Yeah.
You know?
It's also, you know, this kind of feeds into this system of what are called secret societies at the time.
And when we talk about like that term means something different now, basically what's happening is insurgent groups are building over Ireland, right?
And there's different ones, right?
As we'll see later, there are some kind of secret societies that are made up of landlords or in support of the landlords.
There's some that are in support of just the Protestant cause.
And there's others that are basically battling the status quo that are like actually fighting against this absentee landlord system or like Catholic groups fighting against Protestants.
Probably one of the more interesting of these groups were called the Rockites.
They declared allegiance to a mythical Captain Rock.
This is not a guy who existed, but like they would, the Rockites would carry out attacks on landlords, like they would murder or beat up landlords or rent collectors, and then they would write letters justifying what they'd done signed by Captain Rock.
It was kind of like an I.M. Spartacus sort of, although Spartacus was real, obviously.
You know, it's that sort of thing.
We're claiming that there's like this, you know.
My brain is flooding right now with some sort of puns and wordplays about just Dwayne The Rock Johnson or Chris Rock being slapped.
And like, it's so hard to not go with the Chris Rock.
Like, and it's like, you know, when you can't land on a joke because there's too many of them firing it.
That's what just happened right now.
Yeah, just remember that thing that happened with Chris Rock, folks?
Yeah.
Yes.
Actually, in terms of, if you're looking for something to laugh at, prop, the most powerful secret society in this period were called the white boys.
All right.
All right.
It's not for ads.
Gustave de Beaumont, who was a sympathetic French intellectual at the time, wrote this of the white boys, quote, they lived by an atrocious savage code worthy of a semi-barbarious population, which abandoned to itself and has no light to guide its efforts, finds no sympathy to assuage its passions, and is reduced to look to rude instincts for the means of safety and protection.
These are banditi of a singular kind.
To obtain arms or vengeance, they commit all sorts of outrages while they abstain from the gold or silver under their hands.
So he's kind of pointing out that like they're really more interested in vengeance than making money.
They're not like traditional, they're not like criminals in that sense.
They really want to like fuck some shit up.
And in many ways, the white boys are a precursor to a lot of modern insurgent terrorist groups.
Some of them were quite erudit, too.
And in their manifesto, kind of, they have like this thing that is explaining what they're fighting for.
They write, quote, let us strike the culpable, not only in their persons, but in their dearest interests and affections.
Let not only their cattle be howed, hamstrung, their houses burned, their land turned up, their harvests destroyed, but let their friends and relations be devoted to death, the wives and daughters to dishonor.
Which is, there's an allegation that when they talk about wanting people's wives and daughters to be dishonored, that they're like threatening to commit rape of people.
I was like, it sounds like a rape.
Yeah, they may have been.
You know, this is not a pretty series of things that are happening.
White boys.
So the white boys, and they see him as like a precursor to the kind of anti-colonial insurgent groups that would dominate a lot of late 20th century geopolitics, right?
You could see this as like the first stirrings of some things that are going to happen all over the world.
But Ireland also, in this period, gives birth to what some scholars consider the first organized mass nonviolent resistance campaign in history.
Okay.
It's organized by a guy named Daniel O'Connell, who is one of the very few members.
Ireland's part of the UK, right?
So it is possible for Irish people to get elected to parliament.
There's a long history of like what, because like, well, actually, we're about to talk about this.
O'Connell rises to prominence first as a lawyer, and he forms an organization called the Catholic Association in 1823.
And this was the first semi-effective Irish political party in history.
The Catholic Association and O'Connell spend years fighting for Catholic emancipation, which they win in 1829.
And that's what makes emancipation.
Yeah, because Catholics, you're not allowed to like hold land or political office, right?
Yeah.
Like you are, there is like a degree of like apartheid for Catholics, kind of, in the legal sense of the word in this period in Ireland.
And so O'Connell wins the right in this organization, win the right for Catholics to sit on the parliament, right?
So now you can have, because Irish people could be in the parliament before, but they had to be Irish Protestants.
Because of O'Connell, you get your first, he is the first Catholic Irish legislator in like elected, or like in modern elected, I think maybe before shit got all fucky.
This also opens up like Catholics can be lawyers in ways they couldn't before, and they're allowed to be military officers in the British military now.
So this is like a big civil rights campaign, right?
So O'Connell forms this political party.
They fight for like seven years and they win.
I mean, this is a pretty massive victory, you know, for Irish civil rights in this period.
So the next year, 1830, O'Connell wins election to the parliament, and he becomes the first Catholic in modern history to sit in the English parliament.
And he's a pretty cool dude.
He's poor by parliamentary standards, which means he's rich, but not rich compared to the other rich people, right?
Like, you know, and he dresses like a normal person.
So the British elected leaders call him the king of the beggars because he looks poor to them.
Again, he is not a poor person.
There are minimum financial requirements to be in parliament, right?
So he's not impoverished, but they see him as impoverished.
And they also see him as like he is the representative of the hordes of working poor in Ireland, you know?
Tim Pat Coogan writes, he deserves to be regarded as the founder of the modern peaceful civil rights movement.
His hatred of oppression was universal.
My heart walks abroad, he said, and wherever the miserable is to be succored and the slaves to be set free, there my spirit is at home, and I do like to dwell.
In America, he was deified by the anti-slavery movement for his speeches in their favor and for the manner in which he turned down substantial money offers from slave owners who commanded 27 votes in the House of Commons during the emancipation battle, saying, gentlemen, God knows that I speak for the saddest people the sun sees, but may my right hand forget its cunning and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth before to help Ireland, I keep silent on the Negro question.
And what he's saying there is, there's a vote, like England banned slavery in this period, right?
Yeah, yeah.
And a bunch of parliamentarians are like, hey, dude, vote with us to keep slavery and we'll help you out in gaining some concessions for Irish people in parliament.
And he's like, I couldn't, I would never be able to live with myself if I did that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Like our situation is bad, but like this is, I could not, I could not do that.
But it's a principled moral stand.
Yeah.
He denounces George Washington for owning slaves, which gets him, he get a lot of the early Irish diaspora in New York hate him because he like hates George Washington because George Washington owns a bunch of fucking slaves or owned a bunch of slaves.
He's dead at this point.
He gets attacked a lot by U.S. newspapers.
The New York Herald accuses him of having a bunch of concubines and illegitimate children because again, he's like, he thinks slavery is bad.
Here we go.
By the 1840s, he was an old man who had spent decades fighting for his people.
In 1843, he embarked on one last great battle, repealing the Act of Union, right?
This thing that brings Ireland into the UK.
Given total English dominance of Parliament, this was not seen as possible, right?
Like In a quote-unquote legitimate way, the English parliament is not going to vote to give up Ireland, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
But he decides, well, fuck.
I don't, I'm not going to try and convince a bunch of English rich assholes that Ireland ought to be free.
Yeah.
So he creates what some people will say is the first modern civil disobedience campaign.
He holds a series of what are called monster meetings, which are where huge numbers of Irish people assemble to protest in favor of independence.
The first one of these is 120,000 people, and crowd sizes grow over the course of the year that he's doing this to 300,000 to 500,000 at a meeting in Cork.
By August of that year, he's succeeded in assembling his largest crowd yet, 750,000 people.
That's basically a tenth of the Irish population, more than that, really.
And this is the 1840s, you said?
Yeah, this is 1843.
He gets three quarters of a million people to gather to protest for their independence.
Wow.
And again, there's a lot of, I went over the fact that there's a lot of stereotypes of the Irish as drunk and violent in this period.
He's very aware of that.
And so there's this kind of volunteer order police force at these protests to make sure that there's no alcohol and there's no fighting, that people are staying absolutely in line or scrupulously abiding by the laws outside of the fact that they're gathering to make this protest.
And that makes it really hard for the British government to like stop this stuff, right?
Because folks are so disciplined.
They have trouble finding kind of an end to blow this movement up.
And this is a real problem because when you've got 750,000 people assembling for something, well, that's potentially a military issue, right?
If you can get 750,000 folks together for anything, you could cause some problems for the government, you know?
Like, that's a lot of motherfuckers.
That's a lot today.
Yeah.
There was a fucking protest in the U.S. with 750,000 people.
That's a gang of people.
Yeah.
That's some shit could go down.
Obviously, we had like that many people out in the street to try to stop the Iraq war and it did nothing.
But it could, it could mean could have.
Yeah.
It's a lot of people.
If they was up on, the British was up on just, you know, this, oh, no, it hadn't invented yet.
But I'm like, no.
What's up with the tear gas?
I was like, y'all could have just do what you do now, which is just no matter what.
We are building to that prop.
Okay.
But it is like, I think if you wanted to, if there were a comparable civil disobedience movement in the United States, it would be, it would, it would be putting 20 or 30 million people into the streets in a single location.
Dang.
Which I don't think could happen logistically.
Like, we don't have the roads for that.
Yeah, it's not obviously not a fuzz for it.
Yeah.
But this is huge.
So O'Connell plans to hold his most critical meeting on October 8th in Clontarf near Dublin.
By this point, the powers that be have grown terrified of what O'Connell is assembling.
So his, you know, they have trouble because the meetings are peaceful, but on October, in October of 1843, they decide, well, fuck it.
Like, I don't care.
Wait, we don't, we're not going to care anymore.
We're not going to pretend to care that he's followed the rules.
Yeah.
There it is.
The Irish do not have a right to organize for independence.
So they ban his meeting and then they gather an army and they sail warships into the port and train long-range cannons on the meeting site and say, if you gather, if you get a million people together, we are going to shell you with naval artillery.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We're not just like we are shooting guns into a crowd.
We will pound you with bombs.
Like yeah.
Wow.
The land.
Yeah.
The land.
So O'Connell has a choice here.
Struggle For Independence00:03:09
And it's a choice that a lot of civil disobedience campaigners have had.
It's the choice Martin Luther King made versions of where it's like, okay, if we assemble peacefully here, they're going to fuck a lot of people up.
Yeah.
Do we do it?
And he decides no.
He decides not to risk those lives and he cancels the meeting.
He gets arrested.
He serves four months in prison for conspiracy.
And the fact that he refuses to push the British government to force them to either put up or shut up.
A lot of future Irish activists are going to see this as evidence that like peaceful protest doesn't work.
This is a big part of why the things that happened, the 1916 rising, why the decades and decades of insurgent terrorism and stuff, like a lot of them will point back to O'Connell and be like, we tried.
People tried to do this peacefully and you threatened to kill us.
So what else?
What are the options?
I guess we'll make box.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm like, that's where you went, you know?
Yeah.
Wow.
I'm always like, I'm always leery, like, and this is just my own sort of baggage.
I'm always leery when I hear like, you know, a book say this dude was the first version of something, especially when he's not a white dude when I'm like, I don't know.
But that being said, this, I, when you said O'Connell, like a lot of like things from my black studies like started popping up of like, no, wait, we, we talk about him often.
You know what I'm saying?
I didn't know the story till just now, but his name like rang a lot of bells for me.
And it's one of, I try to be clear here that like you will, historians will claim that.
I'm not an expert.
Like I can't comprehensively say no one else ever tried anything like this.
Yeah, I'm not.
I'm not calling you on that.
He does get credit from a lot of people for this.
He's certainly like a seminal figure in the concept of nonviolent mass resistance.
Yeah.
But yeah, this, this, this, I, yeah, like, I, this is one of those dope moments on this show where like some something that you may know like vaguely kind of like finally comes in view and you're like, oh, it's complicated.
And a lot of ways, like, I see the way that you're describing like how he like didn't take that next step, you know, in apartheid South Africa.
Like, you know, people make those claims about Nelson Mandela that there was like another step he didn't take and that, you know what I'm saying?
And where Winnie became more radicalized, you know what I'm saying?
And like, and so you have modern like activists that are like, I appreciate you, you took the rock far enough or didn't take the rock far enough that you took as far as you could go.
But look, you wasn't down the shoot.
Yeah.
And this is, I mean, you'll always, I think that's always going to be the case with everyone who does anything good within the context of like a civil rights movement.
There's always, and anyone who is like, anyone who is organizing for radical social change pretty much always hits a point where they reach the end of their personal willingness to fight for kind of radical change.
And so like, nobody's perfect.
We all get that.
Like there are things that we all believe right now that in a couple of generations, folks will be like, how did you put up with this though?
The Coming Fungus Disaster00:02:47
Yeah.
Like I get why you were protesting for this and this, but how didn't you have a problem with, you know, that's just like the march of time and shit, right?
Yes.
And I'm not like, I think it'd be unreasonable to condemn O'Connell for what he did.
It's just this is what happened, right?
Like he made the call that he made and then the things that happened afterwards happened.
And it's worth understanding that.
And it's worth understanding that there is a point.
I'm never going to be forgiving like the IRA for setting off a fucking bombs and random bars and shit.
Like there's a lot of fucked up things that happen in the armed portion of the struggle for independence.
But when some of those advocates go back and say like, well, we gave the nonviolent shit a try, they're not wrong, you know?
Yeah.
And that's worth acknowledging from a historical standpoint.
So that's the end of 1843.
Okay.
In the summer of 1845, an umasit or water mold known today as Phytophthora Infestans.
That's the best I could do.
I'm sorry.
It's like an English last name.
I'm not going to get it perfect.
The last four words you said, I was like, I don't know what you just said.
A luminous.
Yeah, it's a fungus, right?
It starts to spread throughout Europe.
We're not going to get into a ton of detail because, again, this is like particularly, there's a lot of coverage that'll like really blame this fungus on all of the things that happened.
It's not the fungus's fault.
The fungus is like a thing that it's like blaming the disaster in Hurricane Katrina on the hurricane.
When it's like, no, that's not really what I'm angry about, you know?
But like this, this thing, like this, this, this is an important part of the story.
This thing starts to hit in Europe, right?
Yeah.
Crops start to fail.
It becomes increasingly clear that like not only is there this thing affecting potatoes all over the continent, but it's like pretty bad.
It's wiping out large chunks of the harvest.
Newspapers and farmers' almanacs note with fear as it rampages through crops first on the continent and then in England.
On August 20th, 1845, it is discovered for the first time in Ireland at the Dublin Royal Botanical Gardens.
Obviously, it probably came somewhere else first, but you're going to notice it at the Royal Botanical Gardens first because they've got the most eyes on them.
The population of Ireland at this moment was probably close to 9 million people.
You know, you're talking the 1840s.
We're not as good at censuses and stuff as we would have been.
Probably around 9 million people, a little bit less.
Most of these people are Catholic.
3 million of them are the kind of peasants that we spend a lot of this episode talking about, eking out a precarious living on the land as renters, utterly dependent upon the continued productivity of the potato for their caloric needs.
Yeah.
And that is the stage being set for what's going to happen next, which is not going to be nice.
But prop.
Blight Hits Irish Crops00:04:03
You know what is going to be nice?
These pluggables.
Well, your pluggables.
Yeah.
You're very nice.
Absolutely.
Yeah, man.
Prop hip hop.
Prop it pop.
Prop it pop.
That's all the socials and the website.
There's the hood politics pod.
Still popping and cracking and getting some.
Sophie's helping me get some doper.
Not doper, but some dope guests and such.
You know, we're having a good time over there.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Prop hip hop.
Prop hip hop.
Check it out.
Check out, you know, something else.
Yeah.
Two.
Check out good things.
Read a book.
Or, I don't know.
Find an English person and be like, what the fuck, man?
Huh?
What the fuck?
Yeah, look at an English person and be like, thanks.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Go to an English bar and just like frown.
Just sit in the corner and like mean mug them.
Just mean mug them and be like, give him what for?
Do it for O'Connell.
God an Ullister.
Which I learned is like almost like the Irish like MAGA.
Yeah.
Forgotten Ullister.
There you go.
There you go.
It is a little bit maggoty.
Well, you know, it sounded cool to me because I don't know what Alister means anyway.
You know, it's that Northern Irish Protestant stronghold that's kind of formed as a colony, basically, you know?
Yeah.
Good stuff.
Good stuff.
So go colonize England.
You know, that's what you actually are.
Really, everybody colonize England.
Take, yeah.
All right.
Fuck them up.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
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If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
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There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanks Stat on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
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Greg Gillespie and Michael Marcini.
My mind was blown.
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Laura, Scottsdale Police.
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10-10 shots fired in the City Hall building.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
A shocking public murder.
This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
They screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
A tragedy that's now forgotten.
And a mystery that may or may not have been political.
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