: : Can you really imagine that the English would attempt genocide against the Irish - with what motive? : Every heard of the 1798 Rebellion, Darcy?
: More Irish civilians died in a six-week period than died in the Crimean War seventy years later. If that isn't genocide, you must have some decidedly odd ideas of what genocide actually is...
: : This myth is just another attempt to demonise the English and the comparison with the holocaust is offensive.
: You think we need demonising? - try studying our Imperial history...
: Farinata.
----------My definition of genocide would be the attempt to exterminate an entire group of people based on racial origin. The English mat have wanted to subjugate the Irish but I don't think they really wanted to kill every single Irish person.
-------English actions against the Irish (and I don't condone them - I just said the potatoe famine wasn't an English Act of "Genocide") were based on the desire of the strong to subjugate the weak for their own gain, not to exterminate them utterly (as Hitler did the jews). This is, by our standards, wrong, but it isn't genocide.
------------oh, and I know all about our imperialist history so you can stop being so bloody patronising. The fact is, it requires a lot more knowlegde about history to realise that the Empire was pretty awful in a lot of ways but not entirely evil than it does just to say "it was 100 per cent evil, aren't we all terrible people.".
------------Unbridled damnation is the form of agrument usually used by a 15 year olds who have just read an inflamattory pamphlet on something but really don't know much about anything. Actually, it seems more akin politically correct self-recrimination than analysis.
---------"Ever heard of the 1789 rebellion, Darcy?" Yes of course I have. This still misses the central point that desire to dominate (against which the rebellion was aimed) does not equate to a desire to exterminate on racial grounds. That is why use of the word genocide is inappropriate. It doesn't depend on the numbers killed but the motives of the killers.
