by C. L. Cook
My family left Ireland almost two centuries ago, a generation before the Famine called "Great," and still spelled with a capital "F." Between 1845 and '52 thousands upon thousands upon thousands of Ireland's sons and daughters perished for want of food in what is largely remembered as the "Irish Potato Famine."
More than a million Irish are thought to have died through starvation and disease then, as a million more emigrated to England, North America, and elsewhere, reducing the population of the island by as much as a quarter.
While it's true, the crops fell to the
potato blight in Ireland, as happened across Europe, that is not the greatest reason for the death and misery experienced there. No, there was a much more human cause to the disaster.
Now it seem Ireland's sons and daughters are going hungry again.
Absentee landlords, and legalized injustice contributed far more to the erasure of so many innocent lives. I mention this in passing along
a report from Ireland's Sunday Independent on the new starving of Ireland by a new class of absentee tyrants.
Months into the great IMF takeover of indebted Ireland, the Independent's Ronald Quinlan and Jody Corcoran report families going hungry rather than risk being turfed out of their homes by the banks.
Those economic vampires made fat gourging on the blood of South and Central America and the rest of the Global south during the last century, the same parasites, the
World Bank and
International Monetary Fund, we thought almost dead thanks to the rise of the left in Latin America, are now bejoined by the
European Central Bank and its host of disaster capitalists on a new Valkyrian flight over Europe, taking aim at its weak sisters and deciding who and how many will perish to serve the continued interests of another blight.
The new economic order has crossed another milestone in its historically regressive passage through humankind's horrific past: En route to the second Dark Age, we bid adieu to the Victorian Age and look forward to seeing the Enlightenment disappear in the rear view mirror.
