Behind the Bastards - Part One: That Time Britain Did A Genocide in Ireland

Episode Date: April 12, 2022

Robert is joined by Prop to discuss the bastards of the Great Hunger. FOOTNOTES: https://www.rte.ie/history/the-great-irish-famine/2020/0902/1162846-the-truth-about-trevelyan/ https://scalar.usc.edu/works/star-of-the-sea-a-postcolonialpostmodern-voyage-into-the-irish-famine/charles-trevelyan https://archive.ph/njzu5#selection-3517.0-3537.162 https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.independent.co.uk%2Farts-entertainment%2Fhistorical-notes-god-and-england-made-the-irish-famine-1188828.html https://www.thoughtco.com/great-irish-famine-1773826 https://scholarship.law.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=1653&context=mulr https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ehr.12274 https://www.irishcentral.com/roots/history/queen-victoria-irish-famine Coogan, Tim Pat. The Famine Plot (pp. 83-84). St. Martin's Publishing Group See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I love this. One thing I have not been to a club in a while, so I do miss that reggaeton sound. Masha top! Prop, how are you doing today? This is behind the bastards. I feel like I'm already going through stuff, but I feel like you about to make it increasingly worse.

Well, yeah. I'm anticipating being very sad. 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 Ireland probably got the greatest slang in the whole wide world because they just sold you a reverent. Y'all just hate everybody. I like the pissiness, I like that you don't take the irreverence, you don't take nothing serious.

When you're doing a contest of islands where a lot of bad things have been done to them, there's a lot of competition. But boy, Ireland really up in the, let's say, the top quarter of that pack. I'd say they're high up there. They pretty up there, especially because they wouldn't draft it into white people until much later. It did take them a while. Y'all didn't even get to be white. That's cold as ice. We're the northern part of the same island and we can't get to be white people.

It's quite a tale. 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 the most efficient, with the greatest efficiency. 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 country.

Yeah, that's right. Just can't lose. I will say though, I am like... Yes, I am in the midst of finishing Top Boy. As of right now, I'm like, it's London, isn't it? You know what I'm saying? Selling the food. 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 created this whole type of slang. It's calm, bro. So the only reason I'm enjoying this is because I'm just like, hey, black people make everything cool. 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. Yeah, 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, but 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.

They have a bucket, his. 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'm trying to tell you, we was just doing, running 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 calming all that.

There's a lot of different takes you see from empires that commit genocides. 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, okay, 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 have a date of 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. Yeah.

And I think in this situation, I'm just less right. Yeah. That's that's that's that's that's England again. Yeah, that's that's that's the old that's that's old John bowl, which is the thing people used to call England. So if you've ever been to Ireland prop. No, man, it's it's on my bucket list. I've been there a bunch. I love I love going to Ireland, particularly.

I really like Dublin. And if you if you go to Dublin, which is a beautiful town, Galway is 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 this little chunk of sidewalk. There's 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 sounds terrible.

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 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 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 potato famine.

Yeah. Yeah. The not a potato famine. Yeah. And it is interesting that these and I think what's kind of kind of so compelling about this to me is that like all of the people who died and the thing we're about to talk about this. 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. Yes. And it's it's 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 nine million people. Today there are just north of five million people in Ireland.

And in fact last year is when Ireland first reached five million in population since the famine. It is probably. Yeah it's probably the only nation on earth to have fewer people today than it did in the 1840s. Wow. Yeah. Mons is proper wicked bruv. The piece for the food. I'm sorry y'all like I'm really deep in the top way right now.

That's that's that's fine. I'm very deep into I'm still gearing up to try out my my English accent. We we just did it off for one of the Kissinger episodes and you were going off in the kids. We were going off a little bit. We were trying to do that like posh yaw yaw thing. And so yeah the thing about my like I know it's bad but the 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 Patswa it's like it's OK because they're Jamaican immigrants. You know what I'm saying.

So like that's my only out but at the same time. It's calm bruv. Like it's not good. I know it's not good. You know 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 hmm. They're quite a ball. That's what that's what I did.

You both all hand ran Apollo and apology. Apologize. I mean yes. At the same time for a number of 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.

There we go. I like that though. Nailing it. The old what for. I will say this though. I have noticed after touring through the UK enough like doing music like I finally figured out like that there. And of course does 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. I feel like that's the only. Yeah. 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.

So. 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. Far. Yeah. England not super close to Rome. Ireland even a bit further. It's already far enough this far enough. 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 or 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 he 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 in fighting the Normans to Ireland to help him deal with this little squabble. Which will prove to have been a mistake. Don't invite the English yet.

Mistake number one. Yeah. So yes. 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 popes 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 went on how bad an idea it was to let an English person be the pope. Good God yeah. 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. Yeah I'm like they got a pretty spicy track record. But them to be like I don't know about them. 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 audiences screaming at me for inaccurately describing what a papal bull is. But whatever he issues this papal bull that legitimizes their invasion of the island. And so there's this basically what it goes. 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 comes next. It's a good practice for the Americas.

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 and Africa and in the Americas were kind of tested out in Ireland. Right. Yeah. And for what comes next here I'm going to read a quote by Irish scholar Tim Pat Cougan 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 handpicked bishops rather than having to struggle to assert its influence over powerful Irish habits. 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 where the cattle herding Irish. And so Christ and Caesar came to be hand and glove. Unfortunately when Henry VIII defied the Pope by divorcing his wife to Mary Ann 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. 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 that's solid. I would love to see like the 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 just yeah if they're just like you know what man nah fam nah you know what I'm saying like I just wonder like 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 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 spray job faith on us to you know I'm saying which was like. And then you were like absolutely not yeah yeah it's like first of all. Like y'all just you a subversion of our old fey you acting like you invented something I'm saying so like man at a bit I would have loved to have seen some sort of like alternate timeline where Irish were just like black people like we were just like. Well 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 yeah Cromwell like 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 yes and a lot of it 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. Yeah that doesn't mean that like Christianity isn't there right the Normans Catholic Church don't bring Christianity Ireland been there for quite a while.

Yeah there's also this attitude that like. There's something kind of like feral about the Irish people you see that a lot and kind of the way in which these people write about Ireland in this time. Yeah and there is I think an extent like again a lot has been written and that's not 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 the disenfranchising slaves and like when the yeah all this good stuff and like. Shays rebellion and all this stuff that like kind of tied 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 scepts the in what we're called land usages. And in exchange for this land basically again it's the pretty normal feudalism deal you've got a 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 there 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 any kind of staggers dick first into the history of religion. As crazy like there was a way where I would love to be there for the Henry VIII story. That what maybe we'll get to that at one point that's a little further back than we usually do. Probably do Cromwell before we do Henry because 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 a Christian or Protestant in any way shape or form like you there's no way and I don't care what your theology is your hat has to go off to Henry VIII. An incredible flex like in that was that was amazing. He got to start a denomination just because because he needed the Poonami. He invented the what is it the Anglican. Anglican. Yeah because he wanted to he wanted to fuck differently. I like this look. Incredible.

Respect dog. Yeah. I got like you this look human to human. Sit your theology down for a second. Respect dude bro. Yeah. It's it's pretty it's pretty it's pretty cool. So one of the things that Henry VIII does because he's he's 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 like Irish raids on the English coast. There's kind of fighting within Ireland. So anyway he decides Ireland's been the 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 descend or have to surrender their their land to the Crown and then the Crown is going to give them back. Right. So what he's doing is 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 good. That's pretty mobster right there.

He wants everybody to bend the knee. You know. Yeah. It's basically both of ours. Yeah. So the Irish a lot of people in Ireland I should say aren't super happy with this right. Yes. 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 is led by a guy named Odorty and in 1608 he loses this rebellion and he had owned like he was one of these guys. He was owned a shitload of Irish 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 name. Both as 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. Yeah. Terrible name. Not like Odorty which is a good name. I like that's pretty.

I like it's it's always fun always fun saying to say in 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 it 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 outlying with Irish rebels right and they're kind of playing these different chieftain 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 the kings African rifles and whatnot. You know that's where we get our idiom means and whatnot is these colonial soldiers who are getting played against other you know 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 every way they do it in Africa the Chinese every every group of human beings there have been some who have like conquered others. What 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. When the English you know take have that fight their fights with Scotland the same thing happens where there's groups of nobles in Scotland who side with the English English crown and help crack down a rebellions and there's groups that rebel. Same thing happens in Wales but once those wars are over the Welsh and Scott 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 and like the ruling class of this 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 the these these folks. Yeah it's like it's it's when assimilation works. Yeah right that's like we just assimilate you into the culture and everything's everything's fine.

Yeah and it seems like this is the I mean yeah and and and that's kind of what a lot of. These folks who have sided with the crown expect to happen in Ireland yeah it'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 crap upper class for Catholic Irish chieftains for all that some of them might wear the title sir 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 are 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 post of authority and placed socially beyond the pale of British respectability. Tannestry 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 asheeded Ulster counties only a score of the deserving Irish were allowed to keep as much as 1000 acres of land. The 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 just like 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. Yeah I'm like is it why they don't count I'm like is it is it the anyway yeah it has to be that the religion thing and then being able to fold that into your your construction of yeah it's just it started 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 yeah 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 a kind of an evolving understanding none of this happens overnight. And I'm like but yeah by and large I'm like relatively speaking the space between the British and the Irish is like L.A. in the valley like it's yeah there's there's suburbs in the United States that are closer to their cities of origin. They're further than like Dublin is from from London yeah 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 yeah. There's I think like Kanye's farm in Wyoming is a significant chunk of the land mass 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 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 English names it's always like what.

No of course you pronounce Chichester Chichester it's pronounced you know yeah I'm sorry I'm reading the letters on the page. I apologize for trusting the way you wrote this that's 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 less because there's there's not an L. Anywhere in here that's why I thought there was a pronounced Lester it's one of those things like whales you look at the way things are spelled in Welsh and it makes yeah like I would never even try to pronounce those but at least they don't they aren't pretending to be some. They're not pretending 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 no exactly nope anyway whatever. We don't trust y'all we'll talk about this racist asshole in a second. During the summer of 2020 some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations and you know what they were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series alphabet boys as the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of alphabet boys we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver at the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse and inside his heart so like a lot of guns.

He's a shark and on the good badass way and nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date the time and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to alphabet boys on the I heart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science. The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman.

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It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth his beloved country the Soviet Union is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the I heart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back so Lord Chichester who winds up in possession of that rebel authorities 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 the overthrow. So even in it in this period of time the 1600s you have English. Lords being like there's too many Irish they're too quarrelsome we got an engineer a famine right they should just it's too many of y'all there's too many of y'all y'all stars starvation is going to be the best way to deal with these people right 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. Yeah. But you know I want to talk about like how they did this because it's all wrapped up in kind of this land lording 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 the immense of pacing proclamation aside 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 they are part of the property parcel that you own yeah so you can't like split up families outside of like drafting people to go fight in wars which 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 you're not really paying rent you know like you can't get kicked off the land because you're part of it yeah yeah I've always I've always explained it like okay you know when you when you like if you were renting an apartment in 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 I mean it's like yeah that's a serf yeah that's kind of like you just come with the land when I buy it you know yeah it's 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. So 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. I think it's important to 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 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 our cattle like so that's like. Chattel slavery you know I'm saying like there's a scale you know 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 words are worse than others like yes like desert storm yeah war is bad but desert storm was not as bad as for example the German invasion of Russia. Different was worse than the other yes and it's like yeah like Roman and there's often gradients like we talk about an ancient Roman slavery. There were slaves in ancient Rome who would have who would have felt very similarly about their situation to chattel slaves in North America these would have been slaves working on the lot of 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. Like and they're not even unpaid like they're getting paid a lot like you when you get freed and you had a you would get free generally before too much time is like a household slave or like yeah yeah yeah. 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 slave anyway totally we're getting off the subject yeah yeah yeah. But yeah 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 you said minimizing the experience of one person sort of playing like this oppression Olympics to where you like it. It really is different though. Yeah it's worth understanding that because the Irish in this period they're not slaves in any way.

But also in there's a degree to which there's certainly worse off in most ways than surfs yes because of this landlord system that evolves. So throughout the sixteen hundreds 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 it's just kind of collecting a check that doesn't happen anymore. But it did in this period. Yeah never happened so. First I couldn't follow you I was like wait. Oh yeah he's making a joke.

Yeah I'm just kidding. So throughout the sixteen hundreds England confiscates more than three million acres of land. And yeah this this 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. These are 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 like compare this to like rental situation people living in San Francisco. It's obviously like not not to minimize the horror what's happening in Ireland. But like legally on paper there's there's some real similarities between and 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 totally 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 could 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 three 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. In his 1962 text The Great Hunger historian Cecil Woodham Smith which is a very English name for a guy who's who's writing a very critical book about The Great Hunger. Man's a proper Brit. 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 and subjection of the common people. Ireland was a conquered country the Irish peasant a dispossessed man and his landlord an alien conqueror. So while it is tempting and to some extent worthwhile to again note some similarities with our modern landlord system it's also important to see how unique this system was. The English crown is essentially using a really decentralized network of land holding 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 yeah you know what we'll talk again this a bit more but like it ensures the fact that nobody owns anything in the pack that people don't have any permanent ties to the land that they're born and raised on. Means 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. Yeah. And obviously when this when aspects of this system get taken over to other parts of the world. They get a lot worse. Right yeah 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 was 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 there's elements of that in here.

Uh huh. Because it's you know it's a lot of same people 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. Um tenants also received 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 totally what you're on more valuable and also. More capable of more easily providing a more food both for money and for taking care of yourself and the people who live there.

You there's no point in doing that if you're an Irish Irish tenant farmer. Um we'll get into that a little bit more too but like because you you own nothing. Um it's it's good for people to have a sense of ownership in the things that they live on like it's it's broadly positive. So yeah I was just like why why I'm now now I'm curious as to like why do they why would you think that this like would be successful. Well it is like that yeah but I'm like just in the initial thinking of like I would want if I own a land I would want and I 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 I maybe I'm just again modern eyes where I was like man I would want to incentivize like yo you keep avocado you know I'm saying like hey if you could fix my soil. I want to take one of my avocados for yourself like I would think to me I don't know what I'm talking about.

There are that 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 and are 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 because.

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. Yes. 1690 Adam Smith is just a glimmer in I don't know some other Smith's eye at this point. Yes.

So William of Orange in 1690 beats the Catholic King James II at the Battle of the Boine. 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 the Boine 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. Yeah. 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 three and a half million pounds sterling to William money that's spent on swords and muskets to kill Catholics.

Proper peas isn't it. Yeah. And we don't find it we didn't learn this until documents were uncovered in 2008. Oh. Like for in terms of like 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 US 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 like phone content like OK see if you can keep that hidden for 400 years. Popes like that's that's JV shit. Yeah. Popes like rookie cookies. Red shirt. There wasn't even the United States when we started covering up war crimes.

Come on. You want me. You want me. A country. Yeah. We've got we're hiding shit older than your concept of society. Yeah. We got we got dudes.

Secrets older than your Constitution. Gotta love it. Dog. OK. Throughout the early 1700s the Irish peasantry languished better off than slaves but worse often 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 rented 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. Exactly. So you pay in in produce. Yeah.

Generally basically right. Like you're because you're 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 middle man you can't just be like hiding corn somewhere. Right. Because it's harder because he's yeah. And there's there's obvious there's always local collaborators whose jobs like you know and there's also there people always do get away with shit. Right. Of course.

The same you know we're flattening things a little bit because there's a lot of history to cover here. Of course. And you know what's a what's a what's ahead of lettuce between friends. Yeah. 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 than your landlord will kick you out and will rent it to someone else for more money. Yep. You know like why why why would you.

Now historians have noted that one major issue with achieving progress under the feudal system 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 the 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 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. I think I do like and one of the things that's interesting is England has even though there's a king still they've moved beyond the 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 Cougan writes Irish trade was crippled by the partial conquest instead of being developed valuable cattle fishing in woollen 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 feel like taxing or feel like different there's different ways the government has a fucking this over in order to protect English businesses. You know you don't want it so there's no way out for the Irish really yeah there's even this brief period in the early eighteen hundreds where they're starting to industrialize more and the group the 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 in 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 modern society. Okay yeah and we're talking I 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 it's it's 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 sixteen hundred or so that like the English are found in 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 market 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 it to higher 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. It's just the scale of an entire people. 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. British people are like twice as productive as Irish people in 1845. If you're kind of 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 yeah well and this is going to justify it's 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 adopted 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. Yeah 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 new nutritional values but potatoes have like vitamin C and stuff like they have what you need to not. I don't hold you I think I got through a year in college on French fries. Yeah.

Yeah. No I ain't gonna hold you I could live off a potato. Yeah and they also grow and 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. That's dope man. 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 like a win-win man like you know 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 talk.

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. Like everybody arguing over fries. Like I'm like you eating wax and salt and you think you of course that's going to taste great because it's.

Yeah. I love potatoes. Now look I 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 less. That's a good choice. Wing stops. Wing stops fries are one of my favorites. I was like no.

I was about to say I was just about to say wing stop. We had them yesterday. One thing I'll do sometimes. 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 that like spicy chili oil you can get from Trader Joe's? Yes. I put a bunch of them in like a baking pan. I get like a tablespoon of chili oil. Dallop 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. Oh it's fucking.

It slaps. Yeah. Doug. It's good stuff. You just changed my life because I'm like I am definitely the like don't leave your fries around me. You know what I'm saying. Don't like don't walk away from your plate. Don't look away.

Don't leave 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 socio-economic 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. And also the English cuisine just how 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. So here's ads. This summer of 2020 some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the

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youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the

world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, so we've been talking about how wonderful potatoes are and they are and how like it's actually not again, I'm not talking 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 towards 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 you're, if everyone is growing one kind of potato, then you have what's called a monoculture. I was just about to say. Yeah. It's not great. It's not great. Monocultures ain't good. I just left the coffee farm in Columbia and they were talking a lot about biocultures

and monocultures and like, like just, just to add to your existential dread, uh, according to these like expert coffee farmers, they're like, look, we got about maybe 30 more harvest in us unless we start doing more like bioculture, you know, multi-cultural. This is a problem with every kind of agriculture, right? Yes. Whenever you, there's like 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. Um, you, 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?

Um, not to minimize the problem that a banana blight causes. Yes. Um, 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 want to, 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, uh, who are in like, you know, they, France and England have been fighting for like a century almost by the point at which this happens. No arm. Yeah.

Yeah. Oh, France. It 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, this actually keeps happening for forever. In World War I, the Germans tried to land a ship full of guns on, in Ireland to like, and it did a little bit, but the, the rebellion that, that comes afterwards doesn't work great.

Um, I don't know that, that's the, there's a whole story there. A lot, 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. Um, so when these French guys, you know, they have their, their fight and this, 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. Uh, 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, and Newton, Mount Kennedy in County Wicklow, a Protestant farmer named Joseph Holt attending the sound, the town fair was second 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 cause they're wearing green and that's Irish stuff.

So 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 what is it, the Third Amendment, like that you can't quarter soldiers in people's homes. My wife is here. Like there's like a, there's a reason why people felt that needed to be in the Bill of Rights. Yeah.

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. Right. That's right. That's right. I'm gonna be shit Marine Corps.

Yeah. You don't get to stay in my house. Yeah. I got an amendment motherfuckers. Hey, this, hey, number three say I ain't gotta let you in. Sometimes I'll invite like a, like a, like a lance corporal into my house and they're like, you know what? Get the fuck out.

Nevermind. Gotta go. Get out of here. Yeah. Get out of here. Um, I'm going to continue that quote from Tim Pat Cougan, 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 malicious 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. Through this had time to set the cap was torn off, taking with it much of the crappie 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. That'll help.

I wonder how Abercrombie 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, a frat boy style 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 you go. 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, they, you don't think they soft? Like they not as hard as you were. We use 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 Hollister 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 Himmlers. Yeah. Everybody was like, oh, you got some of those Himmlers? Those look good. It's like that. The bottles are hot. Yeah.

Or I'm like, oh, word. Yeah. You got, you got the new, you know what I'm saying? You got these, you're wearing the Mussolini's. You know what I'm saying? I got these Mussolini air Mussolini 11. Oh man. Yeah.

Those look great. I got the Mussolini 11. It's like a 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 active 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, like a lot of votes in history, right? Like probably most votes in history. Yeah. The history of voting is mostly the history of bribery, basically. It's crazy though, like you mentioned earlier how like you go to like a lot of like Irish like football events and they got like, like Palestinian flags. I'm like, I hope people seeing like how that picture is coming into play now, like why they would like, um, understand and empathize with the Palestinian plight in Ireland.

Like they're like, like, I hope it's coming together now. Like pictures getting pretty clear, you know. Yeah. This, this goes on again, we're the hundreds of years and we're still at that. We're at like the middle point, right? Yeah. This is, yeah. 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 like, 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, it's certainly a lot better. Yeah. Like then this period for sure, that's a little bar though, whatever.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it is, I did, 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 people are like going over to Ireland to try and get Irish passports. Yeah. Yeah. That's right.

Come crawling back, baby. Yeah. 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 again, you don't have to. It's not hard. You're just kind of like dropping them in the dirt, right? Yeah. 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 like grow potatoes and turn them into liquor and stuff. Oh, because they're 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 so. Yeah.

Why? Yeah. Like you guys are, again, yeah. It's infuriating, dude. Like it's pretty not great. Yeah. Like it reminds me of, which may feel like a stretch, but like follow me here to like, we all went to, we all went to, we was 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 spent 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, has anybody like connected these dots here and ain't working because you making it not work, right? So when you look, 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 are we only, why are 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, what is it, 40 acres in 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 or yeah, you steal from a group of people, all of the land that they had lived on and forced them on to 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?

Geez. They seem so depressed. Why are they so sad? Yeah. Well, it's, it's all, again, it's all variations of the same story, you know? So yeah, do, do, do, do, do. 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 bread basket. It's also a growing source of animal products. Irish, Ireland supplies, by 1800, Ireland supplies English cities with 83 percent of their beef, 79 percent of their butter and 86 percent of their pork, just to like to name a few things.

So like, 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. 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. Yeah. And what do young men do when like, shit's rough, they like, they fight, this happens everywhere. Yeah. Like, I mean, y'all, y'all drink, you drink like, like alcohol is like, this is the last day on earth that there'll be alcohol and y'all go home and you're 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, let's fight. What else is there? Yeah. What else is there? 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 that. 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 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, Cougan explains, sometimes several hundred participants took part on either side. The most famous fight at Ballivier Strand and 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 black thorn sticks whose lethal properties were sometimes added to by the insertion of lead in the butts. These killing instruments were the origin of the chelales carried today by, by today's leprechaun dolls. And even more deadly weapon was the white thorn steak, a cut from which could prove fatal. Sometimes sides and slash hooks were used. So there's just like this, again, I respect it.

Like, it's like, you know, you don't have MMA, but you can get a couple of 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 gonna scrap with that block. And it's all, it's all in fun. If you die, you die. I don't hate you.

Some people are gonna die. A couple hundred. Some people are gonna die. You better then muscle up. Think about like, yeah, this, this shit's happening and like, like we talk in our Stalin episodes, like this is happening like Georgia, like there's different kinds of like, like it all over the world, people find excuses to get in big groups and beat the shit out of each other.

Um, in Ireland, we be, we would be, look, when you, you, you live in, you live in the inner city of LA, you sitting on a porch, one of your uncles will be like, Hey, you think you could beat that fool up and you like, uh, I don't know. He's like, Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey, come here, Hey, fight my nephew. And then now y'all just in the street fighting. You know what I'm saying? Uh, okay. You know, it's just like, we're bored.

Yeah. I don't hate the kids. What people do with their board. We're just bored. You know what I'm saying? And yeah, I tell you what, let me tell you, 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. Now, again, so there's a lot going on here, um, but this is not like the English make a lot of this in their propaganda about like how uniquely, fighty the Irish are like we, this happens all over the world and 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 then you've also like they're angry because the situation is unfair, but it has become very clear that we're not going to, we're not going to beat the British military. You know, um, 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 over Ireland, right? And there's different ones, right? As we'll see later, there are some kind of secret societies that are, 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, like actually fighting against the, these, 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 am 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 word plays about, oh, just away in the Rock Johnson or Chris Rock and slapped in 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. That's what just happened right now. You just remember that thing that happened with Chris Rock, folks. Yeah. Yes. Um, actually, in terms of if you if you're looking for something to laugh at prop, the most powerful secret society in this period were called the white boys.

Um, all right. All right. This time for this time for that. Um, 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 banditie of a singular kind to obtain arms or vengeance. They commit all sorts of outrageous while they abstain from the gold or silver under their hands. So he's kind of pointing out that like they, they're really more interested in vengeance than making money. They're not like traditional, they're not like criminals in that sense. They, they really want to like fuck some shit up. Um, and in many ways the white boys are a precursor to a lot of modern insurgent terrorist

groups. Um, some of them were quite erudite 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 how'd hamstrung, their houses burned, their land turned up, their harvests, their harvests destroyed, but let their friends and relations be devoted

to death, the wives and daughters to dishonor, um, 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- I was like, it sounds like a rape. Yeah. They may, they may, they may have been. Um, you know, this is, this is not, not a pretty series of things that are happening. Um,

White boys. So the white boys. And they never change. You can 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 can see this as like the first stirrings of some things that are going to happen all over the world. Um, but Ireland also in this period gives birth to what some call scholars consider the

first organized mass nonviolent resistance campaign in history. Okay. Um, it's organized by a guy named Daniel O'Connell who is one of the very few member, Ireland's part of the UK, right? So I, there are, it is possible for Irish people to get elected to parliament. There's a long history of like what, cause like, we'll actually, we're about to talk about this. Yeah.

So O'Connell rises to prominence first as a lawyer, um, and he forms an organization called the Catholic Association in 1823. And this was the first semi-effective Irish political party in history. Um, the Catholic Association and O'Connell spend years fighting for Catholic emancipation, which they win in 1829. And that's what makes it, yeah, cause Catholics, you're not allowed to like hold land or political office, right? Yeah.

Like you are, there is like a degree of um, like apartheid for Catholic kind of in a 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, cause 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 some before

shit got all fucky. Um, 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. Um, 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, they went, 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, um, and he dresses like a normal person. So the British elected leaders call him the king of the beggars because he, 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, he's not impoverished, but they, they see him as impoverished and they also

see him as like, he is the representative of the hordes of, of working poor in Ireland, you know? Um, Tim Pat Cougan 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 suckered 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? 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. Our situation is bad, but like this is, I could not, I could not do that. But it's a principle moral stand. Yeah. He denounces George Washington for owning slaves, which gets him, he gets 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 at this point.

He gets attacked a lot by US newspapers. The New York Herald accuses him of having a bunch of concubines and illegitimate children because again, he's like, he thinks slavery's 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, that brings Ireland into the UK, given total English dominance of parliament, this was not seen as possible, right?

Like in a, in a quote unquote legitimate way, the English parliament is not going to vote to give up Ireland. Right? 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. 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, a symbol to protest in favor of, 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 10th of the Irish population. More than that really. And this is 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 is 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. Because there's folks are so disciplined. They have trouble finding kind of an end to blow this movement up. And this is a real problem because like, you know, 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 mother, 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. That's some shit could, could go down.

Obviously, we had like that many people out in the street just try to stop the Iraq war, and it did nothing. But yeah, it could, it could mean. It could have. Yeah. It's a lot of folks. If they was up on, the British was up on just, you know, this, oh no, I hadn't invented it yet.

But I'm like, no. It was up with the tear gas. I was like, y'all could have just do what you do now, which is just no matter what they do. We are building to that prop. Oh, 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 road for it. But it's, this is a, 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, but 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, you get a million people together, we are going to show you with naval artillery. Yeah. We shoot. Yeah. We're not just like we are shooting guns into a rod, we will pound you with bombs. Like, yeah. Wow.

The land. Yeah. So O'Connell has a choice here 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?

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 peaceful protest doesn't work. This is a big part of why the things that happen, the 1916 rising, why the decades and

decades of insurgent terrorism and stuff, 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 bombs. Yeah. Yeah.

That's where you went. Yeah. Wow. 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 with the 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 what I try to be clear here that like you will historians will claim that I'm not an expert. Yeah. Of course. 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. Yeah. He's certainly like a seminal figure in the concept of nonviolent mass resistance. Of course. 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, 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 went down to 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 was like, anyone who was organizing for radical social change pretty much always hits a point where they reached the end of their personal willingness to fight for kind of radical change.

And so like, nobody's perfect. Yeah. Like, there are things that we all believe right now that in a couple of generations, folks would be like, how did you put up with this though? Yeah, yeah, totally. I got, I get why you were protesting for this and this, but how, how didn't you have a problem with it? 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 like, 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 bomb, 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? And that's worth, that's worth acknowledging from a historical standpoint. So that's the end of 1843. In the summer of 1845, an umesit or water mold known today as Phytophthora infestans. That's the best I can do.

I'm sorry. It's like an English name, last name, you know, not going to get it perfect. The last four words you said, I was like, I don't know what you just said, a umesit. Yeah. It's a fungus, right? Okay. It starts to spread throughout Europe. We're not going to get into a ton of detail because again, this is like a particularly

there's a lot of coverage that'll like really blame this, this fungus on all of the things that happen. It's not the fungus is fault. The fungus is like a thing that it's like, it's like blaming the disaster in Hurricane Katrina on the hurricane when it's like, no, that's, that's not really what I'm angry about, you know, like, um, but like this, this, this, this, this is an important part of the story. This, this thing starts to hit in Europe, right?

Yeah. Um, crops start to fail. It starts, 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 is 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 cause they've got the most eyes on them. The population of Ireland at this moment was probably close to nine million people. You know, you're talking the 1840s. We're not as good at synthesis and stuff as we would have them, probably around nine million people, a little bit less. Most of these people are Catholic. Three million of them are the kind of peasants that we've spent a lot of this episode talking

about. Eeking out a precarious living on the land as renters, utterly dependent upon the continued productivity of the potato for their caloric needs. And that is the stage being set for what's going to happen next, which is not going to be nice, but prop! You know, it is going to be nice. These plugables? Well, your plugables.

Yeah. Your plugables are very nice. Absolutely. Yeah, man. Prop hip-hop. Prop hip-hop. Prop hip-hop. That's all the socials and the website.

There's the hood politics pod. They'll pop in and crack in and get some, Sophie's helping me get some doper, not doper, but some dopa, 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, too. 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? Find 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 them what for? Do it for O'Connell. God and Allister, which I learned is like, almost like the Irish, like, MAGA. Yeah. Yeah. For God and Allister, which means like, it is a little bit MAGA-y, you know, and sounded

cool to me because I don't know what Allister 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 ought to do.

Really, what's happening to that? Everybody colonize England. Take, yeah. All right. Fuck them up. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse.

And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure, he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become

the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science, and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.