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

Episode Date: April 19, 2022

Robert is joined by Prop for part three of our series on the Great Hunger. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Behind the Bastards, the podcast about crimes against humanity. I'm legally distinct from that mouse. I hated it when you did it off mic and you were just making a joke to Prop and I about how you should do it. We need new bits. I love it. I really hated it and I don't think you sound like the mouse that you're trying to imitate. I think you sound like Donald Glover in that episode of Atlanta when he's not Michael Jackson.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, that was a good episode of that show. Oh, wait, wait, I'm sorry. I'm going along. I need to go along with the bit. Hi, Piggy. Oh, God. This is Kermit the Prop.

Oh, wow. Kermit the Prop. Kermit the Prop. Kermit the Prop. I'm a mouse. Would you like to talk about the starvation genocide of an island? Well, if we need to. Something that the creator of this mouse was probably broadly fine with.

I hope both of you get made fun of on the internet. Here's the thing. I feel like our level of cool can take this sort of hit. I feel like we can't be canceled for making Mickey Mouse supportive of a genocide. And I mean, Kermit is one of the most beloved frogs. He is. He's a meme. He drinks tea and everyone.

Kermit would never support a genocide. No, not at all. I mean, maybe tacitly with his tax dollars because he's not really a fighter, but we all do, right? And then we'll support the odd anyway. This bit is going long. It's not really a bit. It's more of like a mediation about the necessity of supporting terrible things just because

you exist within a society where you don't have total control over some of ours. You cannot help the ocean. You can't help the ocean from being saltwater. Yeah, those dolphins are fucked. It just is. Yep. It just is. I don't know how to tell you.

Yeah. Speaking of saltwater, you ready to get salty? Oh, my God. I mean, just call me sodium chloride, baby. At the end of last episode, we talked about Lord Hatesbury, who was like, I don't think we know if his famine thing is going to be a real problem yet. Let's just hold off. Yeah.

Now we're going to have a name on the nose. Now we're going to have another guy with a really horrible name, but he's actually kind of chill, kind of cool. He's not one of the real problems here because there are, it's worth noting, while overwhelmingly the English government allowed this to happen and in many cases directly enabled the deaths that are coming. There were people who had prominence in the government like O'Connell that we've talked about, but also folks who were English who tried very hard to do something.

And one of them was the unfortunately named Sir Edward Pine Coffin, who doesn't seem like the kind of guy who's going to try to help, but... Pine Coffin. Edward Pine Coffin. And that is spelled like it's out. Okay, listen. We're in a simulation, bro. I'm Janet Coops Box.

That's his American cousin. Yes. Yeah. We're in a simulation because somebody wrote that script. Well, yeah. One of the fun things is actually in terms of coffins. So one of the reasons you would want to go to like a workhouse and we'll talk about these more later, but these are like the places poor people go, well, during the worst parts

of the famine is that when you die, you get a coffin, which you can't, you can't afford otherwise, right? Yeah. You can't guarantee. So that's good. So you get a box, but also you don't because they just put you in the common in the coffin long enough to take you to the mass grave and then they dump you in the coffin. Oh my God.

They throw you all in a mass grave. Yo, that steering wheel just jerked to them. You got me there. And I was like, oh, okay. Well, at least you get a car. Oh, wait. Never mind. And one of the things.

So with these mass graves, a decent number of people get buried alive, which is a thing that always happens in mass graves. You find a lot of stories like that from the Holocaust. One of the differences in when they realize someone is alive in the mass grave, here they do try to rescue them out as opposed to like just shooting them more, which is what the Nazis did. So I guess that's a mark in the British Empire. No, it's not.

This is a neck up, I guess. So Edward Pinecoffin is the deputy commissioner of the government relief agency responsible for Ireland. Okay. When Scotland's potato crop had failed. Because again, this potato failure, this is part of why people, again, reject calling it the potato famine. Yeah.

There are failures of potato crops all throughout Europe. It happens everywhere. The starvation happens in Ireland. Yes. Okay. So when Scotland's potato crop fails, Pinecoffin commandeers a warship, fills it with food and sails around the coast of Scotland, distributing it in starving villages. And he tries to do the same thing in Ireland, but Trevalion stops him because Trevalion

is the guy who controls the purse strings. So Pinecoffin can't spend the money he needs to fill these boats up with food without Trevalion's say ahead. And while everybody's fine with that food, with money getting spent on the Scottish, Trevalion's like, not these people though. Not these people. What's the difference, Trevalion? So Pinecoffin has to watch helpless and pretty enraged as like he's unable to take ships

and food to Ireland, but he keeps watching these ships filled with food depart an increasingly starved island. So people begin dying heavily in 1846. But before they die, a lot of them are forced to make the decision, do we spend, because we did have crops, right, which we can either sell to pay our rent, or we can eat. But if we eat the food that we have, then we can't pay rent and we will get evicted, right? Now, I don't know if you know this bad Ireland prop, pretty wet, not a warm part of the world,

not famous for its balmy weather. Even in the summer, it can be quite rough at night for people, like especially during like the fall and winter, it gets very cold and it's very wet. And by the way, these people are so poor, they don't have like, like they don't own jackets. Oftentimes, they have sold basically, they're like people that are like partly naked because they have sold anything they have that could possibly be a value to try to feed their children. So not without being indoors, people will die.

And if they don't sell their food and turn it into rent money, they're gonna get kicked out and be in just like wandering the countryside and they will starve to death or die of exposure. Being evicted is basically a death sentence for a lot of people. And this happens on a massive scale, whole villages are depopulated and sent just wandering muddy pathways in the countryside begging for help that often did not come. And people begin to die in their thousands, entire communities starve basically, like kicked out of their homes. Now one of the few options for sucker were the so-called workhouses.

These were operated by local landlords. And again, we've been talking, again, this is one of those situations where broadly speaking, the landlords are the problem. There are individual landlords who do do things like, you don't have to pay rent, you know, that is the thing you can find. I would spend more time reading their stories, but I'm worried it would kind of take away from the people who are monsters, but there are and to his credit, Pugin, who's the historian that's the major source for this, goes into some detail.

There are individual landlords who do take very reasonable steps to preserve life and put that up their profits. And that is the thing that happens. It's worth acknowledging that not, partly because it condemns the people who don't do that more. Yes. It is not like every landlord doesn't do the same thing. Yeah.

Some of them help, you know? Yeah. And it's one of those things also in terms of things we can criticize, peel for even though he is probably the best politician of his day in terms of famine relief who has any power, peel as adamant that local landlords should be the ones dealing with the famine problem. It should be up to them, right? And this quote from Pugin's book makes it clear how badly the situation tended to work,

because you have these kind of local landlords who are managing these workhouses. A workhouse was built on the Martin estate at Clifton and County Galway. Pugin was an eccentric figure known for his gambling, for his fearsome prowess as a duelist and for his kindness to animals, which led him to found the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and to be nicknamed Humanity Dick. So hold on to that for a second. Listen, we're in a simulation. Somebody write this script.

You got a problem with Humanity Dick? I don't. I just, I, again, this story, we really need to go back to like the editors here, because your names keep telling the story, both your names are spoiler alerts, like, OK, Humanity Dick. Humanity Dick lived in Splendor at Ballinahinch Castle on a huge estate comprising some 200,000 acres and including parts of Mayo and most of Connemara, that incredibly beautiful but barren area of County Galway stretching westward from Galway City along Galway Bay, skirting

the coastline until it reaches the open Atlantic. A workhouse was built on the estate at Clifton, even though it was notorious for being crippled by debts, mainly through Martin's gambling. The King of Connemara, as he was referred to in Ireland, had had to flee the country several years earlier upon losing his parliamentary immunity. On his death in 1834, his son Thomas became his heir. During the famine, Thomas died from a fever contracted while inspecting the awful conditions in the overcrowded workhouse, which could not cope with the demands placed upon it.

The workhouse went bankrupt and had to close, with catastrophic results for its inmates, Clifton and its environs. The Martin estate was subsequently put up for auction and one of its principal attractions as cited by the auctioneers was the fact that none of the tenants who had lived on the estate before the famine lived there any longer. Given the population density per acre at the time, this could have indicated a death toll of some 200,000 people. So because this family of rich people goes bankrupt, there is no help.

And potentially 200,000 people starve to death in this area alone. What do you do in a workhouse? Is it like, or is it just called workhouse? Yeah, I mean, there's basically you receive a small amount of food and you do, you work. Like there's different kind of things they have you do. Some of these people are like the ones who are digging these, who are building these roads to nowhere and shit. Like there's a variety of things that they might have you do.

But they're also not a ton of people can fit in these workhouses. They are the difference between life and death for some people. But the fact that they are, they're not funded by the imperial government, right? No, they're funded by the kindness, yeah. And out of, by these local landlords, which means if your landlord's doing good and if he's someone who's financially responsible, maybe your workhouse is a lifeline. But in Kanamara, this family are because of their gambling debts, like loses everything. And that means there's just, there's no fucking help for these people.

And yeah, like 200,000 people starved to death. Yeah, it's a problem. That's not good. That's a lot of people to starve to death. Maybe the biggest consequence of a gambling addiction that we've run across on this show. I would say this is probably, yeah, that's pretty up there. It's pretty up there. Yeah.

Yeah. Humanity dick. If only he'd had some help. Humanity dick. So this brings, what an incredible name. And this brings us to a particularly horrifying fact, which is, again, the failure of the potato crop was not the biggest part of the famine. The mass evictions of Irish tenants by landlords killed most, like at least as many people,

if not many more people. And here's the thing. We've been focusing mostly on like, because the crops fail, like they have to either buy food or they can't pay their rent, like a whole bunch of things happen, shit gets too expensive, they can't afford their rent and they get evicted, right? That's the most obvious way for this to happen. That's not the only reason evictions happen. So you know how Instagram works?

In what way? You know how like there's, someone will like decide to paint their nails in like a certain very elaborate way and do a video on it and suddenly that'll go huge and then like there's a bunch of videos like that, you know, that kind of thing works like trends, you know, not just Instagram, but like things get popular and then everybody wants to do a version of that same thing. Well, that kind of happens with rich landlords and a thing called high farming. High farming.

Yeah. Which is basically like clearing areas of agriculture in the way that it had been done in order to make more room for to gray sheep in order to like raise a bunch of sheep, basically. So all these landlords, their friends start doing this. And the problem is that like if you want to clear all of your land to gray sheep to be hip and cool and get into this neat new farming thing that all your friends are doing, well, there's like, there's like people there, right? There's people that live on this land.

There's like, there's like tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people living on that land, but it is your land and you have the right to evict them at any moment. So you want to get up on this trend. What do you do? You should evict the people. You can evict them all. This is what happens when lords. Because it's not like we can grow crops.

Well, no, you want to, it's time for sheep. Yeah. I wanted to see how I was going to say it. Yeah. That's like, that's so, that's so last year. Yeah. Everybody does crops. That's boring.

Yeah. That's last year. Everybody does crops. I want to do sheep. Yeah. Come on now. So Lord Lucan evicts 400 families in his Mayo Estates during like the rising peak of the famine in order to clear grazing area for sheep.

And again, this is because this has gotten like really popular from the aristocracy, from the aristocracy. And so a lot of these rich people start getting into sheep farming and evicting whole, these are ethnic cleansings. They are cleansing an area of its indigenous population. Where do they, and where do they expect them to go? Oh, they're just going to, yeah, not your, why would it be your problem? Very true.

It's your land. You can have them leave if you want, you know? Yeah. They don't, like that's not, that's not on you. Y'all cost too much. Yeah. Y'all cost too much. There's more money in sheep.

Because then I can't feed you. Yeah. You can't feed yourself anymore. So. Yeah. So I might as well kick you off and try this new thing. And that way I could be cool like my friends. So it is prop, hard to exaggerate how enraging some of these stories can be.

Oh my God. The village of Balanglas was a fairly rare find in Ireland. The people there had been allowed by their landlady to improve their land. And they had created a very prosperous community. So prosperous in fact that they all lived in stone houses, which was very rare at the time. I think there were 61 families. So a few hundred people.

Yeah. So after years of clearing bog land and improving their land in order to make it more productive, governments which probably would have allowed them to survive the famine because they've done it. They've been able to do a really good job of improving things. Suddenly their landlady, Miss Gerard, decides she wants to get into high farming. So she evicts them all. Kicks them right out.

Kicks them right out. And I'm going to quote from the famine plot here. On the morning of March 30th, 1846, the detachment of troops and police showed up to eject the people from their homes. Their belongings were thrown out and the roofs of their houses tumbled. It was made clear to the people in surrounding areas that if they took in the evictees they would suffer the same fate. And so the evicted people passed from door to door, vainly seeking shelter.

In desperation, they erected temporary shelters and ditches or constructed what would become a common sight that year across the Irish countryside. Scalps. These consisted either of poles covered by sods that were stretched across a ditch or if the ditches were filled with water as they frequently were, they simply dug a hole in the ground or in the shelter end of a gable in their tumbled house and covered this with sticks and sods. But in Balanglas, as elsewhere, the bailiffs returned in the days following the evictions

to destroy the scalps and move people out of the landlord's land. So again, when they say tumbling, they, in order to stop anyone from reoccupying a house, they destroy the roof. Just the roof. That's all you need. Just the roof. Then it'll rain in there and people can't stay. Can't keep a fire going.

It won't keep you warm. Right? You're so efficient at evil, but you're all thumbs on doing anything decent. That is, like you just saying, well, you said there's stone houses, so it would be a lot more effort or work. So it's more efficient to just let the rain do the work. I'll just knock the roof down so you can think logically. Yeah, but you can't stay.

Right? Yeah. That is in the most perverse way the shortest distance between two points. Yeah. That makes perfect sense. It makes perfect sense. Yeah. But y'all could not figure out how to not have, how to not have your people starve.

Okay. Yeah. I mean, I think a lot reading this about, I spend a lot of time, because Portland has a substantial population of unhoused people in and around just as part of my daily life in campments. And a lot of them sound very familiar in that because it's also very rainy here. You will have people who will kind of set up lean-to-type structures that are partly in ditches because it provides some shelter from the wind.

But then when it rains, they flood, right? Yeah. And no matter what people do, the cops are going to come by periodically and sweep them out. And so oftentimes they'll do it right before a storm or right before the temperature drops and shit. You know, I mean, they're literally sending cops to kick people out of their crumbled-down houses and knock down what little shelters they've been able to make.

You're like, yo, it's not even a house. Yeah. Like, come on, guys. This is an eviction genocide, which I don't know that I've heard about before, but that's what's happening here. So back in Mary Old Angoland, the suffering of the Irish was often caused for mockery in the press. That same year, the Economist magazine, yeah, that one, the one that's still around.

Uh, alleged that Irish suffering had been, quote, brought on by their own wickedness and folly. See. The Times. Yeah, baby. Yeah, the Economist. There it is. Good job, Economist.

Hey, don't worry. There's other people we know who were talking in this period of time. The Times of London, which also exists today, published articles on Ireland every single day. Its message was dizzyingly consistent. The Imperial government should not spend money on Irish relief. And I'm going to quote from RTE here. The worst famine in a century was depicted as an extension of normal, recurring events,

and the newspaper consistently complained about the financial burdens forced on British workers for the sake of the starving Irish. On 15th September, 1846, its editorial declared, It appears to us that the very first importance to all classes of Irish society is to impress on them that there is nothing really so peculiar, so exceptional, in the condition which they look upon as the pit of utter despair. It continued. Is the English laborer to compensate the Irish peasant for the loss of potatoes and secure

him a regular employer for this next 12 month? Why the English laborer is in just the same case? They were not. They were not. They were not. Yeah. They weren't. They sure weren't.

Now, The Times argued that Ireland should pay for its own improvement, which you might say shipping 60% of the food there out to England and other places is paying for. That's why I'm like, y'all, y'all either not hearing yourself or know what the hell you saying. Well, The Times' argument is that because people were suffering and because suffering only really happens when you are not willing to work to make your life better. The fact that things were desperate in Ireland, it was an example of, quote, a case of permanent and inveterate national degradation.

Yeah. Yep. Yeah. I can't stress enough how the same, it's the same argument. It's the same argument now and I'm like, but we can all look back at the same. We can all rewind the tape to the same moment and can see how wrong they are for saying that. We can see that that's not their, that that's your fault that they can't eat.

So how are people still making the same argument now about poverty? Yeah. It is the same. Like that's the thing. It's not, it's what always happens, you know, it's this, it must be their own fault because if it's not their own fault, then perhaps number one, I would have to account for the fact that maybe my success and my, the things that I enjoy are not due to me doing anything to earn it, but also then perhaps if it's not their fault at all, and maybe it is the

fault of a system that I benefit from, then it is incumbent upon me to make some changes. Yes. Yes, there it is. And that's way harder than just writing a column for the economist, which is why people still write so many columns for the economist. Absolutely. Absolutely. But you're nailing on something that I think is like, I know whenever I'm asked to do any

sort of like DEI training, it's that, it's that because if you admit that there was somebody suffering from this system unfairly, then that means you are unfairly being benefited for you. And there's nothing special about your little nose. Yup. Than that. Yeah. That's not going to be popular to the people who read The Times of London.

No. But you know, it is popular to the people who read The Times of London. Every last one of these products and services we buy play y'all, massive fans, big followings in Europe. Yeah. You guys may not know about it. Really big. So, check it out.

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 hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. 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

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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 and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all

bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back, man. So in the winter of 1847, after this is like the third successive failure of the potato crop, right, the famine had already killed hundreds of thousands of people. Culture, art, music had all come to a sudden horrid halt in Ireland as it was gripped by

unimaginable suffering. Just before Christmas, a landlord named Walsh in Mayo personally led the eviction of three villages. Local clergy had begged him to at least wait until after the holiday. But he refused. Homes were destroyed and everyone was forced out. One Quaker engaged in relief efforts later wrote, quote, The people were all turned out of doors and the roofs of their houses pulled down.

That night they made a tinter shelter of wooden straw, but however the drivers, the bailiffs, threw them down and drove them from the place. It would have pitted the sun to look at them as they had to go headfirst into the storm. It was a night of high wind and storm and wailing could be heard at a great distance. They implored the drivers to allow them to remain a short time as it was so near the time of festival Christmas, but they would not. Previously 102 families had lived in the area, but after the eviction, only the walls of three houses remained.

And it's one of those things, these evictions are being carried out by both local law enforcement and by English soldiers, like soldiers of the occupation. And a lot of these guys are shocked by the cruelty of the landlords that they're enforcing evictions for. There are cases of officers asked to use their troops to enforce evictions who found reasons to deny the requests. In one case in particular, Scottish soldiers lodged protests against being forced to evict families and even took up collections to give money to the people they were evicting.

Now, the evictions continued. So this may be, perhaps we should, as we acknowledge the fact that people felt horrible about this, that didn't stop anything as a general rule. And these small acts of kindness did nothing to alleviate suffering on a broader scale. I want to quote now from another write up in RTE. By 1847, the sheer scale of eviction across Ireland prompted newspapers to employ special correspondents who visited the scene of clearances. Among the reporters in the field was James McCarthy, proprietor of the Lymnick Examiner,

who led the way in reporting on the scenes of havoc and despair. McCarthy had no shortage of material to report on, particularly in Counties Clair and Tipperary. Reporters like McCarthy were successful in harnessing public opinion and in some instances preventing eviction. It was often a perilous task, and McCarthy was assailed and insulted in the discharge of his duty by some of the disgruntled wretches who were employed in leveling the houses of the evicted tenants. Yet he was undeterred in reporting eviction, including at the Walter estate in Lymnick,

where he described the evicted being left to burrow into the earth for shelter. The so-called exterminators were frequently challenged by the local press, who were quick to report on the sensational aspects of eviction, especially where women and young children were ejected. Following evictions at the Westrup estate in Clair, it was reported that the body of a young boy had been found dead and eaten by dogs. Likewise, when Arthur Keely Usher cleared over 700 people at Balli Sagartmore, Waterford, it was reported that groups of famished women and crying children hovered the ruins where

they clung for refuge beneath the crumbling chimneys. And again, when we talk about what kills people, some people do starve to death, some people die of exposure. A lot of people die of disease, because disease spreads rampantly, and when you're kicking people out, you're forcing them into workhouses, they're just spending nights out. They don't have access to shelter, which makes their immune systems worse. Also, the potatoes they were eating were high in vitamin C, so the fact that they don't have vitamin C, there's a number of things that are happening.

We talk about what's killing people, but as much as anything, this is an eviction genocide. That's a big part of what is occurring in Ireland. There was no organized resistance on a mass scale to evictions within the country. There were scattered murders and assaults on mayors and landlords, often from these kind of secret society groups we talked about in part one. The evictors were not just absentee landlords and members of the aristocracy. Many of them were members of the growing English and Irish middle class, who had purchased land prior to the famine or during its early days when people were forced to flee their

homes and so went up for cheap. It's worth noting that the largest landholder in Ireland during the famine, and as a result, one of the largest evictors was Trinity College in Dublin, which, yeah, they were one of these. This is not... I can see it though. The leadership is coming kind of from the UK, but plenty of Irish people are part of this. Yeah.

Another tale as old as time. I mean, I guess it's like... Yeah, you can see it. If you don't think of it as old-timey stuff and just think of it as just like, you're just playing the numbers, and especially talking about this rising middle class, they're like ... Yo, we ain't got no nest egg. We don't come from all that. We're barely getting this piece of land, and the only way for us to keep this land is we got to pivot.

I can't be having y'all on my land, or I'm just going to lose it. Lord forbid me become one of you again, you know what I'm saying? If you play in a numbers game, forgetting the humanity, it's again no different than the world we live in now, during our set of our plague, where people being like, I still have to pay the mortgage, so I can't rent. I can't not collect rent, so it's like, I mean, I don't know what to say, dawg, I'd suck, but I have to evict you, or maybe it don't suck, because you just like, why have to... I mean, I can't... I have to weather this storm.

Yeah, you know what I'm saying? None of these landlords, some of them are these just cartoonishly out of touch-rich people who are like, well, I would like to have the... I want to gray sheep now, let's get them off the land. But most people don't like to feel like monsters, like as a general rule, the people who are a part of this eviction genocide are not being like, ha, ha, ha, ha, you know? They're finding ways to be like, well, this is just what... Oftentimes it is... I mean, it's still pretty dire, because they're saying that like, well, I'm a Malthusian, and I believe

that overpopulation, the only thing that happens when there's overpopulation, that's what causes famine, right? Yeah. Rather than famine being a thing that happens and kills people, famine is caused by people breeding out of control, and so the real problem is that they bred, and it's sad and it's tragic, but if we just feed them, then they're only going to breed more, and that's just going to cause more of a... Right? People find ways to justify it, to feel like it's not... They're not complicit in something

nightmarish, as they always do, right? As everybody who is complicit in something nightmarish has done throughout history. Now, it's worth noting that some of these evictions mirrored acts of genocide committed by the U.S. government. One of the most striking was the Dullo Lake incident. This occurred between March 30th and 31st, 1849. A number of starving famine victims were ordered to show up at Lewisburg and be checked to see if they deserved relief tickets.

Now, this is what it sounds like. Deserved. Yeah. Again, eventually, they'll get some like plans implanted where people can get tickets that will entitle them to like some food and supplies and whatnot. So these people who are all actively starving to death and often homeless, they assemble, they all go to Lewisburg and in some cases, means while starving, they have to walk miles to get there.

So they show up at this place to try to get tickets that will give them the food they need to not starve to death. And they are told when they arrive, oh, there's been a mistake and the people who can evaluate you are actually 16 kilometers away at this hunting lodge. Whoa. So you've got to go walk there now, right? So four to 600 people, maybe more like a thousand, it's really not exactly known, spend the night sleeping out in the freezing rain because what else are they going to do?

Yeah. And then they march 16 kilometers to this lodge. And when they arrive, the relief commissioners like, oh, we're actually eating right now and we can't bother people while they're having their lunch. So you're going to have to wait until people finish eating. So the crowd who does not provide it with food, of course, sits around starving after their long walk while these commissioners eat. And then when the commissioners finish eating, they're able to meet with them.

And the commissioners are saying, oh, I'm so sorry, but you don't qualify for relief actually. You don't have any food for you. There's nothing here. I'm so sorry. Off you go. Your British is pretty spot on right now. And I feel like I'm really in the moment. Maybe it's just because I'm so furious at these people while wiping flavorless, flavorless

gravy. Unseasoned mutton. Unseasoned mutton off your jaw being like, oh, we have nothing for you. My God. Get some salt. So these folks have their guards drive this horde of starving people away and force them to march miles back in the frigid rain where a bunch of them die. The bodies of at least seven people are found by the side of Dullo Lake having starved on

the way back. Other people are swept into the lake by a mudside and slide and drown. And this whole situation is like fucked up and shall I say Terry Gilliamy enough. This is really some like Brazil shit. Yeah. That it becomes pretty significant news internationally and it gets back to the United States and some of the people who read about what happens at Dullo Lake are Choctaw people, Indigenous Americans.

Yeah. Now, eight years earlier, the Choctaw had been forced on a death march from Mississippi to Oklahoma by the United States government. And so eight years, not a long time, still dealing very much with the effects of this fucking death march. Yeah, the Choctaw hear about what has happened to these Irish people. And despite being desperately impoverished, they take up a collection and gather seven hundred dollars worth of money, which is a lot at the time and send it to Ireland for

relief. Wow. Yeah. And that is still very much remembered by the Irish people today. There's a monument to the Choctaw. That's amazing. I'm not sure in Ireland as a, like there are people who give more, but there's no one who gives more and has less than the Choctaw.

Exactly. You know, this is something that has never been forgotten to this day. Yo, speaking of that, speaking of that unread Bible, like yet another story Jesus talked about. We've talked about how there's a lot of solidarity in Ireland with the Palestinian cause because they recognize, and it's the same thing the Choctaw, they're looking at this and being like, oh, shit. No, I get that.

We know what that's like. Yeah. Yes. Suffering, suffering like nice people. It's like a type of empathy. You know what I'm saying? Where you just like, why I have the capacity to understand and to have a heart breaking for the people of Ukraine and the people of Yemen and you know what I'm saying, the people

of the Tigrayi region in Ethiopia, you know what I'm saying, like I have capacity for all that because I've suffered. The fact that you trying to make a choice between which one of these things I need to care about is so indicative of exactly what these people did in this incident. It is my job to judge whether you worthy of my mercy. I think when I have had conversations with Irish people about the great hunger, this is the story that probably gets brought up more than any other is the Choctaw donation. I think just because it's such an emotionally affecting story.

So throughout all of this, Travalion and the other public officials and politicians are adamant that landlords cannot be forced to keep tenants on their land, nor could they forcibly reduce rent, right? That's a violation of the landlords, right? If you put any kind of rent control in, we can't do that. But the scale of suffering was titanic enough by the late 1840s that the great and good felt in need to donate. Sir Charles Wood, Travalion's boss donated 200 pounds sterling to famine relief.

Queen Victoria gives 2,000 pounds. That's very nice. That's got to be a significant chunk of her. She probably doesn't have much more than 2,000 pounds, right? Yeah. That's all she could afford. The Pope gives 1,000. The Pope, you know, in Rome, it gives 1,000 pounds in aid.

You want to guess how much Chucky Travalion gives? 25. It's a prop of peas, bro. I'm going to give him peas. Yeah, you fucking dick. You get pee. You mean piss. You just did it.

That's literally, that is an amount to just be able to say I donated, right? Yeah, that's so you could put it on. Fuck yourself, Chuck. You just all day and twice on Sunday, are you telling me the oldest? I didn't know this play was this old for rich people to just donate to a charity. I didn't know that that play was, that play has stood the test of time, my G. So rather than understanding that you are the problem and you could easily solve it, just donate to a cause.

But I am impressed that rich people have figured out how to do this. Travalion is the one that's easiest to make fun of here. I think the Queen and the Catholic Church should actually get more shit. And I'm going to read a quote here from Tim Pat Kugen about why. So we're going to start with the Pope. The people of Rome contributed generously to Irish relief, as did a few Cardinals. But no masterpieces from the Vatican's art collection were removed for sale to help supplement the appeal, and it is likely that the amount of money that was collected came mainly not

as a result of the Pope's letter, but from the generosity of the Irish Catholic diaspora, particularly from America. In fact, at the height of the famine, it was the Irish who sent money to the Pope. In 1849, the Pope was on the run because Republican forces had temporarily driven him from the Vatican. The Irish bishops were ordered to take up a collection to help defray papal expenses. To judge from a letter to the Archbishop of Dublin, Dr. Murray, this appeal must have realized much more than the Pope's gift of a thousand pounds.

So the Irish, while starving, donate more money to the Pope than any way. And again, this is not to say one of the most effective forces for relief is the Catholic churches in Ireland, which are supported financially by the Irish people, not by the church in Rome, not to cut them out of this, because there's a lot of Catholicism. Catholic clergy who do a ton during this period, just not the fucking Pope, just not him. One of the more interesting donors is Sultan Abdul-Masid of Turkey. He's the Ottoman leader. He wants to give.

He's very moved by the suffering of the Irish people. He wants to donate 10,000 pounds. That is a ton of money back in the day. That's a lot of money. But when he says he goes to the British ambassador, he's like, I want to give 10,000 pounds to relief to try to help these people. And the British ambassador says, well, you know, that's a very nice gift, sir, but you see the Queen's given 2,000 pounds and you can't exceed her gift, you know, that would

be quite improper. You don't want people thinking about that. Y'all worry about her clout. Fucking Queen Victoria. Yeah. Oh my gosh. Disney. Okay.

It is worth noting to the Sultan's credit when he's like, all right, well, I can't donate as much cash as I want to. He fills five boats with grain and he sends them to Ireland at his own expense to feed the starving Turkish soldiers. It said have to unload the grain and secret at night in order to avoid embarrassing the royal family. Oh my God. They that petty, that family been a petty for that long.

Okay. And yeah, the Turkish so it's like, if you talk, you already an empire. So you, I mean, it's not like you don't empathize. It's not like the Sultan's not like out. You know, he's not hurting. Yeah. I was like, He's a Sultan.

Yes. He's fine. But at least that's not nothing, you know, that's a meaningful, that's a meaningful attempt to relieve suffering. I'm just like his little piece of like understanding of like, well, of course I don't want to upstage the Queen. I mean, I'm a Sultan. I wouldn't want to be upstaged either.

So this is what we're going to do. We're going to slide this in there because y'all tripping, but I get it. You know, it just like slide this in there under the, yeah, and I just wonder if you were a Turkish soldier, we, if you're just like, man, what? We got high. All right. All right. I guess.

Okay. You know. Yeah. There's a lion in Timpat Cougan's book that I found interesting. I can't vouch for it because I'm not Irish, but he points out that like obviously, you know, in the World War I, Irish soldiers are a major part of the effort at the Battle of Gallipoli, which is this shitload because the British Empire's forces get their asses handed to them by the Turks.

I mean, it's not to say that it's an easy, it's a nightmare. It's one of the worst battles there's been in the history of warfare. Yeah. And Timpat. It's Gallipoli, right? Yeah. Gallipoli. Timpat Cougan makes a point that like at today, there's no more ill will from the Irish

towards the Turks for the casualties at the Battle of Gallipoli, but there are still monuments to the Turkish soldiers who came and like handed out and delivered food. Wow. Yeah. You really do. I mean, you really do remember. You remember your fucking friends. Yeah.

Yeah, it moves graces to you. Yeah. So, Cheryl's Trevalian issued copies of Adam Smith's books to his employees carrying out relief operations in Ireland. He told them that these should be used as guides and handling how to feed the starving. Now, this does not mean that Trevalian did nothing that was capable. In fact, he helped to organize a network of soup kitchens from late 1845 to 1847, which were a fairly effective relief effort and helped stop several significant number of

people from dying. That said, it's not like the soup kitchens were his idea, you know? He was just like the guy who wound up helping to organize them and he was one of the people a lot of folks did see them as dangerous, as bad for the Irish spirit because it would encourage indolence. Trevalian typified the feelings of many English civil servants when he said, the judgment of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson that calamity must not be too much mitigated.

The real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people. So it's like, it's just God sent the famine to Ireland to teach the Irish something. And so we can't help them too much. We can't save too many lives because that would piss God off, piss God off. God and Adam Smith, who are basically the same to Chucky, Chucky T, you know, clearly. You're just like, we, it's already happening to us and we all already know you the cause of it.

Let that be enough. Yeah. But for you to have to keep giving these speeches like this, somehow my fault is I'm just like, that's where I'm just like, now you're, now you're pissing on my grave. Okay. Like, if you could at least just, yeah, I did to me like, that's the salt in the wound that you keep, that y'all keep saying that this is God's will because this is our fault. Like that's when you, when, when it's just, when you just ready to throw a chair, it's

like, I feel like it's that feeling, well, it's, it's not as bad, but it's that feeling when somebody, when a politician get on the, especially like a, like a white boy, get on the stage and be like, well, if Martin Luther King was alive today, he would say, I'm like, I'm going to throw a chair at you. I'm going to throw it like that's like, I just want to throw a chair like, There's a thousand. Yeah. Dr. King's name out your fucking mouth.

I mean, yeah, there's, that's, for one thing, like the guy said a lot, like, you don't have to put words in his mouth. And we, and we, it's, it's recorded on a bunch of stuff actually spoke on a lot of things that are relevant to this story. Yes. I'm pretty sure. This happened and then the story we talked about right now. Yeah.

Yeah. He had a number of opinions on free market economics actually. Yeah. I'll tell you what. You don't have to invent things anyway. You do if you want him to sound like he agrees with something else because there you go. You know, there's Martin Luther King and then there's Martin Luther King. You know, there's, there's the media of Martin Luther King that is easy for anybody to turn

into a guy on their side while they're giving a speech about whatever. I marched with King. Yeah. All right, buddy. Yeah. Yeah. Potatoes. The famine plot goes into greater detail about how Trevalian personally intervened to

exacerbate the famine and the name of his precious free market principles. Quote, one of his first actions on Peel's departure in June, 1846, because Peel, you know, Russell takes over for Peel, right? He eventually leaves being Prime Minister symbolizes the attitude he was to adopt throughout the famine. He canceled a shipment of grain on its way to Ireland. He wrote to Thomas Bering on July 8th, 1846, who's the head of the bank, the cargo of food is not wanted.

Her owners must dispose of it as they think proper. Bering replied congratulating him on the termination of your feeding operations. When the complexity and the time-consuming nature of the corn processing was brought to his attention, Trevalian made two decisive interventions. First, he wrote to the bear to the bearings temporarily cutting back on the corn supply by 50% and asking that henceforth, whenever possible, Indian cornmeal should be sent rather than unprocessed grain. Second, he decreed that there was no need for the Indian corn to be ground twice.

In a letter to Ruth, he summed up his attitude towards relief. It was that of the workhouse. We must not aim at giving more than wholesome food. I cannot believe it would be necessary to grind the Indian corn twice. Dependence on charity is not to be made in agreeable mode of life. In Ireland in early 1846, there was very little danger that the poorest classes would find dependence on Peel's yellow meal agreeable. The milling deficiencies and the fact that through hunger many of the recipients did

not give it sufficient cooking time made for severe and widespread bowel complaints, particularly among children. Hence the meal quickly became known as Peel's brimstone. Why would they need it milled twice? Well, if I have to mill it, let's send half as much, you know? We don't want them to get lazy because we're doing all of this work to prepare the cornmeal for them. Yeah, I was like, there's that thing again.

We can't help you because if we help you, then that means you'll never do anything for yourself. Yeah. Now, you know who isn't lazy? Yeah, I know who's not lazy. Yeah. Yeah. These amazing balls.

Absolutely. Now, they know how to work for themselves, you know? These products and services, they really, they're not lazy. I tell you what. They're not indolent. I tell you what. They're more Keynesian. They don't need to grind their corn more than once.

Sometimes they just eat it raw, just hard corn raw, baby. 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. Because 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 hearse were like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good, bad ass 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 heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your

podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the 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 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?

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 and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI.

How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus, it's all made up? Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back, oh boy howdy. So the famine brought through a series of changes in what we're known as Ireland's poor laws. And for this I'm going to quote from a write up by Virginia Korsman of Oxford Brooks University.

Prior to the Great Famine, relief was only available within the workhouse under the pressure of mass starvation and with many workhouses full to overflowing, the system was extended in 1847 to allow poor law boards to grant outdoor relief to the sick and disabled and to widows with two or more legitimate children. Outdoor relief could only be granted to the able-bodied if the workhouse was full or a site of infection. Anyone occupying more than one quarter of an acre of land, however, was excluded from receiving relief.

The effect of this provision, when combined with falling rent rolls and the liability of landlords to pay the poor rates on holdings worth less than four pounds per annum, was to encourage landlords to evict their smallest tenants. Workhouse occupancy rose from around 417,000 in 1847 to around 932,000 by the end of 1849. So one of the things they do is they make it advantageous financially to evict people for the landlords because it makes for a better tax situation because then you don't have to pay as much. And yeah.

You may gotta pay for it. Yeah. Yeah. It's cool. And the idea of like, if you own, what was it, one quarter of an acre? If you live on a quarter acre, if you live not even own, that's, I was like, wait, not even own. You just gotta live on it.

So if you got, you got a little, well, I don't know, man, you got a little quarter of an acre. Yeah. You cool. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I guess I could, if I had that little quarter of an acre, I guess I could plant some food.

Yeah. Theoretically, right? Theoretically. A quarter acre, by the way, not a ton of space to grow enough food both to pay your rent and keep a family. Yeah. It's like, of course, the food I would grow to eat, I have to pay. And also it doesn't grow right now, a lot of the food that I would eat.

So, yeah, again, people are really edged out of many options here. Yes. So the poor laws effectively put the burden to caring for starving Irish masses on Irish landowners and business owners. One thing this did was make it clear to the, that the United Kingdom, that Ireland had been made to join in 1800, that this idea of the UK doesn't exist for the Irish, right? Because none of the funding for this is coming from outside of Ireland. They stopped that immediately.

Men like Travalion didn't see this as England abandoning Ireland. They saw this as England crafting laws to change the Irish into something else that would make them better people, right? That's the reasoning behind all this. There's a lot of intent in the terrible things they're doing. These aren't just random bad laws. They want to fundamentally alter and get rid of a lot of Irish people in order to make them better, you know?

It's that, yeah, sounds like that, like kill the Indian, save the man thing. And a letter he wrote to Edward Twisselton, the chief poor law commissioner of Ireland, Travalion said, we must not complain of what we really want to obtain. If small farmers go and their landlords are reduced to sell portions of their estates to persons who will invest capital, we shall at last arrive at something like a satisfactory settlement of the country. Yeah. This is again, they just die off.

Yeah. It's an ethnic cleansing for economic purposes. That's what he's discussing. Yeah. With a very convenient fungus. Yeah. Yeah, this fungus convenient, you know what I'm saying? It helps out.

Yeah. Now, the famine also provided an opportunity for the crown and its servants to rid Ireland of some of its pesky and rebellious young men. Crime, which during the famine often meant simply stealing food, was punished often by transportation. This was the forced expulsion of a criminal to somewhere like Australia. John Mitchell, leader of a nationalist group named Young Ireland, was transported in 1848 to Australia.

He later called the famine, quote, an artificial famine. Potatoes failed in like manner all over Europe, yet there was no famine save in Ireland. The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the famine. Sci-sealed delivery. Yeah. Yeah. Nailed it. Yeah.

Time has proven his words very correct. The potato, again, did fail for years, but only in Ireland was their famine and death on an industrial scale. Huge numbers of Irish people fled their homeland in this period, many of whom wound up in the United States. Right? This is when we really get our big waves of Irish immigration. Yeah.

This is pretty well known to most Americans, so I prefer to focus on the fact that a ton of Irish folks also go to England, right? It is, you know, a bit closer, right? A lot closer. Yeah. Tens of thousands of famine victims flee to the seat of the imperial government, hoping for a chance to survive. This, of course, does not make English people very happy.

In 1850, the Liverpool Mercury wrote that the lamentable excess of crime in that city has been caused entirely by Irish refugees. This constant influx of Irish misery and crime is almost impossible to restrain. And of course, there are huge surges in the number of people arrested and charged with crimes, most of whom are Irish, because guess who the cops are focused on? Man, listen, I look, listen, I'm making a retroactive plea to the Irish, like, man, when whiteness comes knocking, like, don't, don't, don't answer that call, man, come chill with us, homie.

You see how they're doing you, just be with us, cuz. Yeah, I mean, there's an unfortunate story of, like, how a lot of these famine victims come to the United States and many wind up becoming police. And it's a whole tale. Yeah. It's a whole tale. It's a whole thing. Yeah.

Yeah. That's why I was just like, man, listen, why are y'all doing this? Like, you know what they do to you. They, they, they, they doing to you. They doing to us what they did to you. Why, like, come on, guys. Nope. That's a, it's, it's, it's not a, the playbook that we're reading through here, isn't

it? Yeah. The playbook because it doesn't work. Exactly. It's a playbook. It works pretty good. It works pretty well. Yeah.

You want to be, it's like at the end of the day, man, like you want to be the hunter or the hunter. And if you have a chance to become the hunter, 10 out of 10 times, you just do that is rather than, rather than that being eight. And it just, and it's like, it just sucks. But it is what it is. It is what it is. So it's also worth emphasizing that many, many foreigners did travel to Ireland during

her time of need to try and help Quakers in particular, probably like the, the group that came in and did the most good, like huge amount of lives saved by Quakers who operated soup kitchens and engaged in other very compassionate aid work, like really incredible shit. And in fact, when you go through like English newspapers in this period that are like people are publishing columns and letters of anti Irish bigotry, you will also find Quakers writing in to be like, shut the fuck up. You know, basically like they're Quakers, you know, because they're not, they're, they're a little nicer about it.

Yeah. Yeah. Many Americans also traveled to the island to help. One American philanthropist at the time wrote of Irish famine victims, I could scarcely believe that these creatures were my fellow beings, never have I seen slaves so degraded. And here I learned that there are many pages in the volume of slavery and that every branch of it proceeds from one in the same route, though it assumes different shapes. These poor creatures are in as virtual bondage to their landlords and superiors as it is

possible for mind or body to be. They cannot work unless they bid them. They cannot eat unless they feed them and they cannot get away unless they help them. Wow. Yeah. No, that's a quote. That is a quote. Yep.

Yep. Yeah. There's a lot of truth. Man. There are many pages in the volume of slavery and that every branch proceeds from one in the same route. Yeah. It's the same route, homie.

Yes. No sympathy at all was to be found in the heart of the regent, Queen Victoria, who came to be known as the Famine Queen for her government's utter failure. And this is something that happens really after the famine, but there's still a push in Ireland out to call her the Famine King, or the Famine Queen, yeah. Historian Christine Kinnelly, director of the Great Hunger Institute, sums it up thusly. There is no evidence that she had any real compassion for the Irish people in any way. When she visited Ireland for the first time in 1849, near the end of the famine, huge

numbers of soldiers were needed to keep the streets clear and ensure that she saw no real sign of the suffering her agents had permitted. We could go on and on about different policies, how they failed or succeeded, which other individuals played roles in the famine, eventually it ended, but only after tremendous suffering. At least one million people starved to death. Modern scholars suspect the real number was closer to 2 million, 1.9 million, something like that. Yeah.

And that's the island, either due to forced transportation or immigration in hope of a better life or just survival. From a pre-famined population of almost 9 million, Ireland's population post-famined was less than 5 million, and it did not exceed 5 million again until last year. That's so crazy. So for an idea of the scale of how this famine compares to modern famines, the famine in Yemen right now is probably the number one humanitarian crisis on the globe at the moment. Yeah, I just did a pot on it.

At least 100,000 people have already starved to death. Experts warn that 400,000 children under the age of five could die in the near future without sufficient intervention. It is a titanic problem that is 100,000 dead so far out of a population of 30 million. The famine in Darfur was probably the most prominent 21st century famine before Yemen. It killed around 100,000 people out of a population of 27 million. Now, both of these are titanic tragedies, and I'm trying to minimize that in any way, but 2 million dead out of 9 million.

For an example of the scale of this, it's a perfect storm. Then in the history of time and understanding of how viruses and bacteria work, when this happened, it's the perfect storm of being like, yeah, this is going to wipe y'all out. Yep, and there's a lot of people who have a vested interest in allowing you to be wiped out. Yep. Anyway. Because we're going to graze this land with these hipster.

I want to get some sheep. I'm going to get some sheep. So fuck Charles Trevalian. All day, every day. Definitely don't like that. I found an article that interviews his great, great, great granddaughter who is a BBC reporter, Laura Trevalian, and she got sent for an idea of maybe how out of touch the BBC can be. They have Charles Trevalian's great, great, great granddaughter.

In the mid-90s, when shit's going off in Northern Ireland, they send her as a correspondent. Oh my God. Let's go. Let's go. So she says, quote, I was interviewing a member of the Republican Sinn Féin in Southern Arma and she asked if I was related to Charles Trevalian. I said I was and she asked me how I could live in Ireland when I had the blood of the Irish on my hands.

She wasn't joking. I was constantly surprised by the number of people who knew about Charles Trevalian and the impact that the famine has in Ireland more than 150 years later, yet I felt ashamed that I didn't know all that much about him. I mean, she writes a book because of this called A Very British Family about the Trevalian family. Yes. Her just being cute, like, hey, are you related to Trevalian?

Yeah. Yeah. It's like my great-great-granddad. You know him? Hmm. You're like, I should. Hmm. That's a chair throw.

That's another chair throw. Yeah. Like I'm happy that lady didn't throw a chair at her. I feel real restraint on behalf of the Irish Republicans there. There it is. I mean, good for you. I know that can be a spicy crowd, I'm surprised. So she writes this fucking book and she says of it, I'm not defending him or endorsing some

of his actions, but I want to show he was more humane than has been portrayed. He did work very hard to try and improve the situation in Ireland and had a genuine concern for the welfare of the people. It's, all right. Like, okay. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

Look, listen. Yeah. Your granddaddy at peace is shit. Okay? It's just, come on. There's some fucking incredible quotes from this lady. He is vilified in Ireland and not wrongly because the policy enacted by the government at the time is impossible to defend, a policy of effectively withholding relief and allowing market forces

to take their courses brutal. However, what I'm taking, what I'm taking issue with is the portrayal of him as someone who wanted the Irish to die. Yes, he was a providentialist who felt the famine had been the will of God, but that's not the same as saying he wanted the Irish to die. It kind of is, man. It sort of is a little bit. It kind of is.

Unless you're being like, God wants these people to die, but fuck him, I'm going to fight him, you know? But like, that's not what Charleston Valiant was saying. No. No. I don't know, man. Listen, I don't know, man. I'm just, listen, your granddad, you piece of shit.

I think your granddad might suck. You just don't have to live with it. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? Just live with it. They don't mean you a piece of shit. They don't mean that. Okay.

They are, listen, we all, you can't go higher. You can't go into nobody's family tree and not find a piece of shit. Absolutely. It's just, they're in all of our families. Look. Like, what do you want me to say? He was a piece of shit. There's a lot of blood on his hands.

Yeah, you probably can't go into anyone's background and not find somebody who helped do a genocide at some point. There's been a lot of genocides that we've done a lot of them as a species. A lot of them. It happened all the time. You relate it. Yes. You relate it.

Somewhere in that line, you've got somebody, like, and it's fine because people aren't responsible for their ancestors. Just don't write a book about how you, what you, now what makes you responsible is you trying to justify it rather than be it like the rest of us, which is like, nah, yeah, it's fucked up. Nah, fool, whacked up. Yeah. Yeah.

It's cool. It's good stuff. Don't write no book about how you thought God wanted them dead, but that doesn't mean he didn't like them, you know? You don't say, I just think I won't feed them because there's principle. Yeah. But I don't mean I want them to die. Yeah.

It's a shame they're dying. I wished I could do something about it as the guy responsible for the relief efforts. I mean, we're all trying to find the guy who did this as Charles Trevalian in a banana costume. Well, a potato costume. Let's go with a potato costume for this dog. This is glorious, man. Just, man.

Don't write a book about your grand. Don't write a book about him. That's the end of the story. Don't write a book about him. Don't write this book about him. I'm sure there's a valid case for like, well, we have this family archives. I'm going to write a book revealing like what made him the kind of man who would do this and like take a hard note.

Do that. That's fine. There's some sort of, there's some like descendants of Nazis who have written some very good things about grappling with the fact that like, yeah, my grandpa did some shit. You know? Yeah. There's that. That's a really valuable thing to do, actually, because.

Yeah. As a species. Or even just like. We could stand and do better at that. Yeah. Yeah. Or I'm like, again, like we said, people are two opposite things can be true at the same time.

So, you know, surely your murderous grandfather was a very cuddly person who could read you a bedtime story. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? Who really loved, you know, nice strolls, you know, and got your grandma daisies every Sunday. Yes. And also is a bloodthirsty murder.

Yeah. They're both true. So even if you're going to defend your granddaddy like, hey, you know, he was really nice to my mom, then just talk about that part. This is. Like the piece of shit stuff is just piece of shit stuff. So just let it be what it is. People like things to be clear cut.

And I think there's not enough of an understanding that probably most of the people who have personally participated in genocide throughout history have been perfectly pleasant human beings outside of that moment. Absolutely. And probably most of the people who owned slaves were lovely to their wife and children. They were just fine at ignoring the humanity of certain other people. Yes. You know?

There could be two things. Well, you know, like, well, my, like, well, not big daddy, big daddy, you know, why do declare? I'd go hang out at Big Daddy's house and we'd sit on the porch and we'd drink our lemonade and he would play tea with us. The whole Big Daddy was so love. Yeah. Yes.

Big Daddy was very loving to you. Yep. It's awesome. That was my southern bell. How'd I do? It was good. It was good. I was fine.

I mean, ooh, my cattillion. We really. I can't deal with this. I've caught the vapors. Oh, gosh. I would like some alabaster columns plantation, you know? Well, I don't know. I don't know.

Yeah, I don't know. I don't have a good. It's all bad. I don't have a good southern bell ready. I apologize. No, I apologize. It's bad. I like pulling alabaster out.

I do. It's one of my favorite words. You really sound white when you say alabaster. There's no other reason to say it unless, again, you're the strongest one. Being a gospel in your, but besides that, why would you ever say alabaster? It's a fun stuff. Well, that's the story of the great hunger. Great hunger, the potato plight, the unnecessary famine.

Yeah, the British famine. The British famine. It would be so dope if in Ireland, their books were called the unnecessary famine. Yeah, the unnecessary famine. I mean, the famine plot is a good one. Cougan frames it very much as like, yeah, it was like people meant for this shit to go down. Yeah, the famine plot.

I did this. Yeah. Which is cool. It's not cool, but it's good to talk about things accurately. Prop! You want to plug anything before we roll out in a hail of- I do. Podcasts.

I do. I wrote a book called After the Revolution. You can Google A, V. No, I'm just kidding. What if I did, what if I, what if I did write it and I just accidentally just told on it? That like right now- I just stole your book? Yeah. I was like, wait.

I was like, yeah, Robert, I waited till this whole time to tell you I want my book. Prop! Hip-Hop! You did write a book, though. You did write a book. I did write a book. It's called Terraform. It's poetry and short story.

And I haven't won any awards for it. That's okay. You know who else didn't win any awards? Well, you know who won actually a lot of awards is Charles Trevalian. He got like knighted and shit. He won a bunch of awards. I hate that. I hate that.

So I want any of that. That's bad. Maybe awards aren't really worth anything. Yeah. All right. Well, that's the podcast. All right, dudes. Go out and again, find a property of the British royal family and damage it.

Oh. Yeah. And find yourself- Yeah. Find yourself somebody in the military and uninvite them into your home. Yeah. Yeah. Invite a soldier into your house and they'd be like, you know what gets the fuck out?

You don't get to be in my house. Third amendment, motherfucker. Bye. 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 was 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. Find Alphabet Boys on the iHeartRadio 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 and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. According to CSI on trial on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get

your podcasts. The Soviet Union collapsing around him. He orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.