> It disproportionately affected those who spoke the Irish language, creating an Anglophone Ireland. It led ultimately to a radical reform of land ownership, wh

> It disproportionately affected those who spoke the Irish language, creating an Anglophone Ireland. It led ultimately to a radical reform of land ownership, which passed to a new class of Catholic farmers. The profoundly uncomfortable truth is that Ireland started to become modern when its poorest people were wiped out or sent into exile—a reality that is too painful to be faced without deep unease. This makes the struggle to keep the Irish language feel like such a vital urge today. Those of you who live in SF be sure to check out the Unite Irish Cultural Center by the zoo. Reading about the export of so much food while people starve reminds me also of the Holodomor, a famine where farmers grain was stolen from them and exported from the country while children starved in the streets. I have never seen a precentage of the population represented as here, but the estimates are 3M to 7M died from famine in the Ukrainian SSR, and today the population is 40M. And it's not as if nobody knew what was going on, when Stalin's second wife confronted him on his actions causing so much death, she was met with such a verbal assault that she committed suicide [ https://archive.is/xsCpP https://archive.is/xsCpP ]. The greed and lust for power and money to cause the death of millions is not limited to capitalism. I know of many strong connections between Ukrainians and Irish people, and have no doubt that this rhyming history may play into it. The cause of these famines may be proximally blamed on a shortage of one type of crop, but when food is being exported from adjacent farms, as happened in both An Gorta Mor and the Holodomor, the true cause is not the lack of growing, the cause is the lack of control of the fruits on ones laber. People not being able to control their own land, not having a widespread group of smallholders of land that can benefit from their own work, from not having administrative control by the majority of people. There's a lesson for us who farm digital land; do we own the land or are we sharecropping? We must fight autocracy in all its forms, lest many of us starve. Those who oppose democracy have killed millions and will do so again if given the chance.