I have received a short comment on my post A Brief Update from somebody called James who seems to be based in England and objected to my criticism of the Irish Slavery meme and my support for the position of Liam Hogan, the Limerick historian who has debunked it. I don’t usually respond to this kind of nonsense but what the Hell! Hogan is right. This rubbish deserves to be criticised by all right-thinking people, regardless of their political beliefs. Here’s the comment:
Definition of the word “Seritude” ? Also no mention of Liam hogans links to far left organisation Open Democracy Or Limerick university – that far left philanthropist George Soros also has links with. If African and Irish immigrants were all in jail, and the africans are treated terribly, this implys the Irish are not prisoners, as there treatment was so much better……Bullshit. How do you explain kidnabbing. Were they servitide contracts as well ?
Yeah, I didn’t mention Liam Hogan’s politics because I neither know nor care what his politics are. And I couldn’t care less about Limerick University’s links to George Soros, if they exist. What interests me is whether Liam Hogan is telling the truth or not and as far as I can see, he is being completely honest while the Irish Slavery promoters are lying their arses off. The fact is, I don’t like the racist and far-right politics that seem to motivate those who support the Irish Slavery meme but if I thought they were telling the truth I would admit that and deal with it, regardless of my attitude towards their political beliefs. The argument about Africans and Irish in prison is really foolish. If we’re talking about people being in prison, they’re prisoners. But indentured servitude and chattel slavery are two different things. Indentured servitude was often (though not always) voluntary, it involved people from many different European countries (including England) and these indentured servants had legal rights and their servitude was time-limited.
In chattel slavery, black people were kidnapped, sold and they had no rights. They and their children and their children’s children were the property of the person who had bought them. If they were tortured, raped or murdered, they had no rights and there was no legal redress.
As for the kidnapping which took place in Ireland between 1653 and 1657, that happened. I’ve discussed it here and Liam Hogan has also discussed it at length. Here’s just a taste of what Liam Hogan said about it:
Cromwellian era forced deportations from Ireland to the British West Indies did not begin in earnest until May 1653 and the total number forcibly deported during the Cromwellian era is roughly estimated by scholars (Corish, Watson, Akenson, et al) to have been around 10-12,000 people. The paucity of records ensures that we will never know the exact number. Kerby Miller (Emigrants and Exiles, 143), Robin Blackburn (The Making of New World Slavery, 247) and Matthew C. Reilly (“Poor Whites” of Barbados, 6) estimate that “several thousand” were banished. These estimates are educated guesses based on contemporary population figures for the islands, allowing for a high mortality rate, pre-existing Irish populations and concurrent voluntary emigration.
In other words, thousands of Irish people were sent to the Americas forcibly as indentured servants. This involuntary kidnapping went on for a few years after the War of the Three Kingdoms ended. These kidnapped people (those who survived) went on to be released, as in the case of Downing and Welch, dealt with on a post here (Niall O’Dowd Answers Critics, April 1st 2017). Some of these former indentured servants were involved in the slave trade themselves. In other words, yes, what happened to those people was bad but it was very different from chattel slavery.
Chattel slavery went on in America until the 1860s. It is estimated that around ten million African people were forcibly removed from their homes and sold in the colonies, where, in general, all their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren were also slaves. So, we are talking at least twenty or thirty million people who were systematically denied any kind of rights and who were systematically treated as less than human during the centuries of slavery.
Now, here’s what I don’t understand. A lot of the Irish population was wiped out during the Cromwellian Wars in Ireland – somewhere between 40% and 20% of the population before the wars. Yet that huge loss of life doesn’t seem to be of any importance to people like you. What you want is Irish slavery. You insist that Irish people were slaves and many of your type insist the Irish were enslaved until the 19th century and there’s a conspiracy to hide that fact. And that, my friend, is total bullshit. Do you think the revolutionary patriots of the 18th and 19th century who hated the English so much wouldn’t have noticed this and written about it? You think it wouldn’t have been a major gripe for people like O’Connell, as many of these Catholic ‘slaves’ would have ended up as Protestants in the colonies? The fact is, whatever motivates people like you to believe this crap is generally to do with white supremacist stupidity, not pride in being Irish.
In short, why don’t you go and read a few books on Irish history instead of insisting on your conclusion before doing any research? Get a proper education and stop filling your head full of this half-baked bigotry and hatred and jealousy.
cassidyslangscam 