this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2024
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The potato joke is also a joke about a genocide.
It’s a joke about being the victim of genocide.
In this case the equivalent joke would be a holocaust joke, which would probably get you fired even faster.
Legitimately, if they're American, the people in HR probably wouldn't even believe you if you told them about what actually happened during the Irish famine, or how England treated them for decades directly leading to "the troubles"
They would assume you're making it up.
I'm not joking
I was more or less taught in school "oh well it was an oopsie-woopsie, all the crops died but England tried to help them! Oh well, such a terrible natural disaster."
I didn't learn about the darker side of things until I read into it outside school.
The US education system is a joke.
Curious. I wonder if the region you grew up in influenced this at all... as I am from an area full of ethnically Irish folk whose roots trace back to emigres during the famine, and we definitely were taught that the bloody English were to blame!
Yeah, I'm certain areas with more Irish heritage are going to have a better grasp of things.
I grew up in an area primarily composed of English, Scottish, and French immigrant descendants.
Oh, then what's the problem?
The Irish genocide is far enough in the past to have become sort of "folklore".
No one who experienced it is still alive or in living memory.
That makes it better suited for small talk, and not equivalent to the Israeli genocide.
Oh it's still in living memory, Ireland and Irish culture still hasn't recovered from it.
The population has barely recovered, in fact. If i recall correctly, it was within the past five years that the Irish population exceeded pregenocide levels.
Just googled it
Pre-genocide it was8.2-8.5 million, today it's 5.1
They're still 60-67% of what their population was before
Can't hold a potato if both hands are full of grudges, though. 🤷🏼♂️
Yeah, cause the english definetly haven't continued fucking over Ireland since then. /s
Tiocfaidh ár lá
By that logic we'll be allowed to laugh about Jews and ovens in about 60 years, right?
I don't know what you mean by "allowed", AFAIK there is no western country (not even Germany) where it would be illegal. I don't know the law in Israel.
My friends and me made lots of those jokes 30 years ago.
Not proud of it at all, but we were edgy 12-year-olds.
I'm guessing allowed by taste, not by law.
Also, unlike the Shoa/Holocaust, it's not that commonly known that the potato famine was a genocide, inflicted by the english.
That doesn't make the Iseraeli's comment ok. Just that they probably didn't know how much their comment was in bad taste.
Would you mind explaining what happened? I don't know anything about Irish History.
They were colonized by the British and essentially taxed through landlords above their ability to produce, but were allowed to support themselves on potatoes, which was okay (not really) until there was a blight damaging the potato crops, which brought on huge amounts of emigration and led to over a million people starving to death. If you want to read more
Thanks. Now I understand, why that joke was quite an asshole joke.
I'd like to tangentially add that Irish people are possible the most chillest when it comes to their ethnicity and identity. About 11 years ago, I got obsessed with pretending I was Irish for a few months during and after dating an Irish-American girl. I had a terrible fake accent, drank Jameson or Maker's Mark, bragged about my fame with Irish good-bye's, etc. I am in no way Irish in the slightest, and I don't think anyone would even think that. Not one Irish person seemed offended. If anything, they welcomed it and found it entertaining at the least. I think that if I did that with any other ethnicity, people would at least be offended if not angry and retaliatory.
Anyone else experience this? If so, any insight on why this may be?
Wasn't the potato famine a natural disaster though?
The potato blight was a natural disaster.
The famine was caused by the British exporting the same amount of potatoes out of Ireland as before.
They didn't export potatoes out of Ireland, they exported everything else. Meaning there was no other food but potatoes for the Irish to eat.
That, the rent system, and the British actively preventing aid (not at their expense!) really turned a bad situation into a full-blown genocide.
Also, monoculture, but yeah. Points at Cavendish bananas.
The Irish at the time also grew wheat and meat and everything else that was grown on the British Isles back then. The problem was the colonising English owned all the land and exported all the food
Potatoes were the emergency food, the only thing Irish could grow and eat
When Irish were dying of starvation the farms they were forced to work were growing plenty of wheat and sheep
Ahh, I see.
Not entirely. Yes there was blight affecting crops but there was more to it than that.
Huge volumes of unaffected produce were exported to England for profit - the decreased yields only impacting the market for locals. Previous famines has seen the British ban exports to ensure the local population had access to food (which also decreased the prices) but not this time around.
English landlords of Irish property were evicting their tenants who weren’t able to pay (since the blight impacted many people’s ability to work) with zero notice or rights for the tenants. Absentee landlords were extracting huge amounts of capital out of the Irish economy, owning vast swathes of the entire country.
The Irish were widely dependent on the potato as a primary form of sustenance but it was due to the potato being high in calories, cheap and easy to grow, and high density yields from relatively small plots of land (landlords dividing up the land into incredibly small divisions whilst simultaneously extracting the highest rent possible for the land).
The Irish were, in essence, forced to eat potatoes due to the extreme economic exploitation they were subject to.
Yet there was no aid from England; she simply sat by reaping profit and leaving things up to the divine - “the market will provide”. There had been efforts to change tariffs and laws but the contention in the governing party about providing aid caused the Prime Minister to resign and the subsequent government threw out all efforts (except those such as offering relief to those without land which forced many Irish to sell what land they had to gain relief and aid).
A Prime Minister at the time launched a commission to investigate and it was found that the absentee landlord system was abhorrent and principally responsible for the famine.
Sadly 1/4 of the population perished, and another 1/4 simply left the country. In some ways, Ireland never recovered.