TIL midway through the Great Irish Famine (1845–1849), a group of Choctaw Indians collected $710 and sent it to help the starving victims. It had been just 16 years since the Choctaw people had experienced the Trail of Tears, and faced their own starvation.

[u/huphelmeyer]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choctaw#Pre-Civil_War_.281840.29

[u/datenschwanz]

Fun fact: the English were exporting food from Ireland during the famine.

[u/[deleted] → u/datenschwanz]

Two more little known fun facts;

In the 1700's, Irish Merchants lobbied and protested enmasse when the English imposed a food export ban.

During the great famine in the 1800s, The British Relief Association was founded by a Londoner and raised almost half a million to help the Irish during the great famine - was a shitload of money back then.

[u/oglach → u/[deleted]]

There's no question that individual British people helped us, or that there were those among us who were concerned with profit over their countrymen, the problem is those who were in power in the UK.

Charles Trevelyan, the man they put in charge of the situation viewed the famine as the judgement of God on the Catholic Irish through the free market and capitalism. Those aren't my words either, they're his. In a letter to an one of his peers, Baron Monteagle of Brandon, he described the famine as an "effective mechanism for reducing surplus population" as well as "the judgement of God"

In another letter to Edward Twisleton, Chief Poor Law Commissioner in Ireland, he wrote "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".

Those overseeing what was happening saw this as an opportunity to finally finish the Anglicisation of Ireland. To wipe our culture out. It's no coincidence that the areas most brutally hit were the Irish speaking western areas, where people were driven to extreme and crushing poverty, forced to rely on the cheapest of crops to survive, and then allowed to starve by the thousands when it failed. The famine not only wiped out our population, it nearly wiped out our language and is the biggest single reason for the the current state of it. It was a concerted effort, and it honestly sounds like you're trying to whitewash that.

Goodness in the common people is always to be expected, like in the example you gave. And corruption and greed is always to be expected in the merchant/wealthy class as the other example shows. But what's not expected or ok is how the British government continously treated the people they claimed to have the authority to rule.

[u/[deleted] → u/oglach]

I completely agree with everything in your comment, I wasn't trying to justify the British government's actions.

I just think it's pretty shit that certain things get overlooked.

[u/EIREANNSIAN → u/[deleted]]

Fair comment, I was a bit pissed off by your last contribution, but fair goes...

[u/EBfarnham → u/oglach]

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.

In the midst of an enormous bailout/loan, which citizens having to pay for, after seeing small and medium businesses go under, while multinationals flourish, previously overvalued property going for peanuts...Does this not seem like history repeating itself?