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O thank you. I had no idea where that slogan came from. How do I miss all these great articles for so long?

It's an interesting argument and a really well researched article. Could you offer a definition of genocide?

Nice to see your first page here on Wizzley and very nicely put together

LOL Katie and I posted at the same time! <3 She was more succinct.

Edit: Awww! Thank you very much for the link back to my article! Is this a case of Keep Calm and Cross-link On?

It's from a poster, one of a trilogy, created by the British government on the eve of World War Two. It was distributed secretly all over the country to people who placed them into storage. They would only have been displayed if Britain had been occupied.

After the war, the 'Keep Calm and Carry On' posters were mostly destroyed without the public ever seeing them. But some survived, then came to light decades later. Then they became cultural icons, because they are sooooo very stiff-upper-lip British. LOL

I've written a Wizzle about it, but I don't want to detract from Katie's excellent article here by diverting you over there. These posters are better anyway, especially the 'Keep Calm and Code On' one, which I really do have my eye on.

cherylone, Thanks for the thought good food for thought. :)K

It's a British saying, Jo wrote a wiz about it. I'll look for it and send you the link. :)

Where did the saying come from? I tend to miss things....

Great information here, katiem2, however once one gets a bit older, the updoes don't do so well. Age has a way of catching up with you I guess LOL I could have used these ideas when I was younger and my hair was down to my rump, thought. Great article.

Like it? I've shown my family and picked out a place on the wall for it! :D

Jo, I thought you would like that. :)

I cheated on the poll. My British accent is spoken like a native. >.>

I LOVE 'Keep Calm and Code On'! OMG! I can has! Kthxbai! And the binary joke never gets old.

At the time, it was much more profitable to use the fields for sheep than for grain, even with the soaring prices of things like maize. You need far fewer workers for things like that.

There is not a definitive figure for the number of people who died. The most commonly cited is between one and 1.5 million dead, and 2 million emigrated, for a total loss of 3.5m people. But that can only ever be seen as a minimum. Record-keeping was patchy, when there was so much displacement and reason for land-owners to fudge tenant numbers.

Something which I didn't make a big deal of here (because its relevancy was going off on a bit of a tangent) was the cultural genocide aspect. This was undoubtedly here, as it had been in Cornwall, Wales, Scotland and, much, much earlier, the Celtic areas of England.

Under severe attack during the famine was the Gaelic language. In fact, some would say that it received a death blow much more keenly felt than the actual physical deaths. Destroy a language, and you undermine national identity. Destroy that and you have succeeded in colonizing a country.

I'm glad that you took something from the article. Thank you very much for reading it. :D

I read this whole thing. Good you included so many facts. I don't really know what to think, but after reading your article I do tend to think that maybe they wanted them gone, indeed, so as to have more control of the land for strategic purposes and maybe also more of the crops, as you say (but then the question is, who would work the fields??), but not necessarily dead, since many of them could and did emigrate. But you're saying that millions died. Do they have a figure? It's awfully high, anyway, and before it got to "millions," many useful measures could have been taken to prevent the whole thing. I did that note of that guy saying there was food for 18 million people, not 9 . . . Never knew much about the potato famine. Thank you so much for a great article -- it's when I read articles like this that I realize the social interaction here on Wizzley comes with great bonuses :-)

sheilamarie, That was my intent. We writers must be ourselves, original and following our own voice. Thanks for stopping by.