There are many unsolved mysteries in the universe.
How do you use the three seashells?
How does a bicycle stay upright when you’re riding it?
What wouldn’t Meat Loaf do for love?
And then there are mysteries that people continue to think are mysteries, even though actually
know the answer.
What was in Marcellus Wallace’s briefcase?
Diamonds.
What?
The writers have said that many times, they just thought it would be cooler not to show
them - but it was diamonds.
Huh, okay…
What does the appendix do?
That one’s a bit more complicated, let me uhm… check your phone.
C’mon, Trillions?!
Top of the mornin’ to ya my name is- Hey hey, hey!
Stop….
Take it off.
Now do it normally.
Ireland – the reason many of you probably still have a hangover.
Or at least, the excuse you gave yourself in order to reinforce a negative stereotype.
Kinda like what I just did.
You probably told yourself that it’s okay because you’re one-sixteenth Irish or something.
But a lot of you actually are - how did that happen?
Before the Romans, there were the Celts who arrived around 400 BC give or take…
Who were before the Celts?
Someone, but we have to start somewhere, alright.
The Celts mixed cultures with the previous inhabitants and eventually created Gaelic
culture, with their pagans and druids and lucky charms.
This is my only Lucky Charms reference, I promise.
The Romans arrived in Britannia in 43 AD, when Ireland was still called Hibernia.
But the first significant part of our story doesn’t happen until 432, when St. Patrick
arrived.
This is when “history” starts for Ireland since this was when the first historical account
was finally put to paper.
St. Patrick converted the Irish from paganism to Christianity and according to legend, banished
all the snakes from the island.
He is now the patron saint of Ireland, engineers, Irish engineers, Nigeria, Missouri?...
Boston, at least that one makes sense, and a few other places.
The Irish went all-in with Catholicism, like, hardcore.
Which is good too, because after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, when the rest
of Europe plunged into the Dark Ages, Ireland did not.
The monasteries kept on preserving Latin literature and Christian texts as if everything was normal
– it was during this time that Ireland became known as the land of saints and scholars.
And once the Dark Ages were over, it was the Irish who re-educated and brought culture
back to Europe.
At least, according of Thomas Cahill’s book How the Irish Saved Civilization – by civilization
he mostly means western Christianity, which was pretty important during the medieval period.
They also preserved many secular literary works, but those were also preserved by the
Byzantines, so there’s a bit of redundancy.
As for saving civilization as a whole, I’ll leave that for you to decide.
Now you might be wondering when I’m going to get to why the video is titled the way
it is.
Because you probably think the appendix is just a ticking time bomb in your body.
I could explain it, but I’m a social studies guy – I talk about history and politics
and psychology and stuff.
If only I knew someone with a degree in biomedical sciences…
I’ve got this one KB!
Although we’re not fully sure what the appendix does in the body, rather than being a ticking
time bomb, one popular theory suggests it could actually be an unsung hero by acting
as a storehouse for good bacteria.
You’ve got trillions of bacteria in your gut.
Yes, trillions.
However, this gut flora is not invincible.
It can get flushed out by bad diarrhea, or damaged by strong antibiotics, or purged by
disease.
The storehouse theory of the appendix suggests that if all hell breaks loose in our gut,
your appendix is positioned in such a way that it can act as a safe haven for bacteria.
And so, when the coast, or the colon, is clear, the good bacteria that have been hiding away
there have their time to shine and can be used to repopulate the gut.
Cheers appendix.
Look at that, you’re learning you’re learning all sorts of stuff today!
Keep that in mind it becomes important.
The Normans invaded England in 1066, and then the Normans, now technically the English,
invaded the island now known as…
Oh man, now whenever I see this I want to channel my inner zealot - My life for Aiur!
- but I know that’s not right…
It’s pronounced Éire.
Thank you, the English invaded…
Éire … in 1171, and soon after, the King of England declared himself the Lord of Ireland.
People are going to be really mad about how much history I just glossed over.
Anyway, skip ahead to 1347 – what happened in 1347?
Ring around the Rosie, Pocket full of Posies…
Why are little girls so creepy?
Did you know that song isn’t actually about the plague?
But everyone thinks it is, so, the plague.
In 1347, the Black Death arrived in Europe from the east and reached Ireland in 1348.
By 1350, between a third and half of everyone in Europe was dead.
But not the Irish, who remained mostly unaffected.
The most plausible explanation for this is that English in Ireland lived in castles and
cities, whereas the Irish mostly lived on farmland.
Living in close proximity to other people without soap usually lends itself to disease.
Or, since a lot of people at the time thought that the plague was some sort of divine retribution,
and gingers don’t have souls, the grim reaper just kinda passed them by.
Gingers have souls!
You’re right I’m sorry…
And not all Irish people are gingers – some of them have rather dark complexions and black
hair, and they’re known as Black Irish.
And every once in a while someone like Joan Walsh tweets about how they’re a person
of color because they’re Black Irish, clearly not understanding what that means.
There are a lot of theories about how these non-ginger Irish people came to be, but I’m
going to tell you one of the most widely held and my personal favorite.
In 1588 the Spanish Armada was destroyed by the English.
That’s just one of those things that I know.
I learned it in 8th grade from Mrs. Reyes’s English class.
Not even history, I have no idea why she taught it.
But I know I’ll never forget it.
When people ask how old I am, I have to do the math.
If I have to write today’s date and my birthday on the same form, there’s a good chance
going to say I was born this year.
If I ever get Alzheimer’s, long after I’ve forgotten my birthday or which cereal was
magically delicious, the last memory to go will be that the Spanish Armada was destroyed
in 1588.
And this is the only time that information has ever been useful.
Thanks Mrs. Reyes.
Anyway, those who survived couldn’t get back to Spain through the English Channel
since the English were blocking it, so they had to take the long way around, hit a storm,
and crashed in Ireland.
And that is why we have Black Irish people – and they’re white.
But hey, maybe Joan Walsh was talking about white people with black hair from Ireland.
Yeah, except that she thinks Obama and Frederick Douglass were Black Irish.
The latter of which is near the top of the “do not confuse with Black Irish” Black
people in Ireland Wikipedia page.
So now we need to talk about the King of England, who remember, was also Lord of Ireland.
It gets a little confusing with the multiple titles.
In 1542, Henry the Eighth declared himself King of Ireland.
He wasn’t the king of any united place, he was the king of two places.
In 1603, James the First slash the Sixth, added King of Scotland to the list.
In 1707, they decided to combine England and Scotland into the Kingdom of Great Britain.
And then in 1800, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was formed.
Throughout all of that, there were numerous rebellions, with varying degrees of success,
but in the end, they’ve always kind of been under England’s thumb.
They’ve never really had their own united royalty, at least not until recently.
Which brings us to the watershed, defining moment in Irish history – the Irish Potato
Famine.
Whenever the Great Famine is brought up, the same question inevitably follows – was it
a genocide?
I’ve talked about genocide a lot on this channel recently, and I’ll be honest, it’s
kind of a drag.
Nobody wants to be known as the genocide channel.
But I’m gonna talk about this one because someone specifically asked me to – only
this time I’m going to give you the tools to be able to think critically about any other
potential genocides yourself.
So you can stop asking me.
Let’s start where all good legal arguments start, the definition.
According to the UN, genocide is “any of the following acts committed with intent to
destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:”
We’ll get to the acts in a moment, but I’ve hit on this before – it’s the intent that’s
important.
There’s a difference between killing people in order to take their land and resources,
killing them through economic exploitation, and killing people for the sole purpose of
exterminating that group.
Only that last one is genocide, it’s the intent, the why behind the killing.
It all looks the same in the end, however many people died.
But when you’re trying to define a crime, it’s the intent that matters.
So the acts, number one, killing members of a group.
That one should be obvious, it’s pretty self-explanatory, it’s the kind of genocide
we all think of when we think of genocide.
And I can tell you that no, the British weren’t running around Ireland intentionally murdering
people just for the sake of murdering people – at least not on any large scale.
Number two, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group.
This means maiming and torturing; starving doesn’t count under this, so no.
We’re going to skip the third one for now, and you can probably guess why, but number
four: Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.
To put that simply, sterilizations, the kind of thing Amer – nevermind this isn’t about
us, no, the British didn’t do that.
Number five, forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
The kind of thing Canada and Austral – Sorry, again, no, this didn’t happen in Ireland.
So, back to number three.
Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical
destruction in whole or in part.
This is the one that has the strongest case, so keep that in mind while we talk about what
happened.
The Irish Potato Famine was caused by potato blight, which is a water mold.
Were the British in league with… oh man… really?
You’re not- uhm… phytoph- P. Infestans.
That’s way worse.
No, they obviously weren’t, nor did they introduce it to Ireland in order to induce
a famine.
In fact, it had hit all of Europe in the 1840s, but it hit Ireland especially hard in 1845.
Why?
The majority of Irish people were dependent on the potato for a number of cultural reasons,
but also economic and legal reasons.
Let’s take a look at those since those would be conditions inflicted on them rather than
choices.
The first problem was Absentee Landlords and Tenant Farming.
To put it simply, the Irish people living on and farming the land didn’t own the land
or any of the profits from anything they produced, yet still had to pay all the taxes.
This isn’t unique to Ireland, in fact we’ve done it for centuries in the United States.
But, the majority of Irish were Catholic, and the English were not, so additional sanctions
were imposed on them like the inability to inherit land.
So a large portion of Irish land was owned by English, who didn’t even live in Ireland.
The point being that they didn’t really care what was going on on the land they owned,
or about the conditions that their tenants were living in, as long as they were making
the most profit possible.
And the most profit came from cattle.
So a lot of the land was cleared and converted to pasture for cows.
Kind of like what’s going on with the deforestation in Brazil right now.
This meant that the Irish tenant farmer had even less land to work with to grow food for
their family.
Enter the potato, which grows in even the poorest soil and contains a lot of calories
in a little package.
Yes I really did buy this one potato just for this joke.
This was also the time of Mercantilism, when all of the colonies of the British Empire
sent their raw materials to England to be manufactured and were then sold back to the
colonies.
And despite the fact that Ireland was part of the United Kingdom proper at this point,
it was still very much treated like a colony.
As a result of the Corn Laws, no corn, or wheat, or any other grain could be imported
to Ireland, except through England.
These conditions – the trade laws, the extraction of wealth, and the potato monoculture – set
Ireland up as somewhat of a house of cards for blight to come blowing through.
Throughout the famine, Ireland remained a net exporter of food, primarily cattle.
Why didn’t the Irish just eat their own cows?
Because then they would have gotten in trouble for that – and the punishment for stealing
something that valuable was usually worse than starving.
During previous famines, the Irish closed down their ports to keep Irish food in Ireland
– but not this time.
A year into the famine, the Whigs thought that free market capitalism would provide
the answer and stopped the limited government aid that was already happening.
Capitalism didn’t save the day in this case and things just got way worse.
In 1847 when they finally decided to try government relief again, they made it so that if you
lived on more than a quarter of an acre of land, you couldn’t get it.
That’s not even a fifth of a football field – most farms were 1-5 acres.
So if you were starving and your crops were failing, you had to give up your land to get
food.
Of the 8 million people in Ireland prior to the famine, about 1 million died either from
starvation or disease – which spread primarily thanks to the fact that everyone was starving
– and another million or so left for cities like Liverpool, New York, and Boston.
Emigration continued for decades afterwards and the resulting diaspora means that even
today, 170 years later, Ireland’s population has not recovered.
The famine itself ended in 1852, the Corn Laws were repealed a few years before that,
and government aid eventually reached the level it needed to be at, though certainly
not fast enough.
So, was this a genocide?
The Irish people, culture, and language, certainly suffered as a result of this famine.
But, was it deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring
about its physical destruction in whole or in part?
Or was it a series of short-sighted economic policies and neglect?
I leave that for you to decide in the comments below.
The famine is the reason why we have such a large Irish population and why St. Patrick’s
Day is such a big deal here in America.
Do not under any circumstance ever, call it St. Patty’s Day.
It was also the start of the Irish Home Rule movement for independence.
But it really kicked off in 1916 with the Easter Rising in the middle of World War 1
– an Irish Rebellion against the Crown, during which, the Germans tried to send weapons
and ammunition to help.
The Germans supporting an independence movement against the United Kingdom in the middle of
a World War?!
That’s unheard of!
The rising itself failed, but it did drum up support for independence, which was officially
declared in 1919.
Which started the Irish War for Independence between the Irish Republican Army and the
Royal Irish Constabulary.
The war ended in 1922 with the establishment of the Irish Free State, which was still a
dominion of the Commonwealth Realm, much like Canada and Australia.
The United Kingdom therefore had to change its name to the United Kingdom of Great Britain
and Northern Ireland because the protestant majority in the north decided to remain part
of the UK and not join the free state.
In 1937 the Irish Free State left the commonwealth entirely, didn’t participate in World War
2 – once again while Europe burns itself to the ground, Ireland is just over there
minding it’s own business – and in 1948 the country officially became the Republic
of Ireland, or…
I wanna say Poblakt nah Iran?
Poblacht na hÉireann Oh man I wasn’t even kind of close.
The Republic of Ireland controls 26 of the 32 counties on the island - the other six
are in Northern Ireland and are viewed kind of like occupied territory.
The Irish constitution claimed the entire island.
A few years ago I took a class in the Sociology of Global Terrorism… along side a few others.
I am still able to fly, believe it or not.
But the vast majority of the terror attacks we learned about regarded the Troubles, which
was the conflict between Ireland and the UK over Northern Ireland.
This is a map of every terror attack in Europe between 1970 to 2016.
It looks like we have a rather acute case of appendicitis there doesn’t it?
And these were proper terrorist attacks, including mortar attacks and car bombs – so many car
bombs.
In fact almost every car bomb set off in the 1970s was related to the Troubles in Ireland
or the UK.
The Troubles were between the Republicans, supported by the IRA – who thought that
Northern Ireland belonged in the Republic of Ireland.
And the Unionists who thought it belonged in the UK, supported by the Ulster Volunteer
Force.
This isn’t some civil war that happened in the before time, in the long, long ago.
I remember this, I was alive for this stuff, and odds are, so were you.
The Troubles lasted for thirty years, from 1968 until the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.
The agreement was that Northern Ireland will remain part of the United Kingdom, unless
a majority of the people living there vote to join Ireland.
If you’ve been paying attention to the whole Brexit situation, this may happen sooner rather
than later.
The border between Ireland and Northern Ireland is open and people can freely move across
it – which again, might change with Brexit.
C’mon Britain, we know you don’t really want to do it, it’s not too late to reverse
this.
And lastly, anyone born in Northern Ireland who wants to attain Irish citizenship can
do so.
And a lot of them do.
The British Olympic team is branded as Team GB, rather than UK – so just Great Britain,
almost intentionally excluding Northern Ireland.
So three quarters of the Olympians from Northern Ireland choose to play for Team Ireland rather
than Team GB.
As time goes on, more people in Northern Ireland are supporting rejoining the republic, so
soon, Ireland may look like this… or this.
I hope you enjoyed the craic and the next time someone tells you that the appendix doesn’t
do anything or that Ire- Hey I looked it up.
What?
What Meat Loaf wouldn’t do for love, it’s in the song.
But then why do people act like it’s some big mystery?
I don’t know, if they actually listened to it, but they should know better.
Hey that’s…
Oh, whoops.
So what do you think, did the Irish save civilization?
Was the potato famine a genocide?
What about Northern Ireland?
Let me know down in the comments and don’t forget to partition that subscribe button.
Also make sure to follow me on twitter and facebook and join us on the subreddit.