american-holocaust

224 AMERICAN HOLOCAUSTconvert and "civilize" the natives, while stripping the land bare of its wealth.In the case of Ireland that wealth was not in gold or silver, but in timber,and in just one century the English despoliation reduced the amount ofIreland's rich timberland from an area covering about 12 percent of itsterritory to practically zero. 77 As we saw in a previous chapter, the Englishalso imitated the Spanish in one other way during their invasion of Ireland-theytortured and killed huge numbers of Irish people.The English treatment of Ireland's native people provides importantinsight into understanding the way the British later would treat the indigenouspeople of North America-not only because it reveals the extent towhich the English would go in defining non-Englishmen as savages anddestroying them in the process of seizing their land, but also because itshows how far they would not go when the native people in question werewhite. For while it is true that the English demolished large portions ofthe Irish population in the sixteenth century-massacring the people ofIreland in the same way their forebears had mass-murdered Muslims-theexample of the Irish does not equate with that of American Indians. Onthe contrary, it actually serves to demonstrate how differently the Britishtreated people they regarded as lesser than themselves-but lesser in varyingdegrees, and different precisely because of the rapidly evolving Europeanideology of race.First, in their depredations and colonizing campaigns in Ireland, theEnglish clearly distinguished between those natives who were Gaelic Irishand those-though certainly Irish-who were known as "Old English" becausethey were descendants of earlier Anglo-Norman conquerors. Althoughboth groups were regarded as barbaric by the English, even thoseBritish who most vociferously denounced all things Irish tended to makefavorable exceptions for the Old English since they were believed to havefallen into barbarism as a result of their long-term association with theGaelic Irish. In contrast, as genealogically non-Anglo-Norman, the GaelicIrish (like the American Indians) were considered always to have been barbaric.Further, in what might seem a paradox only to those innocent ofthe workings of the racist mind, the British sustained this invidious distinctioneven when they were arguing that the Old English could be moredangerous and treacherous opponents than were the more barbarous GaelicIrish. As the Irish historian Nicholas Canny has shown, the British consideredthe Old English to be more formidable in these ways because theycombined "the perverse obstinacy of the authentic barbarian" (i.e., theGaelic Irish) with "the knowledge and expertise of civil people." 78"Authentic" barbarians though they may have been in English eyes,nevertheless, the Gaelic Irish still were not so savage as the darker-skinnedpeople the British at that same time were encountering on the huge continentsof Africa and the Americas. As a result, whether living among theGaelic Irish or the Old English populations, the British never set up seg-