Worst blame-America Conspiracy Theory Ever: The Potato Famine
I was reading some comments about a racialized controversy (doesn't really matter which one) and a commenter mentioned that Irish-Americans are tolerant of Irish jokes even though the USA had caused the Potato famine that almost wiped out Ireland.
The Potato famine of the mid-19th century is widely considered a quasi-genocide in the way the blight crisis was handled and manipulated so there is a proper conspiracy angle... but the USA? WTF?
The USA in the 1840s was probably not conspiring to destroy Ireland. (Was the idea that we wanted to force the wave of Irish immigration? Why would the USA want to destroy Ireland, even if we could? We were not on the best terms with England, having fought a war with them in 1812, so why would we destroy the Irish for them???
So I googled around, curious about where this conspiracy theory came from, and the answer made me smile because the conspiracy-reaction is based on a common bit of non-knowledge (aka ignorance) about potatoes.
The potato blight that destroyed the harvests did come to Ireland from the USA, after originating in Mexico.
But that is hardly surprising if you know that potatoes are from the Americas. (South America, I think. One of the many created domesticated crops native Americans had developed ovr millenia) Same reason a deadly disease of Zebras is likely to come from Africa. (And unlike western south America, the USA traded a lot with Ireland, whch is why the direct point of entry was from the USA.)
The European adoption of American vegetables after 1492 was so explosive and so life-changing and culture-changing that we quickly forgot these things hadn't always been there. (Italy had no tomato sauce back in the day, either. Also an American plant.)
The populations of Ireland and Russia and a lot of other places where grain harvests are marginal grew a lot after the introduction of the potato and it quickly became "traditional" despite being a recent import.
To the point where someone would see it as notable and suspicious that America was the source for a disease of the ancient and traditional Irish crop, the potato.
= new reply since forum marked as read
the main reason the great potato famine took place was that Ireland focused on one single kind of potato which was susceptible to the blight that killed off the crop. Had they diversified the types of potato... there are thousands, they could have survived the whole ordeal. Or so the story in anthropology circles is told. So if there had been more than one variety of the plant available in the intercontinental market is hard to say but that could be one of the main reasons for the famine in the first place. You can't just take one sample and expect it to be a staple without failure.
Beyond that, speculation seems to rule.
