Quinn draws a comparison between the Irish famine to the Holocaust and the slave trade to illustrate how horrific that time in history was. “Given the sheer volume of this passage as well as its nature… bearing more resemblance to the slave trade or the boxcars of the Holocaust than to the routine crossings of a later age” (page 48). He does not further analyze or explain this comparison. However, later on in his writing on page 53, he recounts the comparison of the famine to the Holocaust saying they are “very different events” not to be “confused or equated”.
I believe the initial comparison, written not by him but by historian Robert James Scally, served to illustrate the sheer monstrosity of the famine to those unfamiliar to that part of history. Supposedly, the reader would be well aware of how awful both the African Slave Trade and the Holocaust were, and making that comparison would open their eyes to another horror of history that was the famine. So he included the comparison so that throughout the reading, the reader would open their mind to the severity of the famine. However, Quinn obviously doesn’t agree that the famine and the Holocaust are comparable and simply used the comparison as a tool in the text.
What interests me here is that Quinn takes back the comparison between the Holocaust and the famine, but says nothing about the comparison to the slave trade. Was it that he believed there were somehow more similarities between the slave trade and the famine? Or that he thought of the Holocaust as the more severe historical event and so the more insensitive one to compare? In my opinion, the events are all drastically different. The famine was a terrible situation of pain and turmoil, but at least the starved and desperate Irish migrants had autonomy over themselves and their thoughts. Both Africans and Jews in their respective events were forced into travel and had violent physical and psychological trauma inflicted on them as an “inferior” people. And if either of these two events would be deemed more severe, it could easily be the slave trade because of how long it lasted, how many people were killed, and its devastating lasting effects on the people of the African Diaspora all over the world. If Quinn did not believe the Holocaust and the famine were comparable, surely he would feel the same about the slave trade?
