Hey all, long time listener first time caller here. I wanted to share something that seemed relevant to this community.
My journey from registered young Republican to socialist began on Cracked.com and their articles and podcasts. None of them were as influential for me as columns and a short lived podcast written by Robert Evans. It’s a long story but I’m sure it’s similar to a lot of you. I was drawn over not by the facts I was learning, but by stories and experiences of people I had thought my enemies.
This gets us to the main point of this. I just finished listening to a three part podcast in the series Behind the Bastards on “The Great Hunger” or as most of us know it, the Irish “Potato” Famine. I knew that on a broad level the famine wasn’t because there wasn’t enough food but because of burgeoning free market principles pricing the Irish out of being able to eat the food they were growing in order to pay their rent. Robert Evans walks the listener through the English’s history with Ireland from the start to just after the famine and the results that brought Ireland from a population of over 9 million to one that just made it back to 5 million last year.
I think it’s a great listen for the purposes and interests of this subreddit as it directly deals with landlords, the free market and it’s religious hold on people, and some incredible parallels with the Great Hunger and our own experiences with Covid 19.
This podcast is a major reason why I’m who I am today and why I see the world for what it is instead of what capitalist propaganda told me it was. I would say give the entire series a listen, but I will link the three relevant episodes to this post below.