When Frederick Douglass spent time in Ireland in 1845, upon seeing the conditions of Irish peasants, he was stunned by their deprivation; “a board on a box for a table, rags on straw for a bed, and a picture of the crucifixion on the wall.” It reminded him of the conditions he saw in slave quarters as a child. “I confess I should be ashamed to lift my voice against American slavery,” he wrote, “but that I know the cause of humanity is one the world over.”
Point being, the brutal subjugation of an entire people was not a unique phenomenon; not then, not now.