the Crown and was not a real movement, is disapproved by the way that the Unionists had acted time after time to sabotage the efforts of the British government to come to terms with Irish nationalists, starting with the anti-Home Rule riot in Belfast in 1886 that killed 32 people to the present. Moody noted through the Ulster Volunteers in 1912–14 were encouraged by the leaders of the Conservative Party and the British Army to challenge the British government, the general strike by the Protestant working class in Northern Ireland in 1974 that ended the Sunningdale Agreement was clearly a mass movement directed against the efforts of the Crown to reach a compromise in Ulster. Moody argued that the popular thesis that the Great Famine of Ireland of 1845–50 in which millions starved to death was deliberately planned by the British government as a part of a genocidal plot to wipe the Irish off the face of the earth is not true, arguing that the famine was the result of the social-economic system that existed in Ireland at the time. Another nationalist "myth" that Moody attacked was the claim made during the "Land War" of 1879–81 that the Irish people had existed harmoniously on the land before the English conquest had imposed a "feudal" system on Ireland. Moody argued that "land war" was due to combination of conditions peculiar to the late 1870s, instead of an explosion of long-running resentments as landlord-tenant relations were actually improving in the decade prior to the "land war"; the "Ascendancy" families who owned most of the land in Ireland were generally indifferent as opposed to oppressive landlords; and the claim that Ireland had no "feudalism" before 1169 was based on the mistranslation of various ancient Gaelic texts into English in the 19th century. Finally, Moody attacked the "predestine nation" myth of Irish history that portrayed Irish history as one long struggle for freedom from the British Crown over the course of the last 800 odd years, which he complained reduced everything down to an "unending war with Britain" and did not really address any of the social questions facing modern Ireland in the 20th century. Moody argued that the mainstream Irish nationalists in the late 19th century wanted "home rule" (devolution of powers from the Westminster parliament to a new parliament in Dublin), not independence, as most people in Ireland did not wish to