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It does irk me that famines in Ireland, British India, Africa, ancient regime France, ancient China, Tsarist Russia and the United States are all the understandable effects of blight, weather patterns and supply chain issues but that every famine in a communist country is automatically an intentional act of mass murder and must be treated as such.
I'll speak for the Irish famine: It was an act of nature. There is ample documentary evidence of the British government taking measures to alleviate the problem, such as repealing the Corn Laws to make food imports cheaper and arranging for large quantities of cheap cornmeal to be shipped from America and sold in Ireland at below market rates. These measures were taken at great political cost. Sir Robert Peel had to resign as PM after repealing the Corn Laws (they called him Sir Robert Repeal, no I'm not joking).
The potato blight was a Europe-wide phenomenon and Irish agriculture was notoriously backwards and over-reliant on the potato harvest. The fact that there was a famine is not surprising and I see no reason to blame the British. Contrary to popular belief, Ireland was a net food importer throughout the famine. This is in stark contrast to Ukraine during the Holodomor.
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Outside of the Civil War and its immediate aftermath, there has never been a famine in the United States. No, not even the Dust Bowl.
Irish and British Indian famines often ARE blamed on mass murder.
It’s not “twenty million people died last month” level, but there was rampant systemic malnutrition and hunger in large parts of America during the Great Depression that contributed to tens thousands of excess deaths from various diseases. That’s actually how many famine deaths happen, but when it happens in America it doesn’t count.
No, but if I had a political axe to grind against Roosevelt and was looking for any excuse I could to discredit him, the fact that his administration was seizing and burning thousands and thousands of tons of food in the service of his unworkable extremist economic ideology could be presented to make it look pretty damn intentional.
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There’s a pretty direct line between the policies enacted by Maoist China and soviet Russia and the mass famines; it’s probably fair to give the British empire some portion of the blame for famines in Ireland and India but there’s also not a state ideology at the time of exterminating huge swathes of the victims(in the case of the holodomor).
And at least some African famines are downstream of socialist policies- most of Africa experimented with communism/socialism. Lots of the most famous bad actors were explicitly Maoist.
British landlords were growing massively profitable food cash crops for export only and were refusing to let them be used for starvation relief. The British navy was using military vessels to prevent food aid ships from other countries from docking in Irish ports. How the hell is that not a “direct line from the policies” of the British empire?
I said Britain didn’t intend to exterminate the Irish, not that Britain bore no responsibility for the famine.
I don’t know how to interpret chasing off famine relief with gunboats as anything other than intentional. It’s equal to any of the evidence that can be produced for the Holodomor and it far exceeds any of the evidence for the intentionality of the Maoist famines.
Not sure about this one as IIRC starving people were killed when trying to access grain in warehouses during the Great Leap Forward, and one of the reasons why the famine was so horrific was because Mao and co. continued to export food for political gain and refused foreign aid for at least a year or two.
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