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I’m increasingly starting to believe that counting famine deaths as murders is epistemological hogwash. If we’re going to blame Mao and Stalin for their famine deaths, then we need to blame Churchill for the Bengali terror famine, Prime Minister John Russell for the Irish Holodomor, and Franklin Roosevelt for maiming 2 million Americans with pellagra during the Great Depression. And in all three of those examples you can point to sketch things that make them look intentional. During the Irish famine, the British government was actively taking food out of Ireland for export even while people were dying, they refused to allow American foreign aid to Ireland (just like Stalin did), and various British thinkers and high-ups were muttering darkly about how fewer Irish was probably a good thing. Churchill specifically routed supplies away from India claiming it was necessary for war reasons. Roosevelt was paying American farmers to burn entire crops while people went hungry.
ChadYes.jpg?
It seems to me that the proper thing to do is distinguish between intentional deaths and deaths via mismanagement. Probably Roosevelt did not intend to give people pellagra, but I think it's fine to blame him for the result, even if we don't consider it the moral equivalent of mass murder.
On one hand, I think the Holocaust does read differently if the exact same victims died of plausibly-deniable famine: it's seemingly unique on the basis of the deliberate industrial murder, even though accounts generally count malnutrition and exposure deaths. On the other, this just incentivises malicious incompetence going forward, and doesn't necessarily reduce actual body counts. I'm not sure exactly where I'd put it, but IMO there is a line past which incompetence should be assumed to be malice when it comes to mass murder.
"Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice."
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It's a fair point that famines are far more complex than straight up shooting your political opponents - but I think you're making a historical error to include things like the Bengal famine and even the Irish potato famine in with the holodomor uncritically - especially using the same term for both Ukraine and Ireland.
The Irish potato famine has lots of history - but basically it was the confluence of the potato blight interacting with a growing industrialization (meaning people no longer had craft activities to fall back on) and pressure from population with limited land rights (their small plots could only grow potatoes on the marginal zones at yields to support their families). The economic and support system at the time was "laissez faire" - although there were some direct transfers from British during the first blights, this dried up later in 1847/48 ish as a liberal government came in during a time of recession (I think, it has been a while since I read about it all here: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/9781315708522/famines-european-economic-history-declan-curran-lubomyr-luciuk-andrew-newby). Interestingly the areas that kept exporting typically did better: support was paid out of the wealth of local landowners and those who were exporting higher value cash foodstuffs (cattle for example) could afford to cover the cost of importation of famine relief foodstuffs - the exports weren't typically the key issue. The real key issue was the laissez faire attitude of the British in general to social support at the time leading to little support from Westminster, the changing economic model giving people no diversified income and the fact that both the central government and local landowners had little connection to those they ruled. They didn't need their votes (they didn't have any), there was a local surplus of labor and they didn't feel a brotherhood. It was horrible, but not a holodomor - it was pretty medieval attitudes to smallholders and those you rule over hitting industrial realities.
Churchill and the Bengal famine we don't have enough time to cover in detail, but it does seem like he's unfairly smeared - unlike the governor at the time (Victor Hope) who deserves serious sanction for taking the word of others that everything was fine and not being at all proactive. Contrary to routing supplies away, Churchill did the reverse, constantly raising it with Roosevelt, unfortunately the pressure from the Japanese and the ongoing demands of Operation Torch (the US landings in North Africa, which needed huge logistics) meant that he didn't get much help and British shipping was tied up or depleted. However, again it was a case of failing to divert enough aid to the region and act fast enough, rather than requisitioning food out of hungry mouths. The central source (I think only?) for Churchill being a shit in the crisis comes from the private notes of Wavell - who took over and was really annoyed at the lack of action. We only have his account, which might be accurate but it doesn't seem to match up with what we have documented about Churchill's actions and that Wavell didn't know about, for example how much effort was going on behind the scenes to bring grain in - although too little too late.
The Ukrainian Holodomor however is much worse than those two examples above, and represented something between a complete indifference to millions of deaths in order to secure export earnings and a deliberate attempt to use famine to break the resistance of Ukraine and other zones to the Soviet Union. Soviet agriculture was a mess, they wanted to industrialize and needed money for that but the prices they were paying to farmers didn't encourage them to sell, which led to things like the "Scissors" crisis of the early 1920s where they just stopped selling to cities given the prices the Soviets offered and they couldn't be compelled via force, they could hide the food or plant less. On top of that, Ukraine and outlying regions were more anti Soviet, especially in rural areas where industrialization was non existent. Once the Soviet state was powerful enough to force the issue, Stalin collectivized the farmers (pushed them all onto standard plots where output was more legible). This reduced sharply reduced yields for several reasons, but meant that everything was controlled and could be seized, from now on the famines fell on the countryside rather than the cities, and famines became much more common. Then, the real killer was the forced export targets to earn foreign currency, which were impossible to meet in bad years of which there are many.
We can argue if the holodomor was genocide (many of Stalins actions were - like to the Crimean Tartars), but it's using famine as a tool to break political opposition and knowingly creating one to achieve a target of industrialization, unlike those above where it was a failure or indifference of a colonial authority to provide enough aid to a region rather than using famine as a club. Both the Bengal and Irish potato famines were a serious black mark on the British empire, the Irish one was a large rallying cry for independence (Bengal less so, Indian elites at the time looked at their share of the blame and didn't think it tactical to focus on at the time) - but they weren't premeditated like the Holodomor and efforts were taken to offset them, just badly.
However, the colonial cases point to the fact that people who lack representation and who the elites just don't need are in a really shit position famine wise (one of Sen's positions), and conditions like theirs combined with a technological shift can create terrible results. Hopefully never relevant for AI. Hopefully.
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I explicitly did not count famine deaths as murders, but counted them separately on top of murders. Note (with emphasis added):
Huh, I hadn't read about the Laogai death rate, and was under the impression that the Cultural Revolution was in the hundreds of thousands rather than the millions. Thanks for spurring my education!
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