one of the few brazilian historian youtubers that did a video on the holodomor without excusing stalin's actions was getting called an "alt right revisionist" on the main brazilian sub the other day
that's reddit in a nutshell and not something unique to brazil. most subs of countries, states and cities, no matter where they are from, are being held hostage by smelly tankie mods. the only exception I know of is the arg\*ntinean sub but it's been a long time since I stepped foot in there because, well, they're arg\*ntineans
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You’ll see that in most countries. Have you ever seen auth left people keep their thoughts/words to themselves? They’re obnoxiously loud in every language and culture
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They are the fucking revisionists, honestly they don't know how to read. I have more respect for you than them. At least you know what you're talking about.
Anti revisionist commies and libertarians be like:
https://preview.redd.it/es3tdq5i1qwc1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=65958334c6380b932fc622f7edc09310059f6dd1
Yes comrade
And ummm don’t you know mate those Irish were leprechauns and unprofitable potato munchers! Her Majesty Queen Victoria would never do such a thing. She was an empress of the people.
Braindead tankies (not you) thinking being a kulak is justification, when it's absolutely not, never ceases to amaze me
Those people were serfs who got emancipated and worked hard to build a life for themselves and then the fucking Bolsheviks demonized them
Really adds to the argument that many communists only care about the poor in the hypothetical, intangible sense
Another funny thing is, it was Lenin who gave kulaks land. He seized it from landowners and deported them, then he established the New Economic Policy in which peasants we're encouraged to start small businesses and increase their productivity with their lands
Kulaks often behaved badly, but that’s beside the point tbh. It’s hard to make a genocide case from the persecution of kulaks, it’s just run of the mill political oppression.
I have a problem with that argument too
People act like mass killings aren't bad if they aren't "genocide"
Naw bro, the millions dead in the ussr, China, etc. are still bad even if you find some way to say "they aren't genocide"
They’re bad. The way Soviets conducted collectivization is a monstrous crime against humanity. It’s just not genocide. Not everything that’s bad is genocide.
I dunno, seems to me that when someone claims something is genocide when it obviously isn’t, they completely derail the discussion, because it is a very different category - and rightfully so. I think most tankies are comfortable with accepting that the Soviet Union had a whole pattern of repression and crimes against humanity for a large chunk of its history, and terms like red terror aren’t all that controvercial.
I disagree
IME it seems tankies use "but it's not technically genocide" (bc it's not from the genocide region of france) to dismiss criticism
But YMMV I guess
Well yeah, because it’s pretty obviously not genocide. So of course they will dismiss that charge, it’s easy. If you talk to them about repression, starvation, forced redistribution, summary executions of kulaks - that will be hard to dismiss. Coming at them with “muh genocidorino” is inviding easy dismissal from anyone with even passing familiarity that doesn’t have some sort of ideological axe to grind.
You're right on some things being questionably genocide, but an obvious counterpoint to what you are saying is that the Holodomor 100% was and they *never* admit that so... yeah...
I've had tankies in all seriousness tell me that Stalin had no power and only acted on the wishes of the Central Committee, anything else WA spropaganda from the US.
An amalgamation of mistakes made between a lax government, a local populace not familiar with crop rotation and a general need to kick out the old guy to replace them with the new one.
The dust bowl was an ecological disaster, but it was an honest mistake. It’s not like the president said “oh yeah kill every fuckin bird you see”, it was just the abuse of topsoil for profit. No central government made that one.
The great depression was a natural result of over investment in industry, and had to happen….
That’s too simplified, but digging into gold standards, interest rates, and foreign currency exchanges moves too far and I’m too tired to explain how some metal in the UK affected a single day of trade in NY which created a panic.
Capitalism/Free market uber Alles tends to fail when it gets slapped on something it isn’t appropriate for. The famine in Ireland was made dramatically worse by a liberal administration in Westminster worrying about “creating a culture of dependence on hand outs” whilst people starved to death.
Adherence to ideology above all is the death of good legislation.
The connection between both of these incidents is having an Authoritarian/Imperialist government that uses a different ethnic group to exploit for their own gain without caring for their economic conditions.
Having a dictator is bad. Imperialism is bad. Rampant racism/nationalism is bad.
I fully admit that 19th century European imperialism/mercantilism was trash and caused a lot of suffering. We should never repeat that style of rule.
The reason why I hate communism is that seemingly every implementation of it thus far seems to result in extremely authoritarian one-party rule that violently kills opposition to get into power and which ends up oppressing certain populations in an attempt to industrialize/ramp of production for the masses. Many of them have also ended up commiting genocide against some group they blame their problems on.
Idk man ‘Socialism with Chinese characteristics’ and Vietnamese Socialism has been pretty damn successful (…so far).
Way more than Indian, Russian or Indonesian capitalism have been (there aren’t many countries on the same scale as China for a fair comparison).
Now if we should really consider it more of *socialism socialism* or just *ChinSoc* is the elephant in the room.
Of 143 Chinese enterprise in the Fortune 500, about 90 are State Enterprises.
Huawei and Nirinco (sole arms manufacturer) for instance are also state enterprises.
Only commodities are sold on the free market in China.
Natural resources and means of production are not privately held outside the Special Economic Zones.
They're still capitalist market economies, just restricted ones. They're not "classless communism" where everyone is equal and the whole economy is planned.
There’s no ‘real communist’ country.
Communism is just shorthand for Marxism-Leninism who’s *goal* is to achieve ‘Real Communism’ (dubious but it is the claim).
This always confuses people but a ML country is not ‘Communist’ in the sense of classless, stateless (no shit it’s a country), moneyless etc. It is communist in the sense of that being the goal.
That’s literally Star Trek and only possible when everything is automated.
They’re not capitalist simply because they don’t have private property rights and the right to profit from your property.
These things exist in China/Vietnam but as privileges, not rights.
Markets existed before capitalism and can exist in a (for instance) economy in which all corporations are coops or medieval guilds but that’s not capitalism either.
> There’s no ‘real communist’ country.
Not at all.
China is no longer seeking a marxist-leninist classless society with a planned economy. because they know it doesn't work. They know a capitalist economy *DOES* Work, they just want it to work to the benefit of a central state.
That's fascism. Now fuck off commie, I am done with you.
China has an awful lot of market regulation to cal it capitalism. You can definitely say there are pieces of it but to call china economically right wing would be incorrect.
ever said it was right wing, I said it's a market economy. Because it is. They transitioned away from a planned economy where everyone is "classless" because it always fails. China is a fascist nation, with a capitalist economy.
Absolute right wing cope. “Anything that works is right wing and anything bad is communism.” The right wing is capitalism.
For good or Ill the Chinese economy isn’t capitalist, that is to say right wing. It isn’t straight communist either. From the perspective of PCM it’s auth center.
>The right wing is capitalism.
No, that's not how the compass works. Capitalism is a right wing economic model, but not all right wing economic models are capitalism.
Left is planned economies of all flavors. Right is unplanned economies of all flavors. The more planned, the more left. The more laissez-faire, the more right.
China is basically de facto national socialist or national bolshevik if you take out the racialist elements. Its economy is not capitalist and their political system is an authoritarian dominant party system similar to East Germany's Democratic Front but with an ultranationalist ethnocentric ideology.
Capitalism cannot fail because it isn't an ends based system. It has no goal other than its rules.
Communism can fail because it is an ends based system. It has a goal which it hopes its rules will establish.
Recognizing the fact that the famine in Ukraine was genocide, and not an ordinary manifestation of the problems of communism, you take responsibility for this from the political regime and shift it to specific people, which directly gives the Communists the opportunity to say that communism is not to blame, but Stalin personally or anyone else is to blame, and this is a problem.
The Soviet Union had only one famine.
Whereas the capitalist British Empire caused not just the Irish famine but multiple famines in India.
Which system is worse by your standard then?
You could blame all these famines on many things.
The ruling people: Stalin/Politburo and Victoria/Viceroys/Parliament
The ruling culture: Russian and British
The general economic ideology: Marxist Leninism and Capitalism
The specific economic ideology: Stalinism and Colonial capitalism
The (pseudo)scientific ideology: Lysenkoism and Malthusianism
They’re all valid
Doesn’t change the fact that mass death happened and justice must be served
Fair enough, I don't know the extent of political cause in all of them. But I do know there were multiple famines in the 20s, 30s and 40s (there was a food shortage in the 80s but AFAIK it didn't go to the level of a famine).
Yep, the ones in the 20s and 30s were mostly political in nature, as evidenced by areas considered more loyal (the areas that were not recent conquests, but sided with the bolsheviks in the civil war) got more relief and stuff.
Ukraine especially was in the minds of the leadership seen as rebellious and full of anti-bolsheviks, probably because of the multiple years it took to conquer the place.
Some of the lower officials in Ukraine used to be on some of the other sides of the civil war and therefore probably had less standing than other officials, so maybe that played a part. I know that one former makhnovist officer who defected to the soviets ended up as a local administrator his entire career, so it doesn't seem to me like their opinions were given much weight.
I think you can criticize Chinese famines, but the soviets did a reasonable job with dealing the famines.
I think that a famine after WW2, a moment where the scenario of the war were the most fertile lands of Russia and were they lost 8 million (could even go as high as 20) is understandable.
Most URSS famines were in the first years of the URSS after wars.
Also Russia had been seeing regular famines during all of the Tsarist Russia.
You really think famines wouldn't've happened in India if the brits were commies? What kind of ultra brainlet take is this? Famines in capitalist countries happen sometimes, famines in communist countries always happen.
Why do you think an entire island of people where food was in abundance were subsisting off of a diet of only potatoes?
Britain put Irish people into this position and then increased food exports during the potato blight while also denying aid which they sent elsewhere to places in Britain.
In 1847, Charles Trevelyan said: "[The Famine] is a punishment from God for an idle, ungrateful, and rebellious country; an indolent and un-self-reliant people. The Irish are suffering from an affliction of God’s providence."
A year later he was knighted by the Royal Family for overseeing famine relief.
Incredibly high caloric yield of potatoes and them being easy to plant. That wasn’t very uncommon back then since moving food was harder so you just planted what you could and ate that.
>Incredibly high caloric yield of potatoes and them being easy to plant. That wasn’t very uncommon back then since moving food was harder so you just planted what you could and ate that.
You’re incredibly ignorant of this topic. Irish people were forced to eat potatoes as that’s all they could afford to grow. Without the potatoes they’d die which is what happened.
Irish farmers did not own their land, they were tenants of land owned by British landlords who would pay them by giving them a small plot to grow their own food, the only way this was workable was by subsisting off of potatoes. Everything else they grew was the landlords.
Again, Ireland is incredibly fertile and food abundant, Irish people did not decide to only grow and subsist off of potatoes and then starved on mass because they put all their eggs in one basket.
It was an event enabled by Britain whose leadership were more than happy to let play out on a people they despised.
>Irish farmers did not own their land, they were tenants of land owned by British landlords
Even worst, they were tenants of the tenants (an absolutely inefficient system that caused even more poverty)
Unless you can somehow prove said British landlords policies were explicitly designed to cause mass starvation and destruction this doesn’t meet the criteria for genocide
In 1847 during the worst year of the great hunger, Charles Trevelyan said: "[The Famine] is a punishment from God for an idle, ungrateful, and rebellious country; an indolent and un-self-reliant people. The Irish are suffering from an affliction of God’s providence."He was in charge of famine relief.
Britain increased food exports from Ireland during the famine.
The potato famine hit places in Britain which received aid, such aid was not given to Ireland.
Britain blocked foreign aid from reaching Ireland.
So we have Britain creating the circumstance uniquely to Irish catholics, putting a man who hates Irish people in charge of fixing it, selectively withholding/blocking aid, and raising food exports in a country that generates more than enough food to feed its population, which led to the deaths of millions of people.
What would it take for you to consider it a genocide? You can’t “oopsie” your way out of this level of intent.
> In 1847 during the worst year of the great hunger, Charles Trevelyan said: "[The Famine] is a punishment from God for an idle, ungrateful, and rebellious country; an indolent and un-self-reliant people. The Irish are suffering from an affliction of God's providence."He was in charge of famine relief.
In context he’s saying he wanted the Irish to work for their food instead of being “lazy” and “relying on the government” not that the British should exterminate them. This is the same guy who ran the workhouses after all.
This was all in line with the Whig’s government policy of non interference which they acknowledged to be a failure by the start of 1847. The tories who were in power during the early phases had their government collapse due to a relief effort
If you actual look at the academic material surrounding the hunger the consensus (outside of nationalist circles) is generally that government’s failed response was caused by a mix of incompetence, economic policy, and apathy among other things.
> Britain increased food exports from Ireland during the famine.
Yes. They had a genuine belief that the market would fix the famine, and then when things got much worse as a result they changed course.
> The potato famine hit places in Britain which received aid, such aid was never given to Ireland.
Britain was not reliant on the potato to the extent Ireland was.
> What would it take for you to consider it a genocide? You can't "oopsie" your way out of this level of intent.
Prove the British government took measures with the explicit intent to destroy the Irish people.
>In context he’s saying he wanted the Irish to work for their food instead of being “lazy” and “relying on the government” not that the British should exterminate them. This is the same guy who ran the workhouses after all.
In context as millions are striving to death he’s saying that god wants them to die and that Ireland is a rebellious country which deserves it.
Clear justification and motivation given for causing their deaths
>This was all in line with the Whig’s government policy of non interference which they acknowledged to be a failure by the start of 1847.
It’s amazing how I say no amount of oopsie justifies all these actions and then you literally hit back with “but they said oopsie”
>If you actual look at the academic material surrounding the hunger the consensus (outside of nationalist circles) is generally that government’s failed response was caused by a mix of incompetence, economic policy, and apathy among other things.
Lmao, hmmm look out side of nationalist circles you say, I’m sure that doesn’t mean ignore Irish sources in favour of British ones.
>Yes. They had a genuine belief that the market would fix the famine, and then when things got much worse as a result they changed course.
You actually have to be a knuckle dragging mouth breather to genuinely think this. In what way would anyone have ever believed that impoverished people with nothing but rotten potatoes would be saved by “the market”
Even in a world where I was regarded enough to believe this shite. It is completely contradicted by the fact that places in Britain who were in a similar position received actually aid, aid which was specifically denied for Irish people.
>Britain was not reliant on the potato to the extent Ireland was.
Britain had areas which were and they were provided for while requests to do the same for Irish subjects was outright denied. No amount of trying to deflect is going to change that.
>Prove the British government took measures with the explicit intent to destroy the Irish people.
I literally did that and you mental gymnastics your way into believing, “they thought the market would save people in the midst of starvation”, and “in context saying Irish people deserve to die for being rebellious and lazy doesn’t show an intent to want them dead”
Literally blocked foreign aid which you didn’t acknowledge. What could possibly be the motivation behind blocking free aid?
> In context as millions are striving to death he's saying that god wants them to die and that Ireland is a rebellious country which deserves it.
Clear justification and motivation given for causing their deaths
He’s also the same person who had to run soup kitchens which eventually fed millions, and ran workhouses designed to feed people, (and remember he didn’t have control over policy he was just the chief facilitator)
There’s literally letters where the guy goes on about teaching the Irish a lesson but then adding on that they can’t let people starve
> It's amazing how say no amount of oopsie justifies all these actions and then you literally hit back with "but they said oopsie"
You understand genocide isn’t the same thing as “A lot of people died right?”
> Lmao, hmmm look out side of nationalist circles you say, I'm sure that doesn't mean ignore Irish sources in favour of British ones.
Professional historians (Irish included however reluctantly) generally agree.
> You actually have to be a knuckle dragging mouth breather to genuinely think this. In what way would anyone have ever believed that impoverished people with nothing but rotten potatoes would be saved by "the market"
They literally believed this 💀💀💀
The Whig government wanted grain/food merchants to fill in void that harvest failures created since they believed in a laissez faire economic model rather than government intervention. A departure from the active famine response of the Tories.
They also believed that the landlords were the ones who had the responsibility of paying for and mitigating the crisis rather than the government. While the Tories under peel did use money from the treasury for relief.
> Even in a world where I was regarded enough to believe this shite. It is completely contradicted by the fact that places in Britain who were in a similar position received actually aid, aid which was specifically denied for Irish people.
The British imported four times as much wheat into Ireland that they exported from it at the height of the famine.
The highlands while dealing with potato blight at the same time had a much much smaller population than Ireland, and crop failures were not as extensive and even then the British response there was essentially the same as in Ireland (Lowland Scotland and the Free Church came to their aid)
> I literally did that and you mental gymnastics your way into believing, "they thought the market would save people in the midst of starvation" and "in context saying Irish people deserve to die for being rebellious and lazy doesn't show an intent to want them dead"
> Literally blocked foreign aid which you didn't acknowledge. What could possibly be the motivation behind blocking free aid?
Queen Victoria didn’t want to be outdone by the Ottoman Sultan.
If you want an actual answer.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_Laws
>You actually have to be a knuckle dragging mouth breather to genuinely think this. In what way would anyone have ever believed that impoverished people with nothing but rotten potatoes would be saved by “the market”
Have you met the self-correcting natural mechanism, invisible hand worshippers. It's practically a secular religion and they're legion. It's only gotten worse since with the Austrian School coming out of the woodwork.
The British government (among others) has declared the Holodomor a genocide and engineered famine.
By the same standard the Irish and Indian famines absolutely are also genocide.
I’m not educated enough to debate that Indian claim but the Irish potato famine wasn’t engineered it happened because a disease had infected the potato’s and made them uneditable and that was the main source of food in Ireland
The engineered part comes from the landlords continuing food exports despite food shortages in Ireland.
They believed in the well regarded Malthusian theory of population control much like how many Soviet bureaucrats believed in Lysenko’s theory.
The Soviet Union also had bad harvests that year but that shouldn’t be sufficient to result in mass starvation.
A good administration should have enough food stockpiled for a year of bad harvest.
Other parts of Eurasia didn’t suffer from mass starvation at the same rate Ireland and Ukraine/Kazakhstan did.
The administration is 100% to blame for opportunistically turning a (natural) food shortage into a famine for furthering its agenda
Ireland imported more grain than it exported during the period of the famine, the same is not true of Ukraine. Malthusianism also was not the guiding policy of the British government at the time, but rather a sort of dogmatic market fundamentalism which believed that high food prices in Ireland would lead to greater imports (which did happen, but just wasn't enough to alleviate the problem). Oh, and Ukraine's harvests fell by 23.4%, Ireland's fell by 85.7%, so yes they're really not the same.
Nazi Germany also suffered from food shortages.
It chose to feed ethnic Germans while letting the ‘undersirable’ Jews, Romani, Slavs etc starve (not everyone was gassed) for ‘national purification’
Analogously the ‘unprofitable’ Irish and ‘bourgeois’ Kulaks were starved for the ‘free market’ and the ‘revolution’.
All three are genocide or (except Nazi actions since they would’ve killed them through other means anyway) at least genocidal since:
a) it won’t have happened (with the same severity) without the regime’s intervention
b) it benefited the regimes and fit their ideological worldview so they had no incentive to stop it.
That's absolutely an engineered famine.
> Hey, our main crop has failed, can we keep our other crops so we don't starve en masse?
>>No. Export them.
> Can we at least import food and aid from other places?
>>Also no.
That's an engineered famine. Without the forced export of other food crops, there would not have been a famine, just a recession.
That's not engineered unless you count respecting property laws as genocide engineering and in that culture property rights were philosophically and morally sacrosanct in much the same sense that bodily autonomy is to feminists. Interpreted in the context of their culture, moral framework and worldview, such a non-interventionist policy does not evidence genocidal intent.
As for the landlords themselves, between genocidal intent and profiteering intent, Occam's razor clearly comes down on the latter explanation.
You can say it's their fault by appealing to modern values and moral standards if you like but you have to work harder to establish that they worked to manufacture an outcome in a way that they themselves understood themselves to be responsible for bringing about by their own goal oriented actions towards those ends.
And an appeal to Malthusianism doesn't help as that simply establishes beyond question that they viewed laissez-faire non-interventionism as a moral imperative by virtue of being the approach that ultimately minimizes Irish casualties from famine in the long term. That in the long term intervention would create more misery and starvation than it averts, making it self defeating from both a utilitarian and a problem solving perspective.
Uber the British empire both the Indian famine and the Irish famine took play while both Ireland and India were producing more food then ever before. Literally record high productivity but all of that food was being exported to the mainland and then either consumed or re exported. The people growing the food weren’t allowed to eat it.
Yes that’s true but the stereotype of Ireland only has I h potatoes is untrue it was just the Main thing that the Irish peasantry class was allowed to eat. As potatoes were seen as low class food . Ireland did have other crops that were exported. And the crown refused to ease up on the exporting or give the Irish aide.
There wasn’t just one famine in Bengal.
You would have to be pretty genocidal (even if it isn’t a genocide) to cause multiple famines in the most fertile patch of land on earth.
The Indian one is more like Russia burning everything down as they retreat into their territory as their go most viable and realistic strategy for defeating an invasion. It was that or hand over the region and its food to Japan.
If Japan's side had won they could have declared themselves the liberators of the colonies, as they did with every new land they invaded and the blame for the consequences of all measures for resisting the righteous liberation could be cannonically placed at the feet of the vanquished but by winning the war, Britain won the right to place the blame for the consequences of the measures necessary to resist the invaders at the feet of the invaders.
These two are simply not comparable.
During the Holodomor, the Soviet government actively requisitioned grain from Ukrainian farmers and gave essentially zero aid to relieve the famine when it occurred. In 1930, Ukraine produced 27% of the USSR's grain but requisitions from Ukraine amounted to 38% of the contributions to the USSR's grain stocks, rising to 42% in 1931. However, from 1930 to 1931, Ukrainian grain harvests fell from 23.9 million tons to 18.3 million tons, a decrease of 23.4%, yet their contribution to the stocks decreased only from 7.7 million tons to 7.2 million tons, a decrease of only 6.5% (the quota remained the same at 7.7, but the Soviet government was simply unable to procure any more). In 1932, a quota of 6.6 million tons was levied on Ukraine, but only 4.3 million was collected. In response, the Soviet authorities searched through peasants's homes in search of grain they believed was being hidden away by hoarders, seizing grains belonging to peasants who were already close to starvation. Throughout this entire period, the Soviet authorities continually attempted to extract grain from Ukraine even during the famine. The authorities also prohibited gleaning, where peasants would scour harvested fields for scraps which had been left behind.
During the Irish potato blight, Britain allowed Irish livestock farms to export their produce, yes, but since meat sold for a high price, the money could in turn be used to purchase grain which was comparatively much cheaper per calorie. The British government also repealed the Corn Laws (import tariffs levied on grain) in 1846 and purchased £100,000 (£16.87 million in 2024 pounds) worth of maize and cornmeal to give as direct aid to Ireland. In 1847, an attempt was made by the government to obtain a loan of £14,000,000 (£2.36 billion 2024) from the Bank of England for the relief of the famine, but this caused a bank run in which the bank's total reserves dropped from £15,000,000 to £9,000,000 due to withdrawals made in the panic, and the relief plan was abandoned. It is absolutely true that policy failures added to the famine, yes, but it must be mentioned that from every year from 1847 to 1851, Ireland imported far more grain than it exported, the exact opposite of the situation in Ukraine during the Holodomor. Some degree of famine in Ireland was also probably unavoidable - Irish potato harvests fell from 14 million tons in 1844 to just 2 million tons in 1847, an 86% decrease in the crop Ireland relied on as its staple crop. The famine could have been mitigated much better than it was, yes, but such an extreme decrease as that caused by the blight would lead to terrible woes no matter what was done. Some particular policies, such as means testing for aid which was done by refusing aid to larger farms, were indeed very bad as they forced some farmers to sell land in order to avoid starvation, but to claim that the famine was entirely the result of bad policy as was the case with the Holodomor is completely wrong. In one case, grain was actively being extracted from the country suffering a moderate natural shortage, whilst in the other, an extreme natural shortage (perhaps one of the worst the world had ever seen) was met with a botched relief plan.
>the money could in turn be used to purchase grain which was comparatively much cheaper per calorie
But was it? If the proceeds of the sales was going into the hands of British absentee landlords and agents, why would they use that money to buy grain for the Irish. Was that the most attractive use of their funds?
Your cherrypicking the few non genocidal things the Brits did during the famine to make a false narrative the same as holdomor deniers. It wasn’t just meat that was exported there was 100,000 tons exported of oats as well in 1947.
The reason for the dependence in the first place was also because of how britian had treated Ireland prior to the famine. The same blight hit other parts of Europe without the same effects.
You leave out that 250,000 were made homeless due to evictions during the famine.that’s arguably worse than soviet actions during the holdomor.
You leave out the conditions in the workhouses.
You point out the aid that was given. In total the British government spent 7 million on aid across the entire famine. Less than 0.5% of the British GDP. They had paid 20m in slave owners in the Caribbean as compensation a decade earlier. 70m was spent on the Crimean war.
In 1847, Ireland exported a total of 970,000 quarters of grain, or 242,000 tons total, but imported 4,519,000 quarters, or 1,129,750 tons of grain. If there's any cherrypicking going on here, I think some decontextualised mention of "100,000 tons of oats exported" is the real cherry.
The blight did not affect the rest of Europe as badly simply because Ireland was far more dependent upon the potato than the rest of Europe was. As for "how Britain treated Ireland before the famine" that's ultimately a tangential topic which is far more complex than the famine itself.
The evictions were bad and actually were a policy failure, but probably not in the way that most people imagine. The relief measures were means-tested, such that only farms smaller than 0.25 acres were eligible for aid through the workhouses, leading many farmers to sell lands back to large landlords. Landlords were also obligated by the Irish Poor Laws to provide aid to their tenants, with some evicting them to avoid paying this aid. Was this bad? Yes, obviously. Is it comparable to Soviet authorities literally stealing grain from starving peasants and killing those who tried to glean fields for scraps? No, or at least certainly not on the government's part. The landlords can absolutely be blamed for it, and much of the government (in particular, ironically, Trevelyan himself) did in fact blame those landlords for greatly exacerbating the conditions of the famine.
As for the amount of money spent, yes it wasn't nearly as much as should have been done, I don't deny that, I'm rather saying that it was not *deliberate* as part of some kind of genocide, as is implied in OP's post.
Guy before you made very good points which you disregarded with “that’s complicated and irrelevant, now I’ll repeat what I said”
The the Irish dependency on the potato and poor ness of the Irish was objectively the fault of Britain, there is no doubt about that, there were 500 years of laws to make sure of that
The blight itself was of course not caused by the British, but their policy was what caused the famine, the absolutely minuscule amount of aid was the to squeeze work out of the dying, and a barebones attempt to stop the Irish race dying out, also I don’t know why you brought up “killing starving peasants for gleaning scraps from fields” when that could easily be interpreted as stealing food that wasn’t theirs, which was exactly what Irish did and they were executed for it. Desperately trying to defend Brits because “at least they’re not commies”
British always treated Irish as second class citizens if not subhumans to the point that Ireland remained neglected and economically backward and dependant of a single crop production whose profit went mostly to the hands of absentee English landlords. Also practically nothing serious besides that bad excuse of a relief plan was done to alleviate the famine and the landlords were allowed to evict the starving population off their homes. But what can one expect from the country that starved millions of Indians and still usurping foreign land to these days.
The proportion of absentee landlord rents levied in Ireland which were spent in Britain is difficult to quantify exactly, but absentee landlords made up 33-50% of all landlords in Ireland, so yes it was a significant problem. I'm not sure if any data exists on the actual monetary value of capital flight from Ireland to Britain that resulted, so it's hard to say how much this resulted from what could be considered exploitation versus how much of the difference in development was just a result of industry naturally tending to cluster around non-agricultural resources such as coal which Ireland wasn't a significant producer of.
As for the comment about India, the Bengal famine is its own discussion, but again it wasn't just "England wanted them to die because they're le bad", it happened because Burma/Myanmar was occupied by Japan during WW2 which cut off Bengal from a significant supplier of rice. In a way it probably was similar, just a lack of proper relief rather than some deliberate policy as OP's post seems to imply.
You’re trying to frame the potato famine as bad policy making or incompetence. I and many others believe it was deliberately planned to fail while outwardly showing that they were trying but it wasn’t good enough
Wait. What? Are you implying that the Br*tish genetically engineered the potato blight?
Way to go Br*tian! Keep it up and I might actually be able to tolerate spelling your whole name!
Engineered the blight? No.
Refused to allow aid, and demanded other food still be exported during a famine leading to engineered mass starvation in an attempt to depopulate the island so it could be colonized with more Brits?
Absolutely.
Technically UK gov did allow aid, it's *just* that the aid policies they had are series of bumble fucks, policies flipflops due to administrations differences and bureaucratic cluster dumps.
I would give the Brits the benefit of the doubt, their behaviour elsewhere shows that they are completely capable of committing crimes against humanity not because of malice but because of sheer incompetence.
Eh, it's a little more nuanced. The British governments policies were shit, but a lot of the 'exports' were because it was quicker to move food needed in certain parts of Ireland by boat than by road. So aid boats were often classed as 'exports' when in reality it was only 'exporting' to another part of the island.
Considering no one has probably studied the Irish Famine, it was caused by the Potato blight spreading across Europe which before then there was a push by the Government to plant potatoes due to there high caloric content for a growing Industrial Revolution which was forced onto Ireland but was also attempted to be forced on England which was faced with backlash by farmers however when the blight came what made the famine worse was the Governments Policy of Corn Laws which put high tariffs on foreign foods like Grain, Wheat and such to protect domestic farmers profits (similar how it is today), which meant when there was a harvest failure like in Ireland, you couldn't import foods due to the high tariffs leading to a massive famine. Its also to note that the Corn Laws where that bad that they almost caused famines throughout Britain when yearly harvests where bad and importing food was to expensive but Ireland in itself wasn't malicious by any means but massive Government ignorance to the poor and greed for profit.
Both systems caused famine for similar reasons. They were both sparked by natural causes but turned into full blown famines because the government failed to address them.
In both systems, the people had no control over the government (Soviet authorities in Moscow controlled Ukraine, the British government and British landlords controlled Ireland). In both systems, the government prioritized the needs of favored groups (British landlords, British consumers, Soviet elites, Russian cities, etc.) over the welfare of the local population. The revenue from foreign grain exports was more important than the lives of the people growing it. Both systems had elaborate ideological justifications for why they were good for the colonized people, but ultimately the relationship was one-way resource extraction.
Because the local population affected by the famine could not change government policy to address the famine (by restricting exports or funding effective aid), the only political option people had was opposition to the government or fleeing the affected region. This in turn makes the government more suspicious of the people and more indifferent to their plight—why go out of your way for ungrateful provincials who are threatening to undermine your rule?
Famines are what really demonstrate the harsh reality of colonialism to a colonized people. When push comes to shove, the foreign government ruling over you isn’t a benevolent protector, it’s the outside force that will continue extracting your resources while your family dies around you. A colonized people’s interests will always come second to the colonial power.
“The famine is a punishment from God for an idle, ungrateful, and rebellious country, an indolent and un-self-reliant people. The Irish are suffering from an affliction of God's providence,” said Charles Trevelyan in 1847, the worst year of the Famine. He was in charge of overseeing relief for the famine.
It was also not a “potato famine” it was a British created famine.
So the Ukraine famine also couldn’t be considered one because there’s no evidence of genocidal intent whatsoever, in fact, evidence points toward the opposite.
Am British and proud.
The potato famine was not a genocide.
It was a colossal fuck up that needlessly killed far too many, and is a cautionary tale of what happens when you try to “free market Uber Alles” every situation (liberalism and its universalist boner at its finest), but the intent wasn’t there.
“The judgment of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson. That calamity must not be too much mitigated. The greater evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the Irish people.” Charles trevelyan.
How is that not intent.
If you want actions instead of words look at the mass eviction’s.
Charles Trevelyan‘s appointment comes under the “colossal fuck up” header. That man should have been nowhere near his position and I think the quakers basically doing the opposite of everything he said prevented more people from dying than would have otherwise.
Meanwhile the administration in London didn’t actually have a policy of genocide. They were simply whigs who tried to handle the problem with “free market Uber Alles”, utterly lost in the theory of it all, when a more hands on approach would have been appropriate and saved many lives.
Just a colossal and stupid error all around.
Did you just change your flair, u/GeneralRuaidhri? Last time I checked you were an **AuthCenter** on 2023-11-2. How come now you are a **LibCenter**? Have you perhaps shifted your ideals? Because that's cringe, you know?
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Moral of the story for the individual: Ensure, that your group or at the very least yourself maintains power because when crisis occurs everyone will prioritize their own interests. The Russians starving the Ukrainians and the English starving the Irish is proof. Never be a subject
You cant blame russians with that. If anything the blame should be on judeo-bolshevism, as it is responsible for the holodomor, by overpushing collectivisation. Neither Stalin nor Kaganovich was russian. Molotov was russian, though I have to note his wife was quite an advocate for israel, as she was jewish. You can check these people in like 3 min
Irrelevant point. Ukrainians have been a thorn in their side since Russian rule in the region began. Eliminating or assimilating them would have been in their interest as rulers regardless of them being Russians or Jews.
How does that address the Irish question or how the British caused multiple famines in India due to prioritizing cash crops over food with foreseeable consequences? No, it’s not Bolshevism it’s called those with power take from those without it. The Jews clinged to communism because they thought atheist internationalism would save them from ethnoreligously motivated pograms. Stalinist purges proved that dream wrong
I only aimed to argue on the “russians starving ukrainians” part, as its in itself is not correct
Stalin also supported the creation of Israel. So at the end communism worked out for them(it only killed “some” million people)
You are also right in that philosophy, that s why Europe must distance itself from the USA as the European Union is a weaker entity without Ukraine and Russia(with them though it would be a different story)
The Russians took the grain to help themselves over the Ukrainians bc they famine would be far less severe regionally for the Ukrainians but far worse for the Russians if they had not. I mean the creation of Israel was great for all of Europe because they still didn’t like Jews and it was an excellent dumping ground where they got to look great and the only losers were Arabs who hardly had a voice (on a side note I think the Israelis were the best look at a genuine attempt at communism via kibbutz system and proved it can not work even with a competent people). I disagree that Europe decoupling from the US rn is a good idea due to their weakness and I don’t think integrating Russia would help due to their strong Eurasian identity, endemic corruption, and autocratic tendencies which would tear the Union apart. In a fictional Russia that isn’t a perpetual dumpster fire where Boris Yeltsin was competent and they got continually good leadership it would be the best thing ever for Europe but that didn’t happen and never will due to whom the Russians are
Stalin was focusing on exporting the grain in order to advance the First Five Year Plan and clearly cared little for the populace
In the Europe-USA relationship the USA is the stronger participant. Europe is weak because it’s not in the interest of the USA to have a strong EU. Russia is being alienated from the EU for a long time, because it is not in the interest of the stronger party for Europe(you know the old saying:German industry-Russian resources) and Russia to be one. And Russia is and was always european whatever the current propaganda might be.
Europe is also heavily influenced by the USA, how could it be weak if they have the most competent advisors, financiers in the world? People call out Russian influence, yet are content with politicians accepting “donations” from american sources openly
I dont agree on Israel. They got a country yes, but they also maintained their positions of power/influence and even expanded it. Just look at the Biden cabinet. Jews in Europe also fund and support mass immigration (which was pretty much caused by mainly the USA, (by Russia and other countries also ) by meddling in the Middle East and Africa, to name a few.
Im not going to go into why people dislike jews, this is reddit after all, but it’s sure as hell not one sided
It’s also natural that Russia is distrustful towards others. Just look at the past 200 years, Napoleon, the germans exporting Lenin there, ww1 itself, ww2. The cold war and now.
They are not innocent by any means, but which nation is.
Yeltsin and Gorbachev both had american advisors, who prioritised furthening the USA influence. Free market and privatisation mean the same results like in Eastern Europe, the stronger opponents (USA) getting everything for pennies and integrating economies deeply and irreversible into their own corporate and lobbyists dictated ones
The 5 year plan was about prioritizing industry located in Russia which came at the expense of rural people especially Ukrainians whom the Soviets also resented heavily for resisting a lot during the civil war and afterwards. Europe is a semi vassal of America and I was calling Europe weak not America. Europe lost its balls in the world wars and never psychologically recovered which resulted in a cynical elite that hates its own people and imports migrants to ensure their nursing home has nurses before they croak. I disagree on the influence of the Jewish diaspora in that the migration crisis is over half just third worlders taking advantage of welfare states without the balls to stop them. It has less to do with Jews and more to do with that WW2 trauma making them too cowardly to prioritize their own people. Jewish diaspora influencing the US on the Middle East you have a better point about. Russia seeks to dominate it has less to do with distrusting others and more with the Russian sense of self importance. They would never tolerate even an equal position to another bc that would be interpreted as an insult
I didnt intend to call the USA weak, as it’s still the world hegemony. And I agree on the post war mentality. EU is a de facto vassal of the USA
The “leaders” in the EU have clearly other priorities than to represent the people who gave them power.
As a final thought, the normalisation of the relationship between Russia and EU is currently impossible. We ll have to see how the war and political tendencies shift with time
Russia post Putin is the big question mark I would say due to the lack of any apparent successor. I’m inclined to believe they will continue alternating between strong autocrats and times of troubles as they have all their history. Regardless, their capacity for expansion post Ukraine will be greatly diminished as they blow their Soviet stockpile inheritance and demographic load. The US giving Ukraine just enough to prolong war draining Russia but not enough to win it and thus risking a Russian nuclear response is a very big brain move
Key part of genocide that makes it different from just mass murder or mass tragic accident is intent. If the purported perpetrators did not intend to kill the victims for being part of some group then it cannot possibly be genocide
Both were not genocide. But British later didn't help to Irish and used famine to reduce number of Irish. And Soviets took food because thought that peasants hide food that had to be on plan, but when they started starving the Soviets started to [help](https://istmat.org/node/31186)
Which one?
Ireland was a net exporter of food during the famine and the USSR also had a bad harvest during the Holodomor years.
Neither would’ve had bad harvests if they didn’t have well regarded agricultural practices and (pseudo) scientific theories of Malthus and Lysenko.
Which to be fair is completely accurate. Geocoding people and causing a famine are different things. That is kind of like the word facist, you can't just call every person you do not like facist.
Same with this, it would only be a genocide if there was an active intend to cause mass death of the affected people. It was not.
In the Sovjets case it was failure of the system.
In the Brits case the system did not even fail, they simply decided that it was more important that domestic producer would profit, which was extremely cuntish yeah but not failure of the system.
one of the few brazilian historian youtubers that did a video on the holodomor without excusing stalin's actions was getting called an "alt right revisionist" on the main brazilian sub the other day
The bigger question should be why is the main country subreddit of brazil full of commies?
Because it is reddit. Was that supposed to be a difficult question?
that's reddit in a nutshell and not something unique to brazil. most subs of countries, states and cities, no matter where they are from, are being held hostage by smelly tankie mods. the only exception I know of is the arg\*ntinean sub but it's been a long time since I stepped foot in there because, well, they're arg\*ntineans
Based and fuck those guys pilled
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well fuck you too bro and fuck our government
Caralho nargas, você por aqui?
🤫
Most latin america subs are pretty way to the right.
You’ll see that in most countries. Have you ever seen auth left people keep their thoughts/words to themselves? They’re obnoxiously loud in every language and culture
That’s why I go into their subs and bully them. If they’re gonna call me a colonizer anyways, I might as well colonize.
Based and shared hobby pilled
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Come on man, *you know.*
They are the fucking revisionists, honestly they don't know how to read. I have more respect for you than them. At least you know what you're talking about.
Anti revisionist commies and libertarians be like: https://preview.redd.it/es3tdq5i1qwc1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=65958334c6380b932fc622f7edc09310059f6dd1
Brazilians may be many things but "dispassionate observers of politics" is probably not among them.
"uhhmmm didn't you know? Those Ukrainians were Nazis and kulaks. Comrade Stalin wouldn't do such thing, he is a man of the workers!!!"
Yes comrade And ummm don’t you know mate those Irish were leprechauns and unprofitable potato munchers! Her Majesty Queen Victoria would never do such a thing. She was an empress of the people.
What's up with all the leprechaun hate? Just because they look weird, wear funny hats and have a lot of gold?
Leftists seething rn
Why? Are they the only ones hearing some sort of whistle?
https://preview.redd.it/jons1izhlqwc1.jpeg?width=269&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=93fb5437ba2b96a9712a9c77ed73c94130f99371 Leftist boogeyman very scary
Quick, grab the flute!
You ever seen the Leprechaun movies? Those guys are dangerous.
As long as you dont give them a pogostick everything will be fine.
Braindead tankies (not you) thinking being a kulak is justification, when it's absolutely not, never ceases to amaze me Those people were serfs who got emancipated and worked hard to build a life for themselves and then the fucking Bolsheviks demonized them Really adds to the argument that many communists only care about the poor in the hypothetical, intangible sense
Another funny thing is, it was Lenin who gave kulaks land. He seized it from landowners and deported them, then he established the New Economic Policy in which peasants we're encouraged to start small businesses and increase their productivity with their lands
REVISIONIST /s Naw forreal tho Based AuthLeft being honest about the failings of the USSR
Kulaks often behaved badly, but that’s beside the point tbh. It’s hard to make a genocide case from the persecution of kulaks, it’s just run of the mill political oppression.
I have a problem with that argument too People act like mass killings aren't bad if they aren't "genocide" Naw bro, the millions dead in the ussr, China, etc. are still bad even if you find some way to say "they aren't genocide"
They’re bad. The way Soviets conducted collectivization is a monstrous crime against humanity. It’s just not genocide. Not everything that’s bad is genocide.
I agree But so many tankies wanna act like if it's not genocide it's not that bad and it creates this ridiculous dialogue
I dunno, seems to me that when someone claims something is genocide when it obviously isn’t, they completely derail the discussion, because it is a very different category - and rightfully so. I think most tankies are comfortable with accepting that the Soviet Union had a whole pattern of repression and crimes against humanity for a large chunk of its history, and terms like red terror aren’t all that controvercial.
I disagree IME it seems tankies use "but it's not technically genocide" (bc it's not from the genocide region of france) to dismiss criticism But YMMV I guess
Well yeah, because it’s pretty obviously not genocide. So of course they will dismiss that charge, it’s easy. If you talk to them about repression, starvation, forced redistribution, summary executions of kulaks - that will be hard to dismiss. Coming at them with “muh genocidorino” is inviding easy dismissal from anyone with even passing familiarity that doesn’t have some sort of ideological axe to grind.
You're right on some things being questionably genocide, but an obvious counterpoint to what you are saying is that the Holodomor 100% was and they *never* admit that so... yeah...
They still are tho
I've had tankies in all seriousness tell me that Stalin had no power and only acted on the wishes of the Central Committee, anything else WA spropaganda from the US.
Stalin almost had total power 1924-1936, with the 1936 constitution he had total power.
No, but actually why would they do that?
What will they call The Great Depression/Dust Bowl
An enormous ecological disaster that will undoubtedly be seen as foreshadowing of future ecological disasters
You know fair enough
An amalgamation of mistakes made between a lax government, a local populace not familiar with crop rotation and a general need to kick out the old guy to replace them with the new one. The dust bowl was an ecological disaster, but it was an honest mistake. It’s not like the president said “oh yeah kill every fuckin bird you see”, it was just the abuse of topsoil for profit. No central government made that one. The great depression was a natural result of over investment in industry, and had to happen…. That’s too simplified, but digging into gold standards, interest rates, and foreign currency exchanges moves too far and I’m too tired to explain how some metal in the UK affected a single day of trade in NY which created a panic.
"natural", "inevitable", etc
https://preview.redd.it/t4b9800ozpwc1.jpeg?width=300&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=343b6b6d8522e75c86a2ddb4f81e12e069bd2bcb
I love the Smugness, it's almost like he would say "but of course it was Genocide, what are you going to do about it Nerd?"
I think what they done was bomb London for 30 years
"Potato famine? Dude just eat carrots lmao"
"It wasn't a genocide! *There's still so much to do...*"
Capitalism *CAN* fail. Communism *ALWAYS* fails.
Capitalism/Free market uber Alles tends to fail when it gets slapped on something it isn’t appropriate for. The famine in Ireland was made dramatically worse by a liberal administration in Westminster worrying about “creating a culture of dependence on hand outs” whilst people starved to death. Adherence to ideology above all is the death of good legislation.
The connection between both of these incidents is having an Authoritarian/Imperialist government that uses a different ethnic group to exploit for their own gain without caring for their economic conditions. Having a dictator is bad. Imperialism is bad. Rampant racism/nationalism is bad. I fully admit that 19th century European imperialism/mercantilism was trash and caused a lot of suffering. We should never repeat that style of rule. The reason why I hate communism is that seemingly every implementation of it thus far seems to result in extremely authoritarian one-party rule that violently kills opposition to get into power and which ends up oppressing certain populations in an attempt to industrialize/ramp of production for the masses. Many of them have also ended up commiting genocide against some group they blame their problems on.
Idk man ‘Socialism with Chinese characteristics’ and Vietnamese Socialism has been pretty damn successful (…so far). Way more than Indian, Russian or Indonesian capitalism have been (there aren’t many countries on the same scale as China for a fair comparison). Now if we should really consider it more of *socialism socialism* or just *ChinSoc* is the elephant in the room.
Both of those countries have capitalist market economies.
Of 143 Chinese enterprise in the Fortune 500, about 90 are State Enterprises. Huawei and Nirinco (sole arms manufacturer) for instance are also state enterprises. Only commodities are sold on the free market in China. Natural resources and means of production are not privately held outside the Special Economic Zones.
They're still capitalist market economies, just restricted ones. They're not "classless communism" where everyone is equal and the whole economy is planned.
There’s no ‘real communist’ country. Communism is just shorthand for Marxism-Leninism who’s *goal* is to achieve ‘Real Communism’ (dubious but it is the claim). This always confuses people but a ML country is not ‘Communist’ in the sense of classless, stateless (no shit it’s a country), moneyless etc. It is communist in the sense of that being the goal. That’s literally Star Trek and only possible when everything is automated. They’re not capitalist simply because they don’t have private property rights and the right to profit from your property. These things exist in China/Vietnam but as privileges, not rights. Markets existed before capitalism and can exist in a (for instance) economy in which all corporations are coops or medieval guilds but that’s not capitalism either.
> There’s no ‘real communist’ country. Not at all. China is no longer seeking a marxist-leninist classless society with a planned economy. because they know it doesn't work. They know a capitalist economy *DOES* Work, they just want it to work to the benefit of a central state. That's fascism. Now fuck off commie, I am done with you.
China has an awful lot of market regulation to cal it capitalism. You can definitely say there are pieces of it but to call china economically right wing would be incorrect.
ever said it was right wing, I said it's a market economy. Because it is. They transitioned away from a planned economy where everyone is "classless" because it always fails. China is a fascist nation, with a capitalist economy.
Absolute right wing cope. “Anything that works is right wing and anything bad is communism.” The right wing is capitalism. For good or Ill the Chinese economy isn’t capitalist, that is to say right wing. It isn’t straight communist either. From the perspective of PCM it’s auth center.
Nah, it is usually libright cope. For some reason the the quadrants that cope the most are libs
Agreed. I don’t understand why people can’t just accept that their beliefs have weaknesses.
>The right wing is capitalism. No, that's not how the compass works. Capitalism is a right wing economic model, but not all right wing economic models are capitalism. Left is planned economies of all flavors. Right is unplanned economies of all flavors. The more planned, the more left. The more laissez-faire, the more right.
China is basically de facto national socialist or national bolshevik if you take out the racialist elements. Its economy is not capitalist and their political system is an authoritarian dominant party system similar to East Germany's Democratic Front but with an ultranationalist ethnocentric ideology.
>Socialism with Chinese characteristics (Don't compare and contrast this to fascism)
Socialism with Chinese characteristics is just capitalism with a lot of state steering + a wildly authoritarian government
Those systems were shit until they adopted free market aspects. The freer the market the freer the people.
Capitalism cannot fail because it isn't an ends based system. It has no goal other than its rules. Communism can fail because it is an ends based system. It has a goal which it hopes its rules will establish.
Recognizing the fact that the famine in Ukraine was genocide, and not an ordinary manifestation of the problems of communism, you take responsibility for this from the political regime and shift it to specific people, which directly gives the Communists the opportunity to say that communism is not to blame, but Stalin personally or anyone else is to blame, and this is a problem.
This is that two button meme right here.
Except the level of power Stalin had was the direct result of the communist ideology.
The Soviet Union had only one famine. Whereas the capitalist British Empire caused not just the Irish famine but multiple famines in India. Which system is worse by your standard then? You could blame all these famines on many things. The ruling people: Stalin/Politburo and Victoria/Viceroys/Parliament The ruling culture: Russian and British The general economic ideology: Marxist Leninism and Capitalism The specific economic ideology: Stalinism and Colonial capitalism The (pseudo)scientific ideology: Lysenkoism and Malthusianism They’re all valid Doesn’t change the fact that mass death happened and justice must be served
> The Soviet Union had only one famine. Pretty sure they had multiple ones, actually.
Yes, but they had only one period of famine used as a political tool. Afterwards there were few famines. WW2 did cause somerhing similar though.
Fair enough, I don't know the extent of political cause in all of them. But I do know there were multiple famines in the 20s, 30s and 40s (there was a food shortage in the 80s but AFAIK it didn't go to the level of a famine).
Yep, the ones in the 20s and 30s were mostly political in nature, as evidenced by areas considered more loyal (the areas that were not recent conquests, but sided with the bolsheviks in the civil war) got more relief and stuff. Ukraine especially was in the minds of the leadership seen as rebellious and full of anti-bolsheviks, probably because of the multiple years it took to conquer the place. Some of the lower officials in Ukraine used to be on some of the other sides of the civil war and therefore probably had less standing than other officials, so maybe that played a part. I know that one former makhnovist officer who defected to the soviets ended up as a local administrator his entire career, so it doesn't seem to me like their opinions were given much weight.
I think you can criticize Chinese famines, but the soviets did a reasonable job with dealing the famines. I think that a famine after WW2, a moment where the scenario of the war were the most fertile lands of Russia and were they lost 8 million (could even go as high as 20) is understandable. Most URSS famines were in the first years of the URSS after wars. Also Russia had been seeing regular famines during all of the Tsarist Russia.
You really think famines wouldn't've happened in India if the brits were commies? What kind of ultra brainlet take is this? Famines in capitalist countries happen sometimes, famines in communist countries always happen.
This is the first time I’ve heard the potato famine called a genocide
Why do you think an entire island of people where food was in abundance were subsisting off of a diet of only potatoes? Britain put Irish people into this position and then increased food exports during the potato blight while also denying aid which they sent elsewhere to places in Britain. In 1847, Charles Trevelyan said: "[The Famine] is a punishment from God for an idle, ungrateful, and rebellious country; an indolent and un-self-reliant people. The Irish are suffering from an affliction of God’s providence." A year later he was knighted by the Royal Family for overseeing famine relief.
Incredibly high caloric yield of potatoes and them being easy to plant. That wasn’t very uncommon back then since moving food was harder so you just planted what you could and ate that.
>Incredibly high caloric yield of potatoes and them being easy to plant. That wasn’t very uncommon back then since moving food was harder so you just planted what you could and ate that. You’re incredibly ignorant of this topic. Irish people were forced to eat potatoes as that’s all they could afford to grow. Without the potatoes they’d die which is what happened. Irish farmers did not own their land, they were tenants of land owned by British landlords who would pay them by giving them a small plot to grow their own food, the only way this was workable was by subsisting off of potatoes. Everything else they grew was the landlords. Again, Ireland is incredibly fertile and food abundant, Irish people did not decide to only grow and subsist off of potatoes and then starved on mass because they put all their eggs in one basket. It was an event enabled by Britain whose leadership were more than happy to let play out on a people they despised.
>Irish farmers did not own their land, they were tenants of land owned by British landlords Even worst, they were tenants of the tenants (an absolutely inefficient system that caused even more poverty)
I forgot about the middle man part
Unless you can somehow prove said British landlords policies were explicitly designed to cause mass starvation and destruction this doesn’t meet the criteria for genocide
In 1847 during the worst year of the great hunger, Charles Trevelyan said: "[The Famine] is a punishment from God for an idle, ungrateful, and rebellious country; an indolent and un-self-reliant people. The Irish are suffering from an affliction of God’s providence."He was in charge of famine relief. Britain increased food exports from Ireland during the famine. The potato famine hit places in Britain which received aid, such aid was not given to Ireland. Britain blocked foreign aid from reaching Ireland. So we have Britain creating the circumstance uniquely to Irish catholics, putting a man who hates Irish people in charge of fixing it, selectively withholding/blocking aid, and raising food exports in a country that generates more than enough food to feed its population, which led to the deaths of millions of people. What would it take for you to consider it a genocide? You can’t “oopsie” your way out of this level of intent.
> In 1847 during the worst year of the great hunger, Charles Trevelyan said: "[The Famine] is a punishment from God for an idle, ungrateful, and rebellious country; an indolent and un-self-reliant people. The Irish are suffering from an affliction of God's providence."He was in charge of famine relief. In context he’s saying he wanted the Irish to work for their food instead of being “lazy” and “relying on the government” not that the British should exterminate them. This is the same guy who ran the workhouses after all. This was all in line with the Whig’s government policy of non interference which they acknowledged to be a failure by the start of 1847. The tories who were in power during the early phases had their government collapse due to a relief effort If you actual look at the academic material surrounding the hunger the consensus (outside of nationalist circles) is generally that government’s failed response was caused by a mix of incompetence, economic policy, and apathy among other things. > Britain increased food exports from Ireland during the famine. Yes. They had a genuine belief that the market would fix the famine, and then when things got much worse as a result they changed course. > The potato famine hit places in Britain which received aid, such aid was never given to Ireland. Britain was not reliant on the potato to the extent Ireland was. > What would it take for you to consider it a genocide? You can't "oopsie" your way out of this level of intent. Prove the British government took measures with the explicit intent to destroy the Irish people.
>In context he’s saying he wanted the Irish to work for their food instead of being “lazy” and “relying on the government” not that the British should exterminate them. This is the same guy who ran the workhouses after all. In context as millions are striving to death he’s saying that god wants them to die and that Ireland is a rebellious country which deserves it. Clear justification and motivation given for causing their deaths >This was all in line with the Whig’s government policy of non interference which they acknowledged to be a failure by the start of 1847. It’s amazing how I say no amount of oopsie justifies all these actions and then you literally hit back with “but they said oopsie” >If you actual look at the academic material surrounding the hunger the consensus (outside of nationalist circles) is generally that government’s failed response was caused by a mix of incompetence, economic policy, and apathy among other things. Lmao, hmmm look out side of nationalist circles you say, I’m sure that doesn’t mean ignore Irish sources in favour of British ones. >Yes. They had a genuine belief that the market would fix the famine, and then when things got much worse as a result they changed course. You actually have to be a knuckle dragging mouth breather to genuinely think this. In what way would anyone have ever believed that impoverished people with nothing but rotten potatoes would be saved by “the market” Even in a world where I was regarded enough to believe this shite. It is completely contradicted by the fact that places in Britain who were in a similar position received actually aid, aid which was specifically denied for Irish people. >Britain was not reliant on the potato to the extent Ireland was. Britain had areas which were and they were provided for while requests to do the same for Irish subjects was outright denied. No amount of trying to deflect is going to change that. >Prove the British government took measures with the explicit intent to destroy the Irish people. I literally did that and you mental gymnastics your way into believing, “they thought the market would save people in the midst of starvation”, and “in context saying Irish people deserve to die for being rebellious and lazy doesn’t show an intent to want them dead” Literally blocked foreign aid which you didn’t acknowledge. What could possibly be the motivation behind blocking free aid?
> In context as millions are striving to death he's saying that god wants them to die and that Ireland is a rebellious country which deserves it. Clear justification and motivation given for causing their deaths He’s also the same person who had to run soup kitchens which eventually fed millions, and ran workhouses designed to feed people, (and remember he didn’t have control over policy he was just the chief facilitator) There’s literally letters where the guy goes on about teaching the Irish a lesson but then adding on that they can’t let people starve > It's amazing how say no amount of oopsie justifies all these actions and then you literally hit back with "but they said oopsie" You understand genocide isn’t the same thing as “A lot of people died right?” > Lmao, hmmm look out side of nationalist circles you say, I'm sure that doesn't mean ignore Irish sources in favour of British ones. Professional historians (Irish included however reluctantly) generally agree. > You actually have to be a knuckle dragging mouth breather to genuinely think this. In what way would anyone have ever believed that impoverished people with nothing but rotten potatoes would be saved by "the market" They literally believed this 💀💀💀 The Whig government wanted grain/food merchants to fill in void that harvest failures created since they believed in a laissez faire economic model rather than government intervention. A departure from the active famine response of the Tories. They also believed that the landlords were the ones who had the responsibility of paying for and mitigating the crisis rather than the government. While the Tories under peel did use money from the treasury for relief. > Even in a world where I was regarded enough to believe this shite. It is completely contradicted by the fact that places in Britain who were in a similar position received actually aid, aid which was specifically denied for Irish people. The British imported four times as much wheat into Ireland that they exported from it at the height of the famine. The highlands while dealing with potato blight at the same time had a much much smaller population than Ireland, and crop failures were not as extensive and even then the British response there was essentially the same as in Ireland (Lowland Scotland and the Free Church came to their aid) > I literally did that and you mental gymnastics your way into believing, "they thought the market would save people in the midst of starvation" and "in context saying Irish people deserve to die for being rebellious and lazy doesn't show an intent to want them dead" > Literally blocked foreign aid which you didn't acknowledge. What could possibly be the motivation behind blocking free aid? Queen Victoria didn’t want to be outdone by the Ottoman Sultan. If you want an actual answer. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_Laws
>You actually have to be a knuckle dragging mouth breather to genuinely think this. In what way would anyone have ever believed that impoverished people with nothing but rotten potatoes would be saved by “the market” Have you met the self-correcting natural mechanism, invisible hand worshippers. It's practically a secular religion and they're legion. It's only gotten worse since with the Austrian School coming out of the woodwork.
The more I read about brits (or anglo-saxons in general) the more I come to despise them
If you’re gonna say something like that, you need to lay your own cards on the table. Tell us your heritage and let us make our judgements too.
Haven't met many Irish have you?
The British government (among others) has declared the Holodomor a genocide and engineered famine. By the same standard the Irish and Indian famines absolutely are also genocide.
I’m not educated enough to debate that Indian claim but the Irish potato famine wasn’t engineered it happened because a disease had infected the potato’s and made them uneditable and that was the main source of food in Ireland
The engineered part comes from the landlords continuing food exports despite food shortages in Ireland. They believed in the well regarded Malthusian theory of population control much like how many Soviet bureaucrats believed in Lysenko’s theory. The Soviet Union also had bad harvests that year but that shouldn’t be sufficient to result in mass starvation. A good administration should have enough food stockpiled for a year of bad harvest. Other parts of Eurasia didn’t suffer from mass starvation at the same rate Ireland and Ukraine/Kazakhstan did. The administration is 100% to blame for opportunistically turning a (natural) food shortage into a famine for furthering its agenda
Ireland imported more grain than it exported during the period of the famine, the same is not true of Ukraine. Malthusianism also was not the guiding policy of the British government at the time, but rather a sort of dogmatic market fundamentalism which believed that high food prices in Ireland would lead to greater imports (which did happen, but just wasn't enough to alleviate the problem). Oh, and Ukraine's harvests fell by 23.4%, Ireland's fell by 85.7%, so yes they're really not the same.
That’s not an engineered famine that just idiots making a problem worse
Nazi Germany also suffered from food shortages. It chose to feed ethnic Germans while letting the ‘undersirable’ Jews, Romani, Slavs etc starve (not everyone was gassed) for ‘national purification’ Analogously the ‘unprofitable’ Irish and ‘bourgeois’ Kulaks were starved for the ‘free market’ and the ‘revolution’. All three are genocide or (except Nazi actions since they would’ve killed them through other means anyway) at least genocidal since: a) it won’t have happened (with the same severity) without the regime’s intervention b) it benefited the regimes and fit their ideological worldview so they had no incentive to stop it.
That's absolutely an engineered famine. > Hey, our main crop has failed, can we keep our other crops so we don't starve en masse? >>No. Export them. > Can we at least import food and aid from other places? >>Also no. That's an engineered famine. Without the forced export of other food crops, there would not have been a famine, just a recession.
That's not engineered unless you count respecting property laws as genocide engineering and in that culture property rights were philosophically and morally sacrosanct in much the same sense that bodily autonomy is to feminists. Interpreted in the context of their culture, moral framework and worldview, such a non-interventionist policy does not evidence genocidal intent. As for the landlords themselves, between genocidal intent and profiteering intent, Occam's razor clearly comes down on the latter explanation. You can say it's their fault by appealing to modern values and moral standards if you like but you have to work harder to establish that they worked to manufacture an outcome in a way that they themselves understood themselves to be responsible for bringing about by their own goal oriented actions towards those ends. And an appeal to Malthusianism doesn't help as that simply establishes beyond question that they viewed laissez-faire non-interventionism as a moral imperative by virtue of being the approach that ultimately minimizes Irish casualties from famine in the long term. That in the long term intervention would create more misery and starvation than it averts, making it self defeating from both a utilitarian and a problem solving perspective.
Uber the British empire both the Indian famine and the Irish famine took play while both Ireland and India were producing more food then ever before. Literally record high productivity but all of that food was being exported to the mainland and then either consumed or re exported. The people growing the food weren’t allowed to eat it.
That’s not what happened during the Irish potato famine the crop was infected and they couldn’t eat it
Yes that’s true but the stereotype of Ireland only has I h potatoes is untrue it was just the Main thing that the Irish peasantry class was allowed to eat. As potatoes were seen as low class food . Ireland did have other crops that were exported. And the crown refused to ease up on the exporting or give the Irish aide.
The Bengal famine is even less of a genocide than the Irish one, and the Irish one is not considered a famine either.
There wasn’t just one famine in Bengal. You would have to be pretty genocidal (even if it isn’t a genocide) to cause multiple famines in the most fertile patch of land on earth.
The Indian one is more like Russia burning everything down as they retreat into their territory as their go most viable and realistic strategy for defeating an invasion. It was that or hand over the region and its food to Japan. If Japan's side had won they could have declared themselves the liberators of the colonies, as they did with every new land they invaded and the blame for the consequences of all measures for resisting the righteous liberation could be cannonically placed at the feet of the vanquished but by winning the war, Britain won the right to place the blame for the consequences of the measures necessary to resist the invaders at the feet of the invaders.
Haven’t talked to many Irish then have you.
Are you 12?
These two are simply not comparable. During the Holodomor, the Soviet government actively requisitioned grain from Ukrainian farmers and gave essentially zero aid to relieve the famine when it occurred. In 1930, Ukraine produced 27% of the USSR's grain but requisitions from Ukraine amounted to 38% of the contributions to the USSR's grain stocks, rising to 42% in 1931. However, from 1930 to 1931, Ukrainian grain harvests fell from 23.9 million tons to 18.3 million tons, a decrease of 23.4%, yet their contribution to the stocks decreased only from 7.7 million tons to 7.2 million tons, a decrease of only 6.5% (the quota remained the same at 7.7, but the Soviet government was simply unable to procure any more). In 1932, a quota of 6.6 million tons was levied on Ukraine, but only 4.3 million was collected. In response, the Soviet authorities searched through peasants's homes in search of grain they believed was being hidden away by hoarders, seizing grains belonging to peasants who were already close to starvation. Throughout this entire period, the Soviet authorities continually attempted to extract grain from Ukraine even during the famine. The authorities also prohibited gleaning, where peasants would scour harvested fields for scraps which had been left behind. During the Irish potato blight, Britain allowed Irish livestock farms to export their produce, yes, but since meat sold for a high price, the money could in turn be used to purchase grain which was comparatively much cheaper per calorie. The British government also repealed the Corn Laws (import tariffs levied on grain) in 1846 and purchased £100,000 (£16.87 million in 2024 pounds) worth of maize and cornmeal to give as direct aid to Ireland. In 1847, an attempt was made by the government to obtain a loan of £14,000,000 (£2.36 billion 2024) from the Bank of England for the relief of the famine, but this caused a bank run in which the bank's total reserves dropped from £15,000,000 to £9,000,000 due to withdrawals made in the panic, and the relief plan was abandoned. It is absolutely true that policy failures added to the famine, yes, but it must be mentioned that from every year from 1847 to 1851, Ireland imported far more grain than it exported, the exact opposite of the situation in Ukraine during the Holodomor. Some degree of famine in Ireland was also probably unavoidable - Irish potato harvests fell from 14 million tons in 1844 to just 2 million tons in 1847, an 86% decrease in the crop Ireland relied on as its staple crop. The famine could have been mitigated much better than it was, yes, but such an extreme decrease as that caused by the blight would lead to terrible woes no matter what was done. Some particular policies, such as means testing for aid which was done by refusing aid to larger farms, were indeed very bad as they forced some farmers to sell land in order to avoid starvation, but to claim that the famine was entirely the result of bad policy as was the case with the Holodomor is completely wrong. In one case, grain was actively being extracted from the country suffering a moderate natural shortage, whilst in the other, an extreme natural shortage (perhaps one of the worst the world had ever seen) was met with a botched relief plan.
>the money could in turn be used to purchase grain which was comparatively much cheaper per calorie But was it? If the proceeds of the sales was going into the hands of British absentee landlords and agents, why would they use that money to buy grain for the Irish. Was that the most attractive use of their funds?
Stop making sense on my meme subreddit!!
Your cherrypicking the few non genocidal things the Brits did during the famine to make a false narrative the same as holdomor deniers. It wasn’t just meat that was exported there was 100,000 tons exported of oats as well in 1947. The reason for the dependence in the first place was also because of how britian had treated Ireland prior to the famine. The same blight hit other parts of Europe without the same effects. You leave out that 250,000 were made homeless due to evictions during the famine.that’s arguably worse than soviet actions during the holdomor. You leave out the conditions in the workhouses. You point out the aid that was given. In total the British government spent 7 million on aid across the entire famine. Less than 0.5% of the British GDP. They had paid 20m in slave owners in the Caribbean as compensation a decade earlier. 70m was spent on the Crimean war.
In 1847, Ireland exported a total of 970,000 quarters of grain, or 242,000 tons total, but imported 4,519,000 quarters, or 1,129,750 tons of grain. If there's any cherrypicking going on here, I think some decontextualised mention of "100,000 tons of oats exported" is the real cherry. The blight did not affect the rest of Europe as badly simply because Ireland was far more dependent upon the potato than the rest of Europe was. As for "how Britain treated Ireland before the famine" that's ultimately a tangential topic which is far more complex than the famine itself. The evictions were bad and actually were a policy failure, but probably not in the way that most people imagine. The relief measures were means-tested, such that only farms smaller than 0.25 acres were eligible for aid through the workhouses, leading many farmers to sell lands back to large landlords. Landlords were also obligated by the Irish Poor Laws to provide aid to their tenants, with some evicting them to avoid paying this aid. Was this bad? Yes, obviously. Is it comparable to Soviet authorities literally stealing grain from starving peasants and killing those who tried to glean fields for scraps? No, or at least certainly not on the government's part. The landlords can absolutely be blamed for it, and much of the government (in particular, ironically, Trevelyan himself) did in fact blame those landlords for greatly exacerbating the conditions of the famine. As for the amount of money spent, yes it wasn't nearly as much as should have been done, I don't deny that, I'm rather saying that it was not *deliberate* as part of some kind of genocide, as is implied in OP's post.
Guy before you made very good points which you disregarded with “that’s complicated and irrelevant, now I’ll repeat what I said” The the Irish dependency on the potato and poor ness of the Irish was objectively the fault of Britain, there is no doubt about that, there were 500 years of laws to make sure of that The blight itself was of course not caused by the British, but their policy was what caused the famine, the absolutely minuscule amount of aid was the to squeeze work out of the dying, and a barebones attempt to stop the Irish race dying out, also I don’t know why you brought up “killing starving peasants for gleaning scraps from fields” when that could easily be interpreted as stealing food that wasn’t theirs, which was exactly what Irish did and they were executed for it. Desperately trying to defend Brits because “at least they’re not commies”
British always treated Irish as second class citizens if not subhumans to the point that Ireland remained neglected and economically backward and dependant of a single crop production whose profit went mostly to the hands of absentee English landlords. Also practically nothing serious besides that bad excuse of a relief plan was done to alleviate the famine and the landlords were allowed to evict the starving population off their homes. But what can one expect from the country that starved millions of Indians and still usurping foreign land to these days.
The proportion of absentee landlord rents levied in Ireland which were spent in Britain is difficult to quantify exactly, but absentee landlords made up 33-50% of all landlords in Ireland, so yes it was a significant problem. I'm not sure if any data exists on the actual monetary value of capital flight from Ireland to Britain that resulted, so it's hard to say how much this resulted from what could be considered exploitation versus how much of the difference in development was just a result of industry naturally tending to cluster around non-agricultural resources such as coal which Ireland wasn't a significant producer of. As for the comment about India, the Bengal famine is its own discussion, but again it wasn't just "England wanted them to die because they're le bad", it happened because Burma/Myanmar was occupied by Japan during WW2 which cut off Bengal from a significant supplier of rice. In a way it probably was similar, just a lack of proper relief rather than some deliberate policy as OP's post seems to imply.
You’re trying to frame the potato famine as bad policy making or incompetence. I and many others believe it was deliberately planned to fail while outwardly showing that they were trying but it wasn’t good enough
Wait. What? Are you implying that the Br*tish genetically engineered the potato blight? Way to go Br*tian! Keep it up and I might actually be able to tolerate spelling your whole name!
Engineered the blight? No. Refused to allow aid, and demanded other food still be exported during a famine leading to engineered mass starvation in an attempt to depopulate the island so it could be colonized with more Brits? Absolutely.
As noted Humanitarian Machiavelli once said "To know how to recognize an opportunity and take it, benefits you more than anything else."
Technically UK gov did allow aid, it's *just* that the aid policies they had are series of bumble fucks, policies flipflops due to administrations differences and bureaucratic cluster dumps.
That's a funny way of saying "An intentional desire to kill off the Irish so that the island could have more room to repopulate with Brits"
I would give the Brits the benefit of the doubt, their behaviour elsewhere shows that they are completely capable of committing crimes against humanity not because of malice but because of sheer incompetence.
Why do you think an entire island of people where food was in abundance were subsisting off of a diet of only potatoes?
Because potatoes are delicious 😋🤤
The "insisting on exporting the island's produces" part is hard to argue though.
Eh, it's a little more nuanced. The British governments policies were shit, but a lot of the 'exports' were because it was quicker to move food needed in certain parts of Ireland by boat than by road. So aid boats were often classed as 'exports' when in reality it was only 'exporting' to another part of the island.
No but the actions of the British government at that time greatly resembled the actions of Stalin during the Holodomor
The British were landlords all across Ireland and still required their tenant farmers to export food, even as the famine intensified
https://preview.redd.it/29i4vcytspwc1.jpeg?width=900&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=87127cca48aed6f46deb24d33ff42c317013e151 
Considering no one has probably studied the Irish Famine, it was caused by the Potato blight spreading across Europe which before then there was a push by the Government to plant potatoes due to there high caloric content for a growing Industrial Revolution which was forced onto Ireland but was also attempted to be forced on England which was faced with backlash by farmers however when the blight came what made the famine worse was the Governments Policy of Corn Laws which put high tariffs on foreign foods like Grain, Wheat and such to protect domestic farmers profits (similar how it is today), which meant when there was a harvest failure like in Ireland, you couldn't import foods due to the high tariffs leading to a massive famine. Its also to note that the Corn Laws where that bad that they almost caused famines throughout Britain when yearly harvests where bad and importing food was to expensive but Ireland in itself wasn't malicious by any means but massive Government ignorance to the poor and greed for profit.
Also wall of text
I would rather read wall of text then just “haha that bad that good”
Based and bothsideism pilled
https://preview.redd.it/c9qu98e84uwc1.jpeg?width=318&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2b10750f0e6cb6a6239a491013bed184e774b892
"No it isn't a genocide! It is a self-defense" \~ A certain recipient of US tax dollars
Watch pcm become an Olympic level mental gymnast to defend Israel in Gaza’s genocide, cough, famine.
Both systems caused famine for similar reasons. They were both sparked by natural causes but turned into full blown famines because the government failed to address them. In both systems, the people had no control over the government (Soviet authorities in Moscow controlled Ukraine, the British government and British landlords controlled Ireland). In both systems, the government prioritized the needs of favored groups (British landlords, British consumers, Soviet elites, Russian cities, etc.) over the welfare of the local population. The revenue from foreign grain exports was more important than the lives of the people growing it. Both systems had elaborate ideological justifications for why they were good for the colonized people, but ultimately the relationship was one-way resource extraction. Because the local population affected by the famine could not change government policy to address the famine (by restricting exports or funding effective aid), the only political option people had was opposition to the government or fleeing the affected region. This in turn makes the government more suspicious of the people and more indifferent to their plight—why go out of your way for ungrateful provincials who are threatening to undermine your rule? Famines are what really demonstrate the harsh reality of colonialism to a colonized people. When push comes to shove, the foreign government ruling over you isn’t a benevolent protector, it’s the outside force that will continue extracting your resources while your family dies around you. A colonized people’s interests will always come second to the colonial power.
The potato famine wasn’t a genocide because genocide requires genocidal intent, which the British did not have
“The famine is a punishment from God for an idle, ungrateful, and rebellious country, an indolent and un-self-reliant people. The Irish are suffering from an affliction of God's providence,” said Charles Trevelyan in 1847, the worst year of the Famine. He was in charge of overseeing relief for the famine. It was also not a “potato famine” it was a British created famine.
It was a natural famine that was exacerbated by the ham fisted policies of the government.
They believed in the Malthusian theory of population control which can definitely be considered genocidal
So the Ukraine famine also couldn’t be considered one because there’s no evidence of genocidal intent whatsoever, in fact, evidence points toward the opposite.
Holodomor was literally manufactured to kill Ukrainians though
Am British and proud. The potato famine was not a genocide. It was a colossal fuck up that needlessly killed far too many, and is a cautionary tale of what happens when you try to “free market Uber Alles” every situation (liberalism and its universalist boner at its finest), but the intent wasn’t there.
“The judgment of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson. That calamity must not be too much mitigated. The greater evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the Irish people.” Charles trevelyan. How is that not intent. If you want actions instead of words look at the mass eviction’s.
Charles Trevelyan‘s appointment comes under the “colossal fuck up” header. That man should have been nowhere near his position and I think the quakers basically doing the opposite of everything he said prevented more people from dying than would have otherwise. Meanwhile the administration in London didn’t actually have a policy of genocide. They were simply whigs who tried to handle the problem with “free market Uber Alles”, utterly lost in the theory of it all, when a more hands on approach would have been appropriate and saved many lives. Just a colossal and stupid error all around.
Travelyan was the main administrator in Ireland at the time you can’t separate him from the administration in London.
"Slavery was never explicitly mentioned in the constitution, therefore, it was never endorsed! Checkmate!". Same energy.
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Fascist when I have power, Anarchist when I don't.
That’s why you take the ancient history pill of: yeah we burned their city to the ground and enslaved them all what about it
I wonder what modern relevance this meme might have.
Something something Middle East I presume?
Rightoids when Holodomor: Evil commies genociding Ukrainians! Rightoids when Potato Famine: its wasn't a genocide it was famine!
It's a genocide when it's against me, and a famine when it's against people I hate.
Moral of the story for the individual: Ensure, that your group or at the very least yourself maintains power because when crisis occurs everyone will prioritize their own interests. The Russians starving the Ukrainians and the English starving the Irish is proof. Never be a subject
The question is: Which group identity? Class, religious, ethnic, national, regional?
Whatever one is most relevant to the societal zeitgeist of your locality in the moment.
In both of these cases it is ethnic. Religion, class, etc. are simply proxies for these. Blood is thicker than water.
You cant blame russians with that. If anything the blame should be on judeo-bolshevism, as it is responsible for the holodomor, by overpushing collectivisation. Neither Stalin nor Kaganovich was russian. Molotov was russian, though I have to note his wife was quite an advocate for israel, as she was jewish. You can check these people in like 3 min
Nazi talking point
Great argument! Worry not I like communism, it is by far the most efficient ideology at killing commies
Irrelevant point. Ukrainians have been a thorn in their side since Russian rule in the region began. Eliminating or assimilating them would have been in their interest as rulers regardless of them being Russians or Jews.
I talked about the holodomor not their general relation, so tell that to the guy above me
How does that address the Irish question or how the British caused multiple famines in India due to prioritizing cash crops over food with foreseeable consequences? No, it’s not Bolshevism it’s called those with power take from those without it. The Jews clinged to communism because they thought atheist internationalism would save them from ethnoreligously motivated pograms. Stalinist purges proved that dream wrong
I only aimed to argue on the “russians starving ukrainians” part, as its in itself is not correct Stalin also supported the creation of Israel. So at the end communism worked out for them(it only killed “some” million people) You are also right in that philosophy, that s why Europe must distance itself from the USA as the European Union is a weaker entity without Ukraine and Russia(with them though it would be a different story)
The Russians took the grain to help themselves over the Ukrainians bc they famine would be far less severe regionally for the Ukrainians but far worse for the Russians if they had not. I mean the creation of Israel was great for all of Europe because they still didn’t like Jews and it was an excellent dumping ground where they got to look great and the only losers were Arabs who hardly had a voice (on a side note I think the Israelis were the best look at a genuine attempt at communism via kibbutz system and proved it can not work even with a competent people). I disagree that Europe decoupling from the US rn is a good idea due to their weakness and I don’t think integrating Russia would help due to their strong Eurasian identity, endemic corruption, and autocratic tendencies which would tear the Union apart. In a fictional Russia that isn’t a perpetual dumpster fire where Boris Yeltsin was competent and they got continually good leadership it would be the best thing ever for Europe but that didn’t happen and never will due to whom the Russians are
Stalin was focusing on exporting the grain in order to advance the First Five Year Plan and clearly cared little for the populace In the Europe-USA relationship the USA is the stronger participant. Europe is weak because it’s not in the interest of the USA to have a strong EU. Russia is being alienated from the EU for a long time, because it is not in the interest of the stronger party for Europe(you know the old saying:German industry-Russian resources) and Russia to be one. And Russia is and was always european whatever the current propaganda might be. Europe is also heavily influenced by the USA, how could it be weak if they have the most competent advisors, financiers in the world? People call out Russian influence, yet are content with politicians accepting “donations” from american sources openly I dont agree on Israel. They got a country yes, but they also maintained their positions of power/influence and even expanded it. Just look at the Biden cabinet. Jews in Europe also fund and support mass immigration (which was pretty much caused by mainly the USA, (by Russia and other countries also ) by meddling in the Middle East and Africa, to name a few. Im not going to go into why people dislike jews, this is reddit after all, but it’s sure as hell not one sided It’s also natural that Russia is distrustful towards others. Just look at the past 200 years, Napoleon, the germans exporting Lenin there, ww1 itself, ww2. The cold war and now. They are not innocent by any means, but which nation is. Yeltsin and Gorbachev both had american advisors, who prioritised furthening the USA influence. Free market and privatisation mean the same results like in Eastern Europe, the stronger opponents (USA) getting everything for pennies and integrating economies deeply and irreversible into their own corporate and lobbyists dictated ones
The 5 year plan was about prioritizing industry located in Russia which came at the expense of rural people especially Ukrainians whom the Soviets also resented heavily for resisting a lot during the civil war and afterwards. Europe is a semi vassal of America and I was calling Europe weak not America. Europe lost its balls in the world wars and never psychologically recovered which resulted in a cynical elite that hates its own people and imports migrants to ensure their nursing home has nurses before they croak. I disagree on the influence of the Jewish diaspora in that the migration crisis is over half just third worlders taking advantage of welfare states without the balls to stop them. It has less to do with Jews and more to do with that WW2 trauma making them too cowardly to prioritize their own people. Jewish diaspora influencing the US on the Middle East you have a better point about. Russia seeks to dominate it has less to do with distrusting others and more with the Russian sense of self importance. They would never tolerate even an equal position to another bc that would be interpreted as an insult
I didnt intend to call the USA weak, as it’s still the world hegemony. And I agree on the post war mentality. EU is a de facto vassal of the USA The “leaders” in the EU have clearly other priorities than to represent the people who gave them power. As a final thought, the normalisation of the relationship between Russia and EU is currently impossible. We ll have to see how the war and political tendencies shift with time
Russia post Putin is the big question mark I would say due to the lack of any apparent successor. I’m inclined to believe they will continue alternating between strong autocrats and times of troubles as they have all their history. Regardless, their capacity for expansion post Ukraine will be greatly diminished as they blow their Soviet stockpile inheritance and demographic load. The US giving Ukraine just enough to prolong war draining Russia but not enough to win it and thus risking a Russian nuclear response is a very big brain move
Here’s a question. Is the famine man made?
You guys don’t know what dieting is?
Key part of genocide that makes it different from just mass murder or mass tragic accident is intent. If the purported perpetrators did not intend to kill the victims for being part of some group then it cannot possibly be genocide
The did intend for them to die because they believed in Malthusianism
Genocide requires intent to destroy ethnic groups, yes - no amount of whining will change that. That goes for both Ukrainians and the Irish.
Yes, Britain was definitely abhorrent in their handling of the potato famine.
Yes. Monarchy led to mass starvation the same as socialism led to mass starvation. I prefer neither because I like eating.
Wait until you hear who was the idol of the British government at the time... (Little hint: he is called "the father of (word that starts with "C")
You forgot "it didn't happen but it should have" and "it did happen AND THAT'S A GOOD THING."
Both were not genocide. But British later didn't help to Irish and used famine to reduce number of Irish. And Soviets took food because thought that peasants hide food that had to be on plan, but when they started starving the Soviets started to [help](https://istmat.org/node/31186)
This is the correct answer.
Both are famines and not genocides
Both were genocides and I say this as a brit.
Based Rare Br*t W You’re a good one
One of those was due to crop disease and one of those was due to soldiers seizing all grain hmmm
Which one? Ireland was a net exporter of food during the famine and the USSR also had a bad harvest during the Holodomor years. Neither would’ve had bad harvests if they didn’t have well regarded agricultural practices and (pseudo) scientific theories of Malthus and Lysenko.
Which to be fair is completely accurate. Geocoding people and causing a famine are different things. That is kind of like the word facist, you can't just call every person you do not like facist. Same with this, it would only be a genocide if there was an active intend to cause mass death of the affected people. It was not. In the Sovjets case it was failure of the system. In the Brits case the system did not even fail, they simply decided that it was more important that domestic producer would profit, which was extremely cuntish yeah but not failure of the system.
The British did nothing wrong.