Not to be a tankie or a lib or a capitalists, but sometimes famines do happen, in the USSR was mostly due to one shitty botanist who played the politics game, we SHOULD learn from those mistakes, sometimes it is because natural or unexpected consequences. Like I wonder if there were biologists in China saying that killing the sparrows would cause a famine.
But capitalists famines are such an different beast. They are always obviously preventable but doing so would decrease someone’s profits. The Irish famine was a straight up genocide, dust bowl was rich people recklessly gambling with the nation, and this one? straight up billionaires shoving the nation’s wealth into their pockets, like before but even more mercilessly.
Lysenko the shitty botanist happened a bit later and his ideas had repercussions way into 1970s. Lysenko was still on the come-up back in early 1930s but he really started getting political weight a bit later in 1935-36 when the purges happened and his bullshit started really messing things up after WW2 into the 1950s.
Meanwhile, Holodomor was way more diabolical and spiteful act. Ever since the soviets took over Ukraine - they had paranoia about nationalist uprising taking them out. For a while, a workable solution was to provide national representation. The whole Ukrainization policy. Eventually, their own policy got them scared so much they started the russification policy to undo “the damage”. They started taking out various Ukrainian political and cultural figures under false allegations.
At the same time shambolic economic reforms and collectivization attempts led to people questioning government competence and demand proper political representation instead of whatever soviets tried to do. The government solution was to call business owners and rich upper class peasants the enemy and go full feudal - purge the politically active people (call it the continuing class struggle) and turn peasants into collectivized serfs under kolkhoz system with no representation or rights. They couldn’t even travel without their superior permission and had no documents. And to seal the deal - start village blockades - attrition into submission and assimilation.
Not to be a tankie or a lib or a capitalists, but sometimes famines do happen, in the USSR was mostly due to one shitty botanist who played the politics game, we SHOULD learn from those mistakes, sometimes it is because natural or unexpected consequences. Like I wonder if there were biologists in China saying that killing the sparrows would cause a famine. But capitalists famines are such an different beast. They are always obviously preventable but doing so would decrease someone’s profits. The Irish famine was a straight up genocide, dust bowl was rich people recklessly gambling with the nation, and this one? straight up billionaires shoving the nation’s wealth into their pockets, like before but even more mercilessly.
Lysenko the shitty botanist happened a bit later and his ideas had repercussions way into 1970s. Lysenko was still on the come-up back in early 1930s but he really started getting political weight a bit later in 1935-36 when the purges happened and his bullshit started really messing things up after WW2 into the 1950s.
Meanwhile, Holodomor was way more diabolical and spiteful act. Ever since the soviets took over Ukraine - they had paranoia about nationalist uprising taking them out. For a while, a workable solution was to provide national representation. The whole Ukrainization policy. Eventually, their own policy got them scared so much they started the russification policy to undo “the damage”. They started taking out various Ukrainian political and cultural figures under false allegations.
At the same time shambolic economic reforms and collectivization attempts led to people questioning government competence and demand proper political representation instead of whatever soviets tried to do. The government solution was to call business owners and rich upper class peasants the enemy and go full feudal - purge the politically active people (call it the continuing class struggle) and turn peasants into collectivized serfs under kolkhoz system with no representation or rights. They couldn’t even travel without their superior permission and had no documents. And to seal the deal - start village blockades - attrition into submission and assimilation.
thanks, forgot about Holodomor, you make good points.