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Comment by IntronExon | Hacker News Reader

I think there is, or was, a sense that focusing too much on contemporaneous genocides when considering the period around the Nazi Holocaust, might dilute the horror of it all? I don’t know, maybe it’s just that for a significant portion of history until recently, studying the Holodomor and Stalin (or Mao) in general would mean empathizing with people we still considered rivals or deadly enemies? Whatever the reason, the Nazi holocauust, the Holodomor, and the Great Leap Forward represent a spasm of evil that claimed far more lives than all previous armed conflicts combined.

All of the above is very much my idle speculation.

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You don't have to be a fascist to condemn the Holodomor.

It's also shocking, though, how unaware we are of atrocities committed by Western powers. It is difficult, for example, to understate the culpability of the British Empire, and its economic system in Ireland's Great Famine.

Much like the Holodomor, it was an engineered famine - there was no shortage of food - it was just not very evenly distributed. The free market, and British colonial policy proved itself to be highly effective at providing a solution to the "Irish Question"[1] - which involved killing a quarter of Ireland's population.

Utter contempt for human life is a function of power, not of economic system.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_question

Do you have a source to support your claim that "the free market" was responsible for killing a quarter of Ireland's population?

Ireland had a market economy, Ireland had enough food to feed everyone, ergo the free market caused the famine.

Just like how the Soviet Union had a communist economy, how it had enough food to feed everyone, ergo, people blame Communism for the famine.

> Ireland had a market economy, Ireland had enough food to feed everyone, ergo the free market caused the famine.

That is a non-sequitur. What makes you think “the free market” caused the famine?

There was no real free market for the Irish though. The Irish weren't allowed to fish or hunt or eat other crops which were slotted for English consumption. Nor were the Catholic Irish allowed to own land. They were essentially only allowed to eat potatoes... The famine was a genocide justified as divine retribution against the Catholics of Ireland.

That's not the whole picture - Ireland exported food throughout the famine - more then enough food then it needed to feed itself.

The problem was that exporting food to England was more profitable then selling food domestically. The reason that the Irish poor ate potatoes was not because they were forbidden from other food, but because that was all they could afford.

The invisible hand of the market, and the very visible hand of Parliament was content to see a million people starve to death.

Note that one of the causes of the Holodomor was the Soviet Union exporting food during the famine. History repeats itself.

I agree with the caveat that had their land not been taken from them and given to protestants in the first place, they could have done a much better job of feeding themselves.

Nearly all land has been taken away from someone or other, at sword or gunpoint, at some point in time or another. Do markets only work when land is distributed fairly as a starting condition?

Not just content to see them die, eager I think. Maybe not as explicitly eager as Stalin or Hitler, but more than Mao in his incompetence and arrogance.

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