Famine? Only one crop failed. Ireland was a net exporter of food to the UK..
There’s another word for this, not a famine…
There’s another word for this, not a famine…
> It lead to the Revolutions of 1848.
Too bad politicians today don't read the history books they want to burn, they might save their own skins.
Fact: in 1847, nearly 4,000 vessels carried food from Ireland to British ports while hundreds of thousands of Irish people died of starvation and related diseases. There was PLENTY of food in Ireland.
FACT: The government refused to intervene in the market to prevent food exports, even as the Irish population faced severe food shortages. Why?
While crop failures were happening across Europe, the impact in Ireland was particularly devastating because of the population's heavy reliance on potatoes. The suggestion that food was only unaffordable for the poor overlooks the fact that the potato blight left many people without any access to their primary food source. WHY was it the only source of food in an abundant growing environment??
Fact: Wages paid on “work programs” for those (un)lucky enough to get on them were too low to purchase food at inflated "famine" prices, leading to widespread starvation.
The export of food from Ireland during this period was a significant factor in the suffering of the Irish people, and it is important to acknowledge the role of British economic policies and the prioritization of profits over humanitarian needs which seems to be a struggle for you.
You seem to contradict yourself as well, you say plenty of food, and then it was because of the reliance on potatoes, and then it was the only food source?
Maybe I just dislike comments that insist on saying FACT multiple times.
Workers got either in priority to farmers and further others. Except politicians and connected people got theirs first beyond workers. And some were able to buy it ahead of the queue.
The magical development in the West was driven by really heavy handed subsidies industrial development on already richer area, which USSR just could not afford, and especially not after funding the high military spending. That notwithstanding some completely broken experiments done in large scale like attempts to farm the steppes in the middle of nowhere, a lot of which was funded by export from the few basket countries which would have otherwise had enough food. And after a relatively short while, the industrialization effort stalled, a variety of farming related problems appeared due to both mismanagement, bad weather and plagues, countries involved got indebted on bad terms...
So yeah, it was "free".
The scarcity that made food and housing not free in practice is why monetization (capitalism) ended up being better, which I assume was MikePlacid's point.
Capitalism has problems for sure, but it eliminates scarcity more efficiently than any other system we have tried so far.
Capitalism may share the abundance unevenly, but it still creates it in the first place, which is key.
This famine happened from the concentration of power, not because food costs money. Democratic land reform solves it, keeping the monetary impetus in play.
The Holodomor was a very similar genocide where farms were collectivized. That didn't stop millions of people from dying from hunger as their own food was taken at gunpoint and exported to other countries.
We must judge harshly, but on the proper aspect.
The problem was not exactly that, there wasn't food export when there was famine. Communists are not that stupid. All they wanted was to overcome the corporate greed of the peasantry, who often sold food to workers at 2, 3, or 5 times the price, so they fought price gouging on food, determining fair prices, that would allow all the country to be well-fed.
But for some unknown reason in response to that beautiful and righteous policy the peasantry reduced food production, which caused the famine.
So to be clear: Communists exported food, stolen from the people who grew it, which is very well known, here's one citation from Wikipedia:
> In regard to exports, Michael Ellman states that the 1932–1933 grain exports amounted to 1.8 million tonnes, which would have been enough to feed 5 million people for one year.[16]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1930%E2%80%93...
Further it wasn't "stupidity" of Communists but rather a deliberate genocide of those considered inferior. They sent groups of soldiers around the countryside to steal more grain as children starved in the streets. It is one of the more horrific acts of brutality in the 20th century, all in service of authoritarianism.
That is blatant manipulation. Most of those grain de facto didn't left the country and were used to fight famine. From 1930 there was massive grain import. Moreover, import was considered by Stalin from 1928, but at that time all the statistics showed, that food situation will be fully fixed by fair share from upper parts of peasantry.
>deliberate genocide of those considered inferior
This is literally a conspiracy theory on the level of the Jews starting World War II to exterminate the Europeans.
>They sent groups of soldiers around the countryside to steal more grain as children starved in the streets.
Yeas, and they did that exactly to give that grain to those children.
The fact is, communists with all honesty tried to achieve a fair distribution of necessities to the poorest. But as always leftist's "fair" implies market incentive distortion and as a result hindered production.
The cause of the famine is not the evil communists who took grain from hungry peasants, communists simply tried to take excess food from the rich and give it to the poor. The cause of the famine is the 7-fold drop in food production. And when you have that drop - there inevitable will be mass famine.
For anyone else who doesn’t know, Ireland was exporting grain and meat during the famine at the orders of the British. They explicitly let the Irish die if someone else could order the food because Free Trade was perfect and if it wiped out a bunch of undesirables to boot, even better[1]
As you had groups with a wildly different wealth as the Ottaman Sultan and the Choctaws on the Trail of Tears scrounging for anything to spare to feed the starving Irish, their British overlords were shipping away food to anyone who could pay them a penny more.
If it wasn’t an engineered genocide then it’s close as you can get to one imo
[1] https://ireland-calling.com/irish-famine-ireland-exported-fo...
I think that’s a misconception-yes, there were a significant number of absentee landowners from England, but they were never the majority - the majority of wealthy Irish landowners lived in Ireland. Only around a third of large Irish landowners lived outside of Ireland.
One issue was that the land-owning upper classes were near exclusively Protestant, while the vast majority of the poor were Catholics-which is not to say no Protestants died in the famine, many did-but, while at the time Ireland was 80% Catholic 20% Protestant, famine deaths were 90% Catholic only 10% Protestant-so a Catholic was 2.25 times more likely to perish in the famine than a Protestant. Even though by the time of the famine, most of the formal legal discrimination against Catholics had been repealed, the consequences of it were still very evident.
Although there were many poor Protestants, the average poor Protestant was still better off (and hence more likely to survive) than the average poor Catholic, having benefited from generations of anti-Catholic/pro-Protestant discrimination.
Protestants also benefited from the greater wealth of Protestant charities - even though many Protestant charities were willing to help Catholics too, most Catholics were fearful to accept their help, viewing it as an inducement to conversion
Consider for example, Edmund Burke (the famous conservative philosopher) - he was born in Ireland to a Roman Catholic mother and a Church of Ireland father; his parents raised him Anglican and his sister Catholic - this was not an uncommon compromise for middle class Irish families of the time, discriminatory laws limiting career and education opportunities for Catholics largely didn’t apply to women who were excluded from careers and higher education irrespective of their faith. It is unclear whether or not his father, a lawyer (at a time when Catholics weren’t allowed to practice law) had converted from Catholicism, or if one of his ancestors had - but given Burke’s paternal line came from an old Hiberno-Norman family, descendants of the 12th century English invaders who over the following centuries assimilated to a Gaelic identity, it is obvious that one of his patrilineal ancestors must have switched from Catholicism to Protestantism at some point.