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Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Famines, Wiki Wierdness, and Iraq

I found a number of links while I was looking into nuraido's post (below). What with my fascination with Irish history, along with my long-held belief that the British were worse to the Irish than they were to the Indians, I was surprised to find out what I did. After the jump, I'll tell you what the hell I'm talking about, and then ramble for a while. Very exciting!



The Bengal famine occurred in 1943, and killed an estimated 3-5 million Indians (numbers vary from site to site), although I'm not sure what percent of the population this represents. This is about twice as many deaths as in Ireland during the Hunger, but pales in comparison to Stalin's 5 year plan (7 million in the Ukrane in 1933).

As the Bengal Famine occured during World War II, and particularly due to the proximity of Bengal to the Eastern front, the war clearly must have had some effect on the famine. However, it was not the ultimate cause. From the few articles I have read, this was an almost entirely man-made disaster. Amartya Sen won the Nobel prize in Economics in '98 for his work on the idea of man-made famines, and lived through this one.

For comparative purposes, the Irish Potato Famine killed on the order of 2 million people (about 20% of the population), and displaced another 2 million. The origin of the famine was not directly man-made, but caused by a mold introduced to Europe around that time. Both famines lasted for multiple years, and affected an almost entirely impoverished population.

I most certainly have not read enough about this to make any kind of intelligent statement about the causes of the famine in Bengal. From what I gather thus far, though, it would appear that there was a relatively mild food shortage. Inflation and unemployment in the area made rice unavailable to virtually everyone, and the local government was (as far as I can tell) ineffective to the extreme. Many of the above sites put the blame more on the local Bengal Ministry than on the British.

There are, however, many parallels between the Indian and Irish famines. The British government did absolutely nothing useful in preventing the massive death tolls in either situation. In both cases, regular food shipments out of the affected regions were required. So, I may need to revise my statement about the relative evils inflicted on both colonies. More reading to do.

I bring this up only because there are many smart readers of this blog. So, a couple of questions. First, have you ever heard of this? Second, can you point me to good, and complete, sources to understand this better. Of course, while there are many smart readers, there are very few commenters. Oi! Comment!

As a complete aside, I always find the internal Wiki links somewhat fascinating. Here's a block from the article on the Bengal Famine:


Severe food shortages were worsened by the Second World War, with the British administration of India exporting foods to Allied soldiers. The shortage of rice forced rice prices up, and wartime inflation compounded the problem.

I would think the food shortages that occured during WWII, the British administration of India, rice shortages during the Famine, and wartime inflation would be the most interesting concepts in these two sentences. The links were for "the Second World War" (valid), "Allied" (a bit useless), "price" (a definition of this bizzare concept of monetary value), and "inflation" (again, a definition). What the hell?

I spent virtually no time looking into nuradio's actual question. But, I'm of the opinion that Iraq is a war zone, plain and simple. Hunger is a problem, as is adequate health care. However, both of these are (in my opinion) caused by two factors. The first is the idiotic and unnecessary invasion that involved demolishing the infrastructure, coupled with a civil war which harms many civilians, and our (very poor) response to that civil war. I'm unclear on how many civillians we kill nowadays, vs. how many are killed by insurgents. The second factor is that Americans consider the plight of the Iraqis irrelevant. Not in the "they should be exterminated" sense, but in the sense of doing the minimal amount of work to "alleviate" their suffering. While I think this is remarkably callous on our part, I don't think it approaches the intentional extermination of a people (Hitler, Rwanda, etc), nor does it qualify as a working a people to death (i.e. Stalin).

While my response may not be a wonderfully well thought out idea (or a well presented one), I don't buy the genocide argument in Iraq any more than in any other war between two nations. This war is remarkably stupid, illegal under international law, and remarkably poorly prosecuted. War is a generally bad idea in many cases, and was a remarkably bad idea in this case. It's not genocide, though, in my opinion. Just more pointless death.

1 Comment

Shweenerator said...

I must admit that I didn't read all of this. But, even if I had, I'd still argue that the British were worse to the Indians.

I mean, they did take the Kohinoor diamond....'nuf said.