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.
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.
Might be worth addressing both posters directly as the initial ideological hijack Tech-Noir was rebutting seems to have missed the point that neither sides of that flame-war belong on HN.
You're right, I am opposed to communism, but I am not an ideologue.
I posit that painting both anti-communists and communists as ideologues and rejecting both arguments is a false equivalence since communism is an extreme.
To provide another example it's similar to saying "Anti-Nazis and Nazis are both ideologues, neither of their arguments should be listened to. "
Contrary to what Tech-Noir is slinging, I’m not a mod or trying to act like one. At this point I’m just flagging and moving on and wishing that the article posted didn’t trigger so many people’s pro/anti-communism kneejerk.
> Contrary to what Tech-Noir is slinging, I’m not a mod or trying to act like one.
I didn't claim you were a mod, I said you were effecting the tone of a mod ("Please don't..."), which you were.
> [I'm] wishing that the article posted didn’t trigger so many people’s so many people’s pro/anti-communism kneejerk.
At the time I replied to you, you and gnarbarian made up half the comments here, yet neither you were discussing the article. Your own posts were simply about the Holocaust, Holodomor, Mao, Hitler, etc.
The entire thread from gnarbarian's original post on should be nuked.
