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Some famines are caused by misguided collectivization / socialism enforced by the state, such as Holodomor and this one: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_

• type0 4y ago
  We learned about Irish Famine and Chinese Famine in school but not Holodomor or Bengal Famine. Holodomor is a special kind of famine that was politically and ethnically motivated. Ostensibly Ukrainian Don and Kuban Cossak territories to the south east were greatly affected. This needs to be seen in the context of Decossackization and Dekulakization.
  • evgen 4y ago
    > Holodomor is a special kind of famine that was politically and ethnically motivated. This also applies to the Irish Potato Famine and that one is much more ethnically and culturally relevant for Americans, for example, so for the past century or so that was the one that was taught. Displacing its pedagogical role in US history education is just not going to happen.
    • sc68cal 4y ago
      The Irish potato famine is taught in American schools as something that just happened because the Irish depended on potatoes. No discussion of how British policy created these circumstances. When socialism does it, we teach how the policy and ideology made it happen. When it happens anywhere else, it's how it was an unfortunate disaster caused by nature
      • ohiovr 4y ago
        Interesting that is what I was taught about the potato famine. I got some reading to do on it.
      • evgen 4y ago
        FWIW I guess it depends on how good of a history teacher you had. This was back in the 80s at a US public school in a part of the country with a very large Irish immigrant population, but I learned about why the Irish depended on potatoes (vis a vis caloric return for amount of effort in poor/rocky soil), the dangers of mono-cropping, the English system of landlords and tenant farming, and the long-term impacts of the Irish diaspora from this event upon other countries. As a comparison the Holodomor does not offer many useful lessons to students other than 'Stalin bad, top-down planning bad.'
• tarakat 4y ago
  > Some famines are caused by misguided collectivization / socialism enforced by the state This looks deliberate, not misguided: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor#Causes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor#Causes regions with higher Ukrainian population shares were struck harder with centrally planned policies corresponding to famine, and Ukrainian populated areas were given lower amounts of tractors which were correlated to a reduction in famine mortality, ultimately concluding that 92% of famine deaths in Ukraine alone along with 77% of famine deaths in Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus combined can be explained by systematic bias against Ukrainians [..] Under the collectivism policy, for example, farmers were not only deprived of their properties but a large swath of these were also exiled in Siberia with no means of survival. Those who were left behind and attempted to escape the zones of famine were ordered to be shot. > If you’re going to teach things, you need to find patterns and try to discern the root causes. Otherwise you’re just imparting biased propaganda to students. This implies that history currently is taught so as to find patterns and causes, and that teaching the Holodomor for some reason wouldn't entail patterns and causes. It is a fully general answer that could excuse any event from being taught. A non-answer. And to answer your question, yes, I knew about all of them.
• ETH_start 4y ago
  The Irish Potato Famine was not due to protection of capitalism. Perhaps the single biggest contributor to it was the anti-capitalist Corn Laws: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_Laws https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_Laws