tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post4323867961085670872..comments2024-03-28T08:37:58.136+01:00Comments on Limited, Inc.: SolzhenitsynRoger Gathmannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11257400843748041639noreply@blogger.comBlogger7125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-84888651348537011992008-08-17T16:20:00.000+02:002008-08-17T16:20:00.000+02:00Further to Roger's and Don Cox's comments, a quick...Further to Roger's and Don Cox's comments, a quick look at wikipedia on <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine" REL="nofollow">famine</A> confirms my reading of these things as flowing from a poor grasp of things and limited resources, all paved with good intentions and coupled with a failure to appreciate that there was more than a short term crisis. In fact, food handouts would have prolonged short term problems by drawing labour away from land, if they had in fact turned out to be merely short term. We do no better these days, with a more humane approach to third world famine relief and none to prevention; we have institutionalised the failure of self sufficiency.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-22975842146006274072008-08-11T18:33:00.000+02:002008-08-11T18:33:00.000+02:00"the British policy of letting Irish die in the po..."the British policy of letting Irish die in the potato famine" ____ It wasn't policy. It was a mixture of incompetence and incomprehension. If you read the comments of, for instance, Wellington (who certainly knew Ireland well), it is clear that he simply didn't grasp the scale of the disaster. And even if the government had grasped it, what could they have done? There were no strategic food reserves or famine relief organisations in those days. I think the situation was more like the last famine of the Middle Ages than the first of the 20C.Don Coxhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11232752398252841794noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-65957646287397967872008-08-07T16:14:00.000+02:002008-08-07T16:14:00.000+02:00Nobody ascribes to Stalin the idea of deliberately...Nobody ascribes to Stalin the idea of deliberately starting a famine - the terror is all in the treatment of it. When the British refused to intervene to save Irish lives due to the fact that it would contravene a laissez faire ideology, how, tell me, does that differ from Stalin's treatment of Ukrainian peasants? As for India, the set up of famine "relief" under Lytton, for instance, was deliberately punitive, down to the criminally small amount of food given to refugees in the relief and the rule that the refugees had to go not to camps near them, but to trek to those at some distance. Mike Davis's account of the famine and the response to it in 1876-1877, quoting from contemporary sources, makes quite clear that the kind of official response to famine which, when enacted by Stalin's officials in the Ukraine, has been dubbed terroristic, was the norm in India. However, the terror model has an intention. One could perhaps say that surely the British had no intention in so treating the victims of famine? Here the record is a lot clearer. The British officials expressed themselves about the famines as forms of Malthusian relief. In Ireland, the famine not only cleared the land of an excess and useless population, but the thinning of the Irish just happened to coincide with the breaking of Irish resistance to English rule. Similarly, in India, the British had long been eager to transform the countryside economically, monetizing relations between the farmers and their landlords, destroying the older system of exchanges and freeing up foodstuffs as a commodity. And that is how they used the famine. <BR/><BR/>So you tell me: how can this possibly be any different from Stalin's famine policies? the same ingrediants - punishing the victims, the use of famine to undermine political resistance, and seeing in famine a means of reaching an ideological end - they all come together, here. <BR/><BR/>Plus, of course, the unwillingness to deal with the subject. Pick up a book written by a British historian about Raj India and see how much is devoted to the issue of famine. You will notice that usually, it is a page or two. Now, if the British were writing about a famine that had struck England and had carried off a million or more Englishmen, I would just guess that maybe, just maybe, there would be more written about it.Roger Gathmannhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11257400843748041639noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-50810428909959403372008-08-07T12:00:00.000+02:002008-08-07T12:00:00.000+02:00"Rightwingers will come up with the most absurd ju..."Rightwingers will come up with the most absurd justifications for slavery and apartheid – the British have never reckoned with the crimes of Queen Victoria’s reign, although the terror famines in India are surely the template for Stalin’s policies in the 1930s, just as the concentration camps in the Soviet Union started out in imitation of the French and British penal systems - if one wants to find the roots of mass murder in the Soviet Union, it is pretty easy to find them in the imperialist and penal systems developed by the Europeans and the Americans in the 19th century".<BR/><BR/>Have you so soon forgotten the precept "never ascribe to conspiracy that which can be adequately explained by incompetence"? (I have heard this ascribed to Napoleon.) For instance, "the best denunciation of the British policy of letting Irish die in the potato famine was written by John Mitchel" is in error in one crucial respect: it was not deliberate policy but the outworking of a misguided policy, according to most current analysis (and the same applied in India too, clear up until the Bengal Famine towards the end of the British Raj). These things were worse than a crime, they were a mistake - and such also would be treating them as crime.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-62081234896409463982008-08-07T09:36:00.000+02:002008-08-07T09:36:00.000+02:00200 years together was an eye opener for me. My ta...200 years together was an eye opener for me. My take on alcohol changed drastically. I am not an interest or nudity banner though.<BR/><BR/>Could you do an item on the many jewish drahtzieher and vanguardians that fled their revo gone wrong, many of which commited suicide in various places like the States Solzh mentions (sorry, no page ref (shame on me). ..... Or were they all offed by commiesionaries????<BR/><BR/>sadly the lube thing (rockdusts, monies, porns) distracts from light(er) direct(er) diets. Folks like Moray had wizard ways to claim the all permeating black(hole emitted ... woman is a black ho ... oooly) light could be caught in the right frequency arrays (some certain swedish rock ... crunchahunch your meteoric best on that Nordish). Now the Meyer Stanley is dead and not even a thousand hits on some such phrase. I am tired of that google sieve ... zo lek als een mandje. Politics ouigee (fuck the spelling) boarding with jetfuel fired pulltractors (tremendous force for ever deader lock and deeper dig. Arm the Nietzsche type folk with rock polishers and help the chinese purify industrial waters so it aint all in vain too.<BR/><BR/>read mother s hip landing (blsp blosp blospo bloeisproei) .. 13th of june was an especially fluid restatement of the endlessly repeated hangondownz drewdoo<BR/><BR/>pietAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-37883651037345273112008-08-06T20:26:00.000+02:002008-08-06T20:26:00.000+02:00Hmm, Dostoevsky did like some shit people. On the ...Hmm, Dostoevsky did like some shit people. On the other hand, I have a hard time discounting his unexpected psychological insightfulness. So I can't predict so certainly what he would think of Putin. <BR/><BR/>Solzhenitsyn is, of course, a much lesser writer.Roger Gathmannhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11257400843748041639noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-44790538752618481962008-08-06T03:47:00.000+02:002008-08-06T03:47:00.000+02:00It's all about Mother Russia, Dostoevsky would hav...It's all about Mother Russia, Dostoevsky would have liked Putin, too, I'll bet.Dick Duratahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17601783096358670446noreply@blogger.com