this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2023
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GenZedong
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more neutral wording would have been just 'famine'. there was nothing deliberate about it and the famine killed not just Ukrainians but Russians too.
and 'holodomor' itself is a term which makes people think its like holocaust. 'Communism as bad or worse than Nazism' is historical revisionism.
It's man-made because the severity of the famine was undeniably affected by policy. I don't think there's anything biased about that. What it means, and the extent to which it was deliberate, if at all, should be expanded upon in the article proper.
The usage of "Holodomor" is so common that it's perfectly reasonable for an encyclopedia to use it. It's the article title most people are going to be looking for, after all. But it's worth noting that the very first section (etymology) has a paragraph about how Holodomor is different from the Holocaust due to no evidence of intentional extermination.
wikipedia could have Holodomor redirect to Soviet Famine but they don't.
why call it man-made then? sure you can argue that man-made doesn't mean 'deliberate' but thats not how most people would interpret it. 'famine' is the clear neutral term.
where is mention of 'man-made' in Bengal Famine?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943
where is the criticism is British policy?
If you only read the first paragraph and ignore the rest of the article you deserve to not understand anything.
Feel free to add it. I'll support the change
misleading people is good, got it.
First, the page is protected, also good luck getting that past mayo ass mods.
I don't think it's misleading. Distinguishing between famines caused solely by external factors, and famines caused in part or in whole by policy, seems entirely reasonable. I was responding to your assertion that someone might misunderstand the meaning of "man-made".
The biases of Wikipedia reflect the biases of its editors (there are Wikipedia articles about that). It could be a great tool for radicalization, but I suppose it's easier to just complain about it.
i do not wish to spend the rest of my life in edit-wars with crackers. i've already had the pleasure of having to talk to these annoying turds in neoliberal economics related articles.
There haven't really been that many famines throughout history (at the very least in the last few centuries) that have been caused by there not being enough food to eat per se. Most of them are caused by food being distributed away (either directly via railroads or "indirectly" by market forces and speculation) towards places that already have enough food.
There is no such thing as a famine "caused solely by external factors". The wording is misleading because it implies there is such a thing as a famine that isn't man made and therefore the one that occurred in the Soviet Union being called "man-made" is already a deliberate attempt at drawing a distinction between it another famines. It is a fact that in all famines there is a human factor necessary to compound on environmental factors in order to cause a famine. You don't get famines that occur due to nature alone. The problem with this article is that by starting out with such language the myth is reinforced that there was something exceptionally malicious about this famine.
the human component of the famine is disputed by (even liberal) historians to this day. Wikipedia, as an encyclopedia promoting a No point-of-view policy, should not be so strict on classifying the famine like this in the very opening paragraph. Additionally it's accepted that non-human factors played into the famine, so it's also wrong to imply the famine was strictly man-made.
Unless they mean man-made to say that the kulaks burned their grain, but somehow I doubt that. Still, it does raise a question of ambiguity: who was responsible for the man-made factor? In my opinion, this should then be left out of the opening paragraph because it can confuse the reader, and developed in the article.
There were many factors
Natural factors because the year of the famine was not good for crops.
Kulak factor resulted in destruction of crops and farm animals.
Government incompetence in calculations and policy favouring cities over rural areas.
Keep in mind that once Collectivisation was in full effect, the famine situation in the USSR improved drastically.
Yeah policy exacerbating the problems of the famine through mismanagement still shouldn't be described simply as man-made. At best you could call it a mismanaged famine. Man-made ascribes something deliberate to it.
It would be like calling the deaths by covid in America man-made. Which is sort of true, the US government engaged in negligence and let a million people die. But if I said "covid is man-made" that would be a poor way of framing it, right? It would sound like someone deliberately designed the disease.
FDR's Dustbowl genocide