How is a famine in the fertile Ukraine region twisted irony?

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Answer 1

This isn't actually that unusual, as many of the worst famines have occured in rich and bountiful places. Whenever we talk about famine nowadays we blame it on grand natural disasters; one reporter during the 1984-85 Ethiopian famine, for example, called it a disaster of "biblical proportions." This attitude may have applied in the middle ages, but in today's world there is no fundamental shortage of food. The fundamental problem is the *distribution* of food, because the govt, even if given aid, will do everything it can to keep the supplies and reroute them to those it depends upon for support. The poor rural people, whom the famines hit hardest, were politically unimportant and thus easy to ignore.

Famines are fundamentally *political.* This theory was first proposed by Amartya Sen and then expanded by Alex de Waal; both are very famous experts in famine theory.  They both insist that famine in our times is a crime and not just the result of natural disasters. I think it's strange, for example, that there was no famine after the Indian tsunami a few years ago; clearly environemtnal causes, while they do play a role in food supplies, are not in themselves the main cause.  Almost every famine in the twentieth century is linked to some kind of war or to a totalitarian government. The "Great Leap Forward" in China was the worst famine in history, and its roots lay directly in Mao's collectivization of agriculture.   The Netherlands had hardly had any famine for centuries, but when the n***s stole their grain in 1944 a terrible famine ensued. People poured in funds to alleviate the "poor starving ethiopians" in the mid-80's, not realizing that the DERG (Ethiopian govt) was manipulating them. They largely kept the food for the people in the cities, those whose support they needed, and then stockpiled food for their own uses. In a cruel irony, they were using  pictures of the very people they were exploiting  to further entrench themselves. Food is power in a region or time of scarcity, something that we can tend to forget; but it is extermely important for us to see exactly where the food shipments go.

So I'm presuming you're talking about the Ukranian famine in 1932-33? It has a lot in common with other famines (like collectivization of agriculture), but it rwas eally a much more extreme case. Frequently governments will just ignore the starving populace; this, however, was one of the few times that famine was used explicitly as a weapon of war. Stalin was determined  to exert his control  over the rebellious Ukranians by robbing them of all their strength and resources to fight back. This is also what is happening in Darfur now- while the militia is known for immediate brutality,  they also have a long term plan of starvation. (Scorching fields, poisoning wells, sometimes salting the earth...)

I wouldn't even call this irony, it's too severe for just that.  But whatever we should call it, I think the paradox is that instead of helping his people survive the famine, Stalin deliberately and systematically starved them to crush opposition. Thus even though the Ukranians should have had plenty of food, it was forcibly taken from them (probably to be diverted the cities, though I'm not totally sure).

Answer 2

Well, it's not really irony, since mockery or wit.are not trying to be conveyed in that question (for example, saying "it is beautiful weather" when it is raining). Irony is a subtle form of sarcasm. What you describe is actually incongruity (out of place, or inconsistent with expected results).

That said...

Ukraine is such a fertile region, that they were often referred to as "the breadbasket of Russia" since they provided a large percentage of the agricultural products that fed the USSR. The famine was what Ukrainians commonly refer to as "false famine", as it was the central government that took everything (literally) grown and produced in the region.

The government's stance was that "nobody in the Union has anything, so why should you have more". Yet the conflict in that is that the elite ruling class of Russia had much, the common people had little, and the Ukrainians had nothing.

The Ukrainians were independent people who were against Soviet rule, and the "false famine" was a way used to break the spirit of the Ukrainians. Literally everything was taken from them, including cooked food on the table.

Many Ukrainians starved to death during this period, as a result of having no food, even though they grew and produced a vast percentage of the food consumed in other regions. That is your "irony".