Starvation and Politics
Author: Thomas Keneally
Review: David Gibson
Drought is not the true cause of either the starvation or death linked with the famines so frequently witnessed in our world, according to Thomas Keneally’s Three Famines. The Australian writer makes the case that during a famine people indeed hunger, grow sick and die because food is inaccessible, but that numerous political, economic and human failings ought to be held accountable for that.
Rail-thin children introduced to the world by famine photography signify that much more has failed people than rainfall or crops.
In Keneally’s famine accounts, political leaders sometimes disturbingly concluded that meeting the needs of the hungry would interfere with other political goals they considered greater priorities.
His book tells of government all too ready to believe the news of famine hunger within their borders was greatly exaggerated or were convinced hungry people brought this suffering upon themselves.
Added to that is a tendency among the better-fed to develop an immunity over time toward hungry people, that is to begin ignoring starving people in their midst. It suits governments “who naturally wish to be exempted from all blame” to argue “famine is due utterly to a natural disaster, or even to the previous sins of the victims themselves”, the author writes.
Keneally is the well-known author of Schindler’s Ark, a 1982 historical novel based on the life of a German Catholic industrialist who acted to save the lives of some 1,100 Jews from the Holocaust.
However, he is also the author of numerous nonfiction books, to which he now adds Three Famines, an analysis both of the causes of famine and the realities of human suffering yielded by unrequited hunger.
The book’s three famines include the Great Famine of Ireland that began in 1845, often called the Potato Famine; the deadly 1943-44 famine in Bengal located in the Indian subcontinent’s northeastern region; and an Ethiopian famine that occurred in two phases in the early 1970s and mid-1980s.
“Though these famines are in obvious ways diverse from each other, they were also siblings,” Keneally says. He explains: “In those people who suffered these famines; in those who denied the suffering or propounded theories to explain it, excuse it and so see it as necessary; in those who, against the wishes of government, told the world what had happened and still was happening, or tried to address the suffering by giving aid, there is a remarkable continuity of impulses and reactions.”
The painful truth about the relationship of disease and famine is reported by Keneally. A wide range of diseases and fevers “opportunistically strike the malnourished,” he says.
“If bacteria were sentient,” Keneally writes, “they would look upon famine fields as arenas of near-miraculous chance, an opportunity for a vicious dance across grand reaches of humans, whose resistance to invasion has fatally withered.”
Keneally introduces readers to various heads of state and governmental officials who failed remarkably to respond to famine hunger. He also shows how the efforts of some government officials to do well by hungry people were thwarted by their superiors.
Some older readers, who in Keneally’s words “were charmed” decades ago by the Emperor Haile Selassie, may be startled by his depiction of the Ethiopian leader. Selassie “dealt with minor famines by ignoring them” and he apparently hoped to treat famine as a state secret, fearing that reports of it could prove embarrassing to his country, Keneally indicates. He tells of a newspaper article in which, speaking of famine, Selassie declared that “each individual is responsible for his misfortunes, his fate”. Still, the author makes clear that Selassie’s shortsightedness in the face of famine appears modest compared with that of the Marxist Mengistu Haile Mariam, who headed Ethiopia from 1977.
In his final chapter, Keneally shows readers how common famines are, including the many “created by flood.” Russia, China, North Korea and many parts of Africa have known famine well.
A recent famine in Darfur, western Sudan, is especially pertinent to the overall purpose of Keneally’s book. He writes that during the 21st century’s first decade, “Darfur was an example of the way armies, militias, race and government policy combined to create what the experts call ‘a humanitarian crisis.” – CNS