We are watching people starve to death in 2025, and someone is telling us it isn’t happening.
The
pictures coming out of Gaza make my stomach turn. Children who look
like skeletons with skin stretched over their bones. Babies who weigh
less than Winston, my friends’ white kitten. Mothers holding their dying
babies, not from bombs this time, but from hunger.
There have been precedents.
In the 1930s, Stalin’s government took food away from Ukraine. Between 4 and 7 million Ukrainians starved to death in what’s called the Holodomor.
Stalin’s officials denied it was happening, even as people collapsed in the streets.
In the late 1950s, Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong’s policies in China led to a famine that killed between 15 and 45 million people.
The Chinese government called it “three years of natural disasters.” They said it’s impossible for them to be at fault.
In the 1980s and beyond, as famines swept through Ethiopia, Somalia, and other parts of Africa, much of the world looked away. We treated African hunger like it was just the way things were, instead of recognizing how wars and politics created these crises.
Each time, people in power said the hunger wasn’t real, wasn’t that bad, or wasn’t their fault. Each time, people died while the world debated.
Are we seriously going to accept Netanyahu’s Stalin-grade, Mao-height lie that there is no famine?
We seem to have gotten to the moment when even our reality-challenged, narcissist President seems to have noticed. Never of course admitting he's abetting the problem. Never again?
I hate the fashion online that substitutes video clips for text. For a person accustomed to learn by reading, video is slower, less precise, and less memorable than text. But, alas, perhaps we are becoming a post-literate world.
In any case, instead of writing frequently, Substacker Peter Beinart offers short videos at The Beinart Notebook.
His most recent post is longer than the clips I usually share here. But if you've got 10 minutes, I highly recommend listening to the whole thing. The anguish in the original needs to be experienced.
An abbreviated transcript:
More deaths than Kishinev, Sharpeville or Bloody Sunday. Every Day. The astonishing scale of the killing in Gaza
So, one of the most difficult and depressing things about this moment is
that the slaughter in Gaza goes on and on and on. And yet, it’s been
relegated, you know, to the back pages of the newspaper. Americans are
now more consumed by our own catastrophes. And so, there’s this way in
which we’ve normalized, you know, in Western media discussion in the
U.S, there’s been a kind of normalization of just that is kind of
routine, that every day Palestinians are dying more and more and more.
And it doesn’t even really provoke that much conversation anymore. And
I’ve been thinking about how you can respond to that.
And obviously the
people who have tried the most are the Palestinians in Gaza themselves,
journalists and others who are desperately kind of recording what’s
happening to them and trying to speak to the outside world. ... But I also think there perhaps is a value in just trying to step back
and look at the scale of this, and think about how desensitized we’ve
become compared to other moments and places in history
... there’s a British academic named Michael Spagat—I actually quote him in
my book—at the University of London, and he basically counts death in
wars. That’s his academic specialty. He did this very, very large study
with the Palestinian political scientist Khalil Shakaki where they
surveyed 2,000 households in Gaza in order to try to get a more accurate
count of the death toll. ...
... obviously, in Gaza, where many of the hospitals have been
destroyed, and there’s been many, many reports of widespread starvation
that there would be considerable deaths from that as well. And so, of
the overall death toll that Spagat comes to the number of about 100,000,
which, as Haaretz reported in a piece about his
research, is actually not very different from some other researchers at
the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who’ve come to a
roughly similar number.
... So, if one uses that figure of 100,000, that would mean that more
than 150 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed per day since October 7th. More than 150 per day.
... But 150 people killed per day over 650 days is really just an
astonishing level of death and suffering that has been normalized. ... Even if we think about the horrors, the horrors, the war crimes
committed on October 7th, where roughly 1,200 Israelis, mostly Israeli
Jews, were killed, right? If you just think in terms of the numbers,
there is basically a close to an October 7th in Gaza, in terms of the
number of people killed, every week, right? Every week for now 21
months. And the band just kind of plays on, right?
... you can have 150 people killed per day, you know, over 650 days, and
yet, you know, much of the world reacts with a shrug, and the world
continues to give Israel the military and diplomatic support to make it
possible.
... I think that’s one of the things that people are going to be struggling
to face and deal with, and contemplate, and understand about those of us
who are alive in this moment. How—when there were other moments in
history where far fewer people died, and it sparked the conscience of
the world, and led to fundamental political change—how can it be that in
this case that this can just be tolerated? I think all of us are going
to be living with that question for a very, very long time.
