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The Return of Famine

As famine has returned, so has famine denialism.

Daniel Larison

The Financial Times reports on the return of famine in the world, including Israel’s man-made atrocity famine in Gaza:

“Israel has tried to persuade the world it isn’t a famine, but it has driven Gaza into one,” De Waal said. “Now the consequences are going to be many times more horrible than if they had listened to the people who were saying this was going to happen.”

Modern famines are the product of deliberate policy choices by governments and armed groups to use starvation as a weapon. We see one of the most extreme and intense examples of this in Gaza right now, but in recent years we have also seen it in Sudan, Yemen, Somalia, and Syria. The leaders responsible for these starvation crimes want hunger to do their killing work for them. They hope to drive their enemy’s civilian population into famine, and then they will feign outrage when anyone suggests that this is what they are trying to do. 

The world had nearly eliminated famine by the start of this century, but in the last twenty years there has been a resurgence of it. More governments have been inflicting collective punishment on civilian populations by depriving them of access to basic necessities, and they have largely been able to get away with it. When the Saudi-led coalition was wrecking and starving Yemen, those governments faced no serious consequences for driving the population towards famine. The Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in Sudan and their Emirati patrons are responsible for causing famine in North Darfur. The Israeli government has caused a famine in Gaza, but their U.S. and other Western supporters ignore the evidence and lie on their behalf by saying that nothing is happening. 

As famine has returned, so has famine denialism. Alex de Waal wrote about famine denialism in an article for Boston Review last year:

What the victims don’t see are the distant engineers of this calamity, guiding the self-immolation from a distance—with intent or with reckless, racist indifference to human life. And the engineers themselves deploy a range of techniques to conceal or mislead the world about their crimes: what we can call famine denialism.

We have a new generation of Durantys eagerly carrying water for a famine-causing genocidal regime as they dishonestly claim that reports of the famine are a hoax. These people are typically regime apologists driven by ideology, and they do what they can to churn out exculpatory propaganda. Famine denialists want to shield the perpetrators from any consequences for their crimes, and sometimes they are also interested in buying them time to keep starving the targeted population. 

Denialists will switch between different tactics depending on the audience they’re addressing. When speaking to media outlets, they will simply deny that there is any starvation. They will give their political allies talking points about how any starvation that might be happening is the fault of the enemy or the failure of aid organizations. If there is too much evidence of mass starvation to be dismissed, denialists will blame everyone but the government responsible for it. If denialists are confronting a hostile audience, they will attack the audience for their supposed bias and paint the perpetrators of the crime as poor victims of a vast conspiracy. 

Denialists also focus on the formal requirements for declaring a famine and use that to dispute claims that a famine is coming or already underway. De Waal wrote:

What we see today is that too often the public policy priority is preventing a famine declaration, not preventing a famine. Policies are directed toward ensuring this particular indicator doesn’t flash red. That can be done by preventing humanitarian agencies from collecting information, casting doubt on information that has been collected, or doing just enough to make sure that the particular threshold isn’t crossed.

Now that famine has been officially declared in Gaza, the last resort of the denialist is to accuse the people making the declaration of lying. This doesn’t convince anyone except other denialists, but it is all that they have left. At the core of famine denialism is a grudging awareness of the profound evil of the crime in question. 

Famine denialism is one of the most ghoulish things that a human being can engage in. It requires not just indifference to the forced starvation of other people, but a sort of malicious delight in covering up the crimes of the perpetrators. Ideological attachment explains part of why some people do this, but there has to be something truly twisted in a person’s soul to defend a government that is deliberately starving other people to death.