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It’s what’s known as the Holodomor [death by starvation in Ukraine]. And that’s all Stalin. Giorgi Kandelaki, cited Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War II: Poisoning the Soil, Netflix 2024
The Brazilian Health ministry estimated that hundreds of thousands of children die of hunger every year. Noam Chomsky
It’s not my job to worry about people starving to death in the UK. Theresa Coffey, UK secretary of state for work and pensions
There’s a radio commercial that says a certain diet pill works three times faster than starvation. George Carlin, When Will Jesus Bring The Pork Chops?
How can you have order in a state without religion? For, when one man is dying of hunger near another who is ill of surfeit, he cannot resign himself to this difference unless there is an authority which declares ‘God wills it thus’. Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet. Napoleon Bonaparte
George Orwell said that the ultimate obscenity would be when one half of the world could watch the other half starving to death on television.
Amazingly in 1984, of all years, that nadir was reached in Ethiopia. George Galloway, Apocalyptic Vision of 1984 is Back, article Daily Record 18th July 2011
Man is of no importance. Look at what happens when you starve him. He begins to eat his dead companions to stay alive. Man is only interested in his own survival. That is all that counts. All the Spinoza stuff is a lot of rubbish. Felix Dzerzinski, Polish aristocrat
What art thou, freedom? Oh, could slaves
Answer from their living graves
This demand, tyrants would flee
Like a dream’s dim imagery.
Thou art not, as impostors say,
A shadow soon to pass away
A superstition and a name
Echoing from the cave of fame.
For the labourer thou art bread,
And a comely table spread
From his daily labour come
To a neat and happy home.
Thou art clothes and fire and food,
For the trampled multitude
No – in countries that are free
Such starvation cannot be
As in England now we see. Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Masque of Anarchy
They deliberately tried to starve the population. The Dark Charisma of Adolf Hitler III: Leading Millions into the Abyss, BBC 2012
‘In the final stages of starvation your lips get somehow stretched and it’s what they call a hungry grin.’ ibid. victim
I believe that one of the saddest things in the world today is that some people don’t have enough food to nourish themselves. It’s the 21st century and that’s really not acceptable, so if I could do something that would change that I would be really happy. Izabel Goulart
What Rolfe finds at Jamestown is hell on Earth. Three years before, the colony was founded by five hundred settlers. When Rolfe arrives, barely sixty remain; they’ve been through a winter of starvation. America: The Story of the US: Rebels, History 2010
We were told four years ago that 17 million people went to bed hungry every night. Well, that was probably true. They were all on a diet. Ronald Reagan, TV speech 27th October 1964
Paris is the only city in the world where starving to death is still considered an art. Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Between 1981 and 1987, the US federal government showed its commitment to the free market by cutting its spending on housing from eight billion dollars to three billion. Housing for the poor, which had to be subsidised, was cut from 20,000 units a year in the 1970s to 5,000 a year in the 1980s.
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher pursued exactly the same free-market policies in Britain, with exactly the same results. Perhaps the most astonishing feature of the great decade of the free market in Britain was the increase in the numbers of poor and homeless people. At the start of the decade, 6.1 million people were living on or below the level at which they were entitled to supplementary benefit. By 1985, this had grown to 9.4 million, and has been growing ever since.
As in the United States, Margaret Thatcher’s interpretation of the free market is that only people who can afford expensive housing really want or need houses. Under her guidance, councils have been almost completely prevented from building subsidised houses to rent. For the first time since the 1880s the streets of central London are filled with hungry, homeless people, begging for money for a meal and preferring to risk the elements rather than spend their pittance on an insanitary and dangerous dosshouse.
This astonishing increase in the starving millions, with all the indescribable wretchedness and hopelessness which goes with it, is the chief achievement of the free market in its Great Decade. Its supporters, led by the American president and the British prime minister, have from time to time harked back to that famous dictum of Christ: ‘the poor ye have always with you’. Jesus Christ, who, if he existed, was certainly poor, seemed to be saying that since there was not enough to go round, some people were bound to end up with next to nothing. Like so many of the remarks attributed to him, this one has been taken up by supporters of the free market everywhere to blame poverty on the poor themselves: on their own fecklessness and inability to ‘better themselves’. Paul Foot, The Case for Socialism chapter 4
The consequences seem to have been terrible. These carvings show emaciated figures, their ribs exposed. It seems starvation swept across Easter Island. And starvation may have led to something even worse. Horizon: The Mystery of Easter Island, BBC 2003
To give food aid to countries just because they are starving is a pretty weak reason. Denny Ellerman, Henry Kissinger staff aide
People starve to death for a number of reasons; the least understood reason is the denial of food for motives of politics and profit. John Pilger, Zap! The Weapon is Food For Dictators, ITV 1976
One of the weapons that brought down the democratically elected Allende government in Chile was food. On Dr Kissinger’s orders most American food aid to Chile was cut off, and hunger and disorder followed, leading to a military take-over which brought Chile back into the American fold. And of course once the generals and admirals were in power, Chile got its food back. ibid.
Up to 1974 the US government had paid American farmers $3 billion not to plant millions of acres of cereal crops. This kept the world price inflated. And as a result the food that was available was beyond the reach of those countries on the Zap List like Chile, and countries like Bangladesh that were considered strategically expendable and had no reserves of hard currency. ‘Hunger,’ said President Harry Truman, ‘is fostered not by scarcity but by greed.’ ibid.
Almost twenty-five thousand people a day die of hunger. Penn & Teller, Bullshit! s1e11: Eat This
These Greenpeace dudes want us to believe that GE crops will ruin other crops and harm any animal or person that eats those foods. These extremists love to use bullshit propaganda ... It’s pretty easy to protest when you’re not hungry. ibid.
Norman Borlaug ... The greatest person that ever lived? At a time when doomsayers were hopping around saying that people were going to starve, Norman was working ... When he won the Noble Prize in 1970 they said he had saved a billion people ... Norman is the greatest human being. ibid.
All food is the product of technology ... Every food has been changed through selective breeding or grafting ... Why is anyone fighting food advance? ibid.
There’s people starving in the Third World. Fuck ’em. Jim Davidson, British right-wing comedian
Shops ran out of food. Prices soared on the black market. People kept alive by eating tulip bulbs. The World at War 18/26: Occupation, ITV 1974
Hitler now stripped Holland bare. ibid.
At winter 16,000 Dutch men, women and children died of hunger. ibid.