Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World

Rating:
Summary: One of the Best Texts in Recent Memory
Review: Though I agree with other reviewers that Davis is at his best when discussing India, the sections on Brazil, China, and numerous other places (to which he pays insufficient attention, truly) are generally informative. Perhaps it's fair to say that he establishes his argument on the basis of the British genocides in India, and then produces schematic outlines of varying depths for the imperial genocides in China, Brazil, Egypt, the Sudan, Ethiopia, the Philippines, and so on. That slight flaw noted, this text has very high quality--fine documentation and a well reasoned, committed perspective. Overall, this text is probably the first step in rationally countering the trash that is *The Black Book of Communism*--call this chapter one of *The Black Book of Capitalism* (perhaps Blum's *Killing Hope* can be chapter 2).

That said, I feel the need to confront the reviewer from London, who--while writing a generally just review--introduces several distortions into the debate.

Hartley: "Davis concentrates on the the massive famines at the end of the nineteenth century in India China and Brazil, and argues that they were a result of El Nino conditions. Well, actually he doesn't, because he goes to great lengths, in good Marxist tradition, to set up a definition of a famine as a political event - ie they're always someone's fault. So in the case of India the late nineteenth century famines were the fault of the British administration. Well....certainly the attitude of the British, of complacency mixed with racism and backed by a laissez-faire ideology which believed it best not to interfere in these situations - a complex of attitudes seen fifty years earlier in the Irish famine - exacerbated the situation. But the same catastrophe, with comparable death tolls, hit China as well. Ah, but the Opium Wars, you know.....China had already been affected by the deadly virus of Western capitalism, so even if China wasn't a colony, it was still all the fault of the British. And Brazil? More catastrophe, more megadeaths. No problem - Brazil was already part of the London-based capitalist system. Enough said."

Me: Several problems here. A) We get a straw man when Hartley suggests it is Marxist tradition to claim someone must be at fault for all things--though proper Marxists will point out that there is a politics to everything--including the weather. Apparently, Hartley doesn't think this is the case--but he should actually refute Davis on this point, rather than churlishly dismissing the point. B) Hartley deploys another straw man when he implies that Davis says "the deadly virus of Western capitalism" infected China; in fact, Davis' reading of the Manchu Qing dynasty and its policies is much more nuanced than that, and considers a host of issues--including ENSO, the Taiping and other rebellions, surely the Opium Wars, the catastrophic shift of the Yellow River in 1855, and numerous others--including indigenous Chinese corruption, and, yes, some of the more familiar brutalities of the capitalist system. C) Hartley's dismissive attitude toward Davis' thesis regarding the integration of India, China, and Brazil into the world capitalist system is of course his perogative--but it is not a useful intellectual response to a serious historical debate. Rather, Hartley should attempt to actually refute Davis by proving that the genocides indeed were not caused, exacerbated, or otherwise enabled by British capitalism & imperialism.

Hartley: "So as we turn to the 20th century we should see these trends continue? Well, bit of a problem there actually: two of the greatest 20th century famines were unconnected to El Nino, and were in Russia/Ukraine in the thirties, and China during the Great Leap Forward at the start of the sixties."

Me: This statement is fairly dishonest and perplexing, considering that Hartley otherwise is an articulate and intelligent reviewer. Davis *does* make a case for such developments continuing into the 20th century--and he *does* furthermore consider, briefly albeit, both the Ukranian and Chinese famines mentioned above. Though his treatment overall of Russia is one of the most schematic in the text, he does note that the Volga basin seems to feature a correlation of ENSO to drought/famine, and moreover records the 1930 El Nino as correlated to the 1931 drought crisis (269). This undoubtedly does not explain the fullness of the Ukranian famine, but it certainly will contribute to an explanation that otherwise focuses on Stalinist criminality and bungling. The same goes for the Maoist case, where Davis correlates the famines associated with the Great Leap Forward very specifically to ENSO, an argument certainly to be ignored by unreconstructed Cold Warriors and crypto-mccarthyites (248-251).

Hartley: "Davis mentions the latter: "the scale of this holocaust is stupefying, and for many sympathisers with the Chinese revolution, inexplicable". He doesn't declare himself to be such a sympathiser - it would have been more honest for him to do so - but quite clearly he is. He sneers at Jasper Becker's "Hungry Ghosts" on this episode as a "Robert Conquest-like expose". Ah yes, Robert Conquest - isn't he the guy who insisted that the actual victims of Stalinist excesses, in the famines and the gulags, was much higher than previously thought? And is it not now generally accepted that he was, um, right? So the nineteenth century famines were the result of the inexorable logic of imperialism, while the thirties famine in Russia goes unmentioned and the famine in Maoist China is perhaps down to Mao's personal inflexibility. The problem, declares Davis, was the lack of socialist democracy. Good old socialist democracy, eh.....as practiced where, exactly?"

Me: Again, some fairly obtuse dishonesty here. As noted, Davis does in fact mention the Ukranian famine, however briefly, and the straw man about "Mao's personal inflexibility" is simply puerile--for Davis does attempt to explain the Chinese famine as a result of a complex of factors, including human decisions, meteorology, and the weight of the aggregate of history (the suggestion that Chiang, a victorious Japanese invasion, or an outright US occupation of China would've performed better is quite simply laughable, given the circumstances). Also, the adoration heaped on Robert Conquest and the western Cold War Sovietologists is interesting, as these folks would have us believe that, say, Stalin killed 50 million people in the USSR, but still managed to defeat the Nazis, losing 20 million more in the process-such claims make little sense; indeed, the only people who accept Conquest's exaggerations are pathological anti-communists who don't need any evidence because they've already made up their minds. Finally, his snipe about "socialist democracy" never having existed is both disingenuous and manages to evade Davis' point--which was that the lack of two way communication between Beijing and the Chinese peasant allowed for the true extent of the famine to remain releatively unknown to the state planners. It is disingenuous, for as I think Hartley probably knows, any attempts to pair a socialist economy with a political democracy have been destroyed by the Western powers--consider the destruction of Allende's regime in Chile (1973), to take the most famous example, the sabotage of the Vietnamese general elections in 1955, the low intensity warfare carried out against any number of regimes in Latin America or Africa (Nicaragua? Angola?), resulting in their degeneration and destruction, and the crushing of dozens of movements that struggled against autocratic capitalist regimes all over the world (El Salvador? South Africa? Philippines? Indonesia? everywhere in the Middle East?)--all crimes committed by the US precisely to destroy any potential "socialist democracy" from coming into existence and thereby providing a model of development that counters western militarism and economic hegemony, i.e., the friendly fascism of the US and its allies.