During the Holodomor, a mass famine that killed millions in Soviet Ukraine from 1932-1933, Soviet leader Josef Stalin stated that “if only one man dies of hunger, that is a tragedy. If millions die, that’s only statistics.” The Soviet Union experienced a number of famines that killed nearly 10 million people during the first half of the 20th century. Famine, a war tactic that has been used as a tool of genocide in a number of wars, is now taking place in Sudan due to a siege by the Rapid Support Forces and in Gaza, enforced and denied by the Israeli state and its most powerful ally, the United States.
How have states used both the denial and abstraction of famine to further genocidal actions? Click on to find out more.