Such a patina of reasonableness to your comment but your comparison of the Irish famine to the Holomodor is way overwrought. Holomodor was deliberate and largely not caused by bad harvests. Irish had the potato blight; and in the beginning they were given a large amount of charity.
WRT authoritarianism, govt have a monopoly on violence that individual companies will never have.
Not to pat ourselves on the back to hard, but the reasonable state of today comes in part as a reaction to previous tragedy.
The expansion of government sponsored enterprises with organic police forces is concerning however. Examples in my mind are school districts, transit and other agencies without law enforcement as a core component or competency. To the extent that those forces are bound to the proprietary interests of the enterprise, the bounds of the monopoly are blurred.
In defence of the comparison - it is not at all a consensus that the Holodomor was deliberate from the beginning, that’s an active debate with prominent experts on both sides.
In both famines, there was a refusal to intervene to alleviate the famine once it had begun, and in both cases that was unequivocally a deliberate choice of the British/Soviet leadership.
Further - there are many cases through history of companies steering the state violence, from Colonial India to Blair Mountain to Aaron Swartz.
The broad point here is that the Soviet Union is constantly used in our Western discourse for our own brand of whataboutism.
Our systems fail people constantly and brutally. Our supermarket shelves are stocked, but most of the Anglosphere is in the grips of an unprecedented housing crisis.
There’s absolutely lessons we can learn from the Soviets in housing policy, but we won’t if any mention of them ends up reduced back to their worst failures. They didn’t get their shelves stocked by talking about MKUltra or smallpox blankets all day.
You can argue that the grass is greener overall, but there’s still dead patches all over our lawn. That’s the broader point.
>it is not at all a consensus that the Holodomor was deliberate from the beginning, that’s an active debate with prominent experts on both sides.
Either you're being deliberately dishonest or haven't read enough of the details. Yes, there is debate on what percentage of that gargantuan human tragedy was started by tyrannical incompetence and how much of it was done through deliberate vengefulness by the Stalin government, further moved forward by local initiative, but virtually all experts agree that at least deliberate indifference allowed things to grow monstrously and prolonged them too.
The leaders in Moscow (especially Stalin) and local commissars could soon clearly see that the collectivization policy was practically extinguishing all human life in the Ukrainian countryside, yet they continued to pursue it and even block all avenues of escape, while at the same time exporting grain they'd confiscated from people who were by then dying in their millions.
The British viewed the Irish through Malthusian theory, whose moral and cultural failings they attributed to the cause of the famine. They effectively blamed the Irish peasantry for having too many children while living in a state of poverty, which they viewed as irresponsible. Despite this being as a direct result of their occupation and sectarianism.
The monoculture of potato was solely due to the tenant system imposed on Irish subsistence farmers by the British ruling classes. Ireland remained a net exporter of food during the famine. The supposed 'charity' mainly took the form of workhouses - which were effectively Hospices
One incredible exception was the Choctaw Nation who, fresh off the trail of tears, were so moved by the plight of the Irish peasant that on March 23, 1847, they donated $170 for Irish Famine relief. This was at the height of “Black 47,” when close to a million Irish were starving to death.
To put it simply, Malthus' theory states that famine is caused by overpopulation. Thus the British, by their own basis of justification, deliberately reduced the Irish population. The people targeted were deprived of culture, security, health, and life. They were targeted for reasons of ethnic and cultural intolerance. Ergo constituting Genocide.
The alternative? The aforementioned Workhouses or the aptly named 'Coffin Ships'
WRT authoritarianism, govt have a monopoly on violence that individual companies will never have.