How hunger drives conflicts
By Timothy Snyder |
May 11, 2012, Friday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
CALORIES were made to be counted, but they have generally been counted for two very different reasons. We associate calories with excess, but for most of its history this little unit of energy was linked to shortage. The years since World War II have been a time of cheap and plentiful food, and of obese and sick citizens. Since our own daily struggle is fought against fat, we fail to see that many of the conflicts of the past were wars against hunger. Just as obesity leads to diabetes and human blindness, so plentiful food leads to decadent forms of history and social blindness. We are fortunate to have a bracing book like "The Taste of War," which does much to correct understanding of the causes of armed conflict and mass murder.
If World War II were only about bad ideas, as we like to think, then we are all safe. But if the war and its atrocities had to do with material want, we cannot so easily separate ourselves from evil. Lizzie Collingham soberly argues that the expansionist designs of both Nazi Germany and imperial Japan must be understood within a world political economy in which the single crucial commodity was food. The British Empire had dominated a global system of free trade that was disrupted by the Great Depression. States like Germany and Japan, unable to supply themselves with sufficient food for their own citizens from domestic sources, had two choices. They could play the game by the British rules, which could seem humiliating and pointless in the 1930s, or they could try to control more territory.
Collingham, the author of "Imperial Bodies" and "Curry," sketches the hunger motive on the body of the Japanese soldier in Asia, who not only starved others but was starved himself. The energetic Japanese attacks remembered with chagrin by British and American soldiers were driven by the need to capture food from the enemy. In the end, more Japanese soldiers died from starvation and associated diseases than in combat.
Nazi Germany planned to control a vast Eastern European empire whose inhabitants would be starved in the tens of millions. It was a rare case of planning more murder in war than actually happened. When the Nazis had to choose whom to starve in an uncertain and long war, they thought racially and picked the Jews. Most of the world's Jews, seen by the Nazis as the source of all ills to Germany, lived in the very territories that were to be colonized. Collingham shows, and here she is in the mainstream of Holocaust historians working beyond the United States, how food shortages were one factor that led toward the policy of full extermination.
Another reason we dismiss the material causes of war is that aggressive wars of colonization tend to fail. The Germans and the Japanese lost the war and returned to home territory and home islands. The Germans had hoped to supply themselves for eternity with grain from the rich black soil of Ukraine; but in fact they got very little. This is because, as Collingham demonstrates, war itself tends to disrupt labor, harvests and markets.
The American understanding of World War II arises from the special circumstances that made it, for us, the source of postwar plenty.
Collingham's book masterfully corrects our understanding of the great conflict that made America what it is, and thus prepares us for the conflicts that are all too likely to come. Its usefulness is hard to overstate.
If World War II were only about bad ideas, as we like to think, then we are all safe. But if the war and its atrocities had to do with material want, we cannot so easily separate ourselves from evil. Lizzie Collingham soberly argues that the expansionist designs of both Nazi Germany and imperial Japan must be understood within a world political economy in which the single crucial commodity was food. The British Empire had dominated a global system of free trade that was disrupted by the Great Depression. States like Germany and Japan, unable to supply themselves with sufficient food for their own citizens from domestic sources, had two choices. They could play the game by the British rules, which could seem humiliating and pointless in the 1930s, or they could try to control more territory.
Collingham, the author of "Imperial Bodies" and "Curry," sketches the hunger motive on the body of the Japanese soldier in Asia, who not only starved others but was starved himself. The energetic Japanese attacks remembered with chagrin by British and American soldiers were driven by the need to capture food from the enemy. In the end, more Japanese soldiers died from starvation and associated diseases than in combat.
Nazi Germany planned to control a vast Eastern European empire whose inhabitants would be starved in the tens of millions. It was a rare case of planning more murder in war than actually happened. When the Nazis had to choose whom to starve in an uncertain and long war, they thought racially and picked the Jews. Most of the world's Jews, seen by the Nazis as the source of all ills to Germany, lived in the very territories that were to be colonized. Collingham shows, and here she is in the mainstream of Holocaust historians working beyond the United States, how food shortages were one factor that led toward the policy of full extermination.
Another reason we dismiss the material causes of war is that aggressive wars of colonization tend to fail. The Germans and the Japanese lost the war and returned to home territory and home islands. The Germans had hoped to supply themselves for eternity with grain from the rich black soil of Ukraine; but in fact they got very little. This is because, as Collingham demonstrates, war itself tends to disrupt labor, harvests and markets.
The American understanding of World War II arises from the special circumstances that made it, for us, the source of postwar plenty.
Collingham's book masterfully corrects our understanding of the great conflict that made America what it is, and thus prepares us for the conflicts that are all too likely to come. Its usefulness is hard to overstate.
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