The real Hunger Games.

Famished, but not for the Fuerer?

Turns out the reason European and Asian people swallowed half-baked ideology in the 30s and 40s was not because they were hungry for world domination--according to Lizzie Collingham's new book, The Taste of War, they were just plain hungry.  Collingham posits that the Depression disrupted food supplies for much of the world, and it was the drive for agricultural lands that pushed the Axis powers to war.  In fact, more Japanese soldiers died of starvation and related diseases than from Allied bullets.  Post-war, U.S. agriculture, rich in technology, reaped a bonanza that led Americans to believe it was our free-market, laissez-faire economy rather than our herbicides that made us flourish. In his admiring review of the book, historian Timothy Snyder points out:


More streudel, less Stalin?


The improvements in technology (pesticides, fertilizers, hybrids) were very real, and spread from the United States to the rest of the world after the war. They were and remain enough to oversupply America and Europe with food. Had this green revolution come 20 years earlier, World War II might have been unthinkable.

But now, in meat-eating world of climate change and water shortages, "(t)he early 21st century is coming to resemble the early 20th century, with expectations of shortfall influencing ideology and strategy," Snyder notes, leading to the question, "how would we behave if we anticipated that we will no longer be able to feed ourselves as we are accustomed?"

Gives a whole new meaning to the term Big Mac Attack, doesn't it?

Here's the link:  http://tinyurl.com/cfxsara


World War--Would we be not just Lovin' It but Startin' It if we were starving?