I just finished watching the documentary, The Great Famine, about US assistance to famine victims in 1921-22. In Communist Russia. Under Lenin.
It is a remarkably poignant story. The photos are heart-breaking—countless images of emaciated bodies, dead or dying. Looks like a Holocaust.
The famine followed more than six years of violence in Russia (WWI, Russian Revolutions, Civil War) and the Communist government’s destructive response (seizing food and grain seeds from the peasants). Estimates vary, but some sources believe at least five million Russians died of starvation .
Herbert Hoover, often maligned for failing, as President of the United States, to mitigate the effects of the Great Depression, came into that office known as the Great Humanitarian–a label earned through his effectiveness as head of the American Relief Administration and related organizations in delivering food to Europe during and after World War I, and to Russia during the Great Famine.
Hoover’s biographer, George Nash, suggested that “Hoover was really the vanguard of that whole approach that has become associated with America in the last hundred years, namely that when there is a humanitarian tragedy in the world, whether from war or famine or revolution or a typhoon or an earthquake… Americans will be there to organize the relief.”
George Nash is probably correct in that assumption, so you gotta ask, “Where was American humanitarianism in 2014 when refugee children seeking asylum from terrible violence in Central America tried to enter the land of the Statue of Liberty?” As a matter of fact, how much humanitarianism do people of color–particularly young Black men–experience in the US today? It is not kindness that is killing them. And finally, would any US Presidential candidate today want to be called a “great humanitarian”? What scorn would THAT label bring from the radical right?