Van Gogh’s peasants, he painted them in 1885, are startlingly unattractive. His subjects were inspired by The Blessing before Supper by Charles de Groux; a more comely assemblage.
This was about half a century after the famine in Ireland and Europe seemed unlikely to go hungry again. In fact the Dutch potato eaters went very hungry in the Second World War but that was not a famine. It’s another story, told very movingly by John Hackett in his after-Arnhem memoir, I was a Stranger.
When I was in Ukraine in April last year I saw a memorial to the famine that Stalin created in 1932/33 – the Holodomor. Click and read. There was an experiment at Yale in the early 1960s: the Milgram shock experiment. Volunteers, tellingly all male, were divided into two groups: teachers and learners. The “teachers” were unaware that the “learner” was an accomplice of Milgram. The experiment purported to prove that men would inflict disproportionate punishment (electric shocks) on their fellow-men if ordered to do so. Milgram initially thought his conclusion might have been influenced by being conducted at Yale so carried it out again in a rented office with much the same outcome.
We wouldn’t do that, would we? Turn the clock back to 2019; imagine the government putting you under house arrest indefinitely. Impossible and you wouldn’t obey, would you? Well in my ‘hood by and large we have.
Do you remember a much-loved, by me anyway, American Western Alias Smith and Jones? Forget about Smith, I treat with Jones, Mr Jones, a film released last year about the Holodomor. It shows how Stalin hid genocide from the world and the acquiescence of some journalists and politicians. The story it doesn’t tell is how Stalin could stamp his authority on a nation. I think Milgram has the answer.