Like all living creatures, human beings need food to survive. Yet, across history and into the present day, there are those who, consumed by an insatiable hunger for power, seek to deny others even this most basic necessity. Starvation has long been wielded as a weapon by the powerful against the weak, turning economic and political structures into instruments of death. The world’s wealthiest build their empires on the suffering of the poor, ensuring that famine, displacement, and destruction become tools of control rather than inevitable tragedies.
From the Irish famine of the 19th century, engineered by the British imperialists to exterminate a people they deemed inferior, to the ongoing genocide and forced starvation of Palestinians in Gaza, the pattern remains unchanged. Whether through indifference or calculated cruelty, oppressors mask their crimes behind political justifications, yet the outcome is always the same: a devastated people, forced either into exile or into the abyss of starvation and death.
As the historian Cecil Woodham-Smith wrote of the Irish famine in 1962, “it left hatred behind. Between Ireland and England, the memory of what was done and endured has lain like a sword.” This hatred, this deep and unrelenting rage, does not fade with time. The forced emigration of millions of Irish to distant shores did not erase their pain; instead, it ensured that their resentment would burn for generations. Today, in Dublin, thousands march in solidarity with the Palestinians, for they recognize the same hand of imperialist cruelty that once sought to destroy them.
The Israeli leadership, much like their British imperialist predecessors, believe themselves untouchable, insulated from the consequences of their crimes. But history has no patience for arrogance. Do they truly believe that they can break the Palestinian people without igniting a force greater than themselves? That they can steal land, murder civilians, and starve children into submission without consequence? The fate of all oppressors is written in the annals of history: the wretched of the earth always rise, and when they do, the terrified become terrifying.
Frantz Fanon, in his profound analysis of colonial oppression, understood the link between land, bread, and dignity. “For a colonized people, the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity.” The oppressed do not merely seek food; they seek justice. And when justice is denied long enough, desperation turns to revolution.
Marx and Victor Hugo warned us that without bread, the desperate become desperadoes. It is a lesson lost on those who believe their power eternal, who assume that military might and economic strangulation can silence the cries of the starving. But famine is never just about food. There is a physical hunger, and there is a deeper, more dangerous hunger, the hunger for recognition, for freedom, for vengeance against those who dehumanize and destroy.
What drives this madness? What is this demonic force that compels men to starve, torture, and kill? At the root of oppression lies fear, a fear so deep that it must be masked with domination. Humans are not just physical beings; they are symbolic creatures, forever seeking ways to escape their own mortality. The drive to be superior, to be chosen, is an attempt to defy the inevitability of death. As Ernest Becker wrote in The Denial of Death, humans live in a world of symbols, but their physical reality betrays them. No matter how high they rise, they must still eat, still excrete, still decay. This truth is intolerable, so they turn their anxieties outward, onto others, onto those they perceive as lesser.
This existential terror fuels genocide. The oppressors, in their desperate bid to feel godlike, reduce their victims to nothing, stripping them of land, identity, and even food. The chosen enemy is declared subhuman, a creature undeserving of life. But history is relentless in its verdict: the oppressed will not remain oppressed forever. Deny people bread long enough, and they will take it with bloodied hands.
What if the world did not operate on this madness? What if the hunger for symbolic dominance could be replaced with a hunger for justice? In a world where humans recognized their shared mortality rather than transferring their fears onto others, famine would not exist as a weapon. The bread of truth would replace the bread of death, and no one would seek to be number one, for all would feast as equals.
If only Israeli and U.S. leaders had the wisdom to learn from history. If only they could read Moby Dick and understand its warning, that the madness of men surpasses even the folly of beasts. If only they could see that their obsession with conquest and annihilation will not bring them peace, but only an ever-expanding war.
But they have chosen war, and now, the dark furies wait.
By Hon. Chimazuru Nnadi-Oforgu
OBLONG MEDIA UNLIMITED 
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