Enough of this - you have just given away your your reason for being here which has nothing whatever to do with the debates that take place
JOM
Teribus's pathetic "insulting" name for me (which I grew rather fond of as an indication that he was desperately running out of ideas)
If this is is not a clue to your identity, it is a clear indication of where you are coming from
I'm not here to exchange insults with disaffected extremist right-wingers who can't raise themselves above the level of personal insulting and accuse others of exactly what motivated them - in one particular case, the recurring theme of antisemitism - big-time!
If you are not here to debate famines and their causes but rather, to turn these discussions into soapboxes for hatefests, you really need to go and let those ho genuinely wish to swap ideas get on with it

On the subject in hand - you have obviously not read John Reeds book and, until you have, you are not qualified to comment on it, let alone, condemn it out of hand
Reed was the only western eye-witness to have been present during the Russian Revolution and reported on it extensively
His account, far from being a propaganda exercise, was a detailed and well-documented account of a world shattering event - not a large book by any means, but crammed full of information of the events surrounding the revolution
There are other books from that time, - I've read some of them - but none contain such detail, particularly the differing debates
Far from being the work of a Soviet "dupe", it was disproved of highly by Stalin's regime - your "dupe" comes straight from the most dark period of our history when everything was being thrown at The Soviet Union and when Hitler was regarded as "a bulwark against Bolshevism" by western leaders, including Churchill
If Reed's account is "unreliable" - you need to show why it was; perhaps a good start might be to read it! - probably a ridiculous suggestion as far as you are concerned - books don't appear to be your thing: there is little evidence that they are in any of your arguments.

I have given what I know of the Irish Famine - it has been a life-long interest of mine as it is part of my own family history
It was, as far as I am concerned, a natural disaster deliberately manipulated, first by absentee English landlords to increase their land-ownings though mass evictions, and by English politicians to solve a centuries-old political 'Irish Problem'

As it was, on examination the 'natural disaster' aspect of the Famine is directly traceable back to farming methods forced on the Irish peasantry to fulfill Ireland's role in the British Empire as "Britannia's Breadbasket" - the popular name for Ireland at the time.
This led to farming families having to rely on one type of potato - the "LUMPER" - when that failed the source of nourishment of the Irish people disappeared and, despite the fact that there was four times the amount of food available to feed the Irish, they starved in their millions and as many were forced to emigrate - ethnic cleansing big-time.   

Had the Irish Famine occurred in , say the Midlands or the North of England and had been handled in the manner it was in Ireland, it would have brought about mass unrest, even revolution, as it did here
All the changes that have taken place since the middle of the nineteenth century are directly traceable back to what happened during and immediately following 'The Great Hunger'   

Regarding Famines in general - I came across this fascinating statement publicising a study on twentieth famines by a researcher for the INSTITUTE of DEVELOPMENT STUDIES
"The Institute of Development Studies (IDS) is a leading global institution for development research, teaching and learning, and impact and communications, based at the University of Sussex." hardly a politically-driven propaganda set-up
I haven't read the paper, but the introduction is enough to suggest that though famines are usually caused by natural phenomena, given the political and social will, they are well withing in grasp of governments to deal with the worst effects of them
In my opinion, in today's world that will has never existed, nor will it until the necessities of life are treated as a human right rather than a source of profit
You want to debate Famines - open your tightly -closed, aganda driven minds and do so - without the personal insults
Jim Carroll
Famine in the Twentieth Century Devereux, S., IDS Working Paper 105
Publisher IDS
More than 70 million people died in famines in the twentieth century. Stephen Devereux has compiled data from over 30 major famines and has assessed ,the success of some parts of the world, notably China, the Soviet Union, India and Bangladesh in apparently eradicating mass mortality food crises.
He contrasts this with the experience of sub-Saharan Africa, where famines triggered by the relationship between drought and civil war have become endemic since the late 1960s.
Devereux argues that if famine is to be eradicated during the twenty-first century, it requires not only technical capacity in terms of food production and distribution, but also substantially more political will, at national and international levels, than has been seen to date.