Death by Design
When starvation becomes strategy
There is a peculiar quality to the language we use around famine, the way we reach for words like “tragedy” and “disaster,” as if hunger descends like weather — random, natural, unavoidable. But spend any time examining the great famines of history, and you begin to see the architecture beneath the catastrophe. The blueprints. The signatures.
What emerges is this: famine is rarely about food. It is about power. About who matters and who doesn’t. About which lives get counted and which disappear into statistics that will be disputed for decades. If you look closely at Gaza, at Sudan, at any place where hunger has become epidemic, you see not scarcity but strategy. Not shortage but systems.
The Mathematics of Deliberation
In Gaza, half a million people face starvation while someone, somewhere, maintains precise records of their dying — as if documentation were a form of action, as if knowing could substitute for preventing. The bureaucracy of death has its own vocabulary: IPC Phase 5, catastrophic food insecurity, famine thresholds. But beneath these clinical terms lies something more primal — organized groups ransacking homes for anything edible, from crops to personal food supplies to pets.