ABSTRACT
The preceding contributions have raised many difficult questions and have answered them well. Why, they ask, are monuments commemorating past famines in Scotland in the 1840s, in Spain in the 1930s–40s, and in the Netherlands in 1944–45 so few, while commemorations of the Great Ukrainian Famine of 1932–33 are ubiquitous (Gouriévidis, Chapter 7; Del Arco Blanco and Madden, Chapter 9; De Zwarte and Jensen, Chapter 4)? Why did such lieux de mémoire remain contentious in Finland for a century or more after the event they commemorated (Boerman, Chapter 8)? Why does the main monument commemorating the Greek famine of 1941–44 depict ‘a woman and a child, when adult men and the elderly were the main famine casualties, and […] is situated in Athens, when other localities suffered more than the capital’ (Hionidou, Chapter 5)? Why are the treatments of past famines so different in Soviet, Irish, and Finnish textbooks (Bobeldijk, Chapter 2)? 2 Why is memorialisation in Ireland and in Scotland, to some degree at least, being channelled into present-day environmental and climate justice concerns (Gouriévidis, Chapter 7), while elsewhere famines are weaponised to sustain old enmities (Kudela-Świątek, Chapter 6)? 3
