Michael Ellman says that "the very category 'victims of Stalinism' is a matter of political judgement." Ellman says that mass deaths from famines are not a "uniquely Stalinist evil", and compares the behavior of the Stalinist regime vis-à-vis the Holodomor to that of the British Empire (towards Ireland and India) and the G8 in contemporary times. According to Ellman, the latter "are guilty of mass manslaughter or mass deaths from criminal negligence because of their not taking obvious measures to reduce mass deaths" and a possible defense of Stalin and his associates is that "their behaviour was no worse than that of many rulers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries."