[joeclark77]

Friend of mine just posted this to Facebook. It's sensationalist garbage with anti-British bigotry thrown in. Draws a false equivalence between Hitler (who deliberately exterminated millions) and Churchill (whose "policies" were supposedly unintentionally "responsible" for the famine). That's outrageous even if the history were true. In fact, it isn't. The article claims that "Churchill could easily have prevented the famine." This imbues Churchill with super-powers, and completely ignores the facts of the day: Bengal was a net importer of food and most of its food came from Burma, which had just been conquered by the Japanese. Shipping food from Australia or other places might have been a solution, but Allied merchant shipping was under attack all over the world from the Japanese and German navies. How would it have gotten there in time? And why would that have been the default solution, when neighboring provinces in India had food surpluses and should have been the natural place to expect aid from. The tehelka article also mendaciously suggests that "Myanmar" (a country which didn't exist until the 1990s) offered to help feed Bengal, but the offer was kept secret by cruel British "censors".

Any "help" from "Myanmar" would have come in the form of a conquering Japanese army. Would they have brought some truckloads of rice with them from Burma? Sure. Would they have shared it with the Indians? Probably not. And despite the "censors", I think the Japanese were pretty open about their willingness to conquer and enslave (er, "help") the suffering Indians. I would invite our Indian friends to ask the Chinese if that would have been a good deal.

The Wikipedia article on the 1943 famine is a much more serious read.

[cubancigar11]

FTFY: Churchill's 'policies' were supposedly intentionally "responsible" for the famine.

Link to actual wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943#Governme... (the article has NPOV problems for more than a year now).

For the British apologists, here is the quote to give you some acquaintance with the subject of Britain induced famines:

"During the first eighty years of the nineteenth century, 18,000,000 of people perished of famine. In one year alone—the year when her late Majesty assumed the title of Empress—5,000,000 of the people in Southern India were starved to death. In the District of Bellary, with which I am personally acquainted,—a region twice the size of Wales,—one-fourth of the population perished in the famine of 1816-77."

"Suppose we divide the past century into quarters, or periods of twenty-five years each. In the first quarter there were five famines, with an estimated loss of life of 1,000,000. During the second quarter of the century there were two famines, with an estimated mortality of 500,000. During the third quarter there were six famines, with a recorded loss of life of 5,000,000. During the last quarter of the century, what? Eighteen famines, with an estimated mortality reaching the awful totals of from 15,000,000 to 26,000,000. And this does not include the many more millions (over 6,000,000 in a single year) barely kept alive by government doles."

- From an article printed back in 1908 (http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1908/10/the-new-...). The actual article is much more detailed and better written. And it has less reason to view history from distorted mirrors than we have 110 years later.

The reason Churchill was different from Hitler was because Hitler had an effect in Europe, while Churchill was conservatively continuing the thats-how-people-used-to-think-then policy towards his 'lesser subjects'.

[_delirium]

Even so, the comparison with Hitler and the Holocaust is a bit off, I think: the famine in India is not too similar to an industrialized extermination infrastructure, with concentration camps, gas chambers, bureaucratized selection and rail transfer, meticulous record keeping, etc. The uniqueness of the Holocaust is not just in that a lot of people died, but in how: via the application of modern infrastructure to produce a large-scale, industrial death machine.

One can still make unfavorable comparisons to other "evil" figures, where the analogy is imo closer. If indeed Churchill is responsible for an essentially deliberate famine, one could compare him to Stalin, and the probably-deliberate famine in the Ukraine. Or, if he's merely responsible for a large famine via negligence, one could compare him to Mao, and the probably-not-deliberate famine in China.

[cubancigar11]

Yes, holocaust is going to extreme. But mis-rule on India was extremely systematic and not just failure of a government. It is sad we cannot give that tragedy a name of its own.

[enscr]

Why would you call this garbage & bigotry. There seems to be evidence supporting Churchill's attitude towards Indians:

"Churchill’s excuse — currently being peddled by his family and supporters — was Britain could not spare the ships to transport emergency supplies, but Mukerjee has unearthed documents that challenge his claim. She cites official records that reveal ships carrying grain from Australia bypassed India on their way to the Mediterranean"

&

"Churchill’s hostility toward Indians has long been documented. At a War Cabinet meeting, he blamed the Indians themselves for the famine, saying they “breed like rabbits”. His attitude toward Indians may be summed up in his words to Amery: “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.” On another occasion, he insisted they were “the beastliest people in the world next to the Germans”.

[joeclark77]

So what if he didn't like Indians? How do you go from that claim, to the claim that he perpetrated a "holocaust" against them? It's a monstrous calumny.

[enscr]

'Not liking' is not the same as 'hostility' & 'hate' ! I don't know what's your source of information but you are quite misinformed about how British ruled in India. There's no point in debating all this here. This is not the right forum. But you are wrong about your statements. You need to read more on British Indian history.

Unrelated to Churchill but worth reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jallianwala_Bagh_massacre

[waps]

You forget, this guy is western, and must be guilty of anything he could prevent.

By that standard, of course, Gandhi would also be worse than Hitler, as he could have prevented massacres during the partition that killed much more people than Hitler ever did. In fact, he is accused of directly instigating several massacres, a hell of a lot "more guilty" than Churchill would be even if this were true. If this is true, Churchill refused to get people out of a big mess they got themselves into (which, granted, does sound like something he might do).

https://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/PSEUDOSC/ProblemWithPacifism.HTM

[sridharvembu]

To be clear, there are extremely few Indians who hold any kind of grudge about the British. On the contrary, the English language is more popular than ever, 60 years after the British left.

History is full of injustices. I don't see why the present generation of Indians should hold onto what happened to their grandparents generation. We don't need to suffer history now, we get to live in the present - that is the attitude I see in most people in India. That is why India is as peaceful as it is (we have to normalize whatever good or bad is happening to the population - "India" is not an aggregate in the same sense that, say, "Sweden" is an aggregate - so whatever happens in Sweden once a year would happen almost once a day in India, simply based on the relative population sizes).

[GFK_of_xmaspast]

"One may dislike Hitler's system and yet admire his patriotic achievement. If our country were defeated, I hope we should find a champion as admirable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations."

[cafard]

The Japanese army in Burma had its own supply problems, and a lot of the soldiers starved during their retreat.

But if the neighboring provinces had food surpluses, why didn't the authorities manage a transfer?

[joeclark77]

Apparently, because it's the responsibility of Britain, Australia, and Canada to feed hungry Indians, or something. This is the "soft bigotry of low expectations", the assumption that Indians are children who could not take care of themselves.

How else do you get the argument that Churchill was intentionally killing Indians because he "had a bad attitude" toward them and because he didn't risk enough merchant shipping during a world war to ship food there?

[cubancigar11]

> Apparently, because it's the responsibility of Britain, Australia, and Canada to feed hungry Indians,

I am not sure if you are trolling or you are deliberately distorting the view. India was being ruled by Britain, Indians were paying more taxes (if somehow you think it was just tax and not outright looting) than any living or dead British has ever paid to the crown. Why shouldn't 'hungry Indians' expect to be fed? You do realize your bigotry is very visible when you refer to a famine by 'hungry people expect government to feed them', implying Indians were just lazy. Have you read the article I posted? Have you ever read any historical documents written _by the British themselves_ while the famine was going on?

"What is the cause of these famines... there seems to be no evidence that the rains fail worse now than they did a hundred years ago... rains have never failed over areas so extensive as to prevent the raising of enough food in the land to supply the needs of the entire population... Not because there was lack of food in the famine areas, brought by railways or otherwise within easy reach of all... the chief and fundamental cause has been and is... a poverty so severe and terrible that it keeps the majority of the entire population on the very verge of starvation even in years of greatest plenty, prevents them from laying up anything against times of extremity, and hence leaves them, when their crops fail, absolutely undone—with nothing between them and death...

And the people are growing poorer and poorer. The late Mr. William Digby, of London, long an Indian resident, in his recent book entitled "Prosperous" India, shows from official estimates and Parliamentary and Indian Blue Books, that, whereas the average daily income of the people of India in the year 1850 was estimated as four cents per person (a pittance on which one wonders that any human being can live), in 1882 it had fallen to three cents per person, and in 1900 actually to less than two cents per person.

What causes this awful and growing impoverishment of the Indian people? Said John Bright, "If a country be found possessing a most fertile soil, and capable of bearing every variety of production, and, notwithstanding, the people are in a state of extreme destitution and suffering, the chances are there is some fundamental error in the government of that country."

Seriously man, try to read the very next paragraph in the article.

[joeclark77]

Since when is it a function of government to feed the hungry and clothe the naked? Britain was not yet a cradle-to-grave welfare state at the time of World War II. Government does have moral obligations -- to enforce just laws, defend the peace, etc -- and (you may not have heard about this) the British at the time were busy fighting an existential battle for the survival of freedom and civilization, including India's.

I am not calling Indians lazy. I am challenging the assumption that "If it was theoretically possible that somehow X could have saved Y from a famine, no matter how unlikely, then X is responsible for the famine." It is beyond outrageous to argue that Britain intentionally killed millions of Indians based on that stupid theory. It is not I who am infantilizing Indians, but you sir.

[cubancigar11]

Yes you are infantilizing Indians when you say 'since when is it a function of government to feed the hungry and clothe the naked', implying that Indians were hungary and naked before British came, or probably due to some reason that doesn't involve a direct role of British government, laying all the irresponsibility at door steps of famine stricken people. BULL-SH*T. And I am not going to copy-paste well articulated reasons here for you. Go read the next paragraph and preferabbly the whole article.

I mean, the article was published in 1908 - three decades prior to WW2 and emergence of welfare states in europe - and 100 years ago from today. Yet it is sufficient to refute you! Do I really need to show the triviality in whatever you are trying to debate? Well done creating the strawman of welfare states. And stop referring to systematic famines where millions died by calling it 'hungry naked irresponsible people'. Britain actively and systematically refused to take responsibility of its 'subjects', knowing full well what it implied in human costs, for the only reason that it didn't consider Indians human enough. Churchill is the poster boy of this colonial thinking. Ref.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winston_Churchill#Indian_indep...

'In response to an urgent request by the Secretary of State for India, Leo Amery, and Viceroy of India, Wavell, to release food stocks for India, Churchill responded with a telegram to Wavell asking, if food was so scarce, "why Gandhi hadn't died yet."'