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Churchill's Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II?
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Wow, a lot of contentious threads.
I haven’t read this book before but I heard about it on Revisionist History podcast. Anyways, the book is Churchill's Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II by Madhusree Mukerjee.
> Can you please come with one source that clearly names Brits are responsible for Bengal famine?
Dozens, though they're all Indian and so typically disregarded. You can try starting here
>Urban workers were agitated with propaganda movies that pictured farmers as counter-revolutionaries that hide grains and potatoes.
Replace urban workers with Brits, farmers with Indians, and remove the counter-, and the same is true.
>The First Five-Year Plan changed the output expected from Ukrainian farms, from the familiar crop of grain to unfamiliar crops like sugar beets and cotton.
Replace Five-Year Plan with the British Raj and cotton with things like indigo and the same is true.
>Because there are sources that claims that holodomor was man made and intentional.
You know that the people who started that narrative were literally British and American propagandists, right? Robert Conquest, who did more than anyone else to start the "Stalin worse than Hitler" circlejerk, was employed by IRD. Citing the claims of such men is little better than citing the front page of Pravda.
hey dipshit, its reporting on a study. I don't expect colonizers to understand the pain of colonization. Churchill was scumbag imperialist racist warlord, may he burn in hell eternally. His actions on Bengal were troubling even to others who were in charge of the British Raj.
> Leo Amery, Secretary of State for India and Burma and a contemporary of Churchill, likened his understanding of India's problems to King George III's apathy for the Americas. In his private diaries, Amery wrote "on the subject of India, Winston is not quite sane" and that he did not "see much difference between [Churchill's] outlook and Hitler's".
the man had complete contempt for Indians. btw, Bengal isn't just some random place it was the epicenter of the resistance to British Raj. You can read British historian Christopher Bayly, assessment of the reluctance to provide aid to Bengal and its relations to the Quit India movement.
edit: do yourself a favor go to the library and check out "Churchill's Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II" by Madhusree Mukerjee, its a well researched account of the Bengal Famine.
Some Excerpts from Shashi Tharoor's review of the book.
>British imperialism had long justified itself with the pretense that it was conducted for the benefit of the governed. Churchill's conduct in the summer and fall of 1943 gave the lie to this myth. "I hate Indians," he told the Secretary of State for India, Leopold Amery. "They are a beastly people with a beastly religion." The famine was their own fault, he declared at a war-cabinet meeting, for "breeding like rabbits."
>As Mukerjee's accounts demonstrate, some of India's grain was also exported to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to meet needs there, even though the island wasn't experiencing the same hardship; Australian wheat sailed past Indian cities (where the bodies of those who had died of starvation littered the streets) to depots in the Mediterranean and the Balkans; and offers of American and Canadian food aid were turned down. India was not permitted to use its own sterling reserves, or indeed its own ships, to import food. And because the British government paid inflated prices in the open market to ensure supplies, grain became unaffordable for ordinary Indians. Lord Wavell, appointed Viceroy of India that fateful year, considered the Churchill government's attitude to India "negligent, hostile and contemptuous."
> Mukerjee delves into official documents and oral accounts of survivors to paint a horrifying portrait of how Churchill, as part of the Western war effort, ordered the diversion of food from starving Indians to already well-supplied British soldiers and stockpiles in Britain and elsewhere in Europe, including Greece and Yugoslavia. And he did so with a churlishness that cannot be excused on grounds of policy: Churchill's only response to a telegram from the government in Delhi about people perishing in the famine was to ask why Gandhi hadn't died yet.
Churchill said that history would judge him kindly because he intended to write it himself. The self-serving but elegant volumes he authored on the war led the Nobel Committee, unable in all conscience to bestow him an award for peace, to give him, astonishingly, the Nobel Prize for Literature — an unwitting tribute to the fictional qualities inherent in Churchill's self-justifying embellishments.
> Call Churchill and Roosevelt as War Criminals instead.
Here a book sold on Amazon UK calling Churchill a war criminal - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Churchills-Secret-War-British-Ravaging/dp/0465024815
Here is a book sold on Amazon USA calling Roosevelt a war criminal - https://www.amazon.com/Day-Deceit-Truth-About-Harbor/dp/0743201299
> Let the German claim Holocaust denial
Germany to erase their sordid history have enacted a law specifically against. I don't agree with it, but it's there.
Of course, we are comparing this to a screenshot of "Honeymoon Hotel" :-) You guys are hilarious.
I knew you were saying this. Not a surprise as I've debate many Churchill fans.
Read this book: [Churchill's Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II
And especially this...
Reading this you get the perspective of Indians side of the story instead of Westerns.
I'd really appreciate if you can provide a [reputable] source that supports your argument?
Here are some that disapprove your argument: https://www.amazon.com/Churchills-Secret-War-British-Ravaging/dp/0465024815
Some articles: https://yourstory.com/2014/08/bengal-famine-genocide/ http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/soutikbiswas/2010/10/how_churchill_starved_india.html https://www.quora.com/Why-are-the-British-blamed-for-the-Bengal-Famine-of-1943-instead-of-the-Japanese
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Churchills-Secret-War-British-Ravaging/dp/0465024815 This book, and this podcast has a good summary: http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/15-the-prime-minister-and-the-prof
Hmm, I wonder if a website called the "Churchill Project might be a little biased.
Per Mukerjee:
> The War Cabinet's shipping assignments made in August 1943, shortly after Amery had pleaded for famine relief, show Australian wheat flour traveling to Ceylon, the Middle east, and Southern Africa – everywhere in the Indian Ocean but to India. Those assignments show a will to punish.
In addition, the provincial government of Bengal never declared a state of famine. At best we have utterly incompetent and deadly neglect, at worst we have purposeful murder. Not that that isn't a common thread in imperial history...
Here is the other post that I thought I responded to you, and I did not:
is plenty of evidence that it could have been prevented: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/soutikbiswas/2010/10/how_churchill_starved_india.html Here is a whole book: "https://www.amazon.com/Churchills-Secret-War-British-Ravaging/dp/0465024815/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1481303289&sr=8-1&keywords=churchills+secret+war" The common white-Western narrative that it was preventable is false. Here is a key piece for you: "The scarcity, Mukherjee writes, was caused by large-scale exports of food from India for use in the war theatres and consumption in Britain - India exported more than 70,000 tonnes of rice between January and July 1943, even as the famine set in. This would have kept nearly 400,000 people alive for a full year. Mr Churchill turned down fervent pleas to export food to India citing a shortage of ships - this when shiploads of Australian wheat, for example, would pass by India to be stored for future consumption in Europe. As imports dropped, prices shot up and hoarders made a killing. Mr Churchill also pushed a scorched earth policy - which went by the sinister name of Denial Policy - in coastal Bengal where the colonisers feared the Japanese would land. So authorities removed boats (the lifeline of the region) and the police destroyed and seized rice stocks." Read on the topic before using insults. " I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion. The famine was their own fault for breeding like rabbits.” -Winston Churchill
> Hitler wasn't better during WW2
From our point of view.
Different countries have different interests. Israelis put a higher emphasis on tragedies that affected them directly. Americans put a higher emphasis on tragedies that affected them directly. So do the Russians, Amenians, Polish and every other people. We are Indians -- why should we, uniquely in the world, put others major tragedies, ahead of our own?
Remember -- Hitler was not genocidal towards Indians. Millions of Indians did not die because of him.
We should not be ignoring the fact that the death of millions o Indians is more pertinent to us.
> Nope this is simply not true,
It is. See Churchill's Secret War
> Churchill did is in no way comparable to the holocaust or the evil perpetrated by Imperial Japan.
It is ironic you say that, because in the first para I pointed out that India gave Hirohito 3 days of official mourning when he died. Hirohito was the head of Imperial Japan in WW2. He wielded the power in a pretty hands on manner, often overruling his generals/admirals. To ignore him is a pretty large gap for someone implicitly claiming to knowledgeable in "real history".
>There is a tremendous difference in degrees. To say otherwise is to lessen the victims of the holocaust and the victims in most of eastern Asia.
Many magnitudes more of Indians died due to British Rule. Even the period covered by Mike Davis' Late Victorian Holocausts has around 30 million. I have sympathy for the family of Holocaust victims, but it is you who are trivializing the deaths of tens of millions of Indians.
Oh really? Why don't you read 'Churchill's Secret war' to get what happened instead of believing what any administration interested in self preservation would say?
http://www.amazon.in/Churchills-Secret-War-British-Ravaging/dp/0465024815
Here's a good review of that by Shashi Tharoor, an Indian MP who was also at the UN as undersecretary
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2031992,00.html
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