Some details on British sexual colonialism:
<!--QuoteBegin-"Acharya"+-->QUOTE("Acharya")<!--QuoteEBegin--><i>Acharya:
Interesting tid-bit about Indians being allowed in British messes. I wish there was a book detailing all the small b@s**** done by the Brits.  A consolidated book of all the lvoe and care bestowed on us. I don't think such a book exists.
By the way, you wrote "After WWII the Allied powers went and changed all the book material and media quotes from past colonial leaders to make it more politically correct in the entire world." What is your basis of this claim?  Surely, if the record would exist and can pulled out.  Are you sure your facts are correct?</i>
Some forums are planning to document all the available details about colonial project.
http://www.india-forum.com/forums/index....topic=1747
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ockham/...s19040.htm
<!--QuoteBegin--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->
I have recently published a very detailed account of this two-century holocaust in British India that commenced with the Great Bengal Famine of 1769-1770 (10-million victims) and concluded with the World War 2 Bengal Famine (4-million victims) and took tens of millions of lives in between. <i>In contrast to the response to the Jewish Holocaust, these events have been almost completely written out of history and removed from general perception and there has been no apology nor amends made.</i>
A return from the current annual mortalities of about 10 per 1000 to the 35 per 1000 per year that obtained in British India in 1947 would yield a Third World excess mortality in 2050 of a staggering 200-million persons per year.
"One of the most extraordinary examples of such whitewashing of history is the sustained, continuing deletion of two centuries of massive, recurrent, man-made famine in British India from British and world history, and hence from general public perception. <i>This massive, sustained lying by omission by two centuries of British academic historians occurred in a society having Parliamentary democracy, the means to readily disseminate information and a steadily expanding literate population. Furthermore, this process of lying by omission continues to this day in Britain and its English-speaking offshoots, such as Australia, countries having free speech, high literacy, democracy, prosperity and extensive media of all kinds.</i>
Just recently, Niall Ferguson, the noted British historian was quoted as saying that on the whole, British rule has been good for the countries affected. It is probably fair to say that Davis' book makes it clear that any beneficial effects of British rule, in India for example, were accidental.
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
This is the book to start with. The amount of details and references should be enough to cover decades of data.
<b>
Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (Paperback)
by Mike Davis (Author)
# Paperback: 470 pages
# Publisher: Verso (July 2002)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 1859843824
# ISBN-13: 978-1859843826
</b>
Apologists for Brits have always used laying railway lines in India as their pet arguments in support of the British Raj.
Here's inconclusive proof that they had best intentions of Indians in mind when they laid out those railway line:
<img src='http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v130/indiaforum/BritsTrain.jpg' border='0' alt='user posted image' />
See how neat, trim and healthy looking these Indians are after getting some exercise.
http://www.india-forum.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=8
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2005/12/27...its-holocausts/
<b>
Why do so few people know about the atrocities of empire?</b>
By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 27th December 2005
In reading the reports of the trial of the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, you are struck by two things. The first of course is the anachronistic brutality of the countryâs laws. Mr Pamuk, like scores of other writers and journalists, is being prosecuted for âdenigrating Turkishnessâ, which means that he dared to mention the Armenian genocide in the first world war and the killing of the Kurds in the past decade. The second is its staggering, blithering stupidity. If there is one course of action which could be calculated to turn these massacres into live issues, it is the trial of the countryâs foremost novelist for mentioning them.
As it prepares for accession, the Turkish government will discover that the other members of the European Union have found a more effective means of suppression. Without legal coercion, without the use of baying mobs to drive writers from their homes, we have developed an almost infinite capacity to forget our own atrocities.
Atrocities? Which atrocities? When a Turkish writer uses that word, everyone in Turkey knows what he is talking about, even if they deny it vehemently. But most British people will stare at you blankly. So let me give you two examples, both of which are as well documented as the Armenian genocide.
In his book Late Victorian Holocausts, published in 2001, Mike Davis tells the story of the famines which killed between 12 and 29 million Indians(1). These people were, he demonstrates, murdered by British state policy.
When an El Nino drought destituted the farmers of the Deccan plateau in 1876 there was a net surplus of rice and wheat in India. But the viceroy, Lord Lytton, insisted that nothing should prevent its export to England. In 1877 and 1878, at height of the famine, grain merchants exported a record 6.4 million hundredweight of wheat. As the peasants began to starve, government officials were ordered âto discourage relief works in every possible wayâ(2). The Anti-Charitable Contributions Act of 1877 prohibited âat the pain of imprisonment private relief donations that potentially interfered with the market fixing of grain prices.â The only relief permitted in most districts was hard labour, from which anyone in an advanced state of starvation was turned away. Within the labour camps, the workers were given less food than the inmates of Buchenwald. In 1877, monthly mortality in the camps equated to an annual death rate of 94%.
As millions died, the imperial government launched âa militarized campaign to collect the tax arrears accumulated during the drought.â The money, which ruined those who might otherwise have survived the famine, was used by Lytton to fund his war in Afghanistan. Even in places which had produced a crop surplus, the governmentâs export policies, like Stalinâs in the Ukraine, manufactured hunger. In the North-western provinces, Oud and the Punjab, which had brought in record harvests in the preceding three years, at least 1.25m died.
Three recent books - Britainâs Gulag by Caroline Elkins, Histories of the Hanged by David Anderson and Web of Deceit by Mark Curtis - show how white settlers and British troops suppressed the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya in the 1950s. Thrown off their best land and deprived of political rights, the Kikuyu started to organise - some of them violently - against colonial rule. The British responded by driving up to 320,000 of them into concentration camps(3). Most of the remainder - over a million - were held in âenclosed villagesâ. Prisoners were questioned with the help of âslicing off ears, boring holes in eardrums, flogging until death, pouring paraffin over suspects who were then set alight, and burning eardrums with lit cigarettes.â(4) British soldiers used a âmetal castrating instrumentâ to cut off testicles and fingers. âBy the time I cut his balls off,â one settler boasted, âhe had no ears, and his eyeball, the right one, I think, was hanging out of its socketâ(5). The soldiers were told they could shoot anyone they liked âprovided they were blackâ(6). Elkinsâs evidence suggests that over 100,000 Kikuyu were either killed by the British or died of disease and starvation in the camps. David Anderson documents the hanging of 1090 suspected rebels: far more than the French executed in Algeria(7). Thousands more were summarily executed by soldiers, who claimed they had âfailed to haltâ when challenged.
These are just two examples of at least twenty such atrocities overseen and organised by the British government or British colonial settlers: they include, for example, the Tasmanian genocide, the use of collective punishment in Malaya, the bombing of villages in Oman, the dirty war in North Yemen, the evacuation of Diego Garcia. Some of them might trigger a vague, brainstem memory in a few thousand readers, but most people would have no idea what Iâm talking about. Max Hastings, in the Guardian today, laments our ârelative lack of interest in Stalin and Maoâs crimes.â(8) But at least we are aware that they happened.
In the Express we can read the historian Andrew Roberts arguing that for âthe vast majority of its half millennium-long history, the British Empire was an exemplary force for good. ⦠the British gave up their Empire largely without bloodshed, after having tried to educate their successor governments in the ways of democracy and representative institutionsâ(9)(presumably by locking up their future leaders). In the Sunday Telegraph, he insists that âthe British empire delivered astonishing growth rates, at least in those places fortunate enough to be coloured pink on the globe.â(10) (Compare this to Mike Davisâs central finding, that âthere was no increase in Indiaâs per capita income from 1757 to 1947â³, or to Prasannan Parthasarathiâs demonstration that âSouth Indian labourers had higher earnings than their British counterparts in the 18th century and lived lives of greater financial security.â(11)) In the Daily Telegraph, John Keegan asserts that âthe empire became in its last years highly benevolent and moralistic.â The Victorians âset out to bring civilisation and good government to their colonies and to leave when they were no longer welcome. In almost every country, once coloured red on the map, they stuck to their resolve.â(12)
There is one, rightly sacred Holocaust in European history. All the others can be ignored, denied or belittled. As Mark Curtis points out, the dominant system of thought in Britain âpromotes one key concept that underpins everything else - the idea of Britainâs basic benevolence. ⦠Criticism of foreign policies is certainly possible, and normal, but within narrow limits which show âexceptionsâ to, or âmistakesâ in, promoting the rule of basic benevolence.â(13) This idea, I fear, is the true âsense of British cultural identityâ whose alleged loss Max laments today. No judge or censor is required to enforce it. The men who own the papers simply commission the stories they want to read.
Turkeyâs accession to the European Union, now jeopardised by the trial of Orhan Pamuk, requires not that it comes to terms with its atrocities; only that it permits its writers to rage impotently against them. If the government wants the genocide of the Armenians to be forgotten, it should drop its censorship laws and let people say what they want. It needs only allow Richard Desmond and the Barclay brothers to buy up its newspapers, and the past will never trouble it again.
http://www.monbiot.com
References:
1. Mike Davis, 2001. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World. Verso, London.
2. An order from the lieutenant-governor Sir George Couper to his district officers. Quoted in Mike Davis, ibid.
3. Caroline Elkins, 2005. Britainâs Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya. Jonathan Cape, London.
4. Mark Curtis, 2003. Web of Deceit: Britainâs Real Role in the World. Vintage, London.
5. Caroline Elkins, ibid.
6. Mark Curtis, ibid.
7. David Anderson, 2005. Histories of the Hanged: Britainâs Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire. Weidenfeld, London.
8. Max Hastings, 27th December 2005. This is the country of Drake and Pepys, not Shaka Zulu. The Guardian
9. Andrew Roberts, 13th July 2004. We Should Take Pride in Britainâs Empire Past. The Express.
10. Andrew Roberts, 16th January 2005. Why we need empires. The Sunday Telegraph.
11. Prasannan Parthasarathi, 1998. Rethinking wages and competitiveness in Eighteenth-Century Britain and South India. Past and Present 158. Quoted by Mike Davis, ibid.
12. John Keegan, 14th July 2004. The Empire is Worthy of Honour. The Daily Telegraph.
13. Mark Curtis, ibid.
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Thus in 1997 on a visit to India, Queen Elizabeth II Acknowledged the 1919 Amritsar Massacre (over 1,000 Punjabis gunned down by the British Army near the Golden Temple) but did not offer an Apology. Indeed the British have NEVER Apologized for anything they did during their appalling 2 century mis-rule of British India. While every Briton knows of the (largely fictional) Black Hole of Calcutta story that has demonized Indians for over 2 centuries, very few would be aware of the horrendous calamities inflicted on Indians by the British e.g. the 1769/1770 Great Bengal Famine (that killed 10 million, 1/3 of the over-taxed population of Bengal); further successive famines that killed scores of millions (the annual death rate in 1877 in British labour camps during the Deccan famine was about 94%; see: http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2005/12/27/
how-britain-denies-its-holocausts/); cholera epidemics spread by British mercantilism (that killed about 25 million Indians in the 19th century); extraordinarily low population growth between 1870 and 1930 (due to famine, malnourishment-exacerbated disease and cholera, plague and influenza epidemics); and the man-made, World War 2 Bengal Famine in British-ruled India (4 million victims, huge civilian and British military sexual abuse of starving women, a 1941-1951 Bengal demographic deficit of over 10 million â and all of this largely deleted from British history, in part because it may have been due to a deliberate British âscorched earth policyâ).
THE BIG PICTURE of the impact of the British in India can be best assessed by measuring avoidable mortality (technically, excess mortality) which is the difference between the ACTUAL deaths in a country and the deaths EXPECTED for a peaceful, decently-run country with the same demographics (see: http://globalavoidablemortality.blogspot.com/). The annual death rate in India as recently as 1920 was about 4.8% (see: http://countrystudies.us/india/32.htm) but this declined to 3.5% by 1947 and is presently about 0.9% (still about 2 times greater than it should be for a country with Indiaâs demographics). As a useful yardstick, the annual death rate of sheep on Australian sheep farms is about 2.5% i.e. the British were treating Indians like animals. Using a baseline âexpectedâ annual death rate value of 1.0% and assuming an âactualâ pre-1920 value of 4.8% one can estimated that the avoidable (excess) mortality was about 0.6 billion (1757-1837), 0.5 billion (1837-1901 i.e. during the reign of Queen Victoria) and 0.4 billion (1901-1947 i.e. from the turn of the century until Indian Independence). Thus one can estimate that British rule of India was associated with an excess (i.e. avoidable) mortality totalling 1.5 billion â surely one of the greatest crimes in all of human history. The carnage did not end with the post-WW2 British departure from India and its other colonies egregiously crippled by colonial abuse â thus the avoidable mortality in the mostly Third World British Commonwealth countries during the reign of Queen Elizabeth II (1953 to the present) has totalled about 0.7 billion.
The above figures are no doubt very surprising to English-speaking people of the British Commonwealth and elsewhere, and for good reason â these ugly, genocidal realities have been religiously deleted from British history and from general public perception (as in George Orwellâs â1984â). We live in âpolitically correctâ times in which Anglo-Celtic societies (the US, the UK and the âWhiteâ former British colonies) decry racism but simultaneously IGNORE the intrinsic racism of First World-dominated globalization and of violent UK-US âdemocratic imperialismâ in Iraq and Afghanistan â a phenomenon best described as âpolitically correct racism (PC racism). However ignoring CAAAA (C4A) and ignoring historical realities simply has meant more of the same â history ignored yields history repeated.
On the occasion of the Third Anniversary of the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq it is timely to note the human and economic cost of the Bush Wars â 2.7 million excess deaths and a cost to the US of US$1-2 trillion (see: http://www.newsvine.com/uk , http://mwcnews.net/content/view/5489/42/ ,
http://www.aljazeerah.info/21%20o/Bush%20Wars%20h
ave%20cost%202.7%20million%20lives%20&%20$
1-2%20trillion%20By%20Gideon%20Polya.htm).
The latest UN and UNICEF data indicate that the post-invasion excess mortality in Occupied Iraq and Afghanistan totals 2.3 million and the annual under-5 infant mortality totals 0.5 million (1,300 daily and 90% avoidable) â and this largely due to non-provision by the occupying Coalition of life-sustaining requisites demanded by the Geneva Conventions. Further, the latest UNODC data indicate that the post-2001 global opioid drug-related deaths totalling 0.4 million (including 1,200 Scots, 1,600 Australians, 3,000 Canadians, 3,200 Brits and 50,000 Americans) are largely due to Coalition restoration of the Taliban-destroyed Afghan opium industry back to global dominance (76% market share by 2002).
Remarkably, lying, racist, holocaust-denying, Anglo-American and Australian mainstream media not only ignore the horrendous Iraqi and Afghan death toll from the on-going Anglo-American Bush Wars, they ALSO ignore the huge number of collateral, war-related drug deaths in âWhiteâ Anglo-Celtic countries. There seems little hope for the Asian victims of Anglo-American violence â and indeed for the Third World in general â when Anglo-American mainstream media ignore the carnage inflicted on their OWN KIND.
Nevertheless there IS hope if an indignant world takes resolute action over the crimes of UK-US-Australian democratic imperialism (democratic tyranny, democratic Nazism). Lying, racist mainstream media should be boycotted; the world should be INFORMED about Coalition excesses; Coalition citizens should vote out and prosecute the war criminals; and international sanctions and boycotts should be applied to the racist, criminal Coalition countries. Until there is CAAAA (C4A), i.e. Cessation, Acknowledgement, Apology, Amends and Acceptance of non-repetition of these crimes, all the Coalition countries deserve the active âfree market choiceâ disapprobation of the âdecent worldâ â ANYONE apprised of Coalition war crimes who buys goods and services from Coalition countries is clearly COMPLICIT in these gross abuses of humanity.
Anglo-American Wartime Violation of Indian, Iraqi and Afghan Women
National self-love and "history ignored yields history repeated."
by Gideon Polya
Different societies naturally enough think well of themselves and do not care to reveal "skeletons in the cupboard". Indeed we are all familiar with the adage "The victor writes history".
However "rubbing out" or "whitewashing" history in relation to man-made mass mortality and gross human rights violations has the serious consequence that the probability of recurrence is greatly increased. Thus we all know the aphorism attributed to George Santayana that "History ignored yields history repeated."
In the aftermath of the Jewish Holocaust, the German people acknowledged the immense crime, apologized, made amends and committed themselves to a non-violent and human rights-conscious future. While post-war Japan committed itself to peace, cultural sensitivities have limited public awareness of the Japanese war-time atrocities (e.g. through censored history in school). In recent years, Germans opposed the illegal invasion of Iraq whereas a Japanese military contingent is still in Occupied Iraq.
Anglo-Americans have a high opinion of their societies. Thus the under-stating English say jokingly that "God is an Englishman", the Australians refer to their "Lucky Country" and the Americans talk of "God's Own Country". However, as decribed below, gross, large-scale, war-time sexual abuse of starving women in British-ruled India has been "rubbed out" of history - and half a century later we see "history repeated" with horrendous violation of Iraqi women through huge, avoidable infant mortality that constitutes Anglo-American passive genocide.
Mass violation of starving women in 1940s British India
In the period 1943-1946, a man-made, market-forces and resulting famine killed an estimated four million Bengalis in British-ruled India, the worst of it occurring in 1943-1944. According to Amartya Sen (1998 economics Nobel Laureate, former Master of Trinity College, Cambridge University and now at Harvard), prosperous, war-time Calcutta sucked food out of a starving countryside - those who could not afford the four-fold increase in the price of rice simply perished.
Civilian and military sexual abuse of starving women and girls involved some 30,000 victims in Calcutta alone and probably hundreds of thousands in total throughout British-ruled Bengal. The sexual abuse of starving women and girls via the British Military Labour Corps demands comparison with the "comfort women" abuses of the Japanese Imperial Army at the same time [1, 2].
Children were the most vulnerable to this famine but among children and young people there are sex-related demographic differences consistent with sexual exploitation of famine victims. Thus a nearly two-fold increase in the percent mortality increase of males as compared to females in the age groups of 10-15 and 15-20 has indicated that females had a major additional survival option of sexual submission. Similarly, a greatly decreased ratio of females to males in the 10-15 year age group among destitutes in Calcutta has been interpreted in terms of female prostitution [3].
Greenough [1] has recorded the testimonies of female famine victims forced into sexual submission or prostitution by famine circumstances. There was a major military presence in Bengal at the time, since military campaigns were being conducted against the Japanese in Assam, Burma and the coastal Arakan region south of Chittagong. Service through prostitution in the British Military Labour Corps represented a major avenue of survival for single females or women desperate to keep their children alive. Greenough has reproduced an account of a mother forced into prostitution with the Military Labour Corps in order to keep herself and her child alive; after withdrawing for obvious reasons, she returned to âserviceâ but ultimately succumbed to disease [1].
Bhowani Sen has described the impact of the famine on families and women:
âThe whole life of the people was disrupted. Parents were forced to throw their children and babies on the roadside in the hope that somebody might pick them up and feed them. Husbands were forced to leave their wives and the whole family at the mercy of events. Women were forced to sell themselves and enter brothels. Out of the 125,000 destitutes who came to Calcutta, it is estimated that about 30,000 young women joined brothels to be able to continue their breathing" [4].
Another contemporary observer described the disaster as follows:
âan unprecedented famine in Bengal gathered about two million people to their forefathers, drove countless more to utter destitution, sent innumerable women to brothels and sapped the very life-force of the province for generations to come" [5].
The abuse of scores of thousands of enslaved âcomfort womenâ by Japanese soldiers in the conquered lands of the Second World War has been exposed [6]. The similar abuse of Bengali women on a similar scale during that conflict is a well-kept secret in the English-speaking world.
Allied racism and contempt for Bengalis is revealed by the account of an appalled American officer who had to stop his soldiers amusing themselves (in rail transit through starving Bengal to Assam) by using paddy field peasants (âwogsâ in their speech) and their livestock as target practice [7].
Not just the famine-associated abuses of women have been deleted from history - the Bengal Famine itself has been largely "rubbed out" of British history and has become a "forgotten holocaust" largely removed from general public perception [2, 8]. Author Colin Mason has condemned this lack of acknowledgement as an indictment of all subsequent British Governments [8].
However the big picture is even worse. In 1769-1770 British colonial rapacity caused the Great Bengal Famine that killed 10 million people (a third of the population) and this was followed by two centuries of repeated horrendous famines and epidemics in this rich land culminating in the World War 2 Bengal famine [2, 8].
In 1971 the US-armed and US-backed West Pakistan military overthrew the democratic election results that had threatened democratic Bengali political domination of Pakistan [8-10]. The military killed as many as 3 million (some 80% being adult males in what has been described as one of the worst male-specific "gendercides" in history) [10]. The West Pakistan military also raped an estimated 300,000 Bengali women [8-10].
It gets even worse. The US and Australia are among the worst greenhouse gas polluters of the world and the neo-liberal, blinkered, reactionary governments of both countries have refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. Global warming and rising sea levels are set to devastate deltaic regions such as Bengal - indeed two years ago over half of Bangladesh was under water from monsoon run-off [2, 11].
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd--><!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--QuoteBegin-"Acharya"+-->QUOTE("Acharya")<!--QuoteEBegin--><i>Acharya:
Interesting tid-bit about Indians being allowed in British messes. I wish there was a book detailing all the small b@s**** done by the Brits.  A consolidated book of all the lvoe and care bestowed on us. I don't think such a book exists.
By the way, you wrote "After WWII the Allied powers went and changed all the book material and media quotes from past colonial leaders to make it more politically correct in the entire world." What is your basis of this claim?  Surely, if the record would exist and can pulled out.  Are you sure your facts are correct?</i>
Some forums are planning to document all the available details about colonial project.
http://www.india-forum.com/forums/index....topic=1747
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ockham/...s19040.htm
<!--QuoteBegin--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->
I have recently published a very detailed account of this two-century holocaust in British India that commenced with the Great Bengal Famine of 1769-1770 (10-million victims) and concluded with the World War 2 Bengal Famine (4-million victims) and took tens of millions of lives in between. <i>In contrast to the response to the Jewish Holocaust, these events have been almost completely written out of history and removed from general perception and there has been no apology nor amends made.</i>
A return from the current annual mortalities of about 10 per 1000 to the 35 per 1000 per year that obtained in British India in 1947 would yield a Third World excess mortality in 2050 of a staggering 200-million persons per year.
"One of the most extraordinary examples of such whitewashing of history is the sustained, continuing deletion of two centuries of massive, recurrent, man-made famine in British India from British and world history, and hence from general public perception. <i>This massive, sustained lying by omission by two centuries of British academic historians occurred in a society having Parliamentary democracy, the means to readily disseminate information and a steadily expanding literate population. Furthermore, this process of lying by omission continues to this day in Britain and its English-speaking offshoots, such as Australia, countries having free speech, high literacy, democracy, prosperity and extensive media of all kinds.</i>
Just recently, Niall Ferguson, the noted British historian was quoted as saying that on the whole, British rule has been good for the countries affected. It is probably fair to say that Davis' book makes it clear that any beneficial effects of British rule, in India for example, were accidental.
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
This is the book to start with. The amount of details and references should be enough to cover decades of data.
<b>
Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (Paperback)
by Mike Davis (Author)
# Paperback: 470 pages
# Publisher: Verso (July 2002)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 1859843824
# ISBN-13: 978-1859843826
</b>
Apologists for Brits have always used laying railway lines in India as their pet arguments in support of the British Raj.
Here's inconclusive proof that they had best intentions of Indians in mind when they laid out those railway line:
<img src='http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v130/indiaforum/BritsTrain.jpg' border='0' alt='user posted image' />
See how neat, trim and healthy looking these Indians are after getting some exercise.
http://www.india-forum.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=8
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2005/12/27...its-holocausts/
<b>
Why do so few people know about the atrocities of empire?</b>
By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 27th December 2005
In reading the reports of the trial of the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, you are struck by two things. The first of course is the anachronistic brutality of the countryâs laws. Mr Pamuk, like scores of other writers and journalists, is being prosecuted for âdenigrating Turkishnessâ, which means that he dared to mention the Armenian genocide in the first world war and the killing of the Kurds in the past decade. The second is its staggering, blithering stupidity. If there is one course of action which could be calculated to turn these massacres into live issues, it is the trial of the countryâs foremost novelist for mentioning them.
As it prepares for accession, the Turkish government will discover that the other members of the European Union have found a more effective means of suppression. Without legal coercion, without the use of baying mobs to drive writers from their homes, we have developed an almost infinite capacity to forget our own atrocities.
Atrocities? Which atrocities? When a Turkish writer uses that word, everyone in Turkey knows what he is talking about, even if they deny it vehemently. But most British people will stare at you blankly. So let me give you two examples, both of which are as well documented as the Armenian genocide.
In his book Late Victorian Holocausts, published in 2001, Mike Davis tells the story of the famines which killed between 12 and 29 million Indians(1). These people were, he demonstrates, murdered by British state policy.
When an El Nino drought destituted the farmers of the Deccan plateau in 1876 there was a net surplus of rice and wheat in India. But the viceroy, Lord Lytton, insisted that nothing should prevent its export to England. In 1877 and 1878, at height of the famine, grain merchants exported a record 6.4 million hundredweight of wheat. As the peasants began to starve, government officials were ordered âto discourage relief works in every possible wayâ(2). The Anti-Charitable Contributions Act of 1877 prohibited âat the pain of imprisonment private relief donations that potentially interfered with the market fixing of grain prices.â The only relief permitted in most districts was hard labour, from which anyone in an advanced state of starvation was turned away. Within the labour camps, the workers were given less food than the inmates of Buchenwald. In 1877, monthly mortality in the camps equated to an annual death rate of 94%.
As millions died, the imperial government launched âa militarized campaign to collect the tax arrears accumulated during the drought.â The money, which ruined those who might otherwise have survived the famine, was used by Lytton to fund his war in Afghanistan. Even in places which had produced a crop surplus, the governmentâs export policies, like Stalinâs in the Ukraine, manufactured hunger. In the North-western provinces, Oud and the Punjab, which had brought in record harvests in the preceding three years, at least 1.25m died.
Three recent books - Britainâs Gulag by Caroline Elkins, Histories of the Hanged by David Anderson and Web of Deceit by Mark Curtis - show how white settlers and British troops suppressed the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya in the 1950s. Thrown off their best land and deprived of political rights, the Kikuyu started to organise - some of them violently - against colonial rule. The British responded by driving up to 320,000 of them into concentration camps(3). Most of the remainder - over a million - were held in âenclosed villagesâ. Prisoners were questioned with the help of âslicing off ears, boring holes in eardrums, flogging until death, pouring paraffin over suspects who were then set alight, and burning eardrums with lit cigarettes.â(4) British soldiers used a âmetal castrating instrumentâ to cut off testicles and fingers. âBy the time I cut his balls off,â one settler boasted, âhe had no ears, and his eyeball, the right one, I think, was hanging out of its socketâ(5). The soldiers were told they could shoot anyone they liked âprovided they were blackâ(6). Elkinsâs evidence suggests that over 100,000 Kikuyu were either killed by the British or died of disease and starvation in the camps. David Anderson documents the hanging of 1090 suspected rebels: far more than the French executed in Algeria(7). Thousands more were summarily executed by soldiers, who claimed they had âfailed to haltâ when challenged.
These are just two examples of at least twenty such atrocities overseen and organised by the British government or British colonial settlers: they include, for example, the Tasmanian genocide, the use of collective punishment in Malaya, the bombing of villages in Oman, the dirty war in North Yemen, the evacuation of Diego Garcia. Some of them might trigger a vague, brainstem memory in a few thousand readers, but most people would have no idea what Iâm talking about. Max Hastings, in the Guardian today, laments our ârelative lack of interest in Stalin and Maoâs crimes.â(8) But at least we are aware that they happened.
In the Express we can read the historian Andrew Roberts arguing that for âthe vast majority of its half millennium-long history, the British Empire was an exemplary force for good. ⦠the British gave up their Empire largely without bloodshed, after having tried to educate their successor governments in the ways of democracy and representative institutionsâ(9)(presumably by locking up their future leaders). In the Sunday Telegraph, he insists that âthe British empire delivered astonishing growth rates, at least in those places fortunate enough to be coloured pink on the globe.â(10) (Compare this to Mike Davisâs central finding, that âthere was no increase in Indiaâs per capita income from 1757 to 1947â³, or to Prasannan Parthasarathiâs demonstration that âSouth Indian labourers had higher earnings than their British counterparts in the 18th century and lived lives of greater financial security.â(11)) In the Daily Telegraph, John Keegan asserts that âthe empire became in its last years highly benevolent and moralistic.â The Victorians âset out to bring civilisation and good government to their colonies and to leave when they were no longer welcome. In almost every country, once coloured red on the map, they stuck to their resolve.â(12)
There is one, rightly sacred Holocaust in European history. All the others can be ignored, denied or belittled. As Mark Curtis points out, the dominant system of thought in Britain âpromotes one key concept that underpins everything else - the idea of Britainâs basic benevolence. ⦠Criticism of foreign policies is certainly possible, and normal, but within narrow limits which show âexceptionsâ to, or âmistakesâ in, promoting the rule of basic benevolence.â(13) This idea, I fear, is the true âsense of British cultural identityâ whose alleged loss Max laments today. No judge or censor is required to enforce it. The men who own the papers simply commission the stories they want to read.
Turkeyâs accession to the European Union, now jeopardised by the trial of Orhan Pamuk, requires not that it comes to terms with its atrocities; only that it permits its writers to rage impotently against them. If the government wants the genocide of the Armenians to be forgotten, it should drop its censorship laws and let people say what they want. It needs only allow Richard Desmond and the Barclay brothers to buy up its newspapers, and the past will never trouble it again.
http://www.monbiot.com
References:
1. Mike Davis, 2001. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World. Verso, London.
2. An order from the lieutenant-governor Sir George Couper to his district officers. Quoted in Mike Davis, ibid.
3. Caroline Elkins, 2005. Britainâs Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya. Jonathan Cape, London.
4. Mark Curtis, 2003. Web of Deceit: Britainâs Real Role in the World. Vintage, London.
5. Caroline Elkins, ibid.
6. Mark Curtis, ibid.
7. David Anderson, 2005. Histories of the Hanged: Britainâs Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire. Weidenfeld, London.
8. Max Hastings, 27th December 2005. This is the country of Drake and Pepys, not Shaka Zulu. The Guardian
9. Andrew Roberts, 13th July 2004. We Should Take Pride in Britainâs Empire Past. The Express.
10. Andrew Roberts, 16th January 2005. Why we need empires. The Sunday Telegraph.
11. Prasannan Parthasarathi, 1998. Rethinking wages and competitiveness in Eighteenth-Century Britain and South India. Past and Present 158. Quoted by Mike Davis, ibid.
12. John Keegan, 14th July 2004. The Empire is Worthy of Honour. The Daily Telegraph.
13. Mark Curtis, ibid.
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<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Thus in 1997 on a visit to India, Queen Elizabeth II Acknowledged the 1919 Amritsar Massacre (over 1,000 Punjabis gunned down by the British Army near the Golden Temple) but did not offer an Apology. Indeed the British have NEVER Apologized for anything they did during their appalling 2 century mis-rule of British India. While every Briton knows of the (largely fictional) Black Hole of Calcutta story that has demonized Indians for over 2 centuries, very few would be aware of the horrendous calamities inflicted on Indians by the British e.g. the 1769/1770 Great Bengal Famine (that killed 10 million, 1/3 of the over-taxed population of Bengal); further successive famines that killed scores of millions (the annual death rate in 1877 in British labour camps during the Deccan famine was about 94%; see: http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2005/12/27/
how-britain-denies-its-holocausts/); cholera epidemics spread by British mercantilism (that killed about 25 million Indians in the 19th century); extraordinarily low population growth between 1870 and 1930 (due to famine, malnourishment-exacerbated disease and cholera, plague and influenza epidemics); and the man-made, World War 2 Bengal Famine in British-ruled India (4 million victims, huge civilian and British military sexual abuse of starving women, a 1941-1951 Bengal demographic deficit of over 10 million â and all of this largely deleted from British history, in part because it may have been due to a deliberate British âscorched earth policyâ).
THE BIG PICTURE of the impact of the British in India can be best assessed by measuring avoidable mortality (technically, excess mortality) which is the difference between the ACTUAL deaths in a country and the deaths EXPECTED for a peaceful, decently-run country with the same demographics (see: http://globalavoidablemortality.blogspot.com/). The annual death rate in India as recently as 1920 was about 4.8% (see: http://countrystudies.us/india/32.htm) but this declined to 3.5% by 1947 and is presently about 0.9% (still about 2 times greater than it should be for a country with Indiaâs demographics). As a useful yardstick, the annual death rate of sheep on Australian sheep farms is about 2.5% i.e. the British were treating Indians like animals. Using a baseline âexpectedâ annual death rate value of 1.0% and assuming an âactualâ pre-1920 value of 4.8% one can estimated that the avoidable (excess) mortality was about 0.6 billion (1757-1837), 0.5 billion (1837-1901 i.e. during the reign of Queen Victoria) and 0.4 billion (1901-1947 i.e. from the turn of the century until Indian Independence). Thus one can estimate that British rule of India was associated with an excess (i.e. avoidable) mortality totalling 1.5 billion â surely one of the greatest crimes in all of human history. The carnage did not end with the post-WW2 British departure from India and its other colonies egregiously crippled by colonial abuse â thus the avoidable mortality in the mostly Third World British Commonwealth countries during the reign of Queen Elizabeth II (1953 to the present) has totalled about 0.7 billion.
The above figures are no doubt very surprising to English-speaking people of the British Commonwealth and elsewhere, and for good reason â these ugly, genocidal realities have been religiously deleted from British history and from general public perception (as in George Orwellâs â1984â). We live in âpolitically correctâ times in which Anglo-Celtic societies (the US, the UK and the âWhiteâ former British colonies) decry racism but simultaneously IGNORE the intrinsic racism of First World-dominated globalization and of violent UK-US âdemocratic imperialismâ in Iraq and Afghanistan â a phenomenon best described as âpolitically correct racism (PC racism). However ignoring CAAAA (C4A) and ignoring historical realities simply has meant more of the same â history ignored yields history repeated.
On the occasion of the Third Anniversary of the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq it is timely to note the human and economic cost of the Bush Wars â 2.7 million excess deaths and a cost to the US of US$1-2 trillion (see: http://www.newsvine.com/uk , http://mwcnews.net/content/view/5489/42/ ,
http://www.aljazeerah.info/21%20o/Bush%20Wars%20h
ave%20cost%202.7%20million%20lives%20&%20$
1-2%20trillion%20By%20Gideon%20Polya.htm).
The latest UN and UNICEF data indicate that the post-invasion excess mortality in Occupied Iraq and Afghanistan totals 2.3 million and the annual under-5 infant mortality totals 0.5 million (1,300 daily and 90% avoidable) â and this largely due to non-provision by the occupying Coalition of life-sustaining requisites demanded by the Geneva Conventions. Further, the latest UNODC data indicate that the post-2001 global opioid drug-related deaths totalling 0.4 million (including 1,200 Scots, 1,600 Australians, 3,000 Canadians, 3,200 Brits and 50,000 Americans) are largely due to Coalition restoration of the Taliban-destroyed Afghan opium industry back to global dominance (76% market share by 2002).
Remarkably, lying, racist, holocaust-denying, Anglo-American and Australian mainstream media not only ignore the horrendous Iraqi and Afghan death toll from the on-going Anglo-American Bush Wars, they ALSO ignore the huge number of collateral, war-related drug deaths in âWhiteâ Anglo-Celtic countries. There seems little hope for the Asian victims of Anglo-American violence â and indeed for the Third World in general â when Anglo-American mainstream media ignore the carnage inflicted on their OWN KIND.
Nevertheless there IS hope if an indignant world takes resolute action over the crimes of UK-US-Australian democratic imperialism (democratic tyranny, democratic Nazism). Lying, racist mainstream media should be boycotted; the world should be INFORMED about Coalition excesses; Coalition citizens should vote out and prosecute the war criminals; and international sanctions and boycotts should be applied to the racist, criminal Coalition countries. Until there is CAAAA (C4A), i.e. Cessation, Acknowledgement, Apology, Amends and Acceptance of non-repetition of these crimes, all the Coalition countries deserve the active âfree market choiceâ disapprobation of the âdecent worldâ â ANYONE apprised of Coalition war crimes who buys goods and services from Coalition countries is clearly COMPLICIT in these gross abuses of humanity.
Anglo-American Wartime Violation of Indian, Iraqi and Afghan Women
National self-love and "history ignored yields history repeated."
by Gideon Polya
Different societies naturally enough think well of themselves and do not care to reveal "skeletons in the cupboard". Indeed we are all familiar with the adage "The victor writes history".
However "rubbing out" or "whitewashing" history in relation to man-made mass mortality and gross human rights violations has the serious consequence that the probability of recurrence is greatly increased. Thus we all know the aphorism attributed to George Santayana that "History ignored yields history repeated."
In the aftermath of the Jewish Holocaust, the German people acknowledged the immense crime, apologized, made amends and committed themselves to a non-violent and human rights-conscious future. While post-war Japan committed itself to peace, cultural sensitivities have limited public awareness of the Japanese war-time atrocities (e.g. through censored history in school). In recent years, Germans opposed the illegal invasion of Iraq whereas a Japanese military contingent is still in Occupied Iraq.
Anglo-Americans have a high opinion of their societies. Thus the under-stating English say jokingly that "God is an Englishman", the Australians refer to their "Lucky Country" and the Americans talk of "God's Own Country". However, as decribed below, gross, large-scale, war-time sexual abuse of starving women in British-ruled India has been "rubbed out" of history - and half a century later we see "history repeated" with horrendous violation of Iraqi women through huge, avoidable infant mortality that constitutes Anglo-American passive genocide.
Mass violation of starving women in 1940s British India
In the period 1943-1946, a man-made, market-forces and resulting famine killed an estimated four million Bengalis in British-ruled India, the worst of it occurring in 1943-1944. According to Amartya Sen (1998 economics Nobel Laureate, former Master of Trinity College, Cambridge University and now at Harvard), prosperous, war-time Calcutta sucked food out of a starving countryside - those who could not afford the four-fold increase in the price of rice simply perished.
Civilian and military sexual abuse of starving women and girls involved some 30,000 victims in Calcutta alone and probably hundreds of thousands in total throughout British-ruled Bengal. The sexual abuse of starving women and girls via the British Military Labour Corps demands comparison with the "comfort women" abuses of the Japanese Imperial Army at the same time [1, 2].
Children were the most vulnerable to this famine but among children and young people there are sex-related demographic differences consistent with sexual exploitation of famine victims. Thus a nearly two-fold increase in the percent mortality increase of males as compared to females in the age groups of 10-15 and 15-20 has indicated that females had a major additional survival option of sexual submission. Similarly, a greatly decreased ratio of females to males in the 10-15 year age group among destitutes in Calcutta has been interpreted in terms of female prostitution [3].
Greenough [1] has recorded the testimonies of female famine victims forced into sexual submission or prostitution by famine circumstances. There was a major military presence in Bengal at the time, since military campaigns were being conducted against the Japanese in Assam, Burma and the coastal Arakan region south of Chittagong. Service through prostitution in the British Military Labour Corps represented a major avenue of survival for single females or women desperate to keep their children alive. Greenough has reproduced an account of a mother forced into prostitution with the Military Labour Corps in order to keep herself and her child alive; after withdrawing for obvious reasons, she returned to âserviceâ but ultimately succumbed to disease [1].
Bhowani Sen has described the impact of the famine on families and women:
âThe whole life of the people was disrupted. Parents were forced to throw their children and babies on the roadside in the hope that somebody might pick them up and feed them. Husbands were forced to leave their wives and the whole family at the mercy of events. Women were forced to sell themselves and enter brothels. Out of the 125,000 destitutes who came to Calcutta, it is estimated that about 30,000 young women joined brothels to be able to continue their breathing" [4].
Another contemporary observer described the disaster as follows:
âan unprecedented famine in Bengal gathered about two million people to their forefathers, drove countless more to utter destitution, sent innumerable women to brothels and sapped the very life-force of the province for generations to come" [5].
The abuse of scores of thousands of enslaved âcomfort womenâ by Japanese soldiers in the conquered lands of the Second World War has been exposed [6]. The similar abuse of Bengali women on a similar scale during that conflict is a well-kept secret in the English-speaking world.
Allied racism and contempt for Bengalis is revealed by the account of an appalled American officer who had to stop his soldiers amusing themselves (in rail transit through starving Bengal to Assam) by using paddy field peasants (âwogsâ in their speech) and their livestock as target practice [7].
Not just the famine-associated abuses of women have been deleted from history - the Bengal Famine itself has been largely "rubbed out" of British history and has become a "forgotten holocaust" largely removed from general public perception [2, 8]. Author Colin Mason has condemned this lack of acknowledgement as an indictment of all subsequent British Governments [8].
However the big picture is even worse. In 1769-1770 British colonial rapacity caused the Great Bengal Famine that killed 10 million people (a third of the population) and this was followed by two centuries of repeated horrendous famines and epidemics in this rich land culminating in the World War 2 Bengal famine [2, 8].
In 1971 the US-armed and US-backed West Pakistan military overthrew the democratic election results that had threatened democratic Bengali political domination of Pakistan [8-10]. The military killed as many as 3 million (some 80% being adult males in what has been described as one of the worst male-specific "gendercides" in history) [10]. The West Pakistan military also raped an estimated 300,000 Bengali women [8-10].
It gets even worse. The US and Australia are among the worst greenhouse gas polluters of the world and the neo-liberal, blinkered, reactionary governments of both countries have refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. Global warming and rising sea levels are set to devastate deltaic regions such as Bengal - indeed two years ago over half of Bangladesh was under water from monsoon run-off [2, 11].
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