Gideon Polya, “Churchill’s Bengali Holocaust. Inadvertent confessions of Britain's #1 war criminal”, MWC News, 17 June 2009.
Churchill’s Bengali Holocaust. Inadvertent confessions of Britain's #1 war criminal
History ignored yields history repeated. Mainstream media that ignore the 9-11 million excess deaths so far in the Bush (now Obama) wars also ignore how in 1943-1945 the British under Winston Churchill deliberately starved 6-7 million Indians to death in what was described in India at the time as a Bengali Holocaust. However, to the best of my knowledge, in his lifetime Churchill made no public references to this atrocity that killed more people than died in the WW2 Jewish Holocaust (5-6 million killed, 1 in 6 dying from deprivation).
The WW2 Bengal Famine was associated with horrendous military and civilian sexual abuse of as many as 0.3 million starving women and girls (30,000 in Calcutta alone) but Western media, politicians and academics have ensured that this has been effectively deleted from history – while the “comfort women” sex slave abuses of the Japanese army in WW2 are well known, even in Japan. [1].
Ethical and humanitarian MWC News has of course reported this “forgotten” Bengali Holocaust”, specifically in the context of current huge food price rises that threaten a repetition of the 1943-1945 Bengal Famine on a global scale and for the same reason - when defenceless, disempowered, First World capitalism-dominated, impoverished people are unable to buy food due to food price rises they simply starve to death. [2-3].
MWC News continues to report like atrocities against humanity that are occurring today in the American Empire under “yes we can” Obama that are most succinctly summarized by the current authoritative answer to the anti-war chant from the 1960s of “Hey, hey, USA, how many kids did you kill today?”. Answer: 1,000. [4].
However, in a wider context, 16 million people die avoidably each year (9.5 million being under-5 year old infants) from deprivation and deprivation-exacerbated disease on a Spaceship Earth with a merciless, racist First World at the helm. [5].
The racist, lying, holocaust-ignoring British Establishment of media, politicians, corporations and academics has an appalling record of hiding the awful truth. Thus in this past week the UK Government announced an inquiry into the War in Iraq (no UN sanction for the consequently illegal, war criminal invasion; so far 1.0 million post-invasion non-violent excess deaths; 1.3 million post-invasion violent deaths; 2.3 million post-invasion violent and non-violent Iraqi excess deaths, 0.6 million post-invasion under-5 infant deaths; 6 million refugees) – but the inquiry will be held in secret.
Winston Churchill’s involvement in the deliberate, sustained mass murder of 6-7 million Indians; his subsequent comprehensive ignoring of the WW2 Bengali Holocaust in a process of extraordinary holocaust denial; and his inadvertent and secret confessions of complicity in this immense atrocity are revealed in a series of quotations “from the horse’s mouth” provided below.
1. Churchill’s hatred for Indians is on record as revealed by the following quote of Winston Churchill to Leo Amery, Secretary of State for India (1942): “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.” [6].
2. Winston Churchill (1953) in an egregious act of Nobel Prize-winning Holocaust Denial in which he totally wipes out any mention of the 6-7 million Indians he deliberately starved to death in 1943-1945: “No great portion of the world population was so effectively protected from the horrors and perils of the World War as were the peoples of Hindustan. They were carried through the struggle on the shoulders of our small Island.” [7].
3. Winston Churchill in his major speech to the House of Commons on India made after the Bengali Holocaust on 16 May 1946 and which totally ignores any reference to the 6-7 million Indians he had deliberately starved to death in 1943-1945: “The Cripps mission [1942] failed. The answer which Mr. Gandhi gave to the British Government at that moment of mortal peril was “Quit India”, and he and the Congress proceeded to raise or encourage a revolt , or widespread disturbances, affecting, principally, the communications on which the British and Indian Forces relied for holding the threatened fronts. These disorders, although seriously fomented, were suppressed with surprising ease and very little loss of life, and the incitement to revolt found practically no response, outside the political classes, from the great masses of the Indian people. We persevered with the war, we toiled on; and presently the tide turned. India was successfully defended, and it emerged from this second world war convulsion of our lifetime protected from external violence by the army, sea power and diplomacy at the disposal of the British Empire including, of course, the valiant contribution of the Indian Forces themselves and the Gurkhas from Nepal.” [8].
4. Churchill made an implicit confession to complicity in mass murder in India 8 years before the Bengali Holocaust. Churchill was well aware of the fragility of Indians under a British régime that kept 300 million Indians on the verge of starvation and the consequences of reduction in available food (as occurred under Churchill, notably after his halving of Indian Ocean shipping in 1943) as seen in this quote from a Winston Churchill speech to the House of Commons (1935) that constitutes a confessional admission: “In the standard of life they have nothing to spare. The slightest fall from the present standard of life in India means slow starvation, and the actual squeezing out of life, not only of millions but of scores of millions of people, who have come into the world at your invitation and under the shield and protection of British power.” [9].
5. Churchill, while deleting any mention of the Bengali Holocaust from his public writings, made this secret confession of his involvement and lack of action in a letter to Roosevelt (1944) from London, April 29 1944: “Prime Minister to President Roosevelt Personal and Top Secret.
a. I am seriously concerned about the food situation in India and its possible reactions on our joint operations. Last year we had a grievous famine in Bengal through which at least 700,000 people died. This year there is a good crop of rice, but we are faced with an acute shortage of wheat, aggravated by unprecedented storms which have inflicted serious damage on the Indian spring crops. India’s shortage cannot be overcome by any possible surplus of rice even if such a surplus could be extracted from the peasants. Our recent losses in the Bombay explosion have accentuated the problem.
b. Wavell is exceedingly anxious about our position and has given me the gravest warnings. His present estimate is that he will require imports of about one million tons this year if he is to hold the situation, and so meet the needs of the United States and British and Indian troops and of the civil population especially in the great cities. I have just heard from Mountbatten that he considers the situation so serious that, unless arrangements are made promptly to import wheat requirements, he will be compelled to release military cargo space of SEAC in favour of wheat and formally advise Stilwell that it will also be necessary for him to arrange to curtail American military demands for this purpose.
c. By cutting down military shipments and other means, I have been able to arrange for 350,000 tons of wheat to be shipped to India from Australia during the first nine months of 1944. This is the shortest haul. I cannot see how to do more.4. I have had much hesitation in asking you to add to the great assistance you are giving us with shipping but a satisfactory situation in India is of such vital importance to the success of our joint plans against the Japanese that I am impelled to ask you to consider a special allocation of ships to carry wheat from Australia without reducing the assistance you are now providing for us, who are at a positive minimum if war efficiency is to be maintained. We have the wheat in Australia but we lack the ships. I have resisted for some time the Viceroy’s request that I should ask you for your help, but I believe that, with this recent misfortune with the wheat harvest and in the light of Mountbatten’s representations, I am no longer justified in not asking for your help. Wavell is doing all he can by special measures in India. If however he should find it possible to revise his estimates of his needs, I would let you know immediately.” [10].
History ignored yields history repeated. Peace is the only way but silence kills and silence is complicity. Please inform everyone you know about Mainstream media, politician, corporation and academic lying by omission over Western atrocities – whether the 6-7 million Indians murdered in the Bengali Holocaust in 1943-1945 or the 9-11 million excess deaths so far in the 1990-2009 Bush (now Obama) wars in the Muslim world. As I concluded in my book “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950” (p186) : “Continuing, horrendous global avoidable mortality is fundamentally due to violence, deprivation, disease and lying.”
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[1]. Sangmie Choie Schellstede (editer), Soon Mi Yu (photographer), “Comfort Women Speak: Testimony by Sex Slaves of the Japanese Military : Includes New United Nations Human Rights Report (Science and Human Rights Series, 1)” Holmes & Meier Publishers, 2000.
[2]. Gideon Polya, “World War 2 Bengal Famine remembered. Rice price triples in 1 year”: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/22807/42/ .
[3]. Gideon Polya, “Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History. Colonial rapacity, holocaust denial and the crisis in biological sustainability”, G.M. Polya, Melbourne, 1998 & 2008.
[4]. Gideon Polya, “Hey, hey, USA, how many kids did you kill today?. Answer: 1,000”. Bellaciao, 2009.
[5]. Gideon Polya, ”Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950”, G.M. Polya, Melbourne, 2007.
[6]. Winston Churchill (1944), in Diary of Amery (Secretary for India), September 9, 1942; quoted by Ziegler (1988), pp 351-352 [Ziegler, P. (1988), Mountbatten. The Official Biography (Collins, London) ].
[7]. Churchill (1954), vol. 4, p181 [Churchill, W.S. (1954), The Second World War. Volumes I-VI (Cassell, London)].
[8]. Robert Rhodes James, editor (1974), “Winston S. Churchill. His complete speeches 1897-1963”, vol. 7, 1943-1949 (Chelsea House Publishers/R.R. Bower Company, London & New York).
[9]. Winston Churchill, Hansard of the House of Commons, Winston Churchill speech, Hansard Vol. 302, cols. 1920-21, 1935; quoted by Jog (1944), p195 [Jog, N.G. (1944), Churchill’s Blind-Spot: India (New Book Company, Bombay)].
[10]. Kimball, W.F. (1984) (editor), Churchill & Roosevelt. The Complete Correspondence Volume I. Alliance Emerging October 1933 - November 1942 (Princeton University Press, Princeton), p117.