Churchill and famine
I didn’t know this.
So I found a Guardian article by Michael Safi from March 2019.
The Bengal famine of 1943 was the only one in modern Indian history not to occur as a result of serious drought, according to a study that provides scientific backing for arguments that Churchill-era British policies were a significant factor contributing to the catastrophe.
The study looked at moisture in soil for several famines and found an outlier.
However, the 1943 famine in Bengal, which killed up to 3 million people, was different, according to the researchers. Though the eastern Indian region was affected by drought for much of the 1940s, conditions were worst in 1941, years before the most extreme stage of the famine, when newspapers began to publish images of the dying on the streets of Kolkata…
Rain levels were above average during the peak of the famine.
Food supplies to Bengal were reduced in the years preceding 1943 by natural disasters, outbreaks of infections in crops and the fall of Burma – now Myanmar – which was a major source of rice imports, into Japanese hands.
But the Nobel prize-winning economist Amartya Sen argued in 1981 that there should still have been enough supplies to feed the region, and that the mass deaths came about as a combination of wartime inflation, speculative buying and panic hoarding, which together pushed the price of food out of the reach of poor Bengalis.
More recent studies, including those by the journalist Madhushree Mukerjee, have argued the famine was exacerbated by the decisions of Winston Churchill’s wartime cabinet in London.
Mukerjee has presented evidence the cabinet was warned repeatedly that the exhaustive use of Indian resources for the war effort could result in famine, but it opted to continue exporting rice from India to elsewhere in the empire.
Bengali lives matter.
Rice stocks continued to leave India even as London was denying urgent requests from India’s viceroy for more than 1m tonnes of emergency wheat supplies in 1942-43. Churchill has been quoted as blaming the famine on the fact Indians were “breeding like rabbits”, and asking how, if the shortages were so bad, Mahatma Gandhi was still alive.
Yes but food costs money, you know.
During a famine in Bihar in 1873-74, the local government led by Sir Richard Temple responded swiftly by importing food and enacting welfare programmes to assist the poor to purchase food.
Almost nobody died, but Temple was severely criticised by British authorities for spending so much money on the response. In response, he reduced the scale of subsequent famine responses in south and western India and mortality rates soared.
But money was saved.
British high command in WW2 was forced to make some rather horrible strategic choices in the face of existential threat. One of those decisions was to confiscate food and boats (among other resources) from Bengal coasts in order to deny them to Japanese incursions. Russia’s scorched earth policy against Hitler’s invasion was far more severe. Horrific dilemmas, horrific choices, horrific results. War is horrific—world war most of all.
So, during a war the likes of which the world had never seen, a war in which England’s very existence as a nation was on the brink, a war in which food shortages and starvation were the reality of existence across the British Empire and Europe as a whole, there was a shortage of food in part of India? The famine peaked in 1943, so when the Allies’ forces started turning the tide, more food started turning up in Bengal. This was primarily a war famine, as well as a result of bungled local response. According to Britannica, “The Bengal famine of 1943, for example, was greatly worsened by the government’s failure to declare a famine and thereby secure the official responses that would have been dictated by the Indian Famine Code.”
Saying Churchill was “a racist who presided over a man made [sic] famine which killed millions” is some grade-A history-twisting bullshit.
The Bengal Famine was not an isolated incident. Indian famines increased in frequency and intensity during British rule, when much of India’s agricultural capacity was diverted towards export crops. The Irish Famine of the 1840s became notorious for the continued export of crops while people starved, and the blame-the-victim attitude of the British authorities. This attitude was replicated and magnified in 19th-century India. See “Late Victorian Holocausts” by Mike Davis.
Thank you, I’ll do that.
Did you know that there was to be a BBC comedy series about the Famine? My Irish family was not amused.
Imperialists only build their empires for the resources they make available, and the exclusive control of which they involve, as against the inherent supply insecurities involved in a free and international market. That was a major reason why, for example, the resource-poor Japanese sought expansion on their own terms to create what they called ‘the Greater East-Asian Co-prosperity Sphere’, involving conquest of pretty well everything between Manchuria and Tasmania.
On the brighter side, if my Irish great-grandparents had not fled the 1840s famine (in which Ireland was a net exporter of food) for Australia by way of NZ, my mother would never have met my father, and I would not be here writing this, because I would have never been born.
We are all existential jockeys riding wild outside-chancers in the Extreme Improbability Stakes.
I had heard about Churchill’s record in both India and the Middle East due to a rather odd source–an old We Hunted the Mammoth column about a particularly visceral Indian neofascist who wrote half-coherent rants about how Hitler was actually to be lauded for attacking England and opposing Churchill. It was such a bizarre concept I had to find what was behind the illogic. I had to concede, the guy had excellent reasons for hating the British, even if loving on Hitler is possibly the worst-case scenario of “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
Omar, my story, too, except change Australia for the US. My grandparents met in New York (not city of), and my Irish grandmother almost certainly never would have met my Swedish grandfather if not for the potato famine. Then my Irish-Swedish mother would not have been born to meet my German-English father and I would not be here.
Sometimes I think that would have been good. My parents managed to raise six utterly miserable, mostly asshole children who mostly contribute nothing but misery and misogyny to the world. How I ended up being the only one of the six to escape that…just lucky, I guess.
iknklast:
We each have a role we play on history’s stage, and have some influence on the course of things just by existing. But as you are no doubt aware, the odds against the world being just as it happens to be at this point in time are beyond astronomical. For each of us to be born, the right sperm cell has to have met the right ovum. A woman holds a stock as I recall of around 100,000 ovum-precursor cells per ovary, each one genetically distinct from the rest, so there are pretty long odds against any given one of them even leaving the ovary, never mind getting fertilised with that one particular gene set that would lead on to you; or to me or to anyone else in particular. In this great casino of life the father will produce 100 million or so sperm cells per ejaculation (or as some might put it, per shag) lengthening the odds against any particular individual being born; like say, you or me.
But wait. There’s more! That long-shot against any one of us getting born has to be multiplied for each member of our own ancestral tree, going back beyond the genus Homo, beyond the hominids, beyond the apes, right back to the first bacterium hitting upon the gimmick of sexual reproduction, at some stage in the dim and distant Precambrian. Now to produce this world precisely as it is, that combination of improbabilities has to be repeated for every individual human, animal, plant on the surface of the Earth today; then for yesterday, because that was a somewhat different world. It is as if an ancestral gambler had spent a lifetime visiting every casino and racetrack on Earth, betting all money won at any stage on the next horse or spin of the wheel, so amassing a vast fortune against vaster odds to pass down to us lucky ones.
But then comes the really lucky part. If the Sun was the only star in the entire Universe, the odds against a world with life in it intelligent enough to do science and art would be pretty remote. (Never mind the odds against an asteroid or comet impact that would wipe out the dinosaurs and allow our line into the game.) The astronomers reckon that there are around 10^23 stars in the Universe, so if our Solar System is average, there will be ~10^24 planets. Factor that in to the odds in favour of a world like this appearing at some point in the limited time (~14 billion years) available start to improve, and jackpot! Here we are as the living proof!
So “just lucky I guess” is only a tiny part of it: a grain of sand on a vast beach.
As for me; I am just a bit player, who gets to stand around in one short scene holding maybe a spear, or having a mock conversation with another cast member that nobody else can hear. Not even from the front row. That saddens me at times, but I suppose you could say that I’m used to it now. (Sobs quietly at the existential injustice of it all.)