Churchill’s Famine: The killing of three million is a story waiting to be retold

Merchants in that region were primarily from the Marwari, Agarwal, Jains, Punjabi (Jatt+Khatri Sikh+Hindu), Telegu, and Bania communities (depending on the region).

Please don't talk about social structures if you don't have the knowledge - especially about regions which in living memory have had severe caste violence.

It seems quite interesting that this class becomes the focal point of any attack based on ignorance.

Also, your other replies about jatts is definitely not true. There are various sources that class them in the merchant class responsible for agriculture and trading.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrocities_in_the_Congo_Free_S...

Begium was brutal in the Congo. Their brutality continued all the way to the mid 20th century, when Belgium (with US help) tortured, murdered, dismembered, and dissolved in acid, the body of the recently independent Congo's prime minister Patrice Lumumba. Belgian police commissioner, Gerard Soete who participated in the dismemberment kept two teeth and two fingers from Lumumba as souvenirs. The single tooth, that could still be found, was repatriated last year, to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where a state funeral was held.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-61838781

Belgium's motivation was to continue to steal everything they could from the Congo. The US motivation was specifically to steal the Congo's uranium which was used to produce US nuclear weapons starting from the Manahattan project through the 1950s.

Even Gilley, the author of your post, acknowledged that hands were cut off of the dead in order to account for the ammunition used, though he emphasizes that the practice predated the establishment of the Congo Free State. That's also a claim that Hochschild makes in the book itself:

> Although some Congo peoples, like the Pygmies, were admirably peaceful, it would be a mistake to see most of them as paragons of primeval innocence. Many practiced slavery and a few ritual cannibalism, and they were as likely to make war on other clans or ethnic groups as people anywhere on earth. And traditional warfare in this part of Africa, where a severed head or hand was sometimes proof of an enemy killed in battle, was as harsh as warfare elsewhere. In the far northern Congo some women were maimed, as still happens today, by forced clitoridectomies, a practice no less brutal for being a cultural initiation rite.

One doesn't preclude the other. Beyond that, there's a great deal of historical evidence that supports the use of severed hands to account for ammunition used, and also evidence that severing the hands of the living was not unknown. Hochschild cites multiple sources to support this, even if most hands were taken from corpses. Which, given the numbers involved, is still an atrocity. There are diary entries from missionaries, photographic proof from multiple photographers, and more to support this and the presence of atrocities more broadly.

As Hochschild points out in his response[0] to Gilley, "the regime's own Manuel du Voyageur et du Résident au Congo, has detailed instructions for state officials about how to take hostages." The sheer amount of documentary evidence of atrocities in the Belgian Congo is quite clear. We also have diary entries and written reports from some of the perpetrators themselves, including Charles Lemaire, whose quotation Gilley took issue with.

If you really want to talk about "manipulative and deceptive" narratives "driven by a certain political agenda," you probably shouldn't be quoting Bruce Gilley. His reputation for his rather flawed defenses of colonialism, the most famous of which[1] was fiercely criticized even by fellow conservative academics,[3] is well-known. And while some of the response to that article could be labeled as more emotional than about his specific claims and practices, plenty of ink has been spilled criticizing his arguments. Gilley is quite explicit in his defense of colonialism and his arguments for the return of a neo-colonialism today. For those arguments to hold any sway, he pretty much has to find a way to explain away colonialism's sordid history of atrocities and exploitation. At the very least, extraordinary claims such as Gilley's require exceptional documentation he has not provided.

0. https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-ghost-still-haun...

1. https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/31/2/the_case_for_col...

2. https://www.cato.org/commentary/case-against-case-colonialis...

Churchill could likely have saved 100’s of thousands, but I seriously doubt he could have dropped deaths to zero in the middle of WWII. England was forced to ration food domestically, they didn’t have some great surplus to distribute. That 50,000 tons mentioned could have saved lives but wouldn’t have even come close to solving the problem.

That’s the nuance of history, people could have done more which would have helped though not actually solving the problem. All those shipments sunk by U-Boats were destroying part of a finite pool of food produced which had already shrunk as economies mobilized for war. Eventually you simply hit a breaking point.

It all boils down to the survival of the fittest. Yesterday Europe, today Russia and tomorrow China. No one can stop that

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_famine_of_1974

Which just leaves a <20 year window where a famine was possible. And British India had plenty of gaps of that size.

I won't say it's literally zero evidence that famine was much more frequent under British rule, but its not very strong given the obvious confounder.

There are plenty of clear cut bad guy moments in history, falsely equivocating and saying "it's complicated" is a way to undermine critique.

Isn't this true of every wartime famine throughout history? My understanding is that famine and hunger were pretty standard during wartime as armies would "forrage" (a lovely euphemism for theft, murder and rape).

- Japanese invasions caused rice exports from Myanmar and Singapore to halt.

- A cyclone devastated crops, forcing farmers to consume their seed corn.

- The Japanese meanwhile were bombing coastal cities and using submarines to interdict shipping. Anticipating Japanese invasion, the British stockpiled food for the troops.

- They also exported food for troops elsewhere.

- This led to hoarding, shortages and price inflations which triggered famine.

- Britain, far from not caring, distributed 110 million free meals, but the scope of the economic chaos meant it wasn't enough.

The idea that Churchill actively (as in deliberately) caused the famine isn't supported by history. It's a modern invention by the same sorts of people who assert that only white Americans had slaves, and other historical re-interpretations designed to extract concessions from rich westerners.

The reality is far simpler and closer to what people would expect. Churchill didn't want there to be a famine in India, nobody did. The cause was the Axis attempt to take over the world and the fight-to-the-death that this led to.

Any attempt to attack Churchill or the British over what happened must, to be intellectually rigorous, reflect on the alternative. Churchill was indeed a racist but compared to Hitler, Churchill's views were nothing. If the Nazis had won the Battle of Britain not only would the British population have been enslaved in forced labor camps, thus ending any question of it aiding India, but the Empire would have come under direct Nazi control and D-Day would have been impossible.

With Hitler's full attention and resources on the eastern front it's possible that the Third Reich would have survived and become stable. If that had happened then, given Hitler's views and India's absolute economic weakness in comparison to what a unified Nazi Europe would have had access to, the full scale extermination of Indian and African populations could have followed. Only a major new front by the USA would have been able to stop it. This sort of hypothetical holocaust of Africa is a minor plot point in The Man In The High Castle.

So when people complain about the allocation of food in WW2, it seems like they're forgetting how badly things could have easily turned out in alternative timelines.

[1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Bengal-famine-of-1943

The debate around culpability is vast, nuanced and cannot be settled with reductionist claims like "Churchill was the reason millions died".

>It was ultimately special wartime factors that caused this difficult situation to become a disastrous famine. Fearing Japanese invasion, British authorities stockpiled food to feed defending troops, and they exported considerable quantities to British forces in the Middle East. They also confiscated boats, carts, and elephants in Chittagong, where the invasion was expected.

> So far, few historians have researched the famine, making it an understudied subject of modern history.

But otherwise there seems to be plenty of information there.

It also mentions:

> In recent years, the famine has been subject to conspiracy theories, polarization and historical revisionism in Iran. The official website of Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader, published an article in 2015 asserting the view that the famine was a deliberate act of genocide committed by the British, whose documents have been intentionally wiped out in a cover-up attempt.

So it's going to be full of online vitriol by competing nationalists, just like the Bengal one generates every time I've seen it brought up.