Letters from Vienna #217
Letter to Horst von Wächter XIV
The Anglo-American Empire and the Rise of Fascism XI
Dear Horst,
As I wrote in my previous letter: crimes before, during and after the Second World War were pretty much universal (we are still ruled by a criminal, oligarchic kleptocracy, which is why the Genocide by Jab and the War in the Ukraine are occurring) so to simply pick one group and accuse them is sheer hypocrisy and double standards.
In 2019 The Guardian reported: “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.”
“Researchers in India and the US used weather data to simulate the amount of moisture in the soil during six major famines in the subcontinent between 1873 and 1943. Soil moisture deficits, brought about by poor rainfall and high temperatures, are a key indicator of drought.
Five of the famines were correlated with significant soil moisture deficits. An 11% deficit measured across much of north India in 1896-97, for example, coincided with food shortages across the country that killed an estimated 5 million people.”
“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, then named Calcutta, against the wishes of the colonial British administration.”
“In late 1943, thought to be the peak of the famine, rain levels were above average, said the study published in February in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.”
““This was a unique famine, caused by policy failure instead of any monsoon failure,” said Vimal Mishra, the lead researcher and an associate professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar.”
“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 Madhusree 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.”
“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.”[1]
Madhushree Mukerjee wrote: “Although the actions of the War Cabinet can be traced with some accuracy (mainly through documents of the Ministry of War Transport), its motives for denying adequate grain to India in the summer and fall of 1943 remain too various and intertwined to tease apart. One reason it chose not to relieve the famine derived from its determination to meet the target of 27 million tons of civilian imports for the United Kingdom. To Cherwell, at least, that meant no ships could be released from the import program. A second reason was the Balkan stockpile, close to Churchill’s heart, and also close to Cherwell’s because that reserve could take some of the pressure of feeding liberated Europe off the U.K. stockpile. A third reason appears to have been the avoidance of embarrassment, as in having to admit to American officials that the British Empire controlled enough ships and grain to send substantial relief to a colony imperilled by hunger.”
“Saving face might seem to be a peculiarly trivial reason for permitting a famine to run its course, but perhaps it was not too trivial, given that the English government deemed the lives of Bengalis to be inconsequential. Churchill’s broad-brush loathing of the natives might have added impetus to the other rationales for failing to aid them, as might have the continued defiance of Subhas Chandra Bose, who was wildly popular among Bengalis. (The mere existence of the Indian National Army was a source of humiliation to the British, because it advertised the fact that armies of subjects in British colonies had chosen to fight alongside the Japanese, whereas the reverse was true in the Philippines, an American possession.) 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 area but to India. Those assignments suggest a will to punish.”[2]
Churchill’s fascistic, murderous racism wasn’t merely directed toward the Indians but the Japanese too.
“Looking upon the Japanese as animals,” John W. Dower tells us “or a different species of some sort, was common at official levels in Washington and London before Pearl Harbor. A year and a half before the outbreak of the war, for instance, Churchill told Roosevelt that he was counting on the president to “keep that Japanese dog quiet in the Pacific.” Secretary of War Henry Stimson picked up much the same image in October 1941 when arguing, as he had long done, in support of economic sanctions against Japan. When President Wilson took a hard line against the Japanese in 1919, Stimson reminded the U.S. cabinet, they had retreated “like whipped puppies.” During the war, “mad dogs” as well as “yellow dogs” were everyday epithets for the Japanese among the Western Allies. An American who spent considerable time in Japan between 1936 and late 1941 wrote a wartime article describing the evolution of one of his Japanese acquaintances from a moderate newsman into a “mad dog” ultranationalist military officer. “Mad dogs,” he concluded, “are just insane animals that should be shot.”[3]
Such ideas had consequences: “For four months in mid-1944, (Charles) Lindbergh lived and flew as a civilian observer with U.S. forces based in New Guinea, and as the weeks passed he became deeply troubled, not by the willingness to kill on the part of the soldiers, which he accepted as an inherent part of the war, but by the utter contempt in which the Allies fighting men held their Japanese adversaries. The famous “Lone Eagle,” whose isolationist sentiments had placed him among the conservative opponents of President Roosevelt’s policies, really harkened back to what Gray has called the more chivalrous tradition of the professional militarist, who accepts the necessity of war while maintaining respect for his adversary, recognizing courage as courage and duty as duty, irrespective of the uniform worn. Lindbergh found no such sentiments among the Allied forces in the Pacific, where officers and enlisted men alike saw the enemy simply as animals and “yellow sons of bitches,” and his detailed journal may be the most forthright firsthand account available of the “other” side of the Pacific War.”
“On May 18, 1944, about two weeks after Lindbergh had tied in with a Marine unit, he recorded that the camps were full of reports of Japanese torture and beheading of captured American pilots. A month later, on June 21, he summarized the conversation of an American general who told how an unsuspecting Japanese prisoner was given a cigarette and then seized from behind and had his throat “slit from ear to ear” as a demonstration of how to kill Japanese. Lindbergh’s objections were treated with tolerant scorn and pity.”[4]
After the war the bloodlust continued: “The army’s policy was to starve prisoners, according to several American soldiers who were there. Martin Brech, retired professor of philosophy at Mercy College in New York, who was a guard at Andernach in 1945, has said that he was told by an officer that “it is our policy that these men not be fed”. The 50,000 to 60,000 men in Andernach were starving, living with no shelter in holes in the ground, trying to nourish themselves on grass. When Brech smuggled bread to them through the wire, he was ordered to stop by an officer. Later, Brech sneaked more food to them, was caught, and told by the same officer, “If you do that again, you'll be shot.” Brech saw bodies go out of the camp “by the truckload” but he was never told how many there were, where they were buried, or how.”[5]
In conclusion one has to ask whether anyone in the Anglo-Saxon world has the right to accuse anyone outside it of any crimes. The truth is: “those in glass houses oughtn’t throw stones”.
Best,
Michael
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/29/winston-churchill-policies-contributed-to-1943-bengal-famine-study
[2] pp. 272-273 Churchill’s Secret War, Madhusree Mukerjee
[3] pp.82-83 War Without Mercy, John W. Dower
[4] pp.69-70 Ibid
[5] pp.44-45 Crimes and Mercies, James Bacque
Man’s inhumanity to man. It has never stopped.
This reminds me of the Irish 'patato famine'.