The 1943 Bengal Famine is notable in this respect not only for killing between 3 and 4 million people, and not only for being a man-made famine due to deliberate British policy decisions (diverting rice supplies off the market), but also for being so totally overlooked and forgotten by the rest of the world. At the time, Mountbatten tried to alert Churchill that the British were starving millions of Bengalis to death, but Churchill ignored the consequences and kept right on starving them.
This thread seems more GQ in nature. I don’t see any debates shaping up here. Unless you want to argue that the British were somehow not responsible for these deaths that could have been avoided.
How many people have even heard of this huge tragedy? I had been reading Indian history for years, but never knew of it until I went to a Satyajit Ray retrospective at the Smithsonian and saw Distant Thunder.
And he was sacked for this and never got back a government job, even after the war. If I’m not mistaken, he was only rehabilitated postumously some years ago.
The same thing (being sacked and only rehabilitated during recent years) happened to the Swiss police officer who let Jews cross the border despite orders to the contrary, and the Portuguese consul in sout-western France who signed as many visas as he physically could (even in the train station at the border between france and Spain after he had been recalled). And probably to many others.
That nobody considered rehabilitating/congratulating them even 30 or 40 years after WWII blows the mind.
I for one had never heard of it. I’ve just Googled for it and found an article on Banglapedia that doesn’t speak one word of blame against Churchill or the British, nor that even mentions Mountbatten. Assuming that Banglapedia is not institutionally pro-British, I think we can downgrade this one from “atrocity” to “tragedy”. There seems to have been plenty of rice about the place, but a horrible collision of market factors had driven the price up to idiotic levels.
Doesn’t it show that what we call atrocities now were viewed as not unusual? More of an object lesson? This sort of thing has been going on since the dawn of history. Take a look at the Illiad: when the Achaeans sacked Troy, they killed all the males and enslaved the women.
Good point. IIRC, the Old Testament has passages where the Hebrews, presumably acting under God’s command, attacked other tribes and killed all the men and enslaved the women. It was apparently commonplace enough to go in the Holy Book as Business as Usual for God’s chillun at the time.
Furthermore, the determinants of famine were only worked out in the 1970s (and published in a 1981 book) by A. Sen.
It turns out that the key determinant to look for is NOT an absolute shortage of food. Rather a shortage of buying power leads to famine. The Bengali tragedy was one of the examples in Sen’s work. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amartya_Sen
No. As I remember it, instead of asking a rock to pour out its water as he’d been instructed, he got angry and hit it with his staff. So he got the credit for making the water come out of the rock, and The Big Jealous Guy punished him for it.
That’s unfortunate. I didn’t learn about it till after I graduated from college. One might say that’s the result of a leftist bias in the media and universities. But that gets into a GD type discussion. Suffice it to say it’s worth looking at the numbers mentioned in this thread so far and then drawing one’s own conclusions.
The level of forgottenness of many of these things varies depending on where you’re from. Having grown up in Glendale, CA and having attended public school there for 13 years, I am well aware of the Armenian genocide. 'Fact, on the day all the Armenians took off of school in remembrance, the rest of us got to watch pretty much the same genocide presentation every year.
Except one year, when they had a survivor of the genocide speaking. It was fascinating and heart-breaking, listening to him describe his experiences as a young child. But they’d put him at the end of the program and the glurgly slideshow had run long, so they cut him off early. Apparently, showing us photos to dramatic music and quotes of dubious origin was more important than this man putting everything into a very human, personal scale. :mad:
Well, I’ve neveer heard of this before now. Looking over what I’ve googled about it, I don’t understand why ignorance about this is due to leftist bias. No other atrocities are thought to be poorly known because of political leanings, right or left. Why should this one be?
The Albigensian Crusade will never be totally forgotten; everytime someone wonders about the source of that quote “Kill them all; God will know his own”, they’ll stumble across it.
I remember seeing her on C-Span when her book came out. I was quite impressed with her.