Is FDRE evil?

The BBQ Pit
1

I don’t know. But if one wanted to make the case, one need only look at his/her posts in the thread Are Vegetarians Evil?. In that thread, glee posted a link to the Wiki article about the Amritsar Massacre. FDRE then attempted to defend the massacre by lying, making shit up, and generally ignoring facts. I responded here. And, true to form, FDRE responded with another bullshit defense of the massacre here.

Rather than continue hijacking that thread, and because FDRE is a fuckwit, I’ve decided to continue this discussion in the pit.

Let’s examine his/her most recent post on the topic:

Once again, you continue to try to conflate the victims of the massacre with other acts of violence in the area. This crowd was peaceful and was gathered either for a politcal rally or for a street fair, as corroborated by General Dyer’s own sworn testimony before the Hunter Commission. Dyer did not anticipate any “repeate performance” as he stated in his own sworn testimony.

Dyer achieved a “remarkbly low rate of fire” because he was unable to bring his vehicle mounted machine guns through the narrow opening of the walled courtyard. Had he been able to, he would have used the machine guns on the unarmed crowd as he stated in his own testimony.

Good lord, you’re defending Tiannemen now?

I don’t know what the fuck they do in the UK, but in the USA police are not allowed to use lethal means to disperse a non-violent crowd without attempting non-lethal means first. If the non-lethal means fail, and they do decide to use lethal means, they will attempt to limit casualties and will provide medical assistance. No modern police force in the US is going to fire willy-nilly into an unarmed crowd with children in it, and if they did, there would be criminal and civil liabilities.

What’s utterly bizzarre about this is that we have the testimony of General Dyer who confirmed all the worst aspects of this massacre. He didn’t deny it, or claimed that he felt threatened. He basically bragged about killing a bunch of unarmed men, women, and children. And yet, FDRE, like the fuckwit he/she is, has no problem defending Dyer, even if it means making up bullshit to support that defense.

2

I certainly don’t know enough about Amritsar to to comment on that, but I can’t wait to hear FDRE weigh in on the Kent State shootings.

3

FDRE isn’t evil – just presenting an alternative view of the history behind the event. Unpopular in some quarters, sure, but still just an opinion. I’d have to look further into the event’s background before I could say whether I agreed or disagreed with FDRE’s view.

4

For the record, it appears that Dyer ordered his men to fire on a peaceful political meeting. From a website on Sikh history.

5

Making stuff up isn’t presenting an alternate view. Furthermore, much of the nonsense he posted in that thread was directly contradicted by the Wiki article. FDRE hasn’t done any independent research, he’s just pulling stuff out of his ass. And only to defend a massacre. What he’s done is pretty disgusting in my book.

6

I’ve repeatedly found FDRE to be antagonistic, often blatantly ignorant, and has peculiar ‘styles’ of posting which discourage discourse. (this is the pit, isn’t it?).

7

Let’s have a look at how FDRE ‘interprets’ history. I intersperse Icewolf’s source…

Surprising that more people aren’t killed on UK Armistice Day, really:

‘…thousands of ex-servicemen and women will march along Horse Guards Parade in central London to the Cenotaph where wreaths will be laid in memory of the war dead.’

All those crowds and soldiers together - obviously a ‘very real threat’ according to FDRE :rolleyes:

Turning to the Amritsar Massacre:

Meanwhile, the meeting had gone on peacefully, and two resolutions, one calling for the repeal of the Rowlatt Act and the other condemning the firing on 10 April, had been passed.

Dyer arrived at about 5.15 p.m. He deployed his riflemen on an elevation near the entrance and without warning or ordering the crowd to disperse, opened fire.

No ‘threat’ at all, just murder.
And this in particular makes you wonder if FDRE can understands reality:

The firing continued for about 20 minutes

Ah, the savagery of the unarmed women and children. After 20 minutes of uniterrupted firing, the soldiers were so ‘terrified’ that they ‘fled’ from the ‘mob’, fearing for their lives…

whereafter Dyer and his men marched back the way they had come.

Apparently not. :smack:

8

I see. Well, it could be said then that FDRE should take his own advice:

9

I’m taking no position on your dispute because I am ignorant of the event. Put please don’t think that you can settle an argument by citing Wiki as a source. It is everyone’s and anyone’s opinion, fact, misunderstanding, and deliberate lie.

I wish you the best in your fight against ignorance.

10

Actually, she can. No less august a source than the science journal Nature says so.

And I wish you the best in your fight against ignorance too.

There’s a very informative thread on using, citing and trusting Wikipedia right here.

11

I don’t think Wiki or any other source settles an argument. But if one is going to argue against the info in a Wiki article, one has to back it up with more than speculation and made-up fantasies.

In this case, the Wiki article corresponds to other information I have read about the massacre in the past. I don’t have a problem citing it.

12

Thanks for the the backup and the link. BTW, I’m a guy.

13

One may be cautious about citing Wikipedia, but in this case it is backed up by other sources.

I wanna hear FRDE’s take on the Bloody Sunday Massacre.

14

…The chosen entrance was too narrow for he cars, and so Dyer deployed his men facing the crowd and, without warning, ordered them to fire. They continued to do so, reloading twice, for the next ten minutes. Many years later, a Gurkha told a British officer: ‘Sahib, while it lasted it was splendid: we fired every round we had.’ It was a methodical, directed fusillade with Dyer ordering volleys against parties of demonstrators who were scrambling over walls. When it was over 1,650 rounds had been fired, and 379 lay dead or dying and 1,500 wounded in an area the same size as Trafalgar Square. Dyer and his party then departed, leaving the injured to fend for themselves, or wait for help from friends and kinsfolk who were willing to defy the curfew.

Emphases added. From Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India by Lawrence James ( 1997, Little, Brown and Company ).

  • Tamerlane
15

You are angry, and perhaps understandably so, but I don’t see FDRE doing anything more than playing devil’s advocate, which he makes a habit of. He has taken the shots-fired and casualty figures, and the reported timeframe of 15-20 minutes, and argued that the massacre might have been different in fact to the way it is remembered. I think he is mostly mistaken, but his points are worth addressing.

Rate of fire: - FDRE calculated that each of the 50 riflemen fired on average once every 20 seconds, assuming ten minutes of firing - a conservative assumption. Tamerlane’s cite states that the riflemen reloaded twice, suggesting that they were armed with Lee-Enfields, which take a 10-round magazine. That is indeed a slow rate of fire from a Lee Enfield, which enabled a trained rifleman to fire between 20 to 30 aimed rounds a minute. The idea that the soldiers simply lined up and blazed away non-stop at the crowd for 15-20 minutes is just not compatible with the number of shots fired, and that is a fair point to make. A better description of the massacre might address this inconsistency but I’ve been unable to find one online.

Casualty figures: - this is far weaker. FDRE calculates that of the roughly 30 shots fired by each man, 8 resulted in a fatality and concludes that the soldiers were not always shooting to kill, hence his speculation of overhead warning shots. That is pretty tenuous - Ice Wolf’s cite indicates that Dyer himself considered one death per six shots fired to be likely in those circumstances - 5 fatalities per rifleman. So even the “official” fatality figures do not suggest that any of the ammunition was expended as warning shots.

Dyer of course convicts himself out of his own mouth in the Hunter report by declaring that he believed he could have dispersed the crowd without opening fire. That effectively trumps any other considerations, I think. But I disagree that FDRE deserves the appelation “evil”, or indeed “fuckwit.”

16

The problem is not that FDRE challenged the facts in the case. he made ludicrous references to charging mobs throwing rubble at troops and then tearing the troops limb from limb.
None of this happened.

The soldiers had plenty of time to shoot, since the crowd was no threat.
Tamerlane quotes it as a ‘methodical, directed fusillade with Dyer ordering volleys against parties of demonstrators who were scrambling over walls’.

Comparing an unarmed, non-violent crowd who were massacred by repeated volleys over 20 minutes to a howling mob who tear soldiers limb from limb certainly qualifies as the behaviour of a fuckwit.
I certainly consider those soldiers to have been evil, and I don’t see why someone who defends them is not also tainted by evil.

17

Duly noted.

18

matt,

I don’t know anything about guns or their rate of fire, and if FDRE had confined himself to that topic, I wouldn’t have posted anything. But as glee pointed out, that’s not what FDRE did. He attempted to characterize the victims as a “howling mob” and tell all of us what Dyer and his troops were thinking (directly contradicting Dyer’s own statements).

Quite frankly, I don’t see what difference the rate of fire makes to the larger point here. The fact is that Dyer and his men opened fire, without warning, on an unarmed, peaceful crowd. That is, by any definition, a massacre, regardless of the rate of fire.

And, as I’ve noted before, the casualties would have certainly been much higher had Dyer been able to bring in his machine guns, as he wanted to. And Dyer did order his men to fire at the thickest part of the crowd, which to my mind says that he had no intention to limit casualties. What Dyer did is evil.

As for whether or not FDRE is evil, I chose that thread title as a play on the original thread title. Like I said in my OP, I have no idea whether or not he is, and if my choice of thread title is going to minimize what he’s done in that thread, then I apologize for it. He is, however, defending an act of evil, which does indeed make him at the very least a fuckwit.

19

The query about the rate of fire is just an inconsistency in the description of the massacre. And when you find inconsistencies, you can speculate that the account isn’t entirely accurate. I’m not sure that there is really an inconsistency since the description of the event is quite vague, and everybody is playing “fill in the blanks” with their own prejudices. Personally I’d like to read the whole Hunter report first hand rather than the much-duplicated extracts we are fed by wiki and various other sources. There are some interesting ommissions from the cites presented so far:

From http://lachlan.bluehaze.com.au/churchill/am-text.htm, bolding mine.
Or how about this:

Taken from http://www.epw.org.in/showArticles.php?root=2005&leaf=07&filename=8908&filetype=html, bolding mine.

Both accounts clearly villify the massacre. But what does “the crowd became insistent” mean? The wiki article indicates that the troops just lined up and began firing, almost as if they took them by surprise. The contemporary account above, while condemning the action, implies some sort of interaction between the crowd and the troops before firing commenced. What does an “insistent” crowd of thousands look like when there are just ninety of you, almost half armed only with knives?

FDRE speculated that warning shots were fired and that the crowd may have charged the troops. The extract of the Hunter report quoted on Wikipedia and most online sources seem to contradict this, and perhaps FDRE can be Pitted for failing to read them or outright ignoring them. But that statement in the British House of Commons - “That is absolutely denied by General Dyer”, suggests to me that there is more to the Hunter report than that, we are fed the quotes that put him in the worst possible light, whereas we hear nothing of his denials, his own account of what happened or his explanations.

I don’t see FDRE claiming that the gathering was a howling mob, just that the potential for it to become one was there and the troops would have been aware of it. Ninety troops were dispatched to disperse a gathering of thousands of people who were defying a curfew, and there had been mob violence and confrontation with the military only two days before. The mood in the city was probably ugly.

It is accepted by all investigating agencies involved, even those with biases in favour of Dyer and his men, that this was a massacre, an evil act. But attempting to understand what they were thinking is not the same as defending the act, nor is attempting to understand the context, nor is finding inconsistencies in the accounts of what happened. And with that, I’ll think I’ll leave FDRE to do any further defending of his position himself.

Okay. I’m slow sometimes!

20

Just for a bit more context, there’s a bit more from the Hunter Commission report on this site, and it’s interesting reading.

http://www.hinduonnet.com/fline/fl1422/14220500.htm

A couple of extracts:

“On the morning of April 13, Baisakhi day, Dyer’s troops marched through Amritsar, proclaiming that all assemblies would be “dispersed by force of arms if necessary.” Shortly afterwards, two people walked through the city banging tin cans to announce a rally at 4-30 p.m. at Jallianwala Bagh. By afternoon, a peace gathering of over 20,000 people was in place, hearing a succession of speeches condemning the Rowlatt Act and the recent arrests and firings. (Many of those who had gathered at the maidan, however, were villagers, who were on a visit to Amritsar on the occasion of the Baisakhi fair, and were probably unaware of the morning’s drama.)” Bolding mine.

From the Hunter report:

"Excuse my putting it that way, General, but was it not a resort to what has been called “frightfulness” for the benefit of the Punjab district (sic.) as a whole?

I don’t think so. I think it was a horrible duty for me to perform. It was a merciful act that I had given them the chance to disperse (that is, in the morning). The responsibility was very great. I had to make up my mind that if I fired, I must fire well and strong so that it would have its full effect."
And evidence that Dyer believed that he was in fact pre-empting some kind of armed uprising, although the “arms” were bamboo sticks:

"You had no information that even a single individual of the mob had a firearm?

No, they were going to do it with lathis. I know there were thousands of lathis in the railway station and they were going to be their arms."