{"id":38309,"date":"2021-11-05T09:50:51","date_gmt":"2021-11-05T17:50:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=38309"},"modified":"2021-11-05T09:50:51","modified_gmt":"2021-11-05T17:50:51","slug":"churchill-and-the-atrocity-of-famine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2021\/11\/05\/churchill-and-the-atrocity-of-famine\/","title":{"rendered":"Churchill and the Atrocity of Famine"},"content":{"rendered":"

Michael Gerson doesn\u2019t like<\/a> Geoffrey Wheatcroft\u2019s new book on Churchill<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The charge that he maliciously caused the Bengal famine \u2013 in the sense that Joseph Stalin caused the Ukrainian famine \u2013 seems half-baked.<\/i><\/p>\n

Gerson\u2019s complaint against the book is that he thinks the author is \u201ca snide journalist fishing with a tiny ideological net\u201d and he claims that Wheatcroft supposedly cannot do justice to the subject. This is an unfair cheap shot at the author, and it suggests that Gerson is frustrated that he doesn\u2019t have a serious defense for the ugliest parts of Churchill\u2019s record. It is convenient that Gerson decides that \u201cisn\u2019t possible to consider each of the charges here,\u201d because if he had to consider the charge of Churchill\u2019s responsibility for the 1943 Bengal famine he would not be able to mount much of a defense. At best, Churchill was guilty of horrible neglect that led to the preventable deaths of millions of people living under the rule of the government he led. The evidence strongly supports the contention that the reality was far worse than simple neglect. He did not just \u201cfail\u201d to \u201cprevent\u201d the famine. In his history of famine, Mass Starvation<\/a><\/em>, Alex de Waal comments on the causes of the Bengal famine:<\/p>\n

It is also now well established that the colonial government in London bears the greater responsibility for causing the famine <\/strong>[bold mine-DL] by requisitioning food reserves and stopping all waterborne means of transport, including fishing boats, for fear that these might be useful to the Japanese army which was advancing through Burma, and for failing to enact standard relief measures when the famine was underway. Prime Minister Churchill insisted that food supplies to Britain itself should in no way be jeopardized by providing famine relief to a British imperial possession. Churchill\u2019s offensive views of the Indian people undoubtedly played a role in this, the most lethal of British crimes during the war.<\/i><\/p>\n

Madhusree Mukerjee, author of Churchill\u2019s Secret War<\/a><\/em>, explained<\/a> Churchill\u2019s responsibility like this:<\/p>\n

On August 4, 1943, Winston Churchill made one of his most important but least known decisions:  he declined to send wheat to India, then a British colony, thereby condemning hundreds of thousands, or possibly millions, of people to death by starvation.  The inhabitants of Bengal, an eastern province of India where famine was raging, were of little value to the war effort and in any case they were \u201cbreeding like rabbits,\u201d he explained at subsequent War Cabinet meetings (as recorded by Leopold Amery, the Secretary of State for India).<\/i><\/p>\n

Did Churchill \u201cmaliciously\u201d cause the famine? I don\u2019t think we can know if he made the decisions he made out of malice, but he clearly made them out of indifference to Indian lives. If the best defense Churchill admirers can muster is that \u201cat least it wasn\u2019t the Holodomor,\u201d perhaps they should reflect on why they feel the need to make excuses for a mass atrocity. In her history of India\u2019s role in WWII, The Raj at War<\/em>, Yasmin Khan described the thinking that led to the famine:<\/p>\n

Some people\u2019s lives were not seen as worthy of preserving. The state was geared in every way to the war and prioritised this at all costs. Human negligence and failure to prioritise other human lives as equal was the root cause. Certain lives were not seen as worthy of mourning, or as fully valid as others, and the lives of the people of Bengal had been sacrificed towards the greater global aim of winning the war. The lives of the famine victims were a cost of the Second World War, but these casualties were not counted as such.<\/i><\/p>\n

Read the rest of the article at Eunomia<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n

Daniel Larison is a weekly columnist for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia<\/a>. He is former senior editor at<\/i> The American Conservative. He has been published in the<\/i> New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and<\/i> Culture11, and was a columnist for<\/i> The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter<\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michael Gerson doesn\u2019t like Geoffrey Wheatcroft\u2019s new book on Churchill: The charge that he maliciously caused the Bengal famine \u2013 in the sense that Joseph Stalin caused the Ukrainian famine \u2013 seems half-baked. Gerson\u2019s complaint against the book is that he thinks the author is \u201ca snide journalist fishing with a tiny ideological net\u201d and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":56,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-38309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":"He was responsible for a monstrous crime here, and any honest reckoning with his record has to acknowledge that and take it seriously."},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38309","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/56"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38309"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38309\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38312,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38309\/revisions\/38312"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38309"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=38309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}