Famine and Genocide = Profits, Part 1
Deanna Spingola
It is significant that politicians and
the media conceal the massive genocides of certain populations while the
politicians within the countries that win a particular war and their complicit
media publicize and even institutionalize, for political expediency, to generate
sympathy, favoritism and reparations, and the deaths of certain ethnic groups.
In conjunction with the massive genocide of colonial populations,
Britain has a lengthy
history of exploiting the natural resources of her colonies while that nation’s
calculated policies have created deadly famines.
Beginning in the 1750s, the British East India Company ruled the nation of
Bengal. The Bengal famine (1769 and 1773) decreased the population by an
estimated 10,000,000. The British East India Company’s policies exacerbated the
weather-related famine. The company wanted to maximize profits, increase land
taxes and seize additional land. They increased taxes on their renters from ten
to fifty percent of the value of the produce. Poppy production and distribution,
Britain’s most profitable cash crop, replaced essential food crops in Bengal and
caused the indigenous residents to starve. From 1757 to 1947, under British
domination, India’s per capita income remained static – low. Britain has fully
exploited India, one of their prize possessions, which descended into a third
world country, like some African nations, Caribbean islands and other
resource-rich areas. Imperialists, through their greed, create third world
countries. It is not that these countries lacked adequate geographical riches.
Rather, they could not effectively defend themselves against the despotic
practices of an elite local class and greedy colonial masters.
In 1821, Britain adopted the gold standard and compelled other countries to
follow their example. Following India’s first war of Independence in 1857,
10,000,000 people died over the next ten years. Enormous quantities of
demonetarized silver swamped the world market, which deliberately devalued the
currency of India and China. Between 1873 and 1895, under British control and
the new gold standard, India’s silver rupee lost a third of its value. The
devaluation of silver destroyed the savings of the peasants and imposed a system
of credit and usury. The inequitable British tax system and blatant resource
seizure stripped the majority of India’s resources for over two centuries. The
British neglected the maintenance of India’s infrastructure, including essential
irrigation. Indian farmers were compelled to grow cash crops, like poppies,
exclusively for export, which created deprivation in the local economies.
In 1876, an El
Niño drought hit the Deccan plateau, in India, but the farmers had produced a
net surplus of rice and wheat the previous season. However, Lord Robert
Bulwer-Lytton, the local Viceroy, demanded that the farmers export the grain to
England. In 1877 and 1878, during the famine, grain traders exported 6.4
hundredweight of wheat. When the peasants began to starve, there were no
charitable organizations to offer food or, in the case of the 7-year Irish
Famine (1845-1852), emigration to another location as cheap labor. Officials in
India actually discouraged assistance. The elites enacted legislation, the
Anti-Charitable Contributions Act (1877) that outlawed private donations under
penalty of imprisonment. Further, the exporters refused to alter the grain
prices for the benefit of the growers. The British elites encouraged the
peasants to find labor in local urban areas. The government established labor
camps but most of the starving peasants were physically unable to work. Camp
inmates subsisted on meager amounts of food and most were in a state of advanced
starvation.
[i]
In 1877, the monthly mortality in the labor camps amounted to an annual death
rate of ninety-four percent. The famine affected Bombay and Madras, a total of
138,911 square miles. The Brits were responsible for the unbelievably painful
and cruel starvation deaths of 26,897,971 souls, a deliberate genocide, we
rarely, if ever, hear about.
During the same time,
Oudh and the Punjab, northwestern provinces of India, had also realized superior
harvests for the previous three years. However, due to British export policies,
at least another 1.25 million perished from starvation. Because the British
controlled both the Indian educational system and the media, the details of this
deliberate genocide are also relatively unknown. India, once even more
productive and advanced than the United States has suffered tremendously under
British imperialism. The blood and toil of India financed the British economy
and Britain’s warfare. The Hindus in India experienced the same catastrophic
famine, with long-lasting effects, as the Buddhists in China, and the Catholics
in Ireland – all by the same culprit, which constitutes economic warfare without
the British firing a single shot.
The British, controlled by the profit desires of the international bankers, had
followed the same egregious export and rent or tax collection policies in
Ireland where more than 5,000,000 died while thousands more emigrated to
wage-slave jobs and rat-infested tenements in Manhattan owned by the Astor
family. That was not an option for the citizens of India whose ethnicity made
them less likely to integrate to an Anglo-American environment.
Despite the desperate situation, the famine and starvation, the British
government launched a military campaign to collect back taxes from the starving
residents in India. They seized what little resources the citizens still
possessed to use in their military offensive against Afghanistan in 1878, their
second invasion – the first was in 1842. In 1878, Britain demanded that the
Afghan government accept a British diplomatic mission. They refused, so Britain
launched a war in late 1878.
During yet another famine from 1899 to 1900, approximately 143,500 residents of
Behar starved to death during the same time that the province exported tens of
thousands of bales of cotton and 747,000 bushels of grain.
The banker-backed Bolsheviks invaded Ukraine and brought the country under its
control in March 1921. All new nations, per the treaties signed in Paris, were
obligated to sign minority rights agreements as a condition for diplomatic
recognition, which also applied to the newly reorganized nation of Russia under
the Soviet thugs. Ukraine, the breadbasket of
Europe, was the home of traditional farmers, ethnic Ukrainians and Volga
Germans, who still owned and farmed the land. Volga Germans had settled in
Russia before 1775 at the invitation of the government. The Germans grew rye,
sunflowers (for oil), potatoes, millet, oats, and barley, both used mostly as
animal fodder, and hemp and flax. They did not use commercial fertilizers and
practiced a three and four year crop rotation. Each colony had vast fields
surrounding them to supply sufficient food for everyone.
[ii]
Almost immediately, the Bolsheviks
took measures to seize food and starve the population. From a letter dated July
4, 1921, a Volga German writes, “Now I want to tell you how it is here at home.
It is very difficult. We have not had any bread all summer long. We do not have
any white flour. We have to cook with waste. The summer is so bad. Many people
did not receive any seed. Many people are starving and many have died of
starvation... Father wants you to write sometime...Write if we could come. Here
is hardly survival.”
[iii] Stalin
imposed the First Five Year Plan on January 5, 1930, which implemented a shift
from independent to collectivized farming. American firms, with U.S. government
knowledge and approval were involved in the development of Russia’s First Five
Year Plan.
[iv]
Following Czar Alexander II’s liberation of about
twenty-three million serfs, many of them acquired title to their land which
accelerated agricultural production. However, when Stalin’s new system was in
full operation, between February and March 1930, the number of collective farms
grew from 59,400, with 4,400,000 families, to 110,200 farms, with 14,300,000
families. The government confiscated the land owned by the peasants who resisted
collectivism and either murdered them or exiled them to remote areas. People
refer to this ethnic cleansing as “the liquidation of the kulaks,” a process
that affected five million kulak families. Instead of relinquishing their
animals to the state’s collective farms, many peasants killed them, while state
policies reduced the number of cattle from 30.7 million in 1928 to 19.6 million
in 1933. During the same time (1928-1933) the number of sheep and goats fell
from 146.7 million to 50.2 million, hogs from 26 to 12.1 million, and horses
from 33.5 to 16.6 million. State activity disrupted the 1930 planting season and
the years thereafter which dramatically reduced food production. The government,
like the British had in India and Ireland, insisted on seizing the food from the
rural population to support the urban population. With insufficient food, the
peasants starved.
[v]
The plan called for a massive reduction in the Ukrainian
livestock population. Soviet officials enforced systematic starvation on the
previously self-sufficient souls who opposed collectivism following the
authorized confiscation of all of their grains and stock from their personal and
national supplies. At least twenty five percent of the Ukrainians starved to
death during this orchestrated famine. Conservative estimates indicate that
about 4,800,000 individuals perished while others estimate the number of dead as
high as 10,000,000. President Franklin D. Roosevelt granted the Soviets
diplomatic recognition on November 16, 1933.
In
1945,
Stalin admitted to Winston Churchill that twelve
million peasants died during the transition to collective farming, a
catastrophic man-made famine.
[vi]
Then in
May 1942, in
British-dominated India, Japan totally vanquished
Burma. The British thought that the Japanese would invade India through the
province of Bengal. Therefore, the British army implemented a scorched earth
operation close to the Burmese border. They destroyed the rice paddies in some
of the coastal districts, confiscated all fishing boats, motor vehicles, carts
and even elephants, in order to prevent the Japanese from commandeering them if
they tried to go through Bengal to reach India. The army did not bother to
compensate the residents for their transportation or distribute rations to
replace what they destroyed or supply them with fish that they would have caught
had the British had not seized their boats. Bengal, though she could have grown
sufficient for her needs, then became wholly dependent on rice imports from
French Indochina, Thailand, and Burma, also a ravaged war zone.
[vii] The British
still exported
Bengal’s remaining rice for the sake of profits.
Bengal is the site of the world’s
largest river delta and boats are essential for the distribution of food grains.
Because of Britain’s egregious policies, 30,000 families were unable to obtain
food. The British military ultimately relocated some of them in order to try to
relieve starvation. However, inadequate food throughout the area escalated into
a serious situation and, by January 1943,
The New York Times and
Time Magazine reported that men,
women, and children were starving after officials had forcibly relocated them to
Calcutta’s streets. It was not until January 11, 1943 that London acknowledged
that their policies had created India’s dire food shortage. Now India depended
on imports. Yet, Prime Minister Churchill reduced transportation to the Indian
Ocean by sixty percent despite the Ministry of War Transport’s warnings that
such an action would greatly affect the seaborne commerce of India and adjacent
countries.
[viii]
Starving
refugees continued to flood into Calcutta during the British-inflicted
monster-made famine. Indian novelist,
Bhabhani Bhattacharya attests to the fact that these starving people did
not beg for rice, they were so incredibly desperate they begged for fanna, the
wastewater from the rice pan. Calcutta’s streets, to this day, are overflowing
with people existing in wretched poverty, all attributable to British
imperialism, their local agents, and their insatiable greed, without regard for
India’s population of men, women and children. During the Bengal famine, both
men and women fought each other over rubbish attempting to find food. People ate
roots, twigs, leaves in order to try to survive. Meanwhile, people, who thought
that God had imposed the famine, did not realize that money-minded people like
Samarendra Basu sold rice at high and unaffordable prices. Many women often
resorted to prostitution in order to feed their families. Interestingly, UNESCO
verified that out of 128 countries where Jews lived before they created Israel,
only India allowed the Jews to prosper and practice Judaism.
[ix]
India’s food situation was perilous.
The Board of Economic Warfare published a document in July 1943,
Indian Agriculture and Food Problems,
which predicted famine and “hundreds of thousands of deaths from starvation.” On
August 25, 1943, the New York Times
printed a cabled message from Calcutta’s mayor to New York City’s mayor and to
President Roosevelt, “Acute distress prevails in the city of Calcutta and
province of Bengal due to shortage of foodstuffs. Entire population is being
devitalized and hundreds dying of starvation. Appeal to you and Mr. Churchill in
the name of starving humanity to arrange immediate shipment of food grains from
America, Australia and other countries.”
[x]
British censors in India removed
disturbing words like starvation, corpses and famine from the news reports of
American correspondents in India. However, by September 1943, articles in
American newspapers reported the abject condition of the people in Calcutta and
the rural areas. By October, Calcutta soup kitchens attempted to feed at least
60,000 people out of the expanding hoard of impoverished and famished people. In
September, Churchill and Roosevelt met to correlate their military strategies
and the logistical needs of the Allied soldiers. Records do not indicate any
discussion of India’s famine. Yet, the State Department received regular reports
about the desperate plight of India’s mass starvation. However, Churchill and
Roosevelt were more concerned with the Allied invasion of Italy.
[xi]
Churchill and Roosevelt, possibly both psychopathic given
their apparent lack of empathy for the starving Indian masses, concentrated on
adequate provisions for the Allied troops in Europe and food aid to the Soviet
Union. India’s population was evidently inconsequential, what we currently refer
to as collateral damage. In October 1943, with nary a word about Bengal’s
widespread famine, Vice President Henry Wallace, a Freemason, spoke to the
National Consumers’ Food Conference held in Cleveland. He said, “The more food
we can put into Russian stomachs, the more American blood will be saved.”
[xii]
In November 1943, President Roosevelt
invited delegates from forty-four countries to meet with him at the White House
in order to establish the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation
Administration (UNRRA). He appointed Herbert H. Lehman, then head of the U.S.
Office of Foreign Relief and Rehabilitation Operations, as its director general.
The organization’s purpose was to provide food, clothing, medical supplies, and
other aid people seeking repatriation. In May 1944, the agency would accept
managerial responsibility for the Middle East refugee camps, which held about
37,000 Yugoslavian, Greek, Albanian, and Italian DPs, a number that increased
dramatically as the Allied forces advanced into Germany. Because of
understaffing and insufficient funding at UNRRA, SHAEF took over the
responsibility for the millions of DPs and refugees. On November 25, 1944,
officials from the two entities agreed that SHAEF would direct UNRRA which would
concentrate on postwar issues.
[xiii]
The U.S. Congress enacted legislation in February 1944
authorizing the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA)
to provide India with food relief. However, Churchill, to avoid condemnation and
responsibility, consistently claimed that there was no Bengal famine so the
suffering, starving population did not receive the assistance they so
desperately needed. Certainly, the politicians were aware of the severe
situation, but India’s officials, under Churchill’s tight control, did not
request UNRRA assistance, yet the British-controlled Indian government
contributed $24 million to UNRRA.
[xiv]
On February 9, 1944, Field Marshall Viscount Wavell, the
Viceroy of India (1943-1947) wrote to Churchill, asking for food for the
starving Bengalis. He responded to Wavell on February 15, 1944, “We have given a
great deal of thought to your difficulties but we simply cannot find the
shipping. Everything is involved in the Operation and our own import cut to the
barest minimum. The Secretary of State is cabling you at length. Every good wish
amidst your anxieties.” Wavell cabled him the next day asking for
reconsideration but received the same response.
[xv]
On April 24, 1944, Churchill said that
it was clear that His Majesty's Government could only provide further relief for
the Indian situation at a cost of incurring grave difficulties in other
directions. At the same time, there was a strong obligation on us to replace the
grain which had perished in the Bombay explosion. He was skeptical as to any
help being forthcoming from America, save at the cost of operations or the
United Kingdom import program. At the same time, he said he had great sympathy
for the suffering of the people of India.
[xvi] On April
14, there had been an explosion in Bombay Harbor when the freighter
SS Fort Stikine loaded with 87,000
cotton bales, lubricating oil, thirty-one wooden crates of gold, 50,000 tons of
grain and rice, and ammunition, a disaster just waiting to happen, caught fire,
exploded and sank. Apparently, the fire started in hold number two. The
resulting debris sank thirteen other ships, while the entire area caught fire,
causing injuries to 2500, and the deaths of between 800 and 1,300 people, mostly
civilians living in the slums in the area. The British-Indian censorship
policies prohibited release of the incident until the second week of May, 1944.
On April 29, 1944, Churchill finally
recognized the Bengal famine but never admitted any responsibility. He asked
Roosevelt if the United States could immediately ship 350,000 tons of wheat but
Roosevelt responded in the negative. Wavell, who had ordered the army to
distribute relief supplies to the starving rural Bengalis when he became
Viceroy, wanted to avoid a second round of mass starvations in India. From April
1944 forward, despite the situation, Roosevelt refused to authorize food
assistance to India or use any available American ships to transport food to
India’s famine victims. About 3,000,000 people perished in Bengal, the very
deliberate genocide of 1943 and 1944.
[xvii]
Despite natural disasters, government policies usually cause famine. Prior to
British colonial, imperialistic rule, few people died of starvation, as it had
always been a crime against humanity (obviously not applicable to the British)
to extract profit through the suffering of others during famine periods. The
British imposed their own patterns of economic and societal policy, financed and
encouraged by the Jewish bankers who value gold over people, regularly viewed as
commodities. They seem indifferent, even to lethargic starving children, with
swollen abdomens, emaciated, gaunt, dehydrated bodies, and hopeless, vacant eyes
with no hope of a future. The parasitical British government officials looted
from $5 to $10 trillion dollars from India during the colonial period, money
that went into the vaults of those bankers, the same parasites that control the
media, which has concealed and continues to shroud massive genocide, over many
decades, throughout the world.
The United
States tried to persuade the British to build aircraft factories in India during
the war (1939-1945) instead of shipping planes through dangerous waters
vulnerable to assaults by U-boats. However, the British were adamant about
maintaining India as a dependent, unindustrialized country. Independent Indian
factories might challenge British industry following the war. Britain had
ordered the de-industrialization of India’s once thriving textile industry,
along with all other means of production to keep India dependent and poor, like
a plantation, the perfect captive market for Britain’s inferior merchandise.
The Allied governments committed the
same kinds of atrocities during World War II as those they attributed to the
Germans. The United States, Britain’s partner, used famine and destabilization
tactics in the Persian Gulf War (August 2, 1990 to February 28, 1991), prompted
by Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, which U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie subtly
encouraged, provoked by lies about Kuwaiti babies thrown out of incubators.
President George H. W. Bush, at war’s end, increased Kuwait’s borders to include
the Rumaila Oil fields in southern Iraq. Kuwait was a former British
protectorate in which both American and British oil companies had interests. The
war increased their holdings and profits.
[xviii] The day before
the invasion, Bush approved the sale of $395 million of advanced data
transmission devices. This was in addition to the $1.5 billion of technology
that both the Reagan and Bush administrations sold to Hussein from 1985 to 1990.
[i] Mike Davis,
Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third
World, Verso Publishing, London, 2001, pp. 31-32
[ii]
Agriculture, Norka, a German Colony in Russia,
http://www.volgagermans.net/norka/agriculture.html; accessed
9/7/2013
[iii] Famine
Letters, Norka, a German Colony in Russia,
http://www.volgagermans.net/norka/famine_letters.html; accessed
9/7/2013
[iv] Antony C.
Sutton, America’s Secret Establishment, An Introduction to the Order of
Skull & Bones, Trine Day, Walterville, Oregon, 2002, p. 163
[v] Carroll
Quigley, Tragedy And Hope, A History of the World in our Time, G. S. G.
& Associates, Incorporated, San Pedro, California, 1975, pp. 398-399
[vi] Carroll
Quigley, Tragedy And Hope, A History of the World in our Time, G. S. G.
& Associates, Incorporated, San Pedro, California, 1975, pp. 398-399
[vii] Eric
Markusen and David Kopf, The Holocaust and Strategic Bombing: Genocide
and Total War in the Twentieth Century, Westview Press, Boulder,
Colorado, 1995, pp. 108-111
[viii] Eric
Markusen and David Kopf, The Holocaust and Strategic Bombing: Genocide
and Total War in the Twentieth Century, Westview Press, Boulder,
Colorado, 1995, pp. 108-111
[ix] Dr. Krushna
Ch. Mishra, Bhabani Bhattacharya’s So Many Hungers! from the Human
Rights Point of View,
http://yabaluri.org/TRIVENI/CDWEB/bhabanibhattacharyassomanyhungersoct2005.htm,
accessed 9/11/2013
[x] Eric
Markusen and David Kopf, The Holocaust and Strategic Bombing: Genocide
and Total War in the Twentieth Century, Westview Press, Boulder,
Colorado, 1995, pp. 108-111
[xi] Eric
Markusen and David Kopf, The Holocaust and Strategic Bombing: Genocide
and Total War in the Twentieth Century, Westview Press, Boulder,
Colorado, 1995, pp. 108-111
[xii] Eric
Markusen and David Kopf, The Holocaust and Strategic Bombing: Genocide
and Total War in the Twentieth Century, Westview Press, Boulder,
Colorado, 1995, pp. 108-111
[xiii] Arieh J.
Kochavi, Post-Holocaust Politics: Britain, the United States & Jewish
Refugees, 1945-1948, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill,
NC., 2001, pp. 13-14
[xiv] Eric
Markusen and David Kopf, The Holocaust and Strategic Bombing: Genocide
and Total War in the Twentieth Century, Westview Press, Boulder,
Colorado, 1995, pp. 108-111
[xv] Bengal
Famine, Churchill, October 2008,
http://www.mail-archive.com/churchillchat@googlegroups.com/msg00094.html
[xvi] Minutes of
a meeting of the War Cabinet on the subject of food imports on April 24,
1944
[xvii] Eric
Markusen and David Kopf, The Holocaust and Strategic Bombing: Genocide
and Total War in the Twentieth Century, Westview Press, Boulder,
Colorado, 1995, pp. 108-111
War and Peace, and Freedom and
Oppression by Glen Stanish, Tate Publishing, Mustang, Oklahoma, 2006, p.
137