Nations and Empires that Grew on Genocide and Slavery

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shiv
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Nations and Empires that Grew on Genocide and Slavery

Post by shiv »

Let me start by blaming RajeshA for infecting me with the itch to start unusual threads that have taken BRF to places which no one else explores. Thanks Rajesh :wink:

I start this thread at the suggestion made in the cross post below. If we are to be honest about history of ALL nations and civilizations and not just wallop India for all the crap it is alleged to have squirted out of its bottom on top teh world, we need to document some things in a separate thread
johneeG wrote:
hnair wrote:RajeshA, a war crimes museum is a good beginning and does not need a lot of resources - every person who ordered decimation of civilians and civilizations, from Genghis to Truman to bin laden should be presented there, along with entities that suppress Romas, Africans et al.

churchill, pol pot, mao, stalin et al can finally get that nice little garden to indulge in headcount discussions of historic proportions
Hnair saar,
I wanted to start a thread: which is the most evil civilization/empire in the world based on number of people killed?

But, your suggestion is a good starter: Crimes against humanity thread.

Like many other things, BRF should take initiative in this also to start this. Soon, it will spread.
Crimes against humanity is not a good name. The word "humanity" has been stolen and appropriated by a small bunch of people who claim"humanity". The rest are Indians and other barbaric races. Let us leave that out.
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Re: Nations and Empires that Grew on Genocide and Slavery

Post by shiv »

Remembering India's Forgotten Holocaust
Image
The Bengal Famine of 1943-44 must rank as the greatest disaster in the subcontinent in the 20th century. Nearly 4 million Indians died because of an artificial famine created by the British government, and yet it gets little more than a passing mention in Indian history books.

What is remarkable about the scale of the disaster is its time span. World War II was at its peak and the Germans were rampaging across Europe, targeting Jews, Slavs and the Roma for extermination. It took Adolf Hitler and his Nazi cohorts 12 years to round up and murder 6 million Jews, but their Teutonic cousins, the British, managed to kill almost 4 million Indians in just over a year, with Prime Minister Winston Churchill cheering from the sidelines.

Australian biochemist Dr Gideon Polya has called the Bengal Famine a “manmade holocaust” because Churchill’s policies were directly responsible for the disaster. Bengal had a bountiful harvest in 1942, but the British started diverting vast quantities of food grain from India to Britain, contributing to a massive food shortage in the areas comprising present-day West Bengal, Odisha, Bihar and Bangladesh.

Author Madhusree Mukerjee tracked down some of the survivors and paints a chilling picture of the effects of hunger and deprivation. In Churchill’s Secret War, she writes: “Parents dumped their starving children into rivers and wells. Many took their lives by throwing themselves in front of trains. Starving people begged for the starchy water in which rice had been boiled. Children ate leaves and vines, yam stems and grass. People were too weak even to cremate their loved ones.”

“No one had the strength to perform rites,” a survivor tells Mukerjee. “Dogs and jackals feasted on piles of dead bodies in Bengal’s villages.” The ones who got away were men who migrated to Calcutta for jobs and women who turned to prostitution to feed their families. “Mothers had turned into murderers, village belles into whores, fathers into traffickers of daughters,” writes Mukerjee.

Mani Bhaumik, the first to get a PhD from the IITs and whose invention of excimer surgery enabled Lasik eye surgery, has the famine etched in his memory. His grandmother starved to death because she used to give him a portion of her food.

By 1943 hordes of starving people were flooding into Calcutta, most dying on the streets. The sight of well-fed white British soldiers amidst this apocalyptic landscape was “the final judgement on British rule in India”, said the Anglophile Jawaharlal Nehru.

Churchill could easily have prevented the famine. Even a few shipments of food grain would have helped, but the British prime minister adamantly turned down appeals from two successive Viceroys, his own Secretary of State for India and even the President of the US .

Subhas Chandra Bose, who was then fighting on the side of the Axis forces, offered to send rice from Myanmar, but the British censors did not even allow his offer to be reported.

Churchill was totally remorseless in diverting food to the British troops and Greek civilians. To him, “the starvation of anyhow underfed Bengalis (was) less serious than sturdy Greeks”, a sentiment with which Secretary of State for India and Burma, Leopold Amery, concurred.

Amery was an arch-colonialist and yet he denounced Churchill’s “Hitler-like attitude”. Urgently beseeched by Amery and the then Viceroy Archibald Wavell to release food stocks for India, Churchill responded with a telegram asking why Gandhi hadn’t died yet.

Wavell informed London that the famine “was one of the greatest disasters that has befallen any people under British rule”. He said when Holland needs food, “ships will of course be available, quite a different answer to the one we get whenever we ask for ships to bring food to India”.

Churchill’s excuse — currently being peddled by his family and supporters — was Britain could not spare the ships to transport emergency supplies, but Mukerjee has unearthed documents that challenge his claim. She cites official records that reveal ships carrying grain from Australia bypassed India on their way to the Mediterranean.

Churchill’s hostility toward Indians has long been documented. At a War Cabinet meeting, he blamed the Indians themselves for the famine, saying they “breed like rabbits”. His attitude toward Indians may be summed up in his words to Amery: “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.” On another occasion, he insisted they were “the beastliest people in the world next to the Germans”.

According to Mukerjee, “Churchill’s attitude toward India was quite extreme, and he hated Indians, mainly because he knew India couldn’t be held for very long.” She writes in The Huffington Post, “Churchill regarded wheat as too precious a food to expend on non-whites, let alone on recalcitrant subjects who were demanding independence from the British Empire. He preferred to stockpile the grain to feed Europeans after the war was over.”

In October 1943, at the peak of the famine, Churchill said at a lavish banquet to mark Wavell’s appointment: “When we look back over the course of years, we see one part of the world’s surface where there has been no war for three generations. Famines have passed away — until the horrors of war and the dislocations of war have given us a taste of them again — and pestilence has gone… This episode in Indian history will surely become the Golden Age as time passes, when the British gave them peace and order, and there was justice for the poor, and all men were shielded from outside dangers.”

Churchill was not only a racist but also a liar.

To be sure, Churchill’s policy towards famine-stricken Bengal wasn’t any different from earlier British conduct in India. In Late Victorian Holocausts, Mike Davis points out that here were 31 serious famines in 120 years of British rule compared with 17 in the 2,000 years before British rule.

In his book, Davis tells the story of the famines that killed up to 29 million Indians. These people were, he says, murdered by British State policy. In 1876, when drought destituted the farmers of the Deccan plateau, there was a net surplus of rice and wheat in India. But the Viceroy, Robert Bulwer-Lytton, insisted that nothing should prevent their export to England.

In 1877 and 1878, at the height of the famine, grain merchants exported record quantities of grain. As the peasants began to starve, government officials were ordered “to discourage relief works in every possible way”. The only relief permitted in most districts was hard labour, from which anyone in an advanced state of starvation was turned away. Within these labour camps, the workers were given less food than the Jewish inmates of Buchenwald, the Nazi concentration camp of World War II.

Even as millions died, Lytton ignored all efforts to alleviate the suffering of millions of peasants in the Madras region and concentrated on preparing for Queen Victoria’s investiture as Empress of India. The highlight of the celebrations was a week-long feast at which 68,000 dignitaries heard her promise the nation “happiness, prosperity and welfare”.

In 1901, The Lancet estimated that at least 19 million Indians had died in western India during the famine of the 1890s. The death toll was so high because the British refused to implement famine relief. Davis says life expectancy in India fell by 20 percent between 1872 and 1921.

So it’s hardly surprising that Hitler’s favourite film was The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, which showed a handful of Britons holding a continent in thrall. The Nazi leader told the then British Foreign Secretary Edward Wood (Earl of Halifax) that it was one of his favorite films because “that was how a superior race must behave and the film was compulsory viewing for the SS (Schutz-Staffel, the Nazi ‘protection squadron’)”.

Crime and consequences
While Britain has offered apologies to other nations, such as Kenya for the Mau Mau massacre, India continues to have such genocides swept under the carpet. Other nationalities have set a good example for us. Israel, for instance, cannot forget the Holocaust; neither will it let others, least of all the Germans. Germany continues to dole out hundreds of millions of dollars in cash and arms aid to Israel.

Armenia cannot forget the Great Crime — the systematic massacre of 1.8 million Armenians by the Turks during World War I. The Poles cannot forget Joseph Stalin’s Katyn massacre.

The Chinese want a clear apology and reparations from the Japanese for at least 40,000 killed and raped in Nanking during World War II. And then there is the bizarre case of the Ukrainians, who like to call a famine caused by Stalin’s economic policies as genocide, which it clearly was not. They even have a word for it: Holodomor.

And yet India alone refuses to ask for reparations, let alone an apology. Could it be because the British were the last in a long list of invaders, so why bother with an England suffering from post-imperial depression? Or is it because India’s English-speaking elites feel beholden to the British? Or are we simply a nation condemned to repeating our historical mistakes? Perhaps we forgive too easily.

But forgiveness is different from forgetting, which is what Indians are guilty of. It is an insult to the memory of millions of Indians whose lives were snuffed out in artificial famines.

British attitudes towards Indians have to seen in the backdrop of India’s contribution to the Allied war campaign. By 1943, more than 2.5 million Indian soldiers were fighting alongside the Allies in Europe, Africa and Southeast Asia. Vast quantities of arms, ammunition and raw materials sourced from across the country were shipped to Europe at no cost to Britain.

Britain’s debt to India is too great to be ignored by either nation. According to Cambridge University historians Tim Harper and Christopher Bayly, “It was Indian soldiers, civilian labourers and businessmen who made possible the victory of 1945. Their price was the rapid independence of India.”

There is not enough wealth in all of Europe to compensate India for 250 years of colonial loot. Forget the money, do the British at least have the grace to offer an apology? Or will they, like Churchill, continue to delude themselves that English rule was India’s “Golden Age”?
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Re: Nations and Empires that Grew on Genocide and Slavery

Post by Nikhil T »

Thank you for posting this, shiv saar. I did not know the Famine was so extreme and was so well orchestrated by Churchill. Not sure how such people show their face to God. Ack thoo!
It took Adolf Hitler and his Nazi cohorts 12 years to round up and murder 6 million Jews, but their Teutonic cousins, the British, managed to kill almost 4 million Indians in just over a year, with Prime Minister Winston Churchill cheering from the sidelines.
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Re: Nations and Empires that Grew on Genocide and Slavery

Post by RajeshA »

shiv saar,

a very promising thread subject. Thank you!

The old robbers, pirates and murderers have put on new dandy clothes, their language has become more uptown, their methods have become more subtle and they let their proxies and sepoys do the dirty work, but their deeds and politics have remained just as vile as ever!

Whereas "Western Universalism" as a thread does expose that the Emperor has no clothes, I think this thread would go a long way in showing how the Emperor was never royalty to begin with, but rather simply a butcher, who butchered his way up!

With this thread, BRF can have its own "Museum of Crimes against Mankind"!
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Re: Nations and Empires that Grew on Genocide and Slavery

Post by A_Gupta »

Madhusree Mukerjee wrote the definitive book on Churchill and the Bengal famine.
http://arunsmusings.blogspot.com/2014/0 ... chill.html
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Re: Nations and Empires that Grew on Genocide and Slavery

Post by member_28638 »

Famine and Starvation

The British first established a territorial foothold in the Indian subcontinent when Company-funded soldiers commanded by Robert Clive defeated the Bengali Nawab Siraj Ud Daulah at the Battle of Plassey in 1757.

Bengal's riches were expropriated, the East India Company monopolized Bengali trade and Bengal became a British protectorate directly under its rule.

Bengali farmers and craftsmen were obliged to render their labour for minimal remuneration while their collective tax burden increased greatly.

Some believe that as a consequence, the famine of 1769 to 1773 cost the lives of 10 million Bengalis.

A similar catastrophe occurred almost a century later, after Britain had extended its rule across the Indian subcontinent, when 40 million Indians perished from famine.
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Re: Nations and Empires that Grew on Genocide and Slavery

Post by member_28638 »

Taxes

The British devastation of India was initially achieved by the simple means of taxing it into destitution. In the last year of the last Indian ruler of Bengal, in 1764-5, the land revenue realized was 817,000 pounds sterling. Within a few years of British rule the population had shrunk by one-third through famine, in which ten million perished in 1770 and a third of the country into a jungle inhabited by wild beasts? Nonetheless, by 1771-2 the Bengal revenues had risen to 2,341,000 pounds sterling. As Warren Hastings reported to the Court of the Directors of the East India Company in 1772 with bracing frankness,

Notwithstanding the loss of at least one-third of the inhabitants of the province, and the consequent decrease of the cultivation, the net collections of the year 1771 exceeded even those of 1768? It was naturally to be expected that the diminution of the revenue should have kept an equal pace with the other consequences of so great a calamity. That it did not was owing to its being violently kept up to its former standard?

The British destroyed the old manufacturing towns and the economy of the villages. In Palme Dutt's words, the millions of ruined artisans and craftsmen, spinners, weavers, potters, smelters, smiths, alike from the towns and the villages, had no alternative save to crowd into agriculture?.. India was forced to the status of agricultural colony of British manufacturing capitalism whose ideologues then invoked Malthus to explain India's degraded condition.

http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn08062005.html
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Re: Nations and Empires that Grew on Genocide and Slavery

Post by member_28638 »

Poverty

In an early chapter Palme Dutt cites admiring travelers such as Tavernier, traveling around India in the seventeenth century, remarking that even in the smallest villages rice, flour, butter, milk, beans and other vegetables, sugar and other sweetmeats, dry and liquid, can be procured in abundance?

Many travelers at the time extolled Bengal as marvelous in the abundance of its resources, the advanced nature of its crafts.

By the 1920s, after nearly two centuries of British rule, India was a byword for the vast abyss of its all-pervading poverty.

The average Indian income, wrote two economists in 1924, was just enough either to feed two men in every three of the population, or give them all two in place of every three meals they need, on condition they all consent to go naked, liver out of doors all the year round, have no amusement or recreation, and want nothing else but food, and that the lowest, the coarsest, the least nutritious?

http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn08062005.html
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Re: Nations and Empires that Grew on Genocide and Slavery

Post by shravanp »

How much of the truth is in the theory that Brits shipped tons of hoarded Indian gold to US under WWII debt obligations? Sorry, if this one isn't applicable on this thread.
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Re: Nations and Empires that Grew on Genocide and Slavery

Post by g.sarkar »

A few points:
Bengal was not a stranger to famine. The crops were dependent on the monsoons and that failed every now and then. The tragedy of the Bengal famine of 1943 was that there was a bountiful harvest. The population did not anticipate the famine and did not prepare for it. There was enough food for the upper class, that could afford the higher prices, the poor perished. The British colonial government was not elected and had no responsibility to the poor. A great part of the Indian leadership was in jails due to protests. When I was young, I met people who survived the famine in Bengal. They told me that it was the poor that perished.
Gautam
PS I recommend "India Today" by Rajani Palme Dutt that details the way India was exploited by the British.
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Re: Nations and Empires that Grew on Genocide and Slavery

Post by shiv »

skekatpuray wrote:How much of the truth is in the theory that Brits shipped tons of hoarded Indian gold to US under WWII debt obligations? Sorry, if this one isn't applicable on this thread.
Not OT. The title length restriction did not allow me to add the word looting, but in the modern era of "Globalized world" people get their chaddis in a twist for slavery onlee Genocide is OK, Looting is normal - so heck its a trade off :D
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Re: Nations and Empires that Grew on Genocide and Slavery

Post by Singha »

the british had their own sets of monkeys and wolves to extract taxes on top of the ruins of the afghani sultanate they took over. these were the famous zamindars and their palatial homes the Rajbaris.
here on worthy named Debi Singha *shudder*

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nashipur_Rajbari
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Re: Nations and Empires that Grew on Genocide and Slavery

Post by Singha »

http://karsevakindia.blogspot.in/2010/1 ... dians.html

Now a brief narration of boundless British lootings and silent murders will be presented.
Since 1600, the British trading company used to buy delicate fineries from India and paid in gold and silver. The issue created vast uproar of protest among the British people, resenting the draining of the precious metals from England to India. In those days, Europe had nothing to export that had demand in India. But as soon as the company seized control of Bengal Taxation after Palashi war, Indian commodities were bought with the Indian currency. Besides while vying for all of India and even for war waged in foreign location, the British Indian army was financed by the Indian money. So exploitation and aggression got more acute.
Right after Plassey, the looting and exploitation by the company started unabated. As per agreement with Mir Jafar, Clive collected £ 2.5 million for the company and £ 234,000 for himself from the Nawab's treasury. In addition, Watts collected £ 114,000 for his efforts. The annual rent of £ 30,000 payable to the Nawab for use of the land around Fort William was also transferred to Clive for life. To put this wealth in context, an average British nobleman could live a life of luxury on an annual income of £ 800.
During Warren Hastings, the first Governor General of India, expansion of British rule was pursued vigorously. In 1784 Hastings was succeeded by Cornwallis, who initiated the Permanent Settlement. Whereby an agreement in perpetuity was reached with Zamindars or landlords for revenue collection. British started a kind of genocide with the law. Blueprints were made with the law to paralyze the peasants of India politically and economically. Peasants had to be more dependants. British initiated slavery. Peasants drowned under loan and were not able to collect courage to resist the British. A numerous number of peasants lost their lives, sons and even their wives’ respects due to atrocities of the Jamindars. This British imposed mute genocide made the Indian social structure collapse.
During Wellesley, total British territorial expansion was achieved. Major victories against Tipu Sultan of Mysore and the Marathas, and finally the subjugation and conquest of the Sikhs in a series of Anglo- Sikh Wars led to British occupation all over India. In some places, the British practiced indirect rule placing a Resident at the native ruler’s court. By Lord Dalhousie's notorious doctrine of lapse, native states became part of British India if there was no male heir at the death of the ruler. Often annexation was justified on misrule. Thus annexation and harsh revenue policies exhausted all the potentialities of Indian agriculture.
Thus exploitation and being indifferent to the distress of local people led to many terrible famines in India. Due to plundering of resources and sheer indifference to the dire straits of the victims, Indian people started suffering from full scale famines. The Great Bengal Famine of 1769-70, caused deaths to 10 million Indians in Bihar and Bengal. During 1782-84, 11 million died for famine in Madras, Mysore, Delhi and Punjub. During 1791-92, another 11 million died in Hyderabad, Southern Maratha country, Deccan, Gujarat, and Marwar. The Agra famine of 1837–38 caused 800,000 deaths. Orissa famine of 1866 killed 1 million. Rajputana famine of 1869 killed 1.5 million. The Great Famine of 1876–78 killed 5.25 million in British territories of Madras and Bombay alone. Bengal famine of 1943 killed 3 million in Bengal. All through the 190 years of British rule, economic exploitation continued, reflecting the fate of a Preexisting Colony of Exploitation. How should we label this? Isn’t this genocide? Of course it is. Indirect genocide; done by the British. What they wanted was to kill Indians on any ground.
Thus for almost 200 years, wealth from India was systematically transferred to Britain. British Banks used Indian capital to fund industry in the US, Germany and elsewhere in Europe. Industrial revolution and modern capitalism in the west were based on the colonization of India. It was the forced pauperization of vast Indian population that allowed nations like Britain and US to industrialize and "modernize". This capital was collected through various means including uneven trades, forced use of land and labor, great remittance of Indian income and excessive extraction from the common Indians.
British used arms with no considerations breaching all the boundaries of humanity. The western civilization raised on the base of the blood of Indian peasants.
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Re: Nations and Empires that Grew on Genocide and Slavery

Post by RajeshA »

shiv saar,

Besides Genocide and Slavery, perhaps one can add Robbery/Loot to the title as well!
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Re: Nations and Empires that Grew on Genocide and Slavery

Post by shiv »

RajeshA wrote:shiv saar,

Besides Genocide and Slavery, perhaps one can add Robbery/Loot to the title as well!
The title cannot be that long. There is a length limit. But the content/posts can include loot as well. No rule demands that we stick to slavery/genocide alone. Slavery and genocide were always linked to loot anyway.

Even today looted items are proud possessions of looter nations - like the Kohinoor diamond.
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Re: Nations and Empires that Grew on Genocide and Slavery

Post by Rahul M »

there's an excellent article on BRwiki on famines in India. (must read)

http://bharatrakshak.wikia.com/wiki/Fam ... nsequences
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Re: Nations and Empires that Grew on Genocide and Slavery

Post by A Nandy »

Do we have a list of the looted items residing in foreign shores or a last seen/known location ? Perhaps we can track them to see if anything is being done to bring them back.
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Re: Nations and Empires that Grew on Genocide and Slavery

Post by Abhi_G »

brits have always showcased their pre-WWI and II victories in India by adorning the Trafalgar Square with General Havelock's statue (responsible for brit victory in Kanpur in 1857)alongside Nelson's column. General Napier's statue is on the other side.

Havelock's statue is reminder of Kanpur 1857 and what followed afterwards-courtesy General Outram. For the brits it is a reminder of a formidable military victory; for Indians it is a bloody aftermath continuing until 1947.

We still have Havelock Island, Napier Docks and Outram Ghat in India.
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Re: Nations and Empires that Grew on Genocide and Slavery

Post by member_28638 »

Conversion of Hindus to Christianity

Many influential British officials felt that the conversion of Hindus to Christianity would make them readily accept British rule.

The most influential of these was Thomas Babbington Macaulay who introduced the English education system in India. He made no secret of his goal of conversion of India to Christianity. In 1836, while serving as chairman of the Education Board in India, he enthusiastically wrote his father:

"Our English schools are flourishing wonderfully. The effect of this education on the Hindus is prodigious. ...... It is my belief that if our plans of education are followed up, there will not be a single idolator [Hindu] among the respectable classes in Bengal thirty years hence. And this will be effected without any efforts to proselytize, without the smallest interference with religious liberty, by natural operation of knowledge and reflection. I heartily rejoice in the project."

So religious conversion and colonialism were to go hand in hand. Christian missions always supported the colonial government, with missionaries working hand in glove with the British government. They supported the Jallianwallah Bagh Massacre also, even though many Englishmen were ashamed of it. In a real sense Christian missions were not religious organizations at all but an unofficial arm of the British Administration.

It was part of the Macaulayite education program to distort Indian history to serve British colonial and Christian missionary interest. To do this, he employed a German Vedic scholar now famous as Friedrich Max Muller. Macaulay used his influence with the East India Company to find funds for Max Muller's translation of the Rigveda. There can be no doubt at all regarding Max Muller's commitment to the conversion of Indians to Christianity. Writing to his wife in 1866 Max Muller himself explained his purpose:

"It [the Rigveda] is the root of their religion [Hinduism] and to show them what the root is, I feel sure, is the only way of uprooting all that has sprung from it during the last three thousand years."

Two years later he also wrote the Duke of Argyle, then acting Secretary of State for India:

"The ancient religion of India is doomed. And if Christianity does not take its place, whose fault will it be?"

His job was to uproot Hinduism by giving a negative version of the Vedas!

http://www.hindunet.com/forum/showflat. ... o=&fpart=1
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Re: Nations and Empires that Grew on Genocide and Slavery

Post by sudarshan »

Didn't know all the gory details of the Bengal famine before I read that article. What I concluded is, that Winston Churchill's name belongs right up there along with:

Alexander the "Great"
Mohammed bin Ghazni
Mohammed bin Ghori
Alla-ud-din Khalji
Aurangazeb
Vasco da Gama

Apologies to any mass-murderers, hyper-hoodlums, itchy-fingered kleptocrats, and genocidal megalomaniacs I might have missed out. The Jews got Hitler covered, the Ukrainians and Americans got Stalin, so I don't have to mention them.
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Re: Nations and Empires that Grew on Genocide and Slavery

Post by RajeshA »

From this tweet

Image
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Re: Nations and Empires that Grew on Genocide and Slavery

Post by Neela »

2ndlook.wordpress.com has several articles on Genocide, slavery.
But the author crams too much into a single post.

Rajesh Sir, have you been to the above blog?
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Re: Nations and Empires that Grew on Genocide and Slavery

Post by RajeshA »

Neela ji,

I remember the name, but I don't think I've read any posts on it as yet. But thanks for bringing to our notice.
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Re: Nations and Empires that Grew on Genocide and Slavery

Post by Yagnasri »

Ramaswamy's book Indian Banking has detailed account as to how the gold standered was removed to help UK to loot India. A must read for the people who are interested in this matter and also Indian Economy.
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Re: Nations and Empires that Grew on Genocide and Slavery

Post by Nandu »

chakra wrote: The most influential of these was Thomas Babbington Macaulay who introduced the English education system in India. He made no secret of his goal of conversion of India to Christianity. In 1836, while serving as chairman of the Education Board in India, he enthusiastically wrote his father:
The only reference to Christianity in Macaulay's famous minute is this:

"We abstain, and I trust shall always abstain, from giving any public encouragement to those who are engaged in the work of converting natives to Christianity."
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Re: Nations and Empires that Grew on Genocide and Slavery

Post by Nikhil T »

RajeshA wrote:From this tweet

Image
There are a few reasons for India's share decline in past 3 centuries:
- Colonized powers expanded much more than us economically.
- Britishers sucked out India's resources such as cotton for their own use, leaving Indians more dependent upon agriculture as a means of living.
- Most importantly, India completely missed the industrial revolution, because we were not united under a common leadership. Most of India was controlled by competing kingdoms, who's rulers (Mughals and others) kept vast wealth stored away as gold and precious stones under palace controls - a terrible economic practice that we still follow in our daily lives. The commoners thus had little access to capital, forcing them to rely on local money lenders who's high interest rates and low lending capacity prevented any worthwhile investment in industrial production facilities.
shiv
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Re: Nations and Empires that Grew on Genocide and Slavery

Post by shiv »

Goan Inquisition - Hindu holocaust
http://www.oocities.org/hindoo_humanist/goa1.html
1541: Francis Xavier landed in Goa - sent there by Ignatius Loyola of Jesuit order under the direction of the King João III of Portugal.

1545: Francis Xavier comes to the following conclusions that Hindus are an "unholy race" that they are "They are liars and cheats to the very backbone.". that'St'.Xavier who started this crime against humanity"the Indians being black themselves, consider their own color the best" and also that

"they believe that their gods are black. On this account the great majority of their idols are as black as black can be, and moreover are generally so rubbed over with oil as to smell detestably, and seem to be as dirty as they are ugly and horrible to look at."

He writes to Rome to install inquisition in Goa immediately.

1560: Viceroy's building modified to become the palace of inquisition with 200 cells with residence of the first inquisitor, house of secret, house of doctrine, any number of cells, and other special ones: of secret, of penitence; of perpetual confinement; of the tortures etc. Inquisition installed with powers higher than those of viceroys.

Apr-2 1560: Viceroy D Constantine de Braganca orders that all Brahmins should be thrown out of Goa and other areas under Portuguese control.
Feb-7 1575: Governor Antonio Morez Barreto,issues orders that the propeties of those Hindus whose "presence was prejudicial to Christianity" would be confiscated.
1585 : The Third Concilio Provincial adopts a resolution asking the king of Portugal to banish from Goa 'the Brahmins, physicians and other infidels' who the Church finds as an obstacle to convert the 'the heathens' to the 'only true faith'.
Jan-31, 1620: Portuguese government orders that "...no Hindu, of whatever nationality or status he may be, can or shall perform marriages in this city of Goa, nor in the islands or adjacent territories of His Majesty..."
1625: Governor Francisco Barreto, issues orders that 'bar Hindus from seeking employment' in the Portuguese held Indian territory and Portuguese officials were ordered not to 'use the services of any infidel in matters of his office anyway'
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Re: Nations and Empires that Grew on Genocide and Slavery

Post by shiv »

http://blackwomenofbrazil.co/2013/12/29 ... in-brazil/
The first slave ships were brought by the Portuguese Martim Afonso de Sousa in 1532. The official account estimates that between that date and 1850, something like 5 million black slaves entered Brazil. However, some historians estimate that there could have been twice that number.

The slave ships that brought slaves from Africa to Brazil were called “tumbeiros” due to the death of thousands of Africans during the crossing. These deaths were due to abuse suffered by slaves, the poor hygienic conditions and diseases caused by lack of vitamins as in the case of scurvy.
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Re: Nations and Empires that Grew on Genocide and Slavery

Post by shiv »

http://www.preservearticles.com/2011090 ... -1857.html
The drain of wealth from Bengal began in 1757 when the Company's servants began to carry home immense fortunes extorted from Indian rulers, zamindars, merchants and the common people. They sent home nearly £6 million between 1758 and 1765.

This amount was more than four times the total land revenue collection of the Nawab of Bengal in 1765. This amount of drain did not include the trading profits of the Company which were often no less illegally derived. In 1765 the Company acquired the Diwani of Bengal and thus gained control over its revenues.

The Company, even more than its servants, soon directly organised the drain. It began to purchase Indian goods out of the revenue of Bengal and to export them. I here purchases were known as 'Investments'.

Thus, through 'Investments, Bengal's revenue was sent to England. For example, from 1765 to 1770, the Company sent out nearly £4 million worth of goods or about 33 per cent of the net revenue of Bengal. By the end of the eighteenth century, the drain constituted nearly 9 per cent of India national income.

The actual drain was even more, as large part salaries and other incomes of English officials and the trading fortunes of English merchants also found their way into England.

The drain took the form of an excess of India's exports over its imports, for which India got no return. While the exact amount of the annual drain has not been calculated so far and historians differ on its quantum, the fact of the drain, at least from 1757 to 1857, was widely accepted by British officials.

Thus, for example, Lord Ellen borough, Chairman of the Select Committee of the House of Lords, and later Governor-General of India, admitted in 1840 that India was "required to transmit annually to this country (Britain), without any return except in the small value of military stores, a sum amounting to between two and three million sterling".

And John Sullivan, President of the Board of Revenue, Madras, remarked: "Our system acts very much like a sponge, drawing up all the good things from the banks of the Ganges, and squeezing them down on the banks of the Thames."

The drain went on increasing after 1858, though the British administrators and imperialist writers now began to deny its existence.

By the end of the nineteenth century it constituted nearly 6 per cent of India's national income and one-third of its national savings.

The wealth drained out of India played an important part in financing Britain's capitalist development, especially during the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century, that is, during the period of Britain's early industrialisation.

It has been estimated that it constituted nearly two per cent of Britain's national income during that period. The figure assumes importance if it is kept in view that Britain was at that time investing in industry and agriculture about 7 per cent of its national income.
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Re: Nations and Empires that Grew on Genocide and Slavery

Post by shiv »

http://blast-from-indias-past.quora.com ... in-Numbers
Colonial Damage in Numbers
  • 3.9 Million Pounds paid by Mir Jafar to East India Company 1757
    230000 pounds per annum from Mir Jafar's Successor
    Annual takling 1932900 pounds from Bengal Bihar and Orissa
    Annual revenue from Bihar alone: 680000 pounds
    Famine 1770 : 10 million dead, directly due to British policies
    Annual revenue from Bengal from 1793: 2.68 million pounds
    Famines in 1783, 1792, 1807, 1813, 1823, 1834 and 1854
    Famines in 1877, 1878, 1889, 1892, 1897, 1900 : 15 million dead. Note how the incidence of famine has increased with the passage of colonial rule...
    Revenue from Allahabad: Pounds 1682306 per annum circa 1800s
    Land Tax: 50% of produce
    Maratha area: annual revenue 1,500,000 pounds per annum circa 1800s
    Indian Debt: pounds 51,000,000 in 1857
    Indian Debt: pounds 97,000,000 in 1862
    Indian Debt pounds 200,000,000 in 1901
    44 Million sterling annual outflow from India to Britain. Multiply this figure alone by around 150 - that is approximate 6600 Million - 6.6 Billion. Now compound by 8%... the number comes to 37 Trillion pounds - or nearly 73 Trillion Dollars. India's external debt as on March 2011 was 345.8 Billion Dollars. . (This last bit - the compounding and the extrapolation of annual revenues over 150 years is my guesstimate; to equal it out I have used a factor 112 years)
    Just one years revenue earnings to the British amount to 243 Billion Sterling- nearly 480 Billion Dollars even when I compound it by just 8%..... more than our total external debt . Just one years takings...
    Now just compound the 1.5 Million taking in 1757 for 245 years at 8% - and you get a jaw-dropping number of 232 Trillion Sterling - or 475 Trillion Dollars.
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Re: Nations and Empires that Grew on Genocide and Slavery

Post by member_20317 »

RajeshA wrote:From this tweet

Image

Here, hope this helps:


Image
Nikhil T
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Re: Nations and Empires that Grew on Genocide and Slavery

Post by Nikhil T »

shiv wrote:http://blast-from-indias-past.quora.com ... in-Numbers
Colonial Damage in Numbers
  • -snip-
    44 Million sterling annual outflow from India to Britain. Multiply this figure alone by around 150 - that is approximate 6600 Million - 6.6 Billion. Now compound by 8%... the number comes to 37 Trillion pounds - or nearly 73 Trillion Dollars. India's external debt as on March 2011 was 345.8 Billion Dollars. . (This last bit - the compounding and the extrapolation of annual revenues over 150 years is my guesstimate; to equal it out I have used a factor 112 years)
    -snip end -
This is just ridiculous calculation even if we assume the 44M number is correct. This guy is front loading all 150 years of outflow and then compounding it for 112 years as if India paid the tax for 150 years together in 1 year and then Britishers kept that in a FD for 112 years! No wonder the end figure is a ridiculous number 37 trillion pounds.

A little more accurate will be 44M pounds compounded to 112 years, with 44M added every year. This gets us to 3.5 Trillion pounds - so that's <10% of this claim. The other calculations are even more flawed.

I don't dispute that Britishers sucked the life and wealth out of India - that was the whole point of colonization. But to exaggerate like some blogs do will just divert us from identifying our own failures in the past.
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Re: Nations and Empires that Grew on Genocide and Slavery

Post by ramana »

The beginning of rice cultivation in South Carolina fields in 1800 led to the massive import of slaves from Africa. Rice needed lot of manual labor and Africans were already familiar with rice cultivation in North Africa. BTW the rice used was a variant of a long grain Indian rice which hopped continents. Some planter got a bag of rice seeds as payment for helping a sail ship that grounded. After Civil War rice cultivation was moved to other areas and used mechanization.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_produ ... ted_States
shiv
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Re: Nations and Empires that Grew on Genocide and Slavery

Post by shiv »

Watch this heart-rending video for just 7 minutes from the point where I have linked it
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... enn8#t=459

The incident took place in 1980. The "age of enlightenment" in the west has been quited as a great leap forward - but that age was from 1700 to 1800. What enlightenment had occurred by 1890 in America?
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Re: Nations and Empires that Grew on Genocide and Slavery

Post by Anand K »

Piece of irony:

DRDO's HQ(?) Metcalfe House is named after the curmudgeonly resident of Delhi before the 1857 rebellion. He was apparently poisoned on Zinat Mahal's orders and died a quite lingering death. Anyway that last name is a bit of a burden if you consider that his young son, Thomas "Theo" Metcalfe Jr indiscriminately murdered perhaps thousands of Delhites, civilians at that, with his own band of Afghan auxiliaries when the British retook Delhi. Well, most of his family and friends perished when the rebels took Delhi originally and he himself escaped miraculously, but still he pursued unforgivable mass murder. The blood-lust did not end even days after the victory and the British authorities (who had given him and others like Nicholson a free hand when the campaign started) hurriedly shipped him back to Blighty.
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Re: Nations and Empires that Grew on Genocide and Slavery

Post by RSoami »

Heart rending history of Haiti.
The Europeans first wiped out the native population, then brought slaves from Africa to work for them.
The natives living on the island that would come to be called Hispaniola were peaceful and not trained in military tactics. In the Pre-Columbian era, other Caribbean tribes would sometimes attack the island that would become Hispaniola to kidnap people into slavery. However the arrival of Columbus quickly turned slavery on the island into a massive business; the practice would become a key feature of the Spanish colonization of the Americas.
The natives of the island of Hispaniola initially approached Columbus and his soldiers with friendliness and generosity.
When Columbus arrived in what is today Dominican Republic in December 1492 and met the native Taino Arawak people, they were friendly, exchanging gifts with the Spaniards and volunteering their help. But Columbus was already planning to enslave them. He wrote in a letter to Queen Isabella of Spain that the natives were "tractable, and easily led; they could be made to grow crops and build cities".
When Columbus returned to Europe in 1493 and 30 of his soldiers stayed to build a fort there called La Navidad, they began stealing from, raping, and enslaving the natives. In some cases they held native women and girls as sex slaves. Finding gold was a chief goal for the Spanish; they quickly forced enslaved natives to work in gold mines, which took a heavy toll in life and health. In addition to gold the slaves mined copper, and they grew crops for the Spaniards. In response to their brutality, the natives fought back; the Spanish responded with severe reprisals, for example destroying crops to starve the natives. The Spaniards brought to the island dogs trained to kill the natives and unleashed them upon those who rebelled against enslavement. In 1495 Columbus sent 500 captured natives back to Spain as slaves, but 200 did not survive the voyage, and the others died shortly afterwards. Some Taino escaped into remote parts of the island's mountains and formed communities in hiding as "maroons", who organized attacks against Spaniards' settlements.
It is not known how many Taino people were on the island prior to Columbus's arrival—estimates range from several thousand to eight million. Between 1492 and 1494, one third of the native population on the island died. Two million had been killed within ten years of the Spaniards' arrival. By 1514, 92% of the native population of the island were killed by enslavement and European diseases. By the 1540s the culture of the natives had disappeared from the island; by 1548 the native population was under 500. The rapid rate at which the native slaves died necessitated the import of Africans, for whom contact with Europeans was not new and who therefore had already developed some immunity to European diseases.
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Re: Nations and Empires that Grew on Genocide and Slavery

Post by panduranghari »

skekatpuray wrote:How much of the truth is in the theory that Brits shipped tons of hoarded Indian gold to US under WWII debt obligations? Sorry, if this one isn't applicable on this thread.
Britain took loans from the government of India. They set the terms, then re payed it by debasing it.

For eg. Take a gold loan and repay it in debased silver. You can read about it in John Maynard Keynes and International Relations: Economic Paths to War and Peace by Donald Markwell.

He has elaborated how Britain forced Indian's to surrender gold then exported it to USA to support the confedrates. In turn they imported overpriced silver from Peru and southern America, which was returned to Indian's in lieu of gold.

This is just one aspect.
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Re: Nations and Empires that Grew on Genocide and Slavery

Post by sudarshan »

RSoami wrote:Heart rending history of Haiti.
The Europeans first wiped out the native population, then brought slaves from Africa to work for them.
By 1514, 92% of the native population of the island were killed by enslavement and European diseases. By the 1540s the culture of the natives had disappeared from the island; by 1548 the native population was under 500.[/b] The rapid rate at which the native slaves died necessitated the import of Africans, for whom contact with Europeans was not new and who therefore had already developed some immunity to European diseases.
Horrifying, certainly, but one thing really puzzles me.

The focus now is on Ebola and Marburg virus, Africa is the dark continent, right? Deadly diseases which will finish off the human population on the entire planet, unsanitary conditions, pampered Americans, Ozzies, and Europeans have to be really careful over there.

Well, back in the 1500's through the 1800's, it was European diseases decimating entire native populations, be it in Africa, Australia, or the Americas. Even now, in parts of Africa, they run for cover and hide themselves when they see a white man, because they associate him/her with deadly diseases. Why was it never the other way back then? Europeans had immunity to American, African, or Ozzie diseases, but not the other way round? A troop of several hundred or thousand Europeans could survive and thrive in those worlds, but the diseases they brought in would kill millions of natives?
shiv
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Re: Nations and Empires that Grew on Genocide and Slavery

Post by shiv »

sudarshan wrote:Why was it never the other way back then? Europeans had immunity to American, African, or Ozzie diseases, but not the other way round?
No they did not. That is complete nonsense if someone has told you that. Hundreds of Europeans died of malaria. kala azar, cholera etc. The whole business of adding soda to whisky started with the idea that soda was somehow cleansing.

As regards natives dying from "European" diseases - it was allegedly smallpox that wiped out a lot of native south Americans - although I suspect that a lot of deaths caused by plain genocide was blamed on small pox and stories cooked up like the one you have related "Africans still run when they see white man". Not sure where you heard that story but that is a first for me in 17 years of BRF.
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