Historians blast BBC for 'unbalanced' News At Ten report claiming Churchill was responsible for 'mass killing' of up to three million in 1943 Bengal famine

These attacks on Churchill are absurd.  Churchill was fighting two wars, with Germany and Japan, so simply had no resources left to give to India.  Britain was no food bowl at that time. It imported much of its food.  And transporting anything by ship was a huge challenge with German U-boats sinking many of the transports.

And it was not his responsibility anyway.  It was the responsibility of the government of Bengal.  That government might conceivably have imported grain from Australia but -- again -- where would they get the ships to carry it?  And finding the grain in India would be a very unlikely enterprise. India was always on the brink of starvation and with many men away at the war, that would have meant no grain to spare.

I was in my youth an admirer of Churchill but I have much revised that view now that I have heard of the repatriation of the Cossacks (Southern Russians).  The Cossacks were very anti-Soviet and many joined the Wehrmacht to fight the Red army.  The Wehrmacht lost the war, however so towards the end many of the Cossacks in the Wehrmacht escaped to British lines in Austria.  They knew that Stalin would murder them and thought that they would be safe as British prisoners of war.

But Churchill betrayed them.  He sent them back to Stalin and almost certain death.  Why did he do it?  Because Russia had considerable numbers of British and French prisoners of war and Churchill wanted them released.  It was a prisoner swap.  But it was not the usual swap.  Swapped prisoners are normally welcomed back to their homeland.  The Cossack were killed instead.  And, knowing that would happen, Churchill should have done some other deal -- presumably repatriating all non-Cossack prisoners

So Churchill was no saint. He was a politician.  The Cossacks were a huge blot on his record.  But nobody is perfect and he is certainly well worthy of the honour that is normally given to him.  His unrelenting opposition to Communism is a large part of that

In 2002 the BBC ran a massive national poll asking citizens of the United Kingdom to vote for the 100 greatest Britons of all time. At the top of the list was Winston Churchill.


Historians have criticised the BBC for an 'unbalanced' News At Ten report claiming Churchill was responsible for the 'mass killing' of up to three million people in the 1943 Bengal Famine.

A section broadcast on Tuesday examined how modern Indians view the wartime prime minster as part of a series on Britain's colonial legacy, and featured a series of damning statements about his actions.

Rudrangshu Mukherjee of Ashoka University in India, said Churchill was seen as a 'precipitator' of mass killing' due to his policies, while Oxford's Yasmin Khan claimed he could be guilty of 'prioritising white lives over Asian lives' by not sending relief. 

But today historians said the report ignored the complexities behind the famine in favour of squarely blaming Churchill. World War Two expert James Holland argued he had tried to help but faced a lack of resources due to the war against Japan.

It comes amid a wider campaign to trash the war hero's legacy, with his statue defaced with the word 'racist' by Black Lives Matter protesters in London and civil servants calling for the Treasury's 'Churchill Room' to be renamed.

The Bengal Famine was triggered by a cyclone and flooding in Bengal in 1942, which destroyed crops and infrastructure.

Historians agree that many of the three million deaths could have been averted with a more effective relief effort, but are divided over the extent to which Churchill was personally to blame.

Yogita Limaye, the BBC News India correspondent who led the report, said many Indians blamed him for 'making the situation worse'.

But historians suggested the report attributed too much of the blame onto Churchill when other factors were more significant.

Tirthankar Roy, a professor in economic history at the LSE, argues India's vulnerability to weather-induced famine was due to its unequal distribution of food.

He also blamed a lack of investment in agriculture and failings by the local government.

'Winston Churchill was not a relevant factor behind the 1943 Bengal famine,' he told The Times. 'The agency with the most responsibility for causing the famine and not doing enough was the government of Bengal.'

Churchill has been blamed for down-playing the crisis and arguing against re-supplying Bengal to preserve ships and food supplies for the war effort.

However, his defenders insist that he did try to help and delays were a result of conditions during the war.

They point out that after receiving news of the spreading food shortages he told his Cabinet he would welcome a statement from Lord Wavell, the new Viceroy of India, about how he planned to ensure the problems were 'dealt with'. He then wrote a personal letter urging the Viceroy to take action.

The historian James Holland weighed into the row today, insisting that Churchill faced immense difficulties supplying Bengal due to the amount of British resources tied up in the fight against the Japanese in the Pacific.

'In light of the latest furore over the Bengal Famine and people wrongly still insisting it was Churchill's fault, here's this on the subject,' he tweeted.

'His accusers don't a) understand how the war worked, or b) that his hands were tied over use of Allied shipping.'

Sir Max Hastings, the military historian, accepted that Churchill's behaviour was a 'blot on his record' but argued it should be considered against his achievements in helping to defeat fascism.

The recent Black Lives Matter protests have seen a renewed focus on Churchill's legacy, including calls for his statue to be taken down from Parliament Square.

At one point the monument was even boxed in by London Mayor Sadiq Khan to protect it from vandalism during a weekend of demonstrations. Figures of Gandhi and Mandela were also encased with wooden sheeting, at a cost of £30,000.

Threats to the statue triggered a strong reaction from defenders of the national hero who pointed out that his greatest achievement was defeating racist, anti-Semitic fascism.

At the time, Boris Johnson criticised the calls as being the 'height of lunacy'. The Prime Minister said he would resist any attempt to remove the statue 'with every breath in my body'.

Churchill's legacy has been attacked in other quarters, with a group of civil servants recently complaining that they did not feel 'comfortable' with having a room in the Treasury named after him.

BBC News insiders told MailOnline its report on the Bengal Famine made clear Churchill didn't cause the disaster but has been accused by some of making it worse.

A BBC spokesman said: 'The item was the latest in a series looking at Britain's colonial legacy worldwide.

'The series includes different perspectives from around the world, in this case from India, including a survivor from the Bengal famine, as well as Oxford historian Dr Yasmin Khan.

'The report also clearly explained Churchill's actions in India in the context of his Second World War strategy. We believe these are all important perspectives to explore and we stand by our journalism.'

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Operation Legend' — Trump Confronts Spiking Violence

On Wednesday, President Donald Trump announced that he is directing a "surge" in the federal effort to tackle the growing wave of violent crime currently plaguing several major U.S. cities. Trump noted that the surge, dubbed "Operation Legend" after a four-year-old boy named LeGend Taliferro was murdered last month in Kansas City, would work to support local law enforcement efforts to arrest and prosecute criminals.

Andrew McCarthy reports, "[Attorney General William] Barr detailed that Operation Legend had already commenced with a ramp-up of federal agents in Kansas City, where 200 arrests were made in a two-week period. The initiative is now being expanded to two other cities with soaring crime, Chicago and Albuquerque. Amid a litany of bloody statistics, Trump noted that 23 people were shot in Chicago just [Tuesday] — 15 of them at a funeral home, where respects were being paid to a man who'd been killed in an earlier drive-by shooting."

Barr was quick to note that this increased presence of federal law enforcement will be working within existing federal-state collaborative structures, explaining that they are "standard anti-crime activities we have been carrying on for decades." Essentially, the Trump administration is reinforcing federal law enforcement at federal facilities within these major cities.

Needless to say, Democrats, along with their mainstream media cohorts, are falsely painting Trump's action to quell the violence as causing the violence. Philadelphia's Democrat District Attorney Larry Krasner played up the Left's dubious narrative, warning, "Anyone, including federal law enforcement, who unlawfully assaults and kidnaps people will face criminal charges from my office. ... We're not going to tolerate showing up under the guise of making things safer and [instead] causing violence."

Unfortunately, this underscores the challenge Trump faces — to support law enforcement efforts to end the raging violence and crime in these major cities while not becoming the face of that violence. Democrats are clearly aiming to scapegoat Trump for the violence, just as they have done with COVID-19. And the mainstream media is more than willing to support the Democrats' fallacious narrative by promoting images and footage of federal law enforcement agents tangling with "protesters." See Portland as Exhibit A.

The balancing act for Trump is to on the one hand allow the Democrats running these high-crime cities to politically hang themselves via their own failed policies, while at the same time demonstrating that he is fully committed to protecting innocent, law-abiding Americans from this wave of leftist-orchestrated violence.

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Do Progressives Have a Free Speech Problem?

Leftist MICHELLE GOLDBERG writes from the NYT:

AN ACQUAINTANCE came to me a few weeks ago with the rough draft of a letter about free speech and asked me to sign. I declined, in part because it denounced “cancel culture.” As I wrote in an email, the phrase “‘cancel culture,’ while it describes something real, has been rendered sort of useless because it’s so often used by right-wing whiners like Ivanka Trump who think protests against them violate their free speech.”

A little later my acquaintance came back to me with a new version, which didn’t mention “cancel culture.” Like the people who wrote the letter, I think leftwing illiberalism is a problem, though I’ve mostly stopped writing about it since Donald Trump was elected, because it seems like complaining about a bee sting when you have Stage 4 cancer. So I signed.

The statement, published in Harper’s Magazine as “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate,” spawned takes and countertakes, most of them, despite my modest effort, about “cancel culture.”

At first I avoided wading into discourse about what’s now called the Letter. It seemed self-indulgent to write about media angst when the country is self-immolating because of unchecked disease and an economic catastrophe that’s about to get much worse. But as the debate over free speech grew and grew, I started to think I was using the burning world as an excuse to avoid personal discomfort.

From my (privileged) vantage point, several things are happening simultaneously. The mass uprising following the killing of George Floyd has led to a necessary expansion of the boundaries of mainstream speech. Space has been created for daring left-wing ideas, like abolishing the police, that were once marginalized.

At the same time, a climate of punitive heretic-hunting, a recurrent feature of left-wing politics, has set in, enforced, in some cases, through workplace discipline, including firings. It’s the involvement of human resources departments in compelling adherence with rapidly changing new norms of speech and debate that worries me the most.

In her scathing rejoinder to the Letter in The Atlantic, Hannah Giorgis wrote, “Facing widespread criticism on Twitter, undergoing an internal workplace review, or having one’s book panned does not, in fact, erode one’s constitutional rights or endanger a liberal society.”

This sentence brought me up short; one of these things is not like the others.

Anyone venturing ideas in public should be prepared to endure negative reviews and pushback on social media. Internal workplace reviews are something else. If people fear for their livelihoods for relatively minor ideological transgressions, it may not violate the Constitution — the workplace is not the state — but it does create a climate of self-censorship and grudging conformity.

One of the more egregious recent examples of left-wing illiberalism is the firing of David Shor, a data analyst at the progressive consulting firm Civis Analytics. Amid the protests over Floyd’s killing, Shor was called out online for tweeting about work by Omar Wasow, an assistant professor of politics at Princeton, that shows a link between violent protest in the 1960s and Richard Nixon’s vote share.

Shor was accused of “anti-Blackness” for seeming to suggest, via Wasow’s research, that violent protest is counterproductive. (Wasow is Black.) “At least some employees and clients of Civis Analytics complained that Shor’s tweet threatened their safety,” reported Jonathan Chait at New York magazine. After an internal review, Shor was let go; he was also kicked off a progressive industry listserv.

It should be said that many people on the left, including some who are often dismissive of the idea of left-wing illiberalism, condemned Shor’s firing. Surely one reason this episode has been invoked so often is that there aren’t many comparable examples of such obvious social justice overreach.

Still, there’s no question that many people feel intimidated. John McWhorter, an associate professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia who signed the Harper’s Letter, told me that in recent days he’s heard from over 100 graduate students and professors, most of them left of center, who fear for their professional prospects if they get on the wrong side of left-wing opinion.

The illiberal left is a lot less threatening than the right. But it’s still a threat.

Some on the left have argued, fairly, that those worried about people losing their jobs for running afoul of progressive orthodoxies should do more to strengthen labor protections, since all sorts of employees are vulnerable to capricious termination. But it seems strange to me to suggest that in the absence of better labor law, the left is justified in taking advantage of precarity to punish people for political disagreements.

Writing in the 1990s, at a time when feminists like Catharine MacKinnon sought to curtail free speech in the name of equality, the great left-libertarian Ellen Willis described how progressive movements sow the seeds of their own destruction when they become censorious.

It’s impossible, Willis wrote, “to censor the speech of the dominant without stifling debate among all social groups and reinforcing orthodoxy within left movements. Under such conditions a movement can neither integrate new ideas nor build support based on genuine transformations of consciousness rather than guilt or fear of ostracism.”

It’s not always easy to draw a clear line between what Willis described as “reinforcing orthodoxy” and agitating to make language and society more democratic and inclusive. As Nicholas Grossman pointed out in Arc Digital, most signatories to the Letter probably agree that it’s a good thing that the casual use of racist and homophobic slurs is no longer socially acceptable. “But those changes came about through private sanction, social pressure, and cultural change, driven by activists and younger generations,” he wrote.

Willis reminds us that when these changes were happening, the right denounced them as violations of free expression. Of the conservative campaign against political correctness in the 1990s, she wrote, “Predictably, their valid critique of left authoritarianism has segued all too smoothly into a campaign of moral intimidation,” one “aimed at demonizing egalitarian ideas, per se, as repressive.”

The same is happening today; the president throws tantrums about “cancel culture” while regularly trying to use the power of the state to quash speech he dislikes. Because Trump poisons everything he touches, his movement’s hypocritical embrace of the mantle of free speech threatens to devalue it, turning it into the rhetorical equivalent of “All Lives Matter.”

But to let this occur is to surrender what has historically been a sacred leftwing value. One reason many on the right want to be seen as free speech defenders is that they understand that the power to break taboos can be even more potent than the power to create them.

Even sympathetic people will come to resent a left that refuses to make distinctions between deliberate slurs, awkward mistakes and legitimate disagreements. Cowing people is not the same as converting them.

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Rolling Stone Editor on Why ‘White Fragility’ May Be the ‘Dumbest Book Ever Written’

If there is one non-conservative writer who you should read right now, it's Matt Taibbi. The Rolling Stone editor has been a surgeon in dissecting the Left's uncontrollable descent into insanity. Even if you disagree with most of his work, which I'm sure you will, his analysis of the Left's "woke" awakening is spot on and devastating. Taibbi torched these clowns for their historically illiterate and unhinged tantrum over Independence Day. Now, he's going off on the institutional Left's latest craze: fawning over Robin DiAngelo's "White Fragility," a cacophony of intersectionality nonsense that appears to have driven Taibbi crazy just reading it.

It's everything you'd expect to hear if you were forced to sit in some lecture about race quarterbacked by a "woke" lefty. You'd learn nothing about how to solve America's race issues, only that racism can never be eradicated, and that further entrenching racial divisions is the only remedy because unity doesn't appear to be the goal here. That's not an accident. From Martin Luther King to Jackie Robinson, the book appears to do well to pervert any notion of racial progress. There cannot be within this ethos. Taibbi nukes this book from orbit, calling it possibly the dumbest thing ever written, but also notes why it's no shock that it has caught on with lefty audiences, who are obsessed with race.

He notes that the "cancel culture" phenomenon was borne from this rigid, anti-intellectual movement that is race-obsessed. It's to the point where we have teenagers perusing social media accounts of their peers to find problematic tweets or posts and compiling them on spreadsheets; this is a "woke" hit list. Nothing Orwellian about that, right? It's super healthy…if you were a left-wing authoritarian. Oh, and Taibbi even noted that "woke" parents are just as bad: 

The problem, the aggrieved parent noted, was that his/her sons had gone to a diverse school, and their ‘closest friends are still a mix of black, Hispanic, and white kids,’ which to them was natural. The parent worried when one son was asked to fill out an application for a potential college roommate and expressed annoyance at having to specify race, because ‘I don’t care about race.’"

And? How on earth is this a bad mindset for young people to have? The kid clearly doesn't care about his roommate's background. Yet, the race war—the Left's version of it, the probable phantom struggle between Oceania and Eurasia. There can be no end. It must be perpetual. And there can be no debate. Double-plus good, huh? Also, with the racial division war being unending and solidifying divisions, that's how liberals maintain their competitiveness in national elections?

These kids are going to go to college, become more insane, graduate, and then spread an even more toxic form of "wokeness" into the sociopolitical sphere. It's a scary thought. Just look at what the first wave did to The New York Times, Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben's Rice, the Washington Redskins, and even fruit snacks. They're all hiding under the bed, fearful of the lefty mob.

The best part of this whole book is the notion that if you're white, the only thing you can do is "strive to be less white." It's liberalism in a nutshell: thinking is too hard (via Matt Taibbi):

If your category is “white,” bad news: you have no identity apart from your participation in white supremacy (“Anti-blackness is foundational to our very identities… Whiteness has always been predicated on blackness”), which naturally means “a positive white identity is an impossible goal.”

DiAngelo instructs us there is nothing to be done here, except “strive to be less white.” To deny this theory, or to have the effrontery to sneak away from the tedium of DiAngelo’s lecturing – what she describes as “leaving the stress-inducing situation” – is to affirm her conception of white supremacy. This intellectual equivalent of the “ordeal by water” (if you float, you’re a witch) is orthodoxy across much of academia.

DiAngelo’s writing style is pure pain. The lexicon favored by intersectional theorists of this type is built around the same principles as Orwell’s Newspeak: it banishes ambiguity, nuance, and feeling and structures itself around sterile word pairs, like racist and antiracist, platform and deplatform, center and silence, that reduce all thinking to a series of binary choices.

[…]

Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream,” speech…the framework for American race relations for more than half a century precisely because people of all races understood King to be referring to a difficult and beautiful long-term goal worth pursuing is discounted, of course. White Fragility is based upon the idea that human beings are incapable of judging each other by the content of their character, and if people of different races think they are getting along or even loving one another, they probably need immediate antiracism training.

[…]

Robin DiAngelo, I guess – who believes Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier because he “finally had what it took to play with whites.” Everyone familiar with this story understands that Robinson had to be exceptional, both as a player and as a human being, to confront the racist institution known as Major League Baseball. His story has always been understood as a complex, long-developing political tale about overcoming violent systemic oppression. For DiAngelo to suggest history should re-cast Robinson as “the first black man whites allowed to play major league baseball” is grotesque and profoundly belittling.

[…]

It takes a special kind of ignorant for an author to choose an example that illustrates the mathematical opposite of one’s intended point, but this isn’t uncommon in White Fragility, which may be the dumbest book ever written.

[…]

It sees the human being as locked into one of three categories: members of oppressed groups, allies, and white oppressors.

Where we reside on the spectrum of righteousness is, they say, almost entirely determined by birth, a view probably shared by a lot of 4chan readers. With a full commitment to the program of psychological ablutions outlined in the book, one may strive for a “less white identity,” but again, DiAngelo explicitly rejects the Kingian goal of just trying to love one another as impossible, for two people born with different skin colors.

[…]

At a time of catastrophe and national despair, when conservative nationalism is on the rise and violent confrontation on the streets is becoming commonplace, it’s extremely suspicious that the books politicians, the press, university administrators, and corporate consultants alike are asking us to read are urging us to put race even more at the center of our identities, and fetishize the unbridgeable nature of our differences. Meanwhile books like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird, which are both beautiful and actually anti-racist, have been banned, for containing the “N-word.” (White Fragility contains it too, by the way). It’s almost like someone thinks there’s a benefit to keeping people divided.

War is not meant to be won; it's meant to be continuous. And yet, we're the ones who want to divide. We're the ones that are racist. We're the ones who are the Neanderthals. My eyes can't roll any harder. You all knew this was a liberal trash talking point, especially since before COVID torpedoed it, Donald Trump created the best job market for blacks in our history. Also, women, black, Latino and Asian unemployment had reached historic lows. More people were working than those seeking a job. The economy was roaring before China threw a stone at it. The obsession with race is going to bite liberals in the a** one day. They will overreach and go off the deep end. I know it seems they already have, and you could make that argument, but we still await the one battle where this movement will be exposed as a circus act to everybody else. The drunk McCarthy moment where he took on the U.S. Army has yet to materialize. The "have you no decency, sir" moment has yet to arrive, though it'll probably be framed as "what, are you nuts?"

 SOURCE 


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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 
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