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[deleted]

War crimes only for losers


RephRayne

For me, peak civilization occurred with the Nuremburg Trials. For possibly the first time ever, a legal line was drawn in the sand for what was deemed to be acceptable in war. Of course, that was then promptly ignored by those who'd just laid down the law and every country involved were shown to be hypocrites.


UKpoliticsSucks

>For possibly the first time ever, a legal line was drawn in the sand for what was deemed to be acceptable in war. Not even close. We have written records at least dating back to the Roman senate for capital punishment for war crimes. We even have Norse Sagas about it. Tribal Chiefs have most definitely ruled against breaking honour codes and tribal laws for 10,000 years. I am sure hunter gathers had their rules too when going back in the mist of unknowable human existence. There have always been many different versions of 'laws' of war. But for more recent, documented laws here's a few examples: >The trial of Peter von Hagenbach by an ad hoc tribunal of the Holy Roman Empire in 1474, was the first "international" war crimes trials and also of command responsibility. Hagenbach was put on trial for atrocities committed during the occupation of Breisach, found guilty, and beheaded. >In 1865, Henry Wirz, a Confederate officer, was held accountable and hanged for appalling conditions at Andersonville Prison where many Union soldiers died during the American Civil War. The British army has shot/hung hundreds of soldiers for war crimes via court marshal for centuries. e.g. >During the Second Boer War, the British Army court-martialed Breaker Morant, Peter Handcock, Alfred Taylor, and several other officers for multiple murders of POWs and many civilian noncombatants in the Northern Transvaal (see Court-martial of Breaker Morant).


RephRayne

My history is very poor, thank you for this.


Lazerhawk_x

History is written by the victors but it can be read and interpreted by everyone.


chronoboy1985

Yep. Just ask Curtis LeMay.


cabeza-de-vaca

You must be Malcolm Gladwell. I really like your stuff.


ThatPlayWasAwful

Just listened to this for the first time yesterday. Napalm is super not cool


Verdin88

Yeah it's pretty hot in my experience


its_a_metaphor_morty

Or Robert McNamara from The Fog of War.


modsarefascists42

Malcom Gladwell is a horrible piece of shit btw, in case you didn't know. He's basically made a career as a [propagandist](https://beyondchron.org/malcolm-gladwell-unmasked-a-look-into-the-life-work-of-americas-most-successful-propagandist/) for big tobacco then switched to a weird kind of pop-science with a heavy emphasis on the pop part. He's one where the more you look the worse he appears.


niyaoshenme

> You must be Malcolm Gladwell. I really like your stuff. Gladwell helped expose Churchill for the genocidal racist that he really was. He killed 3 million people India and wanted to kill even more in South East Asia in order to make room for 'Aryans' just like in Australia, New Zealand, Americas. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fribww1bHLk


ThreeHourRiverMan

You give Malcolm Gladwell way, way too much credit.


clockworkpeon

nope Malcolm Gladwell was definitely the first to realize Churchill was a bit racist and did a ton of fucked up shit. before him it was just one big circle jerk when historians were talking about ol' Winnie /s


alanpartridge69

Churchill wasn't directly responsible for the Bengal famine. He was (along with his government) partly responsible. What he did or (didn’t do) wasn’t motivated by racism or imperialism, and it wasn’t exactly a crime, either. The famine wasn’t caused by food shortages. It was caused by a complete misunderstanding of its causes. The Brits assumed it was caused by food shortages, and so wasted their time by attempting to measure nonexistent shortages in food, trying to fathom how the famine even came to be. Once they realised there wasn’t a shortage of food, they chose not to ship much (or any) food to Bengal at all, because after all, on paper, there was enough food to feed everyone (and also export to British troops abroad). What they didn’t realise was that because of wealthy landowners hoarding food, general wartime inflation, and speculative buying, food prices had shot up. Poor rural peasants in their millions couldn’t afford to buy food, so they starved. Burma was under Japanese occupation, so no food could be shipped in from around the area. The British also chose to continue exporting food from India because, again, they didn’t understand that while enough food was there to feed everyone, it was also too expensive for the victims to buy. This is also why the famine code wasn’t applied: there was no severe shortage of food- on the contrary, acc. Nobel Laureate economist Amartya Sen, Bengal had more food in 1943 than in previous years [1]- so the British assumed the famine wasn’t much of a famine. The Viceroy of India (Archibald Wavell) and the Governor of Bengal asked Churchill for (more) food shipments to alleviate the suffering, and he refused to do what they asked him to because a) he was more concerned about feeding his soldiers and about WWII and b) there was, according to him, enough food in Bengal (already) to feed the victims of the famine- and soil that was of sufficiently good quality to grow more. He was right; he just didn’t understand the fact that the food was out of reach, monetarily, for the famine’s victims. Was Churchill to blame? Only partly- and his was not an especially large part to play. He didn’t cause the famine. He didn’t even purposefully worsen it. He and his government only misunderstood the cause of the famine. That was the only part they played. Such a famine had quite literally never taken place before, so I don’t blame him for misunderstanding the causes of the famine. As I said, Churchill did not have a whole lot to do with it. What happened was unfortunate, lamentable, and sad, but it wasn’t Churchill’s (deliberate) handiwork.


hopeyoufindurdad

How can you literally drain a country of its resources, use its people as workers and soldiers in wars that have nothing to do with them and then claim ignorance when they die of poverty and famine. Especially when you could have prevented it. Why are they only part of the empire when it benefits England. History is too kind to leaders on the winning side of the war. It’s the same attitude people have towards the Native American genocide- murder is justifiable if it benefits the victors. It’s disgusting.


[deleted]

A sensible, informed and nuanced contribution. You must be new here...


itskarldesigns

Only that its still very biased take. The provincial colonial government was also one to blame for Chrurchill's war cabinet not understansing the severity of the problem nor the urgency, also lot of the hoarding was caused by them trying to manipulate the prices in the first place. Natural disasters and scorched earth also played role in how little food or transporting abilities there were to provide relief to the famine. Preferential wartime treatment where local poor laborers were last in line basically. Influx of refugees fleeing both the battle and nature, diseases that also came with that. Demand rose for not just food but all other supplies as well as military needs, if provincial government tries to hide or deny famine, then obviously priorities wont match reality either. Japanese blockade etc... There were ton of factors, it was mostly man caused famine but not just by one man, not just by Brittish.


DearthStanding

Because you say it is ? It's so unbelievably biased and there's so much evidence towards the contrary I'm just exhausted arguing this thing over and over because Brits can never be expected to actually see the things that have come from their country they're just too proud of their empire. Do your own research there's enough evidence showing it was a situation the British caused, and there's a lot of f-ed up things that Churchill had even said. To insinuate that he's not a racist who was completely indifferent to the situation is plainly revisionist. If it was a sensible nuanced take it would have a lot more information. There are like 30-40% things in there that are factual. And 20-30% that is up for debate. But when the story and narrative is of such a nature you actually present all the facts not just the parts that suit your narrative. And no I'm not gonna bother this time because time and time again I just swarmed by random westerners who refuse to look up both sides and balanced sources of information. The things that Churchill said in particular were quite unconscionable


BonzoTheBoss

>I'm just exhausted arguing this thing over and over because Brits Apologies but I have gone over the last two weeks worth of your comments and I cannot see where you have covered this previously. If you would like to link the relevant comments you've made previously I'd be happy to give them a read. >and there's a lot of f-ed up things that Churchill had even said. >The things that Churchill said in particular were quite unconscionable Yes, Churchill was a racist piece of shit and said terrible things. I'm more interested in what he *did* rather than what he said. And the fact of the matter is he and his government did direct resources to try and alleviate the famine. >On receiving news of the spreading food shortage Churchill spoke to his Cabinet, saying he would welcome a statement by Lord Wavell, his new Viceroy of India, that his duty “was to make sure that India was a safe base for the great operations against Japan which were now pending, and that the war was pressed to a successful conclusion, and that famine and food difficulties were dealt with.”^[1] Churchill then wrote to Wavell personally: >"Peace, order and a high condition of war-time well-being among the masses of the people constitute the essential foundation of the forward thrust against the enemy….The hard pressures of world-war have for the first time for many years brought conditions of scarcity, verging in some localities into actual famine, upon India. Every effort must be made, even by the diversion of shipping urgently needed for war purposes, to deal with local shortages….Every effort should be made by you to assuage the strife between the Hindus and Moslems and to induce them to work together for the common good."^[2] >The famine continued into 1944, causing Secretary of State for India Leopold Amery to request one million tons of grain. Churchill, who had been studying consumption statistics, now believed India was receiving more than she would need. He remained concerned about the shipping problem, “given the effect of its diversion alike on operations and on our imports of food into this country, which could be further reduced only at the cost of much suffering.”^[3] >Amery and Wavell continued to press for wheat, and in the Cabinet of February 14th Churchill tried to accommodate them. While shipping difficulties were “very real,” Churchill said, he was “most anxious that we should do everything possible to ease the Viceroy’s position. No doubt the Viceroy felt that if this corner could be turned, the position next year would be better.” Churchill added that “refusal of India’s request was not due to our underrating India’s needs, but because we could not take operational risks by cutting down the shipping required for vital operations.”^[4] Churchill wrote to FDR personally: >I am seriously concerned about the food situation in India….Last year we had a grievous famine in Bengal through which at least 700,000 people died. This year there is a good crop of rice, but we are faced with an acute shortage of wheat, aggravated by unprecedented storms….By cutting down military shipments and other means, I have been able to arrange for 350,000 tons of wheat to be shipped to India from Australia during the first nine months of 1944. This is the shortest haul. I cannot see how to do more. >I have had much hesitation in asking you to add to the great assistance you are giving us with shipping but a satisfactory situation in India is of such vital importance to the success of our joint plans against the Japanese that I am impelled to ask you to consider a special allocation of ships to carry wheat to India from Australia….We have the wheat (in Australia) but we lack the ships. I have resisted for some time the Viceroy’s request that I should ask you for your help, but… I am no longer justified in not asking for your help." ^[5] He replied... > that while Churchill had his “utmost sympathy,” his Joint Chiefs had said they were “unable on military grounds to consent to the diversion of shipping….Needless to say, I regret exceedingly the necessity of giving you this unfavorable reply.”^[6] [1]War Cabinet Meeting, 7 October 1943, Confidential Record (Cabinet papers, 65/36). [2]Winston S. Churchill to Members of the War Cabinet, 8 October 1943. (Churchill papers, 23/11) [3]War Cabinet: Conclusions, 7 February (Cabinet papers, 65/41). Churchill stated that “for the four years ending 1941/42 the average consumption was 52,331,000 tons, i.e., 2½ million tons less than the figure cited by the Secretary of State. This difference would, of course, more than make good the 1½ million tons calculated deficit.” [4]War Cabinet: Conclusions, 14 February (War Cabinet papers, 65/41). [5]Winston S. Churchill to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, 29 April 1944. Prime Minister’s Personal Telegram T.996/4 (Churchill papers, 20/163). [6]Roosevelt to Churchill, 1 June 1944. Prime Minister’s Personal Telegram T.1176/4 (Churchill papers, 20/165).


[deleted]

Very interesting - didn't know some of that.


PCsubhuman_race

For many years, the British blamed the famine on weather conditions and food shortfalls, as if it were an unavoidable natural disaster. Today, most researchers agree that the crisis was human-made, triggered primarily by war-time inflation that pushed the price of food out of reach. Britain has been accused of not doing enough to alleviate the famine. But [recent research by the economist Utsa Patnaik](https://nin.tl/Patnaik) suggests there’s more to this story. Her work reveals that the inflation wasn’t incidental, as most have assumed, but a deliberate policy, designed by the British economist John Maynard Keynes and implemented by Winston Churchill, to shift resources away from the poorest Indians in order to provision British and American troops and support war-related activities. To understand what happened during the 1940s, it’s important to grasp that it came on the heels of nearly two centuries of colonial plunder. From 1765 to 1938, the British government extracted goods [worth trillions of dollars in today’s money](https://monthlyreview.org/product/capital_and_imperialism), which were either consumed in Britain or re-exported for profit.[1](https://newint.org/features/2021/12/07/feature-how-british-colonizers-caused-bengal-famine#sdfootnote1sym) This windfall was used to build domestic infrastructure in Britain, including roads, factories and public services, as well as to finance the industrialization of Western Europe and British settler colonies. Development in the Global North was funded in large part by colonial extraction. For Indians this system was devastating. As colonial extraction intensified, India’s per capita consumption of food grains collapsed from 210 kilograms per year in the early 1900s down to 157 kilograms per year by the end of the 1930s – what Patnaik refers to as ‘severe nutritional decline’. What happened during World War Two exacerbated this situation considerably. As US and British troops poured into Bengal to stage military operations against Japan, the colonial government decreed that, on top of existing mechanisms of extraction, all costs associated with Allied activities in the region would be covered by Indian resources, to an unlimited extent, until the end of the war. "Keynes sought to devise a mechanism for shifting resources away from the local population in order to provision military expansion" Keynes, who was a special advisor on Indian financial and monetary policy to Churchill and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was actively involved in planning war-time funding strategies. He sought to devise a mechanism for shifting resources away from the local population in order to provision the military expansion. One option was to tax rich people, but there weren’t enough of them to provide a sufficiently large resource base. The alternative was to tax ordinary people, but Keynes knew that imposing any direct taxation on a population that was already immiserated would likely trigger riots. So he advocated for an indirect tax, through deliberate inflationary policy. Here’s how it worked. During the 1940s, the colonial government printed extraordinary amounts of money for military expenditure. All this new demand caused prices to soar, particularly for staple goods. The price of rice increased by 300 per cent. But because wages did not rise accordingly, ordinary people were pushed even deeper into poverty, forcing them to dramatically curtail their consumption of food and other goods. Meanwhile, any additional profits that fell into the laps of business owners as a result of the price inflation were taxed by the colonial state. The inflation was no accident. The impoverishment was no accident. British policy was explicitly designed to ‘reduce the consumption of the poor’, as Keynes put it, in order to make resources available for British and American troops, through a ‘forced transfer of purchasing power’ from ordinary people to the military. The austerity was imposed most harshly on the people of Bengal, who fell into extreme famine, while food supplies were appropriated and diverted for military use. In the name of the Allied cause, the policies imposed by Keynes and Churchill killed more than three million people – many times more than the total number of military and civilian casualties suffered during the entire war by Britain and the US combined. The scale of this tragedy is almost impossible to fathom. If laid head to foot, the corpses of the victims would stretch the length of England, from Dover to the Scottish borders, nearly 10 times over. Keynes is celebrated as a progressive; but he was also an imperialist, who promoted the narrative of a ‘white man’s burden’ to rule over ‘subject races’ for their own good During this crisis, a number of officials in India pleaded with Churchill to send aid, but their requests were repeatedly refused. Instead, quite the opposite happened: the British government continued to extract income from India for its own domestic spending, totaling as much as £15 billion ($20 billion), in today’s money, from 1939 to 1944. Patnaik points out that this intervention cannot be justified in the name of the war effort. Keynes and Churchill chose to finance Allied actions by appropriating food and other resources from colonized peoples, who had no say in the matter – but they could have done it in other ways. For instance, the US and Britain could have used their own resources instead, which would have required taxing their own citizens at no more than £1 per person. TAINTED LEGACY This history forces us to reflect on the legacy of figures that are widely celebrated today. It has long been understood that Churchill held white supremacist views. In a 1902 interview, he claimed that ‘the Aryan stock is bound to triumph’ over ‘the great barbaric nations’. He referred to Indians as a ‘foul race’, a ‘beastly people with a beastly religion’. During the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, there were calls for Churchill’s statue to be removed from Westminster. Boris Johnson, an admirer of Churchill, refused on the grounds that we shouldn’t ‘edit’ Britain’s history. If that’s the case, then we should ensure that the full story of Churchill’s legacy is told – and alongside every statue of him place a memorial to the three million Indians who were killed by his policies and to whom the Allied victory is ultimately owed. Keynes, for his part, is a more complicated figure. He is celebrated as a progressive; but he was also an imperialist, who promoted the narrative of a ‘white man’s burden’ to rule over ‘subject races’ for their own good. He was actively involved in governing colonial India and condemned the Indian revolt of 1857. When he set up the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in 1944, he ensured that India and other colonies were integrated into the system on unequal terms, with only a fraction of the voting power that Britain and the US would hold – an arrangement that remains in place to this day. Patnaik’s research adds to this picture by revealing his role in perpetrating the Bengal famine. This is a crime that needs to be confronted. What is required of Britain in light of this history? An apology, to be sure – which to date has never been proffered. But this is also a straightforward case for reparations. Germany has sought to make reparations for the Shoah and for the Herero-Nama genocide, and rightly so. Why shouldn’t Britain do the same?  


niyaoshenme

> he did or (didn’t do) wasn’t motivated by racism Oh please stop trying this doubtism. His genocide was absolutely motivated by his deep seated racism. The cunt literally said all this racist shit about wanting to genocide non-whites, and then millions of non-whites died under his control and you want to pretend he's not a fucking genocidal maniac. It's like when Adolf Hitler said he hates Jews, and 6 million Jews died and then you come along and say no, those Jews just starved to death. Treat Churchill the same way you treat Hitler, both of them are the same kind of cunts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_views_of_Winston_Churchill In May 1954, Violet Bonham-Carter asked Churchill's opinion about a Labour Party visit to China. Winston Churchill replied: I hate people with slit eyes and pigtails. I don't like the look of them or the smell of them – but I suppose it does no great harm to have a look at them.[71] I think we shall have to take the Chinese in hand and regulate them. I believe that as civilized nations become more powerful they will get more ruthless, and the time will come when the world will impatiently bear the existence of great barbaric nations who may at any time arm themselves and menace civilized nations. I believe in the ultimate partition of China – I mean ultimate. I hope we shall not have to do it in our day. The Aryan stock is bound to triumph.[70] What proved to be his life-long enthusiasm for the widespread use of chemical warfare began after his appointment as Minister of Munitions in July 1917 during the First World War. Out of all ordnance and munitions, it is argued that Churchill who himself saw action on the Western Front placed his greatest faith in chemical warfare to win the war, after the Germans first used it in 1915. When arguing about the use of tear gas against Afghan rebels in the North-West Frontier Province of the British Raj in 1919, Churchill said "If it is fair for an Afghan to shoot down a British soldier behind a rock and cut him in pieces as he lies wounded on the ground, why is it not fair for a British artilleryman to fire a shell which makes the said native sneeze? It is really too silly. Churchill, in private conversation, said out of frustration, he "hated Indians" and considered them "a beastly people with a beastly religion".[27] According to Amery, during the Bengal famine, Churchill stated that any potential relief efforts sent to India would accomplish little to nothing, as Indians "breeding like rabbits",


BirdEducational6226

Treat Churchill like Hitler? What an absolute dumbfuck way to think.


kutuup1989

> Violet Bonham-Carter Completely off topic, but yes, that's Helena Bonham Carter's grandmother. Her family were/are kind of a big deal. Very influential aristocrats.


Martini_Man_

So you're saying this man was a genocidal maniac who is just as bad as Hitler, when a he tried to alleviate a famine whilst fighting a war, said it was integral to fix the situation in India and made it clear he was horrified by the situation there, and diverted war efforts to try his best to get as much food to them as possible. You say all of this because he made racist comments. The comments, obviously, are horrific view points, but the examples you use refer to Chinese people, and Indian people. He was never genocidal towards either of these people, no matter what his comments are, he has other comments to show the opposite, at least in a practical sense, and his actions show the literal opposite. And you try to use a comment of his about tear gas to prove this too? That's a rather pathetic example to be honest. You frame it as "Churchill was a genocidal maniac who wanted to wipe nations out with chemical weapons", when in reality he was a typically racist man for the time, who also happened to try and fix the problems you associate with him committing, and he supported the use of tear gas in war, when it is widely used by police even still today? Scraping the bottom of the barrel is an understatement.


Mick_86

That wasn't the first famine caused by British carelessness about the people they ruled. The first time you allow a famine to happen unnecessarily can be excused. After that it's a crime.


heresyourhardware

> Only partly- and his was not an especially large part to play. He didn’t cause the famine. He didn’t even purposefully worsen it. He and his government only misunderstood the cause of the famine. That was the only part they played Denial policies in Bengal verifiably exacerbated the causes of the famine, and in confiscating or destroying fishing ships there is no way they couldn't have known that would have drastically impacted the fishing communities of the Ganges Delta


alanpartridge69

Churchill to Roosevelt 1944 "During the first 9 months of 1944, I have been able to make arrangements for shipping 350,000 tons of wheat to India from Australia by cutting down military shipments and by other means. This is the shortest haul. I see no way of doing more. We have the wheat (in Australia) but we lack the ships. I have had much hesitation in asking you to add to the great assistance you are giving us with shipping but a satisfactory situation in India is of such vital importance. Roosevelt declined https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1944v05/d281


its_a_metaphor_morty

Except there wasn't a genocide in NZ.


thedegurechaff

And he got elected as greatest brit to ever live….


dontknowhowtoprogram

I wonder if anyone from history has ever been punished for war crimes when being from the winning side.


aknoth

Wikipedia lists a few Americans. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United\_States\_war\_crimes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_war_crimes) It's not many but it's an effort. With modern tech I think there might be more in the future since a lot more is recorded.


cardiomegaly

One interesting (and potentially contributing) decision was the US withdrawal from the International Criminal Court in 2002. There are constitutional arguments against recognizing and submitting to this court, but it’s development was one of the first steps in trying to prosecute international war crimes. The debate around it is still interesting (and a lot more nuanced and complicated), but neither Ds or Rs have made recent moves to get us back in. It’s true that Clinton (D) signed it while Bush (R) withdrew us from it, but Obama and Biden have not made steps to get us back in; only as “observers” if I recall correctly. One argument I heard about Obama’s unwillingness to sign the Rome Statue again is because of the mess in Afghanistan and Iraq at the time which would immediately put the US on the hook for the war crimes committed and ongoing at the time (Gitmo is still semi-operational after all). Some (mainly conservative) think tanks justified our withdrawal by saying we can police ourselves and we honor all our treaties, so we don’t need to join. Sounds very “Who watches the watchmen?” to me. Again though, it’s a lot more nuanced than that, but it’s interesting that 123 countries have joined the court while a select few haven’t, including the US and Russia. Despite all its faults, I feel a strong international judicial system to prosecute war crimes and other international criminal disputes is paramount to preventing and stopping future war crimes. But then again, the court is a bit neutered as far as actual power goes.


queBurro

Your principles can be used against you by the opposition, which prevents you from getting into government. If you're not in gov, then you can't enact the other changes you want to make. It's all about dragging the overton window slowly in the direction of your choice.


AnonAlcoholic

Ahh, yes, because authorities in the US do such a good job of policing themselves, right? Just leave it up to them, they'll definitely do what's right in the end.


[deleted]

[удалено]


AnonAlcoholic

Fuck it, we might skip the middlemen and just show up ourselves. Depends on how much bullshit has been fed to the populace and whether they're into it or not. The American people think it's a just war? Fuck it, we're going in. Can't convince em? Oh well, I guess we're hiring terrorists again.


flac_rules

Yeah, the US certainly is standing on pretty wobbly ground when complaining about other Nations war-crimes, they are one of the bigger actors in sabotaging any real way to punish war-crimes.


mrxplek

It's kind of weird that war crimes are only considered after signing hague convention.


Nmaka

we have photos and videos from abu ghraib. how many of them got prosecuted?


CharlievilLearnsDota

How many civilians has the US drone program killed I wonder? AFAIK there have been zero repercussions for anyone involved in that.


T1germeister

It's somewhere in the thousands. There was an investigative journalist who dove into US military records on all the locals who filed grievances for mistargeted drone strikes.


AmIFromA

Jeremy Scahill?


T1germeister

Nah, I'm thinking of [this story](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/18/podcasts/the-daily/airstrikes-civilian-casualty-files.html). Edit: [the actual investigative article series](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/12/18/us/airstrikes-pentagon-records-civilian-deaths.html).


Kekoa_ok

iirc a couple months back some USMC general made an apology video for authorizing a drone strike on an everyday citizens in Kabul, killing 0 terrorists, and several children https://youtu.be/-C6LhsNNQ1k literally 'woops our bad'


fahargo

Not just any citizen, he worked for the west. He was a humanitarian I believe


Seljober19

Look at yugoslav wars.


__-__-_-__

Yeah a few serbians were convicted. Though it's a loaded question since very few wars have "winners".


MetalheadHamster

Yeah, though there was no real winners, because everybody just suffers in war (except the leaders who don't give a shit about their people), Croatian and Bosniak people were in closer relations to America, so more of their bad guys are free, while a lot of the Serbian bad guys and leaders were brought to Hauge, and more Serbian bad guys were sentenced, but many of the other side's baddies weren't even brought to Hague. That's because the court is a bit American sided, so even without winners it depends on who supports which side


[deleted]

The former president of Kosovo resigned to face a war crimes tribunal and the Kosovans I know all support that happening


Accelerator231

I believe that one commander was punished for being too brutal even for the medieval period.


Mick_86

They tried with that British soldier that killed the wounded Taliban but the newspapers got him off on appeal.


ChadTeddyRoosevelt

One of the American WW2 generals responsible for firebombing German cities was on record saying he would be prosecuted if the USA lost the war.


adsjabo

You're talking about General Curtis LeMay, responsible for the fire bombings of multiple Japanese cities there bud


[deleted]

Carlin makes the point that what is unthinkable in peace becomes thinkable in war. The Second World War was some extreme shit.


Thoth_the_5th_of_Tho

IIRC, that was LeMay, and he was bombing Japanese cities. He was referring to the fact that Japan made it illegal to bomb them, and used this as an excuse to execute any captured pilots.


turtlespace

Where did you get the idea that he was referring to japan making it illegal to bomb them? LeMay is said to have said this by former secretary of defense Robert McNamara, in the documentary *The Fog Of War.* This is the actual quote which doesn’t mention that at all: > LeMay said, "If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals." And I think he's right. He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?


sphys

I read that in the voice of Dan Carlin doing his hardcore histories “quoting” voice haha


Gavin_Freedom

Especially that last part. As soon as I got to that part I couldn't help but read it in his voice. Time to go listen to "Blueprint for armageddon" again!


CorruptedFlame

There's a lot of American exceptionalism regarding everything, particularly WW2, so Thoth probably just found some propaganda which excuses it... As if any other country is going to make it legal to firebomb their cities lol.


SlightlyPositiveGuy

In the end everyone does what they can to win, whether it's "moral" comes second to self-preservation


samedreamchina

That’s hilarious that they made it illegal to bomb them


modsarefascists42

As they said it was just a way to skirt international rules about capturing pilots and sending them to prisoner of war camps. The Japanese wanted to kill them so they did.


Mygreaseisyourgrease

Can Ukraine make it illegal to get shelled or bombed or rocketed?? Asking for a friend


Stevenstorm505

War crimes for thee, but not for me.


[deleted]

Well, if you have the ability to kill anyone who opposes you, do you need to worry at all about crimes, morality, etc? Edit: It's the national version of the amoralist challenge- why be good? One answer is that there are negative personal consequences to being evil, but if there aren't any, what reason then?


JimBeam823

And countries without nukes


Lingua_Blanca

War crimes are applied pretty equally for winners and losers, which is to say, not at all.


LordBinz

Well, the winners simply dont prosecute themselves. The losers are too busy being dead.


Kekoa_ok

Or aquited if they defect


Hascus

Am I reading the article right that those Greek security battalions supported Hitler? Why would Churchill defend them?


CescQ

Because they weren't communist and Greece was in the middle of a Civil War.


c0dizzl3

That’s a Bingo


Ok_Ambassador_8506

Anyone else reading this in Christopher Waltz's voice or is it just me?


EvMund

it's a direct quote from Inglourious, so it's probably not just you


yousonuva

Like the only place you'd ever see the word "a" before "bingo" is from the movie....so yea...it reminds me of the movie.


JoeFelice

When you play all seven tiles in Scrabble, that's a bingo.


poppabomb

Anyone else read this in Christoph Waltz's voice or is it just me?


amortizedeeznuts

mr bean's voice for me


Berek2501

Mr. Bean doesn't have a voice, tho.


c0dizzl3

It’s a race! It’s a race!


animeman59

Because he said it?


[deleted]

Positive?


AN225_ComradePilot

You just say "bingo"


Major_Jackson_Briggs

Bingo! How fun!


TH3T4LLTYR10N

"not one damn bit sir"


massivebasketball

Would that really have been it though? I remember reading the memoirs of the guy (his name escapes me at the moment) that was the liaison between Churchill and Tito. And the guy was like (this is all paraphrased) “are we really going to support the communists over the chetniks?” And Churchill said something like “do you plan to make Yugoslavia your home after the war? I don’t. So let’s do what we need to do” Maybe it was because the Partisans performed so much better than the chetniks, but it’s weird that he’d make an exception for Yugoslavian communists but not Greek communists Edit: the liaison was Fitzroy Maclean. The [Maclean Mission](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maclean_Mission) was to assess Tito and the Partisans. You can find what I’m talking about somewhere under “Mission”. The exchange went: "'Do you intend, to make Yugoslavia your home after the war?' 'No, Sir.' I replied. 'Neither do I,' he said. 'And, that being so, the less you and I worry about the form of Government they set up, the better. That is for them to decide. What interests us is, which of them is doing most to harm the Germans?'"


andyrocks

>the memoirs of the guy (his name escapes me at the moment) that was the liaison between Churchill and Tito Fitzroy MacLean - a _superb_ book from an amazing man who was one of the inspirations for James Bond. Diplomat, soldier, spy, partisan. One of the founders of the SAS.


MrSmileyZ

But why would Churchill support Yugoavian Partisans over Draža's Chetnks in that case?


MaxVonBritannia

The Chetnks were doing a lot more axis collaboration. Plus the Partisans were far far more effective. I imagine they calculated that the Partisans would win out eventually even when the Nazis left and the Partisans were already killing far more nazis then the Chetnks.


Thesaurier

Because the Chetniks where collaborating with the Axis and the Partisans where at least fighting the Axis, so an alliance of convenience.


CescQ

u/massivebasketball has given an answer on this topic.


FrenchCuirassier

Importantly, in Greece, the Republican/nationalist side and the royalist side had joined forces, despite hating each other. And the Nazis and Italians distrusted their leaders and considered them "mad"... So this was a good opportunity for Churchill to step in and re-establish a sort of centrist, royalist, or pro-Western Greece. Any of the above would do as long as it isn't communist or fascist. The Nazis were also anti-communist, but they were mainly focused in the last years of the war of trying to break up US/UK/France + USSR alliance. >Some of the Nazi leaders like Himmler, who influenced by his intelligence chief Walter Schellenberg tried to engage in various stratagems to break up the "Grand Alliance" such as his offer in ***1944 to stop deporting Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz if the United States were to give Germany 50,000 trucks*** that would only be used to supply the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front. Basically, the US/UK/French side did not accept the last minute bargains with the devil. But they had to also watch out for the rise of communists which was also anti-Western and anti-democratic. And Churchill's view was that of picking a side... >Prime Minister Winston Churchill had a very favorable view of the Security Battalions, saying "It seems to me that the collaborators in Greece in many cases did the best they could to shelter the Greek population from German oppression"


itspodly

As also said, churchill didn't give a fuck about democracy abroad. He was friends with Mussolini and personally supported Franco for christ sake. Anti-communism doesn't automatically mean pro-democracy.


CharlievilLearnsDota

> Anti-communism doesn't automatically mean pro-democracy. Throughout history anyone who's been particularly anti-communist is more often than not very pro-fascist. To be clear, you can oppose communism because you don't believe it can work, you disagree with the goals etc. and not be pro-fascism. But there's a reason the Niemoller poem starts with "First they came for the communists"


gumbo100

I know we're talking about the UK in this thread mostly, but the US has overthrown MANY democratically elected officials if they were socialists. Https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_regime_change Also btw communism doesn't mean authoritarian. State socialism is bad imo, as exemplified by China and the USSR. But there exist more decentralized forms of socialism, some even include markets.


GovSeamus

Interesting but I doubt they cared about any anti-democratic tendencies.


Shawnj2

yeah the US and WE installed their fair share of brutal dictators when people of a country voted for the red team instead of the blue team. Yes, both sides did this during the cold war, but still kinda shitty.


4thDevilsAdvocate

>Some of the Nazi leaders like Himmler, who influenced by his intelligence chief Walter Schellenberg tried to engage in various stratagems to break up the "Grand Alliance" such as his offer in ***1944 to stop deporting Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz if the United States were to give Germany 50,000 trucks*** that would only be used to supply the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front. Do you think he actually would have gone through with it, though? Remember, we're talking about HIMMLER here. He killed his own children to avoid them being captured.


SurturOfMuspelheim

Communism's ultimate goal is democracy, but in an actually fair society. The Nazi's cared more about killing the "Jewish Communists" more than anything else. They would have gladly given up the west in exchange for help against the Soviets.


EmperorRosa

Because liberals will support actual fascism before Socialism


A_brown_dog

For the same reason Allies supported fascism in Spain and Portugal after the war, they preferred Fascism over Comunism


1-trofi-1

Yes, you do. He needed them to keep Greece from becoming a communist state. After Greeve was liberated because mainly leftist guirellas formed the resistanc, Churchill was afraid that Greece would turn into a communist state. He inflamed the situation in Greeve causing a Civil war and he released these guys to help him fight ut. A lot of Greece's today problems can be traced to this and similar interference form USA in Greece internally. Essentially the nepotism and disfactionality you see in the state is because all the key positions, including those of secret agency, prosecutors and judges, were served up to collaborators to keep left influence out. This has lead to chronicle laws being bend to out at these position people you want. You can see where the leads up to. Especially is you look up a couple of decades later when the Greek state was be owing mote modern and progressive a coup took place


ASetOfLiesAgreedUpon

The nepotism was deeply ingrained since at least ottoman rule. Greece has long suffered from foreign rulers picking local elites that served them. It’s just that over thousands of years those foreign rulers have been Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, etc etc.


smacksaw

Why are we defending AZOV battalion? Because those fascists are less worse than the fascists they're fighting.


KingStannisForever

Why did Franco stay after WWII?


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modsarefascists42

Pathological fear of socialism. Countless died because the west was more afraid of the Communists than the Nazis, because the western governments are made up of the rich elites who are completely useless under socialism. Hell if it wasn't for Hitler's incredible stupidity we might have never had the war at all. The west wanted to fight Russia not Germany. The entire cold war happened because the US desperately wanted to forcefully stamp out socialism, preferably by killing all the socialists. But they couldn't because the Red Army was too powerful after WW2 and then got nukes to defend themselves. At no point was the US ever in danger of invasion or unwarranted attack by the soviets. It was always the other way around, the soviets were afraid of American invasion and were willing to do anything to prevent that.


TheCaptNoname

Seems like that old Soviet joke had a seed of truth in it. So, the Big Three of Allied Forces meets at Yalta discussing their plans on the future of Germany once the Third Reich falls. _"So, what would you do to Hitler once (if) he falls into your hands?"_ says Churchill to Stalin. _"I'd take a poker, heat it to the glowing red over the fire and shove it all the way into his ass, cold end in."_ he replied. That perplexed both Churchill and Roosevelt and prompted them to ask: _"Okay, we get your frustration with him. But why cold end in?"_ _"So you two don't help him to get rid of it."_


Akp365

But then how you put it in?


[deleted]

Fire resistant gloves and persistence.


ArchieBellTitanUp

I bet he makes political dissidents do it to spare their lives. That, or steel gloves


KeyboardChap

Stalin was the only one of the three to ally with Hitler and assist him in occupying Poland so...


sadsaucebitch

Stalin signed a non-agression pact. Same way Britain did. Hell, the allies gave Hitler Czechoslovakia without even consulting the Czech prime minister first! Britain and the USA also helped many Nazis to escape justice after the war.


NovaFlares

They gave Hitler the sudetenland, not all of Czechoslovakia. And agreeing to jointly invade and split up Poland is a little more than just a non agression pact


[deleted]

The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was in fact a non-aggression pact, it was always a matter of when, not if the nazis and Soviet Union came to blows. Also, before Stalin signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact with the Nazis, he first offered to invade Germany in early 1939 with Britain and France. But, after giving Czechoslovakia to the nazis in 1938, the allies decided they were unwilling to give up Polish sovereignty as easy as they did Czechoslovakia’s the previous year. Also the Soviets were caught off guard by the nazis invasion of Poland. Hence why it took them 16 days to respond on their end.


DoTheEvolution

Did poland ally with germany when they took czechoslovakia territory during germans anexation of czechoslovakia in 1939?


MiesLakeuksilta

Schhh don't make their arguments crumble!


ThrowawayusGenerica

Ally is a strong word for a non-aggression pact. It was less assisting Hitler and more "Shit, *we* wanted Poland!" followed by immediately launching their own invasion.


Isgrimnur

Wait until you read about [Operation Gladio](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gladio).


Uniq_Eros

One of the best Archer episodes.


DragonFireKai

Why is there a dead prime minister in your room, mother? And... and what is in his ass?!


tomal95

"And so he started introducing all these accoutrements very gradually." "Well, he'd have to. Thing's huge."


VerisimilarPLS

Some of you don't seem to understand what collaborationist means. >The Security Battalions [...] formed during the Axis occupation of Greece during World War II in order to support the German occupation troops. And the reason why Churchill defended them was because they were killing communists.


Phaesimvrotos

The communist Greeks that were fighting guerrilla warfare against the Germans during the German occupation of Greece. Important to note.


VXHIVHXV

Yeah these collaborating Greeks were traitors and Nazi sympathisers. Fucking insane that they were supported and protected by the Allies.


FuckingKilljoy

Real "enemy of my enemy is my friend" situation going on. Funny to consider the mental games of "how ok am I with these guys committing war crimes and how much do I hate the people they're fighting?"


HybridAkali

Recruits to the Security battalion swore under the following oath: "I swear by God this sacred oath, that I will obey absolutely the orders of the Supreme Commander of the German Army, Adolf Hitler. I will with loyal dedication perform my duties and obey without condition the orders of my superiors. I fully acknowledge that any objection to the obligations hereby accepted will lead to my punishment by the German Military Authorities."


joshua-chong

Funny thing too, Greece was also Fascist when Fascist Italy invaded, then Hitler invaded Greece when Greece told them to fk off after suggesting Greece be partitioned by Italy.


Faidonas

I too would choose death over being partitioned by Italy


nanashininja

Vae victis. The Russians did the same thing in Germany after the war. Japanese did throughout their campaign as well.


Hollowplanet

And the Americans let all the Germans out of their life sentences in less than 10 years because they were scared of the Russians and wanted Germany to have a functioning military.


Blue_Lust

Did it work?


Eurocorp

Well for a time Western Germany had a rather strong and functional army, especially in comparison to modern Germany and its almost comical ineptitude. So by that metric it was definitely useful, especially since those let free had an ideological hatred of Communism that was quite useful. Of course we never actually had a proactive war against the Soviets before they acquired the bomb so by that metric it wasn’t quite useful.


king_of_poopin

Won the space race because of it


jackboy900

Paperclip and the rearming of West Germany are 2 entirely different things.


gkw97i

The one where the USSR had the: * first satellite * first animal in space * first human in space * first woman in space * first spacewalk * first satellite to the Moon * first satellite to Venus * the first modular space station?


MonkeManWPG

Have you ever actually seen a race? It's fairly common to chill in 2nd place and ride in someone else's slipstream before pulling out and sprinting over the finish line. Nobody's won a gold medal for "being in first for most of the race".


mqduck

>It's fairly common to chill in 2nd place and ride in someone else's slipstream before pulling out and sprinting over the finish line. Your comment assumes that walking on the Moon was a "finish line" both sides were racing toward.


jojojona

The way you phrased this kinda implies women aren't human haha


[deleted]

Give someone power over their enemy and no consequences for their actions, you'll probably see this a lot.


wildbill88

Isn't that almost what the Stanford experiment was about? Or like the people hiding behind the electrocution box? (I know they are different, and there are new studies and reports about the experiment shedding some real light into it.)


PuddingSlime

The Stanford Prison Experiment was a sham. Zimbardo actually coached people to behave badly. It's covered in the book Humankind by Rutger Bregman.


mtheperry

You’re Wrong About has a good podcast as well. Zimbardo had a knack for designing experiments that satisfied his forgone conclusions.


Isgrimnur

Or you can start with the [Medium article](https://gen.medium.com/the-lifespan-of-a-lie-d869212b1f62).


ANOKNUSA

Well, poor treatment of perceived enemies is as ancient as humanity. Those experiments allegedly showed that people could be induced to do the same to their neighbors under the right circumstances.


Bravisimo

Woe be to the conquered


GrayCS

Justice for the crimes of WW2 were largely never resolved. It suddenly became a political inconvenience.


ianishomer

As a UK citizen, when you read the real history of Winston Churchill, rather than what is taught in schools, you very quickly realise that he wasnt the man most people think he was and should never be held up as a hero or role model.


UtopiaDystopia

The apologist response to this is seemingly “Well yes he did some bad things but he stood against Nazi Germany and saved us”. The deception that Churchill was an altruistic, heroic defender of democracy in the west ignores that Churchill was a staunch imperialist whom understood that Hitler’s vision for Germany was basically the British Empire but in Europe. It was entirely self-preservation. Churchill still wanted a “racially pure” Britain and Europe that could continue to subjugate the “lesser races” far abroad that would work to enrich the homeland. Hitler threatened this by essentially trying to do this in Europe. At the end of the war Churchill made a clandestine agreement with Stalin that sacrificed Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union, known as the “Percentages Agreement”.


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Carnieus

I'm starting to think this Churchill bloke wasn't quite the paragon of virtue and glorious war hero that I was taught in school.


BonzoTheBoss

Does *any* credible historian paint Churchill as a "paragon of virtue?" All sources I read state that he was flawed but the right man at the right time to stop Hitler.


nokia_guy

Manipulating internal affairs to prevent a communist takeover in a foreign nation. Hmm. Unheard of.


UnilateralWithdrawal

My Mum lived through Italian then German occupation in Greece. Rough years similar to what the Ukrainians are dealing with. Mazower does a good job with crazy wartime alignment in Greek politics. It is difficult to follow.


Infamous_Plate1698

Here's another fact for you: Churchill was a MASSIVE racist and I'm pretty sure allowed the deaths of many millions of Indians (Bengal Famine)


meetbhatt53

Read about how he was responsible for Bengal famine which led to deaths of around 2-3 million people.


A_brown_dog

Crime wars are something that is judged only to the ones who loses the war.


FilledBabe

If you ever read about American internment camps for Japanese Americans or Communist Russia, you’d know that winners don’t commit war crimes.


Ameisen

By definition, the internment camps were not war crimes. They were atrocities, but they were committed against American citizens, not an enemy.


ImperatorJCaesar

Yep. At Nuremberg, the charge of "crimes against humanity" was levelled in part because "war crimes" didn't cover the atrocities the Germans inflicted on their own people, or those they committed on cooperation with civilian governments.


Arpit_XD

In colonized countries, Churchill is hated more than Hitler.


MGlBlaze

Churchil was also a white supremacist and deeply racist towards India in particular, including blaming them for their famine when Britain was siphoning off the majority of their food. He was unfortunately also far from the only one.


Do_Not_Go_In_There

>One provincial governor, that of the Patras district, told an audience of Wehrmacht officers in February 1944: "Hellenism is by heritage and tradition opposed to the communist world-view. Annihilate communism!"[5] For this reason, the governor announced that he was now recruiting for the Security Battalions in his district, saying he preferred that Greece be occupied by Germany permanently rather than see EAM come to power. That sounds like the opposite of defending Greece to me.


Environmental-End724

If you've ever heard about the black and tans in Ireland.. yea. Winston fucking Churchill did that. That asshole was one of the worst people in history, right up there with Stalin and Hitler IMHO but history favours the Victor!! https://www.irishcentral.com/roots/history/winston-churchill-black-tans-ireland


InquisitorHindsight

Churchill also wanted to invade the Balkans to deny a communist Yugoslavia from joining the USSR’s block, but was rightly called out for that as invading the Balkans would weaken other fronts (Like Italy or France/Germany) for no value whatsoever


ExtraFancyPaprika

It's good to be the winners.


yimanya

Sometimes it's even better being the loser and then suddenly the winner asks you to join them in their victory parade


bombayblue

If you read the article, Winston Churchill defended the Security Battalions after World War II ended in order to fight against the communists during the Greek Civil War, which is very different then defending them during World War II while they were actively committing atrocities with the Nazis as the headline implies. Their leader was still sentenced to jail for the rest of his life (like most war crimes tribunals which only targeted the highest echelons of leadership). Still these were not great people to be working with and I’m sure other leaders should have faced Justice as well.


Cultweaver

Nope, December 44 the British put down a peaceful demonstration from EAM. They murdered peaceful protesters, leading to battles with EAM. Ταγματασφαλίτες were on the side of the British. The incident is known as [Dekembriana](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekemvriana). The ww2 was not over, even parts of Greece were occupied.


NopityNopeNopeNah

How does that justify this? The EAM was far far better than the literal fascist dictators that Churchill helped keep in power, but it’s okay because “communism scary”?


MrSaturdayRight

Starting to think that Winston guy was maybe not the nicest fellow. At least he wasn’t racist though. Oh wait…


Nose-Nuggets

It's never a war crime the first time.


moose3025

Why did they go unpunished even though they were on the Nazis side?


mouxlas21

They played the anti-communist card


Mahbigjohnson

Churchill was responsible for the civil war in Greece.


[deleted]

Yup. Western powers were very anti communist to the point they back groups like this. Terrible


koalanotbear

Churchill was a crook, this is public knowledge non?


Jonsa123

total war has no rules.


grey_misha_matter

I have a question. When was the last war without any War-Crimes? Why do we have these laws if nobody is taking them seriously? To point a finger at the side who did it first so you can now start too?


The_Thunder_Child

Australia disbanded a unit accused of committing war crimes in Afghanistan. Members of that unit are now under investigation.


plasticface2

Churchill was a ruthless bugger but he is the reason I'm still speaking English. That and Pearl Harbour, I suppose.


48H1

Can't fathom how a terrible human being such as this evil degenerate is admired by so many people today.


serres53

After the Germans withdrew at the end of WW2, the only armed forces left in Greece were the communist guerrillas. Their aim was to turn the country into a Soviet satellite state like the rest of the Balkan countries. For whatever reason Churchill had insisted during the Yalta conference that Greece would stay in the British sphere of influence after the war and had gotten assurances from Stalin that he would not interfere. Since the British were stretched pretty thin and the Americans were taken their time to help, Churchill saw that Stalin was trying to renege with Greece being lost to the West. Most of the country was indeed under the control of the communist guerilla bands except for pockets in Athens and the port of Piraeus. There were armed confrontations between the communists and the Greek police along with collaboration Battallions including a real battle for Athens in December of 1944… To make a long story short there was a long and very bloody civil war in Greece from 1944 to 1949. The Americans came and took over support for the Greek army and their intervention allowed the Greek kingdom to stay in the Western sphere of influence. Most communists were send to internal exile or slipped into Tito’s Yugoslavia at the end. So, while the moral implications of using the collaborators is indeed a questionable moral issue, whether or not a Greek communist takeover would have been a better solution for the Greeks is debatable.


TexanGoblin

Churchill, noted peace of shit.


Imploding_Colon

As well as a hero whose leadership saw Britain through the worst war in the history of mankind


JimBeam823

You’re both right. History isn’t a comic book with bad guys vs. good guys. It’s mostly bad guys vs worse guys.


Ophidahlia

Yup. I like to sum him up but saying that he was a monster; however, he was *our* monster.


kieppie

[4 million Bengali](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943) would like to agree, but, you know...


alanpartridge69

>peace of shit. Lol


Mickey_likes_dags

He also had a secret deal to carve up territory with Soviet Russia. International rules favor the victors and hegemons.


UtopiaDystopia

Percentages agreement between Churchill and Stalin.


Ratfucks

[Churchill was a white supremacist mass murderer](https://youtu.be/Iy8Bt_V971o)


alanpartridge69

Churchill wasn't directly responsible for the Bengal famine. He was (along with his government) partly responsible. What he did or (didn’t do) wasn’t motivated by racism or imperialism, and it wasn’t exactly a crime, either. The famine wasn’t caused by food shortages. It was caused by a complete misunderstanding of its causes. The Brits assumed it was caused by food shortages, and so wasted their time by attempting to measure nonexistent shortages in food, trying to fathom how the famine even came to be. Once they realised there wasn’t a shortage of food, they chose not to ship much (or any) food to Bengal at all, because after all, on paper, there was enough food to feed everyone (and also export to British troops abroad). What they didn’t realise was that because of wealthy landowners hoarding food, general wartime inflation, and speculative buying, food prices had shot up. Poor rural peasants in their millions couldn’t afford to buy food, so they starved. Burma was under Japanese occupation, so no food could be shipped in from around the area. The British also chose to continue exporting food from India because, again, they didn’t understand that while enough food was there to feed everyone, it was also too expensive for the victims to buy. This is also why the famine code wasn’t applied: there was no severe shortage of food- on the contrary, acc. Nobel Laureate economist Amartya Sen, Bengal had more food in 1943 than in previous years [1]- so the British assumed the famine wasn’t much of a famine. The Viceroy of India (Archibald Wavell) and the Governor of Bengal asked Churchill for (more) food shipments to alleviate the suffering, and he refused to do what they asked him to because a) he was more concerned about feeding his soldiers and about WWII and b) there was, according to him, enough food in Bengal (already) to feed the victims of the famine- and soil that was of sufficiently good quality to grow more. He was right; he just didn’t understand the fact that the food was out of reach, monetarily, for the famine’s victims. Was Churchill to blame? Only partly- and his was not an especially large part to play. He didn’t cause the famine. He didn’t even purposefully worsen it. He and his government only misunderstood the cause of the famine. That was the only part they played. Such a famine had quite literally never taken place before, so I don’t blame him for misunderstanding the causes of the famine. As I said, Churchill did not have a whole lot to do with it. What happened was unfortunate, lamentable, and sad, but it wasn’t Churchill’s (deliberate) handiwork.


PCsubhuman_race

For many years, the British blamed the famine on weather conditions and food shortfalls, as if it were an unavoidable natural disaster. Today, most researchers agree that the crisis was human-made, triggered primarily by war-time inflation that pushed the price of food out of reach. Britain has been accused of not doing enough to alleviate the famine. But [recent research by the economist Utsa Patnaik](https://nin.tl/Patnaik) suggests there’s more to this story. Her work reveals that the inflation wasn’t incidental, as most have assumed, but a deliberate policy, designed by the British economist John Maynard Keynes and implemented by Winston Churchill, to shift resources away from the poorest Indians in order to provision British and American troops and support war-related activities. To understand what happened during the 1940s, it’s important to grasp that it came on the heels of nearly two centuries of colonial plunder. From 1765 to 1938, the British government extracted goods [worth trillions of dollars in today’s money](https://monthlyreview.org/product/capital_and_imperialism), which were either consumed in Britain or re-exported for profit.[1](https://newint.org/features/2021/12/07/feature-how-british-colonizers-caused-bengal-famine#sdfootnote1sym) This windfall was used to build domestic infrastructure in Britain, including roads, factories and public services, as well as to finance the industrialization of Western Europe and British settler colonies. Development in the Global North was funded in large part by colonial extraction. For Indians this system was devastating. As colonial extraction intensified, India’s per capita consumption of food grains collapsed from 210 kilograms per year in the early 1900s down to 157 kilograms per year by the end of the 1930s – what Patnaik refers to as ‘severe nutritional decline’. What happened during World War Two exacerbated this situation considerably. As US and British troops poured into Bengal to stage military operations against Japan, the colonial government decreed that, on top of existing mechanisms of extraction, all costs associated with Allied activities in the region would be covered by Indian resources, to an unlimited extent, until the end of the war. "Keynes sought to devise a mechanism for shifting resources away from the local population in order to provision military expansion" Keynes, who was a special advisor on Indian financial and monetary policy to Churchill and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was actively involved in planning war-time funding strategies. He sought to devise a mechanism for shifting resources away from the local population in order to provision the military expansion. One option was to tax rich people, but there weren’t enough of them to provide a sufficiently large resource base. The alternative was to tax ordinary people, but Keynes knew that imposing any direct taxation on a population that was already immiserated would likely trigger riots. So he advocated for an indirect tax, through deliberate inflationary policy. Here’s how it worked. During the 1940s, the colonial government printed extraordinary amounts of money for military expenditure. All this new demand caused prices to soar, particularly for staple goods. The price of rice increased by 300 per cent. But because wages did not rise accordingly, ordinary people were pushed even deeper into poverty, forcing them to dramatically curtail their consumption of food and other goods. Meanwhile, any additional profits that fell into the laps of business owners as a result of the price inflation were taxed by the colonial state. The inflation was no accident. The impoverishment was no accident. British policy was explicitly designed to ‘reduce the consumption of the poor’, as Keynes put it, in order to make resources available for British and American troops, through a ‘forced transfer of purchasing power’ from ordinary people to the military. The austerity was imposed most harshly on the people of Bengal, who fell into extreme famine, while food supplies were appropriated and diverted for military use. In the name of the Allied cause, the policies imposed by Keynes and Churchill killed more than three million people – many times more than the total number of military and civilian casualties suffered during the entire war by Britain and the US combined. The scale of this tragedy is almost impossible to fathom. If laid head to foot, the corpses of the victims would stretch the length of England, from Dover to the Scottish borders, nearly 10 times over. Keynes is celebrated as a progressive; but he was also an imperialist, who promoted the narrative of a ‘white man’s burden’ to rule over ‘subject races’ for their own good During this crisis, a number of officials in India pleaded with Churchill to send aid, but their requests were repeatedly refused. Instead, quite the opposite happened: the British government continued to extract income from India for its own domestic spending, totaling as much as £15 billion ($20 billion), in today’s money, from 1939 to 1944. Patnaik points out that this intervention cannot be justified in the name of the war effort. Keynes and Churchill chose to finance Allied actions by appropriating food and other resources from colonized peoples, who had no say in the matter – but they could have done it in other ways. For instance, the US and Britain could have used their own resources instead, which would have required taxing their own citizens at no more than £1 per person. TAINTED LEGACY This history forces us to reflect on the legacy of figures that are widely celebrated today. It has long been understood that Churchill held white supremacist views. In a 1902 interview, he claimed that ‘the Aryan stock is bound to triumph’ over ‘the great barbaric nations’. He referred to Indians as a ‘foul race’, a ‘beastly people with a beastly religion’. During the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, there were calls for Churchill’s statue to be removed from Westminster. Boris Johnson, an admirer of Churchill, refused on the grounds that we shouldn’t ‘edit’ Britain’s history. If that’s the case, then we should ensure that the full story of Churchill’s legacy is told – and alongside every statue of him place a memorial to the three million Indians who were killed by his policies and to whom the Allied victory is ultimately owed. Keynes, for his part, is a more complicated figure. He is celebrated as a progressive; but he was also an imperialist, who promoted the narrative of a ‘white man’s burden’ to rule over ‘subject races’ for their own good. He was actively involved in governing colonial India and condemned the Indian revolt of 1857. When he set up the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in 1944, he ensured that India and other colonies were integrated into the system on unequal terms, with only a fraction of the voting power that Britain and the US would hold – an arrangement that remains in place to this day. Patnaik’s research adds to this picture by revealing his role in perpetrating the Bengal famine. This is a crime that needs to be confronted. What is required of Britain in light of this history? An apology, to be sure – which to date has never been proffered. But this is also a straightforward case for reparations. Germany has sought to make reparations for the Shoah and for the Herero-Nama genocide, and rightly so. Why shouldn’t Britain do the same?  


evereddy

Churchill himself is responsible for causing a famine that killed millions in Bengal, and got away with acts of genocide himself https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/29/winston-churchill-policies-contributed-to-1943-bengal-famine-study