About Bengal famine.

Churchill's Secret War (2010)
Author: Madhusree Mukerjee

Besides participating in the Boer War and WW1 personally, as a Prime Minister, he spearheaded the Allied Forces in World War 2; Winston Churchill made it his life ambition to destroy India. His handling of the 1943 Bengal famine is equal to genocide. Instead of being responsible colonial masters taking care of their colonies that helped to propel their economies, he chose to blame the shortage solely as the natives' fault for choosing to breed like a rabbit. In his same tone of contempt, he verbalised, "Why isn't Gandhi dead yet?"

At the heights of the Second World War, the British had its hands tied all over the place. It was trying to act as the biggest superpower. In reality, it was bleeding. India was supplying all its credit needs. In essence, on paper, the British bought India's produce with a promise to pay later. And later was after WW2 when Britain was in dire straits and had to let them go.

Britain was also not self-sufficient as far as its food supply was concerned. Churchill had to feed his people throughout the war. He was dependent on the colonies for that - from Australia and the Americas too. The war made it difficult to move the food supply around. The U-boats were supposedly terrorising the Atlantic. In reality, however, there was only one such attack on commercial ships. There was a fear that the Japanese may enter India via Burma, made worse by the support by Bose's Indian National Army.

To deprive the invading foes of food supply, stockpiles were moved and even burnt. Restrictions were imposed on the transportation of rice. On top of that, the agricultural yield in 1943 was dismal after a typhoon. Massive famine ensued. Instead of moving grains from other parts of India to fill in for the need, Churchill did just the opposite. Produce from the Punjab region were siphoned to feed the war troops in the Mediterranean. In Churchill's eyes, feeding Indians serving the British army was equivalent to providing for the whole of India. Imports from Australia were detoured to Ceylon. Despite being advised of the situation on the ground, the one-tracked hotheaded imperialist Churchill gave two hoots to the misery of the Bengalis. He kept dragging his feet to send aid. Contribution from American civil societies also did not make it to India.

The final outcome is a devastating famine in the Bengal region estimated to have reached 3 million by some studies. It became a testbed for what deprivation of food could do to Man. It brought out the best and worst of mankind. Mothers killed their children to ease their suffering. Lactating mothers were seen feeding their already dead babies. The mothers themselves were skin and bones. Some families had to sell their teenage girls to brothels to feed the rest. Many young brides kept themselves alive by marrying old widowers for food. It was common for British officers in India to give their supplies to the pleading and dying locals, but this was supposedly illegal. Eyewitnesses of the devastation at the ground are described in gruesome details in this book.

It is ironic that despite all the miseries that were taking, business in Sonaganj, a brothel village established around the time the British established Calcutta as their administrative capital, prospered with many few intakes! Sonaganj laboured through these hard times and remain the biggest brothel complex in the world.

Churchill's subsequent election loss spurred him to write history to put his perspective history as the correct one, one where he would not be painted as the villain. His statement before the House of Common in 1948 summed it all, "For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself."

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Don't mix facts with truth!

Their Finest (2016)

Unlike movies like 'Dunkirk' and 'Darkest Hour' that looks at a macro level, at the decisions and moves made at a higher level, this British film looks at it from a somewhat different angle. It reveals two things, as I see it; how the war affects the little man in the streets of London and how the spin doctors bend the truth to give a more grandiose picture to suit their agendas. Somehow, in the name of nationalism and duality of nature of things, we always see ourselves as the aggrieved but the righteous one.

Is it just me or do I see more and more flicks where the female, in many recently released movies, play a more dominant and composed role? Their male counterparts are made to appear weak and fickle. 

Catherine Cole, a Welsh lady, starts work with Ministry of Information to make documentaries to boost the morale of the public during the trying times of World War 2 as the UK is under attack by the German forces. She hears about a pair of twins allegedly sailing to Dunkirk. The story goes on to show the falsity of the story and how the whole team turned into a movie, inserting elements to satisfy various quarters and sentiments. The people struggle through the inconveniences of sudden disruptions of daily lives and inability to enjoy their sumptuous meals. The lives of the members of the fairer sex were destined to change forever by the war. As their males counterparts had marched to war, the ladies had to fill the vacuum left by their exodus. The War must have ejected the dames from their comfort zones behind their apron to flood the job market and demand for women empowerment. 

This flick also drove home the point that when a story is based on a true story, it just means that it is loosely associated with it. Along the screenplay, the directing, satisfying the producers and the distributors, many things must have changed and edited a million times to make the whole presentation appear appealing, larger than life, sexy, sellable, screen-worthy and politically correct.

 https://asok22.wixsite.com/real-lesson 

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You cannot reason with a tiger when your head is in its mouth!

The Darkest Hour (2017)

Neville Chamberlain's faux pas with appeasement policy forced him to resign after Hitler ran over Belgium and France. Churchill was chosen as the replacement Prime Minister when Viscount Halifax declined the offer as he felt that he was not ready. Churchill was the only Conservative member who garnered the support of the Opposition and had been warning the House on the dangers of Hitler's military might even before Chamberlain's Norway debacle.

The ghost of Gallipoli did not augur well for his military strategies as many were wary of his seemingly ambitious plans. King George VI, who later developed a cordial relationship with Churchill, had his reservations since his support of King Edward's liaison to Wallis Simpson and subsequent abdication of the throne.

On the home ground, Churchill had a supportive hand in his wife, Clementine, but had to fight his inner demons, the black dog, depression. The indecisiveness on whether to broker peace with Hitler through Mussolini or to fight on proved too overwhelming for this war-time Prime Minister.

He had to decide to rescue the stranded British soldiers and to face eminent German attack on British soil. The movie deals with how Churchill, with his political wrangling and oratory skills, convinced the country to 'fight on the beaches' till 'the loser chokes on his own blood'.

It is interesting to note that despite being sidelined after his snafu about the Germans, Chamberlain remained in the Cabinet as a vital playmaker of the Conservative Party. At the same time, he was slowly dying of cancer.

Historians scoff at the supposed fictionalised accounts of the scenes depicted in this film. After the appointment of Churchill to the post, Halifax and Chamberlain are seen considering to get a vote of no confidence to oust him. When Churchill was undecided on the possibility of initiating peace talks with the enemy, he is seen here to make an unprecedented trip on the Underground to get the popular viewpoint from the crowd.

Overall, this flick is an intense drama with some powerful lines and a stellar performance by the almost unrecognisable Gary Oldman.

Memorable lines

“We have a drunkard at the wheel,” “I wouldn’t let him borrow my bicycle,”

“You cannot reason with a tiger when your head is in its mouth!”

https://asok22.wixsite.com/real-lesson 

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

The dark side of Winston Churchill's legacy no one should forget

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/02/03/the-dark-side-of-winston-churchills-legacy-no-one-should-forget/
By Ishaan Tharoor February 3, 2015

The statue of Britain's former Prime Minister Winston Churchill is silhouetted in front of the Houses of Parliament in London, January 30, 2015. (Eddie Keogh/Reuters)

There's no Western statesmen — at least in the English-speaking world — more routinely lionized than Winston Churchill. Last Friday marked a half century since his funeral, an occasion that itself led to numerous commemorations and paeans to the British Bulldog, whose moral courage and patriotism helped steer his nation through World War II.

Today we remember our greatest ever Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, who saved our country. pic.twitter.com/uRkfSAy7ya
— David Cameron (@David_Cameron)January 30, 2015

Churchill, after all, has been posthumously voted by his countrymen as the greatest Briton. The presence (and absence) of his bust in the White House was enough to create political scandal on both sides of the pond. The allure of his name is so strong that it launches a thousand quotations, many of which are apocryphal. At its core, Churchill's myth serves as a ready-made metaphor for boldness and leadership, no matter how vacuous the context in which said metaphor is deployed.

For example, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair earned comparisons to Churchill after dragging his country into the much-maligned 2003 Iraq war. So too Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose tough stance on Iran's nuclear ambitions has been cast by some in Churchill's heroic mold — the Israeli premier's uncompromising resolve a foil to the supposed "appeasement" tendencies of President Obama.

In the West, Churchill is a freedom fighter, the man who grimly withstood Nazism and helped save Western liberal democracy. It's a civilizational legacy that has been polished and placed on a mantle for decades. Churchill "launched the lifeboats," declared Time magazine, on the cover of its Jan. 2, 1950 issue that hailed the British leader as the "man of the half century."

But there's another side to Churchill's politics and career that should not be forgotten amid the endless parade of eulogies. To many outside the West, he remains a grotesque racist and a stubborn imperialist, forever on the wrong side of history.

Churchill's detractors point to his well-documented bigotry, articulated often with shocking callousness and contempt. "I hate Indians," he once trumpeted. "They are a beastly people with a beastly religion."

He referred to Palestinians as "barbaric hordes who ate little but camel dung." When quashing insurgents in Sudan in the earlier days of his imperial career, Churchill boasted of killing three "savages." Contemplating restive populations in northwest Asia, he infamously lamentedthe "squeamishness" of his colleagues, who were not in "favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes."

Britain marked 50 years since Prime Minister’s Winston Churchill's funeral was held in 1965. His funeral was the world's largest at the time, attended by leaders from more than 100 countries. (Reuters)

At this point, you may say, so what? Churchill's attitudes were hardly unique for the age in which he expounded them. All great men have flaws and contradictions — some of America's founding fathers, those paragons of liberty, were slave owners. One of Churchill's biographers, cited by my colleague Karla Adam, insists that his failings were ultimately "unimportant, all of them, compared to the centrality of the point of Winston Churchill, which is that he saved [Britain] from being invaded by the Nazis."

But that should not obscure the dangers of his worldview. Churchill's racism was wrapped up in his Tory zeal for empire, one which irked his wartime ally, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt. As a junior member of parliament, Churchill had cheered on Britain's plan for more conquests, insisting that its "Aryan stock is bound to triumph." It's strange to celebrate his bravado in the face of Hitler's war machine and not consider his wider thinking on other parts of the world. After all, these are places that, just like Europe and the West, still live with the legacy of Churchill's and Britain's actions at the time.

India, Britain's most important colonial possession, most animated Churchill. He despised the Indian independence movement and its spiritual leader, Mahatma Gandhi, whom he described as "half-naked" and labeled a "seditious fakir," or holy man. Most notoriously, Churchill presided over the hideous 1943 famine in Bengal, where some 3 million Indians perished, largely as a result of British imperial mismanagement. Churchill was both indifferent to the Indian plight and even mocked the millions suffering, chuckling over the culling of a population that bred "like rabbits."

Leopold Amery, Churchill's own Secretary of State for India, likened his boss's understanding of India's problems to King George III's apathy for the Americas. Amery vented in his private diaries, writing "on the subject of India, Winston is not quite sane" and that he didn't "see much difference between [Churchill's] outlook and Hitler's."

When Churchill did apply his attention to the subcontinent, it had other dire effects. As the Indian writer Pankaj Mishra explains in the New Yorker, Churchill was one of a coterie of imperial rulers who worked to create sectarian fissures within India's independence movement between Indian Hindus and Muslims, which led to the brutal partition of India when the former colony finally did win its freedom in 1947. Millions died or were displaced in an orgy of bloodshed that still echoes in the region's tense politics to this day. (India, it should be noted, was far from the only corner of the British empire victim to such divide-and-rule tactics.)

"The rival nationalisms and politicized religions the British Empire brought into being now clash in an enlarged geopolitical arena," writes Mishra, gesturing to the spread and growth of political Islam in parts of South Asia and the Middle East. "And the human costs of imperial overreaching seem unlikely to attain a final tally for many more decades."

When measuring up Churchill's legacy, that tally must be taken into account.

Ishaan Tharoor writes about foreign affairs for The Washington Post. He previously was a senior editor at TIME, based first in Hong Kong and later in New York. Follow @ishaantharoor

For the glory of a piece of a cloth?

Finally finished reading the parallel unbiased biography of two of 20th century's iconic statesmen who are actually remnants of the ideology of the 19th century Victorian values - Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill.
It traces the time before their birth with the story of their ancestors. Actually, after taking almost 9 month to finish the book at a snail's pace due to its fact compacted but 720+ paged package and my indulgences in my other vices, I can only recall certain salient points of their lives.
Gandhi was born in a humble family whilst Churchill was born with an aristocratic background. They grew up following different pathways, one thinking that might is mightier than than words whilst the other believe that the soul force is mightier than brutal physical force.
One thing common between them was that they both believed that their respective race was superior to the other. Churchill believed that the English were there to unite the inferior native race via their administrative and ruling skills. Left on their own, the natives would just fight amongst each other and kill each other crazy. In his later of his career, he tries desperately to conserve the majestic British Empire. In his pursuit of glory to his race, he was labelled as an annoyance. Some used his course to advance their own political agenda. In spite of his tough rock stance during the WW2, he was rejected by the war weary nation.
One could be forgiven to think the man of stature would have that Midas touch and could do no wrong. on the contrary, he had his many share of fumbles and disappointment, the fiasco of Gallipoli during WW1 being one.
Unfortunately, his offspring could not replicate his political success. Probably, after being in his shadow for too long, Winston's political foes just killed his. In spite of his heavy whisky drinking, penchant for cigar and multiple strokes, he lived to a ripe age of 91.
Gandhi was also racial in his outlook. He considered his subject to be of superior race with a far longer civilization history. The invasion of the conquerors is just a speck in their long history. Some of his quirky ideas were to reject modernization that was brought in by the British, citing them the tool of evil. In spite of that, he was a frequent traveller of the then new Railway services for his political tours. He also rejected industrialization and tried to promote the use of khadi and making India a nation of khadi yarning nation.
His dressing was ridiculed. His undying steadfastness to stick to truth and fairness irked his devoted son, Harilal, to take to the bottle, convert to Islam and died as a vagabond in a public hospital a year after the Mahatma's demise.
Although initially Gandhi managed to unite the nation of multiple cultures, religion and languages but once united, the nation turned against him and labelled him a traitor. Many of his followers gave more credence to their political carrier over the values that Gandhi was trying to propagate.
At the end of the day, one really wonders whether all this worth it - living your whole life just for the glory of a piece of cloth that unites a nation of people. Even then in the case of Gandhi, when the day arrived to unveil the flag of the new nation, the consensus decided that Ashoka's wheel should be used instead of the chakra suggested by Gandhi's men during his independence fighting Congress days!