Bengal Famine Churchill Quotes

Humpty Dumpty (Colonial Sonnet) Humpty Dumpty sat on a throne, he made a career of divide-n-rule. Whole west found a savior in a fool, as he was anointed the royal mule. He smuggled food from starving natives, for fighting troops were far more worthy. Adolf was designated the villain supremo, while he was the free world's beloved Humpty. It's fault of the natives to "breed like rabbits", he was right to be their judge and executioner. After all, human rights mean rights of the pale, freedom and equality don't apply to the darker. Humpty Dumpty was ready with his cigar, to fight the invaders on the beaches. Sure he was the right nut for the job, expertise lies in centuries of practice.

The Bengal famine has been the final epitaph of British rule and achievement in India.” Churchill stubbornly refused concessions to nationalist sentiment, dismissing objections from the Americans and their Chinese clients. Leo Amery recoiled in dismay from Churchill’s ravings:

The evil that let three million people starve in the Bengal Famine wasn’t that different from the evil that was with us still. It was the same evil that had led those soldiers to lie about the people they had murdered in Khataba. That evil was the inability to recognize the humanity in experiences that were not your own, in experiences that seemed alien. So, in a way, Kaval had been right. She’d asked me why it mattered what Churchill had done almost a century ago. By itself, it didn’t. Whether Churchill was a hero or a monster was not a problem we really needed to face. The problem we had to face was that the story that allowed Churchill to be monstrous—the colonial mind-set, the mind-set of supremacy based on race and nationality—was still alive. This was not about Churchill the man. This was about Churchill the legacy.

As so often Churchill did himself no good by ill-advised comments about the ‘starvation of anyhow underfed Bengalis’ being ‘less serious than that of sturdy Greeks’, or about Indians ‘breeding like rabbits’ and getting paid a million pounds a day for ‘doing nothing about the war’. These remarks, disgraceful in their own time and even more offensive in today’s judgement, have been the basis of a myth, but it is no more than a myth that Churchill altered decisions which were ultimately based on strategic priorities.