India
And UK-US Bush Wars
By Gideon Polya
22 March, 2006
Countercurrents.org
Faced
with horrendous, man-made mass mortality, humanity has an obligatory
course of action summarized by the acronym CAAAA (C4A), namely Cessation
of the carnage, Acknowledgement, Apology, Amends and Acceptance that
this kind of event will never be repeated. This is precisely the course
of action adopted by the Germans in 1945 and demanded by a horrified
world in the face of the awful realities of the Jewish Holocaust (6
million victims including 1.5 million children).
Unfortunately, the C4A protocol
has not yet been applied to Anglo-American imperialism.
Thus in 1997 on a visit to
India, Queen Elizabeth II Acknowledged the 1919 Amritsar Massacre (over
1,000 Punjabis gunned down by the British Army near the Golden Temple)
but did not offer an Apology. Indeed the British have NEVER Apologized
for anything they did during their appalling 2 century mis-rule of British
India. While every Briton knows of the (largely fictional) Black Hole
of Calcutta story that has demonized Indians for over 2 centuries, very
few would be aware of the horrendous calamities inflicted on Indians
by the British e.g. the 1769/1770 Great Bengal Famine (that killed 10
million, 1/3 of the over-taxed population of Bengal); further successive
famines that killed scores of millions (the annual death rate in 1877
in British labour camps during the Deccan famine was about 94%; see:
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2005/12/27/
how-britain-denies-its-holocausts/); cholera epidemics
spread by British mercantilism (that killed about 25 million Indians
in the 19th century); extraordinarily low population growth between
1870 and 1930 (due to famine, malnourishment-exacerbated disease and
cholera, plague and influenza epidemics); and the man-made, World War
2 Bengal Famine in British-ruled India (4 million victims, huge civilian
and British military sexual abuse of starving women, a 1941-1951 Bengal
demographic deficit of over 10 million – and all of this largely
deleted from British history, in part because it may have been due to
a deliberate British “scorched earth policy”).
THE BIG PICTURE of the impact
of the British in India can be best assessed by measuring avoidable
mortality (technically, excess mortality) which is the difference between
the ACTUAL deaths in a country and the deaths EXPECTED for a peaceful,
decently-run country with the same demographics (see: http://globalavoidablemortality.blogspot.com/).
The annual death rate in India as recently as 1920 was about 4.8% (see:
http://countrystudies.us/india/32.htm)
but this declined to 3.5% by 1947 and is presently about 0.9% (still
about 2 times greater than it should be for a country with India’s
demographics). As a useful yardstick, the annual death rate of sheep
on Australian sheep farms is about 2.5% i.e. the British were treating
Indians like animals. Using a baseline “expected” annual
death rate value of 1.0% and assuming an “actual” pre-1920
value of 4.8% one can estimated that the avoidable (excess) mortality
was about 0.6 billion (1757-1837), 0.5 billion (1837-1901 i.e. during
the reign of Queen Victoria) and 0.4 billion (1901-1947 i.e. from the
turn of the century until Indian Independence). Thus one can estimate
that British rule of India was associated with an excess (i.e. avoidable)
mortality totalling 1.5 billion – surely one of the greatest crimes
in all of human history. The carnage did not end with the post-WW2 British
departure from India and its other colonies egregiously crippled by
colonial abuse – thus the avoidable mortality in the mostly Third
World British Commonwealth countries during the reign of Queen Elizabeth
II (1953 to the present) has totalled about 0.7 billion.
The above figures are no
doubt very surprising to English-speaking people of the British Commonwealth
and elsewhere, and for good reason – these ugly, genocidal realities
have been religiously deleted from British history and from general
public perception (as in George Orwell’s “1984”).
We live in “politically correct” times in which Anglo-Celtic
societies (the US, the UK and the “White” former British
colonies) decry racism but simultaneously IGNORE the intrinsic racism
of First World-dominated globalization and of violent UK-US “democratic
imperialism” in Iraq and Afghanistan – a phenomenon best
described as “politically correct racism (PC racism). However
ignoring CAAAA (C4A) and ignoring historical realities simply has meant
more of the same – history ignored yields history repeated.
On the occasion of the Third
Anniversary of the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq it is timely to note
the human and economic cost of the Bush Wars – 2.7 million excess
deaths and a cost to the US of US$1-2 trillion (see: http://www.newsvine.com/uk
, http://mwcnews.net/content/view/5489/42/
,
http://www.aljazeerah.info/21%20o/Bush%20Wars%20h
ave%20cost%202.7%20million%20lives%20&%20$
1-2%20trillion%20By%20Gideon%20Polya.htm).
The latest UN and UNICEF
data indicate that the post-invasion excess mortality in Occupied Iraq
and Afghanistan totals 2.3 million and the annual under-5 infant mortality
totals 0.5 million (1,300 daily and 90% avoidable) – and this
largely due to non-provision by the occupying Coalition of life-sustaining
requisites demanded by the Geneva Conventions. Further, the latest UNODC
data indicate that the post-2001 global opioid drug-related deaths totalling
0.4 million (including 1,200 Scots, 1,600 Australians, 3,000 Canadians,
3,200 Brits and 50,000 Americans) are largely due to Coalition restoration
of the Taliban-destroyed Afghan opium industry back to global dominance
(76% market share by 2002).
Remarkably, lying, racist,
holocaust-denying, Anglo-American and Australian mainstream media not
only ignore the horrendous Iraqi and Afghan death toll from the on-going
Anglo-American Bush Wars, they ALSO ignore the huge number of collateral,
war-related drug deaths in “White” Anglo-Celtic countries.
There seems little hope for the Asian victims of Anglo-American violence
– and indeed for the Third World in general – when Anglo-American
mainstream media ignore the carnage inflicted on their OWN KIND.
Nevertheless there IS hope
if an indignant world takes resolute action over the crimes of UK-US-Australian
democratic imperialism (democratic tyranny, democratic Nazism). Lying,
racist mainstream media should be boycotted; the world should be INFORMED
about Coalition excesses; Coalition citizens should vote out and prosecute
the war criminals; and international sanctions and boycotts should be
applied to the racist, criminal Coalition countries. Until there is
CAAAA (C4A), i.e. Cessation, Acknowledgement, Apology, Amends and Acceptance
of non-repetition of these crimes, all the Coalition countries deserve
the active “free market choice” disapprobation of the “decent
world” – ANYONE apprised of Coalition war crimes who buys
goods and services from Coalition countries is clearly COMPLICIT in
these gross abuses of humanity.