26 January: Australia Day, Invasion Day, Survival Day And British Invasion Day

By Dr Gideon Polya

 25 January, 2016
Countercurrents.org

On 26 January, Australia's national holiday, Australia Day, White Australia celebrates the arrival of the British First Fleet and first White settlement of Australia at present-day Sydney on 26 January 1788. However Indigenous Australians mark  26 January as Invasion Day or Survival Day, commemorating commencement  of an Aboriginal Genocide and an Aboriginal  Ethnocide that continues today, this qualitatively  representing the worst genocide in human history. The British have invaded 193 countries, as compared to the UK lackey or US lackey White Australians 85, with variously horrendous and genocidal consequences.  26 January should be marked world-wide as British Invasion Day.

In the last 1,000 years the British have invaded 193 out of 203 present-day countries (195 UN-recognized nations and 8 non-UN-recognized self-governing countries) as compared to the French 80,  the US 70 (50 after WW2), Germany 39, Japan 30, Russia 25, Canada 25,  Apartheid Israel 12 and China 2   [1-5].  However  the British invasion of Australia on 26 January 1788 ultimately destroyed as many  as 600 unique Indigenous Australian tribes and a comparable number of languages and dialects. Thus it is estimated that in 1788 there were 300 distinct Aboriginal language groups  and 750 dialects of which only 150 survive) this making the Australian Aboriginal Genocide qualitatively the worst genocide in human history [5-  12].

 

Britain's and Australia 's quantitatively worst genocide was the WW2 Bengali Holocaust in which the British with Australian complicity deliberately starved 6-7 million Indians to death for strategic reasons in the 1942-1945 man-made Bengal Famine, with Australia withholding food from starving India from its huge wartime grain stocks and as many as 0.3 million starving Bengali women and girls subject to civilian or military sexual abuse. The Bengali Holocaust was the first WW2 mass atrocity to be described as a “holocaust” (by N. G. Jog in his  1944 book “Churchill's Blind Spot: India”) but has been largely white-washed from history and general  public perception [5, 8, 13-16].

The consequence of British invasion was typically genocide of Indigenous peoples, as exampled by the Australian Aboriginal Genocides and American Indian Genocides through violence, dispossession,  deprivation and introduced disease. However in India and China , while  there were just too many Indigenous  inhabitants  for total extermination, Indigenous deaths were enormous. Thus 20-100 million Chinese died in the 19th century Tai Ping rebellion  precipitated by British imperialism and the Opium Wars,  and Indian avoidable deaths from imposed deprivation totalled 1,800 million over 2 centuries  of British rule [5, 8, 17]. In Africa slavery, dispossession, exploitation, dislocation and relocation killed scores of millions and the impact of colonialism world-wide continues under neocolonial hegemony. Thus “annual avoidable deaths as a percentage of population” is presently 1.0% for non-Arab Africa, 0.6% for Indigenous Australians, and 0.4% for South Asia as compared to  about 0.0% for “White” overseas  European colonies  (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Apartheid Israel and the US) [5, 12].

The WW2 Bengali Holocaust (6-7 million deaths) and the WW2 Chinese Holocaust (40 million deaths under the Japanese, 1937-1945) occurred at the same time as the WW2 Jewish Holocaust (5-6 million killed through violence or imposed deprivation) which was part of a WW2 European Holocaust in which 30 million Slavs, Gypsies and Jews were killed [5, 8]. However with the exception of the WW2 Jewish Holocaust these atrocities have been largely removed from general public perception. Indeed the term “The Holocaust”  has become synonymous with the WW2 Jewish Holocaust to the exclusion of these other contemporaneous and even bigger holocausts. Thus 6 million Poles (half of them Jews, half of them Christians ) died in a “forgotten” WW2 Polish Holocaust [18-21] . Wikipedia observes: “The Holocaust (from the Greek holókaustos: hólos, "whole" and kaustós, "burnt" and  also known as the Shoah (Hebrew HaShoah, "the catastrophe"), was a genocide in which approximately six million Jews were killed by Adolf Hitler's  Nazi regime and its collaborators. Some historians use a definition of the Holocaust that includes the additional five million non-Jewish victims of Nazi mass murders, bringing the total to approximately eleven million” [21].  

One notes that “genocide” is defined by Article 2 of the UN Genocide Convention thus: “In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such: a) Killing members of the group; b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group” [22].

Google searches for the various  “holocaust” terms relating to WW2 yield the following results (given in brackets): “Bengali Holocaust” (1,500; this also referring to the 1971 Bengali Genocide), “Indian Holocaust” (47,800; this term also referring to the exterminating of North American Indians and horrendous avoidable mass mortality in British India, 1757-1947),  “Chinese Holocaust” (7,200), “Polish Holocaust” (18,400), “Russian Holocaust” (7,600), “Ukrainian Holocaust” (13,200; this term also referring to the 1930s Ukrainian Famine  under Stalin), “Roma Holocaust”(28,200)   and Gypsy Holocaust (8,100)  as compared to the presently overwhelmingly Jewish-specific terms “Holocaust” (47,200,000), “The Holocaust” (15,800,000) and “Jewish Holocaust” (420,000).

Google searches for the various  “genocide”  terms relating to WW2 yield the following results (given in brackets): “Bengali Genocide” (2,100; this also referring to the 1971 Bengali Genocide), “Indian Genocide” (50,800; this term also referring to the exterminating of North American Indians and horrendous avoidable mass mortality in British India, 1757-1947),  “Chinese Genocide” (8,700), “Polish Genocide” (1,100), “Russian Genocide” (31,100; this also referring to Stalin crimes), “Ukrainian Genocide” (28,300; this term also referring to the 1930s Ukrainian Famine  under Stalin), “Roma Genocide”(15,600)   and Gypsy Genocide (1,300) ,  as compared to “Jewish Genocide” (134,000).

White Australia has been associated with 30 genocidal atrocities , specifically the (1)  18th-19th century Aboriginal Genocide, (2) Tasmanian Aboriginal Genocide, (3) British Indian Genocide, Indian Holocaust, (4) European Chinese Genocide ,  (5) Maori Genocide, (6) African Genocide,  (7) Pacific Islands Genocide, Melanesian Genocide,  (8) Fijian Genocide,  (9) Boer (Afrikaaner) Genocide, (10) Armenian Genocide,  (11) Bengali Genocide, Bengali Holocaust, Bengal Famine,  (12) British post-1950 Third World Genocide, (13) US post-1950 Third World Genocide, (14) Australian Colonial Genocide, (15) 20th and 21st century  Aboriginal Genocide and Aboriginal Ethnocide , (16) Palestinian Genocide,  (17) Iraqi Genocide. Iraqi Holocaust, (18) Afghan Genocide, Afghan Holocaust, (19) Ongoing Aboriginal Genocide, (20) Biofuel Genocide, (21) Climate Genocide, (22) Tamil Genocide, (23) Bougainville Genocide, (24) Muslim Genocide, Muslim Holocaust and the US War on Muslims, (25) War on Terror carnage, (26) Asian Holocaust, (27) Somali Holocaust, Somali Genocide, (28) American Holocaust, (29) Australian Holocaust, and (30) Bedouin Genocide (for details and documentation about all these atrocities see [23]).   Yet these terms and the awful realities underlying application of these terms  are largely or completely absent from Mainstream consideration e.g. they are essentially ignored by the authoritative, 2 volume “The Cambridge History of Australia” [23].

Indeed very recent events mean that the list must be extended. Thus the Australian-US joint electronic spying  facility at   Pine Gap in Central Australia is critical in supporting  US nuclear terrorism as well as in targeting illegal US drone strikes in the wretchedly poor countries of Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan [24, 25]. Australia is now into its Seventh  Iraq War and its Third Syrian War in a century, noting that the ongoing, US Alliance-promoted   Syrian civil war has killed 0.3 million people and generated 12 million refugees – a Syrian Holocaust and also a Syrian Genocide as defined by Article 2 of the UN Geneva Convention [26].

History  is written  by the victors and the consequent untruth means that history ignored yields history repeated. This is well illustrated by the qualitatively worst genocide of the world, Britain and Australia  (the ongoing Australian Aboriginal  Genocide and Australian Aboriginal Ethnocide) and the quantitatively worst genocide of the world, Britain  and Australia (the Indian Holocaust including the WW2 Bengali Holocaust).

Thus while Australians are aware of “the gap” between Black and White Australia in terms of health, life expectancy, employment, education, living conditions and wealth, and the key  terms “Aboriginal Genocide”,  “Aboriginal Ethnocide” and “avoidable mortality” are used by activists and decent scholars in relation to Indigenous Australians [9-12], these terms  are almost completely absent   from the discourse of   Mainstream media, politicians and academics in Australia and the UK through a process of censorship and self-censorship as revealed by searching for these terms on the ABC News (the ABC being Australia's equivalent  of the UK BBC) and the UK BBC News. Indeed when the term “Aboriginal Genocide” rarely occurs it is often in the context of denying that it happened (as in the so-called “History Wars” in Australia).  While about 2 million Indigenous Australians have died untimely deaths from violence, disease and deprivation since 1788, the avoidable death rate of Aborigines is currently an appalling 0.6% of population per year (between that of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia). While only 150 of a pre-1788 750 Aboriginal languages and dialects survive, and of these all but 20 are endangered, Australian Aboriginal Ethnocide  proceeds apace in the 21st century  driven by poverty,  forced removal of children from their mothers, and exclusion of bilingual education.  According  to a recent study (2009) : “At the end of 2008 the Northern Territory Government, supported by the Commonwealth Government, all but closed bilingual education in remote Indigenous schools by determining that the language of instruction for the first four hours of school must be English. This decision could spell the death of the remaining endangered Indigenous languages in Australia” [27]. The Aboriginal Genocide and Aboriginal Ethnocide are continuing apace in the 21st century in one of the world's  richest countries, Australia.

Indigenous Indian avoidable deaths from imposed deprivation totalled 1,800 million during the British Raj (1757-1947) with this saga of carnage being regularly  punctuated by extreme horrors  such as the 1769-1770 Great Bengal Famine (10 million deaths) and the Australia-complicit WW2 Bengali Holocaust  (6-7 million deaths),  with numerous, regular famine atrocities  in between [5, 8, 13-17]. Yet these horrors have been largely removed from general public perception by generations of  British and Australian Mainstream  journalists,  politicians and historians as documented in my book “Jane Austen and the Black Hole of  British History” [8].  This  is well  illustrated by rare, eminent historians who deserve praise for actually mentioning the WW2 Bengal Famine in their writing but expunge it from some major works. Thus leading Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey is rare among historians in actually  referring to the WW2 Bengal Famine in his book "The Great Seesaw. A new view of the Western world 1750-2000" but there is no mention of this or indeed of any recurrent Bengal  Famines in his  “A Short History of the World”,  “A Very Short History of the World” or “A Short History of the 20th Century” [28-31]. Leading British expert of WW1, WW2, Churchill and the Jewish Holocaust, the late Professor Sir Martin Gilbert,  must similarly be praised for at least referring  (albeit very briefly) to “1.5 million”  Bengal Famine victims in at least 3 books, namely  “British History Atlas”, “The Day  the War Ended. VE-Day 1945 in Europe and Around the World”  and “A History of the Twentieth Century. Volume Two 1933-1951” [32-35] but he made no mention of the WW2 Bengali Holocaust in his biographies of Churchill [32, 36, 37]. Just imagine biographies  of Hitler that failed to mention the WW2 Jewish Holocaust. Indeed  Churchill himself  excluded any mention of this WW2 atrocity for which he was primarily responsible from his 6-volume “The Second World War” for which he gained the Nobel Prize for Literature [8, 32, 38]. As I warned 2 decades ago [8, 39], Bengal is acutely threatened by a worsening, First World-imposed  climate genocide that in the absence of  requisite action is predicted to kill 500 million Bengalis this century [40], noting that former British  colonies Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the US are disproportionately  high in terms of annual per capita greenhouse gas pollution [41].

Conclusions.

 The world or large slabs of the world are  existentially  threatened by (1) nuclear weapons (that can wipe out humanity at any time), (2) poverty (that is responsible  for 17 million avoidable deaths from deprivation annually) and (3) unaddressed.  man-made  climate change (that is set to flood Island Nations and mega-delta countries like Bangladesh and is predicted to  kill all but 500 million of Humanity this century) [42].

However, (1)  while  Australia has no actual nuclear weapons of its own, it has hosted nuclear tests and the testing of nuclear  weapons delivery systems, hosts nuclear-armed warships, plays a key role in US nuclear terrorism through its Pine Gap joint US-Australian communications facility, and is doing its best to oppose a Nuclear Weapons  Ban [42]; (2) Australia is one of the world's richest countries but has slashed its foreign aid budget from 0.44% of national income  under the short-lived, CIA-removed Whitlam Labor Government in 1972 to 0.25% in 2015-2016 under the pro-war, pro-Apartheid, pro-Apartheid Israel, war criminal, US lackey, pro-coal, pro-gas, anti-science, anti-environment, and climate criminal Coalition Government [43]; and (3) Australia is a world-leading coal and gas exporter and New Zealand,  Australia, Canada, and the US are world leading “White” countries for annual per capita greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution with values of tonnes CO2-e per person per year of 53.2, 52.9, 50,1 and 41.0, respectively (the world average being 8.9 tonnes CO2-e per person per year). In 2011 Australia used up its “fair share” of the world's Terminal Carbon Pollution Budget of  600 Gt CO2 (600 billion tonnes CO2) (that must not be exceeded if we are to have  a 75% chance of avoiding a catastrophic 2 degree C temperature rise) and has been disproportionately  polluting the one common atmosphere and ocean of all nations and stealing the entitlement of  responsible countries [41].

26 January is Australia Day for most White Australians  but is Invasion Day and Survival Day for the long-suffering Indigenous Australians [10, 44, 45]. The  British have invaded 193 out of 203 present-day countries (195 UN-recognized nations and 8 non-UN-recognized self-governing countries) and its genocidal child White Australia has invaded 85 countries as compared to the France 82,  the US 70, Germany 39, Japan 30, Russia 25, Canada 25,  Apartheid Israel 12 and China 2. Accordingly, decent, anti-racist   people around the world  should make 26 January British Invasion Day. Further, the ongoing greed, rapacity,  racism, warmongering, war-making  and lying  by the UK and Australia and their Great Friend the US   demand that decent people should (a) inform everyone they can, and (b) urge and apply Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against all those people, politicians, parties , companies, corporations and countries disproportionately involved in genocidal, ecocidal, speciescidal and terracidal crimes against Humanity  and the Biosphere.

References.

[1].  Gideon Polya, “As UK Lackeys Or US Lackeys Australians Have Invaded 85 Countries (British 193, French 80, US 70)”, Countercurrents, 9 February, 2015: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya090215.htm ).

[2]. Gideon Polya, “British Have Invaded 193 Countries:  Make  26 January ( Australia Day, Invasion Day) British Invasion Day”, Countercurrents, 23 January, 2015: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya230115.htm .

[3]. Gideon Polya, “President Hollande And French Invasion Of Privacy Versus French Invasion Of 80 Countries Since 800 AD”, Countercurrents, 15 January, 2014: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya150114.htm .

[4]. Gideon Polya, “US has invaded 70 nations Since 1776 – make 4 July Independence From America Day”, Countercurrents, 5 July 2013: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya050713.htm .

[5]. Gideon Polya, “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950”, that includes an avoidable mortality-related a history of every country since Neolithic times and is now available for free perusal on the web:  http://globalbodycount.blogspot.com/  .

[6]. Ray P. Norris and Duane W. Hamacher, “Australian Aboriginal Astronomy: overview”, 1 February 2013: http://www.atnf.csiro.au/people/rnorris/papers/n287.pdf .

[7]. “Australian Aboriginal languages”, Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Aboriginal_languages .

[8]. Gideon Polya, “Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History. Colonial rapacity, holocaust denial and the crisis in biological sustainability”, now available  for free perusal on the web: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya290911.htm .

[9]. Gideon Polya, “ Ongoing Aboriginal Genocide And Aboriginal Ethnocide By Politically Correct Racist Apartheid Australia ”, Countercurrents, 16 February 2014: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya160214.htm  .

[10].  “Aboriginal Genocide” : https://sites.google.com/site/aboriginalgenocide/  .

[11]. Gideon Polya, “Film review: “Utopia” by John Pilger Exposes Genocidal Maltreatment Of Indigenous Australians By Apartheid Australia ”,  Countercurrents , 14 March, 2014: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya140314.htm .

[12]. Gideon Polya, “2015 perspective of ongoing Australian Aboriginal Genocide and Aboriginal Ethnocide”, Aboriginal Genocide: https://sites.google.com/site/aboriginalgenocide/2015-perspective .

[13]. Gideon Polya, “Australia And Britain Killed 6-7 Million Indians In WW2 Bengal Famine”, Countercurrents, 29 September, 2011: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya290911.htm  .

[14]. N.G. Jog,  “Churchill's Blind Spot: India” (New Book Company, Bombay, 1944).

[15]. Gideon Polya , “UK Zionist Historian Sir Martin Gilbert (1936-2015) Variously Ignored Or Minimized WW2 Bengali Holocaust”, Countercurrents, 19 February, 2015: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya190215.htm .

[15].  Gideon Polya, “Australia And Britain Killed 6-7 Million Indians In WW2 Bengal Famine”,  Countercurrents, 29 September, 2011: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya290911.htm .

[16]. “Bengali Holocaust (WW2 Bengal Famine) writings of Gideon Polya”, Gideon Polya: https://sites.google.com/site/drgideonpolya/bengali-holocaust

[17]. Gideon Polya, “Economist Mahima Khanna,   Cambridge Stevenson Prize And Dire Indian Poverty”,  Countercurrents, 20 November, 2011: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya201111.htm .

[18]. Terese Pencak Schwartz, “Five million forgotten – non-Jewish victims of the Shoah”, rememeber.org: http://remember.org/forgotten .

 

[19]. Edward Lucaure,”Poland's holocaust: 6 million citizens dead (3 million Christianbs and 3 million Jews”, holocaustforgotten.com: http://www.holocaustforgotten.com/Lucaire.htm .

 

[20]. Richard C. Lukas, “The Forgotten Holocaust: The Poles under German Occupation, 1939-1944”, Hippocrene Books, 2001.  

 

[21]. “The Holocaust”, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust .

 

[22]. UN Genocide Convention: http://www.edwebproject.org/sideshow/genocide/convention.html .

[23]. Gideon Polya, “Review: “The Cambridge History Of Australia” Ignores  Australian Involvement In 30 Genocides”, Countercurrents, 14 October, 2013: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya141013.htm .

[24]. Phillip Dorling, “Pine Gap drives US drone kills”, Sydney Morning Herald, 21 July 2013: http://www.smh.com.au/national/pine-gap-drives-us-drone-kills-20130720-2qbsa.html .

[25]. Gideon Polya, “50 Ways Australian Intelligence Spies On Australia And The World For UK , Israeli And US State Terrorism”,  Countercurrents, 11 December, 2013: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya111213.htm .

[26]. Gideon Polya,“Paris Atrocity Context: 27 Million Muslim Avoidable  Deaths From Imposed Deprivation In 20 Countries Violated By US Alliance Since 9-11”, Countercurrents, 22 November, 2015: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya221115A.htm

[27]. Jane Simpson, Jo Caffery and Patrick McConvell, “Gaps in Australia's Indigenous Language Policy: Dismantling bilingual education in the Northern Territory ”, AIATSIS Discussion Paper Number 24, 2009: http://www.aiatsis.gov.au/_files/ntru/DP242009Simpson.pdf .

[28]. Geoffey Blainey, "The Great Seesaw. A new view of the Western world 1750-2000" (Macmillan, 1988).

[29].  Geoffey Blainey, “A Short History of the World” (Viking, 2000).

[30]. Geoffey Blainey, “A Very Short History of the World” (Viking, 2004).

[31]. Geoffey Blainey, “A Short History of the 20th Century” ( Penguin, 2005).

[32]. Gideon Polya , “UK Zionist Historian Sir Martin Gilbert (1936-2015) Variously Ignored Or Minimized WW2 Bengali Holocaust”, Countercurrents, 19 February, 2015: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya190215.htm

[33]. Martin  Gilbert, “British History Atlas”(Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London , 1968).

[34].  Martin  Gilbert, “The Day  the War Ended. VE-Day 1945 in Europe and Around the World” (Harper Collins, London, 1995).  

[35].  Martin  Gilbert, “A History of the Twentieth Century. Volume Two 1933-1951” (William Morrow, New York , 1998).

[36]. Martin  Gilbert, “In Search of Churchill. A historian's Journey” (Harper & Collins, London, 1994).

[37].  Martin  Gilbert, “Churchill. A Life” ( Heinemann, London, 1991).

[38]. Winston Churchill, “The Second World War” (Cassell, London).

[39]. Gideon Polya (1995) " The Forgotten Holocaust - The 1943/44 Bengal Famine": http://globalavoidablemortality.blogspot.com.au/2005/07/forgotten-holocaust-194344-bengal.html (an edited version of this account has been published  as Polya, G.M.(1995) The famine of history: Bengal 1943. International Network on Holocaust and Genocide vol.10, pages 10-15).  

[40]. “Climate genocide”: https://sites.google.com/site/climategenocide/ .

[41]. Gideon Polya, “Revised Annual Per Capita Greenhouse Gas Pollution For All Countries – What Is Your Country Doing?”, Countercurrents, 6 January, 2016: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya060116.htm .

[42]. Gideon Polya, “Congress Of Vienna 2015 For Global Stability Fails To Address Key, Existential Nuclear, Poverty And Climate Change Threats”, Countercurrents, 12 January, 2016: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya120116.htm .

[43].  Daniel Flitton, ::”The blind truth of Australia's foreign aid cuts”, Sydney Morning Herald, 11 December 2015: http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/the-blind-truth-of-australias-foreign-aid-cuts-20151210-glk3e9.html .  

[44]. “Stan Grant's speech on racism and the Australian dram as part of IQ2 debate goes viral”, ABC News, 24 January 2016: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-01-24/stan-grant's-racism-is-killing-the-australia-dream-speech-viral/7110506 .

 

[45]. Stan Grant, “IQ2 racism debate: Stan Grant”, You Tube, 19 January 2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEOssW1rw0I .

 

Dr Gideon Polya taught science students at a major Australian university for 4 decades. He published some 130 works in a 5 decade scientific career, most recently a huge pharmacological reference text "Biochemical Targets of Plant Bioactive Compounds" (CRC Press/Taylor & Francis, New York & London , 2003). He has published “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950” (G.M. Polya, Melbourne, 2007: http://globalbodycount.blogspot.com/ ); see also his contributions “Australian complicity in Iraq mass mortality” in “Lies, Deep Fries & Statistics” (edited by Robyn Williams, ABC Books, Sydney, 2007: http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/ockhamsrazor/australian-complicity-in-iraq-mass-mortality/3369002#transcript

) and “Ongoing Palestinian Genocide” in “The Plight of the Palestinians (edited by William Cook, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2010: http://mwcnews.net/focus/analysis/4047-the-plight-of-the-palestinians.html ). He has published a revised and updated 2008 version of his 1998 book “Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History” (see: http://janeaustenand.blogspot.com/ ) as biofuel-, globalization- and climate-driven global food price increases threaten a greater famine catastrophe than the man-made famine in British-ruled India that killed 6-7 million Indians in the “forgotten” World War 2 Bengal Famine (see recent BBC broadcast involving Dr Polya, Economics Nobel Laureate Professor Amartya Sen and others: http://www.open.edu/openlearn/history-the-arts/history/social-economic-history/listen-the-bengal-famine ). When words fail one can say it in pictures - for images of Gideon Polya's huge paintings for the Planet, Peace, Mother and Child see: http://sites.google.com/site/artforpeaceplanetmotherchild/ and http://www.flickr.com/photos/gideonpolya/ .