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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.

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