[On the Bengal famine of 1943] Three important books that have broken the wall of silence are Mike Davis'… — Tariq Ali
[On the Bengal famine of 1943] Three important books that have broken the wall of silence are Mike Davis' pathbreaking study Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the making of the Third World and works exclusively on the famine by two North America-based Bengali scholars, Janam Mukherjee and Madhusree Mukerjee. There are also innumerable articles, such that the picture we now have is virtually complete. What exactly happened?
p. 268Source: Wikiquote · CC BY-SA 4.0
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Mukherjee's account makes absolutely clear that, in order to protect the (British) Raj from a Japanese threat that never materialized, the British state sacrificed the lives of some 5 million people. The war cabinet maintained an attitude of callous indifference. In Churchill's case, the indifference was strongly tinged with racism.
p. 278
What accounts, then, for his elevation to a cult figure?
p. 5
One could add that the manufactured love for Churchill, and the uses made of him, came to embody the nostalgia for an Empire that was long gone.
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