Comment by humtum6767 on 04/12/2019 at 12:08 UTC

4 upvotes, 4 direct replies (showing 4)

View submission: Hey Reddit! Have Fun With This One!

Fun fact, Britain starved 3 million Bengali people to death by taking their grain harvest to fight Germany in 1943. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943

Replies

Comment by [deleted] at 05/12/2019 at 23:12 UTC*

4 upvotes, 1 direct replies

Whoa. You’re writing this like that was the only thing that contributed to the famine, and that the brits didn’t pay for the grain and the land that was turned into farm land to meet the demand of textiles and food products the British government was paying for. Come on now.

“The financing of military escalation led to war-time inflation, as land was appropriated from thousands of peasants. Many workers received monetary wages rather than payment in kind with a portion of the harvest.[14] When prices rose sharply, their wages failed to follow suit; this drop in real wages left them less able to purchase food.[15]

During the Japanese occupation of Burma, many rice imports were lost as the region's market supplies and transport systems were disrupted by British "denial policies" for rice and boats (a "scorched earth" response to the occupation). The British government gave preferential treatment in the distribution of supplies to the armed forces, civil servants and other "priority classes".

These factors were compounded by restricted access to grain: domestic sources were constrained by emergency inter-provincial trade barriers, while access to international imports was largely denied by Churchill's War Cabinet, arguably due to a wartime shortage of shipping.[16]

More proximate causes included large-scale natural disasters in south-western Bengal (a cyclone, tidal waves and flooding, and rice crop disease). The relative importance of each of these factors on the death toll is a matter of controversy.”

Comment by humtum6767 at 04/12/2019 at 12:10 UTC

4 upvotes, 1 direct replies

You won’t hear about it because victors write the history. Unlike Germany they never apologized.