blessed britons

On 27 July 1943, the RAF killed 50,000 people in Hamburg. Reflecting on this barbarity, nuclear physicist Freeman Dyson who was then a clerk for Arthur "Bomber" Harris wrote that the Nazis "had sat in their offices, writing memoranda and calculating how to murder people efficiently, just like me. The main difference was that they were sent to jail or hanged as war criminals, while I went free." Eighty percent of all the bombs in World War II fell in the last ten months of the war during which the British, for instance, decided to bomb residential areas with the argument that this would foreshorten the war. The US borrowed this logic at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but only after the USAF firebombed Tokyo on 8 May (General Curtis LeMay who directed the operations, said "we knew we were going to kill a lot of women and kids when we burned that town. Had to be done"). On 13 February 1945, the RAF killed 100,000 in Dresden; on 6 August 1945, the USAF killed 100,000 instantly in Hiroshima (another 100,000 died over the course of the next year).

— Vijay Prashad

mad world

Q: What do you get when you cross an insomniac, an agnostic, and a dyslexic?
A: Someone who stays up all night wondering if there is a Dog.

— Groucho Marx

starvation

new york diners and the irrawady delta

Submitted by antarchi on June 7, 2008 - 20:20.

it seems safe to estimate that the entire disposable wealth of the Irrawaddy Delta before the storm, that of its 3.5 million residents, could have been less than that of one table-full of diners at New York's Four Seasons Grill Room...

Working with figures from Forbes magazine, the IMF, and the UNDP, it's possible to estimate that there are between three hundred and a thousand individuals whose accumulated wealth is so vast that any one of them alone could pay each person in the Irrawaddy Delta for a year, and in the case of the richest, like Warren Buffett, could do it for six decades running and still have billions left.

— Allan Nairn

, in Drawing your last breath hungry (June 2008)

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6-7 million people perished

Submitted by antarchi on April 27, 2008 - 16:24.

Over 60 years ago 6-7 million people perished in Bengal and in the neighboring provinces of Bihar, Orissa and Assam in 1943-1945 when the price of rice doubled and then finally quadrupled - those living on the edge who could not afford to buy food simply perished under the merciless scorched earth policy of the racist British colonial administration of British-occupied India

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food not essential for indians

Submitted by antarchi on April 27, 2008 - 16:17.

In the context of homeland Britain Churchill had argued that food supplies were vital for maintaining national morale. He told the War Cabinet on the thirty first of March 1941 that it was essential ‘to import sufficient to maintain the staying power of the people, even if this meant a somewhat slower development of our service programmes.’ But two years later the War Cabinet wasn’t prepared to divert shipping and food supplies to ease Indian hunger.

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not reaching human stomachs

Submitted by antarchi on April 27, 2008 - 11:32.

There is plenty of food. It is just not reaching human stomachs. Of the 2.13bn tonnes likely to be consumed this year, only 1.01bn, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), will feed people... While 100m tonnes of food will be diverted this year to feed cars, 760m tonnes will be snatched from the mouths of humans to feed animals. This could cover the global food deficit 14 times.

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