blessed britons
at the same time as the Jewish Holocaust was happening in Europe, another Holocaust was happening in the world, namely the 1943/44 man-made Bengal Famine in British-ruled India. This atrocity took as many as 4 million lives and was associated with a 1940s demographic deficit of 10 million in Bengal. Satyajit Ray in his outstanding film “Distant Thunder” asserts that 5 million died. According to Amartya Sen, food was actually available there but cashed-up Calcutta, prosperous because of a war-time manufacturing boom, sucked food out of the rice-producing countryside. The price of rice increased 4-fold for a variety of reasons and in a free market, colonial economy and with a heartless, racist British administration, those who could not afford to buy rice simply starved.
mad world
Based on direct analysis of gases found trapped in cores of polar ice, it is known that the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide for several thousands of years before 1750 was about 280 parts per million. Between 1750 and 2000, during which industrialisation has occurred, the concentration rose by about 31% to 368 parts per million. The IPCC report noted that the current concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has not been exceeded during the past 420,000 years and that “the rate of increase over the past century is unprecedented, at least during the past 20,000 years
