An estimated 2 billion people watched the lavish wedding of Kate and William in London that cost the British economy $10 billion from a national day off work. We all wish the best for the happy couple. However the TV coverage permitted by the Royal Family involved massive censorship of the Australian ABC and indeed all other media. The Royal Family and the British Establishment survive through censorship, lies (of commission and omission) and slice (spin-based untruths) and this latest British censorship demands exposure of Britain’s horrendous past and continuing imperialist crimes.
The Guardian, 29 April 2011
Royal Wedding & Royal Censorship
Exposing crimes of Churchill & Queen Victoria
by Gideon Polya, MWC News, 2 May 2011
An estimated 2 billion people watched the lavish wedding of Kate and William in London that cost the British economy $10 billion from a national day off work. We all wish the best for the happy couple. However the TV coverage permitted by the Royal Family involved massive censorship of the Australian ABC and indeed all other media. The Royal Family and the British Establishment survive through censorship, lies (of commission and omission) and slice (spin-based untruths) and this latest British censorship demands exposure of Britain’s horrendous past and continuing imperialist crimes.
The recent British Royal Wedding involved extraordinary Royal censorship of world media that mirrors British Establishment ignoring of its immense genocidal crimes over the last few centuries. Brilliant humanitarian Indian writer Arundhati Roy has commented powerfully on simultaneous First World holocaust commission and holocaust denial: “the ultimate privilege of the élite is not just their deluxe lifestyles, but deluxe lifestyles with a clear conscience” (see Arundhati Roy in “The Cheque-book and the Cruise Missile”).
The Chasers are a group of Australian comedians who mount a satirical program called The Chaser’s War on Everything for the taxpayer-funded Australian Broadcasting Corporation (the ABC, Australia’s equivalent of the BBC). The Chasers are famous for “stunts”, the most celebrated being driving a person dressed up as Osama bin Laden through the incredibly tight security of the 2007 APEC conference in Sydney that was attended by US president George Bush. However the UK Royals prohibited participation by the Chasers in the Royal Wedding coverage and threatened the ABC with exclusion from BBC TV footage unless The Chasers were excluded.
According to Mumbrella (that comments on Australian media): “The ABC has been forced to cancel Friday night’s alternative coverage of the Royal Wedding by The Chaser on ABC2 after a ruling from the office of the Royal Family. According to the announcement from the ABC, conditions of its use of live footage of the wedding were tightened up over the Easter break, including a ban on the use of the material for the purposes of satire or comedy. The ABC’s original plan was to feature The Chaser’s commentary on ABC2 while rebroadcasting the BBC’s coverage on ABC1. Instead, the approved commentary will go ahead on ABC1, while ABC2 will switch to a royal wedding themed night [minus the Chasers]”.
Now the Chasers are excellent at political satire but remain well inside typical, Elephant-in-the–Room-ignoring Mainstream media parameters. Thus the Chasers are critical of war but have never mentioned, as far as I know, the number of people actively or passively murdered by the war criminal US Coalition (including the UK and Australia) in Iraq (4.6 million) or Afghanistan (5.0 million) or by racist Zionist-run Apartheid Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (0.3 million). I am confident that the Chasers would have provided very amusing and indeed pungent commentary but am equally confident that the Chasers would not have alluded to the immense crimes of England under Protestant monarchs since the deposition of Catholic King Kames II in 1690 by William III and the subsequent Act of Settlement of 1700 that excluded Catholics from the throne and ensured the German Hanoverian succession up to the present day. Indeed the present English Royal Family changed their name from Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to Windsor under George V in 1917 during the First World War against Germany (their relative Prince Louis Battenberg similarly changed to Prince Louis Mountbatten in 1917 because of anti-German sentiment).
In this age of political correctness this British Royal Family censorship action applied to all world media and not just to Australia. It is accordingly reasonable for the world to respond to global censorship by the Catholic-excluding English Royal Family by global exposure of the appalling crimes of England under Protestant monarchs since 1690.
The victory of Dutch Protestant William III over British Catholic James II at the Battle of the Boyne (1689) led to 3 more centuries of violent abuse of the Irish people. In the 18th century, Britain emerged as a major world power that used large-scale, high technology warfare against Celtic Britain, European nations and largely defenseless Americans, Africans, Asians and Australasian. Thus the 1707 act of union with Scotland was enabled by butchery of the Scots. The Protestant Hanoverian succession, the 1701-1714 War of the Spanish Succession against France, and the 1756-1763, Seven Years War against France left Britain the dominant colonial power in North America, India and in Africa (where it was a major player in the 20 million victim slave trade). In 1746 the Scots were finally defeated by the English at the Battle of Culloden, the last battle on British soil, and this paved the way for the genocidal Scottish Clearances.
In 1757 Bengal was defeated at the Battle of Plassey with the help of Indigenous Bengali traitors and was thence rapaciously taxed with the consequence that in 1769-1770 the Great Bengal Famine killed 10 million Bengalis, one third of the population. In 1776 the well-armed White Americans won independence from England, then under King George III, this enabling the genocidal march of English settlement to the West.(by 1844 Indigenous American Indians were prohibited east of the Mississippi). The invasion of Australia in 1788 led to European settlement of Australia and the Aboriginal Genocide in which the Indigenous Australian population fell from about 1 million in 1788 to 0.1 million a century later.
In the 19th century, the Napoleonic Wars concluded with defeat of Napoleonic France on the Spanish Peninsular, at the naval battle of Trafalgar by the British under Admiral Nelson (1805) and finally at Waterloo under Wellington (1815). Industrialization was fed by capital from the Empire in India, Africa, Asia, the Americas and the Pacific. The abolition of slavery was made possible because of the removal of British agricultural workers from the land in the English Enclosures and the brutal suppression of Ireland, Scotland and Wales. An excess of utterly impoverished British labor meant that Britain banned the importation of African slaves in its colonies in 1807 and abolished slavery throughout the British Empire in 1833. However slavery using indentured labor continued in the British Empire well into the 20th century in places such as South Africa, the West Indies, Australia and the South Pacific (notably in Fiji).
After Queen Victoria came to the throne the world suffered horrendous mass murder at the hands of the British during her long rule from 1837-1901. Under Queen Victoria the 1845-1850 Irish famine resulted in 1 million dead from starvation (while food was being exported from Ireland) and 1.5 million Irish fled overseas, many perishing from destitution in transit or on arrival. Similar privations occurred in Scotland with attendant massive emigration of displaced Scots in the Scottish Clearances. Brutal British rule in India was associated with Indian cholera epidemics (25 million victims) and famines (scores of millions of victims). An estimated 500 million Indians died avoidably from deprivation under the merciless rule of Queen Victoria.
The 1854-1856 Crimean War with Russia saw the beginning of the Great Game from Eastern Europe to Afghanistan that is still being played out today with horrendous consequences for Pakistan and Afghanistan. In 1857 the Indians revolted but were defeated, the British killing an estimated 10 million Indians in reprisals for the circa 2,000 British killed in the uprising. British export of Indian opium to China resulted in successive Opium Wars and the Tai Ping rebellion in which 20-100 million Chinese perished. Genocide of Indigenous inhabitants proceeded apace in the British Empire under Queen Victoria, notably in North America (Canada), South America (genocide of the Argentineans, Uruguayan and Paraguayan Indians), Africa (displacement of Africans from temperate regions) and in the South Pacific (Australian Aboriginal Genocide, Maori Genocide and Pacific Islander Genocide through violence, dispossession, slavery and introduced disease). The last years of Queen Victoria’s rule involved massive famine in India, conquest of Southern Africa, victory over the Dutch Afrikaners in the Boer War and the invention of concentration camps to brutally imprison Afrikaner women and children.
The 20th century saw more of the same in the British Empire “upon which the sun never set”. Indeed just after another huge famine in India, the Delhi Durbar was held at vast expense in 1902 to celebrate the British Imperial rule. Excess deaths from deprivation in British India in the period 1901-1947 totaled about 400 million. An arms race among the European imperialists resulted in the 1914-1918 World War 1, horrendous casualties, and dismemberment of the Austro-Hungarian and Turkish Empires with disastrous consequences e.g. the Armenian Genocide (1915-1923; 1.5 million killed), the ongoing Iraqi Genocide (1990-2011, 4.6 million dead, 5-6 million refugees), and the ongoing Palestinian Genocide (0.3 million avoidable dead from deprivation in Occupied Palestine and over 7 million refugees).
Post-war Irish independence, women’s suffrage and democratization of British society were post-WW1 advances, but oil, British power in the Middle East, the 1929 Wall Street collapse, depression, German reparations and European re-armament led to the 1939-1945 World War 2. Nazism was eventually defeated but Britain under George VI and Queen Elizabeth II resolutely ignored the horrendous WW2 Bengali Holocaust in which 6-7 million Indians were deliberately starved to death by the British under Churchill for strategic reasons. The Bengal Famine was the first WW2 atrocity to be described as a “holocaust” (by Indian writer N.G. Jog in 1944) and was atrocity bigger than the WW2 Jewish Holocaust (5-6 million killed, 1 in 6 dying from deprivation) (for details of this “forgotten holocaust” see “Churchill’s Secret War: the British Empire and the ravaging of Indian during World War II” by Madhusree Mukerjee:; “Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History. Colonial rapacity, holocaust denial and the crisis in biological sustainability” by Gideon Polya; and the BBC broadcast involving myself, Economics Nobel Laureate Professor Amarty Sen and other scholars, and entitled “Bengal Famine”).
With Europe temporarily wrecked, Eastern Europe enslaved by war-ravaged Russia, post-war Britain saw British technological advance, the welfare state, civil nuclear power and nuclear arms. Britain under George VI saw the disastrous Partitions of India (1 million killed, 18 million refugees) and Palestine (thousands killed, 800,000 refugees). The New Elizabethan period under Queen Elizabeth II (1952- present) saw UK involvement in the Korean War (3 million dead) , the Malaya Emergency and the May Mau rebellion in Kenya (0.1 million dead), Confrontation with Indonesia, the Rhodesia/Zimbabwe war (1965-1980, 25,000 killed, 0.7 million excess deaths), the 1982, Falklands Island War against Argentinean invaders, UK-US democratic imperialism and invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan (violent and non-violent excess deaths 4.6 million and 5.0 million, respectively) and now the bombing and civil war in Libya.
The decolonization in Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, Asia and the Pacific replaced much of the British Empire with the British Commonwealth. However cessation of direct British rule and military occupation did not stop the huge avoidable mortality (avoidable deaths, excess deaths, excess mortality, deaths that did not have to happen) due to British hegemony. Summary data is provided below is of 1950-2005 excess mortality/ 2005 population (both in millions, m) and expressed as a percentage (%). This ratio is given for the UK and for each country occupied by the UK in the post-1945 era (excluding Japan and Germany) and as a total for all the countries subject to such occupation. The asterisk (*) below indicates a major occupation by more than one country in the post-WW2 era (thus I have listed only the UK and the US as major occupiers of Afghanistan, Iraq and Korea, leaving aside the many other minor participants in these conflicts).
UK [4.411m/59.598m = 7.4%] - Afghanistan* [16.609m/25.971m = 64.0%], Bahamas [0.007m/0.321m = 2.3%], Bahrain [0.054m/0.754m = 7.2%], Bangladesh* [51.196m/152.593m = 33.6%], Barbados [0.015m/0.272m = 5.5%], Belize [0.014m/0.266m = 5.3%], Bhutan [0.908m/2.392m = 38.0%], Botswana [0.443m/1.801m = 24.6%], Brunei [0.020m/0.374m = 5.3%], Cameroon* [6.669m/16.564m = 40.3%], Cyprus [0.054m/0.813m = 6.6%]; Egypt* [19.818m/74.878m = 26.5%], Eritrea* [1.757m/4.456m = 39.4%], Ethiopia [36.133m/74.189m = 48.7%], Fiji [0.054m/0.854m = 6.3%], Gambia [0.606m/1.499m = 47.6%], Ghana [6.089m/21.833m = 27.9%], Greece* [0.027m/10.978m = 0.2%], Grenada* [0.018m/0.121m = 14.9%], Guyana [0.086m/0.768m = 11.2%], Hong Kong [0.125m/7.182m = 1.7%], India [351.900m/1096.917m = 32.1%], Iraq* [5.283m/26.555m = 19.9%], Israel [0.095m/6.685 = 1.4%], Jamaica [0.245m/2.701m =9.1%], Jordan* [0.630m/5.750m = 11.0%], Kenya [10.015m/32.849m = 30.5%], Korea* [7.958m/71.058m = 11.2%], Kuwait* [0.089m/2.671m = 3.3%], Lesotho [0.951m/1.797m =52.9%], Libya [0.785m/5.768m =13.6%], Malawi [6.976m/12.572m = 55.5%], Malaysia [2.344m/25.325m = 9.3%], Maldives [0.015m/0.338m = 4.4%], Malta [0.019m/0.397m = 4.8%], Myanmar [20.174m/50.696 = 39.8%], Nepal [10.650m/26.289m = 40.5%], Nigeria [49.737m/130.236m =38.2%], Occupied Palestinian Territories [0.677m/3.815m = 17.7%], Oman [0.359m/3.020m =11.9%], Pakistan [49.700m/161.151m = 30.8%], Qatar [0.029m/0.628m = 4.6%], Saint Lucia [0.012m/0.152m = 7.9%], Saint Vincent & Grenadines [0.018m/0.121m =14.9%], Sierra Leone [4.548m/5.340m = 85.2%], Singapore [0.113m/4.372m = 2.6%], Solomon Islands* [0.050m/0.504m = 48.5%], Somalia* [5.568m/10.742m =51.8%], Sri Lanka [0.951m/19.366m = 4.9%], Sudan [13.471m/35.040m = 38.4%], Swaziland [0.471m/1.087m = 43.3%], Tanzania [14.682m/38.365m =38.3%], Tonga [0.020m/0.106m = 18.9%], Trinidad & Tobago [0.052m/1.311m = 4.0%], Uganda [11.121m/27.623m = 40.3%], United Arab Emirates [0.087m/3.106m =2.8%], Vanuatu [0.037m/0.222m = 16.7%], Yemen [6.798m/21.480m = 31.6%], Zambia [5.463m/11.043m = 49.5%], Zimbabwe [4.653m/12.963m =35.9%], total = 727.448m/2247.711m = 32.4%.
Of course Britain was not alone in colonial and neo-colonial abuses. Thus 1950-2005 excess deaths in countries occupied by other European countries in the post-WW2 era totaled (in descending order of excess deaths) 142 million (France), 82 million (USA), 72 million (Netherlands), 37 million (Russia), 36 million (Belgium), 24 million (Apartheid Israel), 23 million (Portugal) and 9 million (Spain) – as compared to 727 million for Britain (see “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950” by Gideon Polya). Note that it is the 3 most murderous Occupiers who are presently involved in the France-UK-US (FUKUS) Coalition presently bombing Libya back to the Stone Age.
While former PM Tony Blair has said sorry for the Irish Famine (perhaps to hasten an end to the troubles in Northern Ireland), Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II has ignored the appalling catalogue of carnage outlined above and has merely “acknowledged” the 1919 Amritsar Massacre (the Jallianwala Bagh massacre) in which the British under General R.E.H. Dyer massacred about 1,000 Punjabis. Small wonder with this appalling carnage (1,800 million excess deaths in India alone, 1757-1947) that the Royal Family censored comment on the Kate and William Wedding. The Wedding TV coverage stretched from Buckingham Palace and the Victoria Memorial facing up the Mall to Westminster Abbey in which Winston Churchill is buried near the West entrance. There was no mention in the TV coverage of Queen Victoria’s immense atrocities on all continents of which the greatest numerically were the 500 million Indian excess deaths under Queen Victoria, the 20-100 million deaths in China due to the British opium trade and the 10 million Indians butchered in reprisals for the Indian Rebellion (known as the Indian Mutiny to the British). Nor was there any mention of Churchill’s immense war crimes of which the most dreadful was the “forgotten” Bengali Holocaust in which he deliberately murdered 6-7 million Indians for strategic reasons (for a catalogue of Churchill’s crimes see “Churchill’s crimes from the Indian Holocaust to Palestinian Genocide”). Indeed the BBC coverage of the Royal Wedding included slavishly and lavishly pro-Royal commentary from pro-Zionist historian Simon Schama whose 3-volume work “A History of Britain” (BBC) extraordinarily makes no mention of the WW2 Bengali Holocaust in which the British under Churchill remorselessly murdered 6-7 million Indians in cold blood in the years 1943-1945.
In 1945 the Germans followed a CAAAA (C4A) protocol of Cessation of the violence, Acknowledgment of the crimes, Apology for the crimes, Amends for the crimes and Assertion “never again to anyone”. Peace is the only way but silence kills and silence is complicity. We all wish Kate and William a very happy marriage. However one hopes that even before they are Queen and King of England they will make some Amends for this dreadful catalogue of British mass murder and holocaust ignoring by at least Acknowledging the crimes, offering an Apology and Asserting “never again to anyone”
Exposing crimes of Churchill & Queen Victoria
by Gideon Polya, MWC News, 2 May 2011
An estimated 2 billion people watched the lavish wedding of Kate and William in London that cost the British economy $10 billion from a national day off work. We all wish the best for the happy couple. However the TV coverage permitted by the Royal Family involved massive censorship of the Australian ABC and indeed all other media. The Royal Family and the British Establishment survive through censorship, lies (of commission and omission) and slice (spin-based untruths) and this latest British censorship demands exposure of Britain’s horrendous past and continuing imperialist crimes.
The recent British Royal Wedding involved extraordinary Royal censorship of world media that mirrors British Establishment ignoring of its immense genocidal crimes over the last few centuries. Brilliant humanitarian Indian writer Arundhati Roy has commented powerfully on simultaneous First World holocaust commission and holocaust denial: “the ultimate privilege of the élite is not just their deluxe lifestyles, but deluxe lifestyles with a clear conscience” (see Arundhati Roy in “The Cheque-book and the Cruise Missile”).
The Chasers are a group of Australian comedians who mount a satirical program called The Chaser’s War on Everything for the taxpayer-funded Australian Broadcasting Corporation (the ABC, Australia’s equivalent of the BBC). The Chasers are famous for “stunts”, the most celebrated being driving a person dressed up as Osama bin Laden through the incredibly tight security of the 2007 APEC conference in Sydney that was attended by US president George Bush. However the UK Royals prohibited participation by the Chasers in the Royal Wedding coverage and threatened the ABC with exclusion from BBC TV footage unless The Chasers were excluded.
According to Mumbrella (that comments on Australian media): “The ABC has been forced to cancel Friday night’s alternative coverage of the Royal Wedding by The Chaser on ABC2 after a ruling from the office of the Royal Family. According to the announcement from the ABC, conditions of its use of live footage of the wedding were tightened up over the Easter break, including a ban on the use of the material for the purposes of satire or comedy. The ABC’s original plan was to feature The Chaser’s commentary on ABC2 while rebroadcasting the BBC’s coverage on ABC1. Instead, the approved commentary will go ahead on ABC1, while ABC2 will switch to a royal wedding themed night [minus the Chasers]”.
Now the Chasers are excellent at political satire but remain well inside typical, Elephant-in-the–Room-ignoring Mainstream media parameters. Thus the Chasers are critical of war but have never mentioned, as far as I know, the number of people actively or passively murdered by the war criminal US Coalition (including the UK and Australia) in Iraq (4.6 million) or Afghanistan (5.0 million) or by racist Zionist-run Apartheid Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (0.3 million). I am confident that the Chasers would have provided very amusing and indeed pungent commentary but am equally confident that the Chasers would not have alluded to the immense crimes of England under Protestant monarchs since the deposition of Catholic King Kames II in 1690 by William III and the subsequent Act of Settlement of 1700 that excluded Catholics from the throne and ensured the German Hanoverian succession up to the present day. Indeed the present English Royal Family changed their name from Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to Windsor under George V in 1917 during the First World War against Germany (their relative Prince Louis Battenberg similarly changed to Prince Louis Mountbatten in 1917 because of anti-German sentiment).
In this age of political correctness this British Royal Family censorship action applied to all world media and not just to Australia. It is accordingly reasonable for the world to respond to global censorship by the Catholic-excluding English Royal Family by global exposure of the appalling crimes of England under Protestant monarchs since 1690.
The victory of Dutch Protestant William III over British Catholic James II at the Battle of the Boyne (1689) led to 3 more centuries of violent abuse of the Irish people. In the 18th century, Britain emerged as a major world power that used large-scale, high technology warfare against Celtic Britain, European nations and largely defenseless Americans, Africans, Asians and Australasian. Thus the 1707 act of union with Scotland was enabled by butchery of the Scots. The Protestant Hanoverian succession, the 1701-1714 War of the Spanish Succession against France, and the 1756-1763, Seven Years War against France left Britain the dominant colonial power in North America, India and in Africa (where it was a major player in the 20 million victim slave trade). In 1746 the Scots were finally defeated by the English at the Battle of Culloden, the last battle on British soil, and this paved the way for the genocidal Scottish Clearances.
In 1757 Bengal was defeated at the Battle of Plassey with the help of Indigenous Bengali traitors and was thence rapaciously taxed with the consequence that in 1769-1770 the Great Bengal Famine killed 10 million Bengalis, one third of the population. In 1776 the well-armed White Americans won independence from England, then under King George III, this enabling the genocidal march of English settlement to the West.(by 1844 Indigenous American Indians were prohibited east of the Mississippi). The invasion of Australia in 1788 led to European settlement of Australia and the Aboriginal Genocide in which the Indigenous Australian population fell from about 1 million in 1788 to 0.1 million a century later.
In the 19th century, the Napoleonic Wars concluded with defeat of Napoleonic France on the Spanish Peninsular, at the naval battle of Trafalgar by the British under Admiral Nelson (1805) and finally at Waterloo under Wellington (1815). Industrialization was fed by capital from the Empire in India, Africa, Asia, the Americas and the Pacific. The abolition of slavery was made possible because of the removal of British agricultural workers from the land in the English Enclosures and the brutal suppression of Ireland, Scotland and Wales. An excess of utterly impoverished British labor meant that Britain banned the importation of African slaves in its colonies in 1807 and abolished slavery throughout the British Empire in 1833. However slavery using indentured labor continued in the British Empire well into the 20th century in places such as South Africa, the West Indies, Australia and the South Pacific (notably in Fiji).
After Queen Victoria came to the throne the world suffered horrendous mass murder at the hands of the British during her long rule from 1837-1901. Under Queen Victoria the 1845-1850 Irish famine resulted in 1 million dead from starvation (while food was being exported from Ireland) and 1.5 million Irish fled overseas, many perishing from destitution in transit or on arrival. Similar privations occurred in Scotland with attendant massive emigration of displaced Scots in the Scottish Clearances. Brutal British rule in India was associated with Indian cholera epidemics (25 million victims) and famines (scores of millions of victims). An estimated 500 million Indians died avoidably from deprivation under the merciless rule of Queen Victoria.
The 1854-1856 Crimean War with Russia saw the beginning of the Great Game from Eastern Europe to Afghanistan that is still being played out today with horrendous consequences for Pakistan and Afghanistan. In 1857 the Indians revolted but were defeated, the British killing an estimated 10 million Indians in reprisals for the circa 2,000 British killed in the uprising. British export of Indian opium to China resulted in successive Opium Wars and the Tai Ping rebellion in which 20-100 million Chinese perished. Genocide of Indigenous inhabitants proceeded apace in the British Empire under Queen Victoria, notably in North America (Canada), South America (genocide of the Argentineans, Uruguayan and Paraguayan Indians), Africa (displacement of Africans from temperate regions) and in the South Pacific (Australian Aboriginal Genocide, Maori Genocide and Pacific Islander Genocide through violence, dispossession, slavery and introduced disease). The last years of Queen Victoria’s rule involved massive famine in India, conquest of Southern Africa, victory over the Dutch Afrikaners in the Boer War and the invention of concentration camps to brutally imprison Afrikaner women and children.
The 20th century saw more of the same in the British Empire “upon which the sun never set”. Indeed just after another huge famine in India, the Delhi Durbar was held at vast expense in 1902 to celebrate the British Imperial rule. Excess deaths from deprivation in British India in the period 1901-1947 totaled about 400 million. An arms race among the European imperialists resulted in the 1914-1918 World War 1, horrendous casualties, and dismemberment of the Austro-Hungarian and Turkish Empires with disastrous consequences e.g. the Armenian Genocide (1915-1923; 1.5 million killed), the ongoing Iraqi Genocide (1990-2011, 4.6 million dead, 5-6 million refugees), and the ongoing Palestinian Genocide (0.3 million avoidable dead from deprivation in Occupied Palestine and over 7 million refugees).
Post-war Irish independence, women’s suffrage and democratization of British society were post-WW1 advances, but oil, British power in the Middle East, the 1929 Wall Street collapse, depression, German reparations and European re-armament led to the 1939-1945 World War 2. Nazism was eventually defeated but Britain under George VI and Queen Elizabeth II resolutely ignored the horrendous WW2 Bengali Holocaust in which 6-7 million Indians were deliberately starved to death by the British under Churchill for strategic reasons. The Bengal Famine was the first WW2 atrocity to be described as a “holocaust” (by Indian writer N.G. Jog in 1944) and was atrocity bigger than the WW2 Jewish Holocaust (5-6 million killed, 1 in 6 dying from deprivation) (for details of this “forgotten holocaust” see “Churchill’s Secret War: the British Empire and the ravaging of Indian during World War II” by Madhusree Mukerjee:; “Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History. Colonial rapacity, holocaust denial and the crisis in biological sustainability” by Gideon Polya; and the BBC broadcast involving myself, Economics Nobel Laureate Professor Amarty Sen and other scholars, and entitled “Bengal Famine”).
With Europe temporarily wrecked, Eastern Europe enslaved by war-ravaged Russia, post-war Britain saw British technological advance, the welfare state, civil nuclear power and nuclear arms. Britain under George VI saw the disastrous Partitions of India (1 million killed, 18 million refugees) and Palestine (thousands killed, 800,000 refugees). The New Elizabethan period under Queen Elizabeth II (1952- present) saw UK involvement in the Korean War (3 million dead) , the Malaya Emergency and the May Mau rebellion in Kenya (0.1 million dead), Confrontation with Indonesia, the Rhodesia/Zimbabwe war (1965-1980, 25,000 killed, 0.7 million excess deaths), the 1982, Falklands Island War against Argentinean invaders, UK-US democratic imperialism and invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan (violent and non-violent excess deaths 4.6 million and 5.0 million, respectively) and now the bombing and civil war in Libya.
The decolonization in Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, Asia and the Pacific replaced much of the British Empire with the British Commonwealth. However cessation of direct British rule and military occupation did not stop the huge avoidable mortality (avoidable deaths, excess deaths, excess mortality, deaths that did not have to happen) due to British hegemony. Summary data is provided below is of 1950-2005 excess mortality/ 2005 population (both in millions, m) and expressed as a percentage (%). This ratio is given for the UK and for each country occupied by the UK in the post-1945 era (excluding Japan and Germany) and as a total for all the countries subject to such occupation. The asterisk (*) below indicates a major occupation by more than one country in the post-WW2 era (thus I have listed only the UK and the US as major occupiers of Afghanistan, Iraq and Korea, leaving aside the many other minor participants in these conflicts).
UK [4.411m/59.598m = 7.4%] - Afghanistan* [16.609m/25.971m = 64.0%], Bahamas [0.007m/0.321m = 2.3%], Bahrain [0.054m/0.754m = 7.2%], Bangladesh* [51.196m/152.593m = 33.6%], Barbados [0.015m/0.272m = 5.5%], Belize [0.014m/0.266m = 5.3%], Bhutan [0.908m/2.392m = 38.0%], Botswana [0.443m/1.801m = 24.6%], Brunei [0.020m/0.374m = 5.3%], Cameroon* [6.669m/16.564m = 40.3%], Cyprus [0.054m/0.813m = 6.6%]; Egypt* [19.818m/74.878m = 26.5%], Eritrea* [1.757m/4.456m = 39.4%], Ethiopia [36.133m/74.189m = 48.7%], Fiji [0.054m/0.854m = 6.3%], Gambia [0.606m/1.499m = 47.6%], Ghana [6.089m/21.833m = 27.9%], Greece* [0.027m/10.978m = 0.2%], Grenada* [0.018m/0.121m = 14.9%], Guyana [0.086m/0.768m = 11.2%], Hong Kong [0.125m/7.182m = 1.7%], India [351.900m/1096.917m = 32.1%], Iraq* [5.283m/26.555m = 19.9%], Israel [0.095m/6.685 = 1.4%], Jamaica [0.245m/2.701m =9.1%], Jordan* [0.630m/5.750m = 11.0%], Kenya [10.015m/32.849m = 30.5%], Korea* [7.958m/71.058m = 11.2%], Kuwait* [0.089m/2.671m = 3.3%], Lesotho [0.951m/1.797m =52.9%], Libya [0.785m/5.768m =13.6%], Malawi [6.976m/12.572m = 55.5%], Malaysia [2.344m/25.325m = 9.3%], Maldives [0.015m/0.338m = 4.4%], Malta [0.019m/0.397m = 4.8%], Myanmar [20.174m/50.696 = 39.8%], Nepal [10.650m/26.289m = 40.5%], Nigeria [49.737m/130.236m =38.2%], Occupied Palestinian Territories [0.677m/3.815m = 17.7%], Oman [0.359m/3.020m =11.9%], Pakistan [49.700m/161.151m = 30.8%], Qatar [0.029m/0.628m = 4.6%], Saint Lucia [0.012m/0.152m = 7.9%], Saint Vincent & Grenadines [0.018m/0.121m =14.9%], Sierra Leone [4.548m/5.340m = 85.2%], Singapore [0.113m/4.372m = 2.6%], Solomon Islands* [0.050m/0.504m = 48.5%], Somalia* [5.568m/10.742m =51.8%], Sri Lanka [0.951m/19.366m = 4.9%], Sudan [13.471m/35.040m = 38.4%], Swaziland [0.471m/1.087m = 43.3%], Tanzania [14.682m/38.365m =38.3%], Tonga [0.020m/0.106m = 18.9%], Trinidad & Tobago [0.052m/1.311m = 4.0%], Uganda [11.121m/27.623m = 40.3%], United Arab Emirates [0.087m/3.106m =2.8%], Vanuatu [0.037m/0.222m = 16.7%], Yemen [6.798m/21.480m = 31.6%], Zambia [5.463m/11.043m = 49.5%], Zimbabwe [4.653m/12.963m =35.9%], total = 727.448m/2247.711m = 32.4%.
Of course Britain was not alone in colonial and neo-colonial abuses. Thus 1950-2005 excess deaths in countries occupied by other European countries in the post-WW2 era totaled (in descending order of excess deaths) 142 million (France), 82 million (USA), 72 million (Netherlands), 37 million (Russia), 36 million (Belgium), 24 million (Apartheid Israel), 23 million (Portugal) and 9 million (Spain) – as compared to 727 million for Britain (see “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950” by Gideon Polya). Note that it is the 3 most murderous Occupiers who are presently involved in the France-UK-US (FUKUS) Coalition presently bombing Libya back to the Stone Age.
While former PM Tony Blair has said sorry for the Irish Famine (perhaps to hasten an end to the troubles in Northern Ireland), Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II has ignored the appalling catalogue of carnage outlined above and has merely “acknowledged” the 1919 Amritsar Massacre (the Jallianwala Bagh massacre) in which the British under General R.E.H. Dyer massacred about 1,000 Punjabis. Small wonder with this appalling carnage (1,800 million excess deaths in India alone, 1757-1947) that the Royal Family censored comment on the Kate and William Wedding. The Wedding TV coverage stretched from Buckingham Palace and the Victoria Memorial facing up the Mall to Westminster Abbey in which Winston Churchill is buried near the West entrance. There was no mention in the TV coverage of Queen Victoria’s immense atrocities on all continents of which the greatest numerically were the 500 million Indian excess deaths under Queen Victoria, the 20-100 million deaths in China due to the British opium trade and the 10 million Indians butchered in reprisals for the Indian Rebellion (known as the Indian Mutiny to the British). Nor was there any mention of Churchill’s immense war crimes of which the most dreadful was the “forgotten” Bengali Holocaust in which he deliberately murdered 6-7 million Indians for strategic reasons (for a catalogue of Churchill’s crimes see “Churchill’s crimes from the Indian Holocaust to Palestinian Genocide”). Indeed the BBC coverage of the Royal Wedding included slavishly and lavishly pro-Royal commentary from pro-Zionist historian Simon Schama whose 3-volume work “A History of Britain” (BBC) extraordinarily makes no mention of the WW2 Bengali Holocaust in which the British under Churchill remorselessly murdered 6-7 million Indians in cold blood in the years 1943-1945.
In 1945 the Germans followed a CAAAA (C4A) protocol of Cessation of the violence, Acknowledgment of the crimes, Apology for the crimes, Amends for the crimes and Assertion “never again to anyone”. Peace is the only way but silence kills and silence is complicity. We all wish Kate and William a very happy marriage. However one hopes that even before they are Queen and King of England they will make some Amends for this dreadful catalogue of British mass murder and holocaust ignoring by at least Acknowledging the crimes, offering an Apology and Asserting “never again to anyone”
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