Re:The East India Company, the original corporate raiders
by DoubleCribble on Friday September 22, 2017 @02:37PM
(#15314603)
Being neither British nor Indian, I'd always thought of the British as not horrible colonialists of India, that is until I listened to Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist History podcast.
[1]http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/15-the-prime-minister...
Re:The East India Company, the original corporate raiders
by user982 on Friday September 22, 2017 @02:23PM
(#15314487)
Churchill was merely following proud English tradition: when the Great Famine decimated Ireland as a result of British policies (and during which Irish food exports to England continued unabated), Queen Victoria prevented the Ottoman Sultan from donating more aid and food than she had herself.
Re:The East India Company, the original corporate raiders
by gertef on Friday September 22, 2017 @02:57PM
(#15314788)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943 offers an alternative view.
"Offering aid to your enemy, to highlight their weakness" is a standard propaganda technique, not to be taken at face value.
> hypocrisy of the British to claim the moral high ground when their own leader was intentionally starving millions to death
no disagreement here.
It gets even more ironic than that. During the 1940s Bengal famine, things were so bad that the Axis powers offered to step in and send humanitarian aid. Churchill not only refused, but he tried to prevent the newspapers from printing news of the offer, so that people wouldn't know how truly unnecessary their starvation was.
Lest I be mistaken, this is not to say that the Axis powers were somehow anything other than evil themselves. But it does highlight the level of hypocrisy of the British to claim the moral high ground when their own leader was intentionally starving millions to death out of spite. (And yes, it was spite - read what Churchill himself said on the topic).