First, I would say that the British should not receive the benefit of the doubt as to their behavior during the Bengal famine, given their intransigence to release grain during the Irish potato famine (and that so many Irish were forced to rely on potatoes leaving them vulnerable was another effect of British rule.)

Here's some scientific evidence that the Bengal famine of 1943 was not linked to soil moisture levels, like the previous five: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/04/churchill-policies-bl...

Again, the long history of callousness of the British empire towards its colonies should lead one to be skeptical of the official intent at the time.

Genocide by convenient happenstance, as a side-effect of deliberate action, is still genocide.

The first modern genocide (if you don't count the Congolese, which most don't but should) was a death march. The Turks didn't try to eliminate the Armenians by shooting or poisoning or slashing them; they simply made them walk, en masse and in horrible conditions, until they died.

If you've supplanted an ethnic group's government and redirected resources such that people start dying in horrifically large numbers, that is also a case in which you're committing genocide. Even if you're the Brits.

What’s the deal recently with new accounts on HN peddling anti-western conspiracy theories? There’s a kernel of truth here but the conclusions and narrative are simplistic and false.

There’s no shortage of good historical resources on the Bengal famine which demanded at its peak 3x as much food as was sailing past to war-torn Europe, and with which Churchill asked FDR for assistance, but instead we just get inflammatory rhetoric.

HN is a highly international community. We're nowhere close to global consensus on such topics.

If you think some other post is way off base, it's best to assume good faith as the guidelines ask and reply patiently with correct information, not name-calling like "anti-western conspiracy theories". If you do the latter, there's a good chance you'll make the situation worse by increasing the distance between us instead of bridging it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

>What’s the deal recently with new accounts on HN peddling anti-western conspiracy theories?

That's a gross mischaracterization of what was posted.

> accounts on HN peddling anti-western conspiracy theories? There’s a kernel of truth here

It is a sad day when providing facts is described as "anti-western".

> we just get inflammatory rhetoric

We? Inflammatory? The facts speak for themselves. If the truth hurts, then perhaps the problem is the reader's attachment to invalid notions.

Some of the information you're expressing is important, but it breaks the HN guidelines to push truth in the flamewar style, as you're doing here. Facts don't speak for themselves; there are infinitely many facts, it's up to a human to select them, and the human voice shows up nowhere more loudly than in the facts one selects.

If you're going to post about a divisive topic that's prone to flamewar like this one, you need to do so in the spirit of the site no matter how many facts or how much truth you possess. Otherwise you just damage the container here, and increase the amount of alienation between people, which harms HN and doesn't help the world much either. The cause of the truth is only served to the extent that people can hear you. Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the spirit of this site more to heart when posting here?

I've written about this kind of thing before, if more explanation or context would be helpful:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

> in the flamewar style, as you're doing here

I'm surprised but I'm open to being corrected. Please help me identify which statement I made which is considered "flamewar style".

> It is a sad day when providing facts is described as "anti-western".

> We? Inflammatory? The facts speak for themselves. If the truth hurts, then perhaps the problem is the reader's attachment to invalid notions.

These are the sorts of things people post when they've left the path of curious conversation and are just lashing back against what someone else said.

Also, you Godwinized the thread (invariably a flamewar marker) by taking some horrific quotes from Churchill and escalating that into full Hitlerhood. Again, that's not the path of curious conversation—that's fighting a demon. You can't do both at the same time; none of us can.

If you post in this way, you end up producing the opposite of what you presumably want. Instead of getting people to expand their view of Churchill to include more of his shadow, you push them into locking their current picture down even more, because that is how people react to battle moves. All you'll get in that case is equally inflamed reactive posts back. No one's mind will be changed, only intensified. That is the flamewar style.

Also, you've created accounts to do this sort of flamewar on HN before, and we've asked you not to before, and now you've done it again. That's a seriously bad pattern. Please don't do that. I understand that you have good reason to feel the way you do, and that it's based on valid information that ought not to be so quickly rejected by Western readers. But coming at them with a flaming sword only recreates the problem—and meanwhile it contributes to destroying HN, which helps no one.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Invoking Hitler, aka Godwin's Law [1], is a strong indicator that you're no longer listening to counterarguments.

Also, your quotes are talking about China, not India, and don't seem to mention genocide?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law

Citation of a blog not even mentioning what you describe doesn't count as a fact. War is harsh, colonization was a crime against humanity IMHO, but the ain't no proof about planned genocide of Indian population. Rather the locals were 'deprioritized' when supplies were considered during war, with horrible consequences.

Did you not read the linked articles?

"The study, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, provided scientific backing for arguments that Churchill's policies played a significant role in contributing to the 1943 catastrophe."