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18-11-2008 15:40
Churchill's secret confession
"History is written by the victor" is an aphorism often attributed to Winston Churchill – and it has been very difficult to find anything that Churchill had to say about the Bengal Famine in which he deliberately murdered 7 million fellow human beings (notwithstanding his 1953 Nobel Prize for Literature “for his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for his brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values”).  
 
Thus Churchill made no mention of the Bengal Famine and his deliberate, remorseless mass murder of 7 million Indians in his 6 volume history of the Second World War (see: Churchill, W.S. (1954), The Second World War. Volumes I-VI (Cassell, London)). 
 
The only substantial written comment made by Churchill about the Bengal Famine that I have found is in a secret letter to Roosevelt in mid-1944 that is a documentary confession of his inaction:  
“London, April 29 1944. Prime Minister to President Roosevelt Personal and Top Secret. 
1. I am seriously concerned about the food situation in India and its possible reactions on our joint operations. Last year we had a grievous famine in Bengal through which at least 700,000 people died … I have had much hesitation in asking you to add to the great assistance you are giving us with shipping but a satisfactory situation in India is of such vital importance to the success of our joint plans against the Japanese that I am impelled to ask you to consider a special allocation of ships to carry wheat from Australia without reducing the assistance you are now providing for us, who are at a positive minimum if war efficiency is to be maintained. We have the wheat in Australia but we lack the ships. I have resisted for some time the Viceroy’s request that I should ask you for your help, but I believe that, with this recent misfortune with the wheat harvest and in the light of Mountbatten’s representations, I am no longer justified in not asking for your help.” (see Kimball(1984), p117: Kimball, W.F. (1984) (editor), Churchill & Roosevelt. The Complete Correspondence (Princeton University Press, Princeton); see also Polya 2008, pp157-158: (Polya, G.M. 2008, “Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History” (Polya, Melbourne): Churchill’s 1944 admission of inaction to Roosevelt ). 
 
All I have been able to find additionally are references to Churchill’s notorious comment about the Bengal Famine victims that “they breed like rabbits” e.g. reference by India ’s Nobel Prize-winning economist Professor Amartya Sen quoting in a lecture “Nobody need starve” to the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT), Bangkok, Thailand, 2002 (see: offensive Churchill remark Bengalis ) :  
“Winston Churchill's famous remark about the 1943 Bengal famine - that it was caused by the tendency of the people to breed like rabbits - belongs to this general tradition of blaming the colonial subject. This attitude had a crucial role in delaying famine relief. As a nine-year-old boy, I witnessed this famine myself, and I remember the sight of unbelievably emaciated people dying in the streets from April onwards, but very few government relief centres opened until late October.” 
 
I had the privilege of participating with Professor Sen and other scholars in a BBC program about the Bengal Famine that was broadcast in January 2008 (see: 2008 BBC Bengal Famine broadcast ).
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