Instead of unvarnished truth-telling crucial for global risk management in the face of existential nuclear, poverty and climate threats, humanity is fed fake news through lies of omission and commission by the Mainstream Yellow Press and effective free speech is only granted to dissenters who provide an acceptably soft version of the Awful Truth (e.g. corporate-backed, climate-lite 350.org that wants to reduce atmospheric CO2 to 350 ppm from the present disastrous 405 ppm CO2, as compared to 300.org that has a science-informed target of the pre-Industrial Revolution circa 300 ppm CO2).
“Inglorious Empire. What the British did to India” by Shashi Tharoor is a must-read and powerful but flawed and iconoclast-lite excoriation of 2 centuries of deadly British rule over India [my additions within square brackets]:
“[In 1947] The British left a society with 16 per cent literacy, a life expectancy of 27, practically no domestic industry and over 90 per cent living below what today we would call the poverty line. Today, the literacy rate is up to 72 per cent [74%], average life expectancy [68 years] is nearing the Biblical three score and ten, and 280 million people have been pulled out of poverty in the twenty-first century [30% of 1,324 million Indians or about 400 million are below the $1.90 per day poverty line]”.
By way of comparison, China has 95% literacy, a life expectancy of 76 years, and (unreported by Mainstream media) has eradicated deadly endemic poverty so that annual avoidable deaths from deprivation are zero (0) for socialist China as compared to 4.5 million for neoliberal India.
History is written by the victors, and even dissenting writers like Tharoor are only granted effective free speech by the Establishment because they wittingly or unwittingly soften the Awful Truth and “don’t frighten the horses”. Thus Tharoor variously totally ignored or hugely underestimated the 10 million Indian deaths in the 1769-1770 Great Bengal Famine; 10 million Indian deaths in a decade of British reprisals after the 1857 Rebellion; scores of Indian famine locations in a 2-century Indian Holocaust in which 1,800 million Indians died avoidably from imposed deprivation; 6-7 million Indian deaths in the UK-imposed and Australia-complicit WW2 Bengal Famine (i.e. not just the 4 million perishing in Bengal but also those in the neighbouring provinces of Assam, Bihar and Orissa); the 2-century British policy of subjugating several hundred million Indians by keeping them on the edge of starvation under the heel of well-fed British and “native” troops; and massive white-washing of the Indian Holocaust in part or in whole by generations of mendacious Mainstream journalists, writers, politicians and academics in the English-speaking world.
History ignored yields history repeated. Thus ignoring the ongoing Indian Holocaust (holocaust ignoring is far, far worse than repugnant holocaust denial that at least admits refutation and debate) means continuing annual avoidable deaths from deprivation totalling 4.5 million for neoliberal India as compared to zero (0) for socialist China; a continuing Global Avoidable Mortality Holocaust in which presently 17 million people die avoidably from deprivation each year on Spaceship Earth with neoliberal One Percenters in charge of the flight deck; and a worsening Climate Genocide in which an estimated 10 billion people will die this century unless requisite action is taken against man-made climate change, this predicted carnage including 2 billion Indians, 0.5 billion Bengalis, 0.3 billion Pakistanis and 0.3 billion Bangladeshis (global warming increases sea level, precipitation and hurricane intensity – one third of Bangladesh, population 165 million, is presently under water, the Caribbean is presently being devastated by 3 variously massive hurricanes, and the Paris Agreement upper target of a catastrophic 2 degrees Centigrade average temperature rise is now unavoidable in a worsening Climate Emergency, Climate Holocaust and Climate Genocide…
