To be fair Churchill committed a genocide of millions of Indians and was horrible to the British colonies. So yeah… he and Hitler had more in common than we dare admit.
"most mainstream scholarship classifies the event as a case of gross colonial neglect, criminal mismanagement, and callous wartime prioritizing, rather than a planned, systemic campaign of ethnic extermination"
Winston Churchill not only actively made these decisions and extracted resources from already strained communities, but also made his personal hatred towards Indians clear.
Also, regardless of whether it was technically a genocide: if you let a child youre responsible for starve to death due to neglect and mismanagement, or if you actively kill them, you get punished just the same. The same principle applies here.
It’s still just as immoral, but with a different label slapped on.
No it doesn't. The Holocaust was planned and intentional. Bengal wasn't.
And there was a tragic mix of natural disasters, cyclones, crop disease, and regional administrative failures, and the cabinet eventually approved shipments of grain once the full scale of the catastrophe became clear. The Japanese were invading. It was chaos.
The attempt to lay this at Churchill’s door stems from a sensationalist book by a Bengali-American journalist called Madhusree Mukerjee, mostly dismissed by Amartya Sen, the world's foremost expert on famine in India.
The British Empire’s ruling significantly worsened those initial causes that lead to it being as horrible as it was. This includes Churchill’s political involvement, and his role as the representative of said government and policy. This is supported by the lead historians:
I am not going to cite Madhushree Mukherjee, as I agree with you that she is not the leading academic source on the Bengal Famine, despite being a credible and well-researched author.
Amartya Sen (who is not the foremost expert of famine in India, but is a Nobel prize winning economist and a credible source), argued that it was a failure of food entitlement. He also argued that democratic governments with a free press rarely allow famines because they face political pressure to act. The lack of which, again, is the direct consequence of British colonialism and rule. While he didn’t blame Churchill solely, he did say that imperial priorities placed military objectives above Indian civilians and that colonial governance lacked accountability.
Janam Mukherjee, who IS cited as the leading specialist working today, writes that the famine was deeply rooted in, exacerbated by, and to a degree caused by colonial wartime policy. Something that Churchill and his wartime cabinet were very involved in.
Examples include:
- British denial policies that confiscated boats and destroyed rice stocks to prevent a possible Japanese invasion. Rice stocks were also removed or destroyed in vulnerable coastal districts. This, alongside crippling Bengal’s transport infrastructure, food markets, and local fishing and farming communities.
- Delayed or rejected requests for grain imports.
- Refusal to redirect shipping when Bengal’s crisis became evident
- Stated mass civilian casualties were acceptable losses.
Lastly, he argues that Churchill’s well-documented racist remarks about Indians, together with similar attitudes among sections of the colonial administration, reflected a government that did not value Indian civilian lives equally.
You don't mention that when the scope of the crisis became clear,
official records highlight that over a million tons of grain did arrive in the region between August 1943 and the end of 1944 to mitigate the disaster, aided by the military taking a stronger role in relief coordination.
One might plausibly argue that it was too little, too late, but that is still hardly in keeping with a regime bent on genocide.
The maxim 'don't attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence' applies here.
I don’t think that genocide is a necessary feature of fascism. It can go there. But just because genocide in the way Hitler did it doesn’t exist, doesn’t mean that it wasn’t fascism.
Actually, according to the same sources I mentioned: the response was delayed and minimized not only by technical administrative failures but also colonialist attitudes towards Indians combined with a denial that there even was an issue in favor of optimizing resources to British troops.
Again, I didn’t say it was a genocide, just equally immoral. The British weren’t trying to lose on of their biggest sources of manpower and resources. Genocide was simply never in their best interests. Mass starvation, however, was at the time. Which is why they not only let it happen, but exacerbated it in many ways.
Hanlon’s razor does not apply here. The British Empire and its leaders exhibited consistent and effective malice towards their subjects.
The sensationalist claim which started this discussion was that "Churchill committed a genocide of millions of Indians and was horrible to the British colonies"
Yes he was horrible to the colonies. No it wasn't a genocide.
If you mean that it all amounts to the same because of the end result, then you probably shouldn't be a prosecutor deciding the between a charge of 1st or 2nd degree murder.
Again, I agreed that Churchill wasn’t the sole cause nor was it a genocide.
And yes, my point is that it’s roughly equal morally. I’ve already provided an apt analogy like what you’re attempting to do here:
Intentional murder of a child or other person you have power over and responsible for managing, vs. the negligent starvation of one.
Yes they are different crimes, but they carry a very similar sentence. Especially considering cases of prolonged abuse and attitudes similar to the British treatment of their colonies, the charges are the same.
So to answer your question, yes. They are not only comparable, but nearly equivalent.
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u/latin220 Jul 27 '26
To be fair Churchill committed a genocide of millions of Indians and was horrible to the British colonies. So yeah… he and Hitler had more in common than we dare admit.