The British Empires was arguably one of the evilest genocidal institutions to have ever existed. There is so much historical amnesia about the what the empire really entailed. The fact that they don’t really teach colonial history in their schools, there’s no real awareness of the atrocities.
The fact that Britain financed its industrial revolution and its prosperity from the depredations of empire. The five biggest atrocities committed in the 20th century alone are
JALLIANWALA BAGH MASSACRE IN INDIA (1919) where up to 1,000 peaceful protesters were butchered by British colonial troops. The Jallianwalla Bagh is a public garden of 6 to 7 acres (28,000 m2), walled on all sides, with five entrances. British Troops under the command of Colonel Reginald Dyer fired rifles into a crowd of Indians, who had gathered in Jallianwala Bagh, Amritsar, Punjab. First, they blocked the entry by a tank and locked the exit on their commander’s order, then his troops fired on the crowd for ten minutes, directing their bullets largely towards the few open gates through which people were trying to flee. The casualty number estimated by the Indian National Congress was more than 1,500 injured, with approximately 1,000 dead
CURSING OF THE IRAQI UPRISING 1920, here the British indiscriminately massacred large numbers of the Kurdish population, often whole villages at a time. There were even chemical weapons used on them.
BRITISH PARTITION OF INDIA 1947, Up to a million Indians and Pakistanis were killed in the ensuing sectarian violence after the upheaval. The massacres began soon after the British announced partition: Neighbors slaughtered neighbours; childhood friends became sworn enemies. About 14 million people are thought to have abandoned their homes in the summer and fall of 1947 when colonial British administrators began dismantling the empire in southern Asia. Estimates of the number of people killed in those months range between 200,000 and 2 million.
MAU MAU UPRISING KENYA 1950, The Mau Mau Uprising, also known as the Mau Mau Rebellion, the Kenya Emergency, and the Mau Mau Revolt, was a war in the British Kenya Colony which rounded up 1.5 million Kenyans, including Barak Obama’s grandfather, and put them into concentration camps where 100,000 are believed to have died. The Mau Mau stepped up its attacks on European settlers and Kikuyu, culminating in the attack on the village of Lari in March 1953 in which 84 Kikuyu civilians, mainly women and children, were murdered.
FAMINES IN INDIA UNDER BRITISH RULE, up to 29 million Indians starved to death under British rule while Indians exported and stockpiled millions of tons of food from the country. Mass starvation was a regular feature of life in India under British rule. The last ‘famine’ that was inflicted on India was in 1943 when over four million people died in Bengal. The British Army took millions of tons of rice from starving people. Even when other nations tried to send aid to the people of Bengal, Winston Churchill refused the offers.
Former British prime minister Winston Churchill once said, “I Hate Indians, they are beastly people with a beastly religion. The famine was their own fault for feeding like rabbits“. Incidentally, They have put Winston Churchill on their five-pound note.
SIASAT NEWS