Posted on 07/03/2009 8:10:11 AM PDT by C19fan
My grandmother was able to talk to one of the eye witnesses...her grandmother. They were forcing them out by starvation. BTW how did the murdering thugs do in India. It seems they used the same system over there.
from http://www.hindu.com/2005/12/28/stories/2005122804961100.htm
n his book Late Victorian Holocausts, published in 2001, Mike Davis tells the story of famines that killed between 12 million and 29 million Indians. These people were, he demonstrates, murdered by British state policy. When an El Nino drought destituted the farmers of the Deccan plateau in 1876 there was a net surplus of rice and wheat in India. But the Viceroy, Lord Lytton, insisted that nothing should prevent its export to England. In 1877 and 1878, at the height of the famine, grain merchants exported a record 320,000 tonnes of wheat.
And what about GWB, New Orleans & Katrina!
GENOCIDE!
And the CIA developed Aids to kill blacks, and...
“While this book will not have the impact of Davis’s City of Quartz—a scathing indictment of L.A.’s environmental ravagement, economic disparity and racial divides—in a perfect world, it would. Its subject is nothing less than the creation of what we now call “The Third World,” through a complex series of seemingly disparate natural and market-related events beginning in the 1870s.
Davis dives into the data and journalism of the period with a vengeance, showing that the seemingly unprecedented droughts across northern Africa, India and China in the 1870s and 1890s are consistent with what we now know to be El Ni¤o’s effects, and that it was political and market forces (which are never impersonal, Davis insists), and not a lack of potential stores and transportation, that kept grain from the more than 50 million people who starved to death.
Chapters brilliantly reconstruct the political, economic, ecological and racial climate of the time, as well as the horrific deaths by hunger and thirst that besieged the peasantries of the afflicted c0untries. As in City of Quartz, Ecology of Fear and Magical Urbanism, Davis’s synthetic powers, rendering mountains of data into an accessible and cogent form, are matched by his acid castigations of the murders and moral failings that have attended the advance of capitalism, and by cogent detours into the work of journalists and theorists who have come before him, decrying injustice and rallying the opposition.”
12 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Radical history of Los Angeles, February 25, 2007
By M. A. Krul (Utrecht, Kingdom of the Netherlands)
Davis is well-known in radical circles as a popular writer on various issues relating to labor movements and the like. This is essentially a history of the city of Los Angeles and its surroundings from a radical perspective. It’s quite well-done and very informative (at least to an ignoramus like me), but Davis goes overboard now and then in seeing a conspiracy to repress the poor behind everything. He also has the tendency to call historical incidences of repression a “holocaust” (he actually uses this word multiple times for different things), which I don’t like being used in this manner. Aside from that though, it’s a welcome different approach from the usual hagiographic or hip postmodern analyses of conglomeration cities like LA. There’s not much more I can say about it, as whether you like his left-wing critical vignettes or not will be mostly a matter of taste - judge it for yourself.
I think you hate the British so much that you'll use any stick to beat them with. But that puts you in bed with people whose philosophy, goals and methods you should abhor -- is it really worth it to sacrifice all your principles and beliefs just so you can hate somebody?
Nobody ever ran anything as big as the British Empire without making mistakes (you think as a Scot I like the idea of the Duke of Cumberland in charge of the punitive expedition after the '45?) But stop and think a minute. The British gave us Magna Carta and a system of common law that protects the rights of the individual. They gave us the jury system, that is by no means perfect but the best in the world at protecting the weak from the powerful and the apparently guilty but innocent from unjust punishment. They were the first to abolish the slave trade. They gave us inventions of all kinds, cures for horrible diseases, brilliant novels and poetry, and beautiful music. And their system of law and education has enabled many former colonies to thrive. If you've travelled around the Caribbean, you'll know that the former British colonies are the best-educated, most stable, and most prosperous in the region.
Get off the hate fest and appreciate what good the British have done.
Even the libs can be correct at times. Look at Tony Blair’s support of the U.S.
Too bad the Brits didn’t give a bag of rice with a copy of the Magna Carta. Perhaps some of my ancestors would not have starved to death. Unfortunately food was being shipped out, not in as my grandmother learned from her grandmother. They gave us cures for disease? Hell, they created disease by their starvation policies.
They made an absolute mess of the Middle East, so much so that even T.E. lawrence was disgusted with them. Murder in India, force starvation in Ireland, deception and death in the Middle East, and you blow it off as a “mistake”.
I find it somewhat funny we are discussing this on the fourth of July weekend, you know, where we celebrate our independence from you know who. I guess that was just a little mistake also.
I think we have beaten this topic to death and are going to just disagree. You love them and I don’t. Good enough.
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