holocaust with an H

Over Christmas I read about the Armenian genocide during the First World War by the Turks.

Just another horrific crime against humanity that very rarely ever gets mentioned. One that unlike the Holocaust of the Jews at the hands of the Nazis, one that never gets a capital H.

I have this propensity to read about the very things that sicken me to the core. I am fascinated by our inhumanity to one another. I really do need a proper hobby, perhaps I should take up some physical pursuit, maybe kayaking or something.

Anyways, as I travelled around the internetweb I stumbled on an article that was about Britain’s holocaust(s), which also mentions the Armenian case and has brought more human suffering from our past into my world.


“In his book Late Victorian Holocausts, published in 2001, Mike Davis tells the story of the famines which killed between 12 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 height of the famine, grain merchants exported a record 6.4 million hundredweight of wheat. As the peasants began to starve, government officials were ordered "to discourage relief works in every possible way"(2). The Anti-Charitable Contributions Act of 1877 prohibited "at the pain of imprisonment private relief donations that potentially interfered with the market fixing of grain prices." The only relief permitted in most districts was hard labour, from which anyone in an advanced state of starvation was turned away. Within the labour camps, the workers were given less food than the inmates of Buchenwald. In 1877, monthly mortality in the camps equated to an annual death rate of 94%.

As millions died, the imperial government launched "a militarized campaign to collect the tax arrears accumulated during the drought." The money, which ruined those who might otherwise have survived the famine, was used by Lytton to fund his war in Afghanistan. Even in places which had produced a crop surplus, the government's export policies, like Stalin's in the Ukraine, manufactured hunger. In the North-western provinces, Oud and the Punjab, which had brought in record harvests in the preceding three years, at least 1.25m died.”

From How Britain Denies its Holocausts


As we know the victors write the history books and in my former British colony this is one chapter that was never taught me in history class.

Lets never forget this, it is our ignorance and pettiness that allows our power brokers to abuse our trust whilst they carry out polices that are not in humanities best interests. It is high time we put our collective well being ahead of the interests of a powerful few.

It does beg the question once posed by Mark E Smith, Who makes the Nazis’?

We do