We need more films like this

Rating: 9/10 (18 September 2007)

I recall when I mentioned Churchill's state terrorist Black and Tans at work in London that on two occasions c. 1989 and 2002, a woman colleague of Irish descent came and thanked me privately, telling me how their grandmothers etc. had nightmares about the Black and Tans etc. They kept quiet as the British media even today largely ignores the facts about British imperialism where parallels exist between Ireland and my own native India. The 1970s documentary on Michael Collins, Hang Up Your Brightest Colours, was banned by the BBC for over 20 years. Gordon Brown has recently been trying to prove his "British" credentials by talking up the Empire as a good thing which many ignorant British still want to cling to to and can do so as the facts are suppressed.
In India there was a furore over Attenborough's 1982 Gandhi, as true to British mythology, the Gandhi, Nehru, Mountbatten - all good friends underneath mythology was upheld. Subhas Chandra Bose, Nehru's main rival for leadership of the Congress, who led the Indian National Army which fought with the Japanese, did not exist for Attenborough! Like Roger Casement, Bose had sought help from Germany and travelled in a German U-boat. The mutiny by the Indian Navy, the INA show trial in 1946, Indian troops refusing to leave barracks and white troops slaughtering striking workers in Bombay (the real reason why the British realised they had to go) was airbrushed from history! As the British turned back the Japanese advance in Burma, Bose read "The History of the Irish Freedom Struggle" and the failed INA adventure followed by the INA show trial, like Dublin 1916, instilled the spirit of freedom into India.
Furthermore, in 60 years, the British media has only once shown a programme on the 3 million death toll inflicted by the artificial famine the British created in Bengal in 1942-3 (C4's The Forgotten Famine, 1997). The British exported India's foodgrains and let the natives starve. Satyajit Ray's "Distant Thunder" is about this famine. Whilst the less than 1m Partition deaths are repeatedly highlighted as in 2007, no mention is made of such British-inflicted famine Holocausts which occurred throughout British rule, Bengal 1770 (the great famine), 8 million dead in S.India 1870s and 19 million in W.India 1890s (according to The Lancet) due to British "let the poor starve" Social Darwinist policies as also occurred in Ireland in the 1840s where the British also exported Ireland's dairy produce under army protection whilst the natives died in their millions! American historian Mike Davis discusses these famines in Late Victorian Holocausts. Still in 2001, Thatcherite Niall Ferguson in the Daily Mail wrote of Kipling's "White Man's Burden" repeating brazenly false Kipling myths of heroic British saving starving natives!!!
Also in the 1940s, the British refused American advice to build aircraft in India to fight the Japanese as no industrialisation which might help an independent India compete with Britain was to allowed after the Brits had plantationised our economy.
Thus when the British Right tries to dismiss the facts about the Black and Tans etc. ask them why Hitler loved the British film, Lives of a Bengal Lancer and wrote in Mein Kampf that he wanted Ukraine as his India! Sutapas Bhattacharya