The Forgotten Holocaust - The 1943/44 Bengal Famine

THE FORGOTTEN HOLOCAUST - THE 1943/44 BENGAL FAMINE: impelled in part by global warming concerns, an account by Dr Gideon Polya of the man-made Bengal Famine of 1943/44 and the unresponsiveness of the world at the time to both the Bengal Famine and the Holocaust in Europe; the total or near-total ignoring in many historical texts and in global public perception of the Second World War Bengal Famine and other such horrendous events such as the Great Bengal Famine of 1769/1770, other Indian famines, the Irish famine (1845/46), genocide in Tasmania and mainland Australia in the 19th century and the genocide of the Armenians (1915); history ignored yields history repeated and global warming through greedy industrial profligacy may next century visit even worse disasters on Bengal and on other low-lying regions such as deltaic Egypt, Thailand, Louisiana and Holland. Remarkably, one of the biggest mortality events of the mid-20th century (that has been written about extensively by Amartya Sen (1998 Nobel Prize Winner for Economics) and which was the subject of the film “Distant Thunder” by world-famous Bengali film-maker Satyajit Ray) remains UNKNOWN to most in the English-speaking World - due to extraordinary, continuing academic and media holocaust denial involving self-censorship, lying by omission and intrinsic, covert racism.

Précis

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the end of World War 2 and the world will reflect on the human cost of this conflict. In particular we will remember the enormous loss of civilian life, particularly in Poland (6 million dead), the Soviet Union (20 million dead) and China (35 million dead). The Holocaust involving the deliberate extermination of 6 million Jews and half a million Gypsies has seared the human conscience, never to be forgotten. However a major man-made tragedy of similar proportions that occurred in Bengal in World War 2 has been effectively ignored by the world from the time it occurred. The man-made famine in Bengal in 1943-1944 killed an estimated 3.5 to 5 million people.

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