Comment by abeppu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by abeppu | Hacker News Reader

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1. "permanent" help is not what's required during an famine due to crop failures, and not what anyone was demanding

2. focusing on the "assistance" without mentioning the circumstances which create the crisis is missing a big part of the picture. In the case of British policy in India, some important components leading up to that famine were:

  a. favoring a bunch of non-food cash crops, including opium production for export to China, tea for export to Britain, and materials for industry like jute and cotton. All of this diverted land away from food production which only set up for the famine to be a larger and more deadly crisis.

  b. of the food that was produced, as in the Irish context, the British exported a lot of it. And didn't stop exporting it when there was a local famine.

  c. in some areas imposing extremely high taxes, and in others switching farmers to owe taxes to be a percentage of land rents rather than as a percentage of their production -- i.e. if your crops failed you became insolvent and were pushed off the land, _preventing you from working_.

The narrative that colonizers shouldn't "assist" the victims of a famine when the colonizers were the ones driving down food production and exporting grain is so mind-bogglingly backwards. This is only a step away from an arsonist setting fire to your house and preventing the fire department from responding because that would only teach you to become dependent on the state bailing you out of every crisis.

Blaming the British for the famines in India is like blaming Democrats for the forest fires in California; it only has an air of respectability about it because Brahmins have been doing it for 200 years.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/29/winston-church...

"Mukerjee and others also point to Britain’s “denial policy” in the region, in which huge supplies of rice and thousands of boats were confiscated from coastal areas of Bengal in order to deny resources to the Japanese army in case of a future invasion."

On the topic of brahmins, they were the elite, but mostly not the rulers. All castes discriminated against castes lower to them, even within scheduled castes. Blaming just brahmins for all ills of the society is an uninformed position.

> Brahmins have been doing it for 200 years

Doing what? Starving people to death? Do you have any sources or made it up?

> Doing what?

Blaming the British for their misfortunes. You'll find the articles yourself if you read about this subject. They're also fond of claiming that they were deindustrialized by the British, that British industrial development was predicated upon a theft of wealth from India (the figures here range from the bizarre to the impossible), and that the British created the caste system.

So british has nothing to do with the famine ?

The rest is irrelevant for this thread.

> So british has nothing to do with the famine ?

You could feasibly make the argument that they exacerbated the Bengal famine. I don't think the scholarship supporting this argument is very good, but you could make the argument. As for the famines that occurred throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, no. There is no compelling reason to think that those famines occurred as a result of British mismanagement; they were the result of natural disasters.

Amartya Sen makes the argument that famines stopped occurring after India was granted independence, which alongside Churchill's general disdain for Indians is one of the more compelling reasons to think the British had anything to do with the 1943 famine, but this also coincides with the introduction of modern farming technologies (mechanization, chemical fertilizers, etc.), which complicates things.

There was also a high level of extreme poverty in India for many decades after independence. Maybe not large scale famines, but people being constantly very badly malnourished.

It also coincides with the end of WWII and thus the end of the Japanese naval threat, which was a factor in the last Bengal famine.

These correlations are hard to parse apart. There wasn't any famine in the USSR in the early 1950s either, but that does not mean that Stalin, compared to the 1930s, suddenly became a humanist leader interested in prosperity of all subjugated people.

The argument wouldn't be that the famines occurred due to british mismanagement, but rather due to british management. A country produces a certain amount of food during times of plenty. If they are careful, they will stow away some of that excess food for times of hardship. If they are being "managed" by a foreign power for its own benefit, this excess will instead be shuttled away to generate income. During times of hardship, there will be no excess to feed on and people will starve. The foreign power, in turn, will be nowhere to be found. This is no accident or failure, but rather the colony being run as intended: for profit, not for the benefit of the people living there.

On the topic of the colonization of India, "Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India" is an illustrative book - especially if you want more context to draw conclusions about the scale of wealth taken from India.

The British did plunder INCREDIBLE resource wealth from India, and various African countries, and the Americas prior to the revolutionary war, and the Carribean, and some South American countries too. And they weren't alone: Belgium, France, Spain, Portugal, and more, all colonizer nations, all held colonies, all of which generated revenue which was returned to/made in the home country. Like come on.

And this continues even today. Colonialism is alive and well, and rapaciously exploits the global south every day. Every company that exports jobs overseas because they can pay shit wages is part of it, every government that saddles newly-freed nations with unpayable debt is part of it, every environmental regulation that shoves polluting industry or waste disposal there, where their own voters don't have to look at it, is part of it. And yeah, paying office buildings full of workers barely making starvation wages to remove kiddie porn from Facebook is also part of it. We just traded guns for money, and sure, being exploited to near-death is better if you're getting paid than if you simply earn the right to not be shot, but that's a fucking low bar there.

> Every company that exports jobs overseas because they can pay shit wages is part of it

No they aren't. The case for colonialism is that it improves the country so colonized and benefits the people therein by providing them with wealth and the trappings of civilization. For the most part, actual colonies failed in this ideal by doing more to exploit the people being colonized than to help them. But a company providing jobs to those overseas, even at a shit wage, is definitely providing benefit to those people by giving them a better opportunity than they would otherwise have.

The lesson of the "white man's burden" should be that you, the white man, do not know better than a people themselves what is good for them. Take that lesson.

> But a company providing jobs to those overseas, even at a shit wage, is definitely providing benefit to those people by giving them a better opportunity than they would otherwise have.

This is not the truism as implied and saying that is not "white man's burden." Us filling beaches in developing countries with ships slated to be scrapped by people who work with plasma cutters while barefoot is not charity of any sort. Us polluting lands we do not own with waste we cannot dispose of under the environmental laws we ourselves have created in our own country is not "providing" anything, it's exporting misery. We demand our own people "earn" a living and by the same logic, demand thus of nations who do not necessarily agree, but we hold them hostage to it nonetheless.

If you want to uplift developing nations, tear up the agreements that give Western corporations the rights to plunder them, shred the documents of the "debt" they supposedly owe other nations for their own, deserved and far too delayed freedom, and treat their leaders with the respect they deserve and let them determine the destinies of their own countries, FOR ONCE, including and dare I say especially if said destinies are not the preferred ones by global colonial capitalism.

Everyone deserves freedom. No one deserves the freedom to be exploited, and it's long passed time we all started noting the difference. Freedom to be under the boot of capital is not freedom.

> Us filling beaches in developing countries with ships slated to be scrapped by people who work with plasma cutters while barefoot is not charity of any sort.

Why are "we" responsible for occupational health and safety in India? These shipbreaking yards aren't owned by British interests. Their conditions are reflective of a broader attitude of neglect across the entire subcontinent. "So cut off the supply of ships," you say; the attitude exists even in industries where "we" couldn't possibly change the working conditions (e.g. textile manufacturing) without engaging in what I'm sure you would call neo-imperialism.

Textile manufacturing is an interesting example because some large companies do sign up to anti sweatshop rules. Back in the day Gap got pressured into doing that I believe. Here in UK, last I heard (may not be up to date) Marks and Spencer does that, and apparently so do Primark (cheap clothes store who many might assume use sweatshops), while large supermarket Tesco I've heard associated with using sweatshops and being unresponsive when people complained. I'd argue we the western consumer are responsible to a certain extent. We can do research and find out who's best to shop with and direct our spending accordingly, thus impacting the lives of people in those countries.

> Why are "we" responsible for occupational health and safety in India?

Because we reap the rewards of it?

> "So cut off the supply of ships," you say

Yes, I do.

> the attitude exists even in industries where "we" couldn't possibly change the working conditions (e.g. textile manufacturing) without engaging in what I'm sure you would call neo-imperialism.

Imperialism is not as simple as "when you make people elsewhere do a thing." And more to the point, no activist on earth would state that it's Imperialist to say "your workers need PPE." There is no cultural stance on keeping your goddamn fingers. Poor as shit workforces scrapping ships are not forgoing protective gear because they simply enjoy the thrill of making sure their toes don't get hit by falling slag. They're people for Christ-sakes, just like you, trying to earn a living, and they can't afford to quit that job, nor can they afford a pair of boots to do it more safely, and no established organization is in their country making sure they do. Just like we did before we had things like OSHA and child labor laws made cheap business bastards do the right thing here, they deserve the same.

And while we can't make them form an OSHA, what we can do is tell our own corporations they are not permitted to dump ships on foreign soil where people working incredibly unsafely for slave wages will take them apart. That, we very much can and should do.

> And more to the point, no activist on earth would state that it's Imperialist to say "your workers need PPE."

I have spoken with a Bangladeshi woman who made this exact argument. Granted, her father owned (what she swore wasn't) a sweatshop, so she wasn't impartial. This is also something you see a lot in Brazil. The westerners want to protect the Amazon rainforest, and the locals want to develop it. It's very common for Brazilians to resent this attitude, because westerners are effectively trying to have input on Brazil's economic development, leveraging their status as purchasers of Brazilian exports.

> There is no cultural stance on keeping your goddamn fingers. Poor as shit workforces scrapping ships are not forgoing protective gear because they simply enjoy the thrill of making sure their toes don't get hit by falling slag.

I've watched probably upwards of thirty hours of footage of factories on the Indian subcontinent and have also observed a similar work culture in Latin America. There absolutely is a cultural problem in both regions not taking occupational health and safety seriously, and it's not just a management issue (though this certainly plays a role, and I'd say is probably a factor if we consider the shipbreaking example). If you've ever worked in construction or manufacturing, it isn't rare at all to find employees who will mock each other for wearing PPE or abiding by safety protocols. This has thankfully been changing as the boomers have aged out, but even among young guys it's not particularly rare, and this is in the west. There was never a widespread adoption of workplace safety in the countries we are talking about. There is often a feeling among both management and employees that it isn't affordable, as well as ignorance on the part of the employees who simply view many of these workplace hazards as inevitable. This sounds absurd to you and I because we know that they are not inevitable and that most can be avoided simply by wearing PPE, but that's because we attended shop class and had various government PSAs reminding us of our rights to refuse unsafe work.

Think of something like our approach to trash: Both India and Latin America have significant problems with public littering. Some will protest that this occurs as a result of poverty, because no one can afford to ship their trash out of the city - but this problem was also common in America up until very recently. It took the implementation of fines and a series of public service announcements to change people's behavior.

There was obviously value extraction taking place in these areas. The question is if this extraction had meaningful impacts on the trajectory of the imperialists or that of their subjects. Decolonialists would have you believe that Britain would not have industrialized had it not been for materials they "stole" from India, Africa, and the Americas.

Let's suppose this extraction had an appreciable impact on the development of Britain: Could you explain why the British are not as wealthy as the Germans or the Swedes, being that the British possessed colonies, and the Germans and Swedes did not? This pattern holds for almost all North European countries, so take care that your explanation does not fixate on the two I have chosen.

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