Those concentration camps in South Africa were also death camps in many cases– it wasn’t merely neglect, but specific British attempts to starve the families (including wives and kids) of the Boer soldiers. When the Irish were starving, the British deliberately shipped food away to starve still more Irish. And in India? After 1857, the British wiped out entire villages to cow the Indian people– over 1 million estimated to have died in the reprisals. Those famines of the late 1800′s, in which 43 million Indians were killed, were in large part engineering to mass-murder Indians and reduce the drive for independence. After WWII, the British committed atrocities worse than the French in Algeria– hundreds of thousands of Kenyans tortured and/or killed in British death camps worse than anything at Auschwitz or Bergen-Belsen. British officials such as Lytton and Trollope cheered on the death of the “brown peoples” quite happily!

The British were not only as bad as the Nazis– they were much worse than the Nazis! Any belief to the contrary is just a capitulation to propaganda. When Bose was allying with the Japanese, he did so as a way to beat up on the British. Bose didn’t want the British or the Japanese to be ruling India, so his plan was to set them against each other. Far too many Desis fall for the stupid British propaganda that “the Japanese would have been worse than the British.” Again, Bose wasn’t advocating rule by any outside power, he was doing what any clever independence leader has always done– pitting imperial powers against each other.

And frankly, this is what worked. The Nazis destroyed Britain and its industry in Europe, while the Japanese humiliated the British in Singapore and elsewhere, weakening the British economically, socially and even demographically. Freedom for India came about in large part because of this. The fact is, Gandhi had had predecessors whom the British killed unsparingly; after the World Wars, the British were too weak to do this. The Nazis were evil bastards, no doubt, but far too many Desis forget that Nazi ideology was explicitly derived from the Brits’ own racist ideology used in Africa and South Asia, and the Nazis’ focus was on Europe, not on Asia. And even the Nazis’ war aims were complicated– it was in part a Napoleonic-style push for conquest, but if anything it was more an avenging response to the Versailles Treaty. The more sensible members in the German Officers’ Corps (including the ones like Stauffenberg and Rommel who sought to kill Hitler) even knew that the Germans could never hope to occupy, let alone hold such vast and settled territories in Europe, before civil wars and factional fighting would have ousted the Nazis in bloody conflict anyway– they could only hope, at best, to unite them into some kind of social/economic union with a German center. (A very ironic and ultraviolent precursor to what eventually became the EU.) The fact that Hitler was basically an unrestrained fool trying to imitate Alexander the Great, made him not only evil but damaging to his own cause.

IOW, the Nazis’ war crimes get more “press” b/c they committed them in supposedly “more civilized” Europe, whereas the vast majority of the British atrocities (with the exception of Ireland, of course) were committed against Asian, African and aboriginal peoples considered less “civilized” and therefore without the sympathies of Western historians. This of course is changing now, but we need to dispel the idea, once and for all, that the British were “better” than the Nazis. They merely had different targets, largely Black and Brown people outside of Europe, whom the British mass-murdered in much higher numbers.

In fact, the British committed these atrocities in large part because they were militarily incompetent. Remember that the British lost three different wars in Afghanistan in 1842, 1879 and 1919, with the Afghans not only having defeated the British, but wiped out entire British regiments– which, needless to say, consisted in large part of Indian soldiers! Around the start of the 19th century, the British had earlier lost 2 wars against ad hoc South American regiments (the famous Liniers’ Regiments stretching into Montevideo), had been humiliated by the Haitians, lost to the Albanians leading Egypt in 1806, and of course been beaten by the Americans (with their French and Spanish allies) in 1780. This fine tradition of British military incompetence was continued into the First Boer War, on the Somme and Gallipoli, against the Bolshevik Forces in 1920, against the Irish and Iraqis in 1920-1921, then after WWII, against the Egyptians (Suez), Israelis (1948), the Chinese (1950, British decisively pushed back from Yalu along with the Americans), the Vietnamese (the forlorn Gracey expedition), Cypriots and Yemenis (1950′s and 1960′s). All of these enemies, great and small, utterly humiliated and defeated the British.

IOW, the British were losers on the battlefield and even they knew it, so they only way they could keep a population in line was either to bribe the rulers (which very often worked) or, if a military challenge broke out, to commit mass genocide against the population. That’s what happened to India after 1857, and only those Desis still brainwashed by British propaganda would ever try to defend the British as being “not as bad” as the Nazis or Japanese. They were much, much worse than both of them.

Somehow, the current generation has lost much of their pride because they are unaware of what exemplary men (and women)this country has given to the world. Thank you for the good work done here. I have sent the site to many of my colleagues so that we are all reminded of and take pride the blood that flows in our veins.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust)

Hey even Anne Frank survived for a while under Nazis. Sparing a group of children under the hostile pressure of the locals means little –> After all, Italy during WW2, was either a mainly independant ally (prior to Mussolini’s deposition) or a hostile country (post Il Duce’s lynching). It makes little sense to turn an ally against you over such a small matter.

Oh, I should not think they would be benign! of course I know about the Roma’s fate. Still, i don’t think they intended to exterminate India–I mean, come on–just too many people and anyway, they were in their own continent. The Third Reicht wanted Germany for germans and the rest of Europe and western Asia for Germans. I don’t think they thought it through too much further. A tragic thing is, that the Nazis were willing to have the Jews leave and go to Palestine, but the British, who then ruled it, would not have it; even Jewish leaders were not too enthusiastic for various strange, inscrutable reasons. Truly tragic to have so much murder and mayhem in such recent, “civilized” history.

Acually, German linguists did realize that the Gypsy was an “Aryan” language, and at first, the Gypsies were just studied under Nazi scrutiny. Many were killed, but from all accounts, compared to the Jews, the genocide of gypsies was often half-hearted and sporadic. There is a story of a village in Italy, where the Nazis rounded up a bunch of Roma children and were going to kill them. The Italians would not have it–they got very angy and made the Nazis leave the children alone, which they did. The kids were not killed–forget where I read that; but i don’t think intervention on behalf of Jewish kids would have worked in such a situation.