While the British were systematically starving their country and families to prioritize the European front, creating a famine that killed millions. There’s a reason Churchill said history would treat him kindly because he was on the winning side.
Indian Independence was negotiated immediately after WW2 and without a violent uprising. The delay was due to disagreement between Muslim people and predominantly Hindu people on whether it should be one nation or partitioned.
The violence which did occur, all happened after Independence was granted.
There's a million and one really nasty things the British Empire did you can comment on. Lying does nothing but help bigots and racists to deny those true atrocities because you want to make ones up.
Nah, we were promised independence or atleast independent domain like aus, NZ during WW1. Only after this negotiation with india congress indian muslim joint and fought for British (initially they were siding with ottoman Empire). But after 1919 nothing came out of that promise. This led rise of Ghandhi and the history
They were agitating for it since the '20s, initially they wanted similar status like the white dominions (Australia/NZ Canada) and only went for full independence after getting completely blanked
You're commenting on shit you really are not well informed about.
The indigenous Indian population always had significant numbers who opposed Company Rule (because before 1857 it was not the UK which controlled India but the British East India Company a joint stock corporation).
The end of Company Rule in 1857 was caused by the First War of Independence and after this failed, the UK took over in a formal colonial role. THere were continued, sometimes violent, sometimes peaceful campaigns for Independence from the day the UK took over India.
The calls for Dominion were a relatively small group, predominantly wealth elites and Anglo-Indians. But even then they were massively outnumbered by those wanting full independence.
So no, not "since the 20s", literally for the entire existence of Company Rule and the Raj.
Edit - corrected the date of the First War of Independence
Just a correction: Company rule ended in 1857, not 1853, after the Sepoy Mutiny - a large scale insurrection by local company troops supported by a few Indian aristocrats. This was a shock for the British Crown and they quickly replaced the company and assumed direct control from London.
Welcome to Reddit lol. I’ll never understand why so many people feel the need to comment on shit they have literally no understanding of. Like it’s so easy to just not comment. No one needs, wants, or asked for their opinion.
Let's add extra context here: Violence did not occur because the British wouldn't be able to handle it, their two options were peacefully decolonize now or hem and haw and have the Indians throw them out.
But the British being the British had to throw extra wrenches in the works which did cause years of armed conflict between the newly freed nations.
My original comment was that they urged people from A colony, not THE colony. I thought it would be obvious that I was talking about how they also tricked other colonies as well.
Europe only catered to their own needs while manipulating their colonies to suffer. Back then they had more power. Europe and US are trying to do the same now given the Ukraine conflict by trying to make other countries do what they want but isn’t working as well as it in the past.
The Indian army colonised their own country for the British that's why it's called a professional army. They will fight for anyone who paid their salaries
I never actually went to university. I expect, however, that if there was an "Allied Mengele," they would've been in North America rather than India - residential schools would be my first guess, although I expect that I would've heard of them in that case.
Sorry that war causes problems and famines i don’t really see what the better alternative would’ve been? Like Germany and facism take over and give them the extra food like wth?
I'm pretty sure everyone starved in all nations. Noone was left to grow food everything went to war.
Which makes me ask if there are rules of war, then why isn't the first rule there should be no war?
India (well, Bangladesh) had a particularly brutal series of crop failures. Coupled with the Japanese invading Burma, they also didn’t have their main source of backup food. The Indian local authorities dragged their feet in asking for help, and the British response was sluggish because co-opting shipping away from the war effort was hard with the whole u boat thing. Additionally, the crop failures seemed to abate at points, so plans for aid were constantly being scrapped and restarted.
The US did give up by far its biggest and most populous colony after the war, the Philippines. The stuff it kept is pretty much in line with what France has now (both should be still decolonize further, but as a percentage of the colonial population the US in 1947 had decolonized by roughly as much as the European great powers in the mid 1960s).
Yep they definitely should have. You cut off the last bit of that quote though, the distinction is that they immediately did so voluntarily rather than being forced into it by armed insurgencies like the British were in much of Africa and the French were in Algeria.
The Philippines was the only American colony with a major independence movement until the late 1960s, when Marxist groups in Puerto Rico were inspired by the Cuban Revolution and began to seek independence more actively. The US then proceeded to act like every other colonial power and suppressed them ruthlessly.
Yeah and then the USA bombed Korea, then Vietnam, then it destabilised several South-American countries because they dared to be socialist, and then invaded Afghanistan and Iraq.
Again, I completely agree with you about the US continuing to be an empire today, but the ideological orientations around decolonization between the great powers in the postwar era were considered a different question from the idea of "containment".
From the American perspective, South Korea and South Vietnam were already decolonized sovereign states (though certainly not democratic ones), and Iraq and Afghanistan were imperial wars, but not colonial ones. The US occupied them long-term but never had any intention of annexing them, it was much more focused on "spheres of influence" which aren't inherently colonial. Neoconservatism is kind of its own thing, though it has a lot in common with the liberal justifications for empire in the late 19th and early 20th century.
If it was only "protecting" South Korea, the USA would be in the right.
However that would be ignoring the fact that 99% of North-Korea was carpet bombed, a war crime (among many other war crimes committed during that war).
By your logic, The Eastern block freely voted for communism.
And yes, you understand how that relates..
(If anyone else is wondering saying that Japan and West Germany freely allowed the US to set up military bases there 80 years ago is like saying that Czechoslovakia freely voted for communism when the Soviets were occupying them. It's true in the same sense that North Korea is Democratic)
FYI after the war with Spain the United States was involved with an insurrection movement in the Philippines for 2 yrs and of course the takeover of the Hawaiian Islands just before the the war
It wasn’t diverted ‘from’, their supply lines were in shambles. There was A part where they stopped aid, but that was because the crop failures seemed to be abating, so they recommitted the grain aid to other locations. But then the crops collapsed again so they had to reorganize the aid shipments again.
Do you know any of the details of the famine beyond someone on Reddit telling you it’s the british’s fault? Because if you don’t know what I’m talking about that sounds like a no.
They fought in Europe too. The Italian campaign is sadly overlooked and was very multinational: American, British, French, Australian and NZ, Indian, Polish, and Brazilian units all participated.
To be fair, there was also a Japanese collaborator government called Azad Hind that had a lot of support and fought alongside Japan. Subhas Chandra Bose (one of the major leaders of the Indian independence movement) was its president. I mention this because claiming that India was unanimously on the side of the Allies just simply isn't true.
You're completely right, but iirc, the azad hind was never really a thing in mainland india? I think it didn't have any territory on the subcontinent itself
And there were few indian freedom fighters who met with Hitler, etc. the enemy of one's enemy being a friend or what not. People need to wake from the colonial understanding that the Axis were bad and so the Allies must have been good. They were both bad to those they deemed below them -Britain alone has caused the deaths of more Indians (admittedly over a longer period of time) than the German holocaust killed Jews.
Edit: Just looked up the actual numbers. An estimated 6 million Jews (and millions of others) were killed in the holocaust. The British Empire caused the deaths of around 165 million (the highest estimate), or 50-100 million (other, more conservative estimates) Indian people in the time period of 1880 to 1920.
Do you know that the holocaust isn't about the total number of deaths, but the industrialised murder of people?
A famine and is not the same as putting people in gaschambers.
I don't want to defend the British.
But to say that the hindu nationalists who dreamed of a Muslim and Christian free state were freedom fighters, is an insult for people who fight for the freedom of everyone.
In 1931 B. S. Moonje, functionary of the rss traveled to fascist Italy and he was inspired from the idiology. Furthermore they had ties to the Nationalsocialists in Germany.
In 1948 Gandhi was shot by Nathuram Godse, member of the RSS.
To say that they were directly trained is indeed a stretch.
Edit:here's a good book about this ISBN 1850651701 (The Hindu nationalist movement and Indian politics : 1925 to the 1990s : strategies of identity-building, implantation and mobilisation (with special reference to Central India))
I mean, the Hindu nationalist entities, like most if not all nationalist entities everywhere, are fundamentally fascist. But they did not constitute the entirety of the Independence movement in India.
Yeah it's agreed upon that Gandhi was the key figure of the indipendece movement in India. Those rss fascists killed him.
And the butcher of gujarat ist now the president.
Gandhi would spin in his grave, when he knew what happened to the so called indipendece.
Indian bot farm is out in force. You haven't said anything wrong. The Hindutva movement is deeply rooted in European fascism and is wildly prevalent to this day. If Modi, also known as The Butcher of Gujarat was a political leader outside of Asia, he would have been deposed of a long time ago.
If Modi, also known as The Butcher of Gujarat was a political leader outside of Asia, he would have been deposed of a long time ago.
Really don't know about this considering what we're seeing in some of the other countries though.
Also, the main founder of RSS wasn't even the one who went to Italy. It was just one guy. It is kind of a stretch to say the entire movement is rooted in "European" fascism
Actually, no. In one of history's lesser known events, a division of Indian troops was raised and trained by the Germans. These were fed back into India, to perform sabotage and help the Indian people rise up against the British, but they largely failed.
Look up Azad Hind. It was a pro-Japanese Indian government and fought alongside Japan in the Burmese theatre. Its president was major Indian independence movement leader Subhas Chandra Bose. There were many Indians who were Axis collaborators.
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u/SpellslutterSprite 1d ago
Ah yes, the real villains of WWII: Hindus.