Famine Engineering in Bengal 1943 (Duas for Gaza)

There was a screening of Bengal Shadows by Joy Banerjee and Partho Bhattacharya in East London a few weeks ago which is very much worth crying and writing about.  It concerned the 1943 British-Engineered Bengal Famine which costs the lives of so many millions, devastated the society and exposed villainous institutions that continue to stalk humanity with impunity. It is important to mark and connect with, for descendants of survivors and perpetrator classes and a wider circle of basic elemental justice.

I am not one of the descendants of survivors of this famine who celebrate Indian colonial subject participation in Britain's war effort, no World War Poppyganda for me. The Bengal Famine is one of the reasons I don't buy the anti-Nazi propaganda of the White World War 2 Winners. There really is little choice in the matter if you honour yourself with (more than white) humanity and heritage. More people should know why.

Here's the deal, having spent the first 7 months of 1943 exporting food grains out of India to Britain and its war theatres, Churchill's war cabinet ordered a scorched earth Denial Policy, to destroy boats and food in Bengal citing fears of Japanese landing. Churchill and company were functionally eugenicist and as we are well aware, and as endless quotations and his own voluminous writings show, he was personally a racist of corpulent proportions. The right to food, life and safety of the Indians of British Occupied Bengal were negative in his racial hierarchy which required active hatred and power to constantly maintain and reconfigure, not simply passive disregard. 

A Tenure track into the Zone of NonBeing

Man made disasters like this one do not occur in a vacuum and it can never be said enough, that the parasitic British Indian land tenure system and its beneficiary groups were engines of impoverishment and exploitation upon those beneath them and had been weakening the social economic conditions of the smallholders, sharecroppers and labourers for generations.

Although the roles of more local political rivalries, private companies like the Isphahanis and bog standard hoarders are familiar factor to consider, Bengal Shadows doesn't get bogged down and presents an alarmingly detailed and clear disasterscape in under an hour, wrapping testimonies of some of the remaining survivors of those times with more contemporaneous scholarly contributions.  

We hear from Soumitra Chatterjee, the male lead from Satyajit Ray's 1973 Distant Thunder remembering how important this role was to him. Both Bengal's struggle with survivor bias to reach beyond bhodrolok representation and politics,[its the Brahminisms Stupid]. Though I look forward to learning more about dance pioneer Bulbul's 'Lest We Forget"  and the impact that may or may not have had on audiences in the colonial core.

Bengal Shadows is as good a building point as any, even with its inevitable West Bengal centrism which comes with the territory at the moment. There's an unforgettable scene with a surviving granny figure Jhorna Bhattacharya, recollecting how she witnessed a mother pumping her breast for milk, only to realise that her child was dead, giving the milk to another child so they could live. 

Now think of every time and everywhere right now where this category and worse situation must be playing out.  The film is available to all with an internet connection on the YouTube link below, do watch, if you can in a social context. 

After the screening there was an impromptu Q&A which deserved to have been better prepared for. It was a middling to sparse crowd of largely deshi people in London. There is low awareness of this more than 80 years on, and post Covid I think fewer people show up on these occasions. Brick Lane Circles ran a number of events on the subject some years ago, check their video archive here.

Comments from the audience are always a measure of something. We learned that one young former Cambridge undergrad struggled unsuccessfully with her supervisor about researching this famine. Presumably this was in a History department. The community needs to be our academy, I would not recommend depending on the academy for community.

Holey Social Memory

Another audience member, quite worldy wise shared how often family chains of narration that you would expect to inform you of such vital near history often don't work regarding a traumatising and humiliating matter like this. I concur but its uneven. There's one side of my family where I hear of an aunt walking past live then dead victims on her way to and from University. I hear of rice being sent from Dhaka by an uncle to his mother in the village in a suitcase with clothes for camouflage. I hear of Ispahani company officials dumping rice in the river. On the other side, I grew up with the story of the Brothers and the Grain of Rice.

"The colonialist sees themselves through Israel's eyes, while the colonised see themselves through the Palestinians." A Rahman

Consider this; that the material Impunity of Britain regarding the Bengal Famine of 1943 and its previously engineered famines, in Bengal and Ireland gives subsequent Famine Engineering villains, like Israel & the Zionist Movement - Britain's bastard offspring - impunity for their own Mutation of this, Sadistic, Racially Supremacist Starvation Weapon. 

Eugenic Connections

Some years ago, Madhusree Mukerjee wrote a book on the Famine focusing on Churchill and gave a talk to a larger East London Audience. At the end of her Q&A, she elaborated on the influence of the aristo-eugenicist and physicist Frederick Alexander Frederick Lindemann aka 'Lord' Cherwell on Churchill. Smells of lavender. You can watch the whole thing below. Evil people in high places indeed

I will leave a link to Ray's Distant Thunder here too, who knows how much longer it will stay up for.

[New Word] Tulipsiddiqing

Transnational, Vindictive, Nepobaby self incriminating with Talentless Antics

Dreaming Bangladesh Again

It has been a half year since the Bangladesh Rising made it across that first finishing line. For the first time that I can think of, so many people with family in Bangladesh are peering over with interest, awe, sorrow and glowing embers. 

Just a year ago, Sheikh Hasina's murderous brigade had faked their 3rd election in a row and there was no end in sight. Cringe inducing Government messaging of "Mujib's Bangladesh" was everywhere. Today Sheikh Hasina's murderous brigades are in jail, on the run, or  stirring from Delhi at Narendra Modi's Pleasure, and scheming violence and manipulation on WhatsApp. 

Just a few days ago, public protests responded to her latest antics by demolishing the museum created out of her late father's house in Dhanmondi Road #32.  Such organised pressure matters if just to admonish others into accelerated action and out of ineffectiveness. Soon after the Road #32 incident,  Interim head Prof Yunus finally took the media people to one of the infamous Aynaghar secret detention centres, but not after the military had cleared out and given it a lick of pink paint. So many good men never made it out of there alive, and to add insult to murder, their extrajudicial murders would be turned into Anti Terrorism Performance Indicators. A UN investigation into the former Government atrocities should be read to understand the sick and deadly games that the Hasina regime played at her service: killing, hiding bodies, burning bodies to implicate  and dehumanise protesters. 

No doubt there are many more messes, mixtakes and blunders to come as the combined assemblage of society and government clear their throats, survey the damage with varying degrees of honesty and make arrangements as they see fit. This presents us with the challenge of being alive to what is going on. Traditional media has always been hopeless on Bangladesh, as has academia, inside and out their ivory cages, but these days, thankfully, the Liararchy is getting a thorough wallopping from all directions by established and newly encouraged social media presences. 

Pinaki Bhattacharya's YouTube channel stands out for me. There's an English language interview with him on Centrist Nation  where we learn about his method and his persona.

Breathing in Colour

What we make of this breathing room is on us. The question of colour revolution from the N=2 anti imperial quarter, and people who gave up on desh a long time ago is to be expected. It is worth keeping in mind when building sustained, sustainable movements away from developmentia, delusion, gatekeeping and traditions of extreme and slavish arse licking.

Butch Ware and the US Green Party are helping to open a Decolonial Wormhole to a Better World

Its crucial to demonstrate electoral consequences for genocide.

Today, somebody wise sent me an interview of  Prof Bilal Rudolph "Butch" Ware on the Ansari Podcast. He is the Green Party's Vice Presidential Candidate for the forthcoming US Presidential Elections. To me his words and method are a vital alignment of thought, political spirituality and organising backbone that I find compelling. funny how in the UK, his nonsecular meter would be outlawed for some colonial 'spiritual influence' lawfare. 

The video is embedded below, Nur Nuggets include:

• Democrat Party as Party of the Elephant.
• Republican Party as the Party of the Braying Ass.
• The political aesthetic of a green hoopoe.
• The importance of being ready.
• The Democrats theft and gutting of the Green New Deal policy.
• The recent youth led movement in Bangladesh as a teaching lesson of our times.
• The things that can be done in the case of the team winning presidential office and no friends in Congress or Senate. Anti Trust suites and arms embargo on Israel.
• A poll based argument on why the Party of the Elephant have lost already.
• Plenty of policy reasons for voting for them.
• Good humour about the struggles ahead in any eventuality.
• Their independence from AIPAC and arms industry.
• Anecdote of convincing Republican voters to organise a rally for his party.
• The measures that the Two Party duopoly, Dems especially, have taken to prevent them accessing the voterhood.
• Podcast host's inevitable endorsement for black seed oil, apple cider vinegar, honey gummies from a Palestinian woman. [fractal of the whole thing]

Prof Ware's doctoral research was on the anti slavery resistance of West African Islamic scholars and he has more recently been organising with students and teachers against the Israeli-US genocide in Gaza and beyond. He is based at the History Department of the University of California Santa Barbara.

People in most states of that country have an option to vote against the Zionist's slaughter, with a decolonial ecopolitical horizon. That is a commitment of environmental and social justice that centres coloniality as the systemic foe. Prof Ware has brilliant moves, at least in the domain of discourse. Political proof will be in the struggles and relationships. I really hope they do well, that their supporters and workers do well and make the most of this, for the sake of the Palestinians, wider West Asia, themselves and all of us. Decolonial Duas for them and us all.

If Ware's political content and method resonate with you, he's been on Breakfast Club , Bad Faith, Democracy Now! and will be speaking to reach Trump voters ( ?!?) over the coming weeks.

There is a lot at stake in this election, this devastating year has exposed a lot of people's true colours and functions. So what will it be? Green Hoopoe or Green Card?

Candidates, Campaigns and Colonial Continuities

As Israel's slaughter continues acceleration through Palestine, and Shaytan laughs at his success, political life in older and newer colonial cores is growing more liquid as solidarity with Palestine fertilises the ground and scents the air. Unfortunately this is too late for over 30 thousand Palestinian people, perhaps some factors more if Ralph Nader's reasoning of a massive under evaluation is proven correct. British politicians have been characteristically colonial, cowered and meek. As Aamer Rahman notes, " The coloniser sees itself in Israel". 

Many are thinking to themselves that their sociopathy should not be rewarded and that it may be possible to get rid of them. Despite the pervasive and colonial stifling of debate, the post lockeddown, social media enabled solidarity community has grown more sophisticated, vibrant and societally deep. We can see historic Anti War, Student, Occupy and Corbynjaan movements and methods in the cauldron, along with substantial new features. 

Modest Gains

Following dozens of national marches, inspired by fearless peers in the US and morally uplifted by South Africa's case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, the University Campuses are coming alive once more. Encampments north and south and establishing and demanding at a minimum that their university authorities exercise responsibility and ethics over their investments and relationships with the Israeli death engine. Personal strategic courage and sacrifice has resulted in Anti Zionism recently being successfully demonstrated in the courts and institutions as a protected characteristic. The Implications are that one of those go-to techniques of destroying people's reputations, young and old is proving increasingly weak. Another feature that has well passed its sell by date is The Impunity of The Zionist Sh!tst!rrer, though perhaps this still requires mass whitnessing, documentation and pi$$ed off cops.

Dots are being joined and iA learning is being enacted because this justice alliance has generations of experience running through it and the scars to prove them. Following that by-election  and some recent local elections we can be encouraged that some experiments towards alternatives are paying off. We don't need to rely on legacy media to know about them, but their impacts on the power hungry, the gatekeepers and their courtesans provides a thread of comic relief in such a desperately sorrowful situation.

It's really hard to learn from another's mistakes. Mistakes will be made, they are inevitable because what's going on is unprecedented for most of us, egos exist and bloat with attention, we have our limitations and there is no depth to which the Assemblage of Zionist Enablement won't stoop. 

Forthcoming Labour Pains

Collectively we do need to be careful with the (over) (mis) selection of parliamentary candidates combined with bad actors meddling with local campaigns. Candidate saturation is a sign of unsuccessful consensus building within an inadequate electoral system. However, effective, dialogical and empowering leadership across a heterogenous solidarity movement is a beautiful challenge, to our egos and stupidities, I do so look forward to hearing about it. On a speaker's panel recently ANC-veteran Andrew Feinstein, made a vital point well worth ending a paragaph on, that individual self importance is of no use whatsoever to a movement. Citizen journalism is a prizeworthy activity to mitigate this. Like Not the Andrew Marr Show.

The Genocide Uniparty has had centuries of experience stoking and manipulating personal ambitions and feeding egos. It will always be able to know these things and thus enlist water carriers for all sorts of jobs. Please bear in mind that the issue of Gaza has perversely consolidated the value of these human remainers, who may well be subjugating us and messing things up in more powerful ways shortly*. 

All the better reason to organise, relate and learn in better ways.

*On this I think the campaign to drop the case against the teacher with the beautifully poignant coconut placard is a triple word score initiative.

 

Dummying Down Bangladesh: Three In a Row

In the history of our political culture, which is longer than the Awami League, there is pattern of abuse of comparative advantage and an ever debasing pursuit of said advantage, whether from political patrons close or far from home. Proximity to power, colonial, before or after has always brought advantages and distortion. We hunger for social mobility with reformative not degenerative quality.

This societal distortion affects education, the ability to learn, make, share and refine knowledge in close quarters to texts, teachers and an accountable reality. It affects access to economic resources, land, employment and finance. And of course political and legal rights, to life, family, organisation, access to publishing platforms and social movements. They are all correlated when you  visualise the demeanour, discourse and social trajectory of Homo Bangladeshi fronting the government, a newspaper, NGO or factory owners lobby group.

Cumulatively speaking the 'People's' Moronarchy of Bangladesh is kept thus by the wrong people in all of these spheres, reproducing each other with little or no social corrective. The redeeming features of the society are the resolve and steadfastness of men and women who resist the selfish, materialist call, who bear witness to truth, do not exploit others or take what does not belong to them. 

2024 is 'election' season in Bangladesh, the wider region and around the colonial cores. We know that the pieces will not fall in a golden place, but we are not without the faculties to prepare. The courage and resilience of those Palestinians under genocidal attack from Zionist forces for over a hundred years, and coming onto 100 days in Gaza are not without instructional and inspirational value. 

I would not bet my life on any of the elections of Bangladesh and preBangladesh being fair, but the Dummy Election that will play out on 7th January 2024 will really take the toast biscuit. 

So....Turquoise Salam, Decolonial Duas and Solidarity to all suffering, surviving and dying under our Firaunic bleadership. From the secret prison of Aynaghar, to the overcrowded official prisons, to the hideouts and hospitals, schools and colleges, dwellings, drains, embankments and chars, in exile and in plain sight. In the grave.

 For those of us who can eat, see, care and speak, even from a distance, the minimum we can do is to make it harder for tyrants, their supporters and beneficiaries to escape the truth. The minimum we can do is to make the conditions for speaking about and acting upon the truth easier. Be present for the deshis. Be present like those Anti Zionist Jews standing up against the political commitments and idols of their parents and grandparents. Our adherence to Islamic teachings and virtues should be a seen as moral and existential commitments, less as flag, team, and decontextualised practices.

Pick up your pebbles and throw them with vigour, direction and wisdom, inshAllah they will transform their targets and ourselves.

The Muslim Vote Project

It is a time of great sorrow, disaster and murder in Gaza and the West Bank, and UK elected officials are quite complicit in it. We need not be. Palestine is anti colonial dhikr. Everyone carrying multigenerational colonial wounds remembers them. It matters because these are matters of life, death and the Zone of Non Being. 

Since falling to the British Empire in 1917, life in Palestine and in wider Sykes-Picotistan has been imperilled by a toxic and deadly entanglements of colonial power, European xenophobia, proxy powerplay and the morally debasing Zionist Movement. Not to mention foolishness, and selfish gits. 

Even before the establishment of the once heretical Zionist movement, Christian fantasists and statesmen like Napoleon had toyed with the idea and benefits (to them) of a Jewish state in the region. Later, Ronald Storrs, a British Mandate era Military Governer in Jerusalam remarked that the state could be "a loyal little ulster in a sea of potentially hostile pan-Arabism", I recently heard a dissident US military commentator remark of the current state as a "US Battleship in the Middle East".

British colonial crimes in Palestine draw in a wider historically subjugated fraternity, from the redeployment of colonial torturers from Occupied India, to Black and Tans militia from Ireland. This underlines our visceral concern. 

Another world is possible with organised effort, pain and creativity. Political Cost-benefit analysis shift with time, events and realisation, sometimes quite nonlinearly. The hegemony of the Zionist position(s) was not always a given, the assassination of the anti Zionist Jewish writer Jacob Israel de Haan by the Hagana militants in 1924 demonstrates how insecure the Early Zionist movement leadership was at the time of articulate community-based opposition. We are witnessing a post Zionist turn in the so-called west, and in the UK the scent of something post Labour for many. 

Immigrants to the UK from the colonial periphery generally came with very few political expectations and are seen to have generally fallen behind the Labour Party, especially when they were allowed in and managed into votebanks. The Corbyn Leadership years were an opportunity, they are over now, but the political movements and energies are very much out there. In fact the post corbyn collapse was a bit of a train wreck and its very much worth looking back down the track at those features of the preceding Student Movement and Anti War Movement that made them possible. 

The establishment response to the war on Gaza has exposed the moral vacuity and racism of the British political class in a fairly obvious way, again. On the other hand I feel that the horror of these past months have reminded many people what they are about and what they are politically for. Countless, well attended, inclusive and regular pro Ceasefire protests characterised the last quarter 2023, as Palestinians bodies have been obliterated, maimed and souls departed at a horrific rate. We hear news of direct actions and organic boycotts every other day responsive, collective and determined. High quality political educational resources are abundant, not least due to the brilliant works and efforts of Palestinians like the late Shaheed Dr Refaat Al Areer.

The purpose of this post is to highlight one initiative from the UK's Muslim millet that seeks to boost political organising is The Muslim Vote project, . It is much more than a simple pivot on census data and that Parliamentary ceasefire vote failure, it is a call for long term, ethical, political action. It raises questions, sober realities and exciting possibilities. Do have a browse, listen and think about it. 

 

The coming year brings with it the responsibility for discussion building, wisdom sharing, bullshit busting and ego managing. Nearly 20 years ago a successful Anti War inspired effort in the taken for granted by East London constituency of Bethnal Green and Bro changed the political dynamics of the area, for the better, with material results benefiting the people of the borough to this day. We can do so much better than we are.

Oh and Algorythmic Preventitude under Starmer and the post Starmer is going to be awful, best prepare.

Let's try Branding Big Brother and George Osborne

Big Brother is due to return in a few weeks. 

Looking back past Andrew Tate, himself Big Brother Graduate in Narcissistic Villainy, I recall Big Brother as one of the most obnoxious things of its time. That Big Mouth after show and Russel Brand compounded its obnoxiousness to levels that would disappoint most if not all ancestors and teachers of people who walk the earth today. Many made careers and treasure from its shameless amplification of shaytanic whispers, a celebration the very worst of humanity, flipping a critique of surveillance culture 270 degrees, with a corporate festival of lechery, gossip and the reduction of the human to a dull throbbing base. All watched over by machines of graceless consent.  What could go wrong? 

It was very much a product of Blairtime Britain, Drool Britannia, Britannia waves the Rules. The show and entertainment industry gave Russel Brand, a desperately needy person who from a young age demonstrated just how low he he would go for attention and 'fame', a powerful set of relationships and skills with which he could do as he chose. 

As we are being made aware, everywhere. Russel Brand is in the process of having his historic, sexual impunity protection services withdrawn. A combination of formerly consenting sexual partners|rape victims have had the courage|been encouraged to speak up together. Established investigative journalists have followed through|been resourced to research, refine and curate arguments against him in print and broadcast media. 

Commentary on this media event range from empathy and reflection on the enduring harms of rape, and the difficulties stopping it to the predicament of the perpetrator. I wouldn't spend too much energy defending him, beyond say right to fair trial and treatment. that is energy that can be put to greater justice learning.  It is not a problem that he hasn't brought upon himself and a decent man would take responsibility. He doesn't face the same unjust and torturous fate awaiting Julian Assange, and his contributions to geopolitical justice, past and potential, are not so significant that I can see. As far as postBlair Britain is capable, those who really knew and developed this despicable cultural situation, and these kinds of abuse to human dignity should be brought to a special kind of justice. Especially now that the Big Brother franchise is about to be relaunched.

During and after the (first?!) COVID years, as mistrust and frustration at the morality and substance of political, medical and corporate authorities has grown, he has been deeply in the fray, with a youtube channel that has annoyed, entertained and (mis)educated, and till now evaded the hegemonic power of techno liberal jobsworths at the company. Maybe there is some simple envy operating too, but the  ..erm.. ageist optical  and critical lefts seem to lose there sh!t when anyone tries to contest and short circuit their left and alt right audiences online. 

There are plentimaw able truth seekers out there, there will be plentimaw men who fall through their penises and they will have plentimaw victims, and hypocrites too.

Not unrelatedly in allegation of sexual abuse, over the summer, the former British Chancellor George Osborne, aka, the austerity killer was remarried. Current British Museum Director George Osborne's decisions are argued, with data, to have caused the premature deaths of more people than COVID did directly in Britain, perhaps twice as many. If we factor in the excess deaths and human suffering of COVID following and due to austerity, it is a mighty arsehole footprint. On the eve of the occasion somebody who didn't like him very much distributed a disturbing email to his guests. It became widely available if you knew where to look for it. Nobody wrote very much about it, but a spontaneous protest against the couple at the.... church.... was turned into a media spectacle about Just Stop Oil, the climate justice campaign group. JSO did what they could to make what looked like a dead cat strategy work in their favour, but given the identities of the wedding guests, a wide section of the political and media elite, we are entitled to wonder.

What is allowed in to the court of public opinion in the first place. 

[New Word] Corbodoxy

The growing , and late, realisation by the erstwhile British public that he was generally right about the things that matter.

[New Word] Duaspora

the community that one prays and works for with passionate priority