The Misery And The Murder Of War

Four Million People Died In An Unnecessary Famine.
1942 – 1943.
After Japanese forces captured Burma, the British started preparing for India being invaded.
Convinced that crops would fall into enemy hands, Britain removed anything that could help the invaders, including food.
The enemy never came and four million people died in an unnecessary famine.

White Rose Leaflets.
Brother and sister, Hans and Sophie Scholl, students in wartime Germany, were arrested by the Gestapo on the 18th February 1943, as they distributed white rose leaflets at the university of Munich.
They were condemned to death four days later by the people’s court and executed the same day, by guillotine, along with their friend Christoph Probst.
The leaflets opposed the methods and policies of the Third Reich and Hitler’s Nazism.

The Genocide Of Native Americans.
From the time Europeans arrived on American shores, the U.S. government authorised over 1,500 wars, attacks and raids on the Native people, the most of any country in the world against the indigenous population.
By the close of the wars in the late 19th century, fewer than 238,000 indigenous people remained, a sharp decline from the estimated 10 to 15 million living in North America when Columbus arrived in 1492.
The European settlers were hungry for Native land and the abundant natural resources that came with it.

Britain’s Worst Maritime Disaster.
More than 5,000 British soldiers and civilians were drowned on the 17th June 1940, when the troopship HMT Lancastria was sunk by German bombers as it evacuated allied soldiers, airmen and civilians from France.
Although she was not equipped to hold more than 3,000 people, about 8,000 men, women and children were on board.
Within 25 minutes she sank.
Such was the scale of the tragedy, it remains Britain’s worst maritime disaster, that Prime Minister Winston Churchill ordered a news blackout on it in the interests of public morale.

The 14 Year-Old Soldier.
A 14 year-old boy has been confirmed as the UK’s youngest known service member to have been killed in World War 2.
Reginald Earnshaw was aged 14 years and 152 days when he died under enemy fire on the SS Devon on the 6th July 1941.
The merchant navy cabin boy had lied about his age, claiming he was 15, so he could join the war effort.

The Shortest War In History.
The shortest war in history was between Britain and Zanzibar in 1896.
Britain declared war at 9.00am and Zanzibar surrendered 45 minutes later.

Bombing A Civilian Population.
Over several days in February 1945, the British RAF and the US Airforce jointly dropped around 4,000 bombs on the German city of Dresden.
The resulting firestorm razed 1,600 acres and killed 25,000 people.
Deliberately bombing a civilian population and not a military target is one of the most heinous crimes in a war.

Organised Mass Murder In The Past Century.
The past century stands out in history not so much for the speed of technical innovation or the growth in life expectancy, but for the prevalence of organised mass murder.
That mass murder has, again and again, been inspired by a perverted dream of purity in which the enemy has to be ‘cleansed’ from a particular territory.
While the holocaust of the Jews was a shocking atrocity of the last century it was very far from being the only one.

The holocaust had a grotesque dress rehearsal 100 years ago in the German slaughter of the Herero people in South-West Africa.
When Hitler was still an adolescent, General Lothar Von Trotha was butchering an entire African people.
Just a few years later, in the shadow of the First World War, the German-trained officers of the Turkish Army presided over another genocide, the slaughter of the Armenian Christians within Muslim Turkish lands.
Thousands died in what was considered a ‘holy war’.

Rarely mentioned in the West is the 18 million Soviet citizens and 8 million Soviet troops killed by Nazi Germany.
Other slaughters include the Khmer Rouge’s genocidal campaign, the Soviet Union’s war against it’s own peoples through famine and labour camps, China and North Korea’s adoption of the same techniques, Saddam Hussein’s extermination of Kurds, Serbian atrocities in Bosnia and Kosovo, Hutu genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda, the genocidal campaign against African Christians waged by the Islamist regime in Khartoum, and that same regime’s genocidal onslaught against the people of Darfur.

We have allowed mass murder to continue by failing to recognise that genocidal campaigns have killed more than wars in the past century.
And we have the power to end genocides if we simply take steps to remove the tyrannical regimes that use genocide as a political tool.
It is important for democracies to unite, and fight those behind the genocidal campaigns.
( Wilfred Soon )

The Crusade-Hungry Popes.
The crusades were a blot on the pages of history.
They were a parade of depravity in the name of the Christian religion, and it is hard to know which episode was the most disgusting.
Whipped up by Pope Urban’s extraordinary speech at Clermont in 1095, the first crusaders launched themselves, with sublime stupidity and irrelevance, at the Jews of Germany, killing as they went.

On they careered through Southern Europe and what is now Turkey, and by the time they reached Ma’Arrat in Syria they were so badly led that they resorted to cannibalism, slicing off and eating the buttocks of dead Saracens.
When they captured Jerusalem in 1099 the slaughter was immense, with piles of heads lying in the street while crusaders seized babies by their feet and dashed their brains against the walls.

Of all the atrocities, perhaps the most sickening was the fourth crusade.
In 1204, the greedy, doltish knights were somehow persuaded to launch an attack not on Muslim-held Jerusalem, but on Constantinople.
Pack mules were driven into the great church to carry off the loot.
What lunacy drove these Franco-Belgo-Anglo-Italo-German knights to spend vast sums on trips to the holy land?
It was partly politics.

Crusade-hungry popes were not only trying to recapture Jerusalem for the cross, they were also keen to assert the primacy of the Roman Church over Eastern Christianity.
It was partly the hope of getting rich, it was also sheer religious mania.
These people really believed the Pope when he said that if they went on a crusade they would get out of hell free, and they believed that the more devout and holy they were, the better their side would do in war.

So when Christian forces were facing a critical battle against Muslims in Spain in 1212, Pope Innocent got the entire population of Rome to march through the city in prayer.
The Christians prevailed.
Yippee! Said the Pope. It was prayer that won it.
The crusaders were holy warriors, but it was the Muslims who had invented holy war, and they conquered 7th century Jerusalem in the name of Islam.
( Fred O. Wilson )