Andrew Roberts

Scott Kelly was foolish to apologise for quoting Winston Churchill

This week, an astronaut called Scott Kelly was quoting Churchill and his great line, ‘in victory, magnanimity’. He got massively trolled by the anti-Churchill cyber warriors who denounced him for all sorts of things. One of the things for which he was attacked, of course, was the Bengal famine, which they say he caused.

In October 1942, Bengal was hit by a massive, terrible cyclone which destroyed the rice crop, which the Bengalis living in that area entirely depended upon. The road and rail links that had hitherto brought food in were also destroyed. In the past, rice from Thailand and Malaya and Burma was brought in to deal with these horrific famines. But in no case, of those three, could that be possible this time, for the simple reason that the Japanese controlled those areas and would not allow their rice to be sold to British India.

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