Asklemmy

Germany: The Munich agreement is well known and taught as part of the failed appeasement policy of Western states towards Nazi Germany. Don't think we learned about the Bengal famine.

I am a stupid American and I am unfamiliar with all of these (might be a me problem). But now I'm gonna read up!

The events that are the least emphasized are those that were carried out by dominant powers, particularly when they are still around today writing the history and propaganda books. The way events are handled is seemingly subtle, and the most powerful way they avoid emphasis is to simply never frame the violence they did in terms of its most wide impacts.

For example, you mentioned that you are from India. The greatest violences done to India in the last few hundred years were from the Raj, so the British. And those greatest violences were not the actual acts of ships and soldiers, but in things like this:

• Dismantling of industry and craftmanship in the subcontinent, converting production to the schemes of empire. Namely, producing crops like cotton to supply a British industrialized textile monopoly. This directly created poverty where before there was immense high-value production.

• Famines caused by extreme poverty and the imposition of imbalanced production where farmers had to farm export crops and even export food crops when there were famine risks. The British also did this to Ireland and other colonies.

• The less-talked-about but still incredible violence of poverty in general. Placing a hold on industrialization also meant no balanced infrastructure for the greater public (only what served export and British control), limited hospitals, poor education, more frequent death of one's children, and so on.

• The tweaking of caste to be more racist and classist (per English tastes), creating internal strife and misery.

• Emphasizing other ethnic divides to use marginalization as a scapegoat for suffering and exploitation. The British created or escalated many of the ethnic rifts in the subcontinent, making issues like exodis from and neocolonialism in Kashmir or the partition more likely and more dramatic.

People that attempt to tally these things lay hundreds of millions of deaths at the feet of the British Raj. Yet such numbers are not well-known!

In fact, the liberal economist Amartya Sen even applied this kind of logic to modern India and suggested that capitalism in India killed around 100 million people from 1947 to 1979. But how often do you hear Westerners talk about the mass death campaign of ongoing capitalism, citing millions every decade? Very few, because this is treated as "normal" and "natural" and not something imposed by the dominant system all around us.

A similar example is looking at the published numbers about deaths in Gaza. What we hear is an outdated number of people confirmed dead. It has almost halted for months. Is this because Israel stopped bombing children, hospitals, schools, refugee camps? No, it is because they explicitly targeted and disruoted the entire system responsible for doing these counts, the healthcare system. But even then, let us say the counts continued. Is this everyone killed by Israel's genocide there? No! These numbers do not include the people dying from poor sanitation (Israel cut off water and electricity), of diseases, of malnutrition, of any kind of malady that could have been treated by the medical system the Israelis destroyed. The numbers of civilians killed by deprivation is usually larger than those directly killed in war. It is rarely reported as the death count of a given war, or in this case genocidal occupation.

So, the greatest missed events are those hidden from us without our knowledge. By controlling the definitions of terms like "killed in war" or "died under colonialism" or "excess deaths". The events hidden by our thought patterns ingrained into us since we were young, taught to us by teachers and books and journalists and entertainment media. They weren't all in on some grand conspiracy, either. At least, not most of them. They were also miseducated in the same way. It is a reflection of the ruling class, filtering down in myriad ways until it dictates our very thoughts.

I’m American and probably know more about the Bengal famine. I know the effects of the Munich Agreement and Ribbentrop Pact but they were sort of a “sidebar explanation” in a textbook explaining the rise of Hitler.

I went to high school in the late 90’s and took AP World History but I also majored in International Political Economy, basically, so I read books and wrote a lot of papers on things that would be obscure to most Americans. I’m not sure when I first learned about it. (My high school World History professor was a bit of a hippie.)

A classic economics blunder is also about when the British offered Indians bounties for cobras and some enterprising Indians started breeding them and it all just made everything worse. But stupid mistakes — and often colonial ones — are a big part of Economic history.

Edit: I should probably add that I liked economic history more than military history or whatever so I may have read about some things on my own.

Well, I had been taught about Munich and Ribbentrop in public school, both during standard history classes (though they were only mentioned in passing during US history, as part of the background of what happened before the U.S. joined in)

The famine, I didn't hear about until maybe fifteen to twenty years ago. Can't pin it down exactly because of shit that was going on in my life at the time, but it was something I read about in one of the books on ww2 that covered events outside of Europe and the Pacific theater.

And I've seen many a debate about the degree to which Great Britain was responsible for it.

But, I'd have to say that none of them are exactly high on the list of what the average person remembers about the era. Most people I've even mentioned Molotov-Ribbentrop to had no idea what it is. They maybe remember hearing the words in school, but didn't pay enough attention to link them to anything. The Munich agreement is pretty much unfamiliar to anyone that didn't have an interest in ww2 beyond high school history. And the famine is outside of what most people that do have an interest care about. The only books I have on the subject of ww2 don't mention the famine at all.

Ww2 is far enough in the past now that most of us no longer know anyone that fought in the war. It's passed into the kind of history that's "dead". Even though we all, everywhere still live with the ripples in world events that started then, it might as well be aztec history as far as the typical person here in the US is concerned. Even my generation, that had grandparents that were alive during the war, or fought in the war, the interest is largely no greater than surface level.

And I'm not sure that the details like the two pacts really do matter now. They're not anything that affects us still, unlike a lot of of events of the war. IMO, the famine is more important since it was a much broader event. Depending on how you look at it, the famine shaped a lot of events for India as a whole in ways that neither agreement did for Europe.

American schools don’t teach any of those things.

Or at least they didn’t in the 80’s/90’s.

I'll prefice this by saying that I'm speaking about people, in Britain, who have a general common knowledge of WW2. There is a group that knows nothing. Even which countries were involved.

I would say that the Munich agreement is known about, but not by name. It's the defining moment of Neville Chamberlain's prime-ministership, He is remembered as a fool and a coward because of it. The man who tried to make a naive deal with evil. If you say "I hold in my hand a piece of paper..." there's a good chance people will know the reference.

Molotov-Ribbentropp isn't well remembered. It's known that the Soviets fought against Germany in the end, but not how things began. I remember learning about the battles of the eastern front in high school history, but if I ever learnt about this pact I never remembered it. Maybe that there was a non-agression agreement which Germany broke leading to Operation Barbarossa, but nothing more.

The Bengal Famine is becoming more well known recently. It comes out when Churchill is discussed. Due to his role as WW2 leader he's held in very high esteem by a lot of people. The Bengal famine is brought up to highlight the man's darker, utilitarian and some would say sociopathic aspects in order to achieve war goals. I think this ignores all the events leading up to the situation though and the wider causes. Those are not discussed.

Hope that gives some perspective.