Of empires and famines

British Empire used famine as a weapon of war dozens of times. It will continue to do so until it is defeated and quarantined from the rest of humanity.

[Originally published in I-System TrendCompass]

The unbearable, yet persisting blight on humanity today is the deliberate starvation of the two million Palestinian people in Gaza, or however many are still left alive. The figure is probably closer to 1.5 million. It may seem like the worst thing humanity has witnessed since who knows when except that, unfortunately, it’s only the most recent and most widely reported example of the empire’s monstrous misdeeds.

Many of us recall the famines in Somalia, Sudan or Ethiopia but those seemed like accidents of nature or consequences of civil wars that raged between camps dominated by cruel, barbarous warlords who couldn’t or wouldn’t settle their differences by any civilized means. Any involvement by Western powers in such atrocities was strictly the domain of unhinged conspiracy theorists and little more.

Starving people to subjugate them

But the true nature of the Western empire has been carefully concealed from us behind the glossy façade of the Western “civilization.” Today’s empire is a reincarnation of the undead British Empire, whose DNA it still carries. The more we learn about this empire, the uglier it looks. As an example, it seems that many, if not most of the famines recorded in history weren’t natural disasters nor consequences of wars but results of deliberate policy aimed at subjugating populations and forcing them to accept colonial control and slavery.

This may seem like an exaggeration, but British statesman and Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli explicitly said as much himself. He explained that the objective of the British Empire was to

“Gain and hold territories that possess the largest supplies of the basic raw materials. Establish naval bases around the world to control the sea and commerce lanes. Blockade and starve into submission any nation or group of nations that opposes this empire control program.” (Knuth, E.C. “Empire of the City,” 1946, p. 57)

There’s much evidence that the Empire really did use starvation as a weapon of war against disobedient groups and nations and that they did so relatively frequently. Take the example of India: during the 120 years between 1757 and 1878 when she was under direct British rule, India experienced 31 serious famines (Mike Davis, “Late Victorian Holocausts, El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World” - London: Verso, 2002).

Even in absence of outright famines, much of India’s population lived in chronic food insecurity. While this was concealed from the British public, Britain’s ruling establishment was well aware of it.

Economic historian Robert C Allen found that, during the 19th century, famines became more frequent and more deadly as extreme poverty increased from 23% in 1810 to more than 50% in the mid-20th century. The period from 1880 to 1920, the height of Britain’s imperial power, was particularly devastating for India. By the 1910s, life expectancy collapsed to 21.9 years. In 1939, George Orwell wrote as follows:

“One gets some idea of the real relationship of England and India when one reflects that the per capita income in England is something over £80, and in India £7. It is quite common for an Indian [worker’s] leg to be thinner than the average Englishman’s arm. … it is due to simple starvation. This is the system which we all live on.”

Was India’s chronic food insecurity the result of poor agricultural practices, violent Monsoon storms, or other incidental causes? Apparently, not: the key causal factor behind India’s famines was Britain’s colonial rule: since she gained independence in 1947, India experienced zero famines, and in the 2,000 year period before 1757, only 17 serious famines were recorded, one every 118 years. Contrast that with one famine every four years (31 in 120 years) under the British rule! Tens of millions of Indians perished.

Someone might object that correlation does not necessarily imply causation, but then we also had the suspicious case of the Irish “potato” famine (1845–1852) when at least a million Irish people starved to death, supposedly because potato crops failed. For an island nation covered in lush, green pastures surrounded by an ocean full of fish, the potato blight narrative makes no sense whatsoever, other than a convoluted tale to exonerate British colonial rule.

Genociding Kenya’s Kikuyu people

As recently as 2010, we learned a great deal about the empire’s colonial governance from the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya (1952-1956). The abuse was exposed by Caroline Elkins in her shocking book, “Britain’s Gulag.” The Kikuyu - Ethiopia’s largest tribal group - rebelled against the colonial abuse and plunder in October 1952. British colonial authorities responded with unhinged savagery.

In addition to the anti-insurgency campaign against some 20,000 Kikuyu fighters, the British subjected 1.5 million Kikuyu tribesmen, women and children to a collective punishment, detaining between 160,000 and 320,000 in concentration camps. Women and children were detained in some 800 heavily patrolled villages enclosed with barbed wired fences, spiked trenches and watch towers. In these detention facilities, the Kikuyu were subjected to forced labor, beatings, torture, rape, executions and starvation.

How many people perished before the Mau Mau rebellion was finally crushed remains unknown, since the colonial authorities made sure to either destroy or remove all documentary evidence about their deeds in Kenya: some 3.5 tons of documents were incinerated, while the files deemed useful were shipped back to the UK to be stored at the Hanslope Park high security facility along with the documents removed from 37 former British colonies. Based on Kenya’s census figures, Elkins concluded that “between 130,000 and 300,000 are unaccounted for.”

Are things any better today?

It may be hard to believe that anyone could be as cruel and unscrupulous as that, but history suggests that the moneyed oligarchies behind the British empire really were that cruel and unscrupulous. Are things any better today? Perpetrating a genocide may be a matter of necessity, reserved only for the unruly, uppity subjects, but as we can see, it is still practiced, even in full light of day. Indeed, the empire’s DNA and its mindset never changed, and this is who rules over us to this day.

In April 1974, Henry Kissinger, then Nixon's Secretary of State and National Security Adviser sent out a classified memo to select cabinet officials. The title of the memo was, "Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for US Security and Overseas Interests," and it was commissioned on the recommendation of John D. Rockefeller III and came to be called, more famously, NSSM 200, for National Security Study Memorandum 200.

In it, Kissinger addressed the difficulty of controlling resource rich areas of the world against the social pressures borne of growing world populations and went on to suggest the kinds of coercive measures the US should consider. He bluntly stated that food aid should be considered as "an instrument of national power," and that the US should ration food aid to "help people who can't or won't control their population growth."

The NSSM 200 made depopulation in foreign developing countries an explicit, if secret, national security priority of the United States for the first time. In that, the policy of the British Empire was simply grafted onto the US foreign policy. If anything changed between Disraeli and Kissinger, it's the slick framing of policy goals: “rationing food” to “help people” is the sanitized version of “starving them into submission.” But the language amounted to recommending genocide, at least as defined under the UN Convention of 1948.

Lazy natives discovering Kipling’s “dignity of labour”

In addition to destroying an uppity population as and when needed, starvation is regarded as useful as a means of motivation. If the people are well fed and comfortable, they tend to get lazy and complacent, not the most conducive state to discover what Rudyard Kipling called, “the dignity of labour.” By contrast, if they’re insecure, anxious and hungry, they’ll be at their best, at least from their employers’ point of view. That mindset is still given consideration in policy making in Western liberal democracies.

In July of 2022, the UN published an article titled, “The Benefits of World Hunger,” by one George Kent. Kent is a university professor, of course. He argued that, “hunger has great positive value to many people,” which might be correct. In particular, it would have great positive value to people like John D. Rockefeller III and whoever pays Mr. Kent’s tenure at the University of Hawaii.

Kent explained why hunger is so very beneficial: “… it is fundamental to the working of the world’s economy. Hungry people are the most productive people, especially where there’s need for manual labour.” Of course, hunger is also used as a tool of control when people get uppity and want to change things. We’re seeing this in Palestine today.

Empire’s playbook in Palestine: more of the same

What the Israelis are doing in Gaza (and in the West Bank and south Lebanon) today, may really seem unique and unprecedented in its unhinged savagery, but sadly, it isn’t. The collective punishment of an entire people, indiscriminate killing of tens of thousands and forced starvation of all others is the Empire’s long established modus operandi. Israel, which is the creation of that Empire, is implementing it faithfully.

Even the practice of enclosing villages behind high razor wire fences, as practiced against the Kikuyu in Kenya, is now being replicated against the Palestinians.

Of course, the Mothership - the Heart of Darkness - is the City of London, which is desperate to present itself as the model of civilization, democracy and human rights. It therefore has to go to extraordinary lengths to conceal its hand and to get its proxies to do the dirty work. Thus, the roles of Israel and the United States are highly visible, but we must not overlook London’s role. As “The Gaza Tribunal” has shown, Britain is not just complicit in the genocide against the Palestinians: it is its full fledged participant. Here are just a few examples:

• Only a day after Hamas attack on October 7, 2023 Britain deployed its SAS special forces to Cyprus. When The Sun broke this story, UK Government issued a D-notice to all media organizations (a gag order, essentially).

• At least since December 2023, Royal Air Force has been flying spy planes over Gaza almost daily, sharing intelligence with the Israeli military in real time. Since July 2025 these flights have been outsourced to private companies (here’s Matt Kennard’s 2-min. expose on this)

• IDF officers have been training in Britain throughout the duration of genocide in Gaza.

• Britain has been supplying weapons, ammunition and replacement parts for Israel’s military even as they’ve been killing innocents in their tens of thousands.

Of course, nobody asked the British people for their consent, and the government is keeping them strictly in the dark about their participation in Gaza genocide.

This system must be euthanized

At issue are not the people, but the imperial system of governance which treats humanity anywhere and everywhere as colonial subjects, as cattle or hackable animals. For example, the idea behind our “15-minute cities” could be the same as that behind enclosing Kenya’s or West Bank’s villages behind tall razor-wire fences. Both here and there, the enclosures make it easier for the authorities to keep the populations under control.

From there, rationing food, beatings, arrests, torture and rape could all be only a stone’s throw away. If they will beat and arrest people for saying, “stop killing children in Gaza,” or reading the bible in public, what will they not do? We must simply never allow them to subject our children to the same savagery they’ve visited on the Indians, the Kikuyu, the Palestinians and countless others. Their whole system must be dismantled and ploughed under to never see light of day again.

Alex Krainer – @NakedHedgie is the creator of I-System Trend Following and publisher of daily TrendCompass reports which cover over 200 financial and commodities markets. One-month test drive is always free of charge. To learn more about TrendCompass reports please check our main TrendCompass web page. To start your trial subscription, drop us an email at TrendCompass@ISystem-TF.com, or:

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