The Ruling Elite

by Deanna Spingola

  On April 24, Churchill said that it was clear that His Majesty’s Government could only provide further relief for the Indian situation at a cost of incurring grave difficulties in other directions. At the same time, there was a strong obligation on us to replace the grain which had perished in the Bombay explosion. He was skeptical as to any help being forthcoming from America, save at the cost of operations or the United Kingdom import program. At the same time, he said he had great sympathy for the suffering of the people of India. 1493 On April 14, there had been an explosion in Bombay Harbor when the freighter SS Fort Stikine loaded with 87,000 cotton bales, lubricating oil, thirty-one wooden crates of gold, 50,000 tons of grain and rice, and ammunition, a disaster just waiting to happen, caught fire, exploded and sank. Apparently, the fire started in hold number two. The resulting debris sank thirteen other ships, while the entire area caught fire, causing injuries to 2500, and the deaths of between 800 and 1,300 people, mostly civilians living in the slums in the area. The British-Indian censorship policies prohibited release of the incident until the second week of May, 1944.

  On April 29, Churchill finally recognized the Bengal famine but never admitted any responsibility. He asked Roosevelt if the United States could immediately ship 350,000 tons of wheat but Roosevelt responded in the negative. Wavell, who had ordered the army to distribute relief supplies to the starving rural Bengalis when he became Viceroy, wanted to avoid a second round of mass starvations in India. From April forward, despite the situation, Roosevelt refused to authorize food assistance to India or use any available American ships to transport food to India’s famine victims. About 3,000,000 people perished in Bengal, the very deliberate genocide of 1943 and 1944. 1494

  Despite natural disasters, government policies usually cause famine. Prior to British colonial, imperialistic rule, few people died of starvation, as it had always been a crime against humanity (obviously not applicable to the British) to extract profit through the suffering of others during famine periods. The British imposed their own patterns of economic and societal policy, financed and encouraged by the Jewish bankers who value gold over people, regularly viewed as commodities. They seem indifferent, even to lethargic starving children, with swollen abdomens, emaciated, gaunt, dehydrated bodies, and hopeless, vacant eyes with no hope of a future. The parasitical British government officials looted from $5 to $10 trillion dollars from India during the colonial period, money that went into the vaults of those bankers, the same parasites that control the media, which has concealed and continues to shroud massive genocide, over many decades, throughout the world.

  The United States tried to persuade the British to build aircraft factories in India during the war (1939-1945) instead of shipping planes through dangerous waters vulnerable to assaults by U-boats. However, the British were adamant about maintaining India as a dependent, unindustrialized country. Independent Indian factories might challenge British industry following the war. Britain had ordered the de-industrialization of India’s once thriving textile industry, along with all other means of production to keep India dependent and poor, like a plantation, the perfect captive market for Britain’s inferior merchandise.

  POST-WORLD WAR II

  Women: Prize Plunder for the Allies

  “Enjoy the war; the peace is going to be terrible.” Graffiti, in Berlin, March 1945

  Ilya Ehrenburg said, “The Red Army is burning to light the capital of the Germans as a fire signal of revenge. To Berlin! These words raise the dead, these words mean life. Soldiers of the Red Army! The hour of revenge has come!” 1495

  In ancient pagan wars, the victors employed a might-makes-right mentality. The victors killed the men, raped the women, and frequently raped and enslaved the enemy’s children. The opponent’s women were the primary warfare plunder. It was simply implicit that the vanquished had no rights and the victorious were not obligated to deal justly, even with the most vulnerable—women and children. The ancients were amoral pagans. Times and circumstances have not changed one iota and may have even increased despite the religiosity and sanctimonious attitude of certain countries, including and especially the United States. Large-scale wartime rape occurred in both world wars, in Korea, Vietnam and elsewhere. People, in defining a man’s character, judge how he treats the people who are at his mercy.

  In 1915, to create moral outrage, the Allies accused German soldiers of raping Belgian women, creating the idea that sexual conquest accompanied military conquest. 1496 The French colonial troops under Eisenhower’s command raped about 2,000 German women in Stuttgart. 1497 Politically, sexual relations between a conqueror and the vanquished suggest dominance and submission. A GI, by paying for sexual service from French women, demonstrated the subservient position of France compelling French men to acknowledge their decreasing power. Rape changed the GI from vigilant liberator to brutal invader. Stars and Stripes propaganda incited much of the problem which led to the proliferation of accusations and executions of black soldiers as the main culprits of the crime. 1498

  Millions of enslaved German men left wives, girlfriends, daughters and sisters who became vulnerable to the Allies’ objectives of bastardizing the Germans. No female was safe from rape, venereal disease, or potential pregnancy. The British used the colonial troops, the French Senegalese and Moroccans while the United States manipulated an excessively high percentage of blacks within their military forces. The Americans were a bit more subtle than the Soviets. Rather than using physical force, they compelled the German women to surrender their virtue “for food to eat, beds to sleep in, soap to bathe with and roofs to shelter them.”1499 According to JAG statistics, GIs raped at least 500 German women during two “rape waves” in late summer of 1944, and in the spring of 1945. 1500

  Ehrenburg said, “The Germans are not human beings. From now on the word ‘German’ is for us the worst imaginable curse. From now on the word ‘German’ strikes us to the quick. We shall not get excited. We shall kill. If you have not killed at least one German a day, you have wasted that day… If you cannot kill your German with a bullet, kill him with your bayonet. If there is calm on your part of the front, or if you are waiting for the fighting, kill a German in the meantime… If you kill one German, kill another—for us there is nothing more joyful than a heap of German corpses.” 1501 Ehrenburg, in the Red Army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda, and other propagandists poisoned the more uneducated Russian troops against the Germans by exposing them to dozens of pictures of unnamed Russian POWs of the Majdanek concentration camp, in the Polish city of Lubin. When the Soviets invaded Germany, they raped the allegedly superior German women initially as an act of vengeance. 1502

  Some Soviet soldiers committed horrendous atrocities against German women. As vengeance, they felt they had a prerogative to sexually use every female in the countries they invaded. During the Soviet’s occupation, they raped approximately two million women and girls just in East Germany during the first few months of the occupation. The majority of the rapes were the more violent gang rapes, usually witnessed by Germans to increase the dehumanizing humiliation. Soviet soldiers who engaged in gang rapes wanted the husbands, sons, and fathers to witness their dastardly deeds to inflict additional pain and outrage. Those witnesses could not protect their female family members and friends. Impregnation was often a goal, to bastardize the race, a deliberate and prevalent reminder of the horrendous experiences suffered during the occupation. Not only did they rape German women but they also mutilated them and left them where they would remind other women of the savagery that awaited them. 1503

  The Soviets, both officers and soldiers, also raped Russian, Ukrainian and Belorussian females, of all ages. Many of the women, recently released from enforced labor in Germany, had been seized and enslaved and were finally liberated, only to be ravaged. This behavior discredits the longtime claim that Soviet rape was retaliation against Germany’s viciousness in the Soviet Union. 1504 The unverified belief that Soviet females
enslaved in Germany had prostituted themselves to the Germans’ might explain the Soviet’s brutal behavior toward their own. 1505

  During World War II, young American GIs, unaccustomed to such sexual norms as practiced in France, often viewed French women as easy, immoral, promiscuous and without moral shame, all complicated by the language incompatibility. The advent of flash bulbs, between 1927 and 1930, initiated the age of photojournalism, giving substance to the idea that a picture is worth a thousand words. When GIs liberated France in 1944, a photo journalist, many of who accompanied the soldiers, staged a photo of many happy, grateful French women surrounding and hugging a smiling macho American GI. Right behind that group, one may see the back of another GI obviously kissing someone, presumably another liberated French woman. Another photo, according to author, Mary Louise Roberts, was a hastily-arranged collage of women’s faces, to simulate a crowd of women. 1506

  The Stars and Stripes initially published this photo. The newspaper debuted on November 9, 1861, and is an important and influential newspaper that reports on activities important to the U.S. Armed Forces. The Defense Department published the paper in Europe beginning in 1942 with an obviously biased editorial staff. The mission of the newspaper, strictly for propaganda purposes, is to provide “a symbol of the things we are fighting to preserve and spread in this threatened world. It represents the free thought and free expression of a free people.” The on-site or imbedded staff is composed of newspapermen in uniform and young soldiers. This liberation photo, almost as renowned as the photo of the marines planting the American flag at Iwo Jima, soon appeared on the front cover of Life Magazine, launched on November 23, 1936. 1507

  Eisenhower requested that the Stars and Stripes truthfully report about the war to engender confidence in his command and the way that he and his staff viewed events. Eisenhower was adept at stage-managing the media events for maximum benefit. Therefore, the Stars and Stripes always made certain that their published photos looked legitimate and appropriate to the occasion, always characterizing the government’s idealized interpretation of the war. GIs dutifully read the Stars and Stripes, a propaganda vehicle and a source of inspiration. It published the images of happy women and children after the “liberation” of Normandy. The images symbolically characterized the U.S. military as male, and France as female. They constantly sexualized the American invasion into France which suggested that the victors could justify their sexual conquest. 1508

  After all, two million French men of fighting age were absent, leaving little boys and old men to protect the home front. The men were engaged in resistance movements, in German labor or prison camps or fighting elsewhere, leaving France a nation of vulnerable women, children, and elderly people. The symbolic predominance of women in the photos was highly effective in depicting France as an occupied, defenseless feminine-like, submissive nation, inhabited by helpless women who needed protection, the perfect setting for macho men to demonstrate their physical prowess. Stars and Stripes, creating a military culture, consistently used female Hollywood “pinups,” to illustrate what America was fighting for—a determination to keep women smiling, satisfied and happy. Stars and Stripes, with its photos, eroticized patriotism in heterosexual expressions and connected sexual exploitation with American war objectives, before the United States invaded France to consummate a consensual union. 1509

  German civilians, due to wartime privations and allied confiscation policies, were suffering from slow, torturous starvation. The Soviets abruptly seized and hauled away the German’s stores of food in trucks. The civilians had to rely on whatever food they had secretly stashed or what they could find. The scourge of rape, a fact of war and occupation, was rampant. The victorious Soviets used rape, not about sex, but power, to terrorize, dehumanize and subjugate female citizens in occupied areas. Rape is an agonizing act of aggression that has nothing to do with sex. Men rape in such circumstances because they can, typically without experiencing judicial consequences. The Allies perpetrated an epidemic of rape against all German women and girls. Even the French, besmirched with their own offenses, complained about the excessive violence perpetrated by the American troops. 1510

  Rape charges involving GIs increased from eighteen in January 1945 to thirty-one in February to 402 in March and 501 in April. American officials executed some of the perpetrators although this obviously did not decrease rape’s occurrence. Many desperate German women traded sex for food and shelter. They reportedly found the Americans somewhat attractive. 1511 Military court records provide evidence of at least 14,000 rapes committed by U.S. soldiers against civilians in Britain, France, and Germany during the war years (1942-1945). Time Magazine reported in September 1945, “Our own army and the British army along with ours have done their share of looting and raping… we too are considered an army of rapists.” 1512

  Officials charged many GIs for rape, the most frequently-perpetuated war crime, with a disproportionately high number of assaults committed by black soldiers, especially considering that only ten percent of the troops were black. Rape, because of its racialization, became a “Negro” crime in France. Authorities executed more black soldiers than whites for rape. Certainly, according to victim testimonies, confessions and medical evidence, blacks committed rape. However, in numerous cases, the evidence was nothing more than hearsay, based on racial prejudice. The U.S. military and Judge Advocate General (JAG) made hasty decisions, especially in the case of blacks, in an effort to sweep the entire situation under the rug. 1513

  The JAG judges believed, according to long-held myths, that hyper sexuality affected black men who not only raped but also engaged in “orgies.” JAG lawyers circulated a memo in November 1944, arguing that rape “discloses an entirely unique savagery and wanton disregard of any limits whatever upon measures to accomplish satisfaction of sex desire” as well as a “fundamental deficiency in character and predominant animal instincts on the part of the criminal.” 1514 In Le Havre, American troops received a booklet alerting them to the fact that the German soldiers had treated the French civilians with dignity and that Americans should do likewise. Some of the Americans were indifferent and claimed, “The enemy’s atrocities were worse than ours.” Of course, German soldiers committed their share of atrocities but the old adage that two wrongs do not make a right was and is applicable, even in warfare. Official propaganda makes enemies of ordinary people and incites the atrocities so common in any war.

  That booklet was apparently ineffective. In 1945, GIs besieged the town of Le Havre where they drank excessive amounts of alcohol, followed by daily acts of theft, rape, and physical assault. Women were terrified to be out on the streets. During the day, GIs were publicly engaging in sex where even children could witness their lewd behavior. French men vented their anger and frustration about the Americans taking advantage of vulnerable French girls. 1515 General Charles Gerhardt established a house of prostitution, the Corral, for his men near Rennes, France. General Omar Bradley disapproved and ordered him to close it. Gerhardt said he wanted to protect the health of his men against VD, and decrease or prevent the incident of rape, something the army was investigating in the Norman countryside. Gerhardt, a womanizer, explained that he “identified strongly with the sexual drives of his men.” He wrote to Bradley arguing that his men were “preoccupied” with sex because they were under the influence of eroticized pinups and cartoons. In October 1944, the police in Cherbourg filed rape charges against dozens of GIs. The local authorities suggested that the American military establish a brothel for their soldiers. 1516

  The Soviets supposedly preferred plumper, healthier looking women, rather than those who were thinner. 1517 However, the Soviet soldiers raped without regard for size, age or cultural class and gang rape was rampant. 1518 When the Soviets “liberated” Danzig beginning on March 30, 1945, they raped all, from small girls to 83-year old women. A Russian officer told the women of Danzig who pleaded for protection from the invading brutes to
sequester themselves within the Catholic Cathedral. Soon after, hundreds of women and girls felt safe within the church, yet even within the church’s sanctity, the Soviets savagely attacked them. The local Catholic pastor sadly stated, “They even violated eight-year-old girls and shot boys who tried to shield their mothers.” Rape was committed in every German city that the undisciplined Soviet military invaded. Soviet commanders told their soldiers, after reaching Berlin in late April 1945, that the females of the city were theirs. Some women chose suicide as their only refuge from the raping hordes. 1519

  On April 9, 1951, Life Magazine revealed that Eisenhower used the U.S. Military Mission in Moscow to radio Stalin that he intended to stop his military campaign at the Elbe River in order to allow the Soviets to seize Berlin. John Wheeler-Bennett, of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA), and Eisenhower’s political advisor, drafted the message. U.S. Ambassador W. Averill Harriman received the memorandum and delivered it to Stalin. General Marshall, Chief of Staff, told President Truman that we were “obligated” to let the Russians take Berlin. 1520

  Nuns, young girls, old women, and pregnant women were victims of rape. By the time the Soviets arrived in Berlin, they viewed the women as sexual spoils and not just substitutes for the hated German soldiers. Rapists view this act as a rite of passage following their often-horrific experiences at the frontline. Warfare, an environment of desensitized killing, brutality, and devoid of concerns about culpability triggers uninhibited, angry soldiers, free of social restraints, that often vent their rage on the most vulnerable people and resort to base carnality. Mob mentality frequently instigates collective rape as a bonding experience. 1521 There were as many as 1.5 million cases of rape reported during the first five months of the Russian occupation of East Prussia beginning January 20, 1945. The same situation existed in Silesia, Pomerania and Vienna. In Berlin, the Soviets slaughtered tens of thousands of noncombatants. Soviet soldiers raped between 50,000 and 100,000 German women; 10,000 of those rape victims died—many by their own hand. Sources indicate that Soviet soldiers violated two million German women in the last months of World War II. 1522