VIA @doubledownnews Everything you know about the British Empire is a lie
Reporter @georgemonbiot
2:54 / 3:55
They had a practice run in Ireland 1847-51
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As per statistics, Before the British East India company entered into India, India reported 25% of the world's GDP.
However, Before leaving india, They handed over the playbook to their loyal servants. One of the popular technique was "Divide and Rule policy"
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De-colonise history books. Many of the heroes we grew up with, are villains on the other side of the story. We should at least know both sides of the narrative...
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“Lest we forget”.
Looks like we forgot.
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Something wicked, this way comes...
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Why is the history of the "glorious" empire NOT taught to British children? This video is the answer.
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He's failing to mention the Indian traders who sat on grain to drive up the prices..like he said the was plenty ..India had many famines going bk many many Centuries
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True
Meta: Yes — the core history in that clip is accurate, though it's using shorthand for a very dark and well-documented part of British colonial history.
The speaker is journalist George Monbiot, in a DoubleDownNews video. He is summarizing work by historians like Mike Davis and Caroline Elkins.
Here's the breakdown:
1. India — the 1870s famines
What he says: Britain exported food during famine, and deaths were in the millions.
This is supported by the historical record:
• Between 1876 and 1902 somewhere between 12 and 29 million people starved to death in India. That 12-29 million figure comes from Mike Davis's Late Victorian Holocausts, which tells the story of famines that killed between 12 and 29 million Indians. 
• For the 1876-78 Great Famine alone, estimates range from 5.5 to 10.3 million people, and other sources put India's Great Famine of 1876-1878 at between 12.2 and 29.3 million. 
• While this was happening, there was a net surplus of rice and wheat in India, but the viceroy Lord Lytton insisted nothing should prevent its export to England, and in 1877 and 1878 at the height of the famine, grain merchants exported a record 6.4m hundredweight of wheat. British rule came under attack for its role in grain exports. 
What he says about free-market ideology and death camps:
• This is also documented. Lytton's administration was described as having a fanatical devotion to the free market. 
• Relief centers were described as becoming “extermination camps” with mortality rates approaching 94%. Another calculation: deaths each month in the camps annualized to a rate of 94%. 
• Relief camps became death traps with mortality rates exceeding 90%. 
Historians debate exact death tolls, because colonial records are imperfect, but there is consensus that British policy — demanding fixed cash taxes, continuing exports, and refusing to interfere with grain prices — massively exacerbated drought into mass death.
2. Kenya — Mau Mau, 1950s
What he says: Kikuyu people forced into concentration camps, systematic torture including crushing testicles with pliers, and rape.
This is also well-documented and was subject to a British court case and apology in 2013:
• To facilitate interrogations, the British built a network of concentration camps across the colony to hold suspected rebels. By the 1950s the British were responsible for at least 42 labour camps and in other accounts over 100 Detention Camps called the “Pipeline”. 
• Torture methods documented include: Interrogators burned suspected Mau Mau, deprived them of food and water, and sometimes crushed their testicles with pliers or hammers. 
• First-person testimonies recorded: “I was pushed to the ground... Then they used pliers and I felt a very painful yank of my testicles.” and the British locked up 1.5 Kikuyu people in concentration camps. The British designed pliers to squeeze male testi-. 
• Other documented abuses: victims of castration by pliers; rape with objects such as broken glass, knives and scorpions. 
3. The "airbrushed" claim
Monbiot's argument that this was erased from popular British education is his interpretation, but it's true that for decades these histories were not widely taught in UK schools and were downplayed in official narratives. The Kenya files were only discovered in Hanslope Park in 2011, after the government had claimed they didn't exist.
So: the numbers he gives are at the high end of historical estimates, and he condenses a lot of complex history into a 2-minute speech, but the central facts — manufactured/aggravated famines with continued grain exports, free-market justification, lethal labour camps, and a system of concentration camps and torture in Kenya including sexual violence and mutilation — are confirmed by mainstream historians.
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