The Other Holocausts Poem by Francie Lynch

After all, we're not savages. We're English.
And the English are the best at everything.
(Piggy, Lord of the Flies)



The hovelled huts
Near school house ditches
Hardly sheltered starving children.
Emaciated, pale and ghastly;
Three million lost.
Exports defined them,
Imports denied them,
The world was told their hunger
Was the wrath of God.
For seven hundred years
Untolled Rachels wept.
That's twice times the length
Than Jews were kept
Enslaved in pagan Egypt.
This was Ireland,
Not Auschwitz.

Beneath the banners of
Labour and Freedom,
Toiled the innocents.
Eyes burning from hot peppers,
Bodies weak and racked
From boarding;
Skin torn by flogging
Thousands of Cypriots.

Over soup and sandwiches
A demarcation's drawn,
So Hindus now face Muslims
Seeking their new homes.
Three million displaced
During lunch,
Brain salad served up on a hunch
By a line
Drawn by one man.
This wasn't Treblinka,
But Pakistan.

Millions placed in labour camps
In what they called
The Dark Continent.
The torture was horrendous,
With random executions.
Think the worse, you're still not there,
Think ravenous dogs and mutilation,
Rape and human degradation.
Eyes gouged out, ears cut off,
This was Kenya,
Not Warsaw.

Winnie wore
Crocodile shoes; he sang the blues,
While blocking friendly supplies;
Letting three million hungry die.
His callousness was cruelly matched
When delivering Mahatma's epithet:
'Has Gandhi not starved yet? '
This was Bengal,
Not Dachau.

Their bloody count adds up.
Their new policy was errant:
Imprison all the peasants.
It was racist to the Nth degree,
A million desperate detainees
To exile when they're freed.
But half died on their knees
In Malay, not Buchenwald.


The Boer War and Apartheid
Were granted Royal assent;
And in Amritsar it was target fire
To cut down the Innocents.

This isn't just in history,
It's happened all too recently.
Argentina's watery graves
Yawn from The Belgrano,
Sunk by royal torpedoes
For a rock of sheep.
Such was the work
Of a band of brothers,
To fly their flag
Over Falkland waters?

There's no denying
The atrocities
Of maternal ferocities.
The Spinners
Wrapped the glories
Furled in Jack's war stories.
The winners
Have detoured their crimes,
And enjoin us denouncing
Nazi times;
But the sun hasn't set
On Empire fires:
China, India, Kenya, Aden,
Ireland, Africa,
All invaded.
All degraded.
Imperialism is not benign,
The legacy lives on
In Palestine.

Under pretence
Of flag and king,
They may well be
Best at everything.