—   Bi - Bk   —

BIGHA
A unit of area measurement for land used in Nepal, Bangladesh and parts of India. The size varies considerably from region to region. In Nepal the bigha equals about 1.67 acres (0.677 hectares). In Bangladesh and West Bengal, India, the bigha equals 0.3306 acres or roughly 1/3 of an acre (0.1338 hectares). In central India it usually equals 5/8 of an acre (0.2529 hectares).

BILLIONAIRES

“My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire friendly Congress.” —Warren Buffet, billionaire capitalist investor, and the third richest person in the world, proposing that there be a (somewhat) higher income tax rate for the rich, quoted in Time magazine, 2011. [Of course Buffet doesn’t go so far as to admit that the bourgeoisie actually runs the U.S. and the world in its own interests. —S.H.]

BIOLOGICAL WARFARE EXPERIMENTS — By Japan in the 1930s-1940s

“The Nazis were not the only nation to build death camps in the period leading up to World War II. The Japanese, too, had their concentration camps. The object was not, as with the Germans, the extermination of a people, but instead was to use incarcerated common criminals and prisoners of war as guinea pigs in biological and, to a lesser extent, chemical warfare experiments.
        “The rationale was simple. The fanatical, right-wing militarists who dominated Japanese society from the late 1920s to the end of World War II believed that in order to achieve their goal of Japanese domination of East Asia, they would have to rely upon exotic weapons of war such as pathogenic and chemical arms. That was horrible enough. But those who originated the program did not believe that these weapons could simply be developed in laboratories and let loose against enemies on the battlefield. They had to be tried out on human subjects.
        “And so a vast network of death factories was constructed that, by the time World War II had begun, stretched from the remote steppes of Inner Mongolia to Singapore, and from Bangkok to Manila. The center of this empire of death was Ping Fan, a suburb of the city of Harbin in north China, where the architect of Japan’s chemical and biological warfare program, Lt. Gen. Shiro Ishii, had his headquarters.
        “Each factory employed at least two thousand people, including (apart from the ordinary soldiers used to guard the facilities) some twenty thousand physicians, microbiologists, veterinarians, zoologists, and plant biologists.
        “At a conservative estimate, their diabolical research project of testing prospective pathogens and biological weapons on the camps’ inmates involved between twelve and fifteen thousand men, women and children.
        “Tens of thousands of others were killed in field tests that consisted of distributing food tainted with deadly pathogens; lacing water wells, streams, and reservoirs with other pathogens; creating cholera epidemics by injecting cholera into the veins of unsuspecting peasants, who were told they were being inoculated against the disease; and spraying or dropping various biological weapons on villages, towns, and cities from the air.
        “With the exception of [a] few lesser participants, who were brought before a show trial by the Soviet authorities, most of the architects of Japan’s biological warfare programs were never prosecuted for their crimes. The reason for this was that after the U.S. occupation of Japan, American scientists eager to acquire the experimental data garnered from these biological experiments argued successfully that their Japanese colleagues had gained invaluable insights into how the human body reacted to certain pathogens—information that would greatly assist American biological weapons programs. The result was that the U.S. occupation authorities colluded in a cover-up of what had taken place....
        “But leaving aside [the lack of] prosecutions, the truth is hard enough to come by. Until the 1980s, the Japanese government denied the crimes committed by its doctors and scientists had even taken place. When the overwhelming weight of the evidence forced it to concede something had indeed occurred, the Japanese authorities insisted the program had been the work of renegade militarists. The government neither apologized nor offered compensation to those still alive who had been exposed to the germ warfare experiments, or to the families and heirs of those who had not survived them.”
         —Sheldon H. Harris, in Crimes of War, 2.0, ed. by Roy Gutman, et al., (NY: W.W. Norton, 2007), pp. 59-61.

BISMARCK, Otto Edward Leopold von   (1815-98)

“Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Prussia (1862-1871). He was Chancellor of the Empire and concurrently Prime Minister of Prussia when the German Empire was founded in 1871. He fell from power in 1890. Representing the interests of the big bourgeoisie and big landlords and carrying out a militarist ‘blood and iron’ policy, he ruthlessly suppressed the workers’ movement at home and engaged in aggression and expansion abroad in an effort to establish German hegemony on the continent of Europe.” —Explanatory note accompanying an article on the Paris Commune, Peking Review, vol. 14, #13, March 26, 1971.