WELL, was Winston Churchill a white supremacist mass murderer? The answer is yes, but clearly that was not all that mattered about this most extraordinarily complex man. History has been kind to Churchill.
That’s not surprising as he wrote it. What’s more he got a Nobel Prize in Literature for doing so. Yet he is not above criticism and questioning and we should know more about him. Several books have questioned his record on race, his colossal hatred of all who sought to break up the Empire, and his failure to act quickly enough to help the Bengalis in their famine.
READ MORE: Both sides of Winston Churchill should be known
He really did call Mahatma Gandhi a “half-naked seditious fakir.” He also wanted the Clydeside strikers of 1919 crushed and, as newly-appointed Minister for War offered the means to do so, as he feared it was a Bolshevist revolution.
He was a product of his time, an imperialist who regarded other races as inferior as he spoke of an “Aryan triumph”. Churchill’s Secretary of State for India, Leopold Amery, once wrote: “On the subject of India, Winston is not quite sane.”
Yet it was Churchill who opposed appeasement when doing so was unpopular, and it was who inspired Britain to stand against Hitler’s Nazis. It was also Churchill who promoted Home Rule for Scotland and Ireland and the creation of a federal Britain, and the same Churchill who dreamed of European unity and promoted the convention of human rights – tell that to the Tories who worship his memory and they simply won’t believe you.
There was a dark side to Winston Churchill, of that there is no doubt, but his finest hour more than compensated. The trouble is that if we start poking into the history of the great leaders of the 20th and 21st centuries, never mind further back, then we get into very disputable territory.
For instance, without a shadow of a doubt the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were war crimes in breach of the Hague Conventions which first defined what combatants could and could not do.
Yet no-one was ever going to put President Harry S Truman on trial. Oh, and by the way, the Potsdam Declaration of July 26, just 11 days before the Hiroshima bombing, promising Japan “prompt and utter destruction”
if it did not surrender was co-signed on his last day in office of his first term by the British Prime Minister, Winston Spencer Churchill. What did he know?
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