Thread: Imperial Churchill: Mass Murderer?

Originally Posted by foobar

and probably drunk into the bargain.

Just normal, accepted drinking habits of some English gentlemen at the time.

Originally Posted by Switch

Indian or Native American? Asking for a friend.

Originally Posted by tomcat

Shashi Tharoor

...sounds Cherokee, no?...

Not sure, but I'll take 3 with a butter chicken and onion bhaji.

I recon you'd love to smash his back doors in eh Tommy.

Bit late now Bra, fookers fooked eh.

Originally Posted by Switch

historical context

Most important in any debate. Wonder how our behavior be judged by 22nd century debaters?

Originally Posted by Norton

Most important in any debate. Wonder how our behavior be judged by 22nd century debaters?

I think that the sum of their knowledge will be interpreted by their ability to read between the lines, make comparisons between opinions and facts, and actually understand what the fuck was going on.
We are living through the backwash of fast information and 24 hour news cycle, unable to identify real news from the lazy fakery of contemporary journalism.
It takes a very clever and intuitive mind to understand that everything is connected.

In the Churchill example, there are those that maintain his worst excesses were moderated by his American wife. Others see her as his sycophant. Like most things, there’s a little truth in both, and one is not necessarily mutually exclusive to the other, however polarized those opinions might be.

Originally Posted by Switch

It takes a very clever and intuitive mind to understand that everything is connected.

...and then twist facts to suit a favored reality...despite hagiographic films and books, Churchill's darker angels, already extensively noted elsewhere, need commentary from his darker victims and their descendants to add balance...

Compared against the other leaders of the time might give some perspective:



Hard to play "nice" and win a war against that lot...

Originally Posted by Bettyboo

Hard to play "nice" and win a war against that lot...

...irrelevant, I'm afraid...trampling defenseless natives is one thing...playing hardball against WWII Axis leaders is quite another...

Originally Posted by tomcat

...irrelevant, I'm afraid...trampling defenseless natives is one thing...playing hardball against WWII Axis leaders is quite another...

Guessing that most apologists will ignore/forget Churchill's real evil - the colonial wars and associated.

Making Rudyard Kipling proud.

Originally Posted by tomcat

...and then twist facts to suit a favored reality...despite hagiographic films and books, Churchill's darker angels, already extensively noted elsewhere, need commentary from his darker victims and their descendants to add balance...

Please continue with your delusional hatred. It’s clear that you are immune to the truth.

Originally Posted by HuangLao

Guessing that most apologists will ignore/forget Churchill's real evil - the colonial wars and associated.

Making Rudyard Kipling proud.

Why is why is a no mark merkin idiot allowed to pontificate such nonsense?

For every tale of evil or failure, there is a counterpoint that you have failed to consider, you harpie vandal.

Its ironic that a person of zero leadership skills should criticize a man who has proved himself under such severe conditions.

The conditions in your kitchen demonstrate what you are incapable of.

Originally Posted by tomcat

...irrelevant, I'm afraid...trampling defenseless natives is one thing....

The irony of an American getting on his high horse about Churchill and his treatment of natives is quite astounding.

Here is one for you to mull TC:









If you really, really want to get going about the treatment of natives, maybe you should be asking why American Indians are still treated so shamefully in the USA?

Winston Churchill has earned the right to his place in history. Not for the fact of him being a great leader but for being the last white person ever to be called 'Winston'.

Originally Posted by Pragmatic

the last white person ever to be called 'Winston'.

...

Originally Posted by tomcat

...*sigh*...background info about the article's author: Shashi Tharoor is an Indian politician, writer and a former career international diplomat who was serving as Member of Parliament, Lok Sabha from Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, in 2009. Wikipedia

...a good idea to focus one's thoughts before asking others to mull, Nidhogg......

Y

*Sigh*. Try not to assume others are as stupid as you TC. It would probably save time. I am well aware of where the original article comes from - I was directing my self to your position on the article as shown by your replies on this thread, as well as indeed, the posting of it in the first place.

Do keep up old chap.

Originally Posted by tomcat

...irrelevant, I'm afraid...trampling defenseless natives is one thing...playing hardball against WWII Axis leaders is quite another...

Context is always relevant; there is no meaning without context - only cliche exists without context.

Originally Posted by tomcat

...*sigh*...background info about the article's author: Shashi Tharoor is an Indian politician, writer and a former career international diplomat who was serving as Member of Parliament, Lok Sabha from Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, in 2009. Wikipedia

...a good idea to focus one's thoughts before asking others to mull, Nidhogg......

Y

Once again you resort to deflection in order to avoid answering the question. Given your history of obfuscation and dismissive responses, it behooves you to answer the highly pertinent question.

Also interesting that you are happy to disassemble a persons career, yet you find the limited evidence provided, so amusing.

Originally Posted by tomcat

The Rest of Us Always Knew Churchill Was a Villain

His record in Britain’s former colonies more closely resembles that of a war criminal than a defender of democracy and freedom.
By Shashi Tharoor (Bloomberg)

The recent flap over Winston Churchill -- with Labour politician John McDonnell calling Britain’s most revered prime minister a “villain” and prompting a rebuke from the latter’s grandson -- will astonish many Indians. That’s not because the label itself is a misnomer, but because McDonnell was exercised by the death of one Welsh miner in 1910. In fact, Churchill has the blood of millions on his hands whom the British prefer to forget.

“History,” Churchill himself said, “will judge me kindly, because I intend to write it myself.” He did, penning a multi-volume history of World War Two, and won the Nobel Prize for Literature for his self-serving fictions. As the Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies remarked of the man many Britons credit with winning the war, "His real tyrant is the glittering phrase, so attractive to his mind that awkward facts have to give way.”

Awkward facts, alas, there are aplenty. As McDonnell correctly noted, Churchill as Home Secretary in 1910 sent battalions of police from London and ordered them to attack striking miners in Tonypandy in South Wales; one was killed and nearly 600 strikers and policemen were injured. It’s unlikely this troubled his conscience much. He later assumed operational command of the police during a siege of armed Latvian anarchists in Stepney, where he decided to allow them to be burned to death in a house where they were trapped.

Shortly afterward, during the fight for Irish independence between 1918-23, Churchill was one of the few British officials in favor of bombing Irish protesters from the air, suggesting using “machine gun fire bombs” to scatter them. As Secretary of State for the Colonies, he followed through on that threat in Iraq. He ordered large-scale bombing of Mesopotamia in 1921, with an entire village wiped out in 45 minutes. When some British officials objected to his proposal for “the use of gas against natives,” he found their objections “unreasonable.” In fact he argued that poison gas was more humane than outright extermination: “The moral effect should be so good that the loss of life should be reduced to a minimum.”

This underscores the fundamental contrast in views of Churchill. In Britain and much of the West, he’s seen as the savior of “Democracy, Freedom, and all that is good in Western Civilization,” as one enthusiastic correspondent put it. In fact, his record is far more mixed even there. Throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, Churchill was an open admirer of Mussolini, declaring that the Italian Fascist movement had “rendered a service to the whole world.” Traveling to Rome in 1927 to express his admiration for the Fascist Duce, Churchill announced that he “could not help being charmed, like so many other people have been, by Signor Mussolini’s gentle and simple bearing and by his calm detached poise in spite of so many burdens and dangers.”

What Churchill was above all, though, was a committed imperialist -- one determined to preserve the British Empire not just by defeating the Nazis but much else besides. At the start of his career, as a young cavalry officer on the northwest frontier of India, he declared the Pashtuns needed to recognize “the superiority of [the British] race” and that those who resisted would “be killed without quarter.” He wrote happily about how he and his comrades “systematically, village by village, destroyed the houses, filled up the wells, blew down the towers, cut down the great shady trees, burned the crops and broke the reservoirs in punitive devastation. Every tribesman caught was speared or cut down at once.”
In Kenya, Churchill either directed or was complicit in policies involving the forced relocation of local people from the fertile highlands to make way for white colonial settlers and the incarceration of over 150,000 men, women and children in concentration camps. British authorities used rape, castration, lit cigarettes on tender spots and electric shocks to torture Kenyans under Churchill’s rule.

And his principal victims were the Indians -- “a beastly people with a beastly religion,” as he charmingly called us, a “foul race.” Churchill was an appalling racialist, one who could not bring himself to see any people of color as entitled to the same rights as himself. (He “did not admit,” for instance, “that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia … by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, has come in and taken its place.”)He fantasized luridly of having Mahatma Gandhi tied to the ground and trampled upon by elephants.

Thanks to Churchill’s personal decisions, more than 3 million Bengalis died of hunger in a 1943 famine. Churchill deliberately ordered the diversion of food from starving Indian civilians to well-supplied British soldiers and even to top up European stockpiles, meant for yet-to-be-liberated Greeks and Yugoslavs. “The starvation of anyway underfed Bengalis is less serious” than that of “sturdy Greeks,” he argued. When reminded of the suffering of Bengalis, his response was typically Churchillian: The famine was the Indians’ own fault, he said, for “breeding like rabbits.” If the suffering was so dire, he wrote on the file, “Why hasn’t Gandhi died yet?”

It’s important to remember that these weren’t enemies in a war -- Churchill also wanted to “drench the cities of the Ruhr” in poison gas and said of the Japanese, “we shall wipe them out, every one of them, men, women and children” -- but British subjects. Nor can his views be excused as being reflective of their times; his own Secretary of State for War, Leo Amery, confessed that he could see very little difference between Churchill’s attitude and Hitler’s.

Britons and Oscar voters may yet thrill to Churchill’s stirring words about freedom. But to the descendants of the Iraqis whom Churchill gassed and the Greek protesters on the streets of Athens who were mowed down on his orders in 1944 (killing 28 and maiming 120), to sundry Pashtuns and Irish, to Afghans and Kenyans and Welsh miners as well as to Indians like myself, it will always be a mystery why a few bombastic speeches have been enough to wash the bloodstains off Churchill’s hands. We shall remember him as a war criminal and an enemy of decency and humanity, a blinkered imperialist untroubled by the oppression of non-white peoples, a man who fought not to defend but to deny our freedom.

Hyperbolic and factually inaccurate.

Originally Posted by nidhogg

Try not to assume others are as stupid as you TC

Originally Posted by Switch

interesting that you are happy to disassemble a persons career

Originally Posted by Switch

Hyperbolic and factually inaccurate

...posters, calm thyselves...please note where you think the author is inaccurate...or even hyperbolic...

TC, it is a plain fact that Victorians felt that civilising and leading natives to God was a duty, it seems wrong viewed with hindsight but at the time many thought it the right thing to do. Of course the civilising used to deliver profit was a very handy adjunct or was it the other way around. It gets confusing given the way the UK developed trading links starting with Drake et al, through the East India Co to the Empire.

I think we could all acknowledge Churchill was no saint, had his demons but as has been mentioned his actions and views were by no mean the exception for the time; i'm sure most Amercians would acknowledge that in creating the "Greatest Country On Earth" and few eggs were broken along the way, near Genocide.

The British Empire is always held up as a case study in oppression, exploitation, repression etc but name one empire that this cannot be levelled at...

What did the Romans ever do for us....

Originally Posted by nidhogg

*Sigh*. Try not to assume others are as stupid as you TC. It would probably save time. I am well aware of where the original article comes from - I was directing my self to your position on the article as shown by your replies on this thread, as well as indeed, the posting of it in the first place.

Do keep up old chap.

wait, are you saying an American citizen can't comment on Churchill dark side regarding natives in the 20th century, simply because of the Indian genocide by Americans "British" colonizers in the 19th century?

jesus, did Boon Mee or Chass hacked your brain?

Originally Posted by Dragonfly

wait, are you saying an American citizen can't comment on Churchill dark side regarding natives in the 20th century, simply because of the Indian genocide by Americans "British" colonizers in the 19th century? jesus, did Boon Mee or Chass hacked your brain?

Not your first language...Actually Churchy was 1/2 Mercan and I blame that half for his less laudable actions..runs in the country

Originally Posted by NamPikToot

I think we could all acknowledge Churchill was no saint,

...forwarded your comments to the author...with thanks...