
The Rest of Us Always Knew Churchill Was a Villain - pseudolus
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-02-16/churchill-was-more-villain-than-hero-in-britain-s-colonies
======
twoodfin
FWIW, the (in)famous “I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of
gas” quote was in reference to tear gas. Ultimately banned for use in warfare
by international treaty, but still commonly used today in civilian matters.

[https://www.nationalchurchillmuseum.org/churchills-1919-war-...](https://www.nationalchurchillmuseum.org/churchills-1919-war-
office-memorandum.html)

~~~
nkurz
More than "for what it's worth", that's an important difference. The full
quote puts a very different spin on Churchill's position.

The article: "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.”"

The full quote: "I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas.
We have definitely adopted the position at the Peace Conference of arguing in
favour of the retention of gas as a permanent method of warfare. It is sheer
affectation to lacerate a man with the poisonous fragment of a bursting shell
and to boggle at making his eyes water by means of lachrymatory gas.

I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes. The
moral effect should be so good that the loss of life should be reduced to a
minimum. It is not necessary to use only the most deadly gasses: gasses can be
used which cause great inconvenience and would spread a lively terror and yet
would leave no serious permanent effects on most of those affected."

While Churchill's use of "poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes" certainly
sounds abominable, he does primarily seem to be advocating for the use of non-
deadly tear gas rather than something deadly. On the other hand, he also seems
to be saying that he'd be OK with escalating to a more deadly gas if for some
reason the non-deadly approach wasn't effective.

~~~
whack
If the use of gas is so reasonable, one wonders why he only supports using it
against "uncivilized tribes".

~~~
Teever
Well to be honest I'm sure Churchill would not have any qualms of using gas
against the Irish or the Welsh.

~~~
Udik
He probably didn't think much of them either.

------
sremani
The one party that seems to go unscathed or are even in power positions are
the princes that chose to ally with the British to retain their kingdoms. The
Last Nizam went to become an MP for a long time. His violent Razakar militia
morphed into Political party and wins every Parliamentary election in
Hyderabad. The Scindias of Gwalior are power players in both the INC and BJP.
There are numerous other royal descendants that have FAT fortunes and local
name recognition and political cache.

Indians can hate Winston Churchill all they want, and they can beg the liberal
leaning administrations of Oxford and other British academia to throw away
busts of Churchill. All the while naming colleges and universities after
people who allied with British and treated their population worse than British
have treated Indians.

Winston Churchill is a villian but the Indian allies of British are the worst
scoundrels.

~~~
unmole
> The Last Nizam went to become an MP for a long time.

Osman Ali Khan was briefly the titular head of post-accession Hyderabad but
was never an MP.

> His violent Razakar militia morphed into Political party and wins every
> Parliamentary election in Hyderabad.

MIM as a political entity predates the Razakars. And I'd say the present day
AIMIM has as much in common with it's predecessor as the Congress has with
it's pre-independce avatar, which is not much.

~~~
sremani
Osman Ali Khan was M.P. of kurnool.

~~~
unmole
That was a different Osman Ali Khan, not the Nizam:
[https://archive.siasat.com/news/former-mp-osman-ali-khan-
pas...](https://archive.siasat.com/news/former-mp-osman-ali-khan-passes-
away-196027/)

------
nickysielicki
> “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.

One of my favorite conspiracy theories is the idea that Churchill and
Roosevelt conspired to allow the attack at Pearl Harbor to occur.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_Harbor_advance-
knowledge...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_Harbor_advance-
knowledge_conspiracy_theory)

~~~
Svip
I would not be surprised if this was true, or at least had a significant
amount of truth to it. It reminds me of the Zimmermann telegram that brought
the US into WW1. The UK and the US both knew that Mexico was not going to help
Germany (what with a Mexican revolution going on and all that), but the
telegram was a convenient enough excuse for the US to join the war in Europe
anyway.

The parallel here is that the US and UK are both waiting for the enemy to make
a huge blunder (Germany trying to get Mexico to attack the US, or Japan
attacking Pearl Harbor). Getting the US into the war was one of the top
priorities of Churchill's government. And Roosevelt really wanted to help (the
Lend-Lease among other things).

So this information, that Japan is about to attack, comes along, why would you
stop it? Plus; how would you stop it? You can argue that revealing it was
about to happen publicly would be enough for President Roosevelt to argue a
war against Japan. But maybe he felt if Japan actually got to attack, he could
also argue for a war against Germany?

~~~
darkpuma
> _" Plus; how would you stop it?"_

Well the primary targets, the carriers, weren't present. That was fortunate
for America, to put it lightly. With the carriers missing, the attacking
Japanese pilots focused their attacks on Battleship Row, against which they
did severe damage.

It should be noted however that after the first attack wave, the USN managed
to put up very dense anti-aircraft fire that impeded the Japanese attackers
and probably saved thousands of American lives. If the Americans at Pearl
Harbor had been given even just an hour of warning before the first attack
wave, they would have been in a much better position (the anti-aircraft fire
they could have organized before the first wave would have been even more
effective than what they managed to muster after the first wave.)

If you're interested in the details of the battle, this youtube video is
exceptional:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6cz9gtMTeI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6cz9gtMTeI)

~~~
dmix
The US broke the Japanese crypto and naval signals well before the war. I’m
curious how they missed the boat (no pun intended) on the massive attack.

I vaguely remember the radio operators mistaking it as nothing which delayed
the defences - as the hundreds of aircrafts came into view on radar. But
beyond that how could they not have intercepted the planning beforehand?

I’m not suggesting a conspiracy just curious.

~~~
darkpuma
The Opana Radar Site on the north corner of the island detected the Japanese
aircraft approaching, and the radar operators there reported it to their
command. However this report was confused for a formation of B-17s that was
scheduled to arrive from that general direction. The size of the detected
formation, which might have revealed the confusion, was not properly
communicated.

This incident was a subplot in the 1970 film _Tora! Tora! Tora!_ , which may
be where you heard it.

------
earthicus
Here's an interesting article which gives some response to the accusations
made of Churchill's actions during the Bengal famine. It's short and well
worth reading, although it clearly is papering over Churchill's racism.

[https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/in-the-
media/churchil...](https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/in-the-
media/churchill-in-the-news/indias-famine-would-have-been-worse/)

~~~
SJetKaran
[https://xi.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/267rzg/what_e...](https://xi.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/267rzg/what_exactly_caused_the_bengal_famine_of_1943_and/)

> Churchill certainly did not engineer the famine in Bengal, but he was
> ultimately responsible for the lack of a relief effort for it.

[https://xi.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6zi5fx/was_ch...](https://xi.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6zi5fx/was_churchill_and_the_united_kingdom_more/)

> It is hard to say where British incompetence, obsession with the war effort,
> and active cruelty begin and end. My read of the evidence is that official
> rice production statistics were wrong, and the British let millions of
> people in Bengal die because the war was more important, but there's a lot
> of debate about what actually happened.

[https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/83oijk/was_c...](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/83oijk/was_churchill_really_a_racist_war_criminal_as/)

------
svat
Although the linked article by Tharoor only touches on the Indian connection,
here's an article by Johann Hari that takes a broader view:
[https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/not-his-
fines...](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/not-his-finest-hour-
the-dark-side-of-winston-churchill-2118317.html) (“He may have been a thug,
but he knew a greater thug when he saw one”) — interesting bit of trivia:
“[Barack Obama's grandfather,] Hussein Onyango Obama, was imprisoned without
trial for two years and was tortured on Churchill’s watch”.

------
lazyasciiart
I'd be surprised if it's actually "a mystery" to anyone why Churchill is
considered a hero of democracy.

------
orf
> In 2017, Tharoor put the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in the
> same category as some of "the worst genocidal dictators" of the 20th
> century, saying that Churchill is "one of the more evil rulers of the 20th
> century only fit to stand in the company of the likes of Hitler, Mao and
> Stalin. Churchill has as much blood on his hands as Hitler does.
> Particularly the decisions that he personally signed off during the Bengal
> Famine when 4.3 million people died because of the decisions he took or
> endorsed.

The author has toned down his message in this piece whilst still banging the
same drum. And I'm not sure why. The guy was flawed, sure. He was both a
renowned wit and a racist, who had to make some unbelievably hard decisions
during wartime. One of those decisions unfortunately exacerbated a famine
already well into the making[1], a thing Tharoor seems to ignore each time he
brings it up. Instead he imagines that Churchill himself pushed a button
saying "no shipping grain there because I'm racist" rather than than as a
result of the nearly 1 million tonnes of ships lost in the Indian Ocean in a
single year, stretching already stretched supplies to breaking point as the
Allies continued fighting a war on 6 fronts across 3 continents.

I guess it's easy, you can repeatedly bring this up and tap into some anti-
english sentiment within your countrymen. But why? The man can be both a hero
and a villain in different parts of his life. You can appreciate the man of
the hour whilst understanding that his views and actions in other parts of his
life where outdated and by modern standards pretty disgusting.

You can also appreciate that without him WW2 may have gone very, very
differently for both Europe _and_ India. And maybe there is something to be
thankful for in that. Personally I would think the Nazis would have done a lot
worse things, and held even worse views.

1\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943#February...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943#February%E2%80%93April_1942:_Japanese_invasion_of_Burma)

------
scarejunba
Three million Indians died while food sailed West.
[http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2031992...](http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2031992,00.html)

The death tolls in the East during the Second World War (far greater in China
than in India certainly) are absolutely staggering. Churchill's policy in
Bengal was Mao-esque in malice and incompetence.

~~~
krona
Which policy, specifically?

The only policy I know of was mobilizing the military to transport food and
aid to the famine stricken regions during wartime.

I suppose you're suggesting that more food and resources should have been
diverted, regardless of the consequences elsewhere, and without concern for
any other event unfolding at the time in the region.

Genocidal? I don't think so.

------
Aloha
Churchill was no saint, I don't think any sane person anyone would elevate him
to such - but he's no war criminal - and no villain to most.

Churchill was a nationalist, an unreformed victorian, an imperialist - and
yes, a racist too.

The Bengal famine of 1943 was 1.5m deaths, this in the midst of a war that
killed 85m people. I'd also point out that in the context of India - a country
which in 1943 had around 400m people living in it - in other words .375% of
the total population.

I'd also like to note that in 1949, India inflicted partition on itself, the
greatest humanitarian crisis (almost) no one has heard of before - it
displaced 14m and likely killed another 200k - 2m - again, on a country of
around 400m people.

I consider it a zero-sum game to try to judge people by modern standards, it
is meaningless - and lessens their very important contributions in history.
History is in my opinion about clearly stating facts, and letting individuals
form their own opinion.

I consider Churchill to be a great man - just as with Stalin and Roosevelt,
whatever failings he had as peacetime a leader, are overshadowed to a
significant amount by his wartime successes.

I also point out, that Churchill was not perfect, he was a lousy, lousy
theatre commander.

~~~
malshe
"I'd also point out that in the context of India - a country which in 1943 had
around 400m people living in it - in other words .375% of the total
population."

When you want to trivialize the death of 1.5 million people, it's better to
use even larger denominator like the population of the entire world.

~~~
pessimizer
Compared to the total number of people who have ever died or will ever die...

------
DanielBMarkham
I guess beating up on Churchill is the latest in the "Let's oversimplify
history and find some new villains" game.

Fair enough. Times change.

A related article:
[https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/feb/14/winsto...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/feb/14/winston-
churchill-history-brexit-john-mcdonnell)

------
rainhacker
If anyone is interested to learn more; the author of this post has debated
"Britan does owe reparations" in Oxford Union Society here :
[https://youtu.be/f7CW7S0zxv4](https://youtu.be/f7CW7S0zxv4)

This talk has many facts not even commonly known to Indians.

------
BlackJack
The article says:

 _" 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?"_

People argue it wasn't Churchill's fault. Specifically [1], which says that
the fall of Burma to the Japanese cut off Indian import sources and the
wartime element meant "tough decisions" were made. It argues that in peacetime
things would be different.

That really doesn't make sense. If you look at the history of famine's in
India under British rule [2], over 35MM people died due to famines, and the
majority of those are due to imperial mismanagement. In democratic
governments, you can vote out people who aren't solving the problem. Not so in
colonial societies.

This source [3] puts it clearly:

 _" Throughout the autumn of 1943, the United Kingdom's food and raw materials
stockpile for its 47 million people - 14 million fewer than that of Bengal -
swelled to 18.5m tonnes.

In the end, Mukherjee writes eloquently, it was "not so much racism as the
imbalance of power inherent in the social Darwinian pyramid that explains why
famine could be tolerated in India while bread rationing was regarded as an
intolerable deprivation in wartime Britain"._

To us Indians, Winston Churchill _is_ Hitler and what happened in Bengal _is_
an Indian Holocaust. It is appropriate to call it "revisionist history"
because the Indian and more generally Eastern perspective is not present in
modern history. That is slowly changing thanks to modern scholarship and I
think we will view Winston Churchill very differently in 50 years.

All men are flawed. Churchill did some very good things for England, and some
very very bad things for India, Kenya, etc. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, etc.
very all very charismatic and had strong leadership characteristics, but you
cannot praise them publicly for "their good parts." It is crazy to me that we
still do that with Churchill.

I was glad when Obama sent the bust back to England.

[1] [https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/in-the-
media/churchil...](https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/in-the-
media/churchill-in-the-news/bengali-famine/)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_major_famines_in_I...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_major_famines_in_India_during_British_rule)

[3]
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/soutikbiswas/2010/10...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/soutikbiswas/2010/10/how_churchill_starved_india.html)

~~~
crazygringo
Fascinating thanks, I never knew about this, so I became curious about the
causes:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943#Debate_a...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943#Debate_about_causes)

It certainly seems like an area of controversy, but is it so clear cut that it
was Churchill's fault? It seems like the main takeaways are:

> _Academic consensus generally follows the FEE account, as formulated by A.
> Sen (1977) and A. Sen (1981a), in describing the Bengal famine of 1943 as an
> "entitlements famine". On this view, the prelude to the famine was
> generalised war-time inflation, and the problem was exacerbated by
> prioritised distribution and abortive attempts at price control,[323] but
> the death blow was devastating leaps in the inflation rate due to heavy
> speculative buying.[324][AZ] This in turn caused a fatal decline in the real
> wages of landless agricultural workers,[325] transforming what should have
> been a local shortage into a horrific famine.[326]_

If that's the case, was this clearly foreseeable or not, and were there
alternatives? And it continues:

> _More recent analyses often stress political factors.[BA] Discussions of the
> government 's role split into two broad camps: those which suggest that the
> government unwittingly caused or was unable to respond to the crisis,[327]
> and those which assert that the government willfully caused or ignored the
> plight of starving Indians. The former see the problem as a series of
> avoidable war-time policy failures and "panicky responses"[138] from a
> government that was spectacularly inept,[328] overwhelmed[329] and in
> disarray; the latter as a conscious miscarriage of justice by the "ruling
> colonial elite"[330] who abandoned the poor of Bengal.[331]_

The article doesn't mention if there's a current academic consensus on whether
it was inept wartime panicking or conscious, however.

Is the narrative of "Churchill as Hitler to India" really justifiable, or just
as simplistic as Churchill as Savior? I'm genuinely interested here, since I
was never taught about this, and also curious why your comment is so
downvoted.

~~~
mturmon
Your quoted excerpt intrigued me. The quoted scholar is none other than
Amartya Sen, the Bengali economist and intellectual (Nobel prize in Economics,
now at Harvard).

Born in 1933, Sen was 10 years old at the time of the famine and witnessed it
firsthand. He later investigated the cause of the famine and published
articles and finally a book on it. This research led to the notion
(simplifying here) that famines have a key component that is distributional in
nature - that economic or social conditions (like income inequality) can cause
a relatively small food shock to turn into a famine. This is what he found in
Bengal.

Sen's essays in _NYRB_ ([https://www.nybooks.com/contributors/amartya-
sen/](https://www.nybooks.com/contributors/amartya-sen/)) are excellent. The
Mukherjee book (source [3] in the GP comment) placing blame for the Bengal
famine on Churchill received a mixed review by another author
([https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2010/12/23/did-churchill-
le...](https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2010/12/23/did-churchill-let-them-
starve/)).

------
towaway1138
Meh. It's sad, but the structure of the universe is probably such that one
cannot become a leader of millions without being a villain.

~~~
DFHippie
You can ignore any villainy by this formula. "All leaders are villains, so I'm
turning my attention elsewhere." As Edmund Burke or someone said, "The only
thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."

Also, it relies on equating hard moral choices with villainy. A hard moral
choice is making citizen A hungrier so citizen B doesn't starve. Villainy is
robbing citizen A to enrich citizen B because you like B more.

~~~
towaway1138
As a single individual, it's probably more effective to work on local ethical
issues than to try to do something about global villainy. There are a few
people in very special places and times who have the ability to make a global
effect (Wikileaks comes to mind), but that's quite rare.

Yes, we can denounce villainy that occurs on the global stage. But in truth
that's almost entirely virtue signaling. We look good, but there's no
difference effected in the world.

Do something that makes a difference. Despising Churchill is useless, even if
he deserved it (which is dubious).

~~~
landryraccoon
> But in truth that's almost entirely virtue signaling. We look good, but
> there's no difference effected in the world.

This isn't true at all. The collective fiction that makes up civilization
depends on this.

Saying you believe in free speech, even though free speech is a national
policy decision, is not virtue signalling if enough people do it. Saying
you're against racism isn't virtue signalling if that makes the community as a
whole more loudly against racism.

If everyone becomes cynical and refuses to "virtue signal" as you pejoratively
call it, it swings the door wide open to the government ignoring our rights
since the people have collectively already decided to give up.

------
Bucephalus355
This is garbage. The real villains are Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax.
They would have condemned half a billion people to death just to give Britain
a few extra years of peace.

~~~
YinLuck-
Half a billion foreigners should be worth less than 1 Briton to a British
leader.

~~~
dang
We've banned this account for trolling. Would you please stop creating
accounts to break the site guidelines with?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

------
rcpt
You may not like what he said around WW2 but anyone who recently moved to the
Bay Area will love his take on landlords, from 1909:

> Roads are made, streets are made, services are improved, electric light
> turns night into day, water is brought from reservoirs a hundred miles off
> in the mountains -- and all the while the landlord sits still. Every one of
> those improvements is effected by the labor and cost of other people and the
> taxpayers. To not one of those improvements does the land monopolist, as a
> land monopolist, contribute, and yet by every one of them the value of his
> land is enhanced. He renders no service to the community, he contributes
> nothing to the general welfare, he contributes nothing to the process from
> which his own enrichment is derived.

The whole thing is worth a read. [http://www.landvaluetax.org/current-affairs-
comment/winston-...](http://www.landvaluetax.org/current-affairs-
comment/winston-churchill-said-it-all-better-then-we-can.html)

~~~
kbutler
Property taxes?

At least where I live, land values are assessed annually, and the owner is
obligated to pay a percentage of that value. Those tax funds are used for the
very improvements mentioned, as well as usage-based utility fees for the
services.

~~~
pjc50
Not in the UK. We have a system that's vaguely related to the value of the
house, banded so that expensive property is under-taxed, and usually capped by
central government. It's quite a mess.

~~~
DanBC
And, since 2013, starting to disproportionately affect the poorest too.

[https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/feb/16/counci...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/feb/16/council-
tax-austerity-local-services)

------
ulzeraj
Sounds like ideologic revisionism to me.

~~~
coldtea
Only because we easily dismiss the evil perpetuated in the colonies, push
those things under the rag, and revise history to rewrite Hitler as the only
evil in the world.

It's understandable to some degree. After all, Churchill and colonialists just
enslaved and killed inferior third world peoples (who cares about them), while
Nazi Germany occupied and killed westerners...

~~~
ben_w
What I find most curious is that exactly one of the groups the Nazis
systematically slaughtered went from being widely regarded as an acceptable
target for racist degradation to being given a country, despite ~2,000 years
of being treated as _literally_ the servants of Satan, while the other groups
the Nazis targeted only gradually gained equal rights.

What’s up with that? I wish we could give every disadvantaged group something
like that. Although hopefully we’d learn lessons from creating the modern
state of Israel and avoid a repeat of the six day war.

~~~
pjc50
The Israelis weren't entirely given Israel, they took it at gunpoint (
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1947%E2%80%931949_Palestine_wa...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1947%E2%80%931949_Palestine_war)
). Anti-semitism is still a real problem and there are plenty of people
willing to claim that the k word is "acceptable".

What was unique was the coordination of the diaspora to achieve the founding
of the Jewish state.

~~~
ben_w
As always, the world seems to be messier and more complicated than I realise.

------
rukittenme
> His record in Britain’s former colonies more closely resembles that of a war
> criminal

> Churchill has the blood of millions on his hands whom the British prefer to
> forget.

If only citations mattered to people.

> 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.

A thought without action. War gaming is common. You suggest a full range of
ideas and only use the most sensible option.

> 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.”

Referring to tear gas. And they never used it! He was war gaming.

> Churchill was an open admirer of Mussolini, declaring that the Italian
> Fascist movement had “rendered a service to the whole world.”

That's called politics. Politicians have to flatter less than savory world
leaders all the time.

> “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.”

He was a war correspondent -- a journalist. He has to say these things.
Coverage of wars is always heavily censored and filled with propaganda.

> He fantasized luridly of having Mahatma Gandhi tied to the ground and
> trampled upon by elephants.

Gandhi was asking for Indian independence while Imperial Japan was invading
Bengal. Not great timing! In Churchill's eyes, Gandhi was sabotaging the war
effort and breaking up the empire that he loved so much. Churchill and Gandhi
were political enemies. No doubt every one is guilty of wishing this on their
opposition... Hell, there's a common fantasy of killing "baby" Hitler in
America.

> Thanks to Churchill’s personal decisions, more than 3 million Bengalis died
> of hunger in a 1943 famine.

Ignoring the fact that Japan was attacking India through Bengal... Bengal is a
casualty of war not a "personal decision" of a racist imperialist. The author
conveniently ignores the fact that Churchill asked the US for food aid to end
the famine... The US refused because it was not possible to provide aid. So
Churchill ordered Australia to begin shipping food but Australia's
capabilities to ship food were not great because of...you know WORLD WAR 2.
Should Churchill have ceded India to Japan? Would Japanese occupation been
better for Indians? Not in China's experience!

------
therealforsen
Turns out when you save the world from Hitler, you don't have to be a paragon.

~~~
pessimizer
Whenever I say that about Stalin, people get mad at me.

~~~
therealforsen
stalin was worse than hitler. caused much more death and misery.

------
secfirstmd
That asshole Churchill sent the Black and Tans into Ireland. They and the
Auxiliarys committed grevious human rights abuses...he's no hero.

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sevensor
While we're Churchill-bashing, let's not forget his legacy as First Lord of
the Admiralty. He had the bright idea to force the Dardanelles by landing at
Gallipoli. Utterly futile, terrible loss of life, particularly among the ANZAC
corps, no military gain.

~~~
mcguire
I believe his original plan was to force the passage using naval firepower;
the landings were a compromise with the Navy, who didn't want to lose all
their old battleships.

~~~
sevensor
Not clear on how the original plan would have been better? If I recall
correctly it was tried and abandoned because the passage was heavily mined.

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mnm1
Churchill isn't the only one or at all unique. What major imperialist leaders
wouldn't fit the label "war criminal"? Or much worse: the founding fathers of
the US weren't exactly saints either. The systematic pursuit of slavery over
hundreds of years makes war criminals and their acts almost look like child's
play. This in no way is limited to the past. Leaders today fit that
description just as much. People love war criminals. That's why they vote for
them.

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apexkid
Perfect article. High time people dismiss the self proclaimed heroic version
of western history and know the reality. A person with noble prize deserved to
be hanged till death in an Indian jail.

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dang
This comment breaks the site guidelines, which say " _Comments should get more
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