Winston Churchill: Hero, racist, and imperialist
.
How similar, how very similar, to America's Dear Old Presidential Slimeball !When asked about the rights of the indigenous people in Palestine, Churchill refused to accept that they had any: “I do not admit, for example, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the Black people of Australia. I do not admit that wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race, to put it in that way, has come in and taken their place.”
Years previously, as Britain’s secretary for war, Churchill had championed the use chemical weapons to put down rebellion in India and Iraq, writing in a memo, “I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes.” He was also responsible for the use of chemical weapons in Russia in 1919 with the aim, in conjunction with various other imperialist powers, of crushing the Russian Revolution.
During the Second World War, Churchill’s disdain for non-white European peoples was laid bare with his culpability in the deaths of three million men, women and children in the Bengal Famine of 1943.
Despite the starvation that had swept through this blighted province of India, Churchill ordered the diversion of desperately needed food from India to Europe. The fact that the 70,000 tons of food exported by the British from India in the first seven months of 1943 would have kept 400,000 people alive for a year is a chilling one. “I hate Indians,” Britain’s most venerated prime minister is said to have told one of his underlings. “They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.”
.