Churchill is a white supremacist, mass murderer.

Distasteful as this opinion is, it is probably fairly accurate tbh. The fact he played a role in leading the fight against the Nazis does not extinguish the less palatable side of him.

Plus it enrages Piers Morgan and therefore is worth repeating.

whilst I worship Churchill (been to blenham palace twice, read his biography, went to the Churchill war rooms in Westminster, stopping short before getting the tattoo), it appears that ole Winston was not a big fan of the black race

Cultural context is extremely important here. The mentality of the time that he had is very different to how we view the world and other people. Most British people would have been horrendously racist to modern thinking. The teaching in the late 19th and early 20th century when Churchill was growing up re the Empire and the "natives" would be appalling to us now.  

He wasn't exactly on the Christmas card list of either the Kenyans or the Kurds that's for sure.

 

Yeah, but that's only bcos they don't celebrate Chrissie innit - otherwise they though he was a great bloke

The ginger twot who tweeted this looks about 12 years old. When he gets mugged by reality will he also share that insight with us all?

There are more important issues today ffs.

the politicians or journalists  who make these kind of points are invariably the worst kind of half-educated attention seeking twerps.  I don't like the mentality of forever wanting to find something to try and beat ourselves up over as a nation.  Other countries don't seem so baldy afflicted

You can have a debate all day about whether the British empire was overall a force for good or bad. But of course it doesn't change anything. And imo only crazies think we should be in perma apology mode for our past.

The churchill criticism thing is just another proxy for those needing their latest self-hate fix

He neglected to mention the fact that the British empire was largely built by scots of course.

Imho Blenheim should be sold to the chinese and the money raised given as compo to forrins all round the world.

Give back that big diamond that we nicked off the indians anarl

A lot of people live in places that have a lot to answer for.  Question is, should a vast bunch of the world spend their whole lives apologising and being ignored due to their privilege?

diceman29 Jan 19 12:23

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the politicians or journalists  who make these kind of points are invariably the worst kind of half-educated attention seeking twerps.  I don't like the mentality of forever wanting to find something to try and beat ourselves up over as a nation.  Other countries don't seem so baldy afflicted

You can have a debate all day about whether the British empire was overall a force for good or bad. But of course it doesn't change anything. And imo only crazies think we should be in perma apology mode for our past.

The churchill criticism thing is just another proxy for those needing their latest self-hate fix

 

 

The 90s Blair era really changed the music on this and it has accelerated since, with each PM making some apology or other and universities taking down statues, roads being renamed to scrub retrobaddies from history.  Now we have disconnected entirely from history and do not respect events in the context of their time and social space. We apply 2019 rules to 1919 events and vote it out with an X like x-factor.

To be fair I think the Germans are quite badly affected by the need to apologise for their past conduct.

 

I completely disagree, the enforced national humility has allowed them to get on with being incredibly economically successful and influential without being distracted by the a rose tinted vision of the past that leads to bullshit like Brexit and wasting money on the pretence of being a global military power. 

I don't have much time for Churchill, myself.  His views were those of his times.  To hold them now in 2019 would be rather rum, but he didn't do that, because he died in 1965. So it's a bit strange to hold it against him.  I expect Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, Henry VII and the Duke of Wellington also didn't hold  PC views.  

What I dislike about Churchill is that as a war leader he let the immediate goal of beating the Nazis completely overwhelm his sense of what would happen after the War.  His lack of prudence and foresight led to many disasters, most stemming from the Yalta conference.  For example, there was no need to give Eastern Europe to the Communists.

Britain has made basically zero serious effort to confront it's past. The idea that we've all apologised far too much and are erasing our connection to history is just laughable. At best we've made some patchwork, shallow apologies but the resentful reaction to them shows quite how little actual cultural acceptance of fault there is. The sanitised fantasy versions of what our nation's history still hold complete sway. 

Not that we're by any means unique in this, it's certainly the case in France and the US too. 

The level of public acknowledgement of the realities of what their history involved in Germany is absolutely incredible and a huge credit to the nation. 

Pancakes - and what is it about Britain's past that you feel requires "confronting" ?

At a guess, your mind is ruled by anachronism.  You see everything through the glasses of 2019 and you happily condemn people from past centuries for not obeying the laws and morals of today.  

The past was different.  People had different ideas, different incentives, different technology, different abilities and different needs (mostly food and shelter).  

Churchill was the right man, in the right place, at the right time and was also lucky as hell.  He was neither a genius nor a saint. 

He was a depressive drunk who made decisions that ended the lives of hundreds of thousands at a time, generally when half p1ssed (at best) and based often on no more than a gut feeling he was right.  He often wasn't. 

He was also a naturally very talented political PR man who was (deliberately or not) able to project a really quite cleverly nuanced image of being simultaneously an outsider and born to rule and boy could he write a speech.  At a time when we were not blessed with great political talent and were a long, long way up sh1t creek that made him the best we had. 

People who seem to expect him to have been more than he was are a bit daft. We were lucky that what he was, was enough. 

 

Dal Segno - so do you think if you went back and asked, all the people whose countries we took over were fine with it at the time because that's just the way things worked?

We're not talking about disowning our history because they weren't quite up on the latest LGBQT thinking, We're talking about mass deaths and systematic oppression in the last 100 years, I reckon we can give people of the time enough credit to have known those things weren't exactly okay. 

it's not about losing touch with history, it's about trying to make our picture of it less blinkered.

The successes and the and glamour of empire are firmly part of our cultural consciousness. Trying to expand that to acknowledge the peoples that were trampled on in the path to achieving those things doesn't make us lesser or weaker. 

No one is denying Churchill did a very good job during the war Darko.

But that is not mutually exclusive to him being a) a racist b) culpable in the deaths of a lot of innocent people.

Jimmy Savile raised a lot for charity etc

No doubt there will come a time when another country or even species is better armed and more advanced than us and they will try and colonise us and even if we lose I'm not sure I'll expect them to apologise later.

@ Wellington

Actually, Churchill was as Darko says a good politician and PR man, but a war leader he was pretty poor.  Depressive, often drunk, out-of-touch and bad at making decisions.  

Luckily for us, he was part of a larger team and they did a fairly good job.  Alan Brooke in particular as the head of the Army was incisive, accurate and realistic.  And our casualties were smaller than we might have dared to hope.  

Where Churchill screwed up was that he was so focussed on defeating the Nazis that he did not get a good deal for Britain or for Europe in the arrangements for after the war.  

 

Do you think if we asked the people whose countries we took over whether they would also have taken over countries if they could that they could have (honestly) answered no?

Do you think if we hadn't taken those countries over that it wouldn't simply have fallen to another of the main powers to do so. Do you think they would have treated those countries better?

I see no reason to apologize frankly.   Should we acknowledge (and teach our children etc) that there was another side to it and that the Britain of the time caused a lot of suffering?  Yes of course (and we do).  Should we tear down the statues of Churchill because, when in the leadership of a great power, he behaved like a leader of a great power?  Nope

he certainly did believe that white people were superior to others, there's no doubt about that

it wasn't a view universally held at the time: he was unusually racist even for his period and class

he was absolutely disgraceful and wholly wrong about Gandhi

he also had a large part to play in the death of tens of thousands of Anzac troops at Gallipoli

none of this is new 

it is not fair to call him a mass murderer though. what's that about? the indian famine? bombing of german civilians? 

heh, you are trolling now Wellers but Churchill (unlike Saville!) behaved broadly in accordance with the moral norms of 'his people' (the English ruling classes) pretty much throughout his life. 

A fairer comparison would be Bowie I guess. 

Do you think if we asked the people whose countries we took over whether they would also have taken over countries if they could that they could have (honestly) answered no?

Do you think they would have treated those countries better?

Pure whataboutery. The fact that other colonial powers were also aunts doesn't excuse the behaviour of the british empire.

what's that about? the indian famine? bombing of german civilians? 

I would say both are valid charges although the Bengal famine had a lot of other factors involved of course.

@pancakes

Let's start with the big anachronism.  You refer to the ".... people whose countries we took over.....".  This is a basic confusion.  The world did not consist at that time of neat and tidy post-Westphalian states whose populations were of one ethnicity, spoke one language and identified as the citizens of a particular, enduring state.  Nor did those populations mostly set much store by who ruled them. Nor, in most cases before about 1850 did "we" deliberately take anything over.  It just wasn't like that.  

I don't want to get into a tedious argument, but your view is simply a-historical.  The standards of 2019 have no relevance to decisions that were made in 1819 or 1919.  The only relevant yardsticks  to apply are the situations, rules, ideas, constraints, technology and standards of the day when the decision was made.  

 

 

It's not whataboutery if the charge (against either Churchill or the British Empire) is to be reasonable then the behavior needs to have been out of line judged by the standards of their peers.

Neither was. 

 

 

To be fair Dal a number of problems in this world are the direct result of us trying to impose neat geographical divisions to areas that contained what should in fact have been several different countries.

A number of years ago I won a debate putting forward exactly this argument about Churchill.

To be fair to him about the Gallipoli thing (and I have said this to uniformed Aussies) he had nothing against the ANZACs or viewed them as more expendable. Gallipoli actually killed way more British troops and was in line with what I see as Churchill's incompetence as a military planner. See also when he tried to plan a landing at Trondheim in WWII. That said for all his faults he was the leader we needed at the right time.

As regards Eastern Europe being given to the Russians, Churchill was largely sidelined at that conference and it was very much a case of divvying up between the US and Russia.

charge (against either Churchill or the British Empire) is to be reasonable then the behavior

The charge is that he is 1) racist 2) culpable of mass murder.

In respect to 1) it is beyond debate. In respect to 2) it is debatable but there are strong arguments, particularly in the bombing of Germany that he was guilty of murder.

The fact that other people at that time were also 1) racists 2) murderers doesn't not absolve the man of his crimes.

More importantly, they started it.

I dont agree with anyone apologising for things done by dead people.  wtf is the benefit of that.  my dad was a twot.  am I going to go to that bank he held up and say sorry my dad was a twot?  who fckng bemefits from that?

 

my dad was a twot.  am I going to go to that bank he held up and say sorry my dad was a twot?  who fckng bemefits from that?

 

no, but universal acknowledgement of this fact does at least take the heat off your twottishness a bit, m8.

Yeah he took 350k from a blag in neasden one time by faking a heart attack - they had a fake ambulance on call which drove him away with the money still cuffed to his wrist

@Wellington

i don’t like Churchill much and I don’t think he was a very successsful war leader.  He was a drunk and a depressive and he made a lot of mistakes.  But your “charges” against him are not so much wrong as misconceived to the point of being incomprehensible.  

You say that he was a racist and a mass murderer.  

Nobody is denying that Churchill was what we now call a racist.  The question is whether this category has any relevance at all to assessing him as a historical figure in times when absolutely everybody was committed to opinions that we now deem racist.  

As for murderer, you are out on a limb there.  He did not personally kill anyone so far as I am aware. He certainly made decisions that resulted in millions of deaths, but he did so as a minister of the crown, working with many many other people in a government system dominated by law, rules and procedures and in time of war.  Any of the decisions he made would ALSO have resulted in lots of deaths if he had taken the opposite decision or a different decision. None of that adds up to murder as that term is normally understood.  

None of that satisfies your burning desire to denigrate Churchill.  As I say, I don’t much care for him either.  

@Heffers

Churchill was born in 1871.  Almost everyone born in 1871 held a variety of opinions which we would now deem racist.  Some of these opinions were more strongly held or more adverse towards other races, some were milder.  But almost everybody subscribed to at least some of these idea.

These opinions were commonly disseminated in the newspapers and periodicals of the time, were expressed frequently in public debate (e.g. Hansard) and were not, at that time, controversial.  

That's history for you.  The past is different.  Just different.  Not better, not worse.  It can only be understood on its own terms.