Nothing, it seems, can be allowed to tarnish the national myth – as I found when hosting a Virtual Meetup With emerging young Brit writers .
To those who don't know winston churcill ,
Winston Churchill is known for being an army officer and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1940 to 1945, when he led the country to victory in the Second World War, and again from 1951 to 1955, if you read Western history.
He's the one who's hailed for bringing democracy and new political structure in the colonies of britian by Brits. He's as evil as the infamous racist hitler who was criticized heavily for his hate on jews . This scenario is a classic example of the quote
" The History is written by the victors "
In India, he's remembered as the person who caused the Bengal Famine of 1943, which resulted in an estimated death of 2.1–3 million people in modern-day West Bengal and Bangladesh.
In 1943, India, then still a British possession, experienced a disastrous famine in the north-eastern region of Bengal - sparked by the Japanese occupation of Burma the year before.
At least three million people are believed to have died - and Churchill's actions, or lack thereof, have been the subject of criticism.
Madhusree Mukerjee, author of Churchill's Secret War, has said that despite refusing to meet India's need for wheat, he continued to insist that it exported rice to fuel the war effort.
"[The War Cabinet] ordered the build-up of a stockpile of wheat for feeding European civilians after they had been liberated. So 170,000 tons of Australian wheat bypassed starving India - destined not for consumption but for storage," she said upon release of the book in 2010.
Churchill even appeared to blame the Indians for the famine, claiming they "breed like rabbits".
"It's one of the worst blots on his record," says Toye. "It clearly is the case that it was difficult for people to get him to take the issue seriously."
"Churchill viewed it as a distraction," he explains. Preoccupied with battling Germany in Europe, Churchill didn't want to be bothered by it when people raised the issue.
"We have this image of Churchill being far-sighted and prophetic," says Charmley. "But what he does tragically in the case of the Bengal famine is show absolutely zero advance [since] the Irish famine 100 years earlier."
It was a horrendous event but it needs to be seen within the context of global war, says Packwood.
"Churchill is running a global war at this point and there are always going to be conflicting priorities and demands," he says. "It's an incredibly complex and evolving situation - and he's not always going to get everything right."
Arthur Herman, author of Gandhi & Churchill, has argued that without Churchill the famine would have been worse. Once he was fully aware of the famine's extent, "Churchill and his cabinet sought every way to alleviate the suffering without undermining the war effort", Herman wrote.
It was a failure of prioritisation, says Toye. It's true that Britain's resources were stretched, he says, but that's no excuse given the relatively small effort it would have taken to alleviate the problem.
And His statements about the then national rebel leader Gandhi is an another for his racist and white supremacist attitude and beliefs .
Churchill had strong views on the man now widely respected for his work in advocating self-determination for India.
"It is alarming and nauseating to see Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir… striding half-naked up the steps of the Vice-regal Palace," Churchill said of his anti-colonialist adversary in 1931.
"Gandhi should not be released on the account of a mere threat of fasting," Churchill told the cabinet on another occasion. "We should be rid of a bad man and an enemy of the Empire if he died."
It's unfashionable today to question Gandhi's non-violent political tactics. He is venerated in much the same way as Churchill is in the UK. But for years he was a threat to Churchill's vision for the British Empire.
"He put himself at the head of a movement of irreconcilable imperialist romantics," wrote Boris Johnson in his recent biography of Churchill. "Die-hard defenders of the Raj and of the God-given right of every pink-jowled Englishman to sit on his veranda and… glory in the possession of India."
"Churchill was very much on the far right of British politics over India," says Charmley. "Even to most Conservatives, let alone Liberals and Labour, Churchill's views on India between 1929 and 1939 were quite abhorrent."
He was vociferous in his opposition to Gandhi, says Toye, and didn't want India to make any moves towards self-government to the extent of opposing his own party's leaders and being generally quite hostile to Hinduism.
Churchill's stance was very much that of a late Victorian imperialist, Charmley adds. "[Churchill] was terribly alarmed that giving the Indians home rule was going to lead to the downfall of the British Empire and the end of civilisation."
Younger Tories like Anthony Eden regarded Churchill with great mistrust during the 1930s because of his association with hard-line right-wingers in the party, he says.
"People sometimes question why on Earth did people not listen to Churchill's warnings about Hitler in the late 1930s," says Charmley, "to which the short answer is that he'd used exactly the same language about Gandhi in the early 1930s."
And We're not going to forget his totally absurd and phobic statements on jews
In 2012 there were objections to a proposed Churchill Centre in Jerusalem on the basis that he was "no stranger to the latent anti-Semitism of his generation and class".
Sir Martin Gilbert, Churchill's official biographer, countered that "he was familiar with the Zionist ideal and supported the idea of a Jewish state".
But being anti-Semitic and a Zionist are not incompatible, says Charmley.
"Churchill with no doubt at all was a fervent Zionist," he says, "a fervent believer in the right of the Jewish people to a state of their own and that state should be in what we then called Palestine."
But he also "shared the low-level casual anti-Semitism of his class and kind", he says. If we judged everyone of that era by the standards of 21st Century political correctness, they'd all be guilty, he notes. "It shouldn't blind us to the bigger picture."
A 1937 unpublished article - supposedly by Churchill - entitled "How the Jews Can Combat Persecution" was discovered in 2007. "It may be that, unwittingly, they are inviting persecution - that they have been partly responsible for the antagonism from which they suffer," it said. "There is the feeling that the Jew is an incorrigible alien, that his first loyalty will always be towards his own race."
But there was immediately a row over the article, with Churchill historians pointing out it was written by journalist Adam Marshall Diston and that it might not have represented Churchill's views at all accurately.
"Casual anti-Semitism was rampant," agrees Dockter, "[but] it's inconceivable to pitch him as anti-Semitic."
In a 1920 article, he wrote: "Some people like Jews and some do not; but no thoughtful man can doubt the fact that they are beyond all question the most formidable and the most remarkable race which has ever appeared in the world."
Even his contemporaries found his views on race shocking. In the context of Churchill’s hard line against providing famine relief to Bengal, the colonial secretary, Leo Amery, remarked: “On the subject of India, Winston is not quite sane … I didn’t see much difference between his outlook and Hitler’s.”
Just because Hitler was a racist does not mean Churchill could not have been one. Britain entered the war, after all, because it faced an existential threat – and not primarily because it disagreed with Nazi ideology. Noting affinities between colonial and Nazi race-thinking, African and Asian leaders queried Churchill’s double standards in firmly rejecting self-determination for colonial subjects who were also fighting Hitler.
This failure of courage is tied to a wider aversion to examining the British empire truthfully, perhaps for fear of what it might say about Britain today. A necessary national conversation about Churchill and the empire he was so committed to is one necessary way to break this unacceptable silence
This article is just the start of my series of articles on Britian , WW I , WW II , colonized India and the socio economic status and the life expectancy of indian layman during the era of colonization . stay tuned for the upcoming posts.
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