A genocidal villain who has a place in hell with the worst cretin of his time.
Winston Churchill
- Thread starter Cascarino
- Start date
Half of the morons who’ll cry themselves to sleep tonight over Churchill’s statue being defaced are also the same morons who fetishise swastikas and other Nazi regalia.
You couldn’t make it up if you tried.
You couldn’t make it up if you tried.
I'm not going to read that tweet (I don't engage with arguments as poorly constructed as yours is here).
What does Tommy Robinson have to do with anything. Anti intellectual nonsense.
Churchill's past is a mixture of the British imperial milleu he personified weighed against his at times solitary voice in not giving in to the Nazi war machine. Whatever his reasons (empire, in case you don't know) he successfully waged war against a man who murdered six million Jews and five million others in a systematic cleansing operation.
Churchill wasn't as bad as Hitler and it's nonsense to pretend he was just because he was also a racist. It's a black and white view of a very non black and white topic.
Last edited:
Whatever people's views of Churchill, it's a moronic hill for any movement to wage war on. Slave trader statues are all well and good, but cenotaphs and Churchill are not winning any hearts and minds and are never going to. And anyone who thinks otherwise is, at best, delusional.
And this is the most important point. Aside from being far from certain in terms of historiography, it's an absolutely stupid area to focus on for this particular movement.
All just your opinion, based solely on whatever exposure you've had to history and echo chamber cultural propaganda, which you're welcome to. Tommy also agrees; so good for you, that's the boat you're in.
But don't think for one moment that you speak for the majority, certainly outside of England.
Last edited:
A very wide echo chamber which encompasses communist party talking points, Russian, Indian and Irish perspectives (across the spectrum).
What are your sources? I've read lot of history books on the topic and a lot of academic papers from a lot of perspectives. I'm only now wondering which canonical ones I've missed.
Churchill for me was the type of man required to lead Britain against the nazi war machine 1939 to 1945 he was the type of asshole that could stand up to Hitler and say bring it on but the years before and after world war 2 that side of his legacy should be scrutinised.
Just playing devils advo [some people love this shit lol] but by what metric are you authoritatively stating that it is a universal fact Hitler was worse than Churchill.
The Holocaust sets the two apart. Churchill's worst crimes were in India but were arguably more part of a centuries old British imperial structural mentality. Would have happened (and historically did happen) without him. Whereas Hitler came to power on the back of an ideology he and one other person tailor made. The Holocaust was something that the Nazis invented and it's on Hitler.
Ohhhh so one is structural mentality, meaning sustained. Hitler was only a reaction to that same imperialism, and at the same time, the holocaust can only be attributed to him because anti semitism never existed anywhere else for it to be cultivated in the same vein.
Gotcha. Yeah I see what you mean.
No, I don't think you understand at all.
The Irish famine is a good counterpoint. The British were responsible for many such famines which were avoidable (if not intended, though quite possibly that too). Churchill was a cog in that system in his early career and so bears responsibility. Obviously. Hitler however created an Aryan ideology without which eleven million people wouldn't have been murdered and burned in ovens. Seems bizarre to have to even make this distinction.
My point was imperialism, though admittedly I made it badly. Excuse me.
Not even in the same league. You want to talk about people killed by systems/ideologies, not even close.
Nazism was imperialism.
The Holocaust is reducible to one party and to one or two people's involvement in that party. Without Hitler there is no Holocaust. Without Churchill all the horrors of British imperialism go on more or less as they did with differences here and there. Maybe better outcomes in some cases worse in others. An academic point really.
It's not hard to take a critical position on Churchill without having to go overboard and pretending he was worse than Hitler. If that's your supposition the onus is really on you to prove it because it's outlandish even by post-war Soviet standards.
Never was my supposition. And I've never implied it, personally appreciate that Churchill was a n arsehole but I find solace in that there were people in government opposed to him.
This interaction was to build up to the point that, who is seen worse in history will be determined by those at the end wrong end of that sword. It's not crazy to think that the millions that died directly due to Churchill, will feel he's the worse evil.
Which would be limited to India and that's a valid point. The only thing I question is whether Churchill was directly responsible for the death of millions in the same respect as Hitler. Would Indian famines have happened if Churchill wasn't involved? I think so considering the history of British imperialism throughout the world over the previous three centuries but it's a topic that can be debated. It is worth noting that Gandhi and fellow leaders of the Indian Independence movement were willing to set aside problems during the second world war when they didn't have to (the Irish didn't during the first war).
Well, seeing as we can only question the possibilities of alternative history, it is debatable. But by all accounts he was an overtly blunt racist even for the times.
Nice exchanging
I probably could have made it more interestingly convoluted but i'm pretty drunk tbh
I agree though that for those who died because of the British, Churchill won't be seen as much different to Hitler.
Undoubtedly. Also there's Dresden and his repression of the labour movement in the UK. He did a lot of criminally terrible things in his lifetime. If it weren't for WW2 he wouldn't be a controversial figure at all, he'd be reviled or forgotten. But such was the depravity of Hitler's Nazis that most viewed Churchill as the lesser of two evils.
Worked out in the end I guess
This isn't quite right. The 1943 Bengali famine has been shown to be one of the only famines ever in that region that wasn't caused by drought. In fact the weather in 1943 was good for crops. But despite calls from the Vice-Roy to Churchill's cabinet for emergency food to be bought in, Westminster ordered that rice exports from the region to the rest of empire carried on regardless. Churchill is reported as saying that the reason for the famine was Indians "breeding like rabbits" and wondered if there was a famine how come Ghandi was still alive.
There was also what was called the denial policy in the region which meant massive supplies of rice were removed to make sure they wouldn't fall into Japanese hands if they were to invade.
No one knows how many people died but it's estimated to be between 2.5 and 3 million. Tying to work out whether this is as bad as Hitler or not is abiot of a facile argument, so I won't bother going there. But to say it would happened anyway without the government decisions and policies of the day is wrong. The war cabinet made specific decisions which ended up in the deaths of millions from starvation.
To try and cast Churchill as either a Hero or a villain, is too stark a choice. He was a terrible minister during WW1 (Gallipoli) and a poor Chancellor of the Exchequer afterwards (general strike and return to the gold standard), after that he languished on the back benches and was deeply unpopular. He actually never won a general election until 1951.
But he was a great orator, brilliant at rallying people, lifting the spirits of the UK during some of its darkest days - in other words he was a great war time leader for the people.
I rate him on par with Hitler for the Bengal famine alone but there's way more atrocities on his CV than that. But I'm not white so maybe that's why. Like I don't cry wank over WW2 the way a lot of Brits and Americans do.
How does one know if the victors didn't influence the writings of the losers?
Anybody read Roberts’ biography of Churchill? Bought it the other day so hoping to get to it over the summer.
FFS. This play really is a cesspit at times.
He’s more or less despised by a lot of Irish people, for obvious reasons.
Isn’t he mainly just lucky with timing? Tony Blair oversaw the Uk becoming its most prosperous in the last 100 years and everyone hates him. I reckon the same would be true of Churchill if he didn’t live in a time where the public didn’t look so hard for feet of clay.
Agree wholeheartedly.
Churchill was the right man for a crucial period in British history. He was a reassuring, uniting presence for many people in Britain who were living under great hardship at the time.
I think the British people recognised that he was just a man for a moment, as he was unceremoniously dumped in the election in 1945.
I think the British people recognised that he was just a man for a moment, as he was unceremoniously dumped in the election in 1945.
Brilliant.
I think this sums it up quite well.
I’ve read Richard Toye’s historic investigation into Churchill. It was covered in this article in Independent newspaper 10 years ago.
https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www....rk-side-of-winston-churchill-2118317.html?amp
Of course, it’s easy to dismiss any criticism of these actions as anachronistic. Didn’t everybody think that way then? One of the most striking findings of Toye’s research is that they really didn’t: even at the time, Churchill was seen as at the most brutal and brutish end of the British imperialist spectrum. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin was warned by Cabinet colleagues not to appoint him because his views were so antedeluvian. Even his startled doctor, Lord Moran, said of other races: “Winston thinks only of the colour of their skin.”
Many of his colleagues thought Churchill was driven by a deep loathing of democracy for anyone other than the British and a tiny clique of supposedly superior races. This was clearest in his attitude to India. When Mahatma Gandhi launched his campaign of peaceful resistance, Churchill raged that he “ought to be lain bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi, and then trampled on by an enormous elephant with the new Viceroy seated on its back.” As the resistance swelled, he announced: “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.” This hatred killed. To give just one, major, example, in 1943 a famine broke out in Bengal, caused – as the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has proved – by the imperial policies of the British. Up to 3 million people starved to death while British officials begged Churchill to direct food supplies to the region. He bluntly refused. He raged that it was their own fault for “breeding like rabbits”. At other times, he said the plague was “merrily” culling the population.
Skeletal, half-dead people were streaming into the cities and dying on the streets, but Churchill – to the astonishment of his staff – had only jeers for them. This rather undermines the claims that Churchill’s imperialism was motivated only by an altruistic desire to elevate the putatively lower races.
how much coke has he had at this point?
How do you know it didn't effect his thinking and planning?
I guess the reverse might be to say how do you think Jeremy Corbyn would have got on as PM in 1939?
Forget ancient history, the history lessons you read and the americans one and the asian countries' one are totally different. The only thing we can agree is the Nazi are the bad guys, and that's because they lost so badly they have no choices.
Do you think that the Churchill statue should be taken down and replaced by a national memorial?
If that's the case we should imprison Cheney and Bush first before we talk about Churchil