history.
Churchill’s detractors point to his well-documented bigotry, articulated often with shocking callousness and contempt. “I hate Indians,” he once trumpeted. “They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.”
He referred to Palestinians as “barbaric hordes who ate little but camel dung”. When quashing insurgents in Sudan in the earlier days of his imperial career, Churchill boasted of killing three “savages”. Contemplating restive populations in northwest Asia, he infamously lamented the “squeamishness” of his colleagues, who were not in “favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes”.
At this point, you may say, so what? Churchill’s attitudes were hardly unique for the age in which he expounded them. All great men have flaws and contradictions — the American founding fathers, those great paragons of liberty, were slave owners.
One of Churchill’s biographers, cited by the Washington Post’s Karla Adam, insists that his failings were ultimately “unimportant, all of them, compared to the centrality of the point of Winston Churchill, which is that he saved (Britain) from being invaded by the Nazis”. But that should not obscure the dangers of his worldview.
Churchill’s racism was wrapped up in his Tory zeal for empire, one which irked his wartime ally, US president Franklin D. Roosevelt.
As a junior member of parliament, Churchill had cheered on Britain’s plan for more conquests, insisting that its “Aryan stock is bound to triumph”.
It is strange to celebrate his bravado in the face of Hitler’s war machine and not consider his wider thinking on other parts of the world. After all, these are places that, just like Europe and the West, still live with the legacy of Churchill’s and Britain’s actions at the time.
India, Britain’s most important colonial possession, most animated Churchill. He despised the Indian Independence movement and its spiritual leader, Mahatma Gandhi, whom he described as “half-naked” and labelled a “seditious fakir”, or holy man.
Most notoriously, Churchill presided over the hideous 1943 famine in Bengal, where some three million Indians perished, largely as a result of British imperial mismanagement.
Churchill was both indifferent to the Indian plight and even mocked the millions suffering, chuckling over the culling of a population that bred “like rabbits”.
Leopold Amery, Churchill’s own secretary of state for India, likened his boss’ understanding of India’s problems to King George III’s apathy for the Americas.
Amery vented in his private diaries, writing “on the subject of India, Winston is not quite sane” and that he didn’t “see much difference between (Churchill’s) outlook and Hitler’s”. When Churchill did apply his attention to the subcontinent, it had other dire effects.
As the Indian writer Pankaj Mishra explains in the New Yorker, Churchill was one of a coterie of imperial rulers who worked to create sectarian fissures within India’s Independence movement between Indian Hindus and Muslims, which led to the brutal partition of India when the former colony finally did win its freedom in 1947.
Millions died or were displaced in an orgy of bloodshed that still echoes in the region’s tense politics to this day. (India, it should be noted, was far from the only corner of the British Empire victim to such divide-and-rule tactics.)
“The rival nationalisms and politicised religions the British Empire brought into being now clash in an enlarged geopolitical arena,” writes Mishra, gesturing to the spread and growth of political Islam in parts of South Asia and the Middle East. “And the human costs of imperial overreaching seem unlikely to attain a final tally for many more decades.” When measuring up Churchill’s legacy, that tally must be taken into account. –Courtesy Washington Post
(Ishan Tharoor writes about foreign affairs for the Washington Post. He previously was a senior editor at Time, based first in Hong Kong and later in New York.)