7 Replies to “Winston Churchill: For a nation to tax itself into prosperity…”

  1. “…the great irony of Churchill’s life. In resisting the Nazis, he produced some of the richest prose-poetry in defence of freedom and democracy ever written. It was a cheque he didn’t want black or Asian people to cash – but they refused to accept that the Bank of Justice was empty.”

    For those willing to look beyond the “Great Man’s” pithy quotes, here is a slice of honest history: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/not-his-finest-hour-the-dark-side-of-winston-churchill-2118317.html. No, not from RT or Pravda. From the UK Independent.

    1. A product of his time, no doubt, but he was far more than a jingoistic anachronism.

      However we may dwell upon the difficulties of General Dyer during the Amritsar riots, upon the anxious and critical situation in the Punjab, upon the danger to Europeans throughout that province, … one tremendous fact stands out – I mean the slaughter of nearly 400 persons and the wounding of probably three to four times as many, at the Jallian Wallah Bagh on 13th April. That is an episode which appears to me to be without precedent or parallel in the modern history of the British Empire. … It is an extraordinary event, a monstrous event, an event which stands in singular and sinister isolation……

      Let me marshal the facts. The crowd was unarmed, except with bludgeons. It was not attacking anybody or anything. It was holding a seditious meeting. When fire had been opened upon it to disperse it, it tried to run away. Pinned up in a narrow place considerably smaller than Trafalgar Square, with hardly any exits, and packed together so that one bullet would drive through three or four bodies, the people ran madly this way and the other. When the fire was directed upon the centre, they ran to the sides. The fire was then directed to the sides. Many threw themselves down on the ground, and the fire was then directed on the ground. This was continued for 8 or 10 minutes … [i]f the road had not been so narrow, the machine guns and the armoured cars would have joined in. Finally, when the ammunition had reached the point that only enough remained to allow for the safe return of the troops, and after 379 persons … had been killed, and when most certainly 1,200 or more had been wounded, the troops, at whom not even a stone had been thrown, swung round and marched away. … We have to make it absolutely clear … that this is not the British way of doing business. … Our reign, in India or anywhere else, has never stood on the basis of physical force alone, and it would be fatal to the British Empire if we were to try to base ourselves only upon it.

      ~ Speech in the House of Commons, July 8, 1920 “Amritsar” ; at the time, Churchill was serving as Secretary of State for War under Prime Minister David Lloyd George

      1. The Independent article mentions this rare twinge of conscience. It is like throwing the odd scrap to the dogs. It doesn’t alter the reality of a career otherwise steeped in the blood of non-whites to uphold Pax Britannica. Despite its brutality, the Jallianwala Bagh massacre was a minor blemish compared to greater atrocities, such as the deliberately engineered Bengal famine of 1943 that took three million lives. His deplorable statements on that crime against humanity can be found here:
        http://yourstory.com/2014/08/bengal-famine-genocide/

        Churchill, along with his modern day compatriots like Bush and Blair, deserves only contempt. Their honeyed rhetoric on human rights and democracy is belied by the casual, conscience-free ease with which they brush aside the non-white lives lost in their feeding frenzy.

      2. The British have a deplorable record when it comes to treatment of other races. But this extended to whites as well as non-whites. Take the record of Pax Britannica in South Africa for instance. Nor should we single them out as any worse than the Spanish, Dutch, Belgians, Germans, French, Portuguese, Italians and other European nations who seized empires in Africa, Asia and South America. They all have a brutal history.
        Nor should we single out Bush and Blair as any worse than the millions of politicians — whether European, Asian, African, Middle Eastern, South American, North American — who have disregarded or neglected the safety of civilians in their own or other countries. Or is it because we expect them to meet a higher standard?

  2. You can slice it and dice it all you want, Colin. Churchill, Bush and Blair are responsible for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of deaths. Overwhelmingly non-white. That they might also have, incidentally, caused the loss of some white lives in the process is small comfort to the unwashed natives.

    As for those other millions of politicians, I am afraid there is no hiding in a crowd of human shields for this trio. Those millions will shrink rapidly to a handful when you factor in how many had comparable power to wreak havoc on such a scale. Among those handful, these three are indeed to be held to a higher standard because they all ruled in the post-Nuremberg era of democracy, human rights and the UN. They spouted the noble ideals of this supposedly enlightened era while employing the barbaric ways of our lawless past harking back to the Spanish Inquisition and the Mongol hordes. In faraway lands other their own where they had no business to be, where no one invited them in, over which they bestowed suzerainty upon themselves. Some arguments are not worth prolonging for the sake of an unconvincing draw because the evidence is shouting in one’s face.

    1. KV we seem to be going full circle. It comes back to comparison of Bush/Blair to Stalin and Mao. There is none. I am not condoning anyone’s actions, but despotic leadership is not particularly a white thing. All races (Pol Pot, Idi Amin, …) are prone to this.

  3. Churchill had his faults, but one cannot deny his overwhelming part in first recognising the threat of Hitler’s advancing power and then marshalling the allied response to defeating it. Pause for a moment and imagine if Hitler had not been stopped what the world would have been like. Churchill is still a major net positive to the world, both developed and developing in my book.

Comments are closed.