Churchill - racist and anti-semite

[Henrik]

"This worldwide conspiracy amongst the Jews for the overthrow of civilisation has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the 19th century" -- Winston Churchill writing on 'Zionism versus Bolshevism' in the Illustrated Sunday Herald, February 1920

Churchill in favour of gassing 'lower grade' of races: "I do not understand the squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using poisonous gas against uncivilised tribes." -- Writing as president of the Air Council, 1919

Churchill in favour of exterminating lower grade of races: "I do not admit... that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia... by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race... has come in and taken its place." -- Churchill to Palestine Royal Commission, 1937

Churchill wanted to sterilize the mental ill: "The unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the feeble-minded and insane classes, coupled as it is with a steady restriction among all the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks, constitutes a national and race danger which it is impossible to exaggerate... I feel that the source from which the stream of madness is fed should be cut off and sealed up before another year has passed." -- Churchill to Asquith, 1910

Churchill in praise of Adolf Hitler: "One may dislike Hitler's system and yet admire his patriotic achievement. If our country were defeated, I hope we should find a champion as admirable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations." -- From his Great Contemporaries, 1937

"It is alarming and nauseating to see Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the east, striding half naked up the steps of the viceregal palace, while he is still organising and conducting a campaign of civil disobedience, to parlay on equal terms with the representative of the Emperor-King." -- Churchill commenting on Gandhi's meeting with the Viceroy of India, 1931

[Enrico Cernuschi]

The quotations are all correct, indeed, but what's the purpose? To proof that the Hollywood and BBC propaganda machines were very efficient to cover with some paint the ugliness of the power?
I don't think that anyone may honestly believe that the angels were all on one side and the devils all on the other one. Manicheism is fashionable among the Anglosaxons since Henry VIII, but is both bad history and bad doctrine. "Wright or wrong my country" and "hit the first and in the heavier way", this is all the philosophy necessary at war.
Personnaly I would consider Benjamin (Ben) J. Grimm (the Thing of the Fantastic Four) a deeper and more correct thinker, about life, than many famous, politically correct guys.
Bye EC

[sid guttridge]

Hi Guys,

Yes, those all sound plausible quotes, but if you can only find six discreditable quotations by Churchill in 27 years you are not trying very hard! He was a verbose public figure for over half a century!

Yes, Churchill was a man of his times, a racist and several other things besides. This is no secret and never has been.

But the point about Churchill is that, whatever his bigotries and prejudices, he did not follow them through to the genocidal conclusions of his contemporaries Stalin and Hitler.

What is more, by being instrumental in destroying Hitler and halting Stalin, Churchill's justifiably earned his positive reputation.

In the end the old racist even acquiesced in the peaceful disolution of the Indian Empire.

So, on the whole, I am thankful we had Churchill and that he was one of the major figures that bequeathed us a world in which liberal democracy, rather than Communism or Nazism, sets the standards.

Cheers,

Sid.

[Enrico Cernuschi]

I beg your pardon Sid but while, at first, I has not persuaded by Henrik ideas I must debate some of your sentences.

As a prologue,anyway, I admit to have quite a favourable opinion of the old Diehard. He was, I think, the more simpatic among the members of the War Cabinet during the Second World War and by far the more human, not a frigid guy like Eden or Kinglsey Wood, by far the worste of all the bunch.

1) "Genocidal conclusions". According Kevin Smith, Conflic over Convoys", Cambridge Universitary Press, 1996, pages 156-161, Churchill, with the noble purpose to spare his people the taste of spam (the British had, in the islandes, in late 1942, about one year of American canned meat) as his countrymen preferred the taste of blood meat (in any sense, I presume) diverted merchant ships from the Indian ocean routes (which covered, actually, everything all the area from Freetown to Calcutta) to grant the English voters, in sight of some dangerous local elections, the necessary frozen meat.
This decision was estabilished in spite of Lord linlithgow (Governor of India) pleas for 200.000 and, then, 400.000 tons of grain as "Most liberal and immediate help is absolutely necessary".
The Premier answered this and other demands with hard answers like: "I hope you will be as stiff as you can" (Prime Minister's papers, PREM 3/383/10) in a style that Himmler would have envied - as a matter of fact HH was an amateur, while tho other was a true professional since more than 30 years).
The final consequence of this unuseful decision (as the Conservative had lost the control of the majority since Dunkerque at least and all the partial elections since Spring 1942 untile the final debacle in 1945) was, according the American surveys "...Between 1.500.000 and 3.500.000 people died of starvation and related diseases after mid-1943" Agricultural crises therefore threatened the enire region from India to West Africa. When a firther US freighter aid was at least available, in late 1943, in the Indian Ocean area the harsh comment made by the Governor of Kenya about the humanitarian help sent by the "goddamed yankees" was that "...American interest in Kenyan pyrethrum and sisal dictated aid for its food supply". A sentence declared, I think, during the afternoon tea by the usual old colonial Rhodes style people. Dickens had not invented nothing at all, I believe, and the idea to have fight this kind of social system is still an honour, fifty years after, for any people involved in that struggle.
B) "Halting Stalin", When the Soviet asked the British in Aug. 1941 to recognize the 1941 borders (The Baltic staes, slices of Poland, Finland and Romania) London was ready to agree. It was the US government who stopped this happy avalanche until the Tehran conference when the Russian dictator was able, at least, to ask and obtain everything he wanted with the menace of a separate peace with Germany along the 1941 frontier. Even after that date the difference between the Americand, who tried to do something for Eastern Europe while the British (never enought ready to please the powerful and dangerous bear) granted any concession during and after the war (think only at the British engines for the future MiG 15 sold in 1947).
C) About Indian indipendence it was in 1947 and the old warhorse never approved that idea (quite natural after his young experience of a golden Sahib life at the end of the XIX Century, these were times!). Let me suggest you a look at The Hinge of fate, Houghton Mifflin, Boston 1950.
D) I can understand to be thankful to the old Premier. He was a man and a winner but for God' sake do not mix morale with brutal force. He was the stronger (with the indispensable American aid) and won, that's all.

Bye EC

[Liam]

I would think given his personality, background, lack of sobriety and the times that he lived in it's surprising that he didn't make more clangers than he did. The whole point about those comments is that, of course, he didn't gas anyone, sterilise anyone or similar. Ultimately, he was well-read, much travelled politician and the product and inheritor of a long democratic tradition combined with a loving wife and family. Herr Hitler on the other hand was an embittered, humourless, lonely crank with almost no experience of life, travel, other peoples, languages or life.

[Henrik]

Churchill was certainly responsible for genocides and war crimes, including the Dresden and Hamburg holocausts, as well as massacres in numerous other German cities, killing around 1 million people, and the ethnic cleansing of Eastern Germany, by expulsion of 15 million Germans and massacres of around 3 million civilians committed by Stalin, which Churchill plead for: "Expulsion is the method which, in so far as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting. There will be no mixture of populations [...] A clean sweep will be made. I am not alarmed by these transferences, which are more possible in modern conditions..." (Churchill, House of Commons, 1944)

[Henrik]

Churchill was also responsible for the criminal occupation, apartheid and bloody repression and massacres of "lower grade of races" in Africa, India and other places, especially as "Colonial Minister" of the British "Empire".

[Enrico Cernuschi]

According my modest opinion you are too much harsh, my Prussian (? Kaliningrad?) mate.
We cannot judge the 1944 people by the actual so called politically correct standards. They were XIX Century men, when life was a very expendable item.
The real problem is when someone today try to believe that there were only good guys and bad ones and that the "bad" peoples must be damned forever letting the good to teach them the morale.
Bye EC

[Henrik]

The problem is that Germany is judged by the actual politically correct standards, and so should mr. Churchill. There is little discussion about the long history of British and American racism (the US had race laws until the 60'ies, I think, and their genocide in Vietnam as late as in the 70'ies should be called so). Even last year they started an illegal war of aggression, killing around 10,000 Iraqi civilians and totally until 150-200,000 Iraqis.

[sid guttridge]

Hi Henrik,

There is an enormous literature on British and American racism. Some on the right think there is already too much, while others on the left will never think that there is sufficient.

British and American history is not without its blemishes, but at least both societies have proved capable of recognising their racism as a fault and attempted to correct it.

Nazism's racial record was totally different. Nazism tried to pursue racism through to its logical conclusion: Genocide in its most literal sense - the total extinction of other races.

Cheers,

Sid.

[Henrik]

Nazism's racial record was totally different. Nazism tried to pursue racism through to its logical conclusion: Genocide in its most literal sense - the total extinction of other races.

So did the British and Americans: From the extermination of the native population of USA to the genocide in Vietnam.

[sid guttridge]

Hi Enrico,

You have touched on the single most overlooked issue of the Commonwealth's war effort - the famine in India and its enormous death toll that amounted to not less than two-thirds of all Commonwealth fatalities in WWII.

It seems to me that accusations of British responsibility in this matter are much more convincing and real than any of the various accusations of British responsibility for bombing its enemies in Dresden or acquiescing in the expulsion by its allies of Germans from Eastern Europe.

Differential decisions undoubtedly were made by British officials that definitely did result in an exceptionally high death toll of people in British care that probably exceeded a million.

This deserves its own thread.

Cheers,

Sid.

[Enrico Cernuschi]

I dont't believe that the origin of the Second World war is racism and I still think that this factor had not a decisive influence on German policy until Sept. 1941 and was, even after that season, only a factor (a bloody factor) of the general, huge German administrative chaos. I told it before, I say it again. Nazy Germany was an anarchic political system of the lowest level both according efficiency and ideology. Fascism had an intellectual dignity (not, however, of too much great value, except for labour policy and workers rights); Nazism was only pure, brutal force. The great difference was that 80 millions of people with a great industry were quite more effective than 40 millions with quite a weaker economical system. In the long run, anyway, Nazism was doomed like comminusm; they were both not efficient and not emendable structures.
I have to admit too I'm unable to understand Hendrik opinions. Vietman was not genocide (a word too much used and abused, I think). It was a defensive war (the Americans didn' t invade the enemy land, what a political and military idiocy, like to play soccer only in his own half of the champ hoping to win) against the North Vietnamese which tried to invade the south. It was a bad conceived and worst led war and the consequence, the usual one, is to blame now the losers. According a moral point of view ther's no difference to critic Hitler or Johnson, the were defetaed and stop. So this is a contradiction.
For the Iraq matter the problem is quite the same. Ther's a winner and a loser. The real mater is not to be defeated. If Saddam had win would be now claiming he was morally better than the Anglosaxons? A bit difficoult, I think.
Perhaps the only right (morally) position was Mr. Berlusconi offer to Saddam to give up accepting an exile in Libya before the beginning of the carnage he could not hope to win after the previous 1991 experience. Unfortunatly good ideas (Like Mussolini's proposal for a new Monaco, at once refused by the British and the Germans, in late August 1939 in spite of the favourable French pleas) are often not welcomed.
Bye EC

[Enrico Cernuschi]

Sid, you are a gentleman.
Greetings EC

[John Kilmartin]

Liam,
I believe if you look int o the matter he actually did order the gassing of Kurds in Iraq circa 1922.