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Articles
Winston Churchill the Racist War Criminal
- By SOREN GEIGER
- | April 16, 2018
- Category: Churchill for Today Truths and Heresies
Featured Image: “Bloodstains on his hands” (Tharoor): The Prime Minister with his Chiefs of Staff in the Garden of No 10 Downing Street, London, 7 May 1945 (Wikimedia Commons)
“It will always be a mystery why a few bombastic speeches have been enough to wash the bloodstains off Churchill’s racist hands.” This was how Shashi Tharoor, a successful and popular Indian politician, concluded his recent op-ed for The Washington Post. Tharoor began his piece with the sensational claim that Churchill was a mass murderer in the vein of Hitler and Stalin. One would expect such statements to have a mountain of evidence behind them. There is a mountain of evidence on these and similar issues, but from even the briefest expedition up the slopes one will see Tharoor’s arguments for what they are – revisionist, manufactured history.
By my count, Tharoor makes twenty-two distinct claims about or against Winston Churchill in his 900-word article. I could deal with each of these one at a time, but here I will examine some of the most serious. In so doing, I aim to reveal Tharoor’s allegations against Churchill as unfounded and his historical analysis as embarrassingly sloppy.
Churchill the war criminal
Tharoor first strikes by labelling Churchill as a Hitleresque war criminal, in that he habitually employed cruel and inhumane tactics against his and England’s enemies. He cites a letter in which Churchill calls for “absolutely devastating, exterminating attacks by very heavy bombers” against German cities – what we often call “terror bombing.” Tharoor links to a 2015 article in The Telegraph as his source for this quotation, which leads me to believe that he has not read the original letter in full.
If that is the case, he missed some important context, and if he did read it, then he is withholding significant information. Churchill was writing to Lord Beaverbrook, his close friend and Minister of Aircraft Production in his cabinet, two months into his first premiership. His message was not an official directive from 10 Downing St., but rather an evaluation of what it would take to prevent Hitler’s forces from rolling eastward and from growing in strength.
* * *
He recognized that Britain’s army could not successfully face Germany’s on the continent, and her fleet could not maintain an impenetrable blockade. Mastery of the air and its destructive potential, in Churchill’s opinion, was Britain’s only hope at that time for victory. He ended his letter with the telling statement: “I send this in order that you may know where I stand, before our discussion, by which I am quite prepared to be corrected.” I reproduce below the entire letter.*
We know that the Royal Air Force would go on to bomb German cities and that hundreds of thousands of civilians would be killed. Relevant, then, is Minister of State Richard Casey’s account of Churchill watching footage of “terror bombing” in June 1943. Part-way through the film, Churchill sat upright and said, “Are we beasts? Are we taking this too far?” Casey replied, “We hadn’t started it, and … it was them or us.” These hardly sound like the words of a man bent on inflicting terror for terror’s sake. Churchill was the only member of the wartime “Big Three” to react in this way.
Bombing the Irish
As further evidence, Tharoor quotes Churchill’s suggestion that airplanes should use “machine-gun fire or bombs” against Irish revolutionaries in 1920. The document that contains that quotation says: “If they can be definitely located and identified from the air, I see no objection from a military point of view, and subject of course to the discretion of the Irish Government and of the authorities on the spot, to aeroplanes being despatched with definite orders in each particular case to disperse them by machine gun fire or bombs, using of course no more force than is necessary to scatter and stampede them.”
Tharoor shies away from quoting the entire document because doing so would reveal Churchill’s prudence in phrases like “subject to discretion” and “no more force than necessary.” You do not have to be a trained historian to recognize Tharoor’s pattern of excerpting and isolating quotations from their context in order to support a sensational claim.
Poison gas
In yet another attempt to label Churchill as a war criminal, Tharoor revives an old charge that has long been dismissed. He quotes Churchill as having said, “I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against the uncivilised tribes; it would spread a lively terror.” Without having read the original document, I expected that Tharoor left out something important. I was right. Here is Churchill’s departmental minute from May 1919 in full:
“I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. We have definitely adopted the position at the Peace Conference of arguing in favour of the retention of gas as a permanent method of warfare. It is sheer affectation to lacerate a man with the poisonous fragment of a bursting shell and to boggle at making his eyes water by means of lachrymatory gas. I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes. The moral effect should be so good that the loss of life should be reduced to a minimum. It is not necessary to use only the most deadly gasses: gasses can be used which cause great inconvenience and would spread a lively terror and yet would leave no serious permanent effects on most of those affected.”
Churchill was arguing for what he believed with good reason to be a more humane ammunition than high explosive shells or highly lethal gas canisters. The “poison gas” he was in favor of using was tear gas, not phosgene or chlorine. He was advocating the very same practice currently employed by police forces around the globe.
Churchill and India
It then gets a bit personal for Tharoor. He argues that because Churchill was a racist, Tharoor’s first assumption, and because he especially hated Indians, his second assumption, that he intentionally ignored the plight of millions of Bengalese as they starved to death in 1943, his flawed conclusion. For this he relies upon Madhusree Mukerjee’s book Churchill’s Secret War. However, the real expert on this subject is Pulitzer Prize finalist Arthur Herman, who has written the authoritative work Gandhi & Churchill.
In his review of Mukerjee’s book, Herman notes how the author ignores the actual record of all Churchill, his Cabinet, and the entire British Empire did to aid the starving state of Bengal. Furthermore, Volume 19 of The Churchill Documents, which covers September 1943 to April 1944 and is 2700 pages long, contains a plethora of documentary evidence demonstrating the great lengths the British government went to for the sake of those suffering in India. Hundreds of thousands of tons of grain were shipped from around the globe to Bengal, yet still millions perished. The famine was terrible, but absent Churchill, Herman argues and the record proves, it would have been far worse.
Were Shashi Tharoor the average columnist, one would have read his article, rolled his eyes, and then got on with his work. However, he is a man of serious influence, and that makes his errors important. Distortion and slander are still less excusable in history than in politics.
*Addendum: “I am quite prepared to be corrected”
Winston S. Churchill to Lord Beaverbrook, 8 July 1940
(Churchill papers, 20/13) from The Churchill Documents, vol. 15, Never Surrender, May 1940-December 1940, pp. 492-92:Secret
I have been reading the correspondence leading up to the new aircraft programme about which we are to have a meeting at 5 o’clock this evening. I am very glad to see what a very large measure of agreement has been reached on the policy for the future, subject, of course, to your power to get the raw materials. In the fierce light of the present emergency, the fighter is the need and the output of fighters must be the prime consideration till we have broken the enemy’s attack.
But when I look round to see how we can win the war, I see that there is only one sure path. We have no continental army which can defeat the German military power. The blockade is broken and Hitler has Asia and probably Africa to draw from. Should he be repulsed here or not try invasion, he will recoil eastward, and we have nothing to stop him. But there is one thing that will bring him back and bring him down, and that is an absolutely devastating, exterminating attack by very heavy bombers from this country upon the Nazi homeland. We must be able to overwhelm them by this means, without which I do not see a way through. We cannot accept any lower aim than air mastery. When can it be obtained?
It seems to me very likely that the PE fuze and other methods on the same lines will in the course of the next year greatly increase the effectiveness of fire from the ground against enemy aircraft, and I hope we shall find ourselves scientifically ahead in this respect.
I send this in order that you may know where I stand, before our discussion, by which I am quite prepared to be corrected.
The author
Soren Geiger is director of research for the publication of The Churchill Documents, a sub-series in the official biography of Winston Churchill. This piece was first published on March 27, 2018 by The American Spectator.
Ah… so, I did read Arthur Herman’s Biography on Gandhi & Churchill 9 years ago & that book changed my views completely on Churchill from a HERO to a RACIST colonial. Churchill had tremendous racist contempt for his colonies & FIRMLY believed in White man’s burden. I’m from India so I was just as keen to learn about Gandhi from an outsider like Herman. Heck, Churchill even had contempt for GANDHI. If there was anyone who deserved a Nobel Peace prize, it was Gandhi. So, why was Churchill so mad with Gandhi that he even refused to meet him – on many different occasions & whom he described as “half-naked” & a “seditious fakir”? I appreciate values like conservatism, libertarianism & I hate the left! But the Western amnesia around Churchill is confounding! Its hard for regular people in UK & USA (who never really read about the other side of Churchill or evils of Colonialism) to ignore, deny Churchill’s Dark Side & then only focus on his achievements, primarily his courageous leadership in WW-2. Churchill once said “History will be kind to me for I intend to write it”. Bengal Famine: 3+Mn people dead directly due to Churchill’s directions for “scorched earth policy” anticipating defeats to the advancing Japanese in Bengal (Eastern India border) & then forcing food, Indian soldiers (2Mn men in WW-2) & money out of India for Allies’ war-effort. He truly despised the Indians. Churchill jailed most Indian leaders for the duration of WW-2, but not the Muslim League (Divide & Rule policy – thus Muslim League won all the local elections, weakened the Indian National Congress & successfully created a wedge with the Hindu population, directly leading to Partition of India, (into Pakistan Islamic Republic; similar to division in Arabia & Palestine) in 1947 when 2Mn people died & 15 Mn displaced). When the Indian administrations kept pleading with Churchill for food grains for Bengal, he wrote on that memo, “Why has Gandhi not died yet?”. “Leopold Amery, Churchill’s own Secretary of State for India”, likened his boss’s 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” & that he didn’t “see much difference between Churchill’s outlook & Hitler’s.” Churchill was a blatant racist, a white supremacist & the irony is that he never even tried to hide it? “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.” He referred to Palestinians as “barbaric hordes who ate little but camel dung.” When fighting insurgents in Sudan, Churchill boasted of killing 3 “savages.” Contemplating restive populations in northwest Asia, he infamously lamented the “squeamishness” of his colleagues, who were not in “favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes.” As a junior member of parliament, Churchill cheered on Britain’s plan for more colonial conquests, insisting “Aryan stock is bound to triumph.” There is not enough space here to write about this other Dark side of Churchill which is not popular with conservatives & the proud British. The British people & white racists, I guess, will never accept these facts & never look down on Churchill & colonialism
Thank you for reading. Not a bad idea at all.
(1) Now please read Arthur Herman, “Absent Churchill, the Bengal Famine would have been worse.” http://bit.ly/2CoK8Pr (2) Next read “Churchill on India,” particularly Churchill’s words to Gandhi and Nehru—hardly those of a despiser. https://bit.ly/3gurrO0 Churchill believed India should have self-government; what he opposed—and, yes, acted against—was the Congress Party’s Brahmin dominance. Hence Churchill to Ghanshyam Das Birla: “Mr. Gandhi has gone very high in my esteem since he stood up for the Untouchables.” And Gandhi’s reply: “I have got a good recollection of Mr. Churchill when he was in the Colonial Office and somehow or other since then I have held the opinion that I can always rely on his sympathy and goodwill.”
(4) Next, read Indian historian Tirthankar Roy: https://bit.ly/31MPUKw “Everything [Churchill] said about Indians and the Empire was related to the Indian nationalist movement. Negotiating with Indian nationalists during the war could be pointless and dangerous because the moderate nationalists were demoralized by dissensions and the radical nationalists wanted the Axis powers to win on the Eastern Front. No prime minister would be willing to fight a war and negotiate with the nationalists at the same time.” (5) Before you accept Leopold Amery’s hearsay Churchill quotes, read “Churchill’s ‘Racist Epithets’” to learn how they were Amery’s (but not Churchill’s) everyday speech. https://bit.ly/31MPUKw Was Amery mouthing Churchill, or himself?
(6) For what Churchill really thought about Indians read “The Indian Contribution in WW2”: http://bit.ly/2vudeNM “The glorious heroism and martial qualities of the Indian troops who fought in the Middle East, who defended Egypt, who liberated Abyssinia, who played a grand part in Italy, and who, side by side with their British comrades, expelled the Japanese from Burma…. the unsurpassed bravery of Indian soldiers and officers, both Moslem and Hindu, shine for ever in the annals of war.” Some hater.
(7) On “poison gas,” read “Churchill and Chemical Warfare,” https://bit.ly/3grhyAK and learn the difference between tear gas (which he unfortunately labeled “poison”) and the gasses Germans began using in wartime. On “Aryan stock,” read “Churchill Derangement Syndrome” https://bit.ly/2Dd2qst for where and when he said it. In the same place, you will find that the “camel dung” crack is hearsay. Nor is it possible to excuse Churchill as “a man of his time” because he was far in advance of his time. From ages 25 to 80, examples abound of his concern for the rights of peoples of all colors, particularly in South Africa (you can read about that, too): https://bit.ly/2VbJeS8
Did you read the article? It really doesn’t sound like you did. Your comments repeatedly are taken out of context. Did you not see that the gas he wanted to use was tear gas? Or that Gandhi and Churchill developed a relationship based on Gandhi’s defense for the untouchables? You don’t have to come from a region to learn its history, no one is born with an innate knowledge of their regional history.