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I have searched in Hansard but cannot locate Churchill’s assertion that there was “a difference between failing to prevent food shortages and deliberate murder” so perhaps it is a paraphrase. I would like to know the reaction to it in Parliament — such legal niceties would anyway have been entirely irrelevant to the starving victims. One can only assume that the principle of criminal negligence was poorly developed at the time. There is plenty of evidence that Churchill (romantically attached as he was to the glorious empire) had an outdated and sketchy idea of what life was actually like in the sub-continent, where out of sight was out of mind. Many of the ruling class did not care to think too deeply about the humanity of the peoples they had conquered, at least at the level of the oppressed individual — it sufficed that British values represented the pinnacle of contemporary civilisation, and thus it was ethical to expand the influence (particularly of the educated upper class) of such a superior people wherever that could be achieved, with colonials lucky to have us in charge. Pre-WW2, Churchill paid qualified compliments to Hitler, who shared the view that it is in God’s design that superior guile and strength should win out. In the faltering of the liberal voice in the world today, and the rise of strident right wing nationalism in European politics, we see evidence that these ideas have not gone away.