https://www.orfonline.org/expert-speak/rethinking-churchill-...
Churchill is usually seen in much better light. That light, however, hides many of his atrocities. History is indeed written by the victorious.
The author of the articles is Shashi Tharoor, a name that some might recognize.
Part 2 is here https://www.orfonline.org/expert-speak/rethinking-churchill-...
But had he not taken over it’s likely that most of the Europe would be speaking German today.
- https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091022064745.h...
- https://winstonchurchill.hillsdale.edu/did-churchill-cause-t...
- https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00963402.1987.11...
- Used gas against Iraqis
- Exacerbated the Bengal famine
- Used anthrax bombs against Nazi Germany
I don't believe any of these allegations are made in the preceding comment's link, although it does quote him as being in favour of the option of using gas against Arab natives.
Things like after sinking a ship letting the enemy know where they should come pick up their survivors. Not using hollow point rounds. Banning gas. Etc.
The problem is that in most wars there always seems to be a force of good and a force of evil who is not willing to follow the rules. The Germans, Japanese, Italians, Russians of that time were led by truly evil regimes.
Or maybe this is just our collective 20th century bias. How did Europe see Napoleon for example? How did countries see the actions of other nations during the previous decades?
Back to the point though, it did seem like Britain saw themselves on the side of the light and fought within the rules as much as possible. To fight an evil without becoming evil yourself is quite a challenge for humanity in general.
This did happen, at least early on, in the Battle of the Atlantic. And some U-boat crews not only stopped to pick up survivors but gave up their own bunks for them. Eventually Dönitz had to order them to stop, on the grounds that it put the sub at risk.
You might also be interested in the Charlie Brown and Franz Stigler incident [1] - sometimes a spark of human decency shines through even when you'd least expect it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Brown_and_Franz_Stigle...
> Rescue no one and take no one with you. Have no care for the ships’ boats. Weather conditions and the proximity of land are of no account. Care only for your own boat and strive to achieve the next success as soon as possible! We must be hard in this war. The enemy started the war in order to destroy us, therefore nothing else matters.
I'm not sure what happened in between that led the U-boats in the Laconia incident to ignore that order.
> All efforts to save survivors of sunken ships, such as the fishing out of swimming men and putting them on board lifeboats, the righting of overturned lifeboats, or the handing over of food and water, must stop.
I assume that between these two events the Prize Rules were followed to greater or lesser degree according to the Captain's inclinations (on both sides)
Proposed the use of tear gas. Didn't carry it out.
> - Exacerbated the Bengal famine
Its more the japanese cutting off the rice supply, However I have some sympathy with exacerbate.
> - Used anthrax bombs against Nazi Germany
No. Planned to use it in retaliation. The Nazis were keen to avoid using chemical weapons because they were aware that the british had a far greater capacity to create and deploy them compared to the Nazis. (well in 1939-42)
There are very real faults we can lay at churchill's career.
1) the bombing campaign. lots of "dehoming" (ie attacking civilians instead of industrial targets)
2) dresden
3) hamburg
4) fucking up Galipoli
Punjab banned export of grain outside its boundaries. The viceroy who answered to Churchill could have overridden that.
If Churchill wasn’t made PM there is a good argument to be made that the Jewish population would have been all but wiped out, and Europe today would be a fascist slave state to Germany. But then would the communist purges in Russia and China not have happened. No Vietnam. Peace for Europe but under brutal authoritarian rule.
Any criticism of Churchill’s historical significance really needs to consider the alternative outcome without him. I don’t think there is anyone who would want to take him out of history having acknowledged this. I think most criticism of him comes from ignorance to history.
But yes, the facts are important and it’s good that everything about history is discussed again and again.
>_Any criticism of Churchill’s historical significance really needs to consider the alternative outcome without him. I don’t think there is anyone who would want to take him out of history having acknowledged this. I think most criticism of him comes from ignorance to history._
My guess - another British PM would have made different choices, and perhaps the UK would have been overrun, or perhaps it would not. Perhaps the tide of war would have turned earlier, and the war ended in 1943, or perhaps in 1947. Perhaps it would have taken 2 or 3 British PMs to achieve it, or perhaps a better PM would have come along.
Honestly, the "Great Man" approach to history is overwrought. Here's a different take on the trajectory of the war: once set into motion, the worldwide war was a systemic entity, above and beyond the actions of any singular actor, no matter how powerful. Tactics help, but the outcomes of wars turn on systemic parameters - resources, populations, infrastructure, etc. If we could redo the war a million times and change tactics/leaders each time, the Axis powers would lose close to a million times - with individual battles changing outcomes, but not the war. Perhaps in some cases the war would fizzle out immediately, and in some cases the war would drag on for some years longer.
There is a lot of evidence to suggest that this is correct.
Churchill was the only one talking about the danger of Hitler since 1935 and the need to re-arm. Everyone else was in the appeasement camp. No one wanted war and they did everything they could to avoid it before Churchill was PM and then continued after he was PM.
The alternative to Churchill taking over from Chamberlain was Halifax who had huge support in parliament, and was who everyone wanted, but who was an appeaser, and whilst in Churchill's cabinet pushed for peace talks even after being wrong for the past 5 years on Hitler. It's not a large jump to say that if Halifax was PM, after the fall of France he would have pushed for peace which Hitler would have welcomed because his ideological nemesis lay with the Bolsheviks in the east. If Hitler had a treaty with the UK he could have committed all forces to the East and defeated Russia. Europe - game, set, match.
If you study the events of the time, it does start to seem that he was a singular force.
> If we could redo the war a million times and change tactics/leaders each time, the Axis powers would lose close to a million times
The mistake here is that its not about redoing the war...its that the war between the UK and Germany would have ceased very prematurely without Churchill.
If Halifax were PM & there was a peace treaty with Germany, who's to say Halifax would still be PM the next year and the treaty upheld by the next guy? Perhaps the situation would have thrown up a Black Swan PM? Even if Germany could overrun Russia - could they hold it for very long? Even without Russia, they were stretched thin, and wouldn't have been able to hold their continental wide Reich filled with hostile natives for very long. Thing is, we don't know. While Churchill was important for how the war does progress, it's a mistake to suppose that Churchill is necessary & sufficient in every iteration to determine the course of the war. If not Churchill, somebody else would have come along. Besides, it was only a matter of time before the Americans would have been drawn into the war, something the Japanese ensured. Even if the specifics of Pearl Harbor hadn't happened, America was bound to get involved, sooner or later. Perhaps it would have taken another year, but America had continental scale resources and population to tap into.
I think what you might be missing is that things could have gone a whole lot better if Churchill became PM even earlier in 1935 - perhaps leading to no war at all. In hindsight, Churchill greatly reduced the risk from when he became PM when he did. The Halifax scenario would have allowed Germany to grow even stronger, and ended up with a lot more people killed in camps, etc. That is, more suffering.
So maybe another way to look at this "Great Man" reading of history is from a risk/probability perspective. If you replayed history again - from a risk perspective - would you want to remove or keep? For me it seems pretty clear in we consider the probability and volume of human suffering.
> It's quite a leap to go from there to state that Fascist Europe would have stood till today.
Indeed, but I would argue the authoritarian nature of the Nazi party machinery (e.g. the SS) with a disregard for humanity (e.g. the holocaust) would have allowed them to enforce quite an unshakeable control over the region. When you don't have to worry the people you conquer being fed, and have no qualms with mass extermination - its hard to see how rebellions would be possible when you are restricted from any kind of military force - and there is no other country to help supply the equipment.
Look at China and Russia - unable to shake authoritarianism as much as they would like to even to this day. Yes, slightly different because they are not occupied nations I guess. But also look at Vichy France - this situation could have lasted for a long, long time.
That was not the question: what we had was a statement that Churchill turned the war, and that without him we would have Fascist Europe standing till today - or more pointedly, as you said in another thread, all of Europe would be speaking German. So not native Fascist dictators propped up in each occupied country, but rather a pan-European Reich. Your claim is that the one thing that prevented this from being our reality today was a single man, and that man was Churchill.
I'm suggesting that no single person, even Hitler, determined the outcome of the war once set in motion. Even Hitler did not create out of whole cloth the German resentment that led to the war. He tapped into it, weaving together different aspects of public anger for his own benefit. If not Hitler, somebody else would have, and German aggression would have happened sooner or later. His tactics (ie, the SS) might have aided his speed, but it wouldn't change the inevitable outcome, which are determined more by logistics. Hitler could divert grain away from undesired natives who are just extra mouths to feed towards the frontline and influence the tide of war, but then that's exactly what Churchill did as well with the Bengal famine.
If we're talking about reduction of human suffering, then perhaps it's instructive to consider the harm that Churchill directly created in the Empire. His policies impacted the lives of hundreds of millions of people driven to the edge of destitution as a direct result of British exploitation. He may not have created the Bengal Famine, but he took a bad situation and made it infinitely much worse. Yes, I'm aware of the explanations Churchill apologists like to offer, which is a whole lot of BS. They blame the Japanese, but ignore that British policies in India had turned a net surplus producer of food grains into an importer. British India imported rice from Burma during times of shortfall, a situation created in the first place by British policies of forcing the planting of cash crops for export. A small relevant example: prior to British occupation, rice was grown all along the Gangetic plain as a winter crop, with the river deltas producing as much as three crops in a year. The British built canals to divert water away, and turned the Gangetic plains towards growing cash crops, like indigo. For anybody unfamiliar, the indigo plant is quite toxic, and poisons the land and water table for other crops. In addition, vast tracts of land were turned towards cotton farming, since Indian linen was the currency the East India Company used for international trade. When the British Crown took direct control of India, even the weaving of cotton was disallowed, diverting raw cotton to British mills. Prior to British occupation, India produced over 25% of the world's GDP, and devastating famine wasn't really a thing. British policies in India and the rest of the Empire had put hundreds of millions of people on a knife's edge of basic survival, and Churchill's policies had the ability to push millions of people one way or the other. The Bengal famine is just one example where a single choice, whatever their justification, took the life of 3 million people directly under his care that he considered "beastly with a ghastly religion". Any other PM in his position would accrue similar blame, but Churchill is not exempt because of that when the discussion is about human suffering.
Yes, this is a huge leap, and extremely difficult to prove. I was more rebutting the point you made against the "Great Man" theory of history. I made my points on this future reality but would not want to debate it any further because there is too much that could have happened. Could Germany have won the war and controlled Europe for some time period - I think this is a high probability which Churchill prevented.
> I'm suggesting that no single person, even Hitler, determined the outcome of the war once set in motion. Even Hitler did not create out of whole cloth the German resentment that led to the war.
It's a tricky thing to debate really, because it's impossible to know what would have happened, only what did. You can only know for sure people that died under someone's command, never people that were saved by it.
> If we're talking about reduction of human suffering, then perhaps it's instructive to consider the harm that Churchill directly created in the Empire.
Leaders especially in war are responsible for a huge amount of suffering and death. As I said earlier its only certain the deaths caused not the lives saved. Churchill willingly ordered men to fight battles to their death, and also was involved in military decisions that cost many lives. There are many variables at play. In terms of net suffering, in my opinion he comes out way ahead because he defeated Hitler's regime which was one of the most inhumane the world had ever seen. If the concentration camps were left functioning for even months longer...can you imagine what the death told would have been.
> "beastly with a ghastly religion"
Do you know if there is an original source to this quote. I've seen it used to claim Churchill was racist often but there is no context to it. For example he was very critical of the caste system which could be described as "beastly". Was this an off-hand remark in frustration of such things, or did he hold genuine hatred for them in his heart.
I think its a complex and extremely controversial subject as of recent, but I am happy to have learned some new perspectives and researched some more areas - so thank you for the discussion.
Yet casting Churchill as the white knight holding firm against the rising tide of evil is also not helpful. For all his sins against the people of the colonies, I do not believe Churchill was a malicious person. He was a product of his time, and in some respects held to outmoded ideas even for his contemporaries. I'm not interested in holding Churchill or any historic figure to modern standards of morality, but it is helpful to think of him as more than just the bulwark against the Nazis. He could be both great for the UK & still a net loss if we're considering "human suffering".
I will say that using the nebulous metric of "human suffering" is an incredibly slippery slope for evaluating the actions of any historic figure. For example, some sources (eg, Shashi Tharoor in the top level comment) put the death toll from negligence just in India in 1943-44 during Churchill's tenure at over 3 million. Some like Gideon Polya put that number at 7 million. Contrast with the 6 million Jewish lives lost in the entirety of the Holocaust. Even if we accept the much more conservative figure of 2.1 million lives lost just in the single Bengal province, that's comparable to the 2.7 million killed in all the extermination camps put together. Yes, it was a complex situation, and Churchill's tenure was just the culmination of British destitution of what was once the most prosperous part of the world. I don't hold Churchill personally responsible, but many do, at least for some part of the deaths and immeasurably more human suffering that could have been avoided for little strategic gain.
If Churchill was critical of the caste system, he did precious little to address it. Indeed, the caste system as it exists today was largely a British creation. They stratified a relatively fluid social organization (jati), gave it legal sanction under the guise of a practically obscure text (manu smriti), and applied the status of "varna" upon it. This is not to say Indian society was perfect or that the caste system wasn't oppressive, far from it. But to state that Churchill's bigotry should be seen in the light of his disdain for caste is really stretching it. Indeed, if Churchill was so critical of caste, he had no qualms about his seeing White Protestants at the top of a Darwinian caste system, above Indians, who are themselves above the more savage Africans. Yes, he was a product of his time, but even his contemporaries saw him as extreme in his racial views. In light of his racial views, it's hard not to read that into his willingness to sacrifice millions of Indian lives for minimal gains on the European theatre (the grain supplies eventually ended up not with British soldiers, but shoring up Eastern European stocks just in case). Does an Indian life not equal a European one?
The quotes I believe largely come from the private diaries of Leo Avery, the Secretary of State for India in Churchill's cabinet, and his lifelong friend and ally. Leo Avery shared Churchill's disapproval of German appeasement, yet noted that in his disdain for the plight of India Churchill was "not that different from Hitler".