A Different View Of Churchill That Will Enrage The Brainwashed
A
Different View Of Churchill That Will Enrage The Brainwashed
http://www.globalresearch.ca/winston-churchill-britains-greatest-briton-left-a-legacy-of-global-conflict-and-crimes-against-humanity/5503018
Winston Churchill: Britain’s “Greatest Briton” Left a
Legacy of Global Conflict and Crimes Against Humanity
Global Research, January 23,
2016
Sunday January 24th 2016
marks the anniversary of the death of one of the most lionized leaders in the
Western world: Sir Winston Churchill.
The current British Prime
Minister, David Cameron, has called Churchill “the greatest ever Prime
Minister”, and Britons have recently voted him as the greatest Briton to have
ever lived.
The story that British
schoolbooks tell children about Churchill is of a British Bulldog, with
unprecedented moral bravery and patriotism. He, who defeated the Nazis during
World War II and spread civilisation to indigenous people from all corners of
the globe. Historically, nothing could be further from the truth.
To the vast majority of the
world, where the sun once never set on the British empire, Winston Churchill
remains a great symbol of racist Western imperialist tyranny, who stood on the
wrong side of history.
The myth of Churchill is
Britain’s greatest propaganda tool because it rewrites Churchill’s true history
in order to whitewash Britain’s past imperialist crimes against humanity. The
Churchill myth also perpetuates Britain’s ongoing neo-colonial and neo-liberal
policies, that still, to the is day, hurt the very people around the world that
Churchill was alleged to have helped civilise.
The same man whose image is
polished and placed on British mantelpieces as a symbol of all that is Great
about Britain was an unapologetic racist and white supremacist. “I hate
Indians, they are a beastly people with a beastly religion”, he once bellowed.
As Churchill put it, Palestinians were simply “barbaric hordes who ate little
but camel dung.”
In 1937, he told the Palestine
Royal Commission:
“I do not admit for
instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the
black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these
people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly
wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.”
It is unsurprising that when
Barack Obama became President, he returned to Britain a bust of Churchill which
he found on his desk in the Oval office. According to historian Johann Hari,
Mr. Obama’s Kenyan grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, was imprisoned without
trial for two years and was tortured on Churchill’s watch, for daring to resist
Churchill’s empire.
Apart from being an
unrepentant racist, Churchill was also a staunch proponent of the use
of terrorism as a weapon of war.
During the Kurdish rebellion
against the British dictatorship in 1920, Churchill remarked that he simply did
not understand the “squeamishness” surrounding the use of gas by civilized
Great Britain as a weapon of terror. “I am strongly in favour of using
gas against uncivilised tribes, it would spread a lively terror,” he
remarked.
In the same year, as
Secretary of State for War, Churchill sent the infamous Black and Tans to
Ireland to fight the IRA. The group became known for vicious terrorist attacks
on civilians which Churchill condoned and encouraged.
While today Britons
celebrate Churchill’s legacy, much of the world outside the West mourns the
legacy of a man who insisted that it was the solemn duty of Great Britain to
invade and loot foreign lands because in Churchill’s own words Britain’s “Aryan
stock is bound to triumph”.
Churchill’s legacy in the
Far East, Middle East, South Asia and Africa is certainly not one of an affable
British Lionheart, intent on spreading civilization amongst the natives of the
world. To people of these regions the imperialism, racism, and fascism
of a man like Winston Churchill can be blamed for much of the world’s ongoing
conflicts and instability.
As Churchill himself
boasted, he “created Jordan with a stroke of a pen one Sunday afternoon,”
thereby placing many Jordanians under the brutal thumb of a throneless
Hashemite prince, Abdullah. Historian Michael R. Burch recalls how the huge
zigzag in Jordan’s eastern border with Saudi Arabia has been called “Winston’s
Hiccup” or “Churchill’s Sneeze” because Churchill carelessly drew the expansive
boundary after a generous lunch.
Churchill also invented
Iraq. After giving Jordan to Prince Abdullah, Churchill, the great believer in
democracy that he was, gave Prince Abdullah’s brother Faisal an arbitrary patch
of desert that became Iraq. Faisal and Abdullah were war buddies of Churchill’s
friend T. E. Lawrence, the famous “Lawrence of Arabia”.
Much like the clumsy actions
in Iraq of today’s great Empire, Churchill’s imperial foreign policy caused
decades of instability in Iraq by arbitrarily locking together three warring
ethnic groups that have been bleeding heavily ever since. In Iraq, Churchill
bundled together the three Ottoman vilayets of Basra that was predominantly
Shiite, Baghdad that was Sunni, and Mosul that was mainly Kurd.
Ask almost anyone outside of
Iraq who is responsible for the unstable mess that Iraq is in today and they
are likely to say one word, either “Bush” or “America”. However, if you asked
anyone within Iraq who is mainly responsible for Iraq’s problems over the last
half century and they are likely to simply say “Churchill”.
Winston Churchill convened
the 1912 Conference in Cairo to determine the boundaries of the British Middle
Eastern mandate and T.E. Lawrence was the most influential delegate. Churchill
did not invite a single Arab to the conference, which is shocking but hardly
surprising since in his memoirs Churchill said that he never consulted the
Arabs about his plans for them.
The arbitrary lines drawn in
Middle Eastern sand by Churchillian imperialism were never going to withstand
the test of time. To this day, Churchill’s actions have denied Jordanians,
Iraqis, Kurds and Palestinians anything resembling true democracy and national
stability.
The intractable
Israeli-Palestinian conflict can also be traced directly back to Churchill’s
door at number 10 Downing Street and his decision to hand over the “Promised
Land” to both Arabs and Jews. Churchill gave practical effect to the Balfour
declaration of 1917, which expressed Britain’s support for the creation of a
Jewish homeland, resulting in the biggest single error of British foreign
policy in the Middle East.
Churchill’s legacy in
Sub-Saharan Africa and Kenya in particular is also one of deep physical and
physiological scars that endure to this day.
Of greater consequence to
truth and history should be a man’s actions, not merely his words. Whilst
Churchill has become one of the most extensively quoted men in the English
speaking world, particularly on issues of democracy and freedom, true history
speaks of a man whose actions revolved around, in Churchill’s own words, “a lot
of jolly little wars against barbarous peoples”.
One such war was when
Kikuyu Kenyans rebelled for their freedom only to have Churchill call them
“brutish savage children” and force 150,000 of them into “Britain’s Gulag”.
Pulitzer-prize winning
historian, Professor Caroline Elkins, highlights Churchill’s many crimes in
Kenya in her book Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya.
Professor Elkins explains how Churchill’s soldiers “whipped, shot, burned, and
mutilated Mau Mau suspects”, all in the name of British “civilization”. It is
said that President Obama’s grandfather Hussein Onyango Obama never truly
recovered from the torture he endured from Churchill’s men.
The Nobel Prize-winning
economist Amartya Sen has proved how in Bengal in 1943 Churchill engineered one
of the worst famines in human history for profit.
Over three million civilians
starved to death whilst Churchill refused to send food aid to India. Instead,
Churchill trumpeted that “the famine was their own fault for breeding like
rabbits.” Churchill intentionally hoarded grain to sell for profit on the open
market after the Second World War instead of diverting it to starving
inhabitants of a nation controlled by Britain. Churchill’s actions in India
unquestionably constituted a crime against humanity.
Churchill was also one of
the greatest advocates of Britain’s disastrous divide-and-rule foreign policy.
Churchill’s administration
deliberately created and exacerbated sectarian fissures within India’s
independence movement, between Indian Hindus and Muslims that have had
devastating effects on the region ever since.
Prior to India’s
independence from Britain, Churchill was eager to see bloodshed erupt in India,
so as to prove that Britain was the benevolent “glue holding the nation
together”. For Churchill, bloodshed also had the added strategic advantage that
it would also lead to the partition of India and Pakistan. Churchill’s hope was
this partition would result in Pakistan remaining within Britain’s sphere of
influence. This, in turn, would enable the Great Game against the Soviet empire
to continue, no matter the cost to innocent Indian and Pakistanis. The
partition of India with Pakistan caused the death of about 2.5 million people
and displaced some 12.5 million others.
According to writer, Ishaan
Tharoor, Churchill’s own Secretary of State for India, Leopold Amery,
compared his boss’s understanding of India’s problems to King George III’s
apathy for the Americas. In his private diaries Amery vented that “on the
subject of India, Churchill is not quite sane” and that he didn’t “see much
difference between Churchill’s outlook and Hitler’s.”
Churchill shared far more
ideologically in common with Hitler than most British historians care to admit.
For instance, Churchill was a keen supporter of eugenics, something he shared
in common with Germany’s Nazi leadership, who were estimated estimated to have
killed 200,000 disabled people and forcibly sterilised twice that number.
Churchill drafted a highly controversial piece of legislation, which mandated
that the mentally ill be forcibly sterilized. In a memo to the Prime Minister
in 1910, Winston Churchill cautioned, “the multiplication of the feeble-minded
is a very terrible danger to the race”. He also helped organise the
International Eugenics Conference of 1912, which was the largest meeting of
proponents of eugenics in history.
Churchill had a long
standing belief in racial hierarchies and eugenics. In Churchill’s view, white
protestant Christians were at the very top of the pyramid, above white
Catholics, while Jews and Indians were only slightly higher than Africans.
Historian, Mr. Hari,
rightfully points out, “the fact that we now live in a world where a free and
independent India is a superpower eclipsing Britain, and a grandson of the
Kikuyu ‘savages’ is the most powerful man in the world, is a repudiation of
Churchill at his ugliest – and a sweet, ironic victory for Churchill at his
best.”
Amid today’s Churchillian
parades and celebratory speeches, British media and schoolbooks may choose to
only remember Churchill’s opposition to dictatorship in Europe, but the rest of
the world cannot choose to forget Churchill’s imposition of dictatorship on
darker skinned people outside of Europe. Far from being the Lionheart of
Britain, who stood on the ramparts of civilisation, Winston Churchill, all too
often, simply stood on the wrong side of history.
Churchill is indeed the
Greatest Briton to have ever lived, because for decades, the myth of
Churchill has served as Britain’s greatest propaganda tool to bolster national
white pride and glorify British imperial culture.
The original source of this
article is Global Research
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