The dark side of Winston Churchill’s legacy no one should forget
Washington Post
Published February 3, 2015
By Ishaan Tharoor
The dark side of Winston Churchill’s legacy no one should forget
There’s no Western statesmen — at least in the English-speaking world — more routinely lionized than Winston Churchill. Last week marked a half century since his funeral, an occasion that itself led to numerous commemorations and paeans to the British Bulldog, whose moral courage and patriotism helped steer his nation through World War II.
The power of his name is so great that it launches a thousand quotations, many of which are apocryphal. At its core, Churchill’s myth serves as a ready-made metaphor for boldness and leadership, no matter how vacuous the context in which said metaphor is deployed.
But there’s another side to Churchill’s politics and career that should not be forgotten amid the endless parade of eulogies. To many outside the West, he remains an unvarnished racist and a stubborn imperialist, forever on the wrong side of history. Churchill’s detractors point to his well-documented bigotry, articulated often with shocking callousness and contempt. “I hate Indians,” he once trumpeted. “They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.” He referred to Palestinians as “barbaric hordes who ate little but camel dung.” When quashing insurgents in Sudan in the earlier days of his imperial career, Churchill boasted of killing three “savages.” Contemplating restive populations in northwest Asia, he infamously lamented the “squeamishness” of his colleagues, who were not in “favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes.”
Churchill’s racism was wrapped up in his Tory zeal for empire, one which irked his wartime ally, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt. As a junior member of Parliament, Churchill had cheered on Britain’s plan for more conquests, insisting that its “Aryan stock is bound to triumph.”
India, Britain’s most important colonial possession, most animated Churchill. He despised the Indian independence movement and its spiritual leader, Mahatma Gandhi, whom he described as “half-naked, seditious fakir.” Most notoriously, Churchill presided over the hideous 1943 famine in Bengal, where some 3 million Indians perished, largely as a result of British imperial mismanagement. Churchill was both indifferent to the Indian plight and even mocked the millions suffering, chuckling over the culling of a population that bred “like rabbits.”
Leopold Amery, Churchill’s own Secretary of State for India, likened his boss’ 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” and that he didn’t “see much difference between (Churchill’s) outlook and Hitler’s.”
At: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2015/02/03/the-dark-side-of-winston-churchills-legacy-no-one-should-forget/
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"we"? 
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If it wasn't for WWII, he would have gone down in history as a minor wanker. His prior Foreign Service (or whatever they call it over there) service was mediocre at best and he suffered being recalled for whatever euphemism they have for idiocy.
George Washington, btw, was in a similar predicament before the Revolution. Some say his indecision and silliness while in the British Army was a direct cause for the Iroquois Nation to change sides and go over to the French-- making it the the French and Indian War. (The Iroquois war chief was rumored to have asked "Who is this idiot they sent us?"
He was stripped of rank over that one. Winning the revolution saved his ass, although many historians don't think he had much to do with winning it.
who referred to Native Americans as "savages who delight in cruelty for cruelty's sake" and wrote approvingly of Houston Stewart Chamberlain's "Foundations of the Nineteenth Century" (a book that was tremendously influential on Hitler and Nazi ideas about race). He was also supportive of theories of eugenics (he wrote that "society has no business permitting degenerates to reproduce" , believed in the racial superiority of the "Anglo-Saxons", and was an unquestionable imperialist (he was one of the people agitating for war with Spain as assistant secretary of the Navy).
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