Fuck Winston Churchill
Sep. 17th, 2012 10:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lokifanI just started a book called God Is Not One by Stephen Prothero. So far it's excellent, but it just cited Winston Churchill as an example of someone who was influential and great, and also good. Which lit the blue touchpaper.
Winston Churchill helped us win WW2 and therefore, most likely, had a cumulatively good effect on the world; we can never know quite what would have happened with the world in general if he'd never lived, but speaking as a Brit I'm glad he did. I am, however, sick to the back teeth of hearing him lauded as an uncomplicated national hero.
Most of the people who do it don't know there's any reason not to, so I'm not irritated by them so much as the world in general. And the ridiculous lie, most recently spouted by William Hague, that Britain has had a great long internal conversation about the Empire and our history of colonialism. That we have felt a great guilt and talked it over endlessly and we should just get over it.
BOLLOCKS. In some corners of the UK we talk about imperialism, but it's mostly swept under the carpet in infuriating fashion. I remember, as a teenager, hearing my class discuss rumours that the German exchange students hadn't done Nazism in their history classes. How shocking. And Texas schoolbooks whitewash their nation's original sin? Ugh.
I did history until I was seventeen. The only mention of British colonialism in twelve years of education was a brief mention of colonial rivalry as one of the causes for the First World War in Europe. WHAT THE FUCK.
This is a massive, massive pet peeve of mine. And this mention of Winston Churchill as both great and good steps on it, because he opposed Indian independence. He hoped Gandhi would die on his hunger strikes. HE SUPPORTED GASSING INDIANS.
"I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes."
Yeah. Europeans getting gassed, that's a horror story, but Asians? The “black people of Australia” and the Native Americans, who got the benefit of a “higher grade race coming in and taking its place”? NAH.
He was Prime Minister while millions starved in Bengal. The 1943 famine there killed millions while grain was still being exported or fed to the British-backed Indian army. When he was asked urgently to release food stocks for India, he asked, if the famine was so bad, why wasn't Gandhi dead yet.
OH YEAH. PATRIOTISM SWELLING IN MY BOSOM OVER HERE.
And no one ever hears about this! No one ever talks about it! Such that a very educated, intelligent man - not British, but not ignorant about other nations' history - cites Churchill as example of a man both Great and Good.
The sun apparently still hasn't set on the British Empire.
Winston Churchill helped us win WW2 and therefore, most likely, had a cumulatively good effect on the world; we can never know quite what would have happened with the world in general if he'd never lived, but speaking as a Brit I'm glad he did. I am, however, sick to the back teeth of hearing him lauded as an uncomplicated national hero.
Most of the people who do it don't know there's any reason not to, so I'm not irritated by them so much as the world in general. And the ridiculous lie, most recently spouted by William Hague, that Britain has had a great long internal conversation about the Empire and our history of colonialism. That we have felt a great guilt and talked it over endlessly and we should just get over it.
BOLLOCKS. In some corners of the UK we talk about imperialism, but it's mostly swept under the carpet in infuriating fashion. I remember, as a teenager, hearing my class discuss rumours that the German exchange students hadn't done Nazism in their history classes. How shocking. And Texas schoolbooks whitewash their nation's original sin? Ugh.
I did history until I was seventeen. The only mention of British colonialism in twelve years of education was a brief mention of colonial rivalry as one of the causes for the First World War in Europe. WHAT THE FUCK.
This is a massive, massive pet peeve of mine. And this mention of Winston Churchill as both great and good steps on it, because he opposed Indian independence. He hoped Gandhi would die on his hunger strikes. HE SUPPORTED GASSING INDIANS.
"I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes."
Yeah. Europeans getting gassed, that's a horror story, but Asians? The “black people of Australia” and the Native Americans, who got the benefit of a “higher grade race coming in and taking its place”? NAH.
He was Prime Minister while millions starved in Bengal. The 1943 famine there killed millions while grain was still being exported or fed to the British-backed Indian army. When he was asked urgently to release food stocks for India, he asked, if the famine was so bad, why wasn't Gandhi dead yet.
OH YEAH. PATRIOTISM SWELLING IN MY BOSOM OVER HERE.
And no one ever hears about this! No one ever talks about it! Such that a very educated, intelligent man - not British, but not ignorant about other nations' history - cites Churchill as example of a man both Great and Good.
The sun apparently still hasn't set on the British Empire.
no subject
Date: 2014-06-17 04:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-07-04 01:52 am (UTC)