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Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill was born on November 30, 1874, at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire. He attended Harrow and Sandhurst before embarking on army career, seeing action in India, and Sudan. He became conservative MP in 1900, but in 1904 joined the Liberal Party. He was cabinet member from 1908, and First Lord of the Admiralty from 1911 until the disastrous expedition in early part of WW I. He served on Western Front for a while, before joining the government again from 1917-1929.

During 1930s, he was politically isolated for his opposition to Indian self-rule, support for Edward VIII and warnings about the rise of the Nazis.

He replaced Neville Chamberlain as prime minister after WW II broke out when his fame as inspirational wartime leader was well established.

Then in 1945, Churchill lost power but became prime minister again in 1951 and continued as prime minister until 1955. He died on January 24, 1965, and was given a state funeral and became a great British icon to British people.

Winston Churchill is hailed as a hero of World War II in America and rest of the western nations—except Germany—for leading Britain through her darkest hour. But his dark side is conveniently ignored and so, not that well-known. 

George W. Bush kept a bust of Churchill near his desk in the White House, attempting to foolishly associate himself with the war leader’s heroic stand against fascism. But Barack Obama had it returned to Britain. It is not hard to guess why: His Kenyan grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, was imprisoned without trial for two years and was tortured on Churchill’s watch, for resisting Churchill’s empire. 

A 2002 nationwide BBC poll voted Churchill the “greatest Briton ahead of Shakespeare, Darwin or Elizabeth I.

Again, BBC carried out a poll in 2012 on the hundred greatest Brits.

As a result, Winston Churchill emerged as the greatest Briton. So, there is no question that, in the minds of most Brits, even today, Winston Churchill is the greatest of them all. But with the publication of books such as Madhushree Mukerjee’s award winning “Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II”, or India’s MP, Dr. Shashi Tharoor’s Book, Inglorious Empire, it should be clear to everyone that the “Greatest Briton” was not only a racist war criminal who committed crimes against humanity but also deserves a more special epithet, that of a “genocidal dictator”. Shashi Tharoor further writes:

“This (Churchill) is the man who the British insist on hailing as some apostle of freedom and democracy, when to my mind he is really one of the more evil rulers of the 20^th century only fit to stand in company of the likes of Hitler, Mao and Stalin”.

Tharoor writes further that when Britain arrived on its shores, India’s share of the global economy was 23 percent. By the time the British left India, it was down to below 4 percent. Why? Simply because India had been governed for the benefit of Britain. Britain’s rise for 200 years was financed by its depredations in India.

Churchill vs Hitler

Hitler killed some 6 million Jews by gassing them with cyanide poison gas while Winston Churchill was responsible for killing 4.3 million or more Indians in West Bengal by starvation. Slow death by starvation is the most horrible death than a death in few minutes by poison gas. So how can Churchill be better than Hitler?

If instead of gassing millions of Jews, Hitler simply starved them to death, would he be kinder and more humane? Either the British people were negligently unaware of Churchill’s heinous crimes or they were simply morally bankrupt to elevate Churchill as the greatest Briton. At least, the Germans don’t celebrate Hitler’s life.

They rightly condemn him.

Whether you kill somebody by starvation or you shoot or stab him to death, the result is the same. Both are murderers. Slow grueling death by starvation is worse than dying quickly by cyanide-poison gas… 

Image: Bengal famine of 1943: Dead and dying children on a Calcutta street published in the Statesman 22 August 1943 (From the Public Domain)

As Tharoor points out further:

“Churchill’s wartime philosophy was simple: he would exterminate the Japanese, bomb the Germans into the ground, and starve the Indians to death. Thanks to his personal decision, some four million Indians starved to death.” 

Churchill was the most reactionary among the Englishmen of his time. His views were so extreme that they cannot be excused as reflection of prevailing views at the time. His statements appalled most of his contemporaries. His own Secretary of State for War, Leopold Amery, confessed that he could see very little difference between Churchill’s attitude and Hitler’s.

For Churchill, freedom and democracy faltered at the border of the empire. As Tharoor opines further, “he was an appalling racialist, one who could not bring himself to see people of color as entitled to the same rights as himself.”–“ Gandhi-ism and all it stands for,” declared Churchill, “will sooner or later, have to be grappled with and finally crushed.” 

War with Germany

Looking at his words and policies, Churchill was an outright imperialist and a racist. Throughout his career, he was always for personal glory and self-promotion. When he became the prime minister during WW II, he was in favor of terror bombing of civilians of Germany. He wrote that he wanted “absolutely devastating, exterminating attacks by very heavy bombers.”

The result was horrific firebombing of Dresden. He also recommended chemical warfare against German civilians. ‘I should be prepared to do anything that would hit the enemy in a murderous place,” he declared in a 1944 letter:

“I may certainly have to ask you to support me in using poison gas. We could drench the cities of Ruhr and many other cities in Germany…let us do it one hundred percent.”

Churchill’s team had another plan called Operation Vegetarian. It involved feeding German cattle anthrax cakes: This would kill the cattle, depriving Germans of milk and beef, but also kill German civilians eating infected cows. Churchill was untroubled by the immorality of this course.

The same way, the expulsions of Germans from Hungary, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Poland were carried out brutally, resulting in great suffering and causing the death or disappearance of over 2.1 million Germans. Churchill was unfazed, telling the House of Commons on December 15, 1944:

“Expulsion of people is the method which, in so far as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting. There will be no mixture of populations to cause endless trouble…A clean sweep will be made. I am not alarmed by these transferences, which are more possible in modern times.”

Views on Islam

In his book, The River War, Churchill wrote:

“How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia (rabies) in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. Improvident habits, slovenly system of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the prophet rule or live.”

Taric Ali, the Pakistan-born British author of Winston Churchill: His times, His Crimes (Feb. 2023), rightly describes Churchill the way he was. According to him,

“Winston Churchill’s brave resistance as British prime minister in World War II was an exception. He militantly defended the British Empire, which led him to massacre national liberation fighters in place as disparate as India, Kenya, and Ireland. He justified such atrocities by explicitly espousing white supremacism. He admired the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and coddled the Spanish dictator, Francisco Franco. He bombed the German civilians and advocated a nuclear first strike, not just against Japan in World War II but against the Soviet Union in peacetime. He ignored pleas from his own government to address humanitarian crises, such as the Bengal famine of 1943, in which three million  people perished. He abhorred social democratic values, resisted the social welfare state, and used army to repress striking workers”.  

Churchill was born in 1874 into a Britain that was consolidating the empire while washing the distant nations blood red. Queen Victoria had just been crowned Empress of India and the scramble for Africa was only a few years away. While at Harrow School and then at Sandhurst, he was told a simple story: the superior white man was conquering the primitive, dark-skinned natives, civilizing and bringing them the benefits of civilization. As soon as he could, Churchill jumped in to take part in “a lot of jolly little wars against barbarous peoples”. Now a part of Pakistan, in Swat Valley, he experienced fleetingly some doubt. He realized that the local population was fighting back because they didn’t want the white foreigners had invaded the lands, they considered their own just as Britain would if they were invaded. But Churchill conveniently suppressed this feeling, deciding instead they were just deranged jihadists for whom violence was a second nature  explained by a “strong aboriginal propensity to kill.”

The young Churchill charged through British atrocities, defending each one of them. When concentration camps were built in South Africa, for white Boers, he said they produced  “the minimum of suffering”. The death toll reached 28,000. When at least 115,000 black Africans were also swept into British camps, where 14,000 died, he wrote about his “irritation that Kaffirs should be allowed to fire on white men”. Later, he boasted of his experiences there: “It was great fun galloping about.”

So, he gladly took part in raids that laid waste to whole valleys, destroying houses, and burning crops. He then went to help reconquer Sudan, where he bragged that he personally shot at least three “savages”. 

Image: Barack Hussein Obama, Sr. (Licensed under Fair Use)

Hussein Onyango Obama is rare among Churchill’s victims because his story has come to light because his grandson happened to become the president of the United States.

He believed that Kenya’s fertile highlands should be the preserve of the white settlers and approved kicking out the local black people. He saw the local Kikuyu as “brutish children”. Under Churchill’s post-war premiership, when they rebelled, about 150,000 of men, women and children were rounded up at gunpoint and forced into detention camps. Churchill either directed or was complicit in policies involving the forced relocation of local people from their fertile highlands to pave the way for white colonial settlers. 

Pulitzer Prize winning historian, Professor Caroline Elkins—for five years, she studied the detention camps and wrote the book, “Britain’s Gulag” which narrates the brutal End of Empire in Kenya, explaining the tactics adopted under Churchill to crush the local drive for independence. “Electric shock was widely used, as well as cigarettes and fire.” Further she writes: “The screening teams whipped, shot, burned, and mutilated Mau Mau suspects.” Hussein Onyango Obama was one of the prisoners and never truly recovered from the torture he endured. 

His Views on Gandhi

This is what Churchill said about his anti-colonial adversary in 1931:

“It is alarming and nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir…striding half-naked up the steps of the Vice-regal palace.”

“Gandhi should not be released on account of a mere threat of fasting,” Churchill told the cabinet on another occasion. “We should be rid of a bad man and an enemy of the empire if he died.”

Image: Mahatma Gandhi

Churchill, as per his colleagues, was driven by his loathing of democracy for anyone other than the British and a tiny clique of supposedly superior races. This was made clear by his attitude towards India. When Mahatma Gandhi launched his campaign for peaceful resistance, Churchill raged that “Gandhi ought to be lain bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi, and then trampled on by an enormous elephant with the new Viceroy seated on its back.” As the resistance took momentum, he announced: “I hate Indians. They are beastly people with a beastly religion.” Well, this hatred resulted in the killings of some 3.5 to 4.3 million Indians. 

Starving Millions of Indians to Death

In 1943, a terrible famine broke out in Bengal, India, as a result of—as per Nobel Prize laureate Amartya Sen—British imperial policies. Up to 4.3 million people of Bengal starved to death while British officials begged Churchill to direct food supplies to the region. There was ample food available in other parts of India—He bluntly refused. As news about famine spread, the Canadians, New Zealanders, and Australians, all offered food, but Churchill could not find a single ship to carry the grain and save millions of starving Indians.

“Wheat”, lamented an Australian minister, “was practically waiting to be loaded on boats.”

Doesn’t this show Churchill’s intent to let the Indians starve to death? Churchill instead, raged that it was their own fault for “breeding like rabbits.” Later at other times, he said that the plague was “merrily” culling the population. Half-dead, skeletal people were roaming into the cities and dying in the streets, but Churchill—to the astonishment of his staff—had only jeers for them. This was Churchill, the mass murderer who is hailed as a hero in America and the rest of the western world!

Not only Churchill didn’t care to help starving millions of Bengal famine created due to British policies, but he persisted in exporting grain to Europe, not to feed actual ‘Sturdy Tommies’, to use his phrase, but add to the buffer stocks that were being loaded up in the event of a future invasion of Greece and Yugoslavia.” He deliberately ordered the diversion of food from starving and dying Indian civilians to well-supplied British soldiers and to add up to European stockpiles in Greece and elsewhere. Laden with wheat, ships were coming in from Australia docking in Calcutta but were instructed by Churchill not to disembark their cargo but sail on to Europe. When conscience-stricken British officials wrote to the Prime minister in London pointing out that needless loss of life was being caused by his policies, he just peevishly wrote back, “Why hasn’t Gandhi died yet?”

Author of Churchill’s Secret War, Madhushree Mukerjee has said that despite refusing to meet India’s need for wheat, he continued to insist exporting the rice to fuel the war effort.

“Churchill’s War Cabinet ordered the build-up of a stockpile of wheat for feeding European civilians after they had been liberated. Hence, 170,000 tons of Australian wheat bypassed starving India—destined not for consumption but for storage,” releasing her book, she said in 2010.

Churchill’s Racial Hierarchy

John Charmley, author of Churchill: The End of Glory, says,

“Churchill certainly believed in racial hierarchies and eugenics. In Churchill’s view, white protestant Christians were at the top, above white Catholics, while Indians were higher than Africans. Churchill saw himself and Britain as being the winners in a social Darwinian hierarchy.”

As per former British PM Harold Macmillan, Churchill floated “Keep England White” as a campaign slogan for the 1955 election. More damning is the recollection of his politician friend, Violet Bonham Carter: when asked his opinion on China in 1954, he reportedly replied: “I hate people with slit eyes and pigtails.” All these comments shows how racist this man was.

Further proof of his racism was: He informed Peel Report on the British mandate in Palestine that First Nations in north America and Australia had been colonized by “a stronger race, a higher-grade race”.

He advocated using poison gas on Kurds and Afghans. As a minister for war and air in 1919, he wrote in a memo:

“I cannot understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes.”

Looking at his life’s record, his policies, his writings, and his utterances–despite massive propaganda in the western world–one cannot help but conclude that Winston Churchill was nothing but a racist criminal, the same way as Adolf Hitler was.

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Chaitanya Davé is an engineer and a businessman. He has authored three books: CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY: A Shocking Record of US Crimes since 1776-2007, COLLAPSE: Civilization on the Brink-2010, CAPITALISM’S MARCH OF DESTRUCTION: Replacing it with People and Nature-Friendly Economy. Author of many articles on politics, history, and the environment. Founder/President of a non-profit charity foundation helping the poor villagers of India, Nepal, Haiti, USA-homeless and other poor countries. He can be contacted at [email protected]. 

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.