The Rest of Us Always Knew Churchill Was a Villain
The article says:<p><i>&quot;Thanks to Churchill’s personal decisions, more than 3 million Bengalis died of hunger in a 1943 famine. Churchill deliberately ordered the diversion of food from starving Indian civilians to well-supplied British soldiers and even to top up European stockpiles, meant for yet-to-be-liberated Greeks and Yugoslavs. “The starvation of anyway underfed Bengalis is less serious” than that of “sturdy Greeks,” he argued. When reminded of the suffering of Bengalis, his response was typically Churchillian: The famine was the Indians’ own fault, he said, for “breeding like rabbits.” If the suffering was so dire, he wrote on the file, “Why hasn’t Gandhi died yet?&quot;</i><p>People argue it wasn&#x27;t Churchill&#x27;s fault. Specifically [1], which says that the fall of Burma to the Japanese cut off Indian import sources and the wartime element meant &quot;tough decisions&quot; were made. It argues that in peacetime things would be different.<p>That really doesn&#x27;t make sense. If you look at the history of famine&#x27;s in India under British rule [2], over 35MM people died due to famines, and the majority of those are due to imperial mismanagement. In democratic governments, you can vote out people who aren&#x27;t solving the problem. Not so in colonial societies.<p>This source [3] puts it clearly:<p><i>&quot;Throughout the autumn of 1943, the United Kingdom&#x27;s food and raw materials stockpile for its 47 million people - 14 million fewer than that of Bengal - swelled to 18.5m tonnes.<p>In the end, Mukherjee writes eloquently, it was &quot;not so much racism as the imbalance of power inherent in the social Darwinian pyramid that explains why famine could be tolerated in India while bread rationing was regarded as an intolerable deprivation in wartime Britain&quot;.</i><p>To us Indians, Winston Churchill <i>is</i> Hitler and what happened in Bengal <i>is</i> an Indian Holocaust. It is appropriate to call it &quot;revisionist history&quot; because the Indian and more generally Eastern perspective is not present in modern history. That is slowly changing thanks to modern scholarship and I think we will view Winston Churchill very differently in 50 years.<p>All men are flawed. Churchill did some very good things for England, and some very very bad things for India, Kenya, etc. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, etc. very all very charismatic and had strong leadership characteristics, but you cannot praise them publicly for &quot;their good parts.&quot; It is crazy to me that we still do that with Churchill.<p>I was glad when Obama sent the bust back to England.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;winstonchurchill.org&#x2F;resources&#x2F;in-the-media&#x2F;churchill-in-the-news&#x2F;bengali-famine&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;winstonchurchill.org&#x2F;resources&#x2F;in-the-media&#x2F;churchil...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Timeline_of_major_famines_in_India_during_British_rule" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Timeline_of_major_famines_in_I...</a><p>[3] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.co.uk&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;thereporters&#x2F;soutikbiswas&#x2F;2010&#x2F;10&#x2F;how_churchill_starved_india.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.co.uk&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;thereporters&#x2F;soutikbiswas&#x2F;2010&#x2F;10...</a>