Is Winston Churchill relevant today? Yes. The Ukrainians explicitly invoke his name and his inspiring oratory in their mission to repulse Putin's foul hordes. By contrast nobody in their right mind would invoke Marx or Lenin when fighting for their Freedom.
Perhaps Churchill College played a blinder when it made Priyamvada Gopal a Fellow. After all she would not now be living in England if it had not been for Churchill. This country would have done a deal with Hitler and introduced highly racist Nationality and Residency laws. Communists like Tariq Ali would have been slaughtered on sight.
This is Gopal writing in Prospect magazine on Ali's new book on Churchill
On the back cover of Tariq Ali’s new book on Winston Churchill,
which he shat out of his back side. Ali couldn't even get into the Labor Party. He had zero impact on British or Pakistani or any other type of politics. Fuck would he know about a very successful politician?
a less flattering and so less familiar portrait of the wartime icon comes into view. Here, the man voted the Greatest Briton ever by over a million of his compatriots in 2002 fulminates against everything from women’s suffrage and liberal causes to “international Jews,” “uncivilised tribes” and “people with slit eyes and pigtails.”
Whereas Gopal and Ali prefer fulmining against one of the Greatest Briton who ever lived even though neither would be able to live in Great Britain if Hitler had won. Churchill achieved great things. These two hate mongers have only harmed any cause they have been associated with,
Ali also alludes to Churchill’s approval of the Conservative slogan “Keep England White”—
The only reason any one wants to emigrate to England is because it is White and Christian and Capitalist not Brown and Muslim and a Socialist shithole.
at the same time MPs like Fenner Brockway were bringing the Race Discrimination Bill to parliament
He failed. The first such Act was passed in 1965 after he lost his seat in Parliament because of his support for colored immigration. However, it should be noted that the right to settle in the UK for Commonwealth citizens had been removed. In other words, first colored immigration had to be restricted before racial discrimination could be curbed.
Brockway was a conscientious objector who went to jail rather than fight in the trenches. Churchill was a soldier. Brockway would have been killed by Hitler had Churchill not prevailed.
—and includes an extract from the cringeworthy praise he heaped on Mussolini in 1927.
Back then, this was perfectly justified. Mussolini was better than the Communists though, it must be admitted, he was a Socialist and thus was bound to fuck up. Churchill won his war. Mussolini lost his. Tories rule. Socialists drool.
Such pronouncements will not be new to anyone familiar with the subject,
They will be wholly irrelevant. Did you know that Einstein once said that Indians were an inferior people who “live in great filth and considerable stench.” ? Doesn't that invalidate his Theory of Relativity? Nope. No Indian physicist gave a fuck about Einstein's personal opinions. By contrast the only claim to virtue that Gopal and Ali have is the fact that they are darkies who feel entitled to shit on a great leader of the country in which they have chosen to reside.
but to invoke them in rarefied British company is usually to elicit the dismissive claim that they are not representative of Churchill or that they were simply “of their time.”
In less rarefied British company- mine, for example, the response would be 'fuck off back to JNU you shitty little retard'. It is Priti Patel who represents British Asians, not this sour little spawn of an Indian spy. Churchill College have given her a platform because her rancid rants justify Duncan Sandys type racism.
“Nobody’s perfect” goes the more casual response, as if a view of the world in which Anglo-Saxons were “a higher grade race” entitled to rule the rest was simply a charming upper-class foible.
WASPs did end up ruling a big chunk of the globe. Indians and Pakistanis seem to prefer living in WASP countries. One or two may like biting the hand that feeds or protects them. The rest try to rise up a little and then vote Tory.
Nobody’s perfect, indeed, but not everyone had the power
Ali had none though he tried to get some. This was because he was all talk no trousers. He tells a story about the Pakistani Ambassador to France flying him out to Paris. Over an elaborate meal at Maxime's, the diplomat asked for Ali's help to topple Ayub. Tariq confessed that he no longer had any contacts with the Students or the Unions. The diplomat shook his head. He wanted the rustic musclemen his family employed on their vast feudal estates.
to make such a worldview consequential for the lives of millions of people across the globe, often lethally so.
How do they get that power? By being smart not by writing worthless shite. Ali and Gopal are 'political' but theirs is the politics of futility. Why? Because they are as stupid as shit. Still, they do help the Tories and the Racists because they can be viewed as representing the disloyalty of the rest of their kind.
At the heart of Ali’s account is this historical reality,
Gopal and Ali have no contact with reality. They live in a fantasy world
one that is evaded
fuck evasion. Some people may not tell Ali and Gopal that they are stupid shitheads from a backward part of the world. But I will. Both Churchill and the British Empire were good for this country. What was good for this country is good for me because I live here and will die here- hopefully sooner rather than later. It is perfectly proper to dwell upon Britain's glorious past while accepting that it was that glory which enabled the people of this country to evolve morally and spiritually so as to live more and more in conformity with the teachings of Christ. It is quite true that neither the Empire nor Churchill went in for Bible thumping. But that is perfectly Christian. The fact is Churchill helped put this country on the path to Social Democracy and then played a great role in the defense of this country's traditional liberties. Those liberties are also flourishing more and more in India and many other Commonwealth countries.
in Britain today in favour of a burnished and bullish mythology in which both Churchill and his beloved British Empire emerge with untarnished courage and virtue.
Both showed courage and patriotism. Let it never be forgotten that Hitler wanted to do a deal with Britain. It should keep or expand its Empire to keep darkies in check. He himself would take care of the Commies. Churchill rejected that deal. That showed courage. Not time nor malice can tarnish what is genuinely virtuous. Virtue-signalers may topple statues but the people soon turn against them.
The “cult of Churchill” is a full-blown devotional practice,
No. Churchill had a sense of humor. He wrote well. His books will live. That is why he will always have admirers.
where anyone who demurs is met at the very least with shock and, more probably, tabloid denunciation.
Ali and Gopal write in tabloid style. But what they write is too foolish to appeal to the masses.
“Mythic Churchill,” as some historians have recently argued, has become a “serious fact of modern life” in Britain, “a constant point of reference in political discussion and popular culture,” and, one might add, in the culture wars constantly fomented by politicians.
Churchill is popular. Trotsky isn't. Why? Churchill made the world a better place. The Bolsheviks made created a Hell on Earth.
For Ali, this fact impinges seriously on our ability to reckon clearly with Britain’s past.
Ali is the past- a stupid and noxious one which, mercifully, the British and the Pakistanis rejected with contumely.
The cult itself, however, is of relatively recent vintage,
Churchill was hated by most Tories in the Thirties. It was only in the Fifties that he was achieved political apotheosis. But, by then, there was a Butskellite consensus. One could say that Falklands era Thatcher was Churchillian. BoJo is Thatcherism repeating itself as farce.
assuming its quasi-religious nature during the Falklands conflict in 1982.
No. Butskellism was dead. Churchill represented Free Trade plus a robust Social Security safety net. He could also symbolize a Britain prepared to defy a Continent which gone off the cliff of reason.
These cretins don't get that because Churchill was a politician, his cultus could only be political or quasi political.
One of the more astonishingly successful legacies of this propaganda exercise is the ongoing presentation of Churchill, a man of the hard right by any measure,
Says a stupid Leftie from India. Churchill allied with Lloyd George and helped him push through National Insurance and Death Duties and so forth. He was a Free Trade Tory rather than a Imperial preference fan.
as a figure who transcends political partisanship.
Churchill presided over a coalition Government. What's wrong with that?
This handy fudge
Why does Gopal not give Ali a nice handie if she loves him so much? Is it coz that senile fellow will lose sphincter control and fudge all over her hand?
enables the presentation of elite Conservative projects as above party politics.
Whereas Gopal ends up with a hand full of fudge while engaged in activities which are far below party politics.
No matter how damaging the policy, we are always “all in it together.”
Because the effects of policy are indeed experienced by everybody.
Ironically, Churchill in his own time was far from a unifying figure, famously booted out of office at the end of the conflict that contributes so much to his legend.
But the country remained united. Hitler wasn't ruling over a portion of it while Moseley controlled another bit. The fact is Churchill got back to Downing Street after voters tired of Labor misery.
Prior to the Second World War, Churchill’s career consisted of two related planks, Ali writes: “glorifying colonial atrocities abroad” and “suppressing working-class revolts at home.”
This was the Communist line. Telling stupid lies is what killed off that party. The fact is that it was Stalin who committed colonial atrocities while turning peasants and workers into slaves. Trotsky, of course, thought Stalin didn't go far enough. Ali is a Trotskyite- shittiest Commie party ever. Apparently the JVP in Sri Lanka was Trotskyite. They were and are utterly shite.
Today the British media celebrates his imperialism while quietly consigning his domestic record to a collective amnesia.
That's not the British media luv. It may be some type of Japanese tentacle porn. I wouldn't know. Still, if you can get a hard on reading Trotsky, you must be pretty fucking twisted.
Yet working-class communities, especially in Wales, have not forgotten what their grandparents and great-grandparents endured at Churchill’s hands, particularly during his time as home secretary in 1910.
But Churchill was pretty much Lloyd George's bitch back then.
Ali cites the actor Richard Burton’s revulsion for Churchill as a “bad man… a vindictive toy soldier child,” a perception embedded in his psyche during his Welsh childhood. A wartime leader Churchill may have become, but on many occasions, from Tonypandy in 1910 to Clydeside in 1919, and during the general strike of 1926, to mention but a few, “Churchill treated his own citizens as enemies,” writes Ali, willing to send in troops to manage “skirmishes on the home front.”
Which is why the British working class kept voting Tory while giving the Commies a wide berth.
Churchill deemed anticolonialism to be a wilful refusal of “superior science and a superior law”
Sadly, many Indians discovered British rule was preferable because, when elected politicians took power, they starved to death or got killed because they were of the wrong religion. Still, some got to emigrate to England. Colonialism was bound to end because White peeps don't want to live in shithole countries.
Even as he switched between Liberal and Tory affiliations, Churchill was consistently hostile to the rise of Labourism.
Shocker! By contrast Labor politicians aren't hostile to Tories at all. It is Keir Starmer they hate.
In Britain today, the separation of domestic working-class memories
which Ali and Gopal possess- right?
from imperial history is a political sleight-of-hand to which Churchill is central, made to “play a particular role.”
Why does the British working class not think the way Ali and Gopal want them to? Is it because they are mainly White and Whites have superior cognitive ability? No. Indians and Pakistanis reject Ali and Gopal even more vehemently.
Still, since White peeps won't talk Commie shite, Britain has to import a few darkies- Ali, Ash Sarkar etc- to supply the deficiency. But nobody takes political advise from peeps who come from shithole countries.
Even so, the people whom he led into a necessary war “supported him till the first opportunity arose to get rid of him, which they promptly did.”
And then they re-elected him even though he'd had a stroke.
In Ali’s telling, which draws on more honest
i.e. Commie lies
existing historical scholarship
by Commie liars
than most popular biographies of Churchill, the two-times prime minister emerges not so much as deeply racist
Reading Gopal makes me deeply racist though I'm darker than her and almost infinitely more Hindutvadi.
—some of his contemporaries remarked on it in shock—as profoundly authoritarian, with a soft spot for fascist strongmen,
actually it was Stalin he got in bed with.
and a hostility to working-class assertion.
Also he was against proletarians shoving their dicks up his arse. That was more Tom Driberg's cup of tea.
It is no accident that in his time, as well as ours, rubbishing any criticism of empire goes hand in hand with assaults on the welfare state and trade unionism.
not to mention the anal rape of Communism and the subjection of Cosmpolitanism to cunnilingus.
Indeed, British critics of empire
who achieved nothing
from Ernest Jones and Wilfrid Blunt
who was used as a cat's paw to establish British hegemony over Egypt.
to Sylvia Pankhurst and Nancy Cunard
who didn't actually scissor each other much to the chagrin of people who took bets that they had done so.
would note that colonial subjects abroad and working-class ones at home were both preyed on by the same exploitative and profiteering interests presented as merely “national” in scope.
We must abolish GREED. Also MONEY. Everybody should be constantly scissoring each other rather than spending their time buying and selling things.
For Ali, Churchill’s life is a lens through which to view a less glorious counter-history of empire
But Ali already had that 'counter-history'. Churchill's life isn't a lens to anything for him because he already had a paranoid theory of his own about what actually happened.
than those histories generally lionised in Britain.
Brown man shitting on Churchill- cool. But why can't he do it while living in his own country? Is it because it was safer to be a Red in England's green and pleasant land? But it was only thanks to Churchill that England remained pleasant.
On Churchill’s own life and tendencies, the book is at its strongest in the early chapters, where it details the young aristocrat’s reputation in his milieu as a “self-advertiser” and “medal hunter” possessed of a “vainglorious” enthusiasm for colonial conflicts, including the barbarities of the white-on-white Boer War. The British concentration camps in South Africa, which Hitler is known to have admired, find no mention in Churchill’s own copious account of that war.
So- what have we learned? The guy was a soldier who desperately wanted to return to England and take up his father's cause in Parliament. It was his literary ability which permitted this outcome. But it was his own talent and industry which saw him become a Cabinet Minister at the age of 33.
The Duke of Marlborough’s scion had an unlimited enthusiasm for colonial wars,
if they were winnable and the territory yielded a profit- sure.
most of which involved the use of questionable, if not criminal, “counter-insurgency” tactics against resistant colonial subjects.
Who turned out to be worse than the Brits in almost every case.
The terrors of the First World War, about which Ali is unsurprisingly scathing, afforded Churchill not a fulfilment of his “desire to excel at military strategy” but the humiliating naval disaster at Gallipoli in the Dardanelles.
Churchill was very active. This meant he got a lot of things wrong precisely because he also got a lot of things right. A shrewder politician would have done nothing and bided his time. Baldwin was the most successful British Prime Minister ever. He claimed that he didn't want to achieve anything in politics except to get more Harrovians than Etonians into the Cabinet. Otherwise he'd have liked to breed pigs.
Churchill also created the notorious paramilitary “Black and Tans,”
FALSE! It was created by the head of the Royal Irish Constabulary- T.J Smith. The auxillaries were created by Henry Tudor. Churchill had had nothing to do with Ireland. But as War Minister he could be held responsible for Tudor's actions. Still, he got on well with Michael Collins. Sadly this meant Civil War.
which recruited unemployed veterans of the Great War to tame insurgency in Ireland, the only anticolonial uprising to take place close to home and the legacy of which is still with us today.
The Black and Tans didn't matter because Westminster surrendered. It was the legacy of the Civil War which continues to define Irish politics.
Surprisingly, this gets only a passing mention in Ali’s -account, which otherwise discusses the Irish colonial situation in some detail.
Vardakar knows Ireland. Ali does not. Varadkar's view of Churchill would be worth listening to. Ali's senile ramblings are worthless.
The cult of Churchill is, of course, bound up less with his imperial legacy but his role in the Allied and Soviet defeat of Nazi Germany. For Churchill’s hagiographers, this is touted as negating his “flaws” in relation to the duskier peoples of the world. In actuality, both the British Empire and Nazi Germany were invested in white supremacy and a global race hierarchy, commitments that Churchill did not bother to hide.
But Indians thrived under British rule. Nobody thrived under that of Hitler, Stalin or Tojo.
But was the wartime leader at least a committed antifascist?
No. We only hate Fascists if they are trying to fuck with us. Franco didn't try to fuck with us. We left him alone and Spain rose under his rule in the Fifties and Sixties. Currently we don't care if the 'Azov battalions' have swastika tattoos. We hope they defeat Putin.
Ali evokes a man who was, in fact, rather admiring of both Mussolini and Hitler, at least until 1937 and, after the war, willing to support fascists in Spain, Greece and elsewhere against leftists
because the leftists were far more horrible
and what he deemed “the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism.”
You should hear what Leninists say about Churchill. Oh, wait. We just have. Ali and Gopal are trying to shit on Churchill because he was anti-Red. Sadly they are merely exposing their anus and producing a querulous fart.
Indeed, he would state openly that if it was a choice between communism and Nazism, he would not choose the former.
The Polish Commie whose killing of a German diplomat triggered Kristalnacht was protesting the deportation of Poles from Hitler's Germany. By contrast, everybody was trying to flee Stalin's realm.
Ali cites the New Leader, the sternly antifascist and often anticolonial newspaper of the Independent Labour Party,
a miserable failure
commenting in 1927 on Churchill’s praise for what he deemed “the commanding leadership of Signor Mussolini”: “we always suspected that Mr Winston Churchill was a fascist at heart. Now he has openly avowed it.” Although he was not alone among Conservatives in this regard, Churchill’s enthusiasm for the Italian strongman, who even at this time was recognised as an unsavoury danger, upset the eminently moderate editor of the Guardian, CP Scott, who was also less than approving of Churchill’s own willingness to deploy troops to quell domestic dissent.
If Musso had been on our side in the Second War he'd have received much higher praise. Franco, who remained neutral, was spared. But Poland, which fought gallantly, was sacrificed to Stalin's bestial appetite.
“Churchill saw fascism,” Ali writes, “as an extra-parliamentary current with its own armed bands that could defeat the communists.”
Which was unnecessary in England because of the vast hordes of Lesbians who would happily beat up Trade Unionists in the event of a General Strike. It is because women had the vote that Communism had no chance in the UK.
He is absolutely correct that fascism emerged as a force “prepared to defend capitalism and landlordism by illegal, violent and extraconstitutional methods,”
thus fascism is useless if we beat the fuck out of Commie nutters under the direction of bull dykes.
that “it was created to destroy and defeat the left,”
Communism was created to destroy the working class. It failed. Sad.
and that it “would not have triumphed had the dominant classes refused their financial and political support.”
As opposed to going out into the streets as 'special constables' and beating up Reds under the direction of bellowing bull dykes.
What about Hitler, the danger of whom Churchill did come to recognise before many fellow British politicians, including other Conservatives? Churchill was “the only serious ruling-class politician who understood by late 1938 that a failure to resist the Third Reich would lead to disaster, first for the British Empire and then for Europe.”
Actually, the best outcome for the British aristocracy would have been a modus vivendi till it had built up Air power (indeed, that was the Baldwin strategy'. What Churchill failed to predict was war with Japan.
Before then, however, he had expressed admiration for Hitler’s passionate nationalism and his success in “restoring Germany to the most powerful position in Europe.”
But it was Stalin who allied with Hitler.
Contrary to wider
and correct
perception of his prescience today, Churchill did not initially dissent from Neville Chamberlain’s soft foreign policy approach to the Third Reich,
in the opinion of a couple of leftists from the sub-continent. But they were prescient enough to get out of their shithole countries and to settle in the land Churchill safeguarded.
or indeed “appeasement,” important though it was that he broke from this approach in time.
He also allied with Stalin when it was expedient to do so. But he broke with that monster as soon as it was safe to do so.
Once he had established the danger posed by Hitler, Churchill was rightly implacable in a war for European liberation.
Not from Stalin though. The man was perfectly sane. Britain could defend itself but it could do little in Europe without America.
The unfree subjects of the empire were, however, not consulted before being brought into the war alongside Britain, an “avoidable error” that Indian nationalists, for instance, refused to countenance without protest, although there were differences among them too.
The Muslim League prevented the formation of a Federal Government which would have given assent to joining the war. Why? India depended on Britain for Defense. It did not have the capacity to fight for more than a couple of weeks on its own
This set in motion the final set of manoeuvres and negotiations that would eventually lead to the end of the British Raj
which would have happened in 1924 if Gandhi hadn't lost his nerve. However, India would have continued to depend on the British Navy for at least another thirty years.
and the liquidation of most of the empire, much to Churchill’s fury. His attitude to Indians, always hostile, took on even more intemperate form leading the Conservative secretary of state for India, Leo Amery, to remark: “on the subject of India, Winston is not quite sane… I don’t see much difference between his outlook and Hitler’s.”
But Indians fought for Churchill with much more enthusiasm than those Bose and Nambiar got to enlist in the Waffen SS.
Already, many anticolonialists across Africa, Asia and the Caribbean had asked why they should tolerate the British Empire’s racialised subjugation when they were being asked to oppose Hitler’s racist imperialism.
The answer was that things would get worse if the Brits departed prematurely. The smart play was to do the spadework for an orderly transfer of power. In any case, the Commies were clamoring to replace Westminster with the Kremlin
Combined with his rage at challenges to the British Empire, Churchill’s racial thinking had often fatal consequences for the colonised. Nowhere is that more starkly visible than in his callous and criminal response to the entirely avoidable catastrophe that was the Bengal Famine.
For which Muslim politicians were responsible just as they were responsible for the Bangladesh famine.
India could have avoided British rule. It had very many more people and was only inferior in naval technology. But Indians didn't like being ruled by Indians- especially if they were their brothers or cousins.
Between 1942 and 1944, several million Bengalis died of preventable hunger and illness,
Because Indians were in charge of Food both in Calcutta and Delhi.
and from the British Raj’s failure to provide palliative emergency measures.
Food was wholly under the control of Indians.
While scholars of South Asia recognise that multiple factors resulted in the cataclysmic loss of life—including Indian hoarding of grains, profiteering and differential “entitlements” to relief—
There is only one cause of Famine. Half starved folk having babies some of whom are bound to starve. India did not become poor and weak because of the British. Rather it came under British control because some weak people could become rich as a result.
there is little doubt
in the minds of nutters
that Churchill’s stubborn racial loathing of the subjects of the Raj played a role in the unfolding of “one of the greatest disasters that had befallen any people under British rule,” as Indian viceroy Archibald Wavell himself put it.
But Bengal was under Muslim League rule. Incidentally, Mujib ur Rahman was Suhrawardy's protege. Bengal sank after the departure of the British though, it must be said, Bangladesh has begun to rise through hard work and sensible policies.
Wavell’s correspondence with the India Office, and with Churchill, makes for startling reading.
Not really. Delhi wanted its share of American largesse. India started passing around the begging bowl before Nehru became P.M though it took his genius to make India dependent on PL 480 food while gassing on about Socialism.
The viceroy, hardly a left-wing firebrand, pleaded for relief measures, while the prime minister mocked the Indian birth rate (at a banquet!)
Nehru soon despaired of that birth rate. Poverty is produced by poor peeps having babies like crazy.
and inquired why, if the famine was so bad, Gandhi had not died yet.
It was Linlithgow who showed courage by standing up to that crackpot. Independent India soon realized the fellow was a nuisance.
Ali assigns collective responsibility for the catastrophe to the British Cabinet in London
despite the fact that they had given up power to elected Ministries under the provisions of the 1935 Act. But for the Muslim League, there would have been an Indian Federal Government a well.
while also observing, correctly, that Indian elites were “accessories” to the crime—a fact that is often forgotten by modern Indian politicians expounding on the Bengal Famine today.
Yes, yes. Elites are always accessories or accessorizing things or getting up to all sorts of antics which Commies deplore. On the other hand Communist elites get very very rich and live like Kings.
The later chapters of the book are concerned with a range of imperial misdeeds in which Churchill and his milieu were implicated—from the use of atomic bombs against Japan regime change in Iran, backing French colonial violence in Vietnam and unleashing civil war in Greece, where in the latter Churchill is “still regarded by older generations… as a tyrant and a butcher.”
So what? Gopal and Ali chose to settle in Britain not Iran or Vietnam or Greece. It is shameful to insult the heroes of the land where you yourself live safely and can speak freely.
In Churchill’s varied career, one potent ideology is consistently manifest: the entitlement of elites—specifically upper-class and wealthy white men—to rule women, the working classes and the darker peoples.
Why did Gopal and Ali- who are of darker hue- settle in an island whose ideology is bound to give a higher status to its own indigenous people? The answer is that Britain produced heroes and patriots- one of whom was Churchill. He was not a tall or well built or handsome and charismatic man- unlike his great ancestor- but he worked hard, was creative, and did the best he could. But the same could be said of the vast majority of his people. They may not be eloquent in springing to the defense of their own- Churchill had not skill, or stomach, to clear John Churchill's name of the mud Macaulay flung at it, but his histories take more trouble to be fair-minded. England has had greater orators and much greater Admirals and Generals. But cometh the hour, cometh the man. Churchill came at this island's nation's finest hour which contrary to a common misconception was three o'clock in the morning of the Second of April 1997 when I suddenly ran out of booze. Then I remembered having received a bottle of Churchill's Port. But for this happy event I might not have succeeded in remaining drunk through that dullest of decades.
Again, the man himself was not coy about stating this—insisting, for instance, that the indigenes of North America and the Aborigines of Australia had not been wronged in their dispossession by the “stronger race” and “more worldly-wise” Europeans.
The corollary is that you actually have to fight to keep what you have. Whining about having been wronged is foolish if none will make you whole.
He would claim to a somewhat disapproving US vice-president, Henry Wallace, that there was no need to be “apologetic about Anglo-Saxon superiority.”
Unless Anglo Saxons had a Teutonic boot up their arse. Churchill did drink a lot and say silly things because...urm... that's what you are supposed to do when drunk. The other guy thinks you've let your guard down and pumps your for information. You then tell him what he wants to hear.
Anticolonial nationalism was deemed by Churchill to be a wilful refusal of “superior science and a superior law” by lesser breeds.
The Empire did help Britain defeat Hitler. It was sensible for Churchill to pretend this had something to do with superior science.
The question why did Ali and Gopal choose to settle in a White country? Was it because they secretly believe Whites have 'superior science and superior law'? Or was it just that back home they'd have been dismissed as cretins pretending to be Leftists whereas in England they could be seen as representing the great mass of stupid darkies doing the shitty jobs White peeps didn't want to do.
Accordingly, he described the inhabitants of Palestine, not keen on having their lands expropriated under a British mandate, as the “dog in the manger”
an ineffectual dog.
who had no final right to it though “he may have lain there for a very long time.”
sadly this is true of all peoples at all times. The Ukrainians are showing Churchillian valor in seeking to throw out Putin's foul horde.
Others, like the Iraqi Kurds, were deemed suitable for “poison gas” by virtue of being “uncivilised.”
Why are Iraqi Kurds paying a lot of money to flee their homeland? It is not civilization that is lacking but the willingness of two great clans to share their wealth with the masses.
Perhaps the most infamous 20th-century British counter-insurgency took place in Kenya, targeting “naked savages,” as Churchill dubbed the Kikuyu. The resistance that fuelled the “Mau Mau” began under a Labour government, which failed to start the decolonisation process, as Ali notes, but the brutal emergency was declared in 1952, after Churchill had been returned to office. The landscape was then dotted with a network of hellish detention camps in which thousands were tortured and died; cover-ups took place, most notoriously in Hola detention camp, where 11 detainees were beaten to death.
But Kenyatta invited the Brits back to deal with the Somalis. On the other hand the good folk of Zimbabwe were so inspired by the Mau Mau that they completely fucked up their own country and had to flee from it.
Despite the long charge-sheet, Ali’s book is ultimately less about Churchill’s own “crimes” than an ideological cartography of the imperial-national story in which he emerges as both a leading actor and icon.
Which is why Ali's book is shit. Churchill is relevant because he stands for small nations defying brutal dictators who command vast armies. Nobody gives a shit about Empires which disappeared long ago. Nor do they care about an evil ideology which fucked up half the world. These stupid Lefties show their utter irrelevance by publishing books and articles maligning Churchill at precisely the moment when Zelenskyy and the Ukrainian people are showing that Churchill is a hero for all peoples and at all times when Freedom is imperiled.
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