Michael Gerson doesn’t like Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s new book on Churchill:
The charge that he maliciously caused the Bengal famine – in the sense that Joseph Stalin caused the Ukrainian famine – seems half-baked.
Gerson’s complaint against the book is that he thinks the author is “a snide journalist fishing with a tiny ideological net” and he claims that Wheatcroft supposedly cannot do justice to the subject. This is an unfair cheap shot at the author, and it suggests that Gerson is frustrated that he doesn’t have a serious defense for the ugliest parts of Churchill’s record. It is convenient that Gerson decides that “isn’t possible to consider each of the charges here,” because if he had to consider the charge of Churchill’s responsibility for the 1943 Bengal famine he would not be able to mount much of a defense. At best, Churchill was guilty of horrible neglect that led to the preventable deaths of millions of people living under the rule of the government he led. The evidence strongly supports the contention that the reality was far worse than simple neglect. He did not just “fail” to “prevent” the famine. In his history of famine, Mass Starvation, Alex de Waal comments on the causes of the Bengal famine:
It is also now well established that the colonial government in London bears the greater responsibility for causing the famine [bold mine-DL] by requisitioning food reserves and stopping all waterborne means of transport, including fishing boats, for fear that these might be useful to the Japanese army which was advancing through Burma, and for failing to enact standard relief measures when the famine was underway. Prime Minister Churchill insisted that food supplies to Britain itself should in no way be jeopardized by providing famine relief to a British imperial possession. Churchill’s offensive views of the Indian people undoubtedly played a role in this, the most lethal of British crimes during the war.
Madhusree Mukerjee, author of Churchill’s Secret War, explained Churchill’s responsibility like this:
On August 4, 1943, Winston Churchill made one of his most important but least known decisions: he declined to send wheat to India, then a British colony, thereby condemning hundreds of thousands, or possibly millions, of people to death by starvation. The inhabitants of Bengal, an eastern province of India where famine was raging, were of little value to the war effort and in any case they were “breeding like rabbits,” he explained at subsequent War Cabinet meetings (as recorded by Leopold Amery, the Secretary of State for India).
Did Churchill “maliciously” cause the famine? I don’t think we can know if he made the decisions he made out of malice, but he clearly made them out of indifference to Indian lives. If the best defense Churchill admirers can muster is that “at least it wasn’t the Holodomor,” perhaps they should reflect on why they feel the need to make excuses for a mass atrocity. In her history of India’s role in WWII, The Raj at War, Yasmin Khan described the thinking that led to the famine:
Some people’s lives were not seen as worthy of preserving. The state was geared in every way to the war and prioritised this at all costs. Human negligence and failure to prioritise other human lives as equal was the root cause. Certain lives were not seen as worthy of mourning, or as fully valid as others, and the lives of the people of Bengal had been sacrificed towards the greater global aim of winning the war. The lives of the famine victims were a cost of the Second World War, but these casualties were not counted as such.
Read the rest of the article at Eunomia
Daniel Larison is a weekly columnist for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.
Churchill also killed millions in Europe. Hitler had sent him peace offers several times in 1940, proposing that Germany withdraw from occupied areas except for traditional German regions that were seized after World War I. Churchill should have accepted this offer, but he was an arrogant, selfish, bumbling, alcoholic, psychopath whose actions destroyed Europe and the British Empire.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXHxiKDTHfU
Also see Churchill’s role before he became PM: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Winston-Churchill/During-World-War-I
Then he wanted a war between the US and Russia after WWII: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Unthinkable
i read up Unthinkable before. Some truth on him unearthed with time.
Complete nonsense.
Churchill was a deeply flawed, right-wing imperialist, feudalist and racist. But he was right from the start about Hitler. He didn’t even need to guess about him: i.e. Hitler had made his intentions 100% clear to the world way back in 1925 when he published Mein Kampf.
As for peace offers, the idea that Hitler had any intention of withdrawing forces from northern Europe without first turning the whole region into a large version of Vichy France is beyond laughable. Hitler was completely untrustworthy, and he proved it throughout his life: agreements and treaties meant nothing to him and he referred to them as ‘bits of paper’. Why would Churchill trust him when the whole reason for the start of the war in Europe was that Hitler had unilaterally torn up the ‘piece of paper’ that was the Munich Agreement (which Hitler had personally signed less than 12 months earlier) and invaded Poland???
Churchill was flawed – like many leaders in history. But Hitler was a monster, the like of which only shows up every 1,000 years or so.
@Carlton Meyer; The Second World War started in 1939. Churchill did not come to power until 1940. You can’t blame hime for everything.
Prior to his assent to MP he was Lord of the Admiralty that same year, he was responsible for violating Norwegian neutrality and the subsequent German invasion and it’s occupation.
This caused the collapse of the British government and Churchill’s appointment to MP.
He had a knack for failing upwards.
Do you ever wonder why the British people voted him out of office once the war was over? I don’t.
Here is another memorable article of the British government (at the time) and notably Churchill’s racism: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/dec/07/britains-empire-richard-gott-review
I expect the pro-war hawks are likely to jump in to defend their hero from being exposed for being the racist that he was: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29701767
Is there any doubt that Churchill was a racist? I doubt you would actually find any non-racists (by today’s definition) in early 20th Century Britain. i.e. Churchill was no more or less a racist than the people he led. And for them, imperialism was more than a demonstrably successful model for their nation – it was something of a religion.
I imagine his views on homosexuality also reflected the time and place of his existence and position. So what, exactly, is the point in berating him for his contemperaneous views on such matters? Was he supposed to act according to what he imagined were the mores of a society more than 120 years in the future?
He was what he was: an Edwardian imperialist (a necessarily racist proposition) at a time when imperialism was extremely fashionable. However, what can’t be taken from him is that he led his nation to defy Hitler and Nazism – ultimately helping to remove the gravest threat to western human civilisation since the fall of the Roman Empire.
Our own Woodrow Wilson was certainly a racist. His references to the people of Haiti were quite monstrous.
“I expect the pro-war hawks are likely to jump in to defend their hero;” but I repeat myself.
It has long been a wide open secret that Winston Churchill was every bit as racist, bloodthirsty and unrepentant as Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin. He didn’t involve himself in the Second World War for democracy, he intervened to protect his own Reich. It’s really little wonder that he’s every western imperialist’s hero.
Again, nonsense.
There were no extermination camps or gulags under Churchill. Nor did Churchill invade Europe and the Slavik nations/Russia – enslaving and exterminating peoples he believed to be entirely expendable. Neither did he aim, and almost succeed, to remove an entire people from the face of the earth.
Churchill was a late-Victorian/Edwardian imperialist, and all his racism and inherent belief in white-supremacy fits adequately within that description. Hitler, OTOH, was a messianic ideologue pursuing an anti-human vision. The two are not remotely comparable in terms of magnitude of evil.
NB: Stalin was also an evil and twisted man for whom human life and virtues meant nothing. He was certainly much more evil and destructive than Churchill. Even so, he was no match for Hitler in that respect.