One of the most peculiar sights of the Great Awokening and its wave of statue-toppling and desecration was the repeated attacks on the statue of Winston Churchill in London’s Parliament Square. After all, the rioters are people who never hesitate to declare their hatred of ‘Nazis’ and ‘fascists’ – and Churchill was the one man who, more than any other, led the fight against real Nazis and fascists. So, what was these clowns’ beef with the great man?
Because, like so many of the utter convictions of the modern left, what they think they know, just ain’t so.
The root of the woke left’s hatred of Churchill is not just the usual, bog-standard, charges of ‘racism’, but an extraordinary, defamatory, claim by a single revisionist journalist. Bengali American journalist Madhusree Mukerjee claimed, in a meretricious 2010 ‘history’ conspiracy potboiler, Churchill’s Secret War, that Churchill deliberately engineered the starvation of millions of Indians in the 1943 Bengal Famine.
Needless to say, it’s a load of old cobblers.
Firstly, while Churchill no doubt shared many of the prejudices of his time and class, to describe him as murderously racist toward Indians is farcical. While, as a young subaltern barely out of his teens in the British Indian Army, Churchill grumbled about ‘this tedious land of India’, he also described its inhabitants as ‘primitive but agreeable races’. Paternalistic maybe, and definitely not ‘PC’, but hardly raging racism.
In 1919, in fact, Churchill savagely condemned the Amritsar massacre as ‘monstrous’. As the push for Indian independence gathered pace in the 1930s, Churchill argued – correctly, as history would prove – that British-style independent democracy was incompatible with India’s diverse patchwork of languages, castes and religions. A Hindu-dominated government, he argued, would fracture the precarious unity established by the Raj over the past 150 years.
As the brutal, bloody partition of newly independent India in 1947, with its millions of deaths and even more millions of rapes and other atrocities, proved, Churchill was right. His animosity to Hindu-majority rule was also coloured by his distaste for Hinduism barbaric practices, such as the dominance of the Brahmin caste, the perpetuation of untouchability and the subjugation of women, especially in the practice of child-brides (even today, India remains the world’s most intense hotspot of child brides).
All of that hardly speaks of a supposed motivation to deliberately starve millions. Nor does his valorising of “the unsurpassed bravery of Indian soldiers and officers, both Moslem and Hindu”, whom he said, would “shine for ever in the annals of war”.
The accusation against Churchill also ignores the single biggest fact of 1943: Churchill, and Britain, were embroiled in a to-the-death fight against fascism in both Europe and Asia. Indeed, at one point, Britain itself came within just six weeks of running out of food due to Germany’s blockade. Meanwhile, Japan had already occupied Burma and invaded Bengal and Singapore had fallen. Calcutta was being bombed and Japanese submarines prowled the coast, sinking merchant shipping, including food supplies.
So how has a 67-year-old British Prime Minister in poor health, five thousand miles away, fighting near annihilation in a world war, come to be charged with causing such a cataclysmic disaster?
[…] the actual evidence shows that Churchill believed, based on the information he had been getting, that there was no food supply shortage in Bengal, but a demand problem caused by local mismanagement of the distribution system.
Mismanagement compounded by the very internal hostilities Churchill had warned about. Specifically:
Uneasy relations between the elected, Muslim-led, coalition government of Bengal and its largely Hindu grain merchants, notorious for hoarding and speculation. Churchill had resisted the 1935 constitution granting Indian provinces autonomy; but, by the 1940s, he regarded the food situation in Bengal as primarily a matter for its elected ministry rather than Whitehall. Within the War Cabinet itself, Churchill’s role was one of broad oversight, rather than detailed management, so the idea that he had much influence on actual relief aid to Bengal is far-fetched, especially at the height of the war.
Notably, Mukerjee never blames Churchill for actually causing the famine. Rather, she claims that Churchill callously sacrificed Indian lives by refusing to allow grain shipments from Australia and Canada, bound for Britain, to be diverted to Bengal.
One has only to look at a map to see what a nonsense it would have been for Australian ships bound for Europe to come anywhere near the Bay of Bengal and run the gauntlet of Japanese submarines.
The true facts about food shipments to Bengal, amply recorded in the British War Cabinet and Government of India archives, are that more than a million tons of grain arrived in Bengal between August 1943, when the War Cabinet first realised the severity of the famine, and the end of 1944, when the famine had petered out. This was food aid specifically sent to Bengal, much of it on Australian ships, despite strict food rationing in England and severe food shortages in newly liberated southern Italy and Greece. The records show that, far from seeking to starve India, Churchill and his cabinet sought every possible way to alleviate the suffering without undermining the war effort.
Indeed, Churchill specifically advised newly appointed viceroy, Field Marshal Archibald Wavell, that “Every effort must be made, even by the diversion of shipping urgently needed for war purposes, to deal with local shortages.” In April 1944, he begged US President Roosevelt for shipping to supply Bengal (the request was refused on the grounds that America needed all its shipping to supply the Pacific theatre and the imminent D Day landings).
A few months later, ‘racist’ Churchill told Indian statesman Sir Ramasamy Mudaliar, a member of the War Cabinet, that “that the old notion that the Indian was in any way inferior to the White man must disappear”. “I want to see,” he said, “a great shining India, of which we can be as proud as we are of a great Canada or a great Australia.” Churchill was also known to proudly boast of India’s rapid population growth under British rule.
Whatever the merits of India’s population explosion under stable British rule, these were hardly the sentiments of someone willing genocide by starvation on the Indian people.
Far from smearing his statue and reputation, the Woke left should be bending the knee in fervent thanks to Winston Churchill.
But that would require thinking critically and honestly.
