The Rest of Us Always Knew Churchill Was a Villain

It's an interesting hypothesis. Isolationism was a popular position in America before Pearl Harbor, to the extent that in his 1940 campaign FDR promised he wouldn't enter into a foreign war if he was reelected. And true to his word, after he was reelected America did not declare war on Germany despite many in the press demanding it. Eventually, after Pearl Harbor, it was Germany who declared war on America, not the other way around. After that isolationists in America were quickly silenced. To these isolationists, America declaring war on Germany was one thing but Germany declaring war on America was quite another.

Prominent isolationist Charles Lindbergh even sought to sign up for the USAAF in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. His request was denied by the White House, but he nevertheless helped train American pilots and even flew combat missions as a civilian (which is a bit strange.) It's a very interesting corner of history.

The article says:

"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?"

People argue it wasn't Churchill's fault. Specifically [1], which says that the fall of Burma to the Japanese cut off Indian import sources and the wartime element meant "tough decisions" were made. It argues that in peacetime things would be different.

That really doesn't make sense. If you look at the history of famine'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't solving the problem. Not so in colonial societies.

This source [3] puts it clearly:

"Throughout the autumn of 1943, the United Kingdom's food and raw materials stockpile for its 47 million people - 14 million fewer than that of Bengal - swelled to 18.5m tonnes.

In the end, Mukherjee writes eloquently, it was "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".

To us Indians, Winston Churchill is Hitler and what happened in Bengal is an Indian Holocaust. It is appropriate to call it "revisionist history" 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.

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 "their good parts." It is crazy to me that we still do that with Churchill.

I was glad when Obama sent the bust back to England.

[1] https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/in-the-media/churchil...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_major_famines_in_I...

[3] http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/soutikbiswas/2010/10...

> "Plus; how would you stop it?"

Well the primary targets, the carriers, weren't present. That was fortunate for America, to put it lightly. With the carriers missing, the attacking Japanese pilots focused their attacks on Battleship Row, against which they did severe damage.

It should be noted however that after the first attack wave, the USN managed to put up very dense anti-aircraft fire that impeded the Japanese attackers and probably saved thousands of American lives. If the Americans at Pearl Harbor had been given even just an hour of warning before the first attack wave, they would have been in a much better position (the anti-aircraft fire they could have organized before the first wave would have been even more effective than what they managed to muster after the first wave.)

If you're interested in the details of the battle, this youtube video is exceptional: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6cz9gtMTeI

/s? I dearly hope?

I watched a special about Roosevelt and in it we see many clips of Churchill. First thing I noticed was that he was always drinking heavily, and next, that this was during the war. Basically he spent most of the war partying with the Roosevelts in Ametica.