The Rest of Us Always Knew Churchill Was a Villain

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943#Debate_a...

It certainly seems like an area of controversy, but is it so clear cut that it was Churchill's fault? It seems like the main takeaways are:

> Academic consensus generally follows the FEE account, as formulated by A. Sen (1977) and A. Sen (1981a), in describing the Bengal famine of 1943 as an "entitlements famine". On this view, the prelude to the famine was generalised war-time inflation, and the problem was exacerbated by prioritised distribution and abortive attempts at price control,[323] but the death blow was devastating leaps in the inflation rate due to heavy speculative buying.[324][AZ] This in turn caused a fatal decline in the real wages of landless agricultural workers,[325] transforming what should have been a local shortage into a horrific famine.[326]

If that's the case, was this clearly foreseeable or not, and were there alternatives? And it continues:

> More recent analyses often stress political factors.[BA] Discussions of the government's role split into two broad camps: those which suggest that the government unwittingly caused or was unable to respond to the crisis,[327] and those which assert that the government willfully caused or ignored the plight of starving Indians. The former see the problem as a series of avoidable war-time policy failures and "panicky responses"[138] from a government that was spectacularly inept,[328] overwhelmed[329] and in disarray; the latter as a conscious miscarriage of justice by the "ruling colonial elite"[330] who abandoned the poor of Bengal.[331]

The article doesn't mention if there's a current academic consensus on whether it was inept wartime panicking or conscious, however.

Is the narrative of "Churchill as Hitler to India" really justifiable, or just as simplistic as Churchill as Savior? I'm genuinely interested here, since I was never taught about this, and also curious why your comment is so downvoted.

Churchill was a nationalist, an unreformed victorian, an imperialist - and yes, a racist too.

The Bengal famine of 1943 was 1.5m deaths, this in the midst of a war that killed 85m people. I'd also point out that in the context of India - a country which in 1943 had around 400m people living in it - in other words .375% of the total population.

I'd also like to note that in 1949, India inflicted partition on itself, the greatest humanitarian crisis (almost) no one has heard of before - it displaced 14m and likely killed another 200k - 2m - again, on a country of around 400m people.

I consider it a zero-sum game to try to judge people by modern standards, it is meaningless - and lessens their very important contributions in history. History is in my opinion about clearly stating facts, and letting individuals form their own opinion.

I consider Churchill to be a great man - just as with Stalin and Roosevelt, whatever failings he had as peacetime a leader, are overshadowed to a significant amount by his wartime successes.

I also point out, that Churchill was not perfect, he was a lousy, lousy theatre commander.