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The Rest of Us Always Knew Churchill Was a Villain

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Re: The Rest of Us Always Knew Churchill Was a Villain

#51

Post by Fellshard »

Aloha wrote: post #37

Churchill was no saint, I don't think any sane person anyone would elevate him to such - but he's no war criminal - and no villain to most. 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 pe…

Precisely this.

It is absurd indeed to try and cast a man either as a saint or a villain in this kind of manner - there are many things it is well acknowledged Churchill did extremely badly indeed. His time as PM /at/ the right time in history /with/ the personality and values he held happened to be good and useful, and worked towards a good and useful end. Like all such cases, that pragmatic good has some bad consequences of its own, and does not negate the rest of his life's actions.

Tell all, and consider what may have been good and what may have been ill. To accept all or reject all based on some actions is not only unwise, it is proactively damaging.

Re: The Rest of Us Always Knew Churchill Was a Villain

#52

Post by dang »

YinLuck- wrote: post #24
Bucephalus355 wrote: post #3

This is garbage. The real villains are Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax. They would have condemned half a billion people to death just to give Britain a few extra years of peace.

Half a billion foreigners should be worth less than 1 Briton to a British leader.

We've banned this account for trolling. Would you please stop creating accounts to break the site guidelines with?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: The Rest of Us Always Knew Churchill Was a Villain

#53

Post by heavenlyblue »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #39
ummonk wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

California has prop 13 which results in property taxes not keeping up with assessments.

To be fair, just because the marginal house sells for more doesn't mean that providing local services is commensurately more expensive.

Really? What about heavily contributing to the devaluation of the money paid to keep said services running?

Re: The Rest of Us Always Knew Churchill Was a Villain

#54

Post by ColanR »

rcpt wrote: post #22

You may not like what he said around WW2 but anyone who recently moved to the Bay Area will love his take on landlords, from 1909: > Roads are made, streets are made, services are improved, electric light turns night into day, water is brought from reservoirs a hundred miles off in the mountains -- and all the while the landlord sits still. Every one of those improvements is effected by the labor and cost of other pe…

What about the benefit of actual living quarters for the tenants? Who besides a landlord is going to rent 4 walls and a roof to someone who needs it?

Seems similar to saying that hotel owners 'contribute nothing to the general welfare'.

Re: The Rest of Us Always Knew Churchill Was a Villain

#55

Post by the_watcher »

ummonk wrote: post #35
kbutler wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Property taxes? At least where I live, land values are assessed annually, and the owner is obligated to pay a percentage of that value. Those tax funds are used for the very improvements mentioned, as well as usage-based utility fees for the services.

California has prop 13 which results in property taxes not keeping up with assessments.

Sure, but it still negates the argument that landlords don't contribute towards shared services at all.

Re: The Rest of Us Always Knew Churchill Was a Villain

#56

Post by dang »

apexkid wrote: post #10

Perfect article. High time people dismiss the self proclaimed heroic version of western history and know the reality. A person with noble prize deserved to be hanged till death in an Indian jail.

This comment breaks the site guidelines, which say "Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.".

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.

Re: The Rest of Us Always Knew Churchill Was a Villain

#57

Post by towaway1138 »

DFHippie wrote: post #20
towaway1138 wrote: post #2

Meh. It's sad, but the structure of the universe is probably such that one cannot become a leader of millions without being a villain.

You can ignore any villainy by this formula. "All leaders are villains, so I'm turning my attention elsewhere." As Edmund Burke or someone said, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Also, it relies on equating hard moral choices with villainy. A hard moral choice is making citizen A hungrier so citizen B doesn't starve. Villainy is robbing citizen A to enrich citizen B becau…

As a single individual, it's probably more effective to work on local ethical issues than to try to do something about global villainy. There are a few people in very special places and times who have the ability to make a global effect (Wikileaks comes to mind), but that's quite rare.

Yes, we can denounce villainy that occurs on the global stage. But in truth that's almost entirely virtue signaling. We look good, but there's no difference effected in the world.

Do something that makes a difference. Despising Churchill is useless, even if he deserved it (which is dubious).

Re: The Rest of Us Always Knew Churchill Was a Villain

#58

Post by pjc50 »

kbutler wrote: post #32
rcpt wrote: post #22

You may not like what he said around WW2 but anyone who recently moved to the Bay Area will love his take on landlords, from 1909: > Roads are made, streets are made, services are improved, electric light turns night into day, water is brought from reservoirs a hundred miles off in the mountains -- and all the while the landlord sits still. Every one of those improvements is effected by the labor and cost of other pe…

Property taxes? At least where I live, land values are assessed annually, and the owner is obligated to pay a percentage of that value. Those tax funds are used for the very improvements mentioned, as well as usage-based utility fees for the services.

Not in the UK. We have a system that's vaguely related to the value of the house, banded so that expensive property is under-taxed, and usually capped by central government. It's quite a mess.

Re: The Rest of Us Always Knew Churchill Was a Villain

#59

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

ColanR wrote: post #54
rcpt wrote: post #22

You may not like what he said around WW2 but anyone who recently moved to the Bay Area will love his take on landlords, from 1909: > Roads are made, streets are made, services are improved, electric light turns night into day, water is brought from reservoirs a hundred miles off in the mountains -- and all the while the landlord sits still. Every one of those improvements is effected by the labor and cost of other pe…

What about the benefit of actual living quarters for the tenants? Who besides a landlord is going to rent 4 walls and a roof to someone who needs it? Seems similar to saying that hotel owners 'contribute nothing to the general welfare'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing

Re: The Rest of Us Always Knew Churchill Was a Villain

#60

Post by patrickg_zill »

nickysielicki wrote: post #7

> “History,” Churchill himself said, “will judge me kindly, because I intend to write it myself.” He did, penning a multi-volume history of World War Two, and won the Nobel Prize for Literature for his self-serving fictions. One of my favorite conspiracy theories is the idea that Churchill and Roosevelt conspired to allow the attack at Pearl Harbor to occur. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_Harbor_advance-knowledg…

Lindbergh was excoriated for his position. However in retrospect he was more correct than he is given credit for.
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