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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.
What do Chamberlain and Halifax have to do with whether Churchill is considered a villain?
Sounds like ideologic revisionism to me.
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.
Oh and then there’s the whole Indian famine thing...
Sounds like ideologic revisionism to me.
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.
Which part is garbage? What do Chamberlain and Halifax have to do with whether Churchill is considered a villain?
Vae victis I suppose.
Edit: response to Ntrails:
People find comfort in black and white worldviews. Pointing out that somebody who was a hero in one respect was a villain in other seems to induce some sort of dissonance that gets some people angry. The article says that Churchill was a villain with respect to British colonies, not in every conceivable respect. But this has made some people angry, they see Churchill as a hero in the fight against Germany, so they're unwilling or unable to see Churchill as a villain in Ireland or India. There is no logical contradiction here, but there is an emotional contradiction. I don't consider this a moral failing on the part of those upset, it just seems to be how people are wired.
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.
If you’re going to bring up their blunders you should perhaps also mention how Churchill completely cocked-up several crucial naval operations that could have ended the war early. If he was around today he’d be what they call a “failson” Oh and then there’s the whole Indian famine thing...
> “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…
The parallel here is that the US and UK are both waiting for the enemy to make a huge blunder (Germany trying to get Mexico to attack the US, or Japan attacking Pearl Harbor). Getting the US into the war was one of the top priorities of Churchill's government. And Roosevelt really wanted to help (the Lend-Lease among other things).
So this information, that Japan is about to attack, comes along, why would you stop it? Plus; how would you stop it? You can argue that revealing it was about to happen publicly would be enough for President Roosevelt to argue a war against Japan. But maybe he felt if Japan actually got to attack, he could also argue for a war against Germany?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you’re going to bring up their blunders you should perhaps also mention how Churchill completely cocked-up several crucial naval operations that could have ended the war early. If he was around today he’d be what they call a “failson” Oh and then there’s the whole Indian famine thing...
Which naval operations? WW1 or WW2?
Indeed, I might imagine the UK doing better in WW2, because Churchill was less in direct control of operations.
Sounds like ideologic revisionism to me.
It's understandable to some degree. After all, Churchill and colonialists just enslaved and killed inferior third world peoples (who cares about them), while Nazi Germany occupied and killed westerners...
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.
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 because you like B more.