Last week Gary Oldman picked up an Oscar for his portrayal of Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour, which got me wondering why he’s so widely celebrated. I mean, the guy is everywhere!
He’s on money, in the Whitehouse, outside the BBC, in Parliament Square and about a hundred other prominent places.
He’s a national park, a college, a dock, a tube stop, a school, an auditorium, an insurance company, a building complex and a road in my hometown.
He’s “the greatest Briton of all time”, “England’s greatest ever leader”, “still an inspiration”, and he gets EDL dicks harder than the phrase “1966 closed-borders Brexit”.
Now, he’s an Oscar-winning film too, what a guy! He’s everything some British people seem to love in a cultural icon: successful, powerful, ambitious, unapologetic, brash, obnoxious, heavy-drinking, cigar-puffing, blood-thirsty and very, very, very, very proud of being English – well, white and English anyway.
Churchill and White Pride
Now, I know exactly what you’re thinking, Winston Churchill couldn’t possibly be a racist because he fought Hitler! And if there’s one thing you know about Hitler it’s that he was a racist.
Then again, when Churchill was Prime Minister in 1955 he did think “Keep England White” would be “a good slogan” for his leadership. Maybe that wasn’t racism though. After all, immigration was a hot topic at the time and as we’ve seen recently, this type of populism works. It’s not like he ever actively promoted Nazi-esque ideas about the master race.
Although, as part of the Peel Commission Report in 1937, Churchill did say:
“I do not admit that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that [whites], a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly-wise race to put it that way, [have] come in and taken their place.”
Personally, that’s more than enough for me to chuck away my Churchill nodding dog and revoke his membership to the Great British Heroes club. For some though, it’s a bit more complicated, after all, the whole British Empire thing probably made it a bit confusing and it’s not like he was revelling in people-of-colour suffering.
Apart from that time when he learnt that measles had a high mortality rate for black people he quipped, “Well, there are plenty left. They’ve got a high rate of reproduction.”
Churchill and Eugenics
Churchill’s hilarious banter about the high reproduction rates of black people is endemic of how he viewed the world. As a young man, he proudly declared, ““The improvement of the British breed is my aim in life.”
Now, you might think this is a harmless bit of politicking and no more problematic than Trump’s promises to “Make America Great Again”. Churchill wasn’t talking about social policies, trade deals or foreign policy though, he was quite literally talking about eugenics.
Yes, the great Winston Churchill was a supporter of the noble “science” of eugenics, which, for those who don’t know, is the belief in preserving a population’s superiority through highly controlled and selective breeding – sounds a bit Hitler-y to me.
He was actually Vice President of the first International Eugenics Congress held in London in July 1912, and, while we all need a hobby, Churchill let it interfere with work, arguing for sterilising people with mental illness and learning disabilities. In a letter to Henry Asquith in 1910, the then Home Secretary pleaded to the Prime Minister:
“The unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the Feeble-Minded and Insane classes, coupled as it is with a steady restriction among all the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks, constitutes a national and race danger which it is impossible to exaggerate.”
For years, Churchill pushed the idea of sterilising the mentally ill and those with learning disabilities, but he wasn’t a one trick pony, He had other ideas to deal with the issue and in February 1911, Churchill spoke advocated in parliament for forced labour camps for “mental defectives”.
Thankfully, none of these great ideas to protect the superiority of the British race against non-hereditary issues, came to pass. Unfortunately, many people weren’t ready to give up on eugenics.
In Nazi Germany, sterilisation legislation was passed in July 1933 and more than 150,000 Germans, including many children and babies, judged ‘mentally unfit’ were sterilised, and an equal number killed by gas or lethal injection between 1933 and 1940.
It’s hard to imagine what the result may have been if Britain had enacted similar laws.
Churchill and Islamophobia
Churchill’s views weren’t reserved just for a fluid and ever-changing non-white and able-bodied “other” who needed to be treated with scorn and disdain at best.
He also had some very specific views on Muslims that were so offensive they got Paul Weston (chairman of discount Britain First hate-group, Liberty GB) arrested in 2014 when he repeated them in public.
I’ll present the extract from Churchill’s The River War (1899) in full:
“How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia (rabies) in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries, improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live.”
I personally think Donald Trump has missed a trick by not using that rather evocative “rabid dog” line. Admittedly, there is also a passage in the same book which many people use to justify the argument that Churchill can’t be Islamophobic:
“Individual Muslims may show splendid qualities. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the Queen; all know how to die but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it.”
To be fair, Churchill’s ability to see past the idea of Muslims as a homogenous group of dangerous and savage people, could be taken as proof he was able to view them as humans and individuals.
On the other hand, the “splendid qualities” he reference are literally just dying for the Queen and “appreciating Muslims’ usefulness as human shields” is a pretty low fucking bar for judging islamophobia!
Churchill and Blood-Thirsty War Mongering
Okay, so yes…Churchill was definitely a white supremacist, he definitely wanted to sterilise people with mental illnesses or learning disorders and he definitely hated Muslims – but he was still a war hero, right? I mean, he did save the world from Hitler! And, he also heroically served in the British Forces.
If Hollywood has taught me anything (fun fact – any film that wants to use US military equipment needs to get script sign-off from the government) soldiers are good people and nobody joins the army because they like death and destruction.
Well, maybe Churchill did,
In his autobiography My Early Life (A Roving Commission) when reminiscing on his time in Afghanistan he does gleefully describe how “all who resist will be killed without quarter” because the Pashtuns needed to “recognise the superiority of race”. Charming!
And Churchill’s summation of Britain’s tactics in that conflict is equally as delightful:
“We proceeded systematically, village by village, and we destroyed the houses, filled up the wells, blew down the towers, cut down the great shady trees, burned the crops and broke the reservoirs in punitive devastation.”
Ah, punitive devastation, now that’s a noble cause if ever there was one!
Still, at least Churchill was having fun travelling the world taking part in “a lot of jolly little wars against barbarous peoples.” He bragged about how “every tribesman caught was speared or cut down at once” in Afghanistan and boasted of shooting at least three “savages” in Sudan.
It wasn’t all fun and games though. Originally Churchill felt fighting the Boer wars in South Africa “was great fun galloping about”, but he does note his “irritation that Kaffirs should be allowed to fire on white men”.
Who doesn’t get annoyed when their jaunty trip abroad is disturbed though?
It’s a bit like when other people nick the best seats around the pool, except with concentration camps, don’t worry, Churchill assuredly remarks that these were the good kind that produced "the minimum of suffering".
Sadly, I’ve barely scratched the surface of just how awful Churchill was and I’ve got four more blogs planned on the subject – next, I’ll be addressing all those lovely war crimes he committed! I’ll leave you with this quote from the “Greatest Briton of All Time”, taken from a letter to David Lloyd George’s daughter in 1916:
“I think a curse should rest on me — because I love this war. I know it’s smashing and shattering the lives of thousands every moment, and yet, I can’t help it, I enjoy every second of it.”
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