<nettime> Shree Paradkar: When will there be a film on Winston Churchill, the barbaric monster with the blood of millions on his hands? (Toronto Star)

[Patrice Riemens <patrice@xs4all.nl>]

In case you go see, or went, to the film 'Churchill' ...


Original to:
https://www.thestar.com/opinion/star-columnists/2018/03/09/when-will-there-be-a-film-on-winston-churchill-the-barbaric-monster-with-the-blood-of-millions-on-his-hands.html

When will there be a film on Winston Churchill, the barbaric monster 
with the blood of millions on his hands?
By Shree ParadkarRace & Gender Columnist
Toronto Star, Fri., March 9, 2018


Imperialistic pop culture has enshrined Churchill only as a military 
great, a fun drunk, a loyal monarchist with a penchant for fine speech 
and a flair for loquacious prose. But the British PM lacerated the world 
with tragedies, profiting from plunders and mass murders, writes Shree 
Paradkar.


By the time I came across the ledger at the Bangalore Club with Winston 
Churchill’s name on it in the late 1990s, British rule in India had been 
sanitized; airbrushed to present a picture of overall benevolence with a 
few violent splotches.

The entry in the ledger is dated June 1, 1899 and names one Lt W.L.S. 
Churchill as one of 17 bill defaulters. He owes the club 13 rupees from 
a time when a whisky cost less than half a rupee.

Had we then heard that Churchill once described our beloved city as a 
“third rate watering place … without society or good sport,” we would 
have probably laughed it off as the irascibility ever only indulged in 
the great. Jolly good, old chap.

Colonialism of the mind lingers long after the land is free.

And if we had heard that he once said, “I hate Indians. They are a 
beastly people with a beastly religion,” meh. He was dead. We were 
thriving.

There are flawed heroes. Lincoln, MLK and Gandhi to name a few — men who 
inflicted injustices on individuals.

Then there are monsters.

Powerful men who lacerate the world with tragedies. Adolf Hitler, 
certainly, but his nemesis Churchill, too.

It was only in 2014 that I first got a glimpse of genocidal mania in the 
man so lionized for leading his nation through its finest hour.

It was a piece titled Remembering India’s forgotten holocaust, in 
Tehelka magazine that detailed the ghastly origins of the Bengal famine 
of 1943 that killed an estimated 3 million people in one year.

Historians have easily traced it back to Churchill who had diverted the 
bountiful harvest from Bengal to Britain and other parts of Europe. When 
the locals began starving, he steadfastly refused to send them food. He 
said no to rerouting food that was being shipped from Australia to the 
Middle East via India. No to the 10,000 tons of rice Canada offered to 
send to India, no to the 100,000 tons of rice America offered. The 
famine was the Indians’ fault, he told a war-cabinet meeting, “for 
breeding like rabbits.”

In his Revisionist History podcast, Malcolm Gladwell delves into how the 
historian Madhusree Mukerjee, author of Churchill’s Secret War, dug into 
Britain’s shipping archives to uncover evidence that Britain had so much 
food at the time that the U.S. had become suspicious they were 
stockpiling it to sell it after the war.

In India, she wrote, “parents dumped their starving children into rivers 
and wells. Many took their lives by throwing themselves in front of 
trains.” Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Indian soldiers were 
fighting alongside the Allied forces.

Yet, what did the actor Gary Oldman who portrayed Churchill in Darkest 
Hour say last Sunday when he received an Oscar for Best Actor? “I would 
just like to salute Sir Winston Churchill who has been marvellous 
company on what can be described as an incredible journey.”

Salute. Sir. Marvellous. Incredible.

Oldman might as well have danced on 3 million dead bodies, many of whose 
loved ones were too weak to cremate or bury them.

Such tributes for a heinous white supremacist who once declared that 
“Aryan tribes were bound to triumph.”

Words as hollow as the tunnel-visioned ideals on which people fashion 
this man, but they can’t stem the drip, drip of blood from his hands.

They can’t hide tens of thousands of Kenyans who were rounded up in 
concentration camps called “Britain’s Gulags” under his orders, where 
thousands were tortured and killed for rebelling against British rule.

They can’t hide the bodies of the Greek civilians who were celebrating 
German withdrawal in 1944, but were killed by the British army because 
Churchill thought the communist influence on the Nazi resisters — who 
had allied with Britain — was too strong. And we haven’t even got into 
his treatment of Iraqis or the wiping out of entire Indigenous 
populations of Tasmania.

Churchill was not the first Western leader to profit from plunders and 
mass murders. Remember John A. Macdonald? But imperialistic popular 
culture continues to enshrine him, despite the Gallipoli disaster, only 
as a military great, a fun drunk, a loyal monarch with a penchant for 
fine speech and a flair for loquacious prose.

Churchill tried to manipulate history with the six volumes of his 
memoirs. Indeed he succeeded so well that even today the Bangalore Club 
thumps its chest about his membership there. “Many a past great … 
including Sir Winston Churchill” have been members, says its website.

This compounds the tragedy. Erasing his crimes pronounces his victims 
worthless, deems their lives undeserving of acknowledgement, and leaves 
their deaths but a footnote in history.

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