Not his finest hour: The dark side of Winston Churchill
Dear friends,
Now this is a book we must obtain and read. It will shed light on so much British imperialism that was the current European views of his time. It should be interesting to read about a so-called respected world statesman as Churchill. But in reality was there a darker side? Many of his colleagues thought Churchill was driven by a deep loathing of democracy for anyone other than the British and a tiny clique of supposedly superior races, and they would know as they worked with him. This was clearest in his attitude towards India which is unacceptable today. He clearly seems to be a white supremacist who looked down on other races and their religions. This is who ran Britain. He seems worse than other modern dictators hiding under the guise of democracy and superior ‘cultural’ civility to carry out his atrocities. The irony is Churchill was against monarchical rule but he sure was worse than most dictators.
Some interesting quotes from Winston Churchill that would not be accepted in today’s world views:
As Winston Churchill famously said, “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.“
When the Kurds rebelled against British rule, Churchill said: “I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes…[It] would spread a lively terror.“
When Mahatma Gandhi launched his campaign of peaceful resistance against British colonialism and rule, Churchill raged that he “ought to be lain bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi, and then trampled on by an enormous elephant with the new Viceroy seated on its back.” Lovely statement from a world statesman running a democracy. Ironically the U.K. is experiencing so much migration of the ‘colored peoples’ now and some Brits are complaining. But it was okay for the Brits to take over India, proclaim Queen Victoria as Empress of India and cart off shiploads of India’s wealth into British coffers.
Today many British and Europeans are different, thank goodness, and share a more ‘enlightened’ view of the rest of humanity, but the legacy of their forefathers’ damage still lives on in many countries. I am not against the British at all, in fact they have a rich culture I appreciate and they have contributed much to the world. People like to quote China’s human rights abuses but look at your own history in the not-so-distant past. Every country’s citizens, especially countries with a history of colonialism, should self-examine very carefully as well as see what’s happening everywhere and in China. If you don’t like what’s happening in China, then demand your governments to stop all economic ties, business and profits immediately. Churchill hated India, Indians and their religion, but he didn’t mind the wealth he stole from them and then used to suppress them. Don’t make money from China and then criticize China as it’s hypocritical and until that happens, self-examine. China definitely needs to improve but so do many other countries. Your governments and private sectors are making plenty of money from China and the economic benefits filter down to the citizens, of which one of them is you in one way or another. Even today in the U.S., a supposed powerful human rights-advocating country, there is so much racial tension as you can see in the recent Ferguson events. So many countries are guilty of this past and present. We need to think how much damage and pain has been created.
Let’s not point fingers at this or that country and their human rights record. Many of the finger-pointers have a severe human rights infringement record themselves. I am not on anyone’s side and I wish the best for all countries and world peace but the fact is India has now way surpassed Britain, and it’s ironic for Churchill and his racist view of the ‘inferior dark-skinned natives’. Well I am a dark-skinned native (LOL) and proud of it, and glad I don’t live in a world ruled by the Winston Churchills. Some even consider my religious faith in Dorje Shugden as beastly. But I will continue. The new key clique-ish word that some Western powers seems to have morphed from racism is HUMAN RIGHTS. This country and that country has horrendous human rights and therefore we have the moral high ground to criticize them. Look at your own countries’ dark histories first. Yes, we should speak up and help change the world one country at a time, but remember one ‘ex-convict’ does not need to be all high and mighty about a crime another is committing when you’ve done the same in the past. In other words many countries are guilty of many horrendous acts to other races and cultures, so when we speak up, speak up respectfully and with a good motivation. Speak up knowing no one is perfect or has been perfect or will be perfect. In Buddhism it’s called samsara. When things in samsara go wrong, it’s expected and be only surprised if it goes right. But in secular terms, where there are humans, all types of prejudices, likes and dislikes will arise.
Tsem Rinpoche
Not his finest hour: The dark side of Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill is rightly remembered for leading Britain through her finest hour – but what if he also led the country through her most shameful hour? What if, in addition to rousing a nation to save the world from the Nazis, he fought for a raw white supremacism and a concentration camp network of his own? This question burns through Richard Toye’s new history, Churchill’s Empire, and is even seeping into the Oval Office.
George W Bush left a bust of Churchill near his desk in the White House, in an attempt to associate himself with the war leader’s heroic stand against fascism. Barack Obama had it returned to Britain. It’s not hard to guess why: his Kenyan grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, was imprisoned without trial for two years and was tortured on Churchill’s watch, for resisting Churchill’s empire.
Can these clashing Churchills be reconciled? Do we live, at the same time, in the world he helped to save, and the world he helped to trash? Toye, one of Britain’s smartest young historians, has tried to pick through these questions dispassionately – and he should lead us, at last and at least, to a more mature conversation about our greatest national icon.
Churchill was born in 1874 into a Britain that was washing the map pink, at the cost of washing distant nations blood red. Victoria had just been crowned Empress of India, and the scramble for Africa was only a few years away. At Harrow School and then Sandhurst, he was told a simple story: the superior white man was conquering the primitive, dark-skinned natives, and bringing them the benefits of civilisation. As soon as he could, Churchill charged off to take his part in “a lot of jolly little wars against barbarous peoples”. In the Swat valley, now part of Pakistan, he experienced, fleetingly, a crack of doubt. He realised that the local population was fighting back because of “the presence of British troops in lands the local people considered their own,” just as Britain would if she were invaded. But Churchill soon suppressed this thought, deciding instead they were merely deranged jihadists whose violence was explained by a “strong aboriginal propensity to kill”.
He gladly took part in raids that laid waste to whole valleys, destroying houses and burning crops. He then sped off to help reconquer the Sudan, where he bragged that he personally shot at least three “savages”.
The young Churchill charged through imperial atrocities, defending each in turn. When concentration camps were built in South Africa, for white Boers, he said they produced “the minimum of suffering”. The death toll was almost 28,000, and when at least 115,000 black Africans were likewise swept into British camps, where 14,000 died, he wrote only of his “irritation that Kaffirs should be allowed to fire on white men”. Later, he boasted of his experiences there: “That was before war degenerated. It was great fun galloping about.”
Then as an MP he demanded a rolling programme of more conquests, based on his belief that “the Aryan stock is bound to triumph”. There seems to have been an odd cognitive dissonance in his view of the “natives”. In some of his private correspondence, he appears to really believe they are helpless children who will “willingly, naturally, gratefully include themselves within the golden circle of an ancient crown”.
But when they defied this script, Churchill demanded they be crushed with extreme force. As Colonial Secretary in the 1920s, he unleashed the notorious Black and Tan thugs on Ireland’s Catholic civilians, and when the Kurds rebelled against British rule, he said: “I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes…[It] would spread a lively terror.”
Of course, it’s easy to dismiss any criticism of these actions as anachronistic. Didn’t everybody think that way then? One of the most striking findings of Toye’s research is that they really didn’t: even at the time, Churchill was seen as at the most brutal and brutish end of the British imperialist spectrum. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin was warned by Cabinet colleagues not to appoint him because his views were so antedeluvian. Even his startled doctor, Lord Moran, said of other races: “Winston thinks only of the colour of their skin.”
Many of his colleagues thought Churchill was driven by a deep loathing of democracy for anyone other than the British and a tiny clique of supposedly superior races. This was clearest in his attitude to India. When Mahatma Gandhi launched his campaign of peaceful resistance, Churchill raged that he “ought to be lain bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi, and then trampled on by an enormous elephant with the new Viceroy seated on its back.” As the resistance swelled, he announced: “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.” This hatred killed. To give just one, major, example, in 1943 a famine broke out in Bengal, caused – as the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has proved – by the imperial policies of the British. Up to 3 million people starved to death while British officials begged Churchill to direct food supplies to the region. He bluntly refused. He raged that it was their own fault for “breeding like rabbits”. At other times, he said the plague was “merrily” culling the population.
Skeletal, half-dead people were streaming into the cities and dying on the streets, but Churchill – to the astonishment of his staff – had only jeers for them. This rather undermines the claims that Churchill’s imperialism was motivated only by an altruistic desire to elevate the putatively lower races.
Hussein Onyango Obama is unusual among Churchill’s victims only in one respect: his story has been rescued from the slipstream of history, because his grandson ended up as President of the US. Churchill believed that Kenya’s fertile highlands should be the preserve of the white settlers, and approved the clearing out of the local “blackamoors”. He saw the local Kikuyu as “brutish children”. When they rebelled under Churchill’s post-war premiership, some 150,000 of them were forced at gunpoint into detention camps – later dubbed “Britain’s gulag” by Pulitzer-prize winning historian, Professor Caroline Elkins. She studied the detention camps for five years for her remarkable book Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya, explains the tactics adopted under Churchill to crush the local drive for independence. “Electric shock was widely used, as well as cigarettes and fire,” she writes. “The screening teams whipped, shot, burned, and mutilated Mau Mau suspects.” Hussein Onyango Obama never truly recovered from the torture he endured.
Many of the wounds Churchill inflicted have still not healed: you can find them on the front pages any day of the week. He is the man who invented Iraq, locking together three conflicting peoples behind arbitrary borders that have been bleeding ever since. He is the Colonial Secretary who offered the Over-Promised Land to both the Jews and the Arabs – although he seems to have privately felt racist contempt for both. He jeered at the Palestinians as “barbaric hoards who ate little but camel dung,” while he was appalled that the Israelis “take it for granted that the local population will be cleared out to suit their convenience”.
True, occasionally Churchill did become queasy about some of the most extreme acts of the Empire. He fretted at the slaughter of women and children, and cavilled at the Amritsar massacre of 1919. Toye tries to present these doubts as evidence of moderation – yet they almost never seem to have led Churchill to change his actions. If you are determined to rule people by force against their will, you can hardly be surprised when atrocities occur. Rule Britannia would inexorably produce a Cruel Britannia.
So how can the two be reconciled? Was Churchill’s moral opposition to Nazism a charade, masking the fact he was merely trying to defend the British Empire from a rival?
The US civil rights leader Richard B. Moore, quoted by Toye, said it was “a rare and fortunate coincidence” that at that moment “the vital interests of the British Empire [coincided] with those of the great overwhelming majority of mankind”. But this might be too soft in its praise. If Churchill had only been interested in saving the Empire, he could probably have cut a deal with Hitler. No: he had a deeper repugnance for Nazism than that. He may have been a thug, but he knew a greater thug when he saw one – and we may owe our freedom today to this wrinkle in history.
This, in turn, led to the great irony of Churchill’s life. In resisting the Nazis, he produced some of the richest prose-poetry in defence of freedom and democracy ever written. It was a cheque he didn’t want black or Asian people to cash – but they refused to accept that the Bank of Justice was empty. As the Ghanaian nationalist Kwame Nkrumah wrote: “All the fair, brave words spoken about freedom that had been broadcast to the four corners of the earth took seed and grew where they had not been intended.” Churchill lived to see democrats across Britain’s dominions and colonies – from nationalist leader Aung San in Burma to Jawarlal Nehru in India – use his own intoxicating words against him.
Ultimately, the words of the great and glorious Churchill who resisted dictatorship overwhelmed the works of the cruel and cramped Churchill who tried to impose it on the darker-skinned peoples of the world. The fact that we now live in a world where a free and independent India is a superpower eclipsing Britain, and a grandson of the Kikuyu “savages” is the most powerful man in the world, is a repudiation of Churchill at his ugliest – and a sweet, ironic victory for Churchill at his best.
For updates on this issue and others, follow Johann at www.twitter.com/johannhari101
‘Churchill’s Empire’ is published by Macmillan (£25). To order a copy for the special price of £22.50 (free P&P) call Independent Books Direct on 08430 600 030, or visit www.independentbooksdirect.co.uk
This is strictly for educational purposes only and if you can, I recommend the book above which I will be getting.
Comedian Trevor Noah mocking colonisation
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Winston Churchill was a British politician, military officer and writer who did twice served as the prime minister of Great Britain. Churchill did helped to lead a successful Allied strategy with the U.S. and Soviet Union during World War II. I did not know of his dark side till this post. Winston Churchill was in fact a clear racist and a stubborn imperialist. To many historians Churchill was seen as at the most brutal and brutish end of the British imperialist spectrum. Churchill’s imperialism was motivated only by an altruistic desire to elevate the putatively lower races. Winston thinks only of the colour of their skin. He hate Indians recording to him they are a beastly people with a beastly religion. These are another side to Churchill’s politics and career that should not be forgotten amid the endless parade of eulogies.
Thank you Rinpoche for this interesting sharing of this great statesman with a darker side behind.
we all have dark hours as well as light hours, those with power, influence and wealth – their dark hours as well as their “light hours” make far more of an impact than those of the general populace, I am in no position to judge, my parents and grandparents come from Poland, many of their generation feel betrayed by Churchill – HOWEVER – he wasn’t Polish, so his loyalties were never directed towards Poland in any case, many of my family (as well as that of many ethnic Poles) outside Poland in any case – Poland is NOT homogenous, many ethnic minorities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_minorities_in_Poland
(my Paternal Grandmother’s second husband was non practising Muslim Tatar minority from Belarus & an absolute genius – spoke, read and wrote Russian, Belarussian, Arabic, Polish & English, my Mother’s doctor when she was pregnant with my older brother then me was a Polish Jew who spoke read and wrote Polish, Emglish, Biblical Hebrew, Modern Hebrew and Yiddish, he also escaped from concentration camps in WW2)- it is always hard to be objective when it comes to history – the “winners” always have their advantage, more access to the printing pres, TV, Radio, social media, makes you think . . .
I always admired Winston Churchill since my school day and to read books about him…he was a great leader in British history. Not until i read this article about the darker side of him.Every one of us are not perfect after all so as great leaders do have the dark side past history too.He was a white supremacist who looked down on other races and their religions.Quoted .. where there are humans, all types of prejudices, likes and dislikes will arise.Do agree with Rinpoche.
Thank you Rinpoche for sharing this article for us to get a better inside story of Winston Churchill.
I think Winston Churchill was not perfect like most of us, however he was operating at the age whereby many people around him are studied and learned. Many more things he acted upon were written down. Hence a lot more of what he had to say and his actions were documented and noticed by all the people around him… Plus many of his decisions were made in conflict situations, whereby speed was paramount.
I think Winston Churchill was a great statesman, he may not have said everything and done everything perfectly, but he seemed to have lived his life his way.
I had much admiration for Winston Churchill and all he stood for. That he stood stoically against the German invasion. Never saw this part of Winston Churchill, as he was a hero figure to me and probably many others as well. So this is an eye opener.
Thank you for the funnies by Tervor Noah, a young and promising comedian.
I believe there is dark side to every great leaders in mankind history. No one can NOT be corrupted with the amount of power and authority one posses as a nation leader. It is human nature. We are simply not free from what Buddha coined as the 8 Worldly Dharma.
It is not surprising to know that Churchill was white supremacist. I think most westerners or Caucasians still are. It is just that it is now masked by some form of global human rights, equality and social ethics. When economy is well and life is “good”, we all get by. When a country economy is bad, we can easily see the cracks in the social pretense that we live in. Rules and regulations and laws can govern and maintain superficial peace but to have real equality, compassion, acceptance, tolerance ingrain in society it needs to rely on something more spiritual.
Churchill story should be a reminder for us that there is a dark side to every story and to consider that in our support and loyal for a leader we may become a pawn to their hidden agendas. Choose your leader wisely and consider how much their actions and methods really match their vision.
This is shocking to read about Winston Churchill as I always had the impression that we was a great and fair leader of his time. He actually sounds like a similar version to Adolf Hitler. The difference is that instead of annihilating the entire population, he drained the people and their nation.
It is very disturbing to find out that the media manipulated and promoted Churchill to be an inspiration of mankind where he led with kindness and for the greater good of the people. That’s why it is difficult to jump to conclusion just by reading from the media. We do not know whether the report is biased.
As Rinpoche pointed out, no country should talk down on other countries using Human Rights matters because their countries used to discriminate other citizens, colonize them and drain both their resources and dignity. Colonialism did so much damage to the colonized countries that many of these scars are still being healed.
I believe that the rule of thumb should be to operate from kindness. Karma exists regardless of our acceptance of it. So it’s best to choose our actions wisely.
Winston Churchill was considered one of the most influential persons in British history. It is appalling to know that a person who had held office twice as British Prime Ministers is of dubious character and deep rooted to racism. The fact also lies in how his white supremacy and fascism inclination was conveniently downplayed while his literatures are still being studied today.
Churchill’s basic attitude towards India is contempt to say the least; which will no doubt breach any international standards by today’s view. Winston Churchill famously said, “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion“ while Briton enjoyed the wealth from India. Is it not hypocrisy?
So, if the dark history of Churchill’s government and his colonialism policy is acceptable, then why is it not okay for a country like China to deal with her own state affair? Maybe, instead of criticizing, issue a cease trade order and stop benefiting from the lucrative economies ties from her.
It is not difficult to google and find out which country is squeaky clean without a dark human rights history. Therefore I am very thankful to have His Eminence the 25th Tsem Rinpoche rightly pointed out that “many countries are guilty of many horrendous acts to other races and cultures, so when we speak up, speak up respectfully and with a good motivation. Speak up knowing no one is perfect or has been perfect or will be perfect. In Buddhism it’s called samsara. When things in samsara go wrong, it’s expected and be only surprised if it goes right. But in secular terms, where there are humans, all types of prejudices, likes and dislikes will arise.”
Thank you, Rinpoche, for this insightful article that opens our eyes to the clashing Churchills.
Humbly, bowing down,
Stella Cheang
This is so sad. What the American government did.
The Bengali Famine
The editors of Finest Hour wish to bestow their 2008 Utter Excess Award on MWC (“Media With Conscience”) News in Vancouver for its November 18th editorial by Gideon Polya, charmingly entitled, “Media Lying Over Churchill’s Crimes”
“Churchill is our hero because of his leadership in World War 2,” Polya writes, “but his immense crimes, notably the WW2 Bengali Holocaust, the 1943-1945 Bengal Famine in which Churchill murdered 6-7 million Indians, have been deleted from history by extraordinary Anglo-American and Zionist Holocaust Denial.”
The article goes on to cite a long list of Churchill “crimes,” including all the old chestnuts (poison-gassing the Iraqis, warmongering before World War I, attacking Gallipoli, bombing German cities, etc.); and some new ones: “Churchill actively sought the entry of Japan into World War 2.” (That one brings to mind Churchill’s occasional observation that he had never heard the opposite of the truth stated with greater precision.) We have dealt with most of them before (over and over)—so let’s consider the flagship accusation.
The Bengali Holocaust
Mr. Polya begins by dismissing all historians who disagree with him as Anglo-American and Zionist propagandists, including official biographer Sir Martin Gilbert—who, since it’s always a good idea to question the accused, we asked for comment. “Churchill was not responsible for the Bengal Famine,” Sir Martin replied. “I have been searching for evidence for years: none has turned up. The 1944 Document volume of the official biography [Hillsdale College Press] will resolve this issue finally.”
We next turned to Arthur Herman’s excellent and balanced Gandhi & Churchill (New York: Bantam, 2008, reviewed in Finest Hour 138: 51-52). There is quite a lot on the Bengal Famine (pp 512 et. seq.), which Herman believes “did more than Gandhi to undermine Indian confidence in the Raj.” Secretary of State for India Leo Amery, Herman writes, “at first took a lofty Malthusian view of the crisis, arguing that India was ‘overpopulated’ and that the best strategy was to do nothing. But by early summer even Amery was concerned and urged the War Cabinet to take drastic action….
“For his part, Churchill proved callously indifferent. Since Gandhi’s fast his mood about India had progressively darkened…..[He was] resolutely opposed to any food shipments. Ships were desperately needed for the landings in Italy….Besides, Churchill felt it would do no good. Famine or no famine, Indians will ‘breed like rabbits.’ Amery prevailed on him to send some relief, albeit only a quarter what was needed.”A quarter of what was needed may also have been all that was possible by ship; but Churchill was also hoping for more aid from India itself.
The Facts
We asked author Herman to elaborate. He writes: “The idea that Churchill was in any way ‘responsible’ or ‘caused’ the Bengal famine is of course absurd. The real cause was the fall of Burma to the Japanese, which cut off India’s main supply of rice imports when domestic sources fell short, which they did in Eastern Bengal after a devastating cyclone in mid-October 1942. It is true that Churchill opposed diverting food supplies and transports from other theaters to India to cover the shortfall: this was wartime. Some of his angry remarks to Amery don’t read very nicely in retrospect. However, anyone who has been through the relevant documents reprinted in The [India] Transfer of Power volumes knows the facts:
“Churchill was concerned about the humanitarian catastrophe taking place there, and he pushed for whatever famine relief efforts India itself could provide; they simply weren’t adequate. Something like three million people died in Bengal and other parts of southern India as a result. We might even say that Churchill indirectly broke the Bengal famine by appointing as Viceroy Field Marshal Wavell, who mobilized the military to transport food and aid to the stricken regions (something that hadn’t occurred to anyone, apparently).”
The salient facts are that despite his initial expressions about Gandhi, Churchill did attempt to alleviate the famine. As William Manchester wrote, Churchill “always had second and third thoughts, and they usually improved as he went along. It was part of his pattern of response to any political issue that while his early reactions were often emotional, and even unworthy of him, they were usually succeeded by reason and generosity.” (The Last Lion, Boston: 1982, I: 843-44).
The Unconsidered Factor: World War II
If the famine had occurred in peacetime, it would have been dealt with effectively and quickly by the Raj, as so often in the past. At worst, Churchill’s failure was not sending more aid—in the midst of fighting a war for survival. And the war, of course, is what Churchill’s slanderers avoid considering.
Martin Gilbert writes about the situation at the time: “The Japanese were on the Indian border with Burma—indeed inside India at Kohima and Imphal in the state of Assam. Gandhi’s Quit India movement, and Subhas Chandra Bose’s Indian National Army then fighting alongside the Japanese, provided the incentive for a full-scale Japanese invasion. The Royal Air Force and the Army were fully stretched. We know what terrors the Japanese wreaked n non-Japanese natives in Korea, the Philippines, and Malaya.” If the RAF planes supporting India’s defense were pulled off for a famine airlift, far more than three million would have died. The blame for insufficient famine relief lies with those who prevented those planes from being used: the Japanese.
The case against Churchill collapses when we consider the war—just like the oft-repeated complaints that he did nothing for Australia after Japan attacked, or that he didn’t attend Roosevelt’s funeral out of pique or envy. There was a war on. More pressing military matters were at hand which governed his actions and decisions.
Bottom Line
What have we left besides the falsehood of “deliberate, sustained, remorseless starving to death of 6-7 million Indians”? As a wrap to its condemnation, “Media With Conscience” culls out every critical quote it can find by Churchill on Indians. Thirteen years ago at our 1995 conference, one of these was recited by William F. Buckley, Jr.:
“Working his way through disputatious bureaucracy from separatists in New Delhi he exclaimed, to his secretary, ‘I hate Indians.’ I don’t doubt that the famous gleam came to his eyes when he said this, with mischievous glee—an offense, in modern convention, of genocidal magnitude.”
Sure enough, the quotation resurfaces in “Media With Conscience,” described as Buckley predicted: an offense of genocidal magnitude.
This article is a prize-winning example of non-history: the myopic determination to find feet of clay in a man who was human and made mistakes, like everybody else, but who remains admirable, warts and all, mostly because he gave all his papers to an archive where carpers can pore over them.
One of his more balanced critics observed recently that Churchill may have had one foot of clay, but that the other foot was anchored firmly in his innate decency. His biographer once remarked that, as he sorted through the tons of paper in Churchill’s archive, “I never felt that he was going to spring an unpleasant surprise on me. I might find that he was adopting views with which I disagreed. But I always knew that there would be nothing to cause me to think: ‘How shocking, how appalling.’”
Yes, Churchill had a blind spot where Gandhi was concerned, despite the positive things he wrote and said to Indians, from Birla and Gandhi in 1935 to Nehru in 1953, which his critics never bother to quote. And Thomas Malthus may have influenced Amery’s initial view that the famine was caused by overpopulation. But Winston Churchill did not cause or wish for the death of Bengalis. His impulses in situations of human suffering were the opposite of hateful. After World War I, for example, it was Churchill who urged the Cabinet to send boatloads of food to the blockaded Germans—a proposal greeted with derision by colleagues such as Prime Minister Lloyd George, who preferred to “squeeze the German lemon until the pips squeak.” Their policy prevailed—and we all know what it led to twenty years later.
Perhaps the best summation of this particular piece of invective is that lovely line by Jack Nicholson in the charming film As Good As It Gets: “Sell crazy someplace else. We’re all stocked up here.”
LINK :
http://www.winstonchurchill.org/resources/in-the-media/churchill-in-the-news/575-the-bengali-famine
Chinese Writer Says He’s Forbidden From Traveling to U.S. for Harvard Prize
HONG KONG — The author of a landmark book documenting the millions of deaths from China’s Great Famine said on Tuesday that his former employer, the official Xinhua News Agency, had forbidden him from traveling to Harvard University next month to receive an award honoring his courage and integrity.
In his 2008 book, “Tombstone,” the writer, Yang Jisheng, showed how the deaths of 36 million people during the 1958-62 famine, one of the worst man-made disasters in history, were a result of disastrous government policies under Mao. The book, published after Mr. Yang left Xinhua in 2001, is banned in China. He said by telephone from Beijing on Tuesday that officials from the agency had met with him, telling him he was forbidden to travel to Harvard.
In December, Mr. Yang, 75, was awarded the Louis M. Lyons Award for Conscience and Integrity in Journalism by the Nieman Fellows at Harvard, a group of professional journalists spending an academic year at the university’s campus in Cambridge, Mass. The fellows said Mr. Yang was “a role model to all who seek to document the dark and difficult struggles of humankind.” He had been scheduled to receive the award in person in early March.
In China under President Xi Jinping, journalists who stray from the Communist Party’s official line are increasingly being muzzled as part of a widespread crackdown on civil society that has led to human rights lawyers and feminists being imprisoned, influential bloggers having their social media accounts deleted and professors being told to limit the use of foreign textbooks.
In Mr. Yang’s case, he may have fallen victim to new rules on what retired Communist Party cadres can say, and specifying that their public opinions must have “a high level of consistency with the Party Central under comrade General Secretary Xi Jinping.” As a senior reporter for China’s government-owned official news service for many decades, Mr. Yang was a longtime party member. But he has also been highly critical of the government, dealing a devastating blow to the official account of the famine and Mao’s legacy in his book, and speaking out in public forums around the world.
Until now, he was allowed to travel internationally to receive accolades for his work. Last year, Mr. Yang went to Sweden to receive the Stieg Larsson prize, an award established in memory of the crime writer and journalist, who died in 2004, and given to people working in his spirit. In 2013, he traveled to the United States to receive the Manhattan Institute’s Hayek Prize, named after the economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek. There, he delivered a scathing indictment of modern China under the Communists, who he said had created a society in which “only the already powerful can acquire wealth.”
“China’s path to harmony and stability is to reject this system and instead to heed Hayek’s call to avoid government coercion, respect individual freedom and allow further economic and political liberalization,” Mr. Yang said.
Although Mr. Yang said on Tuesday that he had his passport, leaving the country against the wishes of Xinhua, a powerful arm of the government and Communist Party, might jeopardize any plans he might have to publish future works. Calls during working hours to Xinhua’s main office in Beijing went unanswered.
In a statement Tuesday night, the Nieman Fellows said they still intended to honor Mr. Yang in March. “If circumstances change and he is able to visit the Nieman Foundation, we will be honored to welcome him to campus,” Hamish Macdonald, who helps to oversee the Lyons Award, wrote in the emailed statement.
LINK :
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/17/world/asia/yang-jisheng-tombstone-harvard.html
Unnatural Disaster
‘Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962,’ by Yang Jisheng
By JONATHAN MIRSKYDEC. 7, 2012
In the summer of 1962, China’s president, Liu Shaoqi, warned Mao Zedong that “history will record the role you and I played in the starvation of so many people, and the cannibalism will also be memorialized!” Liu had visited Hunan, his home province as well as Mao’s, where almost a million people died of hunger. Some of the survivors had eaten dead bodies or had killed and eaten their comrades. In “Tombstone,” an eye-opening study of the worst famine in history, Yang Jisheng concludes that 36 million Chinese starved to death in the years between 1958 and 1962, while 40 million others failed to be born, which means that “China’s total population loss during the Great Famine then comes to 76 million.”
There are good earlier studies of the famine and one excellent recent one, “Mao’s Great Famine” by Frank Dikötter, but Yang’s is significant because he lives in China and is boldly unsparing. Mao’s rule, he writes, “became a secular theocracy. . . . Divergence from Mao’s views was heresy. . . . Dread and falsehood were thus both the result and the lifeblood of totalitarianism.” This political system, he argues, “caused the degeneration of the national character of the Chinese people.”
Yang, who was born in 1940, is a well-known veteran journalist and a Communist Party member. Before I quote the following sentence, remember that a huge portrait of Chairman Mao still hangs over the main gate into Beijing’s Forbidden City and can be seen from every corner of Tiananmen Square, where his embalmed body lies in an elaborate mausoleum. Despite this continued public veneration, Yang looks squarely at the real chairman: “In power, Mao became immersed in China’s traditional monarchal culture and Lenin and Stalin’s ‘dictatorship of the proletariat.’ . . . When Mao was provided with a list of slogans for his approval, he personally added one: ‘Long Live Chairman Mao.’ ” Two years ago, in an interview with the journalist Ian Johnson, Yang remarked that he views the famine “as part of the totalitarian system that China had at the time. The chief culprit was Mao.”
From the early 1990s, Yang writes, he began combing normally closed official archives containing confidential reports of the ravages of the famine, and reading accounts of the official killing of protesters. He found references to cannibalism and interviewed men and women who survived by eating human flesh.
Chinese statistics are always overwhelming, so Yang helps us to conceptualize what 36 million deaths actually means. It is, he writes, “450 times the number of people killed by the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki” and “greater than the number of people killed in World War I.” It also, he insists, “outstripped the ravages of World War II.” While 40 to 50 million died in that war, it stretched over seven or eight years, while most deaths in the great Chinese famine, he notes, were “concentrated in a six-month period.” The famine occurred neither during a war nor in a period of natural calamity. When mentioned in China, which is rarely, bad weather or Russian treachery are usually blamed for this disaster, and both are knowledgeably dismissed by Yang.
The most staggering and detailed chapter in Yang’s narrative relates what happened in Xinyang Prefecture, in Henan Province. A lush region, it was “the economic engine of the province,” with a population in 1958 of 8.5 million. Mao’s policies had driven the peasants from their individual small holdings; working communally, they were now forced to yield almost everything to the state, either to feed the cities or — crazily — to increase exports. The peasants were allotted enough grain for just a few months. In Xinyang alone, Yang calculates, over a million people died.
Mao had pronounced that the family, in the new order of collective farming and eating, was no longer necessary. Liu Shaoqi, reliably sycophantic, agreed: “The family is a historically produced phenomenon and will be eliminated.” Grain production plummeted, the communal kitchens collapsed. As yields dived, Zhou Enlai and other leaders, “the falcons and hounds of evil,” as Yang describes them, assured Mao that agricultural production had in fact soared. Mao himself proclaimed that under the new dispensation yields could be exponentially higher. “Tell the peasants to resume eating chaff and herbs for half the year,” he said, “and after some hardship for one or two or three years things will turn around.”
A journalist reporting on Xinyang at the time saw the desperation of ordinary people. Years later, he told Yang that he had witnessed a Party secretary — during the famine, cadres were well fed — treating his guests to a local delicacy. But he knew what happened to people who recorded the truth, so he said nothing: “How could I dare to write an internal reference report?” Indeed. Liu Shaoqi confronted Mao, who remembered all slights, and during the Cultural Revolution he was accused of being a traitor and an enemy agent. Expelled from the Party, he died alone, uncared for, anonymous.
Of course, “Tombstone” has been banned in China, but in 2008 it was published in Hong Kong in two mighty volumes. Pirated texts and Internet summaries soon slipped over the border. This English version, although substantial, is roughly half the size of the original. Its eloquent translators, Stacy Mosher and Guo Jian, say their aim, like the author’s, is to “present the tragedy in all its horror” and to render Yang’s searching analysis in a manner that is both accessible to general readers and informative for specialists. There is much in this readable “Tombstone” I needed to know.
Yang writes that one reason for the book’s title is to establish a memorial for the uncle who raised him like a son and starved to death in 1959. At the time a devout believer in the Party and ignorant of the extent of what was going on in the country at large, Yang felt that everything, no matter how difficult, was part of China’s battle for a new socialist order. Discovering official secrets during his work as a young journalist, he began to lose his faith. His real “awakening,” however, came after the 1989 Tiananmen massacre: “The blood of those young students cleansed my brain of all the lies I had accepted over the previous decades.” This is brave talk. Words and phrases associated with “Tiananmen” remain blocked on China’s Internet.
Nowadays, Yang asserts, “rulers and ordinary citizens alike know in their hearts that the totalitarian system has reached its end.” He hopes “Tombstone” will help banish the “historical amnesia imposed by those in power” and spur his countrymen to “renounce man-made calamity, darkness and evil.” While guardedly hopeful about the rise of democracy, Yang is ultimately a realist. Despite China’s economic and social transformation, this courageous man concludes, “the political system remains unchanged.” “Tombstone” doesn’t directly challenge China’s current regime, nor is its author part of an organized movement. And so, unlike the Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, Yang Jisheng is not serving a long prison sentence. But he has driven a stake through the hearts of Mao Zedong and the party he helped found.
TOMBSTONE
The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962
By Yang Jisheng
Translated by Stacy Mosher and Guo Jian
629 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $35.
LINK :
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/09/books/review/tombstone-the-great-chinese-famine-1958-1962-by-yang-jisheng.html?_r=0
” A Most Secret Tragedy : The Great Leap Forward aimed to make China an industrial giant—instead it killed 45 million”
By Michael Fathers
LINK :
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10000872396390444180004578015170039623486
Mao’s Great Leap Forward ‘killed 45 million in four years’
LINK :
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/maos-great-leap-forward-killed-45-million-in-four-years-2081630.html
Chronology of Mass Killings during the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-1976)
LINK :
http://www.massviolence.org/chronology-of-mass-killings-during-the-chinese-cultural
Destruction of Serthar Institute : A special report
LINK :
http://archive.is/26qR6
The Biggest Holocaust In World History
LINK :
http://hinduwebsite.com/history/holocaust.asp
Dear Steve,
Between 1757-1947, which is for 190 years the British had colonized India and systematically raped/destroyed/pillaged/robbed/massacred India and had her as a and during that time
killed directly or indirectly 1.8 Billion people. Atrocious.That goes way past Mao Tse Tung. Britain is a murderous and genocidal country.
The American Indian Holocaust, known as the “500 year war” and the “World’s Longest Holocaust In The History Of Mankind And Loss Of Human Lives.”
Genocide and Denying It: Why We Are Not Taught that the Natives of the United States and Canada were Exterminated-Death Toll: 95 million to 114 million (95,000,000-114,000,000).American Holocaust: D. Stannard (Oxford Press, 1992) – “over 100 million killed” “[Christopher] Columbus personally murdered half a million Natives” This is the white invading settlers from Europe committing these murders.
Source: https://espressostalinist.com/genocide/native-american-genocide/
Joseph
The Biggest Holocaust In World History
LINK :
http://hinduwebsite.com/history/holocaust.asp
Joseph,
You have actually collected a large number of different episodes committed by different persons over many decades or centuries. Because of that , your effort to excuse Mao Tse Tung is not valid and exposes your very obvious bias and lack of credibility. Please stop trying to deceive and have some integrity.
Dear Stephen,
I’m not exactly sure why you have been posting all these articles and links here, but it seems that you are trying to defend something, when there is no need to defend. All your comments are about non-whites committing genocidal atrocities all over the world. Please don’t get me wrong, everything mentioned in the articles/links you have posted are true and valid but I really don’t understand why you are doing so.
This article was about Churchill, not about seemingly blaming Europeans as the sole perpetrators of terrible actions all over the world. You seem to have taken it this way, and as your replies suggest, you sound racist with your Mao example. This article simply states the facts about what Churchill stated. So it’s here, done and dusted. Just take it as it is. I can’t imagine how you managed to turn this post around and think that it was the administrator’s attempt at stating all atrocities committed were done by white people. You’ve managed to turn this whole page into a racist diatribe.
An interesting read about Sir Winston Churchill. I only knew him as a great Statesman leading England to victory during the World War II and that Prince Charles looked up to him greatly as a Mentor. I knew that not many liked him although they needed him to lead at that time. Now I learn the reason why. Thank you Rinpoche for sharing this article.
Dear Rinpoche
I have always loved Winston Churcill. I think he was a great statement who stood up against NAZI especially in year 1941-1942 where Britain was practically alone in resisting NAZI. He tried and tried again to be successful throughout his political career. Sometimes he failed, sometimes he succeeded, unlike his aristocrats contemporaries who mostly just enjoyed themselves. However, reading this article, I noted that he was not perfect. I came to understand that his motivation was more to maintain Britain’s independence and supremacy and not so much for humanity.
Valentina
Thankyou for sharing Rinpoche.
In the election following the war, Churchill was rejected by the British people. Many working class people remembered his cruelty, particularly during the miners’ strike of 1926 when he ordered troops to attack Welsh miners. For this and other reasons, he was held in low regard in many communities.
I remember how the older people that I knew, spoke of him in bad terms. It seems that the history told by the people can often differ from the official history that is presented by mainstream media.