Churchill's 60th death anniversary: supremacist who believed whites should rule

January 2025 marked 60 years since Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill was summoned to his reward. He was only the second commoner ever accorded a state funeral in the United Kingdom.

In 2000, the BBC put on a programme called ‘The Greatest Briton.’ The British public was invited to vote on the Greatest Briton of all time. It came as no surprise that Churchill was voted Number 1.

Churchill was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom for most of the Second World War. His party lost the 1945 election. Churchill was back as PM from 1951-55.

Winston Churchill started out as a Conservative because he had superb contacts in the party. His father Lord Randolph Churchill was a Conservative and served as Chancellor of the Exchequer (Finance Minister). Winston Churchill later defected to the Liberal Party in 1904. In 1922 he came back to the Conservatives.

To his admirers, Churchill is a national hero. He is the only prime minister to have a college named in his honour at Cambridge University. They see him as an outstanding wartime leader, a decent army officer in his youth and a renaissance man. He was a journalist, historian and a superb orator. He even painted watercolours. Not many people know he won the Nobel Prize for Literature: the only UK Prime Minister to be a Nobel laureate.

In recent decades’ revisionists have gone to work on Churchill. Many of them castigate him. Some even call him evil. Born in 1874 he had some of the white supremacist assumptions of the time. He took it as read that whites should rule the world.

When it comes to policy on Indian independence, Churchill set his face against the independence movement. In the 1930s His Majesty’s Government sought compromise with the independence movement in India. Winston Churchill said no concessions should be made.

He claimed to love the people of India and said that a beneficent British superintendence was best for them. In 1942 he famously said ‘I did not become the king’s first minister to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.’ But that year he reluctantly conceded Indian independence within three years of the war’s end.

When Churchill was PM in the 1940s and 1950s there started to be significant non-white immigration into the UK. This did not disturb Churchill. By the time he died the United Kingdom was 2% non-white. It is now 20%.

Churchill served in the British Army in India. He found Indian culture, history and civilisation uninteresting. He was a convinced imperialist.

In the 1890s Churchill fought in the Malakand Field Force in what is now Pakistan. He wrote some highly disobliging remarks about Islam which inspired Britain’s foes in that conflict. It did not occur to him that most Indian Muslims were neutral or some even pro-British.

Nowadays some regard Churchill as an Islamophobe. He was also scathing about Hinduism. Churchill was brought up a Christian but was not a fervent worshipper.

The Bengal Famine is a blot on Churchill’s escutcheon. The British authorities in India destroyed many bridges and boats in Bengal to forestall the Japanese advance. That is because the Japanese had already taken some of north-east India. The Bengal Famine killed at least 2,000,000 people. Churchill refused to send food aid arguing that it would likely be sunk by Japanese submarines in the Bay of Bengal.

Bengal had an elected government in 1942 when the famine started. Therefore, they bear some of the blame too. But Churchill’s response was at best grossly inadequate. Some even accuse him of genocide.

When Churchill was Colonial Secretary in the 1920s, he said that Indians resident in East Africa ought not to be allowed to vote. He did not want black people to vote either.

One racial prejudice Churchill did not have was anti-Semitism. Lord Rothschild was a very prominent Jewish banker and a key ally of Randolph Churchill. It was partly because of this that Winston Churchill was an outspoken Philosemite. He was also sympathetic to Zionism. He said that if the Palestinians were supplanted, this would be permissible on the basis that Jews were ‘a higher grade race.’

In 1914 most of the British Cabinet was against the United Kingdom participating in the First World War. But Churchill was one of those who said it was imperative that the UK should fight. He is therefore one of those responsible for getting the United Kingdom into the bloodiest war it ever fought. As a result of the costs of that war, the UK has not recovered its preeminent position and never shall.

Winston Churchill initially opposed granting women the vote. When he was PM, he promoted almost no women to high office.

In the Second World War Churchill authorised attacks to de-house the German civilian population. Over two million German civilians were killed in that war. A small per cent of them were killed by the British Forces.

Churchill even spoke openly of ‘spreading terror’ among German civilians. Many would regard this as a war crime. The bombing of Dresden is very contentious. In the spring of 1945, the city was firebombed by the Royal Air Force (RAF). The RAF (i.e. British Air Force) killed thousands of German civilians there when Germany was already close to total defeat.

Churchill was a vociferous anti-communist after the 1917 Revolution in Russia. He had advocated military intervention to crush the Reds. He got the United Kingdom involved in the Russian Civil War.

In the 1940s Churchill realised that the United Kingdom needed to cooperate with the USSR against Germany. Churchill met Stalin and even said ‘I like that man’ despite knowing that Stalin was a mass murderer on the scale of Hitler.

There are still partisans of Churchill. There is the International Churchill Society.

There are many detractors of Churchill in the United Kingdom and around the world. To his enemies, he is a racist, a sexist and a snob. There are those who regard him as a warmonger.

Churchill’s statue has been vandalised. Some older people find this deeply offensive.