Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

The rest of us knew Churchill was a villain

Brexit "More ugly historical ironies may yet waylay Britain on its treacherous road to Brexit. But it is safe to say that a long-cossetted British ruling class has finally come to the end of itself as it was." "The British ruling class amd Brexit"

What does Winston Churchill and Boris Johnson have in common? Very little and a lot. "Churchill had strong views on Gandhi. Commenting on the Mahatma's meeting with the viceroy of Indian, 1931, he had notoriously decalred: 'It is alarming and nauseating to see Mr Gandi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the east, striding half naked up the steps of the viceregal palace, while he is still organising and conducting a campaign of civil disobedience, to parlay in equal terms with the represnetative of the Emperor-King.' (Gandhi had nothing in common with fakirs, Muslim spiritual mendicants, but Churchill was rarely accurate about India.) 'Ghandi-ism and all what it stands for,' declared Churchill, 'will, sooner or later, have to be grappled with and finally crushed.' In such matters Churchill was the most reactionary of Englishmen, with views so extreme they cannot be excused as being reflective of their time...

The Real Winston Churchill

The so-called impartiality of a liberal. "Churchill held opinions that would disbar him f rom political office today - despicable yes, but surely massively outweighed by the scale of his accomplishments." Seeing the dismantling of the empire against his will, killing of the Greek resistance, advocating the use of poison gas against recalcitrant tribes, praising Mussolini for being the greatest legislator in Europe, his racism, etc were just opinions and very small things compared to his "accomplishments". " If we were to denude Britain of all the statues of dead politicians and soldiers who held a few views we now find problematic, the country would be littered with unoccupied plinths." Does that mean there is a lack of people who could have statues, people who were progressives? There are only representative of a bloody and colonial past. "Pity the country that needs heroes." Statues like those of Churchill, Rhodes and Havelock celebr...

The crimes of Winston Churchill I recommend Churchill's Empire by Richard Toye Britain's Gulag by Caroline Elkins

" In breaking the Greek Resistance, the British had precipitated a civil war that would last — in open or latent forms — for some thirty years, with a brief lull between 1963 and 1965. It would only end with the fall of the colonels’ dictatorship in 1974. This “coup in Athens” reminds us that through its history, modern Greece has only enjoyed a very limited sovereignty. This, indeed, is its painful experience once again today." How Churchill broke the Greek resistance

Another crime by that man on the five-pound note How Churchill broke the Greek resistance

"Civilisation is face to face with militant Mohammedanism", Winston Churchill asserted.  — Quoted in Frederick Woods, Young Winston's Wars, 1972, p. 30