Posted on 02/11/2021 11:23:44 PM PST by knighthawk
The rest in the article is also exaggerated, but note a grain, grain of truth.
Churchill WAS racist - no doubt, he hated non-English - whether "white" or "brown" or "black", but he never advocated a "final solution"
Churchill was RESPONSIBLE for the fall of the british empire - his obstructionist policies in the 20s and 30s prevented making India a Dominion like Canada or Australia. If they had done that, then India would be similar to Australia.
Note that he was a good war-time leader against the Nazis, but he was responsible for the failure at Gallipolli instead of listening to DH Lawrence and attacking near Antioch. he was also obstinate causing the Indians to push for independence.
He wasn't a "white" supremacist as he was part of the British creation of concentration camps where white Boers (Dutch origin people) were starved and kept.
“I’m no fan of Britain, but they left their colonies in better shape for independence/self-rule than other colonizers.”
We have a rule of thumb for vacation spots. If it was settled by the British or the Dutch, its most likely okay.
If it was settled by the French or the Spanish, stay away.
L
well, it wasn’t that simple either :)
Their colonies WERE in a better shape - but it depends WHERE.
We can’t compare India to Nigeria or Congo etc. nor to Indo-China.
However one can compare Malaysia to Indonesia or Vietnam.
British controlled Malaysia - the british heavily relied on divide-and-rule, so the Chinese and Indians were given a free hand to develop. Indonesia - the Dutch were purely exploitative. Vietnam is on par in many ways with Malaysia - despite being a larger country.
The Belgian Congo was not even a colony - just a pure “exploit everything as much as we can”. The French African colonies were slightly better - only slightly.
The British hit upon a better idea - DEVELOP the place so that you can extract more money from it. The Brits set up railways so that they could extract wealth faster and more effectively. They set up rule of law to save money and expense on policing. They also gave limited rule, so that they didn’t need to spend a lot on British army etc - the largest army was the british raj army which had indians and even Indian officers
Chamberlain was himself changing. He didn't want to fight another WWI, but in 1939 he realized he was lost. At that point the British realized that they HAD to fight to survive
Also Britain could not have been conquered by Nazi Germany in 6 months -- Britain is an island and had a strong Navy - the strongest in the world until 1944. The Germans had practically nothing naval in response. The Italians had a good navy but were bottled up in the Mediterranean.
Why did the Nazis race forward and conquer France in 1940? Because the French remembered the millions they lost in WWI which was mostly fought on French and Belgian lands in the West.
Britain would not have followed.
The British who remained would be slaves in fields and factories. -- have you read the Mein Kampf or even Hitlers rantings until 1943? He saw the British as "fellow Aryans" on par with the Germans.
hitler also revered Houston Stewart Chamberlain - the son-in-law of Wagner and the man who created the racial philosophy that drove Hitler.
So much for fantasies.
PFFFFFFFFFFFFFFT
Not completely. He did want to secure the oil but he was wary of the Turks.
In addition he didn't want sub-Saharan Africa
More favorable treatment than Britain provided? - strangely enough, if he HAD somehow won over britain in 1940, then there wouldn't have been a final solution of murder. Hitler would have conquered the lands of israel and "dumped" all of europe's Jewry there. He wanted them out. The final solution was because there weren't any other solutions for him to get rid of the Jews -- Remember the MS St Louis fiasco?
During the build-up to World War II, the Motorschiff St. Louis was a German ocean liner which carried more than 900 Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany in 1939 intending to escape anti-Semitic persecution. The refugees tried to disembark in Cuba but were denied permission to land.
The captain, Gustav Schröder, went to the United States and Canada, trying to find a nation to take the Jews in, but both nations refused. He finally returned the ship to Europe, where various countries, including the United Kingdom, Belgium, the Netherlands and France, accepted some refugees. Many were later caught in Nazi roundups of Jews in the occupied countries of Belgium, France and the Netherlands, and some historians have estimated that approximately a quarter of them were killed in death camps during World War II.
he hated Jews IN Germany. He hated Christianity as it was "the Jewish messiah religion" and he hated Poles because they were in his way.
there is a whole “what if” area on reddit.
I’ll skip it.
I’m not very good at “what if.”
I’m pretty good at “what was,” however.
The second worse thing about Hitler’s existence is that, aside from killing 6 million people, we have to listen for the rest of history about how this person or that is worse than Hitler.
Of course, you’ll never hear:
“He’s worse than Stalin.”
“He’s worse than Pol Pot.”
“He’s worse than Hirohito.”
“He’s worse than Mao.”
I mean, Hitler was bad, but can’t we change up the lingo from time to time?
That’s very funny! Add Portugal’s former colonies to “do not visit”.
The independence movement in the two “bad ones” were very different; the Spanish ones were like our own (where Spaniards in the colonies rebelled against their monarchy, and set up new countries without paying much heed to aspirations of the native people), while the rest were non-European natives rebelling against the colonizer. With the exception of Haiti, independence came much later (more than a century) for the others.
The flaw in Britain using Indians in other colonies is that when the British left the natives wanted the Indians out as well - and that happened in east Africa, and today is a source of friction in Trinidad and Fiji.
The Malaya “emergency” was much less bloody than Vietnam’s “unification”. Other colonizers did set up infrastructure, simply to move resources out; you can see remnants of it all over in Africa.
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