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The 10 greatest controversies of Winston Churchill's career
BBC News Magazine ^ | 23rd January 2015 | Tom Heyden

Posted on 01/23/2015 9:36:29 AM PST by the scotsman

'The UK is marking the 50th anniversary of the death of Winston Churchill. He is regarded by many as the greatest Briton ever, but for some he remains an intensely controversial figure.

During Britain's darkest hours in World War Two, Churchill's leadership was vital in maintaining morale and leading the country to eventual victory over Nazi Germany.

In 2002 Churchill saw off the likes of Shakespeare, Darwin and Brunel to be voted the greatest ever Briton.

But in a career spanning some 70 years, he had more than a few moments of controversy.

"There's a danger in Churchill gaining a purely iconic status because that actually takes away from his humanity," says Allen Packwood, director of the Churchill Archives Centre.

"He is this incredibly complex, contradictory and larger-than-life human being and he wrestled with these contradictions during his lifetime."

Here are 10 of the most common debates that have raged about Churchill's legacy.'

(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.co.uk ...


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Foreign Affairs; United Kingdom
KEYWORDS:

1 posted on 01/23/2015 9:36:29 AM PST by the scotsman
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To: the scotsman

“but for some he remains an intensely controversial figure.”

I think you can include Barrack Obama on that list.


2 posted on 01/23/2015 9:38:17 AM PST by Parley Baer
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To: the scotsman

My Favorite.....
hurchill,”The River War”
“How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries!
Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries, improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live.
A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement, the next of its dignity and sanctity.
The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.

Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities, but the influence of the religion paralyzes the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step, and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it (Islam) has vainly struggled,the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome.”


3 posted on 01/23/2015 9:41:27 AM PST by Robe (Rome did not create a great empire by talking, they did it by killing all those who opposed them)
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To: Parley Baer
I think you can include Barrack Obama on that list?...good bet!
4 posted on 01/23/2015 9:49:46 AM PST by AngelesCrestHighway
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To: the scotsman
4. Statements about Gandhi

Churchill had strong views on the man now widely respected for his work in advocating self-determination for India.

"It is alarming and nauseating to see Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir… striding half-naked up the steps of the Vice-regal Palace," Churchill said of his anti-colonialist adversary in 1931.

Churchill feared that if the Raj departed and India was granted full independence, the factions making up Indian society (mostly Hindu and Muslim) would annihilate each other in an incredible bloodbath.

What a foolish belief!

5 posted on 01/23/2015 9:56:11 AM PST by Cincinatus (Omnia relinquit servare Rempublicam)
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To: Cincinatus

LOL

Churchill was right years before anyone else, Gandhi was a fraud. Not the saint we sickeningly hail.

Oh, and he didn’t drive the British out of India. WW2 did that. If anyone drove us out of India it was Hitler (ironically, as he admired the British and the Empire).


6 posted on 01/23/2015 10:00:31 AM PST by the scotsman
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To: the scotsman

On Sunday, January 24, 1965, immediately following his death, KRLA aired an hour-long tribute to Winston Churchill, calling him “a great American,” because his mother was from the US. The fact that KRLA—a rock station—would air such a broadcast shows how much he was revered in this country at the time.


7 posted on 01/23/2015 10:05:14 AM PST by Fiji Hill (Io Triumphe!)
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To: the scotsman

bump for later


8 posted on 01/23/2015 10:06:49 AM PST by gattaca (Republicans believe every day is July 4, democrats believe every day is April 15. Ronald Reagan)
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To: Robe
My Favorite..... Churchill,”The River War”

I started reading that book a week and a half ago. I am reading an unabridged 1899 version. It is amazing Churchill's command of the English language and his assessment of Mohammedans, Arabs, the ethic diversity of Sudanese natives. I can only assume that his assessment was valid at that time. It is completely unvarnished. It would be impossible to write the same words today using acceptable language. While the correct words still exist, they are no longer acceptable in our politically correct world. Churchill used terrible words to describe the exact nature of the people who lived in Sudan; terms like savages, Negros, aboriginals, Muslim, etc. He provided a historical profile, going back to when Arabs invaded the Sudan. He discussed the slave trade from Sudan to Jeddah and made reasonable arguments for imperial intervention to stop abuses of the savage natives of the Sudan and thwart the curses of Mohammedanism.

Guess what. Churchill was correct in 1899, and he would be correct today. There still exists a slave trade where the darkest of skin colored people in Sudan are taken by Muslims and sold into slavery. Of course, today some people can't identify the root of problems because they have been constrained by the notion of moral equivalency and that diversity is a good thing.

Churchill wrote with the tone of an exceptionalist, and he was correct because at the time England was exceptional in its morality, culture, industry, and in most other besides their food. England has since then rectified their cuisine issues but forgot the importance of exceptional morality and culture which used to be the hallmark of the west. Too many in America now have forgotten the same things. Attacks on Churchill are simply plays by Marxists elites that want to rewrite history to eliminate any arguments against Marxism today. Heaven forbid that people actually read history from original sources and see how it repeats today.

9 posted on 01/23/2015 10:15:22 AM PST by ConservativeInPA (#JuSuisCharlesMartel)
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To: Fiji Hill

“his mother was from the US”

WC was also declared an “honorary American” later in life.


10 posted on 01/23/2015 10:56:11 AM PST by CharleysPride (non chiedere cio che non si puo prendere)
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To: the scotsman

Churchill, Hitler, and “The Unnecessary War”: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World

http://tinyurl.com/lxucgpu

Patrick Buchanan joins the league of authors who rightfully dethrone the “man of the century”, Winston Churchill. Churchill, a man of aristocratic descend, a man of abysmal political judgement, ruthless and reckless, bloodthirsty in his inner soul, was the man who was ultimately responsible for the decline not only of the British Empire, but for the Decline of the Abendland as we witness it today.

This historical review was long overdue.

The German “Kaiser” who had in 25 years of regency not fought one single war, much to the contrary of the haughty later victorious allies, England, France, Russia, and the US, was insidiously dragged into the first World War because England, and foremost Winston Churchill, thought Germany was becoming too strong, economically and politically. While the old empires England and France and the US were morally fully entitled to have their colonies and to rule the seas, Johnny-Come-Lately Germany, was not to have her slice and to leave her merchant fleet at the mercy of the green-eyed British. France and Russia had their own motives to destroy Germany.

Buchanan unfortunately fails to point out that the German speaking regions west of the Rhine “Elsass and Lothringen” had been annexed by the French king Louis XIV in the 17th century when the German principalities were too weak to resist the maroding French armies. After the French-German war of 1870/71, which was declared by the French, France had to cede these German regions to the German Reich. The German conditions for peace in 1871 were mild compared to those which would be imposed onto her by the victorious allies in 1919.

After Churchill had successfully starved Germany into submission by 1919, one of his many crimes against humanity, German lands were torn from the Fatherland, millions of Germans were against their own will put under the rule of foreign countries, the country plundered. The seeds for Hitler’s rule were sown. Above all, the vengeful clique of western statesmen, who forced Germany to sign that Carthaginian treaty in Versailles, knew already in 1919 that they we were paving the way into a new bloody war. They knew very well that what they were doing to Germany was a villainous crime.

Were the Germans and Hitler not right to demand their century old territories back ? Imagine if England had lost Cornwall to France ? Would the English not have done the same and reclaimed their lands ? The English and their leaders Baldwin, Hallifax, Eden, and last but not least Chamberlain, tacitly supported German moves to right the wrongs of Versailles. Austria, which had been forbidden by the allies to unite with Germany in 1919 and the Sudetenland were united with Germany.

All that had been achieved without spilling a drop of blood. True, Hitler was a dictator, but who was not ?
Austria had been a dictatorship under Schuschnigg, Poland under Pi’sudski , Spain under Franco, Russia under Stalin, Italy under Mussolini, the Czech Republic under Benes. Also true, Hitler should not have made the remains of the multiracial Czech republic a “protectorate”, but how many “protectorates” did the British, the French and the Americans have ? As Buchanan emphasizes, this was not Britain’s backyard and it was not a reason to go to war with Germany.

In March 1939, in order to halt Germany’s successful re-unifications, the British panicked and they signed away their empire when they gave the “pigheaded” Polish Gen. Beck a guarantee which would lead straight into part 2 of the Second 30 Year European Civil War. The Germans shall not have their old city of Danzig back, let alone the other lands that they were forced to cede to the Poles in 1919.

True, Hitler dreamt of swallowing the Ukrainian wheat fields, but given the English sea blockade from 1914-1919 which had killed millions of German civilians, was that not of an existential necessity for Germany, as was the control of the seas for the British ? Besides, the Ukraine had a substantial German speaking population that despised Stalin who had been terrorizing them for many years.

To return to our “hero” and the “man of the 20th century” Winston Churchill. Although all these events in Middle and Eastern Europe posed no threat to England’s security, the English declared war on Germany, because Germany, this time with force, wanted to re-united the old German town of Danzig with the Fatherland.

Why did Chamberlain and the English panic in Sep 1939 ? Germany and Hitler, had always wanted to be “brothers in arms” and friends of the British, they had never even though about attacking the British, the Kaiser’s mother was English. Hitler had even offered troops to protect the British Empite. But instead of taking the hands of the Germans the British boot-licked the greatest mass murderer at the time, Josef Stalin, and Churchill admitted “ I really like that man.” By 1939 Stalin had killed at least 20 million of his own people, apart from Poles and Baltic people. A thousand times more than Nazi Germany.

So it came that when Chamberlain resigned in 1940 after Churchill personally had botched the British invasion of Norway, which constituted a flagrant violation of Norwegian neutrality, Churchill became PM and he embarked on a brutal crusade against a European brother nation which was unique in European history and turned a European War into a World War. This time, the German people should be bombed into submission which culminated in the raid of Dresden by 700 Lancaster bombers. An estimated 50.000 - 200.000 civilians burned in their homes and in the streets crowded with refugees. A hero’s work.

In the end Churchill had lost it all : the British Empire was gone, sold to the Americans, 100 million East Europeans were under a brutal Communist dictatorship, and England was soon to be no longer white.

Was it just to declare war on Germany because she had violated the Versailles Treaty and she had tried to use force to re-unite her former territories with the Fatherland ? Maybe.

But was it wise to declare war on Germany ? Certainly not.

Winston Churchill was certainly a successful warrior, but a man of abysmal political and often even disastrous military judgment and he will be regarded as the man who was ultimately responsible for the Decline of the Abendland and for the fall of the White Race which had bled itself to death in the greatest Civil War of European history.

Buchanan’s book is highly commendable, although many aspects are not new to the informed reader and certain other aspects are left out completely.

If you had believed that Germany was the root of all evil in the 20th century, you will have to think again.


11 posted on 01/23/2015 11:31:22 AM PST by Yollopoliuhqui
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To: Yollopoliuhqui

Churchill at least acknowledged that the protecting Poland meant treating Stalin as an enemy (since he invaded one half while Germany invaded the other). In the end he knew all his casualties had been for naught since Poland ended up in the hands of one of the two invaders of 1939 anyway.


12 posted on 01/23/2015 1:01:23 PM PST by kearnyirish2 (Affirmative action is economic warfare against white males (and therefore white families).)
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