No, racism wasn’t “the norm”. People were prejudiced more than today, but they were still people.
Churchill was a different level - he was ok with Chinese and Indians dying and didn’t care too much about Jews or Slavs or southern Europeans either.
“At one point, prior to becoming the PM, he had a chance to meet with Hitler, but he confronted Hitler’s aide about his anti-Jewish racial policies, notwithstanding his success on the economic front, and in the end they called off the meeting.” —> Churchill had his “wilderness years” from 1929 to 1939 and wasn’t in government and didn’t meet with anyone from the German govt (Hitler came to power in 1933)
Churchill was a deeply flawed man. He was the man of the hour during WWII, and should be lauded for that, but we need to remember his drawbacks as well.
Racism has to be the norm if you have a vast global empire. To continuously subjugate Indians, Chinese, Arabs, Kurds, Africans and Jews, you have to believe you are a better judge of what’s good for them than they are, and that was the nature of the “white man’s burden”. No bigee. The British were more benign imperialists than the Chicoms presently are. But some sense of racial and/or cultural superiority was still required, and without it you couldn’t get close to the levers of power.
“Churchill had his “wilderness years” from 1929 to 1939 and wasn’t in government and didn’t meet with anyone from the German govt (Hitler came to power in 1933)”
I’m quoting one of his biographers who was a regular guest at his table. The meeting wasn’t official, just a preliminary meet at a tavern during the wilderness years, which never went anywhere because he objected to Hitler’s racial persecution of Jews. He had railed against the White Paper, blocking Jewish immigration to the Mandate, but then, when he became PM, signed it as a geopolitical necessity because of the war. When Labour formed their government after the war, they immediately further alienated the already estranged Jews of the Mandate, who had voted for Labour as a reaction to the White Paper. The result was the bombing of the King David Hotel and the subsequent dissolution of the Mandate. Churchill was actually a Judaio-phile, who did what he did to the Jews of the Mandate in order to prevent or at least lessen Arab uprisings around the vital oil reserves in Iraq and the Hijaz. Labour, however, was totally on the side of the Arabs. Leftards will be leftards.
He was out of government, but still in parliament, and still a man of some importance. He was not in government, because after jumping from Conservative to Liberal, he had jumped back to Conservative. Conservatives were mad at him for making fun of them for 20 years, and Liberals were mad at him for abandoning them.
“Churchill was a deeply flawed man.”
I’d say that England was and still is a deeply flawed country. His flaws were chronic bipolar disorder, and an ignorance of the Greeks, which he refused to study in school and was whipped for. Lin Yutang in Between Tears and Laughter (Doubleday, 1940) uncannily detects his ignorance of the Greeks, and ascribed it as the cause for his treatment of China, repeating the mistakes of the Athenian demagogues. He also used to do his office work in bed, and was overly domineering to subordinates, and a drinker.
But he was also an accomplished writer/historian, painter and bricklayer, in addition to saving the free world. He dreamt up the idea of the European Union, and wisely walked away from it while it was gaining popularity in Europe. He also served most of his second term as PM totally paralyzed, but managed to hide it. He was more than the “man of the hour”. The remainder of the 20th Century, from the shape of the Cold War, to the partitioning of Ireland and the Jewish homeland, to the formation of the EU, all bore his imprint.
England remains two steps behind the times to this day. The yobs are the ones with sense, but the peerage and the media are unable to catch up with their thinking. They’re still resisting Brexit, totally delusional about the “refugees,” and are consequently demonizing working class heroes such as Tommy Robinson for standing up to the grooming gangs that prey on teenage girls. Finest hour was eighty years ago.