- Saturday, May 11, 2024
By: Pramod Thomas
A panel at Cambridge’s Churchill College has said that Winston Churchill was a white supremacist and had led an empire ‘worse than the Nazis’.
Panellists for the ‘Racial Consequences of Mr Churchill’ talk accused the former Prime Minister of racism and complicity in the Bengal Famine which killed three million Indians while discussing his legacy, reported The Telegraph.
Interestingly, the Churchill College at Cambridge was established with the help of the leader in 1958.
The group chaired by college fellow Prof Priyamvada Gopala was branded biased before the event began for omitting defenders of the wartime leader.
The Empire Churchill led against Nazi Germany in the Second World War was branded morally poorer than the Third Reich, and the view that a virtuous Britain defeated the genocidal state was deemed a “problematic narrative”, observed the panellists.
Professor Kehinde Andrews, author of The Psychosis of Whiteness, said Churchill was: “The perfect embodiment of white supremacy”.
He claimed that this supremacist view dominated the politics of the day, and currently dominates in post-Imperial Britain.
Fellow panellist Dr Onyeka Nubia noted that Churchill’s History of the English Speaking Peoples made use of the language of white supremacy through the veiled terms “English Speaking Peoples” and “Anglo-Saxon”, the newspaper report said.
Dr Madhusree Mukerjee argued that the prime minister viewed Indians as “rabbits”, and his policies had a direct role in the Bengal Famine of 1943.
“Militarism is the core of the British identity, and statues celebrating this should be taken down. It was the Soviets who defeated the Nazis and the Americans who defeated the Japanese,” she said.
Historian Dr Zareer Masani wrote to the Cambridge College before the event warning that its panel lacked historical expertise and aimed only to “vilify” Churchill.
Andrew Roberts, author of Churchill: Walking with Destiny, described the panels’ claims as “libels” that are “entirely factually incorrect”.
“If the Japanese had captured India in WW2 would have led to perhaps tens of millions of deaths if their record elsewhere was comparable. Churchill did his best in the exigencies of wartime to alleviate the Bengal Famine. In his political career he fought again and again against slavery and for the rights of non-whites within the British Empire. Churchill was moreover instrumental in destroying the worst racist in history, Adolf Hitler,” he said.
According to the College, the event was a panel discussion not a debate, and intended as one in a series of events on the leader’s legacy.
