1 – Churchill had some really dubious views about race

“I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.”

When the young Winston was born in 1874, the British Empire was coming close to its peak. By the time he left Sandhurst and entered into the British Army in 1895, the imperial might of Britain was arguably at its height. The empire on which the sun never set spread from Australia to India in the east, from Arabia and Egypt down to Cape Town in Africa as well as Canada, Ireland and the West Indies. It covered around a quarter of the world’s landmass and sustained itself through a combination of terror, economic control and bureaucracy. It was into this mindset that Churchill was reared.

Children of his background, groomed for military and imperial service, were raised with the idea that Britain was best and that the natural order was for them to be in charge. Thus, when he was first sent to India in October 1896, he was sent to be part of an administration that solely existed for the furthering of British goals: namely maintaining the flow of wealth out of India and back to Britain.

Churchill might not have been particularly racist by the standards of fellow Edwardian aristocrats, but from the very beginning, Churchill exhibited a level of racism that would shock a modern observer. He thought that those over whom the British presided were little more than savages, whom were protected from killing each other by the patronage of the colonists. “The strong aboriginal propensity to kill, inherent in all human beings, has in these valleys been preserved in unexampled strength and vigour,” he wrote in his memoirs of his time in what is now Pakistan. Churchill wrote extensively of the way in which the warring tribes in the Northwest Frontier provinces fought each other and paid no respect to each other’s dead, but at no point mentioned that the British did exactly the same when they killed natives.

Of the Chinese, he wrote: “I think we shall have to take the Chinese in hand and regulate them. I believe that as civilized nations become more powerful they will get more ruthless, and the time will come when the world will impatiently bear the existence of great barbaric nations who may at any time arm themselves and menace civilized nations. I believe in the ultimate partition of China — I mean ultimate. I hope we shall not have to do it in our day. The Aryan stock is bound to triumph”.

Later Churchill managed to get himself posted to the Sudan – though the leader of the British campaign there, Lord Kitchener, protested vehemently against having to bring the young Winston, whom he thought little more than a glory-hunter. Churchill fought at the Battle of Omdurman in September 1898, in which the Sudanese, armed with spears, were massacred by the heavily-armed British.

A witness described it as thus:
“They could never get near and they refused to hold back…It was not a battle but an execution…The bodies were not in heaps – bodies hardly ever are; but they spread evenly over acres and acres. Some lay very composedly with their slippers placed under their heads for a last pillow; some knelt, cut short in the middle of a last prayer. Others were torn to pieces.”

Churchill later wrote of his “irritation that Kaffirs (blacks) should be allowed to fire on white men” and his personal physician, Lord Moran, once remarked that “Winston thinks only of the colour of their skin.” The final word on Churchill’s views on race might well go to journalist and biographer Max Hastings, who described it as such: “Churchill’s view of the British Empire and its peoples was unenlightened by comparison with that of America’s president [Franklin Roosevelt], or even by the standards of his time.”

Churchill would, throughout his career, reserve the worst of his ire for the Indians – read on to discover what he thought of them.