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| Churchill .www.coventry |
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| Churchill .henrypayne.com |
As for India, the PM Modiji and theTN state CM take the correct decision regarding total lock down of the country and some relief here and there, but a large swathe of irresponsible people in many parts of the country and in TN pay little attention to social distancing and self-isolation that will keep the spread of virus in check. The disparaging fact is the opposition leaders, using the virus problem as a ruse and criticize the leaders instead of being cooperative. They have failed to act in tandem with the government to alleviate the social problems being faced by the people. No decent donations from these political parties to the public funds to handle the present virus emergency in Tamil Nadu and elsewhere.
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| Winston Churchill cigarmonkeys.com/ |
Shashi Tharoor, Congress man and an active politician from Kerala, rightly put Winston Churchill in the same category of the 'Rogue's gallery' as one will find in the police department. I wish I had a mug shot of Winston, the craziest man from the English aristocracy. Without any hesitation Tharoor referred to him as “the worst genocidal dictators” of the 20th century because of his complicity in the Bengal Famine.
In his well-received popular book ''Inglorious Empire'' Dr Tharoor lists despicable atrocities of the British Empire and he, with authority, argued that Churchill's reputation as a great wartime leader and protector of freedom was simply hyped up by the British media. The worst Bengal famine exposed his racist and snobbish mentality towards Indians. No body ever thought
Churchill would stoop to such a low level as to divert the ships from Australia laden with wheat docked at the Calcutta harbor to European destinations to increase the buffer stock there and meet the needs of British soldiers and countries such as Greece. This was done on purpose by him while a deadly famine was sweeping through Bengal, killing people in large numbers almost daily. He never showed any remorse toward the dying people, their pain and misery. The paradox is it was India and the natives' sweat and blood financed the industrial revolution in England and these people stood by the British during the two world wars and they supplied them the needed arms, ammunition, uniforms, boots, etc during the wars - all at the cost of Govt. of British India (they got the revenue from the Indian lands).
“This is a man the British would have us hail as an apostle of freedom and democracy, when he has as much blood on his hands as some of the worst genocidal dictators of the 20th century,” Tharoor said to an audience in England and it was well received by the well-balanced people in the audience. Dr Tharoor first rose to prominence after his heartfelt speech at Oxford Union, discussing the economic toll British rule took on India, in July 2015 went viral.
Churchill' paranoia about India was quite well-known so was his wild and adamant opposition to freedom for Indians. Equally distressing was his hatred for Mahatma Gandhi that generated carping remarks from him. In this respect, his badmouthing never became subdued, he repeatedly mocked, calling Gandhi (among other things) a “malignant subversive fanatic” and “a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Viceregal palace.”.
When the British officials informed him about the daily unfolding causality in Bengal due to famine, Churchill said, “People started dying and .... well it’s all their fault anyway for breeding like rabbits. He said ‘I hate the Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.” His senior cabinet colleague Leo Amery recalled how Churchill had once referred Indians as beastly people. He added that their leader - Winston was, in his opinion, the beastliest of them all.
'' ...Even sharper in its criticism was the now-defunct Indian News Chronicle. Its editorial on September 27, 1951, titled “Churchilliana,” said the former British leader’s memoirs were full of myths and misstatements, of which the calumnies against Gandhi were representative. Churchill’s “entire political career,” the paper thundered, “is a record of political opportunism, inconsistency, and downright wickedness.” Calling him a “friend of reaction” and “a high priest of British imperialism,
Dr Tharoor, a former Under-Secretary of the UN, said the British broke the backbone of the traditional Indian industries such as textiles which reduced India to “a poster child of third world poverty” by the time the British left in 1947.
It is quite well-known that the British Empire was responsible for
5 worst atrocities that can not be erased from the pages of British history. they are
1. Boer concentration camps - 1900- 1902 (26000 women and children perished in the camps in S.Africa)
2. Amritsar massacre - April 13, 1919 (unofficially more than 1000 unarmed people were killed, countless people bled to death, no medical services, no ambulance. carried by Brig. Gen. Reginald Dyer; more than 1000 were severely injured)
3. Partitioning of India -August 1947(communal violence took its roots during the colonial period; during partition resulted in the death of more than one million people while shifting their residecy across the India and Pakistan borders.)
4. Mau Mau Uprising (1952-1960 in Kenya)
No doubt Winston Churchill is one of the evil rulers of the 20th century sharing the lousy reputation of cunning and murderous people like Hitler, Mao and Stalin. In reality, his almost strangled neck in the face of Hitler's pounding of England in the WWII was saved by the superior war strategies and the bravery of Americans and Russians at the right time. The impact of WWII was so much on Britain, at last, it loosened its tight grip on the Indian subcontinent. The Indians had begun to see the flickering light at the end of the tunnel and there was no end to Winston's mad continuous blabbering about India.
In his homeland, Churchill’s supposedly vital contribution to saving his people from Hitler' onslaught eclipses other leaders real contribution and he was voted as the greatest Briton of all time. A senior Labor party leader described him as a “villain” for having ordered troops to fire on striking workers in the Welsh town of Tonypandy in 1910. Till his death Churchill's superiority complex and obdurate attitude toward people of other races kept surfacing for the simple reason - his strong belief in the hegemony of the world by Anglo-Saxon peoples.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/04/churchill-gandhi-briton-indian-greatest/584170/
http://navrangindia.blogspot.com/2018/07/wiston-churchills-abusive-quotes-on.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/world-history/winston-churchill-genocide-dictator-shashi-tharoor-melbourne-writers-festival-a7936141.html
Ramachandra Guha is a historian based in Bengaluru. His most recent book is Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World, 1914-1948.