I think the argument that Churchill was ‘product of his time’ is an interesting one - because so is everyone, including Hitler. By arguing that Churchill was essentially a good leader because he defeated Hitler, we not only argue that Churchill was the good to Hitler’s evil, but we also draw a direct comparison between the two, and if we are going to do that, we have to be honest, because both were products of their time - but we still criticize Hitler, do we not?
I think a closer look at Hitler and leaders throughout history would be useful. Arendt argues that we have to dispel the idea of ‘the uniqueness of the holocaust’ because when we place the holocaust within a history of colonial expansion, we see that the basic principles behind the both of them are fundamentally the same - that inferior races could be exterminated if it was in the interest of empire building. This led Lord Salisbury to argue that the world can be divided into the living and the dying - to argue that it is acceptable to kill savages because they are already dying, but not the civilized (white people) because they are the supreme race that will continue into the ages. Linquist in his histories has shown that imperialists had the basic idea that the laws of nature dictate that higher races destroy lower ones, and that they were a higher race.
So what was unique about Hitler, if not his mass extermination? It was rather that he did it in Europe. Whereas the Christian bourgeois applied colonial practices to the rest of the world, Hitler did so to Europe. To quote Fanon ‘Nazism turned the world of Europe into a colony’. Indeed, it was the work of the colonial Germans against the Herero people that inspired Hitler - but for some reason the colonial Germans don’t inspire the same disgust in us as Hitler does.
If we’re going to justify the actions of Churchill because he was ‘a product of his time’, we should also apply the same justifications to everyone, including Hitler, Jimmy Saville and Harvey Weinstein (remember both Weinstein and Saville were treated like gods, given inordinate power, their actions were seen as a norm by those in power etc, psychologists have discussed the effects this has on the mind, and a creation of entitlement to another body’s as if it is our own), but we don’t give them a get out of jail free card, do we? We critique what they did.)
Now, if we’re willing to criticize Hitler for what he did to those he deemed to be of a lower race, why can we not do the same to Churchill? Because to me, he is just another Hitler - he saw the lives of Indian children as worth less than British ones, leading to millions dying.
But actually, what’s interesting is, the more we contextualise Churchill - the more we realize that he was worse than other leaders of his time, and that had someone else been British prime minister, millions of ‘savages’ wouldn’t have been killed by the British. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin was told by his cabinet not too appoint him because he was too racist - this was in the 1920s. Even his doctor Lord Moran argued that “Winston thinks only of the colour of their skin” when it comes to other races, and thought this was strange. When Churchill was stockpiling grain, British officials were telling him it was unnecessary, and to stop because Indians were dying and it was wrong, not just British officials, but members of his cabinet - they thought what he was doing was wrong. To contextualise his views shows not only that his views no different to Hitler’s, just applied to non Europeans (who we often exclude from our narratives), but also that his views were much worse than other colonialists of his time - he was deemed racist by other racists. His right hand man, the guy who ran the colonies for British interest argued that “on the subject of India, Winston is not quite sane", arguing that there is he didn’t “see much difference between [Churchill's] outlook and Hitler's."
If Hitler’s crime was killing millions because they were deemed a lower race, and Churchill’s crime was killing millions because they were deemed a lower race - what’s the difference?
Now even if we entertain that Hitler was worse, which I think he was, but only marginally, it wasn’t even Churchill that defeated him - that is a myth. In no country apart from Britain do a majority believe that Britain was the most important in defeating the Germans - not even britons believed that until recently. The most important nation was the USSR, under Stalin - do we build statues thanking him? Because without him we’d be speaking German? Nah we don’t, because he killed millions, just like Churchill did.
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