AS WE CELEBRATE SOMETHING CALLED ANZAC, TO REMEMBER THE MEN AND WOMEN OF Australian & New Zealand Army Corps WHO FOUGHT IN OUR WORLD WARS, WE STILL NEED TO THINK ABOUT WHY.

WHY, WHY, WHY, THESE PEOPLE HAD TO FIGHT? SURE WE KNOW: HITLER, NAPOLEON, THE DUKE FERDINAND, THE COMMUNISTS, THE TURKS, THE ARABS, THE SPANISH, THE CHINESE, THE AMERICAN INDIANS, THE INDIANS FROM INDIA, THE BLACKS, THE ABORIGINES, THE FRENCH, GENGHIS KHAN, SATAN, AN AXIS OF EVIL, THE GREEKS, THE ROMANS, THE SLAVIC HORDES, THE BOERS, THE PIRATES, THE MEXICANS, ETC, WITH THE LATESTS ON THE LONG LIST OF WHAT/WHO WE HATE, BEING XI JINPING AND VLADIMIR PUTIN…

ONE COULD WONDER WHAT DRUG WE’RE ON OR WHAT GENETIC MUTATION TURNED ALL OF US INTO PSYCHOPATHS — OR WARRIORS — OR GOOD DOGS FOLLOWING ORDERS TO FIGHT ON THE BEHALF OF GOVERNING PSYCHOS…

HITLER WAS A PSYCHOPATH AND ONE NEEDED ANOTHER PSYCHOPATH TO DEFEAT HIM…. THIS IS WHAT IS TROUBLING — AND YOU ARE GOING TO HATE ME FOR SAYING THIS — IS THAT XI AND PUTIN ARE NOT PSYCHOPATHS NOR ARE THEY SOCIOPATHS, BUT WE NEED TO DEFINE THEM AS SUCH IN ORDER TO JUSTIFY OUR OWN WESTERN SOCIOPATHY, DEFINED AS THE RULES-BASED ORDER OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE DESIGNED TO CONQUER THE WORLD WITH OUR SUPERIORITY AND EXCEPTIONALISM. 

WE HATE THE OTHERS…

WINSTON CHURCHILL WANTED TO BOMB (NUKE) RUSSIA. WINSTON CHURCHILL WANTED TO BOMB (NUKE) CHINA — ALL MOSTLY BECAUSE THEY EXISTED. RUSSIA AND CHINA DO NOT HAVE THE RIGHT TO EXIST, EXCEPT IF THEY KISS OUR BIG WESTERN ARSE.

THIS IS OUR TROUBLE. WE INVENT THEIR DESIRES… WE DO NOT LISTEN. AND THIS IS BORN FROM AN ANGLO/SAXON  — ENGLISH GERMANIC ARYAN LINE OF SADISTS, RACISTS AND PSEUDO-INTELLIGENT WHITE SHINNED, BLUE-EYED POWERFUL MORONS.

IT’S TIME TO TAKE A BREAK FROM OUR FOLLIES.

G.L.

Why can't Britain handle the truth about Winston Churchill?

This article is more than 3 years old

Priyamvada Gopal

Nothing, it seems, can be allowed to tarnish the national myth – as I found when hosting a Cambridge debate about his murkier side

baleful silence attends one of the most talked-about figures in British history. You may enthuse endlessly about Winston Churchill “single-handedly” defeating Hitler. But mention his views on race or his colonial policies, and you’ll be instantly drowned in ferocious and orchestrated vitriol.

In a sea of fawningly reverential Churchill biographies, hardly any books seriously examine his documented racism. Nothing, it seems, can be allowed to complicate, let alone tarnish, the national myth of a flawless hero: an idol who “saved our civilisation”, as Boris Johnson claims, or “humanity as a whole”, as David Cameron did. Make an uncomfortable observation about his views on white supremacy and the likes of Piers Morgan will ask: “Why do you live in this country?”

Not everyone is content to be told to be quiet because they would be “speaking German” if not for Churchill. Many people want to know more about the historical figures they are required to admire uncritically. The Black Lives Matter protests last June – during which the word “racist” was sprayed in red letters on Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square, were accompanied by demands for more education on race, empire and the figures whose statues dot our landscapes.

Yet providing a fuller picture is made difficult. Scholars who explore less illustrious sides of Churchill are treated dismissively. Take the example of Churchill College, Cambridge, where I am a teaching fellow. In response to calls for fuller information about its founder, the college set up a series of events on Churchill, Empire and Race. I recently chaired the second of these, a panel discussion on “The Racial Consequences of Mr Churchill”.

Even before it took place, the discussion was repeatedly denounced in the tabloids and on social media as “idiotic”, a “character assassination” aimed at “trashing” the great man. Outraged letters to the college said this was academic freedom gone too far, and that the event should be cancelled. The speakers and I, all scholars and people of colour, were subjected to vicious hate mail, racist slurs and threats. We were accused of treason and slander. One correspondent warned that my name was being forwarded to the commanding officer of an RAF base near my home.

The college is now under heavy pressure to stop doing these events. After the recent panel, the rightwing thinktank Policy Exchange, which is influential in government circles – and claims to champion free speech and controversial views on campus – published a “review” of the event. The foreword, written by Churchill’s grandson Nicholas Soames, stated that he hoped the review would “prevent such an intellectually dishonest event from being organised at Churchill College in the future – and, one might hope, elsewhere”.

It’s ironic. We’re told by government and media that “cancel culture” is an imposition of the academic left. Yet here it is in reality, the actual “cancel culture” that prevents a truthful engagement with British history. Churchill was an admired wartime leader who recognised the threat of Hitler in time and played a pivotal role in the allied victory. It should be possible to recognise this without glossing over his less benign side. The scholars at the Cambridge event – Madhusree Mukerjee, Onyeka Nubia and Kehinde Andrews – drew attention to Churchill’s dogged advocacy of British colonial rule; his contributing role in the disastrous 1943 Bengal famine, in which millions of people died unnecessarily; his interest in eugenics; and his views, deeply retrograde even for his time, on race.

Churchill is on record as praising “Aryan stock” and insisting it was right for “a stronger race, a higher-grade race” to take the place of indigenous peoples. He reportedly did not think “black people were as capable or as efficient as white people”. In 1911, Churchill banned interracial boxing matches so white fighters would not be seen losing to black ones. He insisted that Britain and the US shared “Anglo-Saxon superiority”. He described anticolonial campaigners as “savages armed with ideas”.

Even his contemporaries found his views on race shocking. In the context of Churchill’s hard line against providing famine relief to Bengal, the colonial secretary, Leo Amery, remarked: “On the subject of India, Winston is not quite sane … I didn’t see much difference between his outlook and Hitler’s.”

Just because Hitler was a racist does not mean Churchill could not have been one. Britain entered the war, after all, because it faced an existential threat – and not primarily because it disagreed with Nazi ideology. Noting affinities between colonial and Nazi race-thinking, African and Asian leaders queried Churchill’s double standards in firmly rejecting self-determination for colonial subjects who were also fighting Hitler.

It is worth recalling that the uncritical Churchill-worship that is so dominant today was not shared by many British people in 1945, when they voted him out of office before the war was even completely over. Many working-class communities in Britain, from Dundee to south Wales, felt strong animosity towards Churchill for his willingness to mobilise military force during industrial disputes. As recently as 2010, Llanmaes community council opposed the renaming of a military base to Churchill Lines.

Critical assessment is not “character assassination”. Thanks to the groupthink of “the cult of Churchill”, the late prime minister has become a mythological figure rather than a historical one. To play down the implications of Churchill’s views on race – or suggest absurdly, as Policy Exchange does, that his racist words meant “something other than their conventional definition” – speaks to me of a profound lack of honesty and courage.

This failure of courage is tied to a wider aversion to examining the British empire truthfully, perhaps for fear of what it might say about Britain today. A necessary national conversation about Churchill and the empire he was so committed to is one necessary way to break this unacceptable silence.

• Priyamvada Gopal is an academic and author of Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/17/why-cant-britain-handle-the-truth-about-winston-churchill

As a young cavalry officer, the Old Harrovian Winston Churchill was accused of having “participated in acts of gross immorality of the Oscar Wilde type” with fellow cadets at Sandhurst; but he successfully sued his accuser for libel, and there is no evidence that, as an adult, he engaged in physical homosexual relationships. Yet he was far from being straightforwardly heterosexual. Although he worshipped his beautiful American mother, he showed a lifelong aversion to women. (In Churchill’s only novel Savrola, the obviously autobiographical hero has a purely chaste relationship with the heroine, obviously based on Churchill’s mother.) He seems to have had a low sex drive, and married rather cold-bloodedly, aged 33, for social and dynastic reasons, just after being appointed to Asquith’s cabinet. Though he came to depend on his “Clemmie” in many ways, she was often exasperated by his emotional unresponsiveness and treatment of her as a child-bearer and housekeeper, and more than once considered leaving him.

While he never showed much interest in women other than his wife, Churchill’s life was marked by a series of close platonic relationships with attractive young men. Prominent among these were Eddie Marsh, a civil servant who served devotedly for 25 years as his private secretary, whom Churchill described as “a friend I shall cherish and hold on to all my life”; Archie Sinclair, a cavalry officer, whom he chose as his second in command on the western front in 1916, as his personal assistant as war secretary and colonial secretary in 1919-22, and finally (after Sinclair had become leader of the Liberal party) as air minister in 1940; Bob Boothby, the youngest and handsomest MP, whom Churchill, as chancellor of the exchequer in the 1920s, appointed his PPS despite the bumptious Boothby having criticised his policies; and Brendan Bracken, a young man on the make whom Churchill (to the horror of his family) effectively adopted in the 1920s and who served as his right-hand man during the 1930s, finally becoming information minister during the second world war. (Of these four, Marsh, who developed crushes on young writers and actors, and Boothby, who had a taste for “rough trade” from the criminal underworld, were certainly predominantly homosexual, and Bracken, though he cloaked his private life in impenetrable secrecy, probably, too.) 

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/may/16/double-lives-a-history-of-sex-and-secrecy-at-westminster#

There’s been much discussion this week about Churchill’s thirsty drinking habits. My colleague Harry Wallop felt very sick after he tried replicating the great statesman's daily intake. But what is missed sometimes in accounts of famous boozers from history is how the drinking was often supported by heavy-duty prescription drugs.

This was especially true in the early days of the so-called psychopharmacological revolution of the mid-20th century. All of a sudden a clutch of different compounds emerged on to the market that for the first time offered effective treatment of wretched and intractable conditions like insomnia, anxiety and depression. At the same time, the addictive potential of amphetamines (speed) and barbiturate sedatives was poorly understood.

Churchill called his doctor Lord Moran a “vendor of nostrums” but, according to Moran’s biographer Richard Lovell, Moran was a parsimonious prescriber. Even so, Lord Moran tried out a range of different psychoactive drugs on his distinguished patient, giving many of them nicknames. (As a side-note: it was the rather quaint fashion of the time that instead of putting the real name of a medicine on its packaging, doctors often specified a vague descriptive title such as “the sleeping draught” or “for nerves".)

One of the drugs that Moran put Churchill on was known as "reds" because of the shiny, jewel-like vermilion capsules it came in. This was Seconal, a powerful, rapid-acting barbiturate that can easily kill in higher doses and is particularly lethal when mixed with alcohol. Seconal, along with Amytal, is the nuclear bomb of sleeping pills and is now considered too dangerous to be used except in special circumstances – it is both highly addictive, and deadly in higher doses. (A mixture of Seconal and Amytal was branded Tuinal - ie, Two-in-All: quick-acting Seconal to get you off to sleep, longer-acting Amytal to keep you slumbering.)

Majors and Minors

A lot of people found the intoxication produced by "reds" very appealing, so, not surprisingly, they leaked on to the illicit market in large numbers during the 1960s and 1970s. So did another widely abused street drug of the period, “purple hearts”. This was Drinamyl. (Drinamyl came in little blue triangular tablets, hence "purple hearts".) It was half barbiturate – to calm – and half amphetamine – to perk up the mood. Churchill took these from the time of his stroke in 1953 onwards. Moran called them “Majors” to distinguish from the weaker formulation of “Minors” – Edrisal, a mixture of painkillers and a barbiturate. Churchill himself dubbed his favourite tablets his “Morans”.

Churchill wasn’t the only statesman to take psychoactive medication, of course, just the best known. Kennedy was another: his doctor, Max Jacobson, became notorious for his “tissue regenerator” shots - active ingredient, almost certainly: speed. And Anthony Eden is thought to have relied heavily on Drinamyl (like Churchill) during the Suez crisis. And there were countless others, all the way back to Cleopatra.

Plenty of ordinary patients took these pills too, and barbiturates were among the most popular medicines of the 10th century, until they were discredited and plummeted out of fashion.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/11380891/Churchills-drinking-was-one-thing-but-what-about-his-drug-taking.html

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