Mastodawn

John Birkhead Mar 21

In 1919 someone famous said this:

“I cannot understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes”

He was the government minister for war, and he was talking about the Middle East (Kurds and Afghans).

It was Winston Churchill. Not much has changed. The disregard for human life continues.

#IranWar

Syd II 🇪🇺Mar 20

@dave You can’t say that about Saint Winston. The Gammons will be apoplectic. 😉

Charlie Stross Mar 20

@dave @quixoticgeek

Yeah, what many anglophones today don't seem to realize is that Winston was a monstrous asshole.

For perspective, consider that it took fricken' HITLER to make him look good.

(In his defense: he was born in 1874 and as an officer in the British Army rode in cavalry charges against Pashtuns in what is now Pakistan: classic Victorian imperial soldiering. By the 20th century he was already a living fossil.)

@cstross @dave @quixoticgeek
Don't think you needed to be born in the 20th century to know that concentration camps and fascism are bad. He approved of concentration camps during the boer war. Then put ones in place in Kenya and Malaya in the 1950s. And wrote back to his sister how much he loved Mussolini in the '20s.

Charlie Stross Mar 20

@catch56 @dave @quixoticgeek Yup! Like I said, it took Hitler to make him look good. An absolute monster in any other context.

Ray McCarthy Mar 20

@cstross @catch56 @dave @quixoticgeek
He also ordered the bombing of a German city during "the battle of Britain" guessing that Hitler would retaliate and thus take the pressure off the RAF airfields. The decision "won" the Battle of Britain but led to bombing of other UK cities as well as London and V1 & V2 (vengeance) which ironically killed more slaves making them than people in the targets. The V1 was the original Cruise "missile" and V2 the original ballistic missile.
He was a racist.

Charlie Stross Mar 20

@raymaccarthy @catch56 @dave @quixoticgeek And that's without mentioning Churchill's culpability in the Bengal famine.

Ray McCarthy Mar 20

@cstross @catch56 @dave @quixoticgeek
Yes, that too.
Now it's mentioned. Absolutely evil.

Stalin also fought Hitler and that doesn't make him good either.

Ray McCarthy Mar 20

@cstross @catch56 @dave @quixoticgeek
Winston Churchill was even banned from the BBC in 1930s and originated Enoch Powell's "rivers of blood" rhetoric.
He vetoed bombing railways feeding the death camps in 1940s.

Charlie Stross Mar 20

@raymaccarthy @catch56 @dave @quixoticgeek The RAF would have had difficulty bombingreat g those railway lines: the death camps were to the east of Germany, at extreme range, and taking out railway lines with bombs is difficult (ask the USAF how well it worked during the Vietnam war).

Churchill did enough horrible things he can be blamed for that there's no reason to dogpile him with edge cases. It just serves to undercut the strength of the case against him. He was an asshole: the end.

Ray McCarthy Mar 20

@cstross @catch56 @dave @quixoticgeek
He was certainly equally nasty. Hated Jews *and* Muslims. Probably anyone not Anglo-Saxon Anglican? But I don't know about that.
My dad collected his "history" books from S/H and I may have those now. I wonder if any less biased than Julius Caesar?

@raymaccarthy @cstross @dave @quixoticgeek yeah he wrote an article in about 1920 complaining about international Jews which is an early example of the 'judeo bolshevism' far right conspiracy theory.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Zionism_versus_Bolshevism

Zionism versus Bolshevism - Wikisource, the free online library

Ray McCarthy Mar 20

@cstross @catch56 @dave @quixoticgeek

It doesn't take long to fix a bombed railway line or airstrip. Big bridges or hangers full of aircraft is another matter. There is a good reason why Iran stores drones underground.

Nor does bombing cities make it likely a government will surrender.

@cstross @raymaccarthy @dave @quixoticgeek well there are non 'edge case' examples from WWII like destroying every fishing boat in Bengal in case the Japanese army reached there, then refusing to send any rice or wheat when the rice harvest failed shortly afterwards, insisting it should all go to England instead, resulting in a famine in which approx 3 million people died, to which his response was 'if there's a famine why isn't Gandhi dead yet?'

Gerbrand van Dieyen Mar 20

@raymaccarthy @cstross @catch56 @dave @quixoticgeek Arguably it didn't shorten the war at at all. Bombing of civilian targets cost a lot, lowered moral authority, and had extended the war according to some historians.

Charlie Stross Mar 20

@gerbrandvd @raymaccarthy @catch56 @dave @quixoticgeek It mostly gave the more naive British public the illusion that something was being done, during a 3 year period during which the UK wasn't actually fighting on the ground in the European theatre (commando raids aside). And tied up about a million German soldiers and 30,000 high velocity artillery tubes that would otherwise have been sent to the Russian front. Aside from that it was horribly expensive, cruel, and pointlessly destructive.

Dave Robinson Mar 20

@cstross @catch56 @quixoticgeek
And he was an alcoholic too. Probably not advisable to have an alcoholic running the country.

anubis2814 Mar 20

@cstross @quixoticgeek @dave Yeah they Brits were running Jews in work camps a few years after Hitler died, because everyone used them. Hitler's death camps made concentration camps look bad so everyone stopped using them in the west until Trump came a long.

Charlie Stross Mar 20

@anubis2814 @quixoticgeek @dave Source for the "Brits running Jews in work camps after Hitler" thing, plz. (Am Jewish; also British and I've never heard of such a thing.)

anubis2814 Mar 20

@cstross @quixoticgeek @dave Check out the behind the bastards episode on the history of concentration camps.

Charlie Stross Mar 20

@anubis2814 @quixoticgeek @dave Is that a TV thing? Because I don't/can't watch TV/video. (If you've got a written source that'll do.)

anubis2814 Mar 20

@cstross @quixoticgeek @dave youtu.be/-whes5DdXvI?si=KCPBeN… podcasts, can you not watch those either? It's just audio. They mention their sources inside, this one must have accidentally not put up its show note with references

Concentration Camps Are Back, So Let's Talk About Their History | BEHIND THE BASTARDS

YouTube

Barney Dellar (he/him)Mar 20

@cstross @dave @quixoticgeek Ross Greer from the Greens got in loads of “trouble” a few years back for saying what a monster Churchill was.

Charlie Stross Mar 20

@BarneyDellar @dave @quixoticgeek The myth of the "just war" of WW2 (because look, Hitler!) took root really deeply in the UK. If you're going to surrender an empire it helps to have a just-so story to take the sting away. Too bad a lot of the formative mythology of modern England is 100% pure bullshit and lies.

Quixoticgeek Mar 20

@cstross @BarneyDellar @dave this thread is a strong argument for having an otter and a squirrel on the UK bank notes.

Charlie Stross Mar 20

@quixoticgeek @BarneyDellar @dave I dunno, I think we missed a trick in not replacing Churchill with a tapeworm, or maybe scrofula or herpes.

Steve Woods Mar 20

@cstross @dave @quixoticgeek In WW1 Churchill has the main cheerleader for the disastrous Gallipoli campaign, which saw my grandfather sent abroad for the first and only time in his life. He survived, unlike thousands of others.

Charlie Stross Mar 20

@wood5y @dave @quixoticgeek Did you notice what Churchill did in the wake of Gallipoli? (Took full responsibility, resigned, joined the army, and was sent to the western front.)

Yes, it was a fuck-up: but can you see a modern politician doing that?

(Also: if Gallipoli had worked—I blame the failure on the Royal Navy leadership in the theatre—it would have shortened the war by two years and there'd have been no Russian revolution, Brest-Litovsk, or Kaiserslacht. Millions fewer dead.)

Steve Woods Mar 20

@cstross @dave @quixoticgeek Another contributory factor to the failure of Gallipoli was the maps being used by the Brits, which were 50 years out of date.

Added to that was the dismissive racist attitude towards the Turks, who proved far more determined as soldiers than had been predicted.

No, I couldn't imagine a similar show of contrition from any modern politician.

The last to exhibit such behaviour. was Profumo.

Charlie Stross Mar 20

@wood5y @dave @quixoticgeek As I keep saying, Churchill was a creature of another age. Vile, bigoted, reprehensible—all these things are true: but he was also erratically brilliant and took responsibility for his blunders. (If they cost *British* lives. Imperial subjects and bloody foreigners could go hang, for all he cared.)

Charlie Stross Mar 20

@wood5y @dave @quixoticgeek Mind you, the Ottoman Empire was only in the war in the first place because Churchill fucked up and at the outset of hostilities with Germany requisitioned two battleships, Sultân Osmân-ı Evvel and Reşadiye, which the British built for a Turkish contract. Germany saw an opportunity and donated the Goeben and Breslau as replacements, and signed a treaty of alliance with Turkey. So it's Churchillian fuck-ups all the way down.

jimkennedy Mar 20

@cstross @dave @quixoticgeek I would imagine he's almost atop the list of most reviled Brits in Ireland, for his role in sending the Black and Tans to suppress the rebellion. Probably edges out Thatcher but not Cromwell.

Mx. Dudula the Dud Mar 20

@dave he wanted to gas German civilians in WWII, as well.

Christo. London, England Mar 20

@dave
My Dad hated Churchill

beakerman Mar 20

@[email protected] d the people of South Wales, Tonypandy in particular,dispyed him.
(November 1910)

@dave Something has changed, since politicians and militaries have akways the same mindset, but civilians don't like to hear it anymore, in a public speaking.
Might be that in some far future nobody at all would think or say it, even though just a feeble hypothesis.

Deb Nam-Krane Mar 20

@dave I'm grateful every time someone posts something like this. It starts to make up for all of the times I've had to endure "Churchill was a principled hero of the twentieth century. "

Dave Robinson Mar 20

@dnkboston
Sadly most British think he was a hero and a military genius. Probably in reality he just happened to be the guy in charge at the time, and Hitler was defeated by his own over-ambition and the Russians. The British got rid of Churchill at the first opportunity.

Trump said that Starmer is "no Churchill", which I take as a compliment. Maybe he needs reminding that America didn't join in for 2½ years, instead lending Europe resources which took decades to repay. By Pearl Harbour, Hitler was bogged down outside Moscow and the tide was starting to turn.

Deb Nam-Krane Mar 20

@dave Stalin's War by Sean McMeekin (sp?) covered some of Churchill's failings, not least that he was somewhat smitten with Stalin until it was too late.