“Show me who your friends are, and I’ll tell you who you are.” So says Sancho Panza, the sidekick of protagonist Don Quixote in Cervantes’ famous novel.
This proverb applies very much to Britain’s latest prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer. The Labour leader hosted a European Political Community Summit last month at Blenheim Palace, near Oxford, which included as a guest Ukrainian president Zelensky.
Starmer took the opportunity at this fanfare to point out that the palace was the ancestral home of the Duke of Marlborough, and the birthplace of Winston Churchill.
“We stand for the values that he [Churchill] embodies around the world,” Starmer declared. “Liberty and democracy – yes, of course – but also defiance and resolve in their defence.”
“Today as a new storm gathers over our continent,” the UK PM continued, “we choose to meet it in that same spirit, and we choose to meet it together.”
Of course, Starmer, the lackey of the British establishment, is distorting the truth about Churchill. He was no champion of “liberty and democracy”. The only “values” he embodied were those of racism, imperialism, antisemitism, and white supremacy.
In other words, he was a reactionary, anti-working-class scumbag of the first order; an out-and-out bigot – an accurate reflection and representative of the British establishment and its imperial ambitions.
Starmer loves to wrap himself in the Union Jack, and so is keen to associate himself with Churchill. If the cap fits, wear it.
Enemy of the working class
As a young boy, growing up in South Wales, I remember the contempt with which the name of Churchill provoked in ordinary people.
In 1910, as the home secretary, Churchill sent the troops, armed with bayonets, against striking miners at Tonypandy.
From then on, Churchill became a hate figure in South Wales – a feeling passed down from one generation to the next.
In the dock strike in Liverpool the following year, Churchill again sent in the troops and stationed a warship in the Mersey. He then dispatched soldiers against striking railway workers.
Supporter of the Empire
His hatred for the working class was only equaled by his hatred and subjugation of the non-white races, his support for imperialism and, of course, the British Empire.
It was not for nothing that it was said the imperialists marched into Africa with the Bible and left with the land. With slavery abolished, taking their land was the next best thing, rich in diamonds, minerals, and later oil. Modern imperialism was born.
The Tories were the party of the Church and Monarchy, of ultra-patriotism and Empire. Churchill embodied all of these things. Throughout his career, he espoused white supremacy.
He justified the actions of colonialism in terms of the plight of the “inferior races” where “a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly-wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place”.
“I hate people with slit eyes and pigtails. I don’t like the look of them or the smell of them – but I suppose it does no great harm to have a look at them,” explained Churchill.
If the black and brown races resisted their subjugation, they needed to be violently put down. Speaking of the Kurds, Churchill stated: “I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas…I am strongly in favour of using poison gas against uncivilised tribes.”
Anti-communist
Churchill hated the Bolsheviks, and mounted an armed intervention to overthrow them, fearing their example would destroy the British Empire. He was livid that British troops were barred from using poison gas.
During the 1926 general strike he edited the government’s propaganda sheet, The British Gazette, and helped mobilise blackleg labour, using reactionary organisations to smash the strike.
He wholeheartedly supported Mussolini and his fascist dictatorship, and visited him personally.
“If I had been Italian, I am sure I should have been wholeheartedly with you from the start,” he said. Churchill called El Duce “the Roman genius”, telling him “your movement has rendered service to the whole world”.
Churchill spoke favourably of Hitler and the Hitler Youth.
In a statement to the House of Commons on 6 November 1938, a year before the Second World War, he said: “I have always said that if Great Britain were defeated in war, I hoped we would find a Hitler to lead us back to our rightful position among nations.”
“Whatever else may be thought of these exploits,” wrote Churchill elsewhere, discussing Hitler’s reconstruction of German capitalism and imperialism, “they are certainly the most remarkable in the whole history of the world.”
He also welcomed Franco’s fascist victory in the Spanish Civil War, and turned a blind eye to his atrocities.
Second World War
In the middle of the Second World War, Churchill deliberately allowed famine to sweep Bengal, in which over three million people starved or died from epidemics caused by the man-made famine of 1943.
Churchill refused a state of emergency and had the food supplies diverted to the war effort. Churchill’s war cabinet refused requests for food imports, at a time when rice was exported from Bengal.
The whole genocide was hushed up. Shockingly, Churchill blamed the famine on the Indian population for “breeding like rabbits”.
Despite the fact that Japan was about to surrender in 1945, Truman dropped the bomb on the Japanese, with the full support of Churchill (and Labour’s Clement Attlee). It was nothing more than a demonstration of the power of the United States, and a warning to the Soviet Union.
After the Second World War, Greece was granted to Churchill by Stalin and Roosevelt, as it was deemed to be in Britain’s ‘sphere of influence’.
British imperialism fomented the Greek Civil War, by backing the monarchist counter-revolution, and sending in troops to disarm the communist-led resistance and impose a reactionary dictatorship.
Defender of colonialism
As the sun began to set on the British Empire after the War, Churchill resisted the demands of the colonial peoples for freedom and independence.
In Palestine, by 1948, a section of the British ruling class, under pressure from US imperialism, favoured partition and the creation of Israel. Churchill defended this policy with foul, unashamed racism:
“I do not agree that the dog in the manger [the Arabs] has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. 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.” (our emphasis)
Churchill certainly favoured ethnic cleansing on Zionist lines. For him, the Jews were a superior race compared to the Arabs. He nevertheless made a distinction between the ‘good’ Jews (the Zionists) and the ‘bad’ Jews (the Marxists and revolutionaries).
Elsewhere, he favoured ‘regime change’ to impose pliable stooges of imperialism. Above all, everything would be done to preserve what remained of the dying British Empire.
During the so-called ‘Malayan Emergency’ which began in 1948, the Chinese Malaysian freedom fighters were hunted by the British.
Newspapers appeared in England with members of Parliament photographed alongside the decapitated heads of rebel fighters. Rape, murder, and torture were the means by which Britain maintained control.
The same methods were employed in Kenya under Churchill, in the face of a growing revolt against British dictatorial rule. The land was stolen by the white settlers, and the Africans were treated like animals, and forced into destitution.
Eventually, they rose up in the Mau Mau rebellion. Some 11,000 were killed to protect British interests. These “terrorists” were blamed for the atrocities – but they were only the reaction to the atrocities of their sadistic British overlords.
Following independence, those black leaders who failed to comply with their former masters were either killed (Patrice Lumumba in Congo) or removed from office (Nkrumah in Ghana, Obote in Uganda).
This is the real legacy of Churchill: one of racism, colonialism, and rabid anti-communism. Starmer and the other criminals in Westminster are welcome to it. May they rot in hell.
Only the overthrow of this rotten capitalist system and its cronies can rid the world of imperialism and its continuing crimes.
