“UK kids say Churchill was 1st man on moon!:
…Nearly three quarters of children between 4 to 10 years cannot even identify the moon in the night sky, let alone any stars or planets…(and say) Sir Winston Churchill, the UK Prime Minister during the second world war, was the first man to walk on the moon…”
I don’t see Churchill on moon but surely see him in hell.
Amartya Sen wrote in Economic & Political Weekly February 16-22, 2008:
“…Winston Churchill’s famous remark that the Bengal famine of 1943 was caused by the tendency of people there to breed like rabbits belongs to this general tradition of blaming the colonial victim. This had a profound effect in crucially delaying famine relief in that disastrous and easily preventable famine. The demands of cultural nationalism merge well with the asymmetry of power and can have quite devastating effects…”
(India was hardly alone. Sample cruelty of Britain towards Ireland:
"Charles Edward Trevelyan, the head of the treasury in London during the famines, who had a huge role in the making of public policy in Ireland, even took the liberty of speculating: “There is scarcely a woman of the peasant class in the West of Ireland whose culinary art exceeds the boiling of a potato”. There, it seems, we see the birth of a putatively great explanation of a famine – people starved because the Irish peasant woman could not cook beyond boiling a potato!"
It is estimated that between 500,000 and 1.5 million people died as a result of the famine.
"The famines of the 1840s also changed the nature of Ireland in a decisive way. It led to a level of emigration – even under the most terrible conditions of voyage – that has hardly been seen anywhere else in the world. The Irish population even today is very substantially smaller than it was more than 160 years ago, in 1845, when the famine began.")
Although Churchill once said: “One of our great aims is the delivery on German towns of the largest possible quantity of bombs per night”, he still had some concern left for Germans as exemplified in para below.
“…Even Churchill came to regret the extent of the bombing, in March 1945 writing to the RAF’s head saying that ”the terror bombing must stop” and remonstrating over the destruction of Dresden…”
But for Indians, he only had scorn. “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.”
Considering that he also said: ”I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes.”, Bengalis should be considered lucky that they were killed by famine and not by Agent Yellow!
I really wish Churchill indeed did only paintings….
Artist: Charles E. Martin 6 February 1954
