The white man's burden

As an adult, I was always at a loss understanding how people born in India could not be angry.  Did they not care that the Bastard Empire ruined everything?  Even the loss of a historical continuity, and the very fact that here I am thinking and blogging in English?  Why such a worship of the barbarians who decimated life all around the world?  (Not that the rest of the world, including the old country, was a paradise otherwise.)

Over the years, I have blogged in plenty ranting about the Bastard Empire, and even celebrating the mess when the Conservatives tumble.  I am mighty glad that it has once again become a small island that is irrelevant to the rest of the world, as it was for most of human history.

One bastard, however, successfully managed to paint himself as the savior of western democracies.  Yep, this post is about the cigar chomping racist bastard.  It is beyond time to rewrite his history, like how Priya Satia writes in this essay.

(You may also want to read this book-review essay in the NYRB on the imperial delusions of the bastards; one of the books reviewed there is Priya Satia's Time's Monster.)

Satia, who is an endowed chair professor at Stanford, writes that Churchill had a godawful "sense of historical birthright, of masculine, upper-class entitlement to make history without accountability for human costs."

In every time, including ours, multiple value systems are in contest. Churchill’s decisions were guided less by intellectual consistency than an unapologetic sense of entitlement to make decisions (often opportunistically) based on his romantic intuitions.

I thought I had by now known enough about the bastard; yet, this was a shocker to me:

He praised Mussolini through the 1930s and continued to flatter him during the war itself. He sided with the fascists in the Spanish Civil War and admired Hitler, who also garnered a chapter in “Great Contemporaries.” He didn’t object to fascism but to the threatening continental expansionism that it inspired in Germany. 

I am reminded of George Carlin's punchline that the Allies were upset with Hitler because he cut in on their action.  It was not Hitler's Aryan supremacy and hitlerism that bothered the likes of Churchill, but that the fact that he went on an expansionist rampage into their own territories!

As we move forward in time, even those like Churchill who tried to engineer their stories will be defeated by the unfolding of history.  That is the fate that also awaits the contemporary GOP and the Republican "leaders" who, too, view "dominance as a birthright."

As a historian I assure you that what the @GOP and @LeaderMcConnell did today is completely in keeping with disenfranchisement after Reconstruction and the Jim Crow South. And history will judge them accordingly. They belong in the dustbin of history and will live in infamy.

— Manisha Sinha (@ProfMSinha) June 22, 2021