The famine was caused by a cyclone ruining Bengali rice-crops, exacerbated by Japan’s invasion of British Burma, formerly a leading exporter of rice regionally. Contemporary quotes from a stressed Churchill to the effect that the Indians were a “beastly people” who “breed like rabbits” are abused to imply that (as his equally short-tempered political colleague Leo Amery put it in 1944) there was “not much difference between his outlook and Hitler’s” when it came to the allegedly disposable lives of non-whites. Misrepresentation of the Bengal Famine is key to the anti-Churchill case promulgated by the activist scholars who gathered at the college which bears their enemy’s name. As the College explained: “Sir Winston is often presented as the embodiment of WWII and the UK’s identity, and so … to critically reassess Churchill is to critically reassess a nation’s identity,” namely by making it out as being worse than Nazi Germany. In February 2021 Churchill College hosted a symposium titled ‘The Racial Consequences of Mr Churchill,’ aimed at “giving voice to Black and ethnic minority scholars” to spout nonsense unchallenged. Ironically, Britain’s leading center of Churchill-bashing today is Churchill College, Cambridge, an institution established in his honor in 1960, which today attracts student mobs of eco-activists and BLM allies who repeatedly deface his bust and signage to draw attention to the way Sir Winston was also somehow apparently responsible for climate-change. As Churchill biographer Andrew Roberts memorably commented in response, “If these people think Churchill was a racist, just wait until they hear about the guy he was fighting!” His statues are now regularly vandalized, most famously during Black Lives Matter London protests in 2020, when his effigy in Westminster had its name-plaque spray-painted to read ‘CHURCHILL was a racist’. Yet to some, flaws are all Sir Winston had. A petition was started by leftist locals to get the café closed, as it “insensitively evoke memory of the Empire,” a subject which “has little to do with cafés.” As the bemused owner of the eatery observed, however, “If you can’t celebrate… Churchill, who can you celebrate? Everyone has flaws.”

In 2018, Blighty UK, a WWII-themed café in London where customers could drink tea beneath model Spitfires, had a mural of Sir Winston defaced with ‘IMPERIALIST SCUM’. But lately, rather than celebrating Churchill, it has become more fashionable to denigrate him. April 9th was National Winston Churchill Day, an annual celebration of the life and legacy of Britain’s wartime prime minister.

Winston churchill andrew roberts