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11 tweets,
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You can’t fit the amount of terrible things Winston Churchill did into a tweet. Every time I think I’ve heard the full list of his heinous crimes I find more. India, Kenya, Afghanistan, Iraq, Ireland, Guyana, Malaysia, Israel. And closer to home British Miners and Suffragettes.
In WW2 terms I think that a) someone else could have done the same things, someone with good rhetoric but who wasn’t an imperialist white supremacist and Tory for example. And b) just because in retrospect it was a just war doesn’t mean we didn’t commit terrible atrocities.
He was a fan of Hitler for a while anyway, ideologically they were very similar. He was also a fan of Mussolini and generally an awful bastard.
Massacres and concentration camps are Churchill’s real legacy.
I guess for us to have an accurate picture of Churchill requires us to see that he absolutely was a man of his time, as in he was representative of the actions and ideology of the British Empire. A brutal and terrible crime in itself that Britain still benefits from today.
Churchill was a white supremacist, the British Empire was a white supremacist endeavour and we live in a society formed from white supremacy.
White supremacy isn’t just overt racism like the racism Churchill overtly spoke, its policy like the policies he created, its built this world. It’s tied up with capitalism and patriarchy and other systems of oppression. It’s inside us and it’s all around us.
If white people don’t learn our real history, we can’t change our present. If white people aren’t trying to actively deconstruct whiteness then we can’t be liberated from the systems that surround us either. Although we we still benefit from those systems even as they confine us.
The least we can fucking do is not whitewash the terrible people from our history. I know we have school and Hollywood pushing these false versions of Churchill but the facts are all there. He didn’t hide who he was.
Criticism of Churchill is criticism of the past and the present, and both those things need to be criticised. Churchill worship is tied up with reactionary forces within culture both in terms of the overt far right and of being on our money. Embedded into mundane capitalism.
Sorry for the rant.
