Churchill was a racist, so what?
Every so often the statue of Winston Churchill in London’s Parliament Square gets defaced as part of a protest. This past weekend it was defaced during protests supporting the global Black Lives Matter movement. Under the engraved CHURCHILL someone had painted “Was a Racist”.
It’s powerful because it’s factually correct.
Whatever people feel about Churchill’s leadership during WWII it’s an established fact that he wasn’t simply flawed in ways perhaps all of us are. Churchill was an Edwardian imperialist and perhaps the last and most famous icon of the British Empire during the 20th century. In his own words, using the language of populism, he set his career to ‘the maintenance of the enduring greatness of Britain and her Empire’.
“Churchill justified British imperialism as being for the good of the ‘primitive’ and ‘subject races’ … to call him a white supremacist is nothing but the truth. And it is never a good idea to deny the truth,”
wrote Tory peer Daniel Finkelstein in The Times (12th February 2019).
It’s powerful not because it triggers the performative outrage used by far right commentators to manipulate and activate their base nor the hand-wringing, ‘but nazis…’, apologists in the mainstream media. It’s powerful because it challenges our programming.
If you’ve been immersed in a hagiographic version of history from birth, structurally and uncritically reinforced, through school to media it becomes faith. Facts that emerge to counter the narrative are, not simply viewed with disbelief they’re, treated as heresy with an angry demand to silence these dissonant truths. In that moment, if we collude in silence, we reveal who we are. The social media posts we see from respected colleagues, friends and family who demand silence by focusing on the act of defacement rather than its meaning tells us who they are. It’s uncomfortable because if we’re serious about change it means we have to do some work, on them and ourselves.
European expansionism from the 15th century, of which the building of the British Empire was part, was catastrophic for many millions of people throughout the world. It’s impact, predominantly in the global south, remains obvious today as do the resultant inequalities that exist between peoples throughout the global north. Pointing out the whataboutery of expansionism doesn’t matter if we fail to recognise its human cost. The challenges we see in our society won’t be solved by silencing the victims but by confronting the truth.
Modelled on British imperialism of the late 19th and early 20th century, as well as America’s Manifest Destiny, the German concept of Lebensraum, of settler colonialism, was the ideological principle of Nazism and German expansionism. Hitler’s strategic program for world domination was based on the belief in the power of Lebensraum, especially when pursued by a racially superior society. Within this expansion those people deemed of non-Aryan race were expelled or destroyed. This is what many of our ancestors fought against and was the fight for which Churchill is best known in victory.
Call him flawed, call him complex, call him a hero, should you choose, but those pointing at Nazi defeat in defence of Churchill should be concerned by the return of the swastika and rise of the far right across Europe and the US. It is precisely our inability to challenge the flaws of our own mythology that has allowed these groups to fester in the shadows, camouflaged within our institutions, and now to apparently flourish in the mainstream. We should not fear calling out truths for they will set us free from the captivity of myth. We should not fear honest reappraisal of our history either for this will allow us to grow.
Churchill was a racist, now move on.
