Former US president George W. Bush, who led the 2003 Iraq invasion, used to keep a bust of Winston Churchill in the Oval Office as a way of placing himself among the great historical leaders who fought against fascism and evil in the world.
When President Barack Obama won the elections and began moving into the White House in 2010, among the changes he made to the furnishings was to remove that bust to the United Kingdom.
Returning the sculpture caused uproar in the conservative camps and among conspiracy theorists, who interpreted Obama’s act as personal
hatred of the British statesman: it was under Churchill’s watch that Obama’s Kenyan grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, was brutally tortured in Kenya and imprisoned by the British colonial forces for two years without trial.
The Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, even used that sculpture issue in his fundraising campaigns against Obama in 2012 and claimed he would return the Churchill bust to the Oval office if he became president.
However, in 2010 the White House curator, William Allman, informed the media that the bust had been loaned to Bush by former British prime minister Tony Blair and was scheduled to be returned to Britain before Obama’s arrival in the White House.
The rumour of Obama’s alleged dislike for Churchill’s bust was debunked many times. But the issue of Churchill’s detest towards other ethnicities and races, and his belief in the supremacy of the white race, has resurfaced in the British media, this time through a new book: Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made. Author Richard Toye uses direct quotes by Churchill to reveal the man behind the statesman.
As a young man Churchill was educated at Harrow and Sandhurst, where he was taught that, “The superior white man was conquering the primitive, dark-skinned natives, and bringing them the benefits of civilization,” wrote The Independent daily in London.
The author writes that in Sudan, Churchill took part in destroying houses and burning the corpses of locals, and was proud to have personally killed three “savages.”
It also mentions that when Mahatma Gandhi began his peaceful resistance in India, Churchill was outraged and said: “He ought to be lain bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi, and then trampled on by an enormous elephant with the new Viceroy seated on its back.” He also said: “I hate Indians. They are beastly people with a beastly religion.”
The author reveals that Churchill was defending every atrocity committed by the British Empire due to his belief that the “Aryan race is bound to triumph.”
The book also highlights the fact that some of Churchill’s designs still cause suffering to people: he was the architect of who designed the country of Iraq by forcing together different groups of people within artificial borders.
When the Kurds rebelled against British rule in Iraq in the1920s – under the leadership of Sheikh Mahmud Barzanji -- Chruchill was quoted as saying: “I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against the uncivilized tribes… it would spread a lively terror.”
It is an unfortunate and evil coincidence that, decades later, Saddam Hussein did in Iraq what the former British statesman had advocated. In 1988, Saddam used chemical gas in Halabja against “uncivilized tribes,” as he chose to call them.
Toye’s book shows Churchill as a person whose imperialist viewpoint brought both praise and horror. Like Adolf Hitler, Churchill believed in the supremacy of his race, and although he stood against Hitler, he was also an imperialist who compared Gandhi to Hitler, celebrated racism and claimed India would never become a democracy.
Ironically, today India is considered the biggest democracy in the world. And as the chemical bombing of Halabja showed, chemical gas did not succeed in “spreading a lively terror” among the Kurds. It rather increased their determination to seek more freedom. Today, Iraq’s Kurdish region is the most flourishing, and stable part Iraq and closer to independence than ever before.
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