Churchill and the “Feeble-Minded,” Part 2
continued from part 1…
Churchill’s early attitudes toward British “moral superiority” were unfounded—but he was born into a world in which virtually all his countrymen believed the same thing, from the Sovereign to a Covent Garden grocer.
And yet it was Churchill, the aristocratic Victorian, who argued that Sudanese had a “claim beyond the grave…no less good than that which any of our countrymen could make”; that in South Africa, Boer racism was intolerable and the Indian minority deserved the same rights as all British citizens. (This was something Gandhi never forgot, though Churchill did, and something which Gandhi praised years later, when they were opponents over the India Bill.)
It was this same Churchill who urged that shiploads of food be sent to a starving Germany after the Great War ended the wartime blockade; that the 1920 Armritsar massacre in India must be condemned and its perpetrators punished (“Frightfulness is not a remedy known to the British pharmacopoeia”); that the coal miners should be compensated after the 1926 General Strike; that carpet bombing German cities in World War II was morally reprehensible.…
