It’s not easy to choose Churchill’s “darkest hour” | Mickey Z.

Gary Oldman portrays Prime Minister Winston Churchill in the film 'Darkest Hour.'

Mickey Z. -- World News Trust

Dec. 19, 2017

As Sir Winston Churchill -- subject of yet another phallocentric and hagiographic film glorifying male violence -- once declared: “History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.”

This is precisely why so few of us ever discuss Churchill as a war criminal or racist. In 1910, in the capacity of Home Secretary, he put forth a proposal to sterilize roughly 100,000 “mental degenerates” and dispatch several thousand others to state-run labor camps. These actions were to take place in the name of saving the British race from inevitable decline as its inferior members bred.

Another “dark hour” was Churchill’s role in the Allied invasion of the Soviet Union in 1917. England’s Minister for War and Air during the time, Churchill described the mission as seeking to “strangle at its birth” the Bolshevik state. In 1929, he wrote: “Were [the Allies] at war with Soviet Russia? Certainly not; but they shot Soviet Russians at sight. They stood as invaders on Russian soil. They armed the enemies of the Soviet Government. They blockaded its ports, and sunk its battleships. They earnestly desired and schemed its downfall.”

Two years later, Churchill was ready for his Big Screen close-up as secretary of state at the war office when the Royal Air Force asked him for permission to use chemical weapons against “recalcitrant Arabs” as an experiment. Winston darkly consented (Yes, Churchill’s gassing of Kurds pre-dated Saddam Hussein’s by nearly 70 years). 

“I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes,” he explained, a policy he espoused yet again in July 1944 when he asked his chiefs of staff to consider using poison gas on the Germans “or any other method of warfare we have hitherto refrained from using.” Unlike in 1919, his proposal was denied… but patriarchal history would have forgiven him anyway.

In dark language later appropriated by the Israelis, Movie Hero™ Winston had this to say about the Palestinians in 1937: 

"I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place."

When not scheming a Bolshevik downfall, gassing the uncivilized, or comparing Palestinians to dogs, Churchill found time to write macho soulmate Benito Mussolini. In January 1927, Sir Winston gushed to Il Duce, “if I had been an Italian, I am sure I would have been entirely with you from the beginning to the end of your victorious struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism.” 

Even after WWII commenced, Churchill found room in his dark heart for the Italian dictator, explaining to Parliament in 1940: “I do not deny that he is a very great man but he became a criminal when he attacked England.”

Mussolini’s criminality aside, Churchill certainly took note of Axis tactics… cavalierly observing that “everyone” was bombing civilians. “It's simply a question of fashion,” he explained, “similar to that of whether short or long dresses are in."

Sir Winston must have been a slave to fashion because he soon ordered a fire-bombing raid on Hamburg in July 1943 that killed at least 48,000 civilians, after which he enlisted the aid of (male) British scientists to cook up “a new kind of weather” for larger German city, Dresden.

In his wartime memoirs, Oscar-worthy Winston Churchill wrote the history of the more than 100,000 civilians slaughtered in Dresden in that dark hour: “We made a heavy raid in the latter month on Dresden,” he wrote benignly, “then a centre of communication of Germany’s Eastern Front.”

Men rain down 24/7 violence. 

Men rain down 24/7 propaganda.

Name the problem.

#WhatMalesDo

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It’s not easy to choose Churchill’s “darkest hour” by Mickey Z. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://worldnewstrust.com/it-s-not-easy-to-choose-churchill-s-darkest-hour-mickey-z.