Winston Churchill
The following is a quote from a News Statesman article by a prominent British commentator:
A A Gill nominates: Cromwell and Churchill for "Worst Briton". As someone who championed Shakespeare for the greatest Briton, I would have to vote for Cromwell as my worst - a man who closed down theatres, banned dancing and cancelled Christmas....
My other nomination is Churchill. Churchill was a man who met a moment, and the moment was much shorter than he's given credit for - about six months. He made four speeches, all of which were derivative of Shakespeare and Macaulay. Everything else about his wearyingly long public life was self-serving and disastrous: he was a terrible self-publicising hack; he was a loathed soldier; he was the worst First Sea Lord we ever had. A staggeringly inept Home Secretary, he was wrong about absolutely everything he set his sights on. He was responsible for the Dardanelles, the worst disaster of the First World War. He sent soldiers to shoot Welsh miners. He put field guns on to the streets of the East End of London. During the General Strike, he was so rabid that he had to be kept out of government, because he wanted to machine-gun bus drivers. Later, he was the worst sort of empire loyalist, desperate to hold on to India, and racist about Gandhi, that naked little fakir (frankly, if you had to choose the greater man between Gandhi and Churchill, there's no contest). He sent the Black and Tans into Ireland. He'd have bankrupted the country by returning us to the gold standard; he gave away large areas of eastern Europe to Stalin. And he was responsible for the disgraceful but forgotten war of intervention to support the White Russians at the end of the First World War. Altogether, he represents everything I find most dispiriting, snobbish, philistine, proudly anti-intellectual and stubbornly backward-looking about Britain.[1]
Further Reading
Winston Churchill and Chemical Weapons
De-classified memos/minutes concerning use of poison gas against Iraqi Kurds and Germany.
British use of Chemical weapons in Iraq
The British use of gas against the Iraq 'insurrection' in 1919
Notes
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