Hollywood, stop having a major hard-on for Churchill!

In July 2017 I went to watch Dunkirk, a masterful in storytelling, background music, and cinematography. However, it had one major flaw which I began realising half an hour into the movie. There were no Indian soldiers to be seen. A few minutes later they started talking of Churchill in such a high regard that I couldn't even believe it. Soon the reality hit me. Oh, this is one of those? In which they circle jerk each other and tell how heroic their leaders of the past were without having a glance at the history books? I expected better of Christopher Nolan and from then one I started cringing at every mention of Winston Churchill in the movie. There was a huge uproar in India regarding the falsification of historical facts, the movie went on to win Oscars and the world moved on.



Fast forward to January 2018, The Darkest Hour was released in India. The movie shamelessly showed Winston Churchill leaving aside his breakfast to be wasted while millions of people died solely because of him in India. Guess what? The movie went on to win the Oscar!
It just amazes me to think that in this day and age of information a mass murderer like Winston Churchill is celebrated as a hero. The number of people choosing to be willingly ignorant is astounding. For you who still do not know about the atrocities that he committed in India, here are few facts about him

• Although the massive global dislocations of supplies caused by World War II virtually guaranteed that hunger would occur somewhere in the world, Churchill's animosity and even racism toward Indians decided the exact location where famine would fall.

• The famine that started with bad crops and cyclone was fuelled by Churchill's antipathy against Indian people. This is attributed to British anger over widespread Bengali nationalist sentiment and the perceived treachery of the violent Quit India uprising. He willingly chose to export supplies for the soldiers fighting in Europe while leaving nothing for the poor in Bengal.

• The War Cabinet's shipping assignments made in August 1943, shortly after Amery had pleaded for famine relief, show Australian wheat flour traveling to Ceylon, the Middle East, and Southern Africa – everywhere in the Indian Ocean but to India. Those assignments show a will to punish.

• Not only did the British pursue its own policy of not helping the victims of this famine which was created by their policies. Churchill persisted in exporting grain to Europe, not to feed actual ‘Sturdy Tommies’, to use his phrase, but add to the buffer stocks that were being piled up in the event of a future invasion of Greece and Yugoslavia. All this while 4.3 million people in India died due to a shortage of food.

• When Mahatma Gandhi launched his non-violence movement, Churchill said that 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."

• When British officials begged for him to direct food supplies to the famine infected region he refused and said, "I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion. The famine was their own fault for breeding like rabbits." He also boasted that the plague was "merrily" culling the population!

• When conscious striken British officials in India wrote to him regarding the loss of life, he smugly wrote, "Why hasn't Gandhi died yet?" at the margin of the report.

His policies took 4.3 million lives yet people choose to accept him in high regards while condemning Hitler for a crime of similar intensity. How hypocritical! I could not bring myself to watching the whole movie and I choose to stand by my decision.

Churchill was an asshole in power who got away with far too much simply because he defeated Hitler and that too not by himself.