How shall we cast asunder, figures of History?

“The Great” after Alexander, has faded. The bar to be remembered favourably in perpetuity has risen so high, that mother Teresa’s closet risks disclosing skeletons. Einstein of the 1920s is ostracizable for being a racist and sexist, who found the Chinese “obtuse”, “filthy”, with “little difference” in appearance of men and women and, who were out to supplant other races. The bludgeon of the party with a grudge can reduce any reputation to smithereens. We demand perfection, even as we ourselves remain decidedly imperfect. So, who should replace those being displaced? Gods of antiquity? Prophets? However, one religion’s prophet is another’s infidel. We could do away with all historical figures and thereby, history. For, history is a repeating story of Peoples past, hoping to be finally learnt. Our world now sees only in black and white. In this unequivocality, one may be a hero or a villain; nothing in between. We expect anew of those whose lives are long done and dusted. We accuse but, are blind to our own destined imperfection and contradictions. We are friends or we are foes. We are born to a boundless potential, that we dare not unleash. Instead, cacooning ourselves in mediocrity. A few in every age, strive and metamorphose to a state that soars above those who feared to up-anchor. They become the standard bearers of their time, reminding us where we come from. They are our creditors. Yet, these giants of history are gossamer. They are the dust we tread upon. In turn, they and their time is indifferent to whether we revel in or revile them.

Our age is unduly politically correct. A well-meaning smile is taken for a snarl because some teeth showed! Coarse court jesters are adulated and turned kings, while the substantial are scorned. Usually, one would just gently shake one’s head except, the next in sights of the roused rabble was……. Winston Churchill! That concentrated the mind upon the issue: Who to relegate to the dustbin of history? Who, better to question than The giant of twentieth century? Ruthless opportunist, saviour, historian, warrior, adventurer, journalist, politician, artist, futurist, novelist, biographer, war correspondent, film script writer, King maker, Kingdom creator, prime minister, Nobel laureate, bricklayer, was Churchill. Who better to remain on the plinth? He is proof that even the greatest come with warts. By glossing over the ugly in the good or making monsters of the unquestionably bad, we blind ourselves. We can be inspired by those who rise, despite being flawed as the rest of us. But, we cannot aspire towards achievements that demand the impossible precondition of utter perfection for all times.

Churchill saved civilization as we know it, where the swastika does not span the globe and several cultures direct the current discourse. Imagine, if Lord Halifax not Churchill, had become Prime Minister. Could the world have survived another Nero? Halifax would have negotiated peace with Hitler. Churchill beat the war drums loud. For peace, Chamberlain surrendered others’ lands. Halifax would have followed suit, effecting a placating capitulation, á la Française. Aged, Churchill picked a fight with Germans when they invaded Norway, personally commanded forces, prolonged a lost cause and, damaged himself politically. He was the impudent, distrusted Cassandra. Until, he became prime minister. An imperfect man stopped the Germans. Today, Churchill’s treatment of his staff would have been a matter for ‘Human Resources’, bringing about his removal or suppliant apologies. No picture of ‘work-life balance’, he drank much and even had a prescription for it. Delivering unembellished truths earned him accusations of being a racist and imperialist. Calling a person born to and in the service of an empire an imperialist as if it were a slur, is to call someone today a patriot, as if it were a slur. A pragmatist, for the common cause of defeating Hitler he temporarily befriended the devil he abhorred: the communists. What if Churchill were not there, putting up seemingly hopeless resistances to the Nazis around the world and, indefatigably convincing Roosevelt the war was a US cause too? Those resistances rescued Moscow, before winter came to defeat Germany. Sans Churchill, 1941 may have seen every continent in Nazi grip including the north and south of North America. The formidable British navy, the world’s largest, would have fallen into Hitler’s lap as France’s had. What chance would USA have had? More peoples than the Jews and gypsies would have shared a common fate. Churchill was the crucial link, that cog in the wheel, the Moses that parted waters, without whom today would not have been.

We fall when we fell those whose shoulders we stand upon. We are erased when we attempt to wipe off the past. ”A nation that forgets its past has no future,” said Churchill. Where would the US be without the “First American” Benjamin Franklin? And, he called native Americans “savages” and spoke of selling Blacks, while his own kind were “cultivators of earth”. George Washington had owned 316 slaves. What of Thomas Jefferson, if judged by those who judged William Jefferson (Clinton)? Jefferson owned slaves. Not for their lamentable behavior rather, for preponderance of the good and extraordinary, are the great revered. By consigning Churchill to the labyrinths of museums, we choose to forget him and his time. Then, how will we recognize the next Churchill? Consider: Once, there was Cicero who almost saved his world. Then, came Churchill who did. The former is history. The latter also wrote history as we know it. Churchill foretold future as a youth, predicting that he would be the savior of his people in a great tumult. The almost arrogant, self-belief was proven true. He predicted our time: “The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.”

A noose to hang Churchill’s reputation by is, that he promoted chemical warfare against the unruly Mesopotamians (current day Iraq). A cherry-picked quotation, sans the ensuing part that promotes inconveniencing with tear gas rather than shooting dead is ‘proof’. Why swoon over a smug, self-entitled, profligate aristocrat? And, what great profligacy! To win the war, Churchill liened pieces of his beloved empire at terms most advantageous to the United States. Sold the family silver, so to speak. The debts were finally paid off not during his, but this century. Churchill’s strengths and well-practiced flaws were a fairy dust, composed of atoms from the victorious Constantine I, the valiant Constantine XI and, Belisarius in between. His eloquence came from Gibbons, Shakespeare and Cicero. A xenophobic invader, when the eastward expansion of his beloved empire was halted, he called the Afghans “barbarians”. Yet, he was bereft of prejudice when his moving prose soared to acknowledge the bravery of the vanquished Sudanese. Provocatively, he assailed other faiths. Churchill also led one to suspect that he knew better.

Churchill stands accused of genocide in India, for the Bengal famine of 1943 that killed millions. Accepting that would mean Churchill was also responsible for Bengal’s previous famines including, one more than a century preceding his birth that killed fivefold more. Churchill is the scapegoat. Those who perished like flies were the overwhelming mass of rural poor, in bondage of native landowners. The Muslim majority government of Bengal failed to check profiteering and corruption. The Hindu majority government ruling the fertile province of Punjab could have easily helped but did not, attempting to gain politically by causing the Bengal government to fail. The viceroy wrongheadedly refrained from interfering in ‘home rule’. The Japanese overran Burma from where rice had come during famines past. Churchill lacked ships to deliver grain from overseas during a raging war, when Roosevelt refused to spare any. Given Japan’s stranglehold in the Bay of Bengal, they would have been sunk anyhow. It was the native saboteurs for “Quit India” movement, who targeted railroads supplying Bengal. Blame also the East India company, the Bengali nabobs, the end of Mughal empire!

Churchill is dubbed a racist for frequently expressing a low opinion of the Indians. Is speaking out against social evils like the Hindu caste system racism? Churchill apprehended the brutal fate awaiting ‘the untouchables’ once the Raj concluded. He was proud of the empire that did away with ‘Sati’, where the widow was immolated on her husband’s funeral pyre. Cicero extolled Sati, finding nothing amiss in no such reciprocation by the widowers. Churchill did snub Gandhi, describing him as “a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of viceregal palace.” Delicious! Churchill would not speak gently of one who called Hitler “Friend”; advised the Jews their deliverance lay in dying voluntarily and peacefully; exhorted the British to end bloodshed by stop fighting because they were losing, and assuring, “Hitler is not a bad.” Churchill, was a judeophile who hated Hitler.

Churchill glowering in stony silence, ready to swipe at the Luftwaffe with his cane if it dared cross the channel, deserves the place he chose for his statue. The statues also must remain, where placed by those who were grateful. Understand why the statues are, where they are.

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