Winston Churchill, "Class Act"

All people are complex, capable of great wrongs and great rights, products of their cultures, victims and victimizers from ignorance, lack of understanding, and happenstance; we are vessels for creation and destruction. For these reasons hagiography is rarely accurate, this blog's name notwithstanding. Thomas Jefferson was a vindictive slaveholder; Mahatma Gandhi not only abused his wife but was a time-to-time racist (he referred to blacks as "uncivilized races," suggested black Africans are lazy, and actively supported the British military campaign against the Zulu, among other things); Albert Einstein essentially abandoned his natural children and was a notorious womanizer (his second wife was his cousin -- he still had many affairs after than marriage -- but he married her only after her daughter turned him down); Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., had numerous affairs and plagiarized a large part of his doctoral dissertation. These people also were great leaders and thinkers. Gandhi, for example, for all his foibles still fought for woman's rights and human equality and ultimately became an icon to Steven Biko and Nelson Mandela in South Africa, not to mention King.

Which brings me to Winston Churchill.

Churchill -- who referred to Gandhi as "posing as a [half naked] fakir of a type well known in the east" -- did not have what we, a scant eighty years later or so, would call "enlightened views." In 1919 he seriously proposed gassing "uncivilized tribes," earlier having said "the growth of the feeble-minded and insane classes ... constitutes a national and race danger which it is impossible to exaggerate ...." He believed that Jews were a "race" -- a term he often used to describe Judaism and its followers -- and he believed in an "international Jewish conspiracy":

The conflict between good and evil which proceeds unceasingly in the breast of man nowhere reaches such an intensity as in the Jewish race. ...

And it may well be that this same astounding race may at the present time be in the actual process of producing another system of morals and philosophy, as malevolent as Christianity was benevolent, which, if not arrested, would shatter irretrievably all that Christianity has rendered possible. ...

     *  *  *In violent opposition to all this sphere of Jewish effort rise the schemes of the International Jews. ... This movement among the Jews is not new. ... [T]his world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing. ... It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the Nineteenth Century; and now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire.

Churchill did not believe that all Jews were part of the conspiracy -- some of the "race" were good nationalists of their various countries, and he advocated Zionism to combat the "international godless Jewish conspiracy." His views, though, were not unique -- they're the views of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion myth and, of course, of the Nazis as well as many modern day kooks.  

As Prime Minister during World War II Churchill ordered thousands of Germans, Austrians, and Italians living in Britain into internment camps -- an order that was later reversed by Parliament. These were potential "enemy aliens," and, as the BBC states:

That many of the 'enemy aliens' were Jewish refugees and therefore hardly likely to be sympathetic to the Nazis, was a complication no one bothered to try and unravel - they were still treated as German and Austrian nationals. In one Isle of Man camp over 80 per cent of the internees were Jewish refugees.

As a sidenote, the SS Andora Star, a British cruise ship appropriated to the war effort, was sunk by a German U-boat while carrying German, Austrian, and Italian internees, as well as Axis prisoners of war, to Canada for internment. About 700 went to the bottom of the sea.

Churchill's interesting life involved many acts of personal courage and was defined most by his stand against fascism. But it was also one framed by great mistakes, from the invasion of Gallipoli in World War I (which resulted in about 470,000 casualties with an astounding 60% casualty rate and achieved nothing), to his numerous stumbles as a statesman before and after World War II. He was a great writer and orator but not necessarily a great thinker -- he was not able to enlist as an infantry officer, for instance (and so went into the cavalry) because he could not pass the math test. The basic math test ...  for the infantry. He was not good at math.

People: we're all a mixed bag.