Indians are getting post-truth history about Winston Churchill

Blackleaf

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With regard to Churchill, it’s the sign of a self-confident people that they can ascribe greatness to people who actively disliked them, as we do for the anglophobic Thomas Jefferson, Napoleon Bonaparte and Charles de Gaulle. But after such splendid hospitality, I wasn’t about to tell 3,000 Indians that it was time to grow up...

Notebook

Indians are getting post-truth history about Winston Churchill

Andrew Roberts



Andrew Roberts
4 February 2017
The Spectator

Did Winston Churchill, like Donald Trump, also like to ‘grab them by the p ussy?’ Last week at the Jaipur Literary Festival, I was on a panel discussion entitled ‘Churchill: Hero or Villain?’, where the Indian biographer Shrabani Basu told a large crowd that at a suffragettes’ demonstration outside Parliament in November 1910 Churchill, then home secretary, had ‘given instructions for police that they can batter the women and assault the women and sexually assault them as well’. He allegedly told policemen to ‘put their hands up their thighs. They can grope them and press their breasts’. ‘Can I just point out that that is completely untrue?’ I intervened. ‘He at no stage ever OK’d the sexual assault of any woman ever. It would be monstrous were it to be true, but there’s no evidence for it.’ To which Ms Basu replied: ‘It’s your word against mine.’ Welcome to post-truth history.

I’d been invited to the city of pink palaces by my friend and Cambridge contemporary Willie Dalrymple, who had also invited me to defend Brexit, speak on the art of biography, and plug my biography of Napoleon. The title of Willie’s best-known book, White Mughals, might well have been autobiographical, so much does his presence dominate the festival that was his brainchild and which is now celebrating its tenth year. He is the pasha of all he surveys.


The pink city of Jaipur, northern India

It’s the world’s largest paid-ticket literary festival, so I was expecting large crowds, but nothing like the 3,000 people who turned up for the Brexit debate, covering the whole front lawn of the Diggi Palace. I was the sole Brexiteer on a stage of six people, but it went off all right, especially when I asked the crowd if, at their ‘midnight hour’ of independence in 1947, they had been told they would have better trade deals and market access by staying in the British Empire, they would have foresworn their chance for sovereign independence.

The other panellists seemed to think that the British had voted for Brexit in an act of post-imperial nostalgia, an idea that went down well with an audience who seemed fanatically angry with the British Empire even three-quarters of a century after it lost its jewel in the crown. Really? It would be nice to think that the 17.4 million people who voted Leave still thought, or indeed knew very much, about the British Empire, but surely other more immediate things were on our minds. I’m about the last public supporter of the empire left in Britain today, yet imperialism didn’t cross my mind throughout the Brexit debate, except perhaps Brussels’. If the people of Sunderland had voted Leave because of what happened on the Indian subcontinent between 1875 and 1947, wouldn’t someone there have said so? At Jaipur, the empire was regularly presented as having no redeeming features whatever — but here’s a sentence from the coffee-table book in my hotel lobby, Rajasthan: the Living Traditions (1999). Writing of the practice of suttee (abolished by the British), it states: ‘The ladies went to their deaths with dignity, in the manner of a celebration.’

Anita Anand chaired the biography panel, which also featured A.N. Wilson, Roy Foster, Suzannah Lipscomb, David Cannadine and Lucinda Hawksley. She asked us whether biographers had anything in common with serial killers, ‘who also like to cover themselves with the skin of dead people?’ She later equated us with stalkers, for the way we intrusively try to find out everything about our subjects’ lives. Another good line came from Andrew Wilson, describing an archivist who shall be nameless but with whom several of the panellists had had run-ins in the past, who he said had ‘now taken off on her broomstick and flown away over Slough’.

During the Napoleon interview, expertly conducted by Dr Swapan Dasgupta MP, I became aware of a gigantic monkey sitting on a wall behind the thousand-strong crowd, which seemed to be listening intently to what was being said. I found myself trying to retain the interest of this magnificent primate and started to gesticulate far more than I normally do. I’m pleased to say it stayed to the end, even through the Q&As. Living cheek by jowl with dozens of different animals is a knack most urban Britons have lost, but in Jaipur I was reminded of how natural it is in India. There were cows meandering nonchalantly down the middle of motorways with storks standing on their backs, feral pigs the size of small ponies, donkeys and camels, cockerels on the rubbish tips, a goat sitting on a car roof, an ostentation — great collective noun — of peacocks at our hotel, flocks of bright green parrots, and everywhere mongrel dogs that for some reason all looked identical.

After a day hearing all about the evils of the British Empire, it was refreshing to attend the party Meru Gokhale threw to celebrate Penguin’s 30th anniversary in India, which was as grand a durbar as any viceroy ever attended. Horse-drawn carriages and vintage cars brought the guests to the front steps of a palace which were flanked by two military bands and beyond which were 2,000 candles flickering in the trees. India is about to attain economic superpower status and it’s unbecoming for the country still to try to cling to victimhood status. The Times of India has had to run headlines such as: ‘Don’t Blame West for Molestations, Rapes Here’. (The paper also has adverts for ‘upper-caste brides’ in its lonely hearts column.) With regard to Churchill, it’s the sign of a self-confident people that they can ascribe greatness to people who actively disliked them, as we do for the anglophobic Thomas Jefferson, Napoleon Bonaparte and Charles de Gaulle. But after such splendid hospitality, I wasn’t about to tell 3,000 Indians that it was time to grow up.

Indians are getting post-truth history about Winston Churchill
 
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Danbones

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the part in gandhi where the british officer orders the machine gunning, or was it beating, of all those poor innocent people
that was enough
no need to make up more reasons to dislike being invaded and occupied

"Dharasana Satyagraha was a protest against the British salt tax in colonial India in May, 1930. Following the conclusion of the Salt March to Dandi, Mahatma Gandhi chose a non-violent raid of the Dharasana Salt Works in Gujarat as the next protest against British rule. Hundreds of satyagrahis were beaten by soldiers under British command at Dharasana. The ensuing publicity attracted world attention to the Indian independence movement and brought into question the legitimacy of British rule in India."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dharasana_Satyagraha
they had high civilization in India when those at the time in the british iseles were still cave dwellers

ah screw it
here read the whole thing from an un biased observer

"American journalist Webb Miller was an eye-witness to the beating of satyagrahis with steel tipped lathis. His report attracted international attention:

Not one of the marchers even raised an arm to fend off the blows. They went down like ten-pins. From where I stood I heard the sickening whacks of the clubs on unprotected skulls. The waiting crowd of watchers groaned and sucked in their breaths in sympathetic pain at every blow.

Those struck down fell sprawling, unconscious or writhing in pain with fractured skulls or broken shoulders. In two or three minutes the ground was quilted with bodies. Great patches of blood widened on their white clothes.

The survivors without breaking ranks silently and doggedly marched on until struck down. When every one of the first column was knocked down stretcher bearers rushed up unmolested by the police and carried off the injured to a thatched hut which had been arranged as a temporary hospital.

There were not enough stretcher-bearers to carry off the wounded; I saw eighteen injured being carried off simultaneously, while forty-two still lay bleeding on the ground awaiting stretcher-bearers. The blankets used as stretchers were sodden with blood.

At times the spectacle of unresisting men being methodically bashed into a bloody pulp sickened me so much I had to turn away....I felt an indefinable sense of helpless rage and loathing, almost as much against the men who were submitting unresistingly to being beaten as against the police wielding the clubs...

Bodies toppled over in threes and fours, bleeding from great gashes on their scalps. Group after group walked forward, sat down, and submitted to being beaten into insensibility without raising an arm to fend off the blows. Finally the police became enraged by the non-resistance....They commenced savagely kicking the seated men in the abdomen and testicles.

The injured men writhed and squealed in agony, which seemed to inflame the fury of the police....The police then began dragging the sitting men by the arms or feet, sometimes for a hundred yards, and throwing them into ditches.[7][8]

Miller's first attempts at telegraphing the story to his publisher in England were censored by the British telegraph operators in India. Only after threatening to expose British censorship was his story allowed to pass. The story appeared in 1,350 newspapers throughout the world and was read into the official record of the United States Senate by Senator John J. Blaine."

guess they had too much irish blood in em
 
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Blackleaf

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the part in gandhi where the british officer orders the machine gunning, or was it beating, of all those poor innocent people
that was enough
no need to make up more reasons to dislike being invaded and occupied

If it wasn't for the wonderful British Empire then India wouldn't be the economic superpower it is today and the Indians would still be burning widows alive on their husbands' funeral pyres.

guess they had too much irish blood in em

Of course, many Irishmen were instrumental in the running of the British Raj, including General Reginald Dyer, the fellow who ordered his men to shoot all those protesters you mentioned.
 

Danbones

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www.youtube.com/watch?v=fys2Lvv7VEA

Published on Dec 9, 2012
The Jallianwala Bagh massacre (also known as the Amritsar massacre), took place in the Jallianwala Bagh public garden in the northern Indian city of Amritsar on 13 April 1919. The shooting that took place was ordered by Brigadier-General Reginald E.H. Dyer.

On Sunday 13 April 1919, Dyer was convinced of a major insurrection and thus he banned all meetings. On hearing that a meeting of 15,000 to 20,000 people including women, senior citizens and children had assembled at Jallianwala Bagh, Dyer went with fifty riflemen to a raised bank and ordered them to shoot at the crowd. Dyer kept the firing up till the ammunition supply was almost exhausted for about ten minutes with approximately 1,650 rounds fired.[1] Official Government of India sources estimated that the fatalities were 379, with 1,100 wounded. The casualty The casualty number estimated by Indian National Congress was more than 1,500, with approximately 1,000 dead

sure showed them eh?

If it wasn't for the wonderful British Empire then India wouldn't be the economic superpower it is today and the Indians would still be burning widows alive on their husbands' funeral pyres.



Of course, many Irishmen were instrumental in the running of the British Raj, including General Reginald Dyer, the fellow who ordered his men to shoot all those protesters you mentioned.

he would have been a PROTESTANT and under orders from the brass
AN ESCAPEGOAT

the tactic of using scapegoats from the colonies to duck blame is reprehensible

the BRITISH have been MONSTERS in the lands they invaded and yet think their poop don't stink
while HATING the GOVERNMENT sanctioned invasion of muslims in Britain
hypocrite much?
 

Colpy

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Saint John, N.B.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=fys2Lvv7VEA

Published on Dec 9, 2012
The Jallianwala Bagh massacre (also known as the Amritsar massacre), took place in the Jallianwala Bagh public garden in the northern Indian city of Amritsar on 13 April 1919. The shooting that took place was ordered by Brigadier-General Reginald E.H. Dyer.

On Sunday 13 April 1919, Dyer was convinced of a major insurrection and thus he banned all meetings. On hearing that a meeting of 15,000 to 20,000 people including women, senior citizens and children had assembled at Jallianwala Bagh, Dyer went with fifty riflemen to a raised bank and ordered them to shoot at the crowd. Dyer kept the firing up till the ammunition supply was almost exhausted for about ten minutes with approximately 1,650 rounds fired.[1] Official Government of India sources estimated that the fatalities were 379, with 1,100 wounded. The casualty The casualty number estimated by Indian National Congress was more than 1,500, with approximately 1,000 dead

sure showed them eh?



he would have been a PROTESTANT and under orders from the brass
AN ESCAPEGOAT

the tactic of using scapegoats from the colonies to duck blame is reprehensible

the BRITISH have been MONSTERS in the lands they invaded and yet think their poop don't stink
while HATING the GOVERNMENT sanctioned invasion of muslims in Britain
hypocrite much?

To drag this back to the subject at hand:


  • Winston Churchill, at the time Britain's Secretary of State for War, who called the massacre "an episode without precedent or parallel in the modern history of the British Empire… an extraordinary event, a monstrous event, an event which stands in singular and sinister isolation... the crowd was neither armed nor attacking" during a debate in the House of Commons. In a letter to the leader of the Liberals and former Secretary of State for India, the Marquess of Crewe, he wrote, "My own opinion is that the offence amounted to murder, or alternatively manslaughter."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reginald_Edward_Harry_Dyer

Churchill was a great man.
 

Danbones

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he was part of an exceptionally dishonest system
and he is painted that way
THAT does NOT make it true
more about Mister Concentration Camps:

"Not his finest hour: The dark side of Winston Churchill

Winston Churchill is rightly remembered for leading Britain through her finest hour – but what if he also led the country through her most shameful hour? What if, in addition to rousing a nation to save the world from the Nazis, he fought for a raw white supremacism and a concentration camp network of his own? This question burns through Richard Toye's new history, Churchill's Empire, and is even seeping into the Oval Office.

George W Bush left a bust of Churchill near his desk in the White House, in an attempt to associate himself with the war leader's heroic stand against fascism. Barack Obama had it returned to Britain. It's not hard to guess why: his Kenyan grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, was imprisoned without trial for two years and was tortured on Churchill's watch, for resisting Churchill's empire.

Can these clashing Churchills be reconciled? Do we live, at the same time, in the world he helped to save, and the world he helped to trash? Toye, one of Britain's smartest young historians, has tried to pick through these questions dispassionately – and he should lead us, at last and at least, to a more mature conversation about our greatest national icon.

Churchill was born in 1874 into a Britain that was washing the map pink, at the cost of washing distant nations blood red. Victoria had just been crowned Empress of India, and the scramble for Africa was only a few years away. At Harrow School and then Sandhurst, he was told a simple story: the superior white man was conquering the primitive, dark-skinned natives, and bringing them the benefits of civilisation. As soon as he could, Churchill charged off to take his part in "a lot of jolly little wars against barbarous peoples". In the Swat valley, now part of Pakistan, he experienced, fleetingly, a crack of doubt. He realised that the local population was fighting back because of "the presence of British troops in lands the local people considered their own," just as Britain would if she were invaded. But Churchill soon suppressed this thought, deciding instead they were merely deranged jihadists whose violence was explained by a "strong aboriginal propensity to kill".

He gladly took part in raids that laid waste to whole valleys, destroying houses and burning crops. He then sped off to help reconquer the Sudan, where he bragged that he personally shot at least three "savages".

The young Churchill charged through imperial atrocities, defending each in turn. When concentration camps were built in South Africa, for white Boers, he said they produced "the minimum of suffering". The death toll was almost 28,000, and when at least 115,000 black Africans were likewise swept into British camps, where 14,000 died, he wrote only of his "irritation that Kaffirs should be allowed to fire on white men". Later, he boasted of his experiences there: "That was before war degenerated. It was great fun galloping about."

Then as an MP he demanded a rolling programme of more conquests, based on his belief that "the Aryan stock is bound to triumph". There seems to have been an odd cognitive dissonance in his view of the "natives". In some of his private correspondence, he appears to really believe they are helpless children who will "willingly, naturally, gratefully include themselves within the golden circle of an ancient crown".

But when they defied this script, Churchill demanded they be crushed with extreme force. As Colonial Secretary in the 1920s, he unleashed the notorious Black and Tan thugs on Ireland's Catholic civilians, and when the Kurds rebelled against British rule, he said: "I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes...[It] would spread a lively terror."

Of course, it's easy to dismiss any criticism of these actions as anachronistic. Didn't everybody think that way then? One of the most striking findings of Toye's research is that they really didn't: even at the time, Churchill was seen as at the most brutal and brutish end of the British imperialist spectrum. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin was warned by Cabinet colleagues not to appoint him because his views were so antedeluvian. Even his startled doctor, Lord Moran, said of other races: "Winston thinks only of the colour of their skin."

Many of his colleagues thought Churchill was driven by a deep loathing of democracy for anyone other than the British and a tiny clique of supposedly superior races. This was clearest in his attitude to India. When Mahatma Gandhi launched his campaign of peaceful resistance, Churchill raged 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." As the resistance swelled, he announced: "I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion." This hatred killed. To give just one, major, example, in 1943 a famine broke out in Bengal, caused – as the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has proved – by the imperial policies of the British. Up to 3 million people starved to death while British officials begged Churchill to direct food supplies to the region. He bluntly refused. He raged that it was their own fault for "breeding like rabbits". At other times, he said the plague was "merrily" culling the population.

Skeletal, half-dead people were streaming into the cities and dying on the streets, but Churchill – to the astonishment of his staff – had only jeers for them. This rather undermines the claims that Churchill's imperialism was motivated only by an altruistic desire to elevate the putatively lower races.

Hussein Onyango Obama is unusual among Churchill's victims only in one respect: his story has been rescued from the slipstream of history, because his grandson ended up as President of the US. Churchill believed that Kenya's fertile highlands should be the preserve of the white settlers, and approved the clearing out of the local "blackamoors". He saw the local Kikuyu as "brutish children". When they rebelled under Churchill's post-war premiership, some 150,000 of them were forced at gunpoint into detention camps – later dubbed "Britain's gulag" by Pulitzer-prize winning historian, Professor Caroline Elkins. She studied the detention camps for five years for her remarkable book Britain's Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya, explains the tactics adopted under Churchill to crush the local drive for independence. "Electric shock was widely used, as well as cigarettes and fire," she writes. "The screening teams whipped, shot, burned, and mutilated Mau Mau suspects." Hussein Onyango Obama never truly recovered from the torture he endured.

Many of the wounds Churchill inflicted have still not healed: you can find them on the front pages any day of the week. He is the man who invented Iraq, locking together three conflicting peoples behind arbitrary borders that have been bleeding ever since. He is the Colonial Secretary who offered the Over-Promised Land to both the Jews and the Arabs – although he seems to have privately felt racist contempt for both. He jeered at the Palestinians as "barbaric hoards who ate little but camel dung," while he was appalled that the Israelis "take it for granted that the local population will be cleared out to suit their convenience".

True, occasionally Churchill did become queasy about some of the most extreme acts of the Empire. He fretted at the slaughter of women and children, and cavilled at the Amritsar massacre of 1919. Toye tries to present these doubts as evidence of moderation – yet they almost never seem to have led Churchill to change his actions. If you are determined to rule people by force against their will, you can hardly be surprised when atrocities occur. Rule Britannia would inexorably produce a Cruel Britannia.

So how can the two be reconciled? Was Churchill's moral opposition to Nazism a charade, masking the fact he was merely trying to defend the British Empire from a rival?

The US civil rights leader Richard B. Moore, quoted by Toye, said it was "a rare and fortunate coincidence" that at that moment "the vital interests of the British Empire [coincided] with those of the great overwhelming majority of mankind". But this might be too soft in its praise. If Churchill had only been interested in saving the Empire, he could probably have cut a deal with Hitler. No: he had a deeper repugnance for Nazism than that. He may have been a thug, but he knew a greater thug when he saw one – and we may owe our freedom today to this wrinkle in history.

This, in turn, led to the great irony of Churchill's life. In resisting the Nazis, he produced some of the richest prose-poetry in defence of freedom and democracy ever written. It was a cheque he didn't want black or Asian people to cash – but they refused to accept that the Bank of Justice was empty. As the Ghanaian nationalist Kwame Nkrumah wrote: "All the fair, brave words spoken about freedom that had been broadcast to the four corners of the earth took seed and grew where they had not been intended." Churchill lived to see democrats across Britain's dominions and colonies – from nationalist leader Aung San in Burma to Jawarlal Nehru in India – use his own intoxicating words against him.

Ultimately, the words of the great and glorious Churchill who resisted dictatorship overwhelmed the works of the cruel and cramped Churchill who tried to impose it on the darker-skinned peoples of the world. The fact that we now live in a world where a free and independent India is a superpower eclipsing Britain, and a grandson of the "savages" is the most powerful man in the world, is a repudiation of Churchill at his ugliest – and a sweet, ironic victory for Churchill at his best."
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/u...e-dark-side-of-winston-churchill-2118317.html

his actions show churchhill was a aggressive colonial racist typical of his TYPE
no different then hitler - except he was british and NOT german
 
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Colpy

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he was part of an exceptionally dishonest system
and he is painted that way
THAT does NOT make it true

Not sure what you mean here.

How was the British Empire "exceptionally dishonest"? Amoral, at times, but still probably the greatest and most benevolent empire in history, one that spread the ideals of parliamentary democracy around the world. Imagine India without the British Raj having ever existed........

Churchill was probably the greatest man that lived in the twentieth century. I recently finished William Manchester's three volume biography The Last Lion. You need to read it.
 

Danbones

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"BOOKS
Hitler didn't start indiscriminate bombings — Churchill did
Bombing in Europe was never a winning strategy, says Richard Overy in The Bombing War

The bombing of Bulgaria was Churchill’s idea, and he remained the driving force behind the argument that air raids would provide a quick and relatively cheap way of forcing the country to change sides.
Fine in theory, but in practice things worked rather differently. The ‘political dividend’ Churchill sought to achieve in the early months of 1944 was offset by a high level of civilian casualties ‘which undermined the prestige of both the United States and Britain in the eyes of the Bulgarian people’. Overy notes that while bombing contributed to the collapse of any pro-German consensus and strengthened the hand of opposition political parties it did not result in a change of government until September 1944 when the Soviets introduced an administration dominated by the Bulgarian communist party."
Hitler didn't start indiscriminate bombings
just a for instance

and everyone glorifies this low life cad?
without the death of thousands (millions?)of colonials and the squandering of the colonial wealth, britain would have yet ANOTHER GERMAN MONARCH/Leader these days

from the ABOVE link
"Overy traces the origins of the bombing war back to 10 May 1940, the same day that Germany began its attack on the West and Churchill replaced Chamberlain as British prime minister. ‘Chamberlain had always opposed the use of bombing against urban targets,’ writes Overy, ‘but Churchill had no conscientious or legal objections.’ Indeed, already as Minister of Munitions in 1917, Churchill had been in favour of an independent air force and a policy of long-range bombing against German industrial targets.

Up until Churchill’s appointment as prime minister both Germany and Britain had stuck to a pledge not to attack targets in each other’s cities where civilians were at risk. Overy dismisses the long-held belief ‘firmly rooted in the British public mind’ that Hitler initiated the trend for indiscriminate bombings. Instead, he says, the decision to take the gloves off was Churchill’s, ‘because of the crisis in the Battle of France, not because of German air raids [over Britain].’"

further:

"Ethical restraints which had been imposed at the start of the war became slowly eroded as a result of Britain’s decision to initiate ‘unrestricted’ bombing of targets located in Germany’s urban areas. In a fascinating chapter entitled ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ Overy suggests that Britain’s Bomber Command developed its tactics for concentrated ‘area bombing’ and the wide use of incendiary bombs by observing the destruction Germany wrought on London during the Blitz.

The RAF altered its strategy of focusing on precise targets when it saw how effectively the German air force attacked clusters of targets in industrial and commercial areas. However, Overy says that under Sir Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris’s stewardship Bomber Command took things a grisly step further by deliberately targeting German workers to reduce industrial output."
 

Colpy

Hall of Fame Member
Nov 5, 2005
21,887
847
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Saint John, N.B.
"BOOKS
Hitler didn't start indiscriminate bombings — Churchill did
Bombing in Europe was never a winning strategy, says Richard Overy in The Bombing War

The bombing of Bulgaria was Churchill’s idea, and he remained the driving force behind the argument that air raids would provide a quick and relatively cheap way of forcing the country to change sides.
Fine in theory, but in practice things worked rather differently. The ‘political dividend’ Churchill sought to achieve in the early months of 1944 was offset by a high level of civilian casualties ‘which undermined the prestige of both the United States and Britain in the eyes of the Bulgarian people’. Overy notes that while bombing contributed to the collapse of any pro-German consensus and strengthened the hand of opposition political parties it did not result in a change of government until September 1944 when the Soviets introduced an administration dominated by the Bulgarian communist party."
Hitler didn't start indiscriminate bombings
just a for instance

and everyone glorifies this low life cad?
without the death of thousands (millions?)of colonials and the squandering of the colonial wealth, britain would have yet ANOTHER GERMAN MONARCH/Leader these days

from the ABOVE link
"Overy traces the origins of the bombing war back to 10 May 1940, the same day that Germany began its attack on the West and Churchill replaced Chamberlain as British prime minister. ‘Chamberlain had always opposed the use of bombing against urban targets,’ writes Overy, ‘but Churchill had no conscientious or legal objections.’ Indeed, already as Minister of Munitions in 1917, Churchill had been in favour of an independent air force and a policy of long-range bombing against German industrial targets.

Up until Churchill’s appointment as prime minister both Germany and Britain had stuck to a pledge not to attack targets in each other’s cities where civilians were at risk. Overy dismisses the long-held belief ‘firmly rooted in the British public mind’ that Hitler initiated the trend for indiscriminate bombings. Instead, he says, the decision to take the gloves off was Churchill’s, ‘because of the crisis in the Battle of France, not because of German air raids [over Britain].’"

further:

"Ethical restraints which had been imposed at the start of the war became slowly eroded as a result of Britain’s decision to initiate ‘unrestricted’ bombing of targets located in Germany’s urban areas. In a fascinating chapter entitled ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ Overy suggests that Britain’s Bomber Command developed its tactics for concentrated ‘area bombing’ and the wide use of incendiary bombs by observing the destruction Germany wrought on London during the Blitz.

The RAF altered its strategy of focusing on precise targets when it saw how effectively the German air force attacked clusters of targets in industrial and commercial areas. However, Overy says that under Sir Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris’s stewardship Bomber Command took things a grisly step further by deliberately targeting German workers to reduce industrial output."

It is called "total war" in which populations become legitimate targets.

It ain't pretty, but it was necessary.

“In war, resolution; in defeat, defiance; in victory, magnanimity.”
 

Blackleaf

Hall of Fame Member
Oct 9, 2004
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"BOOKS
Hitler didn't start indiscriminate bombings — Churchill did
Bombing in Europe was never a winning strategy, says Richard Overy in The Bombing War

The bombing of Bulgaria was Churchill’s idea, and he remained the driving force behind the argument that air raids would provide a quick and relatively cheap way of forcing the country to change sides.
Fine in theory, but in practice things worked rather differently. The ‘political dividend’ Churchill sought to achieve in the early months of 1944 was offset by a high level of civilian casualties ‘which undermined the prestige of both the United States and Britain in the eyes of the Bulgarian people’. Overy notes that while bombing contributed to the collapse of any pro-German consensus and strengthened the hand of opposition political parties it did not result in a change of government until September 1944 when the Soviets introduced an administration dominated by the Bulgarian communist party."
Hitler didn't start indiscriminate bombings
just a for instance

and everyone glorifies this low life cad?
without the death of thousands (millions?)of colonials and the squandering of the colonial wealth, britain would have yet ANOTHER GERMAN MONARCH/Leader these days

from the ABOVE link
"Overy traces the origins of the bombing war back to 10 May 1940, the same day that Germany began its attack on the West and Churchill replaced Chamberlain as British prime minister. ‘Chamberlain had always opposed the use of bombing against urban targets,’ writes Overy, ‘but Churchill had no conscientious or legal objections.’ Indeed, already as Minister of Munitions in 1917, Churchill had been in favour of an independent air force and a policy of long-range bombing against German industrial targets.

Up until Churchill’s appointment as prime minister both Germany and Britain had stuck to a pledge not to attack targets in each other’s cities where civilians were at risk. Overy dismisses the long-held belief ‘firmly rooted in the British public mind’ that Hitler initiated the trend for indiscriminate bombings. Instead, he says, the decision to take the gloves off was Churchill’s, ‘because of the crisis in the Battle of France, not because of German air raids [over Britain].’"

further:

"Ethical restraints which had been imposed at the start of the war became slowly eroded as a result of Britain’s decision to initiate ‘unrestricted’ bombing of targets located in Germany’s urban areas. In a fascinating chapter entitled ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ Overy suggests that Britain’s Bomber Command developed its tactics for concentrated ‘area bombing’ and the wide use of incendiary bombs by observing the destruction Germany wrought on London during the Blitz.

The RAF altered its strategy of focusing on precise targets when it saw how effectively the German air force attacked clusters of targets in industrial and commercial areas. However, Overy says that under Sir Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris’s stewardship Bomber Command took things a grisly step further by deliberately targeting German workers to reduce industrial output."

Let's not forget that Britain, unlike Canada and the US, was directly targeted by the Germans and suffered mass bombing, child evacuations (including my grandparents) and rationing. Britain was fighting for her very survival. To the Americans and Canadians, WWII was just another war being fought abroad which involved their soldiers, like Vietnam and Afghanistan. But to the British, however, it was something different: the war took place HERE, within our country. It is not merely a war which happened abroad involving our troops. Throughout those dark days the British Government was, rightly, prepared to do anything in its sheer desperation to win the war. It's easy to look back 75 years later and say "Oh, but the British shouldn't have done that". The British at the time, however, were staring at invasion from an evil regime at were prepared to do anything to win. Hindsight is a great thing.