Churchill, Statues, and Undeserved Glorification

Trigger Warning: discussion and reference to racism, xenophobia, r*pe, murder, starvation, Nazis, imperialism, and slavery.

Imagine you worked in an office building.

Everyday, when you go to your own office, you pass the man who hired you. He was the only person in your area who was willing to give you a job, and you needed that job. He pays you for your work, it’s decent pay too, in fact, it’s far better than many others in the building. This wage you have saved your life. It keeps you alive. You’ve worked there for some years now and he appears like a fine man with good banter. You don’t really have a relationship with him, but he gave you the job and pays your wages and essentially saved your life, so you see him as good.

Then, people start talking. For years you only saw him as a great man, that’s all people said when they talked about him, and they adored how he saved them from poverty by giving them these chances. What a great man. But now there’s an investigation. He’s a rapist.

This isn’t simply an allegation, there is concrete evidence that he has done horrible things to not only your co-workers, but people all over the place. He has raped many people, and the victims were convinced to keep quiet because he saved them, he pays their bills and essentially has kept them alive all this time, so don’t they owe him something? You are, of course, disgusted. Everyone is. But the last account was years ago, it’s all coming out now, but he hasn’t done it in a long time and ever since an ‘accident’, he can’t rape anyone anymore, but it’s unclear if he still has those feelings. “It was a different time” they say.

And now, every single day when you come to work, you pass his office door and go to work. He saved you, so you are grateful, and his victims have left the business already, so it’s not like you know anyone he hurt, and you’re not his boss so it’s not like you have any power against it. It’s just opinions of people to you right now. So you keep it out of your mind.

Then there’s a change in leadership. The business becomes a union and now democracy rules. The first issue on the table, what do we do with the known racist that hired us all and saved our lives all those years ago. Nothing will change if we fire him, firstly he’s very rich so he’ll be fine, we’re not damning him, and he’ll be remembered as instrumental to the business in our logs. Secondly, someone else will continue to pay us, he’s not the only one, and surely we can continue to fight against poverty by hiring and saving people who need to be saved. Really, the only change will be if we see him and his office.

You think. He can’t hurt anyone now, so does it matter? But people walking past his office will be reminded of it, and if we don’t hold him accountable for his actions then what’s stopping it from happening again? Some say that firing him will be like we’re erasing him from history, but we have documents and records to prove the good things he’s done, his name is synonymous with the business so no one will forget it, and if we just ignore his crimes then won’t we be erasing the lesser known and damaging history?

He’s a good man, some cry. We wouldn’t be here, likely not even alive, if it weren’t for him. Which is true, he did do good there. But did he? The business existed before him, and it may have failed if he didn’t do the good things he did and hire people, but didn’t he do what he did for himself? He saved us, yes, but he also saved himself by making sure the business survived. He was pretty much born into the business, he grew up in it, and sure, the competition were doing very immoral things, but so was our business, just less so. If he was born into the other business, the one that openly accepted rapists, then he likely would have saved it too, he certainly agrees with them more, but by being of this business it was essentially his obligation to fight for us. If this business failed then he would have failed, and he wouldn’t want that, so it’s not like he did what he did out of moral duty. I mean, he got rich out of it too so greedy could have been a factor.

He didn’t rape you. He didn’t rape anyone you personally know. Some people working in the building may be related to or acquaintances with the victims, but no one with a vote right now was there when it was happening. The secretary’s parents were abused and suffered at his hand, both raped when this man was in his prime, and it destroyed them, and now their descendant must walk past this man’s office every day and act like everything is fine. Is that okay? Sure, he can’t do it anymore, but he’s still glorified and praised and treated like a hero, with all criticisms being ignored. Should we still keep him hired and up there?

If he didn’t do the good stuff before all the bad stuff later on, then there’s a chance we wouldn’t have survived, and if we did survive then we’d be working for the competitor who openly allows rape, so isn’t this better? But also, if we get rid of him now, the competitor is already gone and not a threat and if anymore arise then we already have new people willing to fight against them who aren’t known rapists. People may be suffering out there right now as a long-term consequence of his actions, but they’re not here, but also we are still glorifying him by keeping him around, so that can’t be helping how they feel about that, or how we feel about it.

And, if we do keep him, what’s to stop the people have got the power to rape from starting to rape now, encouraged by the fact we’re not holding this rapist accountable and are even glorifying him by keeping him around. If we punish rapists now but keep this man in his office, glorified in public view, aren’t we hypocrites?

“It was a different time” they still cry. Rape wasn’t okay then, it happened and was essentially legal, but many people fought to change that back then, and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that forcing yourself on another person is wrong. Slavery was always known to be wrong, it was banned in England in 1102 on moral grounds but then later legalized for business reasons, so it’s not like they just had different sensibilities. ‘It was a different time’ works for slang and what music you liked and what you were capable of being aware of, not hate, slavery, and rape.

So should we fire him?

Again, it may just be surface level now as he’s not doing anything good or bad anymore, he’s just there. But he is there. We see him every day. We’re reminded of him. We don’t need him, and we have plenty other like him in all the good ways. Should we glorify him, and keep him around, simply because he was efficient at doing a good thing that he was obligated to do and would have wanted to do anyways a long time ago? Or, should we tear down his glorified statue because people walk by it every day and would be reminded of the bad things he did and would see how he’s still standing and praised despite the horrific things he had done.

The answer seems pretty clear to me.

Demonstrators in London’s Parliament Square tagged an iconic statue of Winston Churchill with graffiti branding him “a racist”. This has divided the nation.

This came after the toppling of a Bristol statue of Edward Colston, a prominent slave trader who donated some of his blood money that he shouldn’t have made in the first place into Bristol itself, hence why he had a statue. But in the midst of a political revolution where the people just aren’t standing for racism anymore, it makes sense that this monster of a man should not be, and really should never have been, glorified in such a way. Thus, the statue was torn down and thrown into the docks. Almost everyone agrees this was a good thing, I say ‘almost’ because of course there are people who hate what was done, listing reasons from the concept of vandalism being too ‘evil’ for them and they just want people to be nice… to the long-dead slave trader and his statue glorifying him, to people straight up thinking slavery was okay back then because it’s a different time and that everyone should be excused for it.

When it comes to Winston Churchill’s statue, however, it’s a lot less black-and-white.

Firstly, his statue wasn't destroyed and thrown into the docks, it was merely spray-paint over his name, his statue is still intact, so we do have some time to decide on whether it should be torn down. This opens up a wonderful discourse on the good he has done and the bad he has don-Nazis, he fought the Nazis who are the epitome of pure evil and therefore he is the epitome of pure good and if you criticism him then you a Nazi or think the Nazis should have won, do you really think the Nazis would have tolerated the Black Lives Matter movement, he could have been worse but he wasn’t so really he’s the best, let’s all suck his-

Okay. So. That may have been an exaggeration of those who defend Winston Churchill and his statue, but it is essentially the beginning and end of their argument. He defeated the Nazis, our cultural default for the concept of evil, and arguably saved the world, or at least Britain, from evil bigoted fascists. That’s a good thing, of course it is, but it was also what was expected. He became Prime Minister during the Second World War, and the Nazis weren’t subtle in their desire to pretty much take over the world. It would make sense that a man with experience in war, who kinda loved war, and was a war-time leader, would fight a war to protect his country from a foreign invader. It was what was expected of him, at the very least. Yes, he was a great leader, and was instrumental in winning the war, but he by no means did this on moral grounds, he was just effective at his job.

I’ve seen this a lot when it comes to the generation who fought against the Nazis. They act as if they’re wholly good and moral because they defeated Hitler, a man so evil it’s absurdly comical in some cases. Isn’t it odd how pretty much everyone who was born in Britain, raised in a culture where fighting for one’s country is the best thing one can do, decided to fight for their country against a foreign invader on moral grounds alone? It’s more likely that case that they just wanted to do their duty and protect their country, just as many Germans did who weren’t even aware of the concentration camps. We have the luxury of hindsight and awareness, they didn’t. If the UK and US were really fighting a war of morals, with justice against bigotry, then why the hell has the UK and US been steeped in bigotry for the seventy-five years since? Back then, xenophobia was far more common than today, and many likely hated Germans simply for the fact they were German. Just because you fought against the Nazis, doesn’t mean you disagreed with them. Which leads nicely into what kind of man Winston Churchill was.

Boy, did he love killing! During his time fighting in imperialist expeditions in North-West Frontier, what is now Afghanistan, he recalled “all who resist will be killed without quarter” because the Pashtuns needed to “recognize the superiority of race”. What can i say but yikes?

His slaughter, which included, in his words, how “every tribesman caught was speared or cut down”, didn’t stop there. In Greece, late into a war, he condemned the anti-fascist groups who liberated their own country from the Nazis because they also opposed the new government Churchill tried to create in Greece that were exactly like the Nazis just by a different name, so he fired on these protesters and murdered twenty eight while wounding over a hundred.

He committed genocide in Bengal, too. Through World War Two, Indians kept lending Britain money to help with the war effort to protect India. Churchill hated this, and didn’t want to be in debt to India, so he forced them into forgiving him by manufacturing a famine. He shipped millions of tons of rice away from India, often to places that didn’t need or want them where they just were wasted, and he blamed them for a whole manner of racist reasons, such as ‘breeding like rabbits’. This led to the deaths of four million people due to starvation in Bengal. Other nations such as the US and Canada saw this crisis and attempted to offer food, but Churchill, who was occupying the area at the time, refused it to teach them a lesson… a lesson that was apparently not to help fund the British during wartime.

He didn’t just commit atrocities far from home, Ireland was also a victim of his bloodlust. Early in his career, he often sent people to attack Irish civilians and their property and orchestrated the Croke Park massacre, where his men fired into a crowd at a football match and killed fourteen. He built his career on destroying property, but no, vandalism of horrific racists who love destroying the property of those below them is what’s morally reprehensible. Churchill was adamant about using planes with machine-guns or bombs to frighten the Irish civilians into submission to the British Empire.

His atrocities continue, from overthrowing democratic governments in Guyana to racist comments about Cuba, and from encouraging looting of Iran so he could steal their resources and oil to colonizing Kenya and establishing British supremacist governments with institutionalized racism where he sent over a hundred and fifty thousand men, women, and children into literal concentration camps.

Winston Churchill was an evil imperialist warmongering genocidal racist, and yet the nation is currently in uproar because someone dared to graffiti the word ‘racist’ onto a statue that glorifies him. He was undoubtedly racist, with horrific beliefs and actions embedded into every aspect of his career. He spread word throughout the world about how great Britain was but hated immigration, stating that England should be '“kept white”. He blamed Aboriginal Australian and Native American genocides on those people’s own ‘racial inferiority’. He even hated many white people and considered them inferior because they weren’t rich and in power, almost considering them a wholly different race themselves and suggesting they be forcibly sterilized for their crime of not being born rich.

But he fought against Nazis! And also donated to the criminal defense fund of Nazi war criminals, and only really disagreed with their plan to take over the world because they were German and he wanted the British Empire to do so, which is a bit biased, and, you know, imperialistic and horrific.

In essence, why the hell should we keep any statues of Winston Churchill?

He was an effective wartime leader, who caused many atrocities and did horrible things out of spite and only really protected his country because he was a part of it and hated the Germans on the grounds that they weren’t British. People who take the ‘nuanced’ position that he was complex with good attributes and bad attributes are merely trying to be centrists of the issue; acknowledging the horrible things he has done while continuing to glorify him and keep things as they are.

Winston Churchill was a disgustingly horrible person and we should remove his statue.

To the people who say that we are erasing history by taking down statues; Hitler is one of the most well-known person in the world and I don’t think I have ever seen a statue of him. Perhaps history exists without glorification in the form of statues. We can remember them, that does not mean we should glorify them.

History has been written by the victors, with the true atrocities of their actions hidden in the footnotes, but now we are winning, moral decency is prevailing, and we’re going to move those footnotes to the front page!

There is a bust of King Leopold II of Belgium in Ghent, Belgium. That man orchestrated the colonial genocide of ten million Congolese people, and yet is still gloried across Belgium and history books, when he should be hated along with the likes of Hitler himself. We should tear down his statue too.

Many, many statues of confederate officials in the US, who were glorified long after losing the war, during the Jim Crow era, as a reminder to the now more free black people in those areas that the racists were not going away. All of their statues should be torn down as well.

There are too many statues still standing today of horrific people who have committed disgusting atrocities. They will be remembered, they should never be glorified. Tear them down!