89 year old Winston Churchill leaves the House of Commons for the last time. He was a member of Parliament for 64 years. July 27, 1964.
by Comprehensive-Way482
89 year old Winston Churchill leaves the House of Commons for the last time. He was a member of Parliament for 64 years. July 27, 1964.
by Comprehensive-Way482
5 Comments
A very complicated and brilliant man who is also a personal hero. Historically he is a challenging individual to make a moral decision about. He undoubtedly saved the lives of an entire nation, but his decisions in that process cost the lives of millions of others. His plans for taking over the ports of my home country of Ireland 🇮🇪 as an occupying force during the Second World War is a case in point. Objectively I understand why, personally, it’s more difficult to imagine my country as an enemy during that period.
That’s an incredible tenure. What was his final speech or action in the House of Commons?
But 🚬 is bad for you, yet soo many men of his era smoked like chimneys and lived until they were 100, George Burns & Bob hope two of millions.
A complex individual and not entirely sure where i sit… very glad someone had the conviction to stand up to Hitler and the Nazis and you wonder what the world would be like if he didn’t.
I get that he was clever, noting the quote below
“If I were married to you, I’d put poison in your coffee,” Lady Astor once famously remarked to Winston Churchill. “If I were married to you,” he replied, “I’d drink it.”
Churchill was openly very interested in eugenics for disabled people, although he lost interest in this fairly early in his career.
He repeatedly argued against self-rule for the British colonies; he did raise some concerns that leaned mostly logisitcal or at least welfare-based, but also on several occasions referenced other races being less than whites, referring to white people in 1937 as a ‘higher grade race’ to justify colonialism .His Mediterranean strategy focused on expanding and maintaining British imperial interests in a way that may have unnecessarily elongated WW2. He also insisted that India contiue to export rice during the Bengal famine, while millions starved.
Contemporary evidence regarding (British) public opinion on empire tends to indicate mixed views, with an emerging sense of the empire as a burden in light of the war- so it’s hard to straightforwardly argue he was simply a man of his time.
Anyway I know we love his witty one-liners and (admittedly more legitimately!) his opposition to Hitler, but there are many arguments as to why this is not a man to unambiguously hold up as a hero. People often refer to him as ‘complicated’ and I think it’s worth unpacking what is being referenced when we say that