Of a sort, yes.
We did grant the Philippines their independence and at least some Americans said we were doing it to protect the territories from becoming Euro colonies.
OTOH, some Americans were out and out unabashed imperialists.
Our hands may be less dirty than some but by no means clean.
Here’s my summary of the causes of the Bengal famine:
It was not easy to bring in food from other countries because:
Imperialism was out of step with the mainstream in the 1930s? Really?
Well at that time many European nations had empires that they were not about to give up. Moreover the Italians were busy trying to create a new one in Libya, Somalia and Eritrea, so were the Japanese in Far East colonising China. The Germans, of course, had African colonies and were keen to carve out an empire in much of central and eastern Europe.
It was not until the years after WW2 that the idea of colonial territories started be abandoned politically. The British in Kenya and the French in Algeria fought colonial wars to preserve the status quo. The British really started decolonising in earnest in the 1960s.
I agree about Dowding. An odd fellow, with a rather curious belief in the existence of fairies, but his radar and observer based command and control system for the RAF was a brilliant innovation that saved the country from invasion by defeating the Luftwaffe. So too was the pugnatious Canadian Lord Beaverbrook who got aircraft production up to speed and produced in sufficient numbers to win the Battle of Britain.
Churchill got all the attention as a political leader who rallied the nation when it needed it, a political maverick. Churchill’s career in the years up to WW2 and the years afterwards were not so impressive.
Imperialism is not a monolithic belief system. There is a spectrum between the kind of 20th century “imperialism” that @Dangerosa describes above as in “I think major powers have the right to meddle in affairs of developing nations and depose their rulers if we don’t like them” through to “Non-Europeans are uncivilized primitives completely incapable of ruling themselves, and should be grateful to the British, who are inherently better than everyone else, for ruling over them and bringing the fruits of civilization.” Churchill was at the latter end of the spectrum, while he wasn’t the only senior figure who felt that way, it was a position that had become out of step with both the political consensus (particularly among in the left wingers who were pretty much Churchill’s only supporters against appeasement in the 1930s) and the obvious reality on the ground.
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This paragraph starts by saying that Churchill didn’t prevent an invasion, and ends by saying how he prevented an invasion. A peace treaty in 1940 would have made eventual invasion inevitable and almost certainly successful.
I don’t think we can say that for sure. I mean sure Hitler might have conquered Russia and decided to invade the UK, but I wouldn’t say it was “inevitable”.
I am comfortable saying that with anyone else as PM in 1940 there would have been a peace treaty. It was really only Churchill and his personal beliefs that prevented that.
No. I said that what Churchill prevented (which was a Germany-Britain treaty that took Britain out of the war and left Hitler in charge of all mainland Europe) was worse for the rest of Europe than a Nazi invasion of Britain.
It seems to me that this statement is not in conflict with the OP.
I don’t know, maybe. Has someone made that argument? Otherwise, how is it relevant? Either way, it would be a separate point of discussion.
never mind …
Why should anyone get “slack” for this kind of stuff? You can argue that X person did A-type things and B-type things. Why should one create “slack” for the other?
How is this not strawmanning?
Not really. If he was in fact a “genocidaire” that would not be a particularly morally consistent statement IMO (he did some genocide but he also helped stop some people who were doing genocide, so all good)
I mean its not a strawman, its the crux of the whole argument in the OP. What Hitler and Stalin did quite clearly makes them genocidaires, they absolutely bear the responsibility for the people who starved to death during the Holodomor and in the Arbeitslager. If Churchill similarly bears responsibility for those that starved to death during the Bengal Famine then he is a genocidaire. And, as shown in the various post above, he does not.
Stalin and Hitler don’t define the concept of genocide. The argument is whether Churchill committed genocide. That’s the arguable point. Saying that what he did isn’t as bad as what Stalin or Hitler did is a distraction. Plenty of genocidaires can’t be compared to Stalin or Hitler. Bringing them into the conversation is a suspect tactic.
Whether he was a genocidaire is a question of fact. Why couldn’t he have been a genocidaire in one situaiton and have opposed another genocidaire in another situation? There’s no logical or factual inconsistency in that.
Well Hitler sort of does. The term was literally coined in a description of Nazi occupied Europe.
No it is not. It is an opinion.
If he did the things that Mukherjee accuses him of, then there’s no room for opinion on the matter. The dispute is solely over whether he did them. That’s a question of fact.
We don’t use “genocide” to mean “exactly what Hitler did.”
Good points.
At best, he could have/should have done more to alleviate the famine. However- there was a war on.
But Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot et all, are the ones who ordered their genocides.
I dont think there is a comparison at all.
Callous bastard who would do anything to win the war- yes.
Genocidaire- no.
I mean if you ask 100 people on the street what the definition of genocide is “what Hitler did” will be the most common answer.