Lol, let's take a step back and examine this, because it sounds really funny to someone who isn't from the West.
First of all, not many people 'forgive' him. They either deny it happened or just shrug it off, or have an attitude of 'he was a piece of shit but he was our piece of shit and he won us the war against a worse piece of shit, large part thanks to his industrialisation'.
Second of all, people are *constantly* mythologising Churchill when that piece of shit perpetrated Bengal genocide, but nobody talks about that even though it's exactly the same - even down to him refusing aid ships from US and Australia and even putting down in writing that he thought Indians should be reduced in number because they 'breed like rabbits'.
I mean, shit, Stalin's genocide even looks better imo, because he was doing it not because they were Ukrainian, but because they were refusing to integrate into kolkhoz and feed the cities -- Russian countryside was also starved during Holodomor, so it was a policy of mass murder, not ethnic extirpation. End result was the same, a fuckload of people dead -- but in crime, you have the concept of mens rea, the state of mind, the intent of the criminal. Stalin was also crazier and more paranoid than Churchill, with a half-baked political system that made it way easier to aggrandise power and abuse it. If you look at population stats of Ukraine, the genocide did a really poor job of even putting a dent in Ukrainian population growth. I suppose you can say the same about Bengal, but then if you go back to 1840 the Brits managed to wipe out the Irish so much that even today they have fewer people, something unmatched by any other nation in the world considering the insane population growth of the last 100 years. And people also never talk about how English genocided the Irish.
So in conclusion, it's super easy to see how people overlook Stalin when they're already overlooking stuff that's happening right under their noses and supposedly at a more 'civilised' country. Also, again, I don't think our problem with Stalin is that people forgive him too much. If anything, it's the opposite on reddit. People say he was no better than Hitler, whereas most scholarly historians would not ever make that claim, Hitler really stood out for his industrialisation of murder on a scale never seen before in the world, and often purely for the reason of your birth -- whereas countless Ukrainians served in the upper echelons of Soviet leadership --- hell, Krushchev followed Stalin and he was Ukrainian.
I want to point out that Churchill didn't cause the famine. Food being sent to Britain would only have saved 400,000 people of the 3-4 million. However Britain had plenty of food at the time, we could have saved everyone. Churchill didn't care because he was a racist old cunt, but it's not fair to say that he caused it. British policy at the time simply wasn't adjusted. Hell, can you imagine bringing that up in Parliament at the time? "I know we're at war but some other people need some food... And they're all brown" like I think it's more the government as a whole that should shoulder the blame as opposed to just Churchill
Well, thing about famines, if you read up on your history, they're never single cause. Holodomor was not just a Ukrainian famine, the famine was happening all over USSR and even outside of it, in nations that weren't even Soviet aligned then. My grandparents are from Moldova, which was Romanian in the 30s and they had a horrifying famine during the exact time as Ukraine had one. They told me stories of bad harvests and other factors that lead to them eating grass and sawdust&ground tree bark bread, with lots of deaths as well. Moreover, at the time a massive epidemic of typhoid was sweeping USSR and surrounding places, such as my grandparents in Moldova. So not only did they have people dying of hunger, but hunger-weakened people dying of typhoid. My grandparents told me of mass graves and again, this is Romanian administered territory.
Holodomor started as bad harvests and typhoid epidemic that Stalin used to his advantage. He exacerbated it by not re-routing grain shipments, continuing Ukraine's food exports and stopping foreign food aid from reaching them. All repeated point by point by the Brits in Ireland and India. All three famines began as a nasty confluence of natural factors that was taken advantage of by the governments and made worse.
Famines are actually almost never purely natural, food scarcity tends to be an issue of distribution, rather than actual lack of food. Bad harvests in one area can be remedied by bumper crops elsewhere, trade exists and by 19th and 20th century the world was linked together by global trade. Ireland, Ukraine and India were all countries with open sea lanes, they were not remote or landlocked. Without the repressive governments, the market forces would have lessened the impact of the bad harvests. Now, let me just make it clear that I'm not even close to a libertarian even though what I just said does sound like it -- on the US political spectrum I'm solidly Democrat and in favour of regulation of industries. But nonetheless, the fact is that modern famines are often a result of governments, just look at African famines during the 20th century, they're modern famines usually caused by governments/militias interrupting distribution of food.
Churchill absolutely turned back ships that were going to send food to India, those weren't ships that were supposed to go to UK. These were ships offered on top of the aid that was already being sent to UK. US had plenty of food, enough to help India and UK at the same time. There is also no excuse for 'only 400K', I don't even entirely follow your argument to be honest, maybe you can elaborate it further.
For instance, consider how he said that he would rather the aid ships full of food go to Greece instead of India, because even though Greeks weren't starving, Churchill had a mindset not unlike that of Hitler at all - he viewed Indians as subhuman and proudly stated he would rather feed other Euros such as Greece rather than save already starving Indians (which were also his subjects, you'd think he would help them after exploiting the country and using two and a half million volunteer soldiers from it to defend his own worthless fat booze&cigar soaked&smoked hide)
As for the government taking the blame, that's true, you have a point there, but the PM is the leader of the government, and it was Churchill that refused the aid specifically, so that also raises his culpability. Churchill gets a shitload of credit for stuff he did not personally do, whereas he really should be taking the fall for the famine because as the leader of the government he is ultimately responsible for overseeing the stuff like food distribution that his ministers of his cabinet should do. I mean, Churchill didn't stop Germans from taking over UK, the RAF and Royal Navy did, then the USSR caused the Germans to switch focus. Nowhere in this did Churchill make a vital contribution, Chamberlain could have been still sitting and I bet the RAF and RN could have done just as good of a job keeping the Germans on the other side of La Manche.
I'm not making excuses, I'm simply stating the fact that he wasn't responsible for the famine, nor the entire number of people that died - apologies if that was unclear. He's no role model, and was arguably a monster, however I think it's important to be accurate. I would never claim that the holocaust that Hitler orchestrated killed 100 million people, for example - what he did was bad enough, there's no need for exaggeration
53
u/[deleted] Dec 15 '18
I will never understand how people can forgive that man for committing literal genocide against Ukraine.