We do not touch the obstinate old lion who stood up to Hitler without risking the wrath of the conservative English press, which continues to adore the mythical politician as an old divine relic. No wonder, therefore, that she bent on Tariq Ali, accusing him of all the crimes while the author was content to highlight little-known and unflattering passages from the life of the former Prime Minister Winston Churchill (1874-1965).
The essayist, however, does not question the crucial role he may have had during the Second World War, the only one who resisted Hitler, in this fascinating and fierce critical portrait. He admits that the “imperial activist” was also one of the only important political figures of the ruling class to have grasped from the end of 1938 the dangers of the IIIe Reich.
According to Tariq Ali, the cult deemed “excessive” and practically undisputed for Churchill (he counts more than 1600 biographies about him) has nothing to do with his wartime deeds. This glorification of Churchillian rhetoric is quite recent. Started by Margaret Thatcher during the Falklands War, it continued with the English Conservatives, who have since striven to preserve it in the United Kingdom.
The book, unconventional, full of digressions, does not only question the legacy of the politician, it demystifies the dark past of an individual considered untouchable. And the result is severe. In addition to his “catastrophic” military errors during the First World War, especially when he found himself at the head of the navy, Ali recalls Churchill’s fierce hostility towards the working class, his acquaintances with several fascist leaders such as Mussolini or Franco.
He also points to a poor tactician obsessed with the preservation of the British Empire and fascinated by the atomic bomb. He points out that in the 1920s Churchill “enthusiastically” supported the use of chemical weapons against Arabs and Kurds.
The prolific essayist, who has already grilled the political legacy of George W. Bush and Barack Obama in his previous essays, presents a Churchill who swears by “Anglo-Saxon superiority”. Quoting former British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, he recalls that, to counter immigration from the British West Indies, Churchill would have proposed to the Conservatives an electoral slogan that the far right would not have denied, “ Keep England white (Keep England White), for the 1955 general election.
And that’s not all. We learn that Churchill, sexist, racist, did not hesitate to express his aversion towards the peoples under the yoke of the Empire. He called the Kikuyus tribes of Kenya “naked savages” and blamed the Indians for “multiplying like rabbits”. According to Tariq Ali, Churchill was also behind several war crimes: the violent practices of the British army in Sudan in 1898, the famine in Bengal in 1943 or the brutal repression of the Greek resistance.