Winston Churchill

[PaleoPhil]

This incompetent was directly responsible for the disastrous Gallipoli campaign and his foul-up re the Gold Standard directly led to the General Strike of 1926.If not for the US...

Would you tell me more about the Gold Standard and General Strike issues?

I knew of Churchill's imperialist attitude, but this was an eye-opener for me:

When the Kurds rebelled against British rule in Iraq, he said: “I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes.” It “would spread a lively terror.”

...even at the time, Churchill was seen as standing at the most brutal and brutish end of the British imperialist spectrum. This was clearest in his attitude to India. When Gandhi began his campaign of peaceful resistance, Churchill raged that he “ought to be lain bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi and then trampled on by an enormous elephant with the new Viceroy seated on its back.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/books/review/Hari-t.html

It would be good for balanced perspective to hear from a critic of Churchill, because most of what we heard in America until very recently was praising of him, because of his role in WWII.

[sabertooth]

Iraq was never a real country, its borders were drawn out by the British imperialist through the league of nations, with no regard whatsoever to the fact that the different tribal regions had no wish to be bound together into one country. 

Saddam Hussein was put into power by British intelligence as a Hench Man that would keep the tribal peoples in check and he gassed his own people using chemical weapons he had gotten from the west.

So I guess that the genocide that Saddam was accused of was actually dreamed up by good old Churchill himself. The Kurds never accepted imperial rule and so had to be dealt with.

[TylerDurden]

The info is all available online(eg:-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winston_Churchill_in_politics:_1900%E2%80%931939

)

[PaleoPhil]

Thanks for the responses guys.

How ironic that the Kurds are now the friendliest of friendlies in Iraq and that the Allies harshly criticized Sadam for doing what Churchill argued for.