What if winston churchill

Britain was at war. The fate of the nation now rested in the hands of the man who had done more than most to alert the world to the threat posed by Nazi Germany. What would we now think of Winston Churchill if all we had to go on was his career and his views prior to the war? Fifty-five years on from his death, the debate about Churchill rages on.

To many around the world, he is beyond criticism — the man who saved his nation in its greatest hour of need. To others, he is a racist, imperialist, warmongering drunkard who, without the career redemption the war afforded him, would have gone down in history as a failure.

Would we all see him this way were it not for the war? Churchill is frequently accused of being a racist and an imperialist. Like all children of the Victorian age, he was brought up in the bosom of the British Empire. His views on race and colonialism were fairly typical of the time. To Churchill, the British sat at the very top of the tree. Below them, occupying various branches depending on colour, creed and geographical location, were all the other peoples of the world - with Indians and black Africans very much at the bottom.

This idea is grotesque to modern people, but to those who had grown up in a country that held dominion over a quarter of the globe, the idea that the British — masters of all they surveyed - were at the very top and black Africans were at the very bottom made perfect sense. You only had to look at a map, after all. Was Churchill a racist? By the standards of today, of course, he was. On the charge of imperialism, again, it is important to remember that the British Empire was the most powerful the world had ever known when Churchill was born.

While there was a small anti-imperialist movement in Britain, it was hardly mainstream. This explains his utter disdain for Mahatma Gandhi and the Indian independence movement.

Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir… striding half-naked up the steps of the Vice-regal Palace,' Churchill wrote of Gandhi in These words sound horrifying to the modern reader, brought up in a world where Gandhi is a venerated figure almost beyond criticism.

Outraged letters to the college said this was academic freedom gone too far, and that the event should be cancelled. The speakers and I, all scholars and people of colour, were subjected to vicious hate mail, racist slurs and threats.

We were accused of treason and slander. One correspondent warned that my name was being forwarded to the commanding officer of an RAF base near my home. The college is now under heavy pressure to stop doing these events. Churchill was an admired wartime leader who recognised the threat of Hitler in time and played a pivotal role in the allied victory. It should be possible to recognise this without glossing over his less benign side. In , Churchill banned interracial boxing matches so white fighters would not be seen losing to black ones.

Even his contemporaries found his views on race shocking. Just because Hitler was a racist does not mean Churchill could not have been one. He never actually quite said "History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it", but that turned out to be the case. His historical works were so good, they earned him the Nobel Prize for literature. No other British prime minister can remotely match the scope of Churchill's achievement.

When he died in the historian Sir Arthur Bryant said: "The age of giants is over. Bryant was right - and yet that, in a way, is a measure of Churchill's success. Ever since he destroyed Hitler's despotism, our political leaders haven't needed to be giants. The UK is marking the 50th anniversary of the death of Winston Churchill. He is regarded by many as the greatest Briton ever, but for some he remains an intensely controversial figure.

The 10 greatest controversies of Winston Churchill's career 22 January The nature of Churchill's depression. Did Churchill's words help win the war? Image source, PA. There were several major strategic mistakes in WW2. Churchill leaving parliament in - he remained an MP almost until the end of his life. They can just be ordinary. More from the Magazine. Paint thrown over Churchill's statue in Parliament Square,