Gary Oldman as Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour. In his Oscar acceptance speech for playing the role, Oldman said, “I would just like to salute Sir Winston Churchill.” He might as well have danced on 3 million dead bodies, writes Shree Paradkar. By the time I came across the ledger at the Bangalore Club with Winston Churchill’s name on it in the late 1990s, British rule in India had been sanitized; airbrushed to present a picture of overall benevolence with a few violent splotches.
The entry in the ledger is dated June 1, 1899 and names one Lt W.L.S. Churchill as one of 17 bill defaulters. He owes the club 13 rupees from a time when a whisky cost less than half a rupee.
Had we then heard that Churchill once described our beloved city as a “third rate watering place … without society or good sport,” we would have probably laughed it off as the irascibility ever only indulged in the great. Jolly good, old chap.
Colonialism of the mind lingers long after the land is free.
And if we had heard that he once said, “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion,” meh. He was dead. We were thriving.
There are flawed heroes. Lincoln, MLK and Gandhi to name a few — men who inflicted injustices on individuals.
Then there are monsters.
Powerful men who lacerate the world with tragedies. Adolf Hitler, certainly, but his nemesis Churchill, too.
It was only in 2014 that I first got a glimpse of genocidal mania in the man so lionized for leading his nation through its finest hour.
It was a piece titled Remembering India’s forgotten holocaust, in Tehelka magazine that detailed the ghastly origins of the Bengal famine of 1943 that killed an estimated 3 million people in one year.
Historians have easily traced it back to Churchill who had diverted the bountiful harvest from Bengal to Britain and other parts of Europe. When the locals began starving, he steadfastly refused to send them food. He said no to rerouting food that was being shipped from Australia to the Middle East via India. No to the 10,000 tons of rice Canada offered to send to India, no to the 100,000 tons of rice America offered. The famine was the Indians’ fault, he told a war-cabinet meeting, “for breeding like rabbits.”
In his Revisionist History podcast, Malcolm Gladwell delves into how the historian Madhusree Mukerjee, author of Churchill’s Secret War, dug into Britain’s shipping archives to uncover evidence that Britain had so much food at the time that the U.S. had become suspicious they were stockpiling it to sell it after the war.
In India, she wrote, “parents dumped their starving children into rivers and wells. Many took their lives by throwing themselves in front of trains.” Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Indian soldiers were fighting alongside the Allied forces.
Yet, what did the actor Gary Oldman who portrayed Churchill in Darkest Hour say last Sunday when he received an Oscar for Best Actor? “I would just like to salute Sir Winston Churchill who has been marvellous company on what can be described as an incredible journey.”
Salute. Sir. Marvellous. Incredible.
Oldman might as well have danced on 3 million dead bodies, many of whom were too weak to cremate or bury their loved ones.
Such tributes for a heinous white supremacist who once declared that “Aryan tribes were bound to triumph.”
Words as hollow as the tunnel-visioned ideals on which people fashion this man, but they can’t stem the drip, drip of blood from his hands.
They can’t hide tens of thousands of Kenyans who were rounded up in concentration camps called “Britain’s Gulags” under his orders, where thousands were tortured and killed for rebelling against British rule.
They can’t hide the bodies of the Greek civilians who were celebrating German withdrawal in 1944, but were killed by the British army because Churchill thought the communist influence on the Nazi resisters — who had allied with Britain — was too strong. And we haven’t even got into his treatment of Iraqis or the wiping out of entire Indigenous populations of Tasmania.
Churchill was not the first Western leader to profit from plunders and mass murders. Remember John A. Macdonald? But imperialistic popular culture continues to enshrine him, despite the Gallipoli disaster, only as a military great, a fun drunk, a loyal monarch with a penchant for fine speech and a flair for loquacious prose.
Churchill tried to manipulate history with the six volumes of his memoirs. Indeed he succeeded so well that even today the Bangalore Club thumps its chest about his membership there. “Many a past great … including Sir Winston Churchill” have been members, says its website.
This compounds the tragedy. Erasing his crimes pronounces his victims worthless, deems their lives undeserving of acknowledgement, and leaves their deaths but a footnote in history.
On Twitter @shreeparadkar
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Protesters marching to the United Nations base housing Nepalese peacekeepers in Mirebalais, Haiti, on Oct. 29, 2010. Credit Associated Press
roger hollander 
Bolivia’s Former President and Defense Minister Face Florida Trial for Civilian Deaths March 12, 2018
Posted by rogerhollander in Bolivia, Criminal Justice, Human Rights, Imperialism, Latin America, Uncategorized.Tags: aymara, Bolivia, bolivia history, Evo Morales, james carville, mamani, roger hollander, sanchez bedrsain, Sánchez de Lozada, tim elfrink
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Roger’s note: there’s a familiar pattern here. A Latin American head of state is supported, propped up or whatever by the United States government in order to protect U.S. corporate, military and geopolitical interests. When his murderous policies become so untenable that popular uprisings (and in a few cases democratic elections) succeed in overthrowing said caudillo, he finds refuge in a playboy’s lifestyle in the United States or elsewhere. Batista, Jiminez, Duvalier, Somosa… There is a long list. Chile’s brutal dictator, Pinochet, got caught in England, but a British court let him slip away. Ecuador’s Mahuad, responsible for millions losing their life savings, was last seen teaching Economics at Harvard.
Now we see, perhaps for the first time, a possibility for justice for U.S. supported high crimes in Bolivia.
TIM ELFRINK | MARCH 5, 2018, Miami New Times
In 2003, Bolivian President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada and Defense Minister Carlos Sánchez Berzaín fled to Miami amid roiling protests in La Paz. The two had enraged indigenous Bolivians by trying to sell off the country’s natural gas reserves to private corporations and then had responded to peaceful protests by ordering out the army, which killed 58 civilians and wounded more than 400 people.
The two figured they would find safe haven in South Florida, as so many other deposed strongmen have done. But they didn’t count on the extraordinary resolve of Eloy and Etelvina Mamani, whose 8-year-old daughter, Marlene, bled to death in their home near Lake Titicaca after a government sniper shot her through the chest.
Along with several other victims of the massacre, the Mamanis sued the two Bolivian leaders in federal court with the help of the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard. Today, after more than a decade of legal battles, the Mamanis will get to face Sánchez de Lozada and Berzaín in court.
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Lawyers for the families say the trial, set to begin in Fort Lauderdale’s federal courthouse, will be the first time a former head of state faces a human rights trial in U.S. civil court.
“The former president and his minister of defense must now listen as we testify about what happened,” Teófilo Baltazar Cerro, a member of the indigenous Aymara community of Bolivia, said in a news release. “We look forward to this historic opportunity to have our day in court.”
The roots of the case date back to the early 2000s, when Sánchez de Lozada — a U.S.-educated, corporation-friendly leader — took power and tried to begin privatizing state resources, with the hearty backing of the Clinton administration. (James Carville even ran his successful 2002 campaign in Bolivia.)
As New Times wrote in a 2008 feature about the case, that move quickly ran into strong opposition from the impoverished Aymaras and Quechuas in the western highlands:
Sánchez de Lozada ordered Berzaín and the military to respond — and they did, with violent force. As protests intensified amid the dozens of deaths and hundreds of injuries, Sánchez de Lozada and his defense minister resigned October 17, 2003, and jetted to Miami. They lived here in comfort in Key Biscayne, but the Mamani family wanted justice for their daughter.
“I want them all in jail,” Etelvina told New Times in 2010. “But that doesn’t seem possible.”
With the help of Harvard’s lawyers, they found one angle for justice in Miami’s federal courts. Lawyers for the former leaders have spent years arguing that U.S. courts have no jurisdiction over what happened in Bolivia in 2003.
“All evidence shows the response of the Sánchez de Lozada government was constitutional, lawful, and appropriate,” Howard Gutman, an attorney for the Bolivian leaders, said in 2008.
But the Mamanis have won several major victories already. In 2016, a judge ruled they could continue fighting for their case under the U.S. Torture Victim Protection Act, and last month a motion for summary judgment by the former leaders was tossed out, clearing the way for today’s trial.
“The trial will offer indigenous Aymara people, who have historically been excluded from justice, a chance to testify about events that led to dozens of deaths and hundreds of injuries,” Beth Stephens, an attorney for for the victims, says in a statement.