Winston Churchill: His Times, His Crimes

Mukherjee's account makes absolutely clear that, in order to protect the (British) Raj from a Japanese threat that never materialized, the British state sacrificed the lives of some 5 million people. The war cabinet maintained an attitude of callous indifference. In Churchill's case, the indifference was strongly tinged with racism.

What accounts, then, for his elevation to a cult figure?

One could add that the manufactured love for Churchill, and the uses made of him, came to embody the nostalgia for an Empire that was long gone.

... importance of the Falklands conflict in re-launching Churchill.

One of the worst criminals Europe ever produced was Leopold of Belgium, whose ownership of and brutalities in the Congo led to the deaths of several million Africans.

[On the Bengal famine of 1943] Three important books that have broken the wall of silence are Mike Davis' pathbreaking study Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the making of the Third World and works exclusively on the famine by two North America-based Bengali scholars, Janam Mukherjee and Madhusree Mukerjee. There are also innumerable articles, such that the picture we now have is virtually complete. What exactly happened?

The Bengal famine was no natural disaster but 'the direct product of colonial and wartime ideologies and calculations that knowingly exposed the poor of Bengal to annihilation through deprivation'; 'a grievous crime was committed in broad daylight', one that is still unacknowledged.