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A Farcaster Exclusive
Two Monsters at War: Churchill and Hitler’s Shared Legacy of Mass Death
The greatest tragedy of the Second World War may not be that evil triumphed, but that evil fought evil, and we have spent the last eight decades pretending only one side was monstrous. History, as the saying goes, is written by the victors, and no victor has been more successfully sanitised than Winston Churchill, the racist architect of genocide who happened to be on the winning side against Adolf Hitler. Yet when we examine the documented evidence with intellectual honesty, a clear truth surfaces: both men were architects of mass death who held supremacist ideologies and implemented policies that deliberately starved millions to death. The difference between them was geographical and political.
When protesters recently defaced Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square, writing “was a racist” beneath his name, they were not engaging in historical revisionism but historical honesty.
Why do we we memorialise one genocidal racist while condemning another, and to ask whether the victor’s crimes should be absolved simply because he fought on the “right” side.
Churchill’s racial ideology was every bit as explicit and systematic as Hitler’s. Hitler spoke of Aryan superiority, Churchill championed what he called “Anglo-Saxon superiority,” asking “Why be apologetic about Anglo-Saxon superiority, that we were superior?” He described Arabs as a lower manifestation than Jews, whom he viewed as a higher grade race compared to the great hordes of Islam. Palestinians were dismissed as barbaric hordes who ate little but camel dung. Most damning of all were his views on Indians, whom he described as a beastly people with a beastly religion, later adding that the famine was their own fault for breeding like rabbits.
These remarks formed the ideological foundation for policies that would kill millions. Just as Hitler’s antisemitism drove the machinery of the Holocaust, Churchill’s racism drove the machinery of imperial exploitation and deliberate starvation. When we strip away the mythology of the “good war,” we find that both men implemented their supremacist worldviews through state policy, with devastating consequences.
The parallels in their methods are particularly striking when we examine how both leaders wielded starvation as a weapon of war. Hitler’s systematic starvation of Jews, Slavs, and other groups in concentration camps and ghettos is well-documented and universally condemned. Less known, but no less systematic, was Churchill’s use of starvation against colonial subjects, most catastrophically during the Bengal Famine of 1943. This was an engineered catastrophe, as confirmed by a 2019 study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters (https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2018GL081477) which concluded that British policies under Winston Churchill significantly contributed to the famine, making it unique as it did not primarily result from drought, unlike previous famines in India.
The study’s findings demolish decades of British apologetics that blamed nature for what was clearly a man-made disaster. The famine-affected region actually received above-normal precipitation between June and September of 1943, yet three million Indians starved to death while Churchill ordered the diversion of grains and essential supplies from Bengal to military stockpiles supporting already well-supplied British troops. His cabinet was warned repeatedly that such diversions could cause famine, yet the exports continued. When British officials informed Churchill about the mounting death toll, with rotting corpses lining the streets of Calcutta, his response was to ask why Mahatma Gandhi was still alive if the situation was truly so dire.
This callousness in the face of mass death mirrors Hitler’s own indifference to suffering. Both men viewed their victims not as fellow human beings but as obstacles to their imperial visions, as subhuman burdens on resources better used elsewhere. When the Delhi government telegraphed Churchill about the horrible devastation and briefed him on the death toll, his response, “Then why hasn’t Gandhi died yet?” reveals the same cold calculation that Hitler brought to the Final Solution. In both cases, the deaths were wartime policy with desirable outcomes.
The scale of Churchill’s crimes rivals Hitler’s most notorious atrocities. The Bengal Famine killed approximately three million Indians in less than a year, wiping out one-third of Bengal’s population. This death toll exceeds that of many individual Nazi extermination camps and represents one of the largest civilian casualties of the Second World War, yet it receives virtually no attention in Western historical memory. Unlike the Holocaust, which is commemorated in museums, memorials, and educational curricula worldwide, the Bengal Famine has been relegated to historical footnotes. As scholars have noted, not a single memorial, museum, or even a plaque anywhere in the world commemorates the millions who perished under Churchill’s policies.
This selective memory shows the fundamental hypocrisy in how we assess historical guilt. We know about Hitler’s crimes because he lost the war, allowing his ideology to be defeated, his regime destroyed, and his crimes documented at Nuremberg. Churchill’s crimes remain obscured because he won, allowing his ideology to claim victory, his regime to be celebrated, and his genocide to be buried beneath the mythology of liberation. The uncomfortable truth is that the Second World War was not a battle between good and evil but a conflict between competing imperial powers, both willing to commit genocide to achieve their aims.
Such assessments are not the products of postcolonial revisionism but of rigorous historical investigation freed from the constraints of imperial mythology. They represent a growing recognition that moral judgment must be applied consistently, regardless of which side a leader fought on or whether their victims were European or Asian, white or brown. The principle established at Nuremberg, that “following orders” provides no defence for crimes against humanity, must be extended to include the principle that “winning wars” provides no defence for genocide.
The implications of this moral reckoning extend far beyond historical debate into contemporary discussions about memory, monuments, and national identity. As statues of Churchill face calls for removal and his image on banknotes is questioned, we confront fundamental questions about whom we choose to honour and why. A recent petition to “Remove image of racist and white supremacist Winston Churchill from British banknotes” argues that British society remains in denial about institutional racism precisely because it continues to celebrate the legacies of genocidal leaders. The petition calls for Churchill’s removal as a first symbolic step towards dealing with the deep-rooted racism in British society.
Such calls for accountability are not attacks on historical memory but attempts to restore it. They seek to rescue the three million Bengali victims of Churchill’s policies from historical oblivion and to ensure that their deaths carry the same moral weight as the six million Jewish victims of Hitler’s genocide. They insist that the colour of victims’ skin should not determine the weight of historical judgment, and that Western lives should not matter more to Western historians simply because they are Western.
The resistance to this moral reckoning shows how deeply embedded imperial mythology remains in Western consciousness. Churchill continues to be celebrated as democracy’s greatest champion precisely because his crimes targeted those whom the West has traditionally viewed as less than fully human. His genocide was committed against Indians, not Germans; his victims were brown, not white; his methods were economic rather than industrial. These distinctions matter greatly to those who wish to preserve the fiction of Western moral superiority, but they are irrelevant to the millions who died and to any honest assessment of historical responsibility.
Justice demands that we judge Churchill and Hitler by the same moral standards. Both held explicit racist ideologies that informed their governance. Both implemented policies that caused mass civilian deaths on an industrial scale. Both showed callous indifference to suffering when it served their imperial purposes. Both pursued territorial expansion through the subjugation of peoples they deemed inferior. Both used starvation as a deliberate weapon of war. The fact that Churchill’s victims were subjects of the British Empire rather than citizens of the German Reich, or that his methods relied on administrative neglect rather than industrial killing, does not diminish his moral culpability.
This is not to minimise Hitler’s crimes or excuse Nazi ideology, but to insist that genocide is genocide regardless of the perpetrator’s nationality or ultimate success in war. The moral equivalence between Churchill and Hitler lies in their shared willingness to treat human beings as expendable resources in service of racial supremacist ideologies. Both men left legacies built on mountains of corpses, and both deserve the same historical condemnation.
Churchill and Hitler were both monsters, and the fact that they fought each other does not make either of them less monstrous. History may be written by the victors, but it must ultimately be judged by moral consistency. By that standard, both Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler stand condemned as architects of genocide whose legacies are built on the systematic dehumanisation and destruction of those they deemed inferior. The time has come to remember all their victims with equal honour and to judge all their crimes with equal severity. 1 reply
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