A lively terror

Prime Minister David Cameron and President Barack Obama inspecting the Jacob Epstein bust of Winston Churchill in the Oval Office (not the identical one loaned by the British Embassy to George W. Bush, which was returned to the embassy after Bush left the White House), July 2010, photo by Pete De Souza. Via ABC News. 

Speaking as an old Boomer who yields to none in my loathing for that bloodsucker and intellectual mediocrity Henry Kissinger, I was not sorry to hear Bernie Sanders last night calling Hillary Clinton out for her friendliness with the criminal advocate of mass murder in Cambodia, Chile, East Timor, and who knows where else, but taken aback, by the same token, when he was nominating two leaders, one domestic and one foreign, who would "influence his foreign policy decisions", in answer to Judy Woodruff's question.

He started off by naming Franklin Roosevelt, not a bad choice at all, but failed to mention any of FDR's foreign policy ideas or moves in his explanation, which made him sound a little like Marco Rubio playing pin the sound bite on the donkey, if you know what I mean, and then his other choice was none other than Sir Winston Churchill, defended in terms that weren't too different, logically, from Clinton's defense of Kissinger (she may "disagree" with him "on a number of things" but he went to China) earlier in the debate:

as the foreign leader, Winston Churchill's politics were not my politics. He was kind of a conservative guy in many respects. But nobody can deny that as a wartime leader, he rallied the British people when they stood virtually alone against the Nazi juggernaut and rallied them and eventually won an extraordinary victory. Those are two leaders that I admire very much.

Churchill was a violent ruffian imperialist who prosecuted his host of "jolly little wars against barbarous peoples" with abandon and delight, and direct personal involvement, quite unlike Kissinger's cold calculus, from Swat to Sudan (in a two-day battle the Anglo-Egyptian forces achieved a 90% casualty rate, killing 20,000 and wounding 22,000 and taking 5,000 prisoners from an army of 50,000 soldiers) to South Africa, where the Afrikaners were herded into genocidal concentration camps and 28,000, mostly women and children, died—nobody knows, of course, how many black Africans died in the concentration camps for "Kaffirs", among the 107,000 who were interned. And then, as colonial secretary, from the Catholics of Ireland, to be ravaged by the pitiless Black and Tan regiments, to the Kurds of Iraq, of whom he said,

"I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes...[It] would spread a lively terror."

And then as prime minister during the world war, when

in 1943 a famine broke out in Bengal, caused – as the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has proved – by the imperial policies of the British. Up to 3 million people starved to death while British officials begged Churchill to direct food supplies to the region. He bluntly refused. He raged that it was their own fault for "breeding like rabbits". At other times, he said the plague was "merrily" culling the population.

And as long as I'm up let's not forget

Hussein Onyango Obama... one of 150,000 rebellious Kikuyu “blackamoors” forced into detention camps during Churchill’s postwar premiership, when the British governnment began its brutal campaign to suppress the alleged “Mau Mau” uprising in Kenya, in order to protect the privileges of the white settler population at the expense of the indigenous people. About 11,000 Kenyans were killed and 81,000 detained during the British government’s campaign to protect its imperialist heritage.

The paternal grandfather of the US president.

To paraphrase Bernie's words on the wicked Dr. Kissinger, I am proud to say that Winston Churchill is not my friend. I will not take advice from Winston Churchill. We can be grateful for the outcomes of his work in the Second World War the way we are for Josef Stalin, but there is really no need to fawn. (Clinton's more carefully composed answer was Roosevelt and Nelson Mandela, after which she careened into accusing Sanders of not loving Obama as much as she does, which the Rude One calls, together with the Sanders response, the "stupidest fucking moment of the evening", and not groundlessly.)