Dog in a manger?_其他_趣味英语-查字典英语网

Dog in a manger?

As Sir Winston himself declared: “History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.”

This is precisely why so few of us ever discuss Churchill as a war criminal or racist. In 1910, in the capacity of Home Secretary, he put forth a proposal to sterilize roughly 100,000 “mental degenerates” and dispatch several thousand others to state-run labor camps. These actions were to take place in the name of saving the British race from inevitable decline as its inferior members bred.

History has forgiven Churchill for his role in the Allied invasion of the Soviet Union in 1917. England’s Minister for War and Air during the time, Churchill described the mission as seeking to “strangle at its birth” the Bolshevik state. In 1929, he wrote: “Were [the Allies] at war with Soviet Russia? Certainly not; but they shot Soviet Russians at sight. They stood as invaders on Russian soil. They armed the enemies of the Soviet Government. They blockaded its ports, and sunk its battleships. They earnestly desired and schemed its downfall.”

Two years later, Churchill was secretary of state at the war office when the Royal Air Force asked him for permission to use chemical weapons against “recalcitrant Arabs” as an experiment. Winston promptly consented (Yes, Churchill’s gassing of Kurds pre-dated Hussein’s by nearly 70 years).

“I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes,” he explained, a policy he espoused yet again in July 1944 when he asked his chiefs of staff to consider using poison gas on the Germans “or any other method of warfare we have hitherto refrained from using.” Unlike in 1919, his proposal was denied...not that history would not have forgiven him anyway.