Churchill statue branded ‘zionist war criminal’ in Whitehall

Conservatives and fascists got two absolute spankings last night. First, their man lost in the Gorton and Denton by-election. Then an activist graffitied Churchill’s statue in Whitehall — and not for the first time. That’s a tough 24hrs for people who think they’re living in the movie Zulu because they once saw an Asian person in Big Asda.

Here’s the Canary’s news report on the incident.

You can see the ‘damage’ — I mean, it does just wash off — below:

Poor Winston got called a ‘Zionist war criminal’. Another part of the graffiti said ‘stop the genocide’. Thing is… Churchill was a proud Zionist and a key architect of several British imperial genocides. So while it is a bit naughty to spray that stuff on his statue… what was said isn’t technically inaccurate. The graffiti also said ‘free Palestine’, which doubtless added to the right-wing meltdown.

Met Police said a man was arrested at the scene at 4am on 27 February. It’s striking that he was detained for “racially aggravated criminal damage”:

Proud Zionist

Churchill was a racist, Zionist and imperialist to his core. In fact to be fair to him he never said he wasn’t. He held these views proudly and loudly. The only people who have an issue with this basic fact are his weird cultists. Who, perversely, are often also racists.

Left-wing writer Tariq Ali wrote a (bloody good) book about the cult of Churchill and the reality of the man’s views. He told Current Affairs in May 2022:

He was a supporter of the Spanish fascist dictator Francisco Franco. He supported Franco like Hitler and Mussolini did in the Spanish Civil War.

Churchill was also “a terribly open admirer” of Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini:

He said, what a great role Mussolini was playing in Italy. [“I could not help being charmed by his gentle, simple bearing,” Churchill said of Mussolini.

Then we have the 1943 Bengal famine, which may have killed 3mn people. A British-manufactured horror which:

Churchill refused, explicitly, to intervene to stop that famine.

And don’t forget Churchill’s 1944 crushing of the Greek resistance in favour of fascism:

the order given to the British commander, who the resistance had allowed to enter Athens, that if the resistance doesn’t do as we say, treat Athens as a colonial city. And the bloodbath that occurred in Greece as General Scobie tried to crush the Greek resistance.

Churchill’s views, as you can imagine, on Palestine flow quite naturally from these.

Churchill and Israel

Churchill, like so many imperialists in his day and ours, was both a supporter of Zionism AND an antisemite.

He supported the Balfour Declaration (the colonialist Middle East carve-up which helped get us where we are today) as British colonial secretary:

 I am in full sympathy with the historical traditional aspirations of the Jews.

And said:

Jerusalem must be the only ultimate goal. When it will be achieved it is vain to prophesy; but that it will some day be achieved is one of the few certainties of the future.

Yet he wrote in 1940 that Jews

have been partly responsible for the antagonism from which they suffer.

And that:

there are times when one feels instinctively that all this is only another manifestation of the difference, the separateness of the Jew.

Of the Palestinians and their claim on their homeland, he had absolute contempt:

I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time.

He also denied that:

a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the Black people of Australia.

Churchill said such people had just been replaced with “a higher grade race.”

Nice bloke…

Now vandalising public monuments these days is going to get you in trouble — whether the politics are agreeable or not. In this case it seems to have been Dutch pro-Palestine activists. But if we’re talking about the graffiti itself, the claims made aren’t inaccurate. So maybe it’s time butthurt Churchill fans stop pretending and own their hero’s legacy as a racist and bigot.

Featured image via the Canary