The first story is what led to a lot of interesting pieces being written about Churchill and offers some interesting insights about the nature of history.
Winston Churchill was a villain, says John McDonnell
There has been renewed debate recently over the legacy of Churchill, who in 2002 was named the greatest Briton ever in a BBC poll. The Good Morning Britain host Piers Morgan rebuked the Green party MSP Ross Greer on live TV last month after the politician called Churchill a “white supremacist mass murderer” in a tweet.
The Rest of Us Always Knew Churchill Was a Villain
His record in Britain’s former colonies more closely resembles that of a war criminal than a defender of democracy and freedom.
The Churchill row is part of the glib approach to history that gave us Brexit
The idea of history as composed of heroes and villains is infantile. Inside every hero lurks an opposite. The best answer to a stupid question is no answer, as McDonnell said when asked his favourite Tory. Fake history may be a clever way to engage the empathy of the young with otherwise difficult material. But if the purpose of history is to offer lessons for the future, distorting it is fraught with danger.
The current cult of identity politics is to rifle through the past careers of great men and women, not to ascertain accuracy but to sort them into friends or foes. Churchill has been accused of racism. He undoubtedly expressed racist views but they were uttered in very different times, in which such ideas were deemed acceptable by many.
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