Churchill: Anatomy of a Libel
How lies are born
"I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion. The famine was their own fault for breeding like rabbits."
So said Winston Churchill. We learn this from the Guardian, CBC, Huck magazine, and 5Pillars. These are reputable media outlets with subeditiors, which wouldn’t just print blatant lies.
But the quote is a fabrication. It is lie told to discredit and delegitimise British history.
A common routine used to defame the United Kingdom is portraying the Bengal Famine (caused primarily by Japan's war of aggression against the British Empire) as a genocide, morally comparable with Nazism. The attack on Churchill is a key part of the campaign. The falsehood that Churchill caused the famine has been discredited elsewhere, but I want to briefly follow the genealogy of the false quote.
Back in 2010, the Indian politician Shashi Tharoor wrote an otherwise forgettable book review for Time magazine, containing the following:
"I hate Indians," he told the Secretary of State for India, Leopold Amery. "They are a beastly people with a beastly religion." The famine was their own fault, he declared at a war-cabinet meeting, for "breeding like rabbits."
This is the proto-misquote. Tharoor has a fanatical hatred of Churchill, and determination to smear him with responsibility for the famine. He is wheeled out by the press whenever an iconoclast is required to defame the man - in the Washington Post, the Independent, Al Jazeera, or the Hindustan Times. He repeatedly compares Churchill to Hitler.
You will notice that in Tharoor’s article, the phrasing has not fully evolved. Tharoor drew from the diaries of a wartime cabinet minister, Leo Amery. On 10 November 1943, during the famine, he recorded his recollection of a cabinet meeting:
"Cabinet, at which I brought up again my earnest demand for more shipping. I did not press for India’s demand for 50,000 tons a month for 12 months but concentrated on asking for 150,000 tons over December, January and February. Winston, after a preliminary flourish on Indians breeding like rabbits and being paid a million a day for doing nothing, asked Leathers (the minister in charge of shipping) for his view. He said he could manage 50,000 tons in January and February (1944). Winston agreed with this and I had to be content."
This is the origin of the "rabbits" comment quoted by Tharoor - in the context of Churchill agreeing for the maximum supply of food to Bengal. A literate reader will notice there is no assignment of "fault" for the famine- this is entirely Tharoor's invention. The "I hate Indians" comment was supposedly made by Churchill to Amery a year earlier. Amery's diary cannot be taken as a transcript of Churchill's thoughts. Churchill's published writings and speeches, and his actions in his personal and professional life, do not reflect a hatred of Indians.1
Tharoor stuck the two quotes next to each other, around 2014 one of his more gormless or disingenuous readers decided it was a single sentence. The earliest instance seems to have been this 2014 article in the Indian outlet YourStory. This new work of fiction began to circulate on forums and blogs, before being laundered into legitimacy by the Professional, Fact-Checked news outlets mentioned above.2
There is another quotation which does the rounds.
“On the subject of India, Winston is not quite sane … I didn’t see much difference between his outlook and Hitler’s.”
It has appeared in the Guardian, from Cambridge academic Priyamvada Gopal; in the New Yorker; and in the Washington Post3. It is deployed to portray Churchill as a racist by the standards of his own time, and to equate the British Empire with Nazi Germany. But the full quote is never provided. I give it to you here:
"This let loose Winston in a state of great exultation describing how after the war he was going to go back on all the shameful story of the last twenty years of surrender, how once we had won the war there was no obligation to honour promises made at a time of difficulty, and not taken up by the Indians, and carry out a great regeneration of India based on extinguishing landlords and oppressive industrialists and uplift the peasant and untouchable, probably by collectivisation on Russian lines.
It might be necessary to get rid of wretched sentimentalists like Wavell and most of the present English officials in India, who were more Indian than the Indians, and send out new men. What was all my professed patriotism worth if I did not stand up for my own countrymen against Indian money-lenders? Naturally I lost patience and couldn't help telling him that I didn't see much difference between his outlook and Hitler's which annoyed him no little. I am by no means sure whether on this subject of India he is really quite sane."
This is again from Amery’s diaries, on 4 August 1944, in the context of Churchill arguing with Amery in favour of Britain’s responsibilities to the untouchable castes. What has Churchill said which Amery compared with Hitler? That the caste system of India should be abolished, exploitative industrial and agrarian practices dismantled, and the ordinary peasant uplifted. The respectable media use Churchill’s complaint about landlords to pretend he had genocidal intent.
Interestingly, some particularly dishonest writers sellotape the two misquotes together, as in this example from Forbes:
"When Churchill’s India Secretary and childhood friend Leo Amery asked him to do something, Churchill laughed about the prospect of shrinking a population that bred “like rabbits.” A horrorstruck Amery wrote that when it came to India, there wasn’t “much difference between [Churchill’s] outlook and Hitler’s."
The laughter, you will have noticed, is the author's own invention.
Why does this happen? Why don't the ocean of fact checkers, fake-news fighters and Responsible Journalists ever point out this pack of lies? Part of it the usual low standards of the media, and a victim-complex which sometimes emerges from the Indian media. But it is also the product of a real effort to defame Britain and to pretend that the British Empire was comparable with the Third Reich or Soviet Union. There is a deliberate campaign to delegitimise national pride, and false Churchill quotes are one small part of that.
I am not pretending Churchill had the politics of Caroline Lucas. He was a conservative Victorian imperialist. If he was somehow teleported to 2023 and asked to explain his beliefs, he would be considered a racist; as would practically every single person alive at the time. But the ideology of Nazism - an ideology of hate which his critics attempt to draw a parallel to - was fundamentally different.
This happens a lot. I have often observed the osmosis of nonsense from the imagination, to unhinged blogs, to slightly more normal looking blogs, to the media and academia. Linkrot and the changing internet make it ever harder to trace the route back. See also this thread.
This particular article has so many falsehoods and misrepresentations it would need an entire post just to address them - practically everything in it is wrong to a greater or lesser extent. Amusingly, the same article complains about the incorrect attribution of quotes to Churchill
So is the claim that Leo Emery was lying in his diaries when he quoted Churchill saying that?