Did Churchill pen 'anti-Semitic' paper?
Sometimes the blogosphere seems to be off into it's own direction. Other times it's ahead of the news. Read the latest article on Winston Churchill:
Weeks before he became British prime minister in 1940, Winston Churchill may have stopped the publication of an article he had written in which he suggested that the Jews were partially responsible for "the antagonism from which they suffer," according to a paper published by a Cambridge University researcher.
The Churchill article, titled "How The Jews Can Combat Persecution," was written in 1937, and argued that "the wickedness of the persecutors" was not the sole reason for the ill-treatment of Jews throughout the ages. While Churchill described Jews as "sober, industrious and law-abiding" and praised their willingness to fight and, if necessary, die for the country they lived in, he added: "Yet there are times when one feels instinctively that all this is only another manifestation of the difference, the separateness of the Jew."
Read the full article on Winston Churchill
2 comments:
Churchill did have his biases. A supporter of a Jewish state in Palestine, he was once asked
if this might inflict an injustice on the Palestinian Arabs. He replied, "I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia. I don't admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher race, or a more worldy-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place."
"a stronger race, a higher race, or a more worldy-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place"
Scary stuff; I wonder WHEN this was said.
Wikipedia on "race": Alongside empirical and conceptual problems with "race" following the Second World War, evolutionary and social scientists were acutely aware of how beliefs about race had been used to justify discrimination, apartheid, slavery, and genocide. This questioning gained momentum in the 1960s during the U.S. civil rights movement and the emergence of numerous anti-colonial movements worldwide.
I wonder how much the beliefs of the people were used to make such a statement. Hard to estimate (you could write a complete thesis on the subject), yet interesting to somehow mark how discriminatory Churchill was.
Post a Comment