Barack Obama and Winston Churchill

25 April 2016. A World to Win News Service. During a stopover in London, US president Barack Obama encouraged voters in an upcoming referendum to approve the UK's continued membership in the European Union and avoid what is widely known as a Brexit (Britain Exit). London's pro-Brexit mayor Boris Johnson provoked major controversy with an article claiming that Obama had banished a statue of Winston Churchill from his office as a snub to Britain's World War II prime minister, considered one of the most important individuals in British history. Johnson called this a "symbol of the part-Kenyan President's ancestral dislike of the British empire." (thesun.co.uk, 22 april 2016)

Obama's press secretary responded that it is customary to return items given to former presidents, and that another bust of Churchill enjoys a prominent place in the White House. Obama said he keeps this Churchill bust where he can see it every day. "It's there voluntarily... I love Winston Churchill. I love the guy."

What is there to love about Winston Churchill? His hands were shamelessly drenched in the blood of literally millions of people in Africa and Asia, and he defended these deaths by arguing that the world's dark-skinned natives benefited from the rule of the superior white man. Yet people are so brainwashed that UK polls hail Winston Churchill as a great statesman, perhaps the greatest ever.

As a young man he set off for Africa to take part in "a lot of jolly little wars against barbarous peoples". When he found the local population fought back against British troops and settlers occupying their land, he branded their resistance as "a strong aboriginal propensity to kill" and demanded they be crushed. He defended the British concentration camps in South Africa where 28,000 Boers (Dutch immigrants) died, and separate camps where 150,000 Black Africans were herded and 14,000 died. As Colonial Secretary in the 1920s, he unleashed Black and Tan thugs (the Special Forces of the day) on Irish rising up against British rule. When Kurds rebelled against British domination in the 1940s, he declared himself "strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes".

Churchill believed the fertile highlands of Kenya should belong to white settlers and indigenous populations should be cleared out. When the Kikuyu people fought against this in what became known as the Mau Mau rebellion, some 150,000 were forced into detention camps. In her book Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag, based on five years of investigation, Pulitzer prize-winning historian Professor Caroline Elkins describes the electric shocks, whipping, horrendous mutilation and murder, including burn people alive, used against Africans suspected of of supporting the uprising.

He offered the "Promised Land" to Jews and dismissed the Palestinians already living in the country as "barbaric hoards who ate little but camel dung". He created Jordan and Iraq, using arbitrary borders to divide and rule ethnic groups, bombing whole villages into submission and setting the stage for today's crisis. The terror bombing of civilians in 1920 was a preview of US and British tactics during the invasion and occupation of contemporary Iraq.

In sheer numbers, Churchill's imperial policies were most brutally demonstrated in colonial India. In the 1943 famine, at least 3 million people starved to death in Bengal. In full awareness, Churchill refused to send food supplies to the region, saying it was the fault of Indians themselves for "breeding like rabbits".

Madhusree Mukerjee's book Churchill's Secret War vividly describes the famine's effect, drawing on interviews with survivors. "Many suicides, mercy killings and cases of child abandonment took place among families who could no longer bear to see the wild-eyed, starving faces of their children. Mass prostitution by village mothers, wives or daughters with anyone who had grain often saved whole families. Brothels for [British and Australian] soldiers were serviced by the starving young girls from the countryside. Many were lured by promises of a real job and then forced into servitude, in much the same way as today women are forced into prostitution around the world." (See awtwns110411)

After WWII, the British empire gave way to US domination, and British imperialism flourished as junior partner in this new "special relationship" with the U.S. The days when Western powers enjoyed direct and open government over colonies may be mainly over, but imperialism as an economic and political system in which a handful of countries dominate and bleed the world is still in force. For instance: the troop occupations and wars spawned by the need to protect US, UK and other Western interests in the Middle East, and the sweatshops in Bangladesh and China without which there would be no Western malls, are no less devastating than the horrors faced by directly colonised peoples who once made up most of the world's population.

Obama's own Kikuyu grandfather was imprisoned under Churchill's reign. But Churchill is Obama's role model, just as he is for most leaders and would-be leaders of imperialist powers. When Obama says "I love the guy", he is speaking as the commander in chief and chief executive officer of the American empire, and like Churchill, he is prepared to do whatever he can to defend it.