[hartpuff]

>There is a difference between refusing to send aid, and actively attempting to exterminate democracy, governments, and populations.

Perhaps you can explain the difference between deliberately not sending food to people you know will die without it, while revelling in their deaths, and "actively attempting to exterminate" them? Preferably from the point of view of the people being killed.

>Churchill largely did the first, and perhaps in small amounts did the second.

Of course. The 25% of the entire planet that made up the British Empire was a hotbed of free elections and democracy.

>It's quite ridiculous to claim that Churchill is just as evil as Stalin, even if you believe Churchill is on-the-balance evil.

I'll try and remember that, if I ever say Churchill was just as evil as Stalin.

[argonaut]

Direct causality, for one.

If a person on the street who is starving asks me for food, and I decline and yell some epithet about the homeless, and keep walking, any reasonable person would consider that less evil than if I shot that person while yelling that epithet.

At the end of the day, the direct cause of the famine were crop failures and the invasion of Burma, not Churchill's inaction. At the end of the day, the direct cause of the millions of deaths in famines in the USSR was Joseph Stalin's mass collectivization.

You should remember it, because, to put it bluntly, if you ever said that in Western society, you would be laughed out of the room.

[at5]

Maybe because we in the west are biased towards our own and vilify the other? And quite frankly who gives a damn what the west thinks about one of its leaders? Hardly an objective POV is it? Why not ask the victims or observers with data and facts?

In this case, given that Churchill was prime minister of a colonial power, its more akin to starving POWs while siphoning their crops to a different locale; a crime in any post war court. Your analogy is way off base.

Would also add that part of the crop failures thing is because the British forced the locals to grow cash crops over several centuries. Funny how independent India has yet to have a drought that escalated into a famine and has effectively dealt with droughts huh?

[hartpuff]

Your analogy of some random stranger on the street is so fatuous I'm just going to ignore it to save you any further embarrassment.

As for "Western society", that you modestly imagine yourself as a representative of/spokesperson for, I'm British. I have never met a single person in my entire life who had a positive opinion of Churchill, with views ranging from contempt to indifference.

Outside of Conservative/Establishment circles, among people who know more about him than a handful of speeches he made, Churchill is rightly loathed. He was an objectively bad person.

He was supported during WWII because, unlike others in the cowardly Quisling British Conservative Establishment, he actually wanted to fight Hitler, albeit for his sense of 'supremacy' over Germany/Hitler than any particular morality.

Once Hitler was defeated, in spite Churchill's ego-maniacal interference in the war effort that caused countless unnecessary deaths and catastrophes, he was rejected by the people in every single general election.

Unfortunately for Britain, and for Obama's grandfather who Churchill tortured along with thousands of others, the "democratic" British electoral system allowed him to become PM again, despite receiving far fewer votes than his opponent.

Sounds like an election Stalin would be proud of.