We did not see the film The Darkest Hour until recently. I had concerns about the lead, about the film, and particularly about its subject, the much lionized Winston Churchill.

It is one of my nightmares to find myself teaching a subject I know little to nothing about, such as the Boer War. Even so, I thought I knew British history. I knew for example that Indians (of India) died of starvation while the British sat on overfull grain houses during WWII. When I feel particularly distressed about the interference of my own country in the lives of people around the world, I have only to call up the atrocities of the British. They have been at it so much longer than we have.

I thought I knew this story.

A new essay in The Washington Post by Shasti Tharoor about Winston Churchill reveals how little I knew. He reviews Churchill’s unwarranted and brutal attacks on people of color all over the world. He advocated genocide,

“ ‘History,’ Winston Churchill said, ‘will be kind to me, for I intend to write it myself.’ He needn’t have bothered. He was one of the great mass murderers of the 20th century, yet is the only one, unlike Hitler and Stalin, to have escaped historical odium in the West. He has been crowned with a Nobel Prize (for literature, no less), and now, an actor portraying him (Gary Oldman) has been awarded an Oscar.”

“Churchill’s beatification as an apostle of freedom seems all the more preposterous given his 1941 declaration that the Atlantic Charter’s principles would not apply to India and the colored colonies. He refused to see people of color as entitled to the same rights as himself. ‘Gandhi-ism and all it stands for,’ he declared, ‘will, sooner or later, have to be grappled with and finally crushed.’

“Many of us will remember Churchill as a war criminal and an enemy of decency and humanity, a blinkered imperialist untroubled by the oppression of non-white peoples. Ultimately, his great failure — his long darkest hour — was his constant effort to deny us freedom.”

Not counting soldiers, millions died as a direct result of Churchill’s policies in Kenya, Ireland, South Africa, Afghanistan, Greece, Iran, Iraq, Palestine, and other countries. Up to three million died of starvation in India alone. In response to Gandhi’s campaign of peaceful resistance, Churchill said the Mahatma “ought to be lain bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi, and then trampled on by an enormous elephant with the new Viceroy seated on its back. . . . I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.”

He bombed and starved and destroyed and exploited. His words beyond his famous rousing speeches about British persistence, reveal a man so certain of British (English) superiority, so bigoted and self-righteous, that he never was held to account for his racism, terrorism, and butchery.

He helped win a war. Didn’t he?

Would ordinary Brits have done and said such things? Would I? No one likes to think so, but then I have to wonder why it keeps happening if so many, many people “would never . . . ”