O lado dark de Winston Churchill, um velhaco imperialista, que salvou a Europa do nazismo...

O lado dark do grande (talvez cinzento) imperialista Wiston Churchill, que não apenas refletia os preconceitos de sua época, mas tinha um zelo especial pelas glórias do império britânico. O fato dele ter sido decisivo na resistência a Hitler, quando vários líderes britânicos queriam entrar em algum tipo de compromisso ou entendimento com o mostro nazista, oferece uma espécie de contraponto a todos os seus erros, seu racismo e seu imperialismo teimoso. Não compensa, talvez, mas no que nos concerne, foi um nobre gesto, tremendamente custoso para o seu povo. A resistência contra tiranos é, em si, um dever moral.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida 

WorldViews

The dark side of Winston Churchill’s legacy no one should forget

By Ishaan Tharoor The Washington Post, February 3, 2015, at 3:30 AM

The statue of Britain's former Prime Minister Winston Churchill is silhouetted in front of the Houses of Parliament in London, January 30, 2015. (Eddie Keogh/Reuters)

There's no Western statesmen — at least in the English-speaking world — more routinely lionized than Winston Churchill. Last Friday marked a half century since his funeral, an occasion that itself led to numerous commemorations and paeans to the British Bulldog, whose moral courage and patriotism helped steer his nation through World War II.
Churchill, after all, has been posthumously voted by his countrymen as the greatest Briton. The presence (and absence) of his bust in the White House was enough to create political scandal on both sides of the pond. The allure of his name is so strong that it launches a thousand quotations, many of which are apocryphal. At its core, Churchill's myth serves as a ready-made metaphor for boldness and leadership, no matter how vacuous the context in which said metaphor is deployed.
For example, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair earned comparisons to Churchill after dragging his country into the much-maligned 2003 Iraq war. So too Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose tough stance on Iran's nuclear ambitions has been cast by some in Churchill's heroic mold — the Israeli premier's uncompromising resolve a foil to the supposed "appeasement" tendencies of President Obama.
In the West, Churchill is a freedom fighter, the man who grimly withstood Nazism and helped save Western liberal democracy. It's a civilizational legacy that has been polished and placed on a mantle for decades. Churchill "launched the lifeboats," declared Time magazine, on the cover of its Jan. 2, 1950 issue that hailed the British leader as the "man of the half century."
But there's another side to Churchill's politics and career that should not be forgotten amid the endless parade of eulogies.  To many outside the West, he remains a grotesque racist and a stubborn imperialist, forever on the wrong side of history.
Churchill's detractors point to his well-documented bigotry, articulated often with shocking callousness and contempt. "I hate Indians," he once trumpeted. "They are a beastly people with a beastly religion."
He referred to Palestinians as "barbaric hordes who ate little but camel dung." When quashing insurgents in Sudan in the earlier days of his imperial career, Churchill boasted of killing three "savages." Contemplating restive populations in northwest Asia, he infamously lamented the "squeamishness" of his colleagues, who were not in "favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes."

Remembering British wartime PM Winston Churchill(1:45)

Britain marked 50 years since Prime Minister’s Winston Churchill's funeral was held in 1965. His funeral was the world's largest at the time, attended by leaders from more than 100 countries. (Reuters)

At this point, you may say, so what? Churchill's attitudes were hardly unique for the age in which he expounded them. All great men have flaws and contradictions — some of America's founding fathers, those paragons of liberty, were slave owners. One of Churchill's biographers, cited by my colleague Karla Adam, insists that his failings were ultimately "unimportant, all of them, compared to the centrality of the point of Winston Churchill, which is that he saved [Britain] from being invaded by the Nazis."
But that should not obscure the dangers of his worldview. Churchill's racism was wrapped up in his Tory zeal for empire, one which irked his wartime ally, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt. As a junior member of parliament, Churchill had cheered on Britain's plan for more conquests, insisting that its "Aryan stock is bound to triumph." It's strange to celebrate his bravado in the face of Hitler's war machine and not consider his wider thinking on other parts of the world. After all, these are places that, just like Europe and the West, still live with the legacy of Churchill's and Britain's actions at the time.
India, Britain's most important colonial possession, most animated Churchill. He despised the Indian independence movement and its spiritual leader, Mahatma Gandhi, whom he described as "half-naked" and labeled a "seditious fakir," or holy man. Most notoriously, Churchill presided over the hideous 1943 famine in Bengal, where some 3 million Indians perished, largely as a result of British imperial mismanagement. Churchill was both indifferent to the Indian plight and even mocked the millions suffering, chuckling over the culling of a population that bred "like rabbits."
Leopold Amery, Churchill's own Secretary of State for India, likened his boss's understanding of India's problems to King George III's apathy for the Americas. Amery vented in his private diaries, writing "on the subject of India, Winston is not quite sane" and that he didn't "see much difference between [Churchill's] outlook and Hitler's."
When Churchill did apply his attention to the subcontinent, it had other dire effects. As the Indian writer Pankaj Mishra explains in the New Yorker, Churchill was one of a coterie of imperial rulers who worked to create sectarian fissures within India's independence movement between Indian Hindus and Muslims, which led to the brutal partition of India when the former colony finally did win its freedom in 1947. Millions died or were displaced in an orgy of bloodshed that still echoes in the region's tense politics to this day. (India, it should be noted, was far from the only corner of the British empire victim to such divide-and-rule tactics.)
"The rival nationalisms and politicized religions the British Empire brought into being now clash in an enlarged geopolitical arena," writes Mishra, gesturing to the spread and growth of political Islam in parts of South Asia and the Middle East. "And the human costs of imperial overreaching seem unlikely to attain a final tally for many more decades."
When measuring up Churchill's legacy, that tally must be taken into account.

Ishaan Tharoor writes about foreign affairs for The Washington Post. He previously was a senior editor at TIME, based first in Hong Kong and later in New York.

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Building Imperialism: the British East Indian Company

How Maritime Routes Led to Cultural Exchanges

By RODERICK CONWAY MORRIS

The New York Times, November 5, 2011

National Maritime Museum, London

A striking example of how the East India Company influenced Chinese culture is this 19th-century Chinese painting, "A Trading Junk," with a ship in the background flying the Company flag.

LONDON — Sir John R. Seeley, the 19th-century British historian, famously remarked that “the British Empire was acquired in a fit of absence of mind.”

The greatest single force in the expansion of that empire was the East India Company. Although in theory dedicated to trading by sea, the company gradually acquired vast areas of territory in Asia and found itself the ruler of a sixth of humanity.

A further unplanned consequence was that the Company became the primary conduit for carrying Asian art and artifacts to the West, and European art and manufactures to the East, profoundly influencing the development of the arts at both ends of the long and arduous trading routes of the day.

After its somewhat inglorious demise following the Indian Mutiny, the Company was abolished in 1858. Its grandiose headquarters at East India House in the City of London were demolished in 1863, and much of the former contents of the Company museum found their way to the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1879.

But at last there is a new permanent gallery, “Traders: the East India Company and Asia,” inaugurated in late September at the National Maritime Museum in the London borough of Greenwich, which relates the Company’s remarkable story with more than 125 fascinating historical pieces, including paintings, artworks, artifacts and manuscripts.

The initiative is accompanied by an exemplary, highly readable and handsomely illustrated book by H.V. Bowen, John McAleer and Robert J. Blyth: “Monsoon Traders: The Maritime World of the East India Company.”

When the Company made its first tentative foray into the Indian Ocean in 1601, it was entering seas that had been the scene of commerce for thousands of years, whose activities were regulated by the monsoon winds. Owing to contrary winds nearer home, it took the first Company fleet of four small ships nearly two months to leave the shores of England. But the expedition returned successfully after 939 days with 500 tons of pepper and its commander, James Lancaster, was knighted by King James I. The only known portrait of Lancaster, from the museum’s own collection, is now on show in the gallery.

The Company was competing in an arena that was already dominated by Arab, Ottoman, Portuguese and Dutch fleets. The Dutch East India Company managed to exclude the English company from the lucrative Spice Islands, now part of Indonesia, forcing it to carve out a niche for itself in India: trading in textiles and spices from the Asian subcontinent.

The ancient overland Silk Roads had carried examples of the Eastern arts to Europe for many centuries. But the rise of maritime trade vastly increased the variety and sheer quantities of these goods that made it to European shores, and guaranteed their wider distribution and appreciation.

While spices remained a staple, by 1664 textiles accounted for 70 percent of the value of the Company’s imports. And by 1699 a writer was commenting on the calico “craze” in England among both men and women with “Calico shirts, Neckcloths, Cuffs, Pocket-handkerchiefs” for the former, and “Hoods, Sleeves, Aprons, Gowns, Petticoats” for the latter; and “India stockings for both sexes.” By 1750 the Company was importing 11 million yards of handwoven Indian cloth, by then an essential element in everyday dress and high fashion, as illustrated here by historic textiles and contemporary paintings and prints.

The diarist Samuel Pepys records tasting tea as early as the 1660s. Even after the Company gained regular direct access to Canton in 1711, tea drinking was a luxury. But the practice gradually became popular at every level of society. In the early 1750s the Company was shipping around three million pounds, or 1.36 million kilograms, of tea annually. By the end of the century this had risen to more than 30 million pounds. And, as was noted in 1812, China was now “the most important branch of the Company’s concerns.”

The craze for tea and the imported paraphernalia involved in its drinking had a similar effect on decor and furniture that the earlier craze for Indian textiles had on fashions. Chinese ceramic and porcelain teapots, cups, saucers and bowls helped fuel the mania for Chinoiserie.

This also gave rise to China-export wares, styled for Western markets, a trend that produced some of the extraordinary hybrids on show in the “Traders” gallery. Among these are a teapot with additional decoration added in Holland (probably in Rotterdam), a bowl and beer mugs owned by Capt. James Cook and his wife, Elizabeth; and a breakfast service that belonged to Lord Nelson. Although supposedly based on “Japan” patterns, this garish, gilded ensemble, which mixes Japanese floral motifs with crowns and images of ships’ sterns, was made in Worcester, England, by Chamberlain’s China Factory, which Lord Nelson visited in 1802.

No less curious is a punch bowl presented to an English shipyard owner in the 1780s. Made in China, the bowl is decorated with Western sailing ships under construction, probably taken from technical drawings, but with a delicate, inescapably Chinese landscape backdrop.

Such local orders gave rise to a thriving Western-inspired school of Chinese paintings of marine, river and port scenes, some splendid examples of which expand the gallery’s horizons into the artistic influences that the Company's presence played a large part in introducing into China. One of the most richly colored and atmospheric of these is “A Trading Junk” from the 19th century, with an Indiaman flying the Company flag anchored in the background.

Many of the art pieces and artifacts brought back from the East were essentially souvenirs, like a Qianlong period miniature Chinese garden in the gallery, made of coral, carved wood and ivory, of the kind that a visiting artist like William Alexander, who joined a diplomatic mission in the 1790s, might have dismissed as “knick knacks.” But objects of high quality were also sought out and exported for discriminating Western buyers, reaching Europe in the Company’s vessels.

Lavish diplomatic gifts presented to Asian rulers in the hope of gaining advantageous trade concessions arrived in impressive quantities every year on the Company’s ships and were a principal means through which Western tastes were introduced into the region. Among the gifts delivered by King James I’s ambassador, Sir Thomas Roe, to the Mogul emperor Jahangir was a coach, with which the emperor was so pleased he had two copies made. Emperor Jahangir was no less delighted when, as a wager, he had a copy made of a miniature given to him by Sir Roe and the disconcerted ambassador found himself unable to say which was the original.

War booty was another source of Asian art exported to the West, as witnessed in the museum by an Imperial Chinese silk flag with a gold-leaf winged lion, carried off when Canton was captured in the Second China War in 1857. In the same year, one of the prizes taken from the King of Oudh’s palace, when Lucknow was stormed, was a fine 17th-century Persian astrolabe, also on display.

The largest exhibit on show is the colorful painted wooden figurehead of H.M.S. Seringapatam, built at the Bombay Dockyard in 1819. The vessel took its name from the capital of the then ruler of Mysore, Tipu Sultan. After a protracted and bloody struggle, the city was overcome by the Company’s troops in 1792. The colossal booty amassed, valued at more than £1 million, included numerous artworks, quite a number of which are now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Royal Collection and various country houses in Britain.