In our imagination, Winston Churchill is the hero of Great Britain’s fight against Hitler. Even in The Crown, a series where he is often criticized, presenting him as a grumpy and arrogant old man, there is never the slightest doubt that we are faced with a colossus, the savior of the country. Things, however, are very different if we look at them from the prism of the people who suffered from his decisions.

The Pakistani writer Tariq Ali, in Winston Churchill. His times, his crimes, provide us with an iconoclastic vision that we could define as anticolonial. The conservative politician appears here as a deeply reactionary figure, a staunch defender of British rule and the racial superiority of the English over non-European peoples.

We are, in effect, facing a leader who, today, would not pass a political correctness test, although he would give countless headlines to the media with his outbursts. The female vote, without going any further, seemed to him an absurdity contrary to civilization. Hence the suffragettes got on his nerves. As for the workers, he earned their enmity with his militant stance against the labor movement.

Regarding cultural diversity, his position was equally rigid. In the 1950s he spoke of the need to “keep England white.” Some time ago, when India was still under British rule, he allowed himself to despise its inhabitants, who seemed to him “a disgusting people with a disgusting religion.”

His racism pushed him to cause an immense famine in the Bengal region, with millions of deaths. In the middle of World War II, he preferred to allocate food to the Army rather than to the civilian population, with a view to preventing a Japanese invasion that never materialized.

As Ali says, imperialism was the “true religion” of a politician who was never ashamed to resort to the most questionable methods, convinced that whatever he did, posterity would not take its toll. He himself confessed his intention to write his own history and impose the story that was most favorable to him.

For a long time, the cult of his legacy seemed to prove him right. Nowadays, however, we have a much more complex vision, which has nothing to do with the myth of the hero without fissures alone against the Third Reich.