Racial views of Winston Churchill


, two-time British Prime Minister, made numerous explicit statements on race throughout his life, which have been considered to have contributed to his decisions and actions in British politics and in office. From the late 20th century onwards, increasing awareness of these attitudes resulted in the reappraisal of both his life achievements and his work by both British historians and the British public, and the reappraisal of his status as one of Britain's most celebrated leaders.
Churchill, author of A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, was of the view that British domination – in particular through the British Empire – was a result of social Darwinism. Like many of his contemporaries he held a hierarchical perspective of race, believing white people were most superior and black people the least. Churchill advocated against black or indigenous self-rule in Africa, Australia, the Caribbean, the Americas and India, believing that British imperialism in its colonies was for the good of the "primitive" and "subject races". During an interview in 1902, whilst discussing his views on the Chinese, Churchill stated that the "great barbaric nations" would "menace civilised nations", and that "The Aryan stock is bound to triumph".
He held mixed views of West Asian Muslims, calling Afghans and Iraqis "uncivilised tribes", and held particular contempt for the Arabic people. However, Churchill was supportive of Ibn Saud, insofar as Saud would support the policy for a Jewish state in Palestine that Churchill had driven personally in the 1920s. Churchill met Saud personally in February 1945 to discuss issues surrounding Palestine, though the meeting was reported by Saudis at the time as being widely unproductive, in great contrast to the meeting Saud had held with American President Franklin D. Roosevelt just days earlier.
During World War II, he prioritised the stockpiling of food for Europeans over feeding Indian subjects during the Bengal famine of 1943, against the pleas made by India secretary Leo Amery and the Viceroy of India, Lord Linlithgow, but eventually eased the famine by shipment of grains from Australia. Churchill held views on the British populace that were eugenic in perspective, and was a proponent of forced sterilisation to preserve "energetic and superior stocks".
Historian John Charmley has argued that Churchill's denigration of Mahatma Gandhi in the early 1930s contributed to fellow British Conservatives' dismissal of his early warnings about the rise of Adolf Hitler. Churchill's comments on Indians – as well as his views on race as a whole – were judged by his contemporaries within the Conservative Party to be extreme, at one point having described Indians as "a beastly people". Churchill's personal doctor, Lord Moran, commented at one point that, in regards to other races, "Winston thinks only of the colour of their skin." In 1955, Churchill expressed his support for the slogan "Keep England White" in regards to immigration from the West Indies.
During the George Floyd protests in the United Kingdom in June 2020, a statue of Churchill in Parliament Square was spray-painted with the words "was a racist", raising further public discussion of his views. At the same protest, the statue of his rival Mahatma Gandhi, was also sprayed with the word "racist".

Judaism

Though wary of communist Jews, Churchill strongly supported Zionism and described Jews as "the most formidable and the most remarkable race", whose "first loyalty will always be towards ".
Churchill had some sympathy for the "Jewish Bolshevism" conspiracy theory, and stated in his 1920 article "Zionism versus Bolshevism" that communism, which he considered a "worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality", had been established in Russia by Jews:
There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshevism and in the actual bringing about of the Russian Revolution, by these international and for the most part atheistical Jews; it is certainly a very great one; it probably outweighs all others. With the notable exception of Lenin, the majority of the leading figures are Jews. Moreover, the principal inspiration and driving power comes from the Jewish leaders.

However, according to one of his biographers Andrew Roberts, Churchill rejected antisemitism for virtually all his life. Roberts also describes Churchill as an "active Zionist" and philosemitic at a time when "clubland antisemitism... was a social glue for much of the Respectable Tendency". In the same article, Churchill wrote; "Some people like the Jews and some do not, but no thoughtful man can doubt the fact that they are beyond all question the most formidable and the most remarkable race that has ever appeared in the world." He further pointed out that the Bolsheviks were "repudiated vehemently by the great mass of the Jewish race", and concluded:
We owe to the Jews a system of ethics which, even if it were entirely separated from the supernatural, would be incomparably the most precious possession of mankind, worth in fact the fruits of all wisdom and learning put together.

He also described the Arabs as a "lower manifestation" than the Jews whom he treated a "higher grade race" compared to the "great hordes of Islam".
In the lead-up to the Second World War, Churchill expressed disgust at Nazi antisemitism; Clement Attlee recalled that Churchill openly wept when recounting to him the humiliations inflicted upon Jews by the SA during the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses in April 1933. In August 1932 while in Munich, Churchill was snubbed for a meeting by Adolf Hitler when the two happened to be sharing the same hotel. Churchill expressed to Hitler's confidante Ernst Hanfstaengl, "Why is your chief so violent about the Jews?... what is the sense of being against a man simply because of his birth? How can any man help how he is born?"

Palestine

In 1937, during the midst of the Arab revolt in Palestine, Churchill spoke at length during Parliamentary debates on the British policy in Palestine. Churchill insisted that the British government not renege on its 1917 promise to create a Jewish national home in Palestine, opposing the idea of granting Palestine self-rule due to the necessary Arab majority that would rule in Britain's place. Churchill held the belief that an eventual Jewish state within Palestine would advance the prosperity of the country, asking rhetorically before the Peel Commission:
Why is there injustice done if people come in and make a livelihood for more and make the desert into palm groves and orange groves?

Churchill's first-hand experience with Arab culture, both as a soldier and an MP, had "not impressed him", in the words of historian Martin Gilbert; an Arab majority, Churchill maintained, would have resulted in both cultural and material stagnation. Churchill rejected the Arab wish to stop Jewish migration to Palestine:
I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, though he may have lain there for a very long time I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been to those people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race or at any rate a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place. I do not admit it. I do not think the Red Indians had any right to say, 'American continent belongs to us and we are not going to have any of these European settlers coming in here'. They had not the right, nor had they the power."

At the same time, Churchill believed that British policy should not result in what he called "harsh injustice" to the Arab majority, and that the Arab people would not be displaced by the Jewish influx. He further emphasised the British responsibility to ensure that Palestine's Jews would not discriminate economically against their Arab neighbours, stating that such discrimination would result in the future restriction of Jewish immigration to Palestone. Churchill summarised his views before the Peel Commission bluntly: "It is a question of which civilisation you prefer."

India

Churchill often made disparaging comments about Indians, particularly in private conversation. At one point, he explicitly told his Secretary of State for India, Leo Amery, that he "hated Indians" and considered them "a beastly people with a beastly religion". Churchill was an admirer and follower of physicist Frederick Lindemann, whose views were supportive of both eugenics and so-called "race science". Lindemann advocated for a hierarchical society "led by supermen and served by helots", wherein new scientific means and technologies would lead to the advancement of some and the control of others through surgery, mind control and drug and hormone manipulations. According to Lindemann, this would lead to a society wherein people in the future could be fine-tuned for specific tasks, with those serving the ruling classes - the "helots" – able to carry out their duties without ever thinking of revolution or their right to vote.
During the Bengal famine of 1943, Churchill stated that any potential relief efforts sent to India would accomplish little to nothing, as Indians "bred like rabbits". His War Cabinet rejected Canadian proposals to send food aid to India, asking the US and Australia to send aid in their stead; according to historian Arthur Herman, Churchill's overarching concern was the ongoing Second World War, leading to his decisions to divert food supplies from India to Allied military campaigns.
However, Churchill exported the excess grain to Europe instead of to the British troops on the front line, adding to the buffer stocks being created against the possibility of future invasions in both Greece and Yugoslavia. Leo Amery, Secretary of State for India and Burma and a contemporary of Churchill, likened his understanding of India's problems to King George III's apathy for the Americas. In his private diaries, Amery wrote "on the subject of India, Winston is not quite sane" and that he did not "see much difference between outlook and Hitler's". However, Amery did state that without Churchill's assistance, the end result of the famine would have been worse, however little that assistance may have realistically been.

China

Churchill called China a "barbaric nation" and advocated for the "partition of China". He wrote:
I think we shall have to take the Chinese in hand and regulate them. I believe that as civilized nations become more powerful they will get more ruthless, and the time will come when the world will impatiently bear the existence of great barbaric nations who may at any time arm themselves and menace civilized nations. I believe in the ultimate partition of China – I mean ultimate. I hope we shall not have to do it in our day. The Aryan stock is bound to triumph.

In May 1954, Violet Bonham-Carter asked Churchill's opinion about a Labour party visit to China. Winston Churchill replied:
I hate people with slit eyes and pigtails. I don't like the look of them or the smell of them – but I suppose it does no great harm to have a look at them.

Chemical weapons in Iraq

After 1920 Iraqi revolt against the British, Churchill advocated the use of tear gas against "uncivilized tribes" as a means of dispersing rebels without excessive loss of life or resort to lethal force:

I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. We have definitely adopted the position at the Peace Conference of arguing in favour of the retention of gas as a permanent method of warfare. It is sheer affectation to lacerate a man with the poisonous fragment of a bursting shell and to boggle at making his eyes water by means of lachrymatory gas.
I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes. The moral effect should be so good that the loss of life should be reduced to a minimum. It is not necessary to use only the most deadly gasses: gases can be used which cause great inconvenience and would spread a lively terror and yet would leave no serious permanent effects on most of those affected.

Churchill also defended the use of chemical weapons against Germans in World War I.