Winston Churchill: His Era, His Crimes

We know Winston Churchill as a prominent political and state figure, a fighter against Nazism, and finally, a Nobel Prize winner in Literature. In a survey conducted by the BBC in 2002, the English acknowledged him as the greatest Briton in history.

However, Churchill was primarily a man of his time, which means he was a passionate defender of the British Empire and the imperial idea. It is to this side of his political activity, without which Churchill's portrait would not be complete, that the renowned British-Pakistani writer, historian, publicist, and social figure Tariq Ali turns.

As head of the British Navy during World War I, Churchill made a number of catastrophic mistakes that cost thousands of lives. His attempt to crush Irish nationalists left wounds that have not healed to this day. Even the most revered period of Churchill's political career, when the war against Nazi Germany was underway, was marked by famine in Bengal, which claimed the lives of more than three million Indians, clashes between British forces and the Greek People's Liberation Army, and other "dark pages" that are thoroughly documented in Tariq Ali's book.