Great good can accompany great evil

Historical figures found to have an ugly side has prompted some to either excuse this behaviour or to censor it.

On the 50th anniversary of Winston Churchill’s death, Britain was torn between honouring him or castigating him for his white supremacist sentiments, for as a young soldier, Churchill helped to burn crops and homes of Indigenous peoples in what is now Pakistan.

In Sudan, he bragged about having killed three “savages.”

In India, he opposed Gandhi’s non-violent opposition to British tyranny by suggesting that Gandhi “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 said.

In 1943, three million people in Bengal died because he diverted food grains from India to Europe adding that he preferred to support the sturdy Greeks as opposed to scrawny Bengalis who were only going to die anyway.

In South Africa, he felt the war against blacks “great galloping fun.” In the 1920s, he supported use of poison gas against rebellious Kurds to spread what he called “a lively terror.”

More recently, Americans have been trashing statues of racist leaders of the Confederacy and Halifax has wondered what to do with the statue of Cornwallis infamous for offering a bounty for Indigenous peoples’ scalps.

Truth and Reconciliation commissioner Justice Murray Sinclair, has provided a reasonable middle ground solution. He suggests we provide a full history about our historic icons so that we see that some of them were capable of both good and great evil.

Gerald L. Harrison Saskatoon