Where I take issue with people like him is not that they want to study and/or reveal the negative things that great figures from history may have done, but that they tend to maintain a laser-like focus on those negative actions to the point of "redefining" the good things that these people accomplished.
My other problem with them is that they only seem to want to subject white, European & American historical figures to this "revisiting" process. How about "revisiting" Montezuma? Or Shaka Zulu? Or the Islamic African chiefs who sold their own people in to slavery?
Humans of all colors from all continents have been treating each other badly tens of thousands of years - it did not start and end with the British Empire or Belgium's Leopold II.
Did Winston Churchill do some bad stuff in the name of Great Britain? Yes, of course. But left to their own devices, a$$hats with the mindset of David Olusoga would have us believe that there was no moral difference between him and Hitler or Mussolini.
With that said, Adolph Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Emperor Hirohito were responsible for the 1943-44 famine in India.
I’m not sure what exactly he expected Churchill to be able to do about a famine half a world away when Britain itself was under severe rationing, what shipping was available had to be devoted to bringing over troops and supplies from North America, the Nazi hordes were only then starting to be driven back and the Japanese Empire was making an all out assault on India at Imphal. This seems to me to be a weak attempt at getting attention.
Probably Churchill would have answered him, “yes I was the worst war criminal, except for all the others”.
I truly despise these one sided, bitter, ungrateful, revisionists who in the name of “historical accuracy” present and emphasize only the worst of a person, ignoring the much greater good they’ve done, and judging them according to current mores. He’s a Nigerian, not a British, perhaps he could tell us a bit about the atrocities his wonderful country has and is committing.
Howard Zinn happens to be another one of this ilk.
good post, and let’s add MLK to your list.........