If you want to twist some public person's words to mean whatever you want, it's pretty easy to do. As far as "moral limitations by modern standards" I would say "modern standards" have as much relation to any respectable standard of morality as astrology has to astronomy.
Jonathan Hayes ________________________________ From: Gregory B. Smith <gbsl...@comcast.net> To: churchillchat@googlegroups.com Sent: Friday, October 10, 2014 12:17 PM Subject: [ChurchillChat] Quote from Steven Pinker's "The Better Angels of Our Nature" “On the other side of the Atlantic, the young Winston Churchill wrote of taking part in “a lot of jolly little wars against barbarous peoples” in the British Empire. In one of those jolly little wars, he wrote “we proceeded systematically, village by village, and we destroyed the houses, filled up the wells, blew down the towers, cut down the shady trees, burned the crops and broke the reservoirs in punitive devastation.” Churchill defended these atrocities on the grounds that “Aryan stock is bound to triumph,” and he said he was “strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes.” He blamed the people of India for a famine caused by British mismanagement because they kept “breeding like rabbits,” adding “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.” “ The above paragraph is taken verbatim from page 658 of Stephen Pinker’s recently published (2011) masterful work on the decline of violence The Better Angels of our Nature which I have just finished reading. He cites Toyes’ book Churchill’s Empire and an August 12, 2010 New York Times article by J. Hari as his sources. Pinker purports to examine the mindset of historical figures showing their moral limitations by modern standards. Too bad he didn’t bother to consult www.winstonchurchill.org or back issues of Finest Hour where these out-of-context quotes have been shown most decidedly not to be reflections on Churchill’s morality. The battle continues.... Gregory B. Smith -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "ChurchillChat" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to churchillchat+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to churchillchat@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/churchillchat. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "ChurchillChat" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to churchillchat+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to churchillchat@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/churchillchat. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
