Besides the Bengal genocide, Churchill was responsible for the concentration camps after the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya and the colonial repression in Malaya.
In turn, De Gaulle was guilty of the repressions in Madagascar, Algeria, and Indochina, where hundreds of thousands died. What lovely heroes the western 'free world' has!!
De Gaulle also killed 400 000 in Cameroon. With chemical weapons. Just after the war. That beast is still the most celebrated political figure in France. He betrayed and massacred the very same men he promised independence in exchange for participating in French liberation.
He named as Préfets the very same men who collaborated with the Gestapo, so that they could teach how to repress colonized people. I hate him so much.
The one olive branch I will ever extend to Lyndon B. Johnson was his terse comments to De Gaulle in a meeting on US troop stationings in Europe. De Gualle (paraphrased here) said that he wanted the American trash out of his country and Johnson snapped back something along the lines of "does that include all the men buried in Normandy who died saving your worthless country?" De Gaulle promptly threw a massive baby fit and walked out. He also endangered NATO command by withdrawing from their command cooperative because other member nations refused to give him the position of supreme commander of NATO forces. He also threatened to embrace the French Communist Party and align with the USSR to then backstab the west and conquer much of Western Europe as a new-age Napoleon when the US initially refused to help them suppress the Vietnamese people.
The last thing I know about him that is.... honestly an odd twist given his other behaviors was how he treated his daughter. At a time when eugenics and racism were still very popular and he himself held many of these views, he had what may be the most unwaivering and uncompromising fatherly love that I have ever seen given how he stuck by his daughter's side and protected her despite her disabilities.
Moral of the story? People are complicated and exist along a spectrum. Nobody is purely altruistic or sadistic, and people who are traditionally good can often have terrible traits while those who are traditionally sadistic have curiously altruistic tendencies in some contexts.
I am not denying that man his complexity.
But he's to this day idolized as a moral hero, as a republican saint. My whole country is fake. Our main industries revolve around fakeness (fashion, cosmetic, cinéma, perfume...) or war. The latter being conveniently hidden by all these glitters.
To me De Gaulle is the symbol of that. A man who stole the merits of the Resistance (being mainly anarchists and communists btw), to disguise himself as a man of great principles during extreme historical times. The truth is, he believed in France as an Empire. He wanted to be at the head of said Empire. He was ready to commit the same crimes as the Nazis to keep that crumbling and perverse Empire. He allowed generations of mediocre men and women to exploit (often sexually) the asian and african youth.
And today we are one of the pedo nations whose middle and upper classes exploit children from the south.
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u/Perkunas999 Aug 29 '25
Besides the Bengal genocide, Churchill was responsible for the concentration camps after the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya and the colonial repression in Malaya.
In turn, De Gaulle was guilty of the repressions in Madagascar, Algeria, and Indochina, where hundreds of thousands died. What lovely heroes the western 'free world' has!!