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Of course, in that period and context, those things may have been perfectly normal opinions.
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You raise lots of interesting points there, Wim Libaers.
Indeed context is everything, particularly when we come to judge people . It’s so easy to take the moral high ground and judge history by projecting it backwards from our own modern day standpoint. What concerns me is
“do we still pronounce judgement on what is “right” and “wrong” even though the context is different – cannibalism, slavery, imperialism, the rights of women, equality, individual freedom etc “. For example the English Queen Elizabeth I is generally smiled on favourable by British history books yet, through Drake and others, she was arguably a state sponsor of terrorism against the Spanish – but that was the context of the Age.
My own view is that, at the end of the day, someone has to play God and say “These are the rules/moral values by which we judge things”. No doubt they are open to accusations of arrogance, imperialism and megalomania but so be it. Of course that’s easy for me to say, speaking from the safe comfort of the West. I know that it is the West, through its superior power and technology, who is likely to offer ( and does) the candidate for that.
As to Churchill’s attitudes to “lower grade races”, that was a commonly held belief amongst the English Victorians and ( to quote Hitler for a change ) “Churchill was just an old Victorian “.
Here I’m reminded of a very useful distinction that my university tutor introduced me to – the distinction between an excuse and an explanation. We cannot excuse Churchill for his racism but he is guilty of the lesser “crime” of something which is “wrong” but explainable given the context.