It may not surprise you to learn that Churchill, who was born in 1874, harbored some beliefs about race that are truly shocking today. Per the Independent, Churchill, who was a keen supporter of the expansion of the British Empire and had served in the British military in a number of colonial campaigns as a young man, believed in the superiority of white Europeans over the non-white peoples — “savages” — the empire came to subjugate. “The Aryan stock is bound to triumph,” the newspaper reports him as claiming.

It is perhaps unfair or even unwise to judge figures from the past by the standards of today, and it would be easy to dismiss criticism of Churchill’s racism by claiming that such ideas were, at the time, commonly held. But as the academic Priyamvada Gopal writes in The Guardian: “Even [Churchill]’s contemporaries found his views on race shocking.” And Churchill was often in a position of power to act upon his views, to shape government policy around his own prejudices. Many instances have been recorded, but possibly the most shocking was Churchill’s treatment of the British Empire‘s Indian subjects, who suffered a deadly famine in 1943. Churchill was begged to send aid — but he didn’t. Instead, he reportedly claimed that the disaster was the result of self-inflicted overpopulation and that the famine would be a “cull,” according to The Independent. As a result, three million people lost their lives.