Only it seemed as if you were almost suggesting the Beeb was unusual and had an unusual responsibility since it is funded involuntarily through tax; when of course all media is funded by everyone through advertising without personal choice. Certainly you have no choice but to fund the moderate and honest BBC as well as the raving lunacy of Rupert Murdock and co. Interesting that the first seems to be the only one you care about but hey.
You genuinely don't have a clue do you?
Not only are there ways to avoid receiving adverts, but the money paid to air them isn't coming out of your pocket (unless you're actually paying a subscription to some TV service which again is OPTIONAL).
Just by the act of owning a TV and any means of making it display programming (so freeview, which has no subsciption fees attached) is enough to incur an involuntary fee to support the BBC even if I want nothing to do with the content they produce.
It's a racket pure and simple.
There is indeed no way to avoid paying for advertising, no way at all, since it is funded through increases in the price of the advertised products. Advertisers get to distort the market in their favour and keep out innovative, enterprising new companies that can do their job better*, and Murdock gets to make up a pack of lies with impunity and you get to act smug. Everyone's happy except sensible people.
The BBC is also funded involuntarily, but is, of course, aggressively regulated by the politicians you elect and therefore control. It's also legislatively obliged to be basically sensible, while Murdock is free to advertise for brown-shirted fascists and the latest brand of poison gas for Muslims.
If you think the latter is more transparent - or morally superior - you're either a liar or a buffoon. Which?
* This is the sole purpose of advertising, one of the biggest market distortions going.
Edit to add: and of course the British did human experiments involving gas on Indian subjects with mustard gas.
Not unusual for the time.
So moral equivalency. You've given up your right to ever criticise anyone ever again, of course. I will cite this the next time you do so.
It's not really defensible as an action but then neither is [any of the massive list of atrocities committed by axis nations] or the shenanigans the yanks were up to at the time.
The first clause is sufficient in this sentence and the second a dishonest attempt to forgive what you admit is unforgivable.
To respond to UP:
The idea that Churchill was sincerely concerned about the welfare of his Indian victims is ridiculous and your argument that Churchill was not "exploitative" is flatly untrue.
"(The) starvation of anyhow underfed Bengalis is less serious than that of sturdy Greeks"
"If food is so scarce, why hasn’t Gandhi died yet?"
He was regarded, accurately, at the time as one of the most appalling and vicious racists (and, just for fun, anti-semites!) in the UK. Churchill once had an entire ethnic group in Kenya thrown into concentration camps and tortured - all of them. This is not someone who cares about the deaths of the subhuman.
Churchill's remarks about the use of poison gas on freedom fighters should be seen as an attempt at media management, not sincere. After all, his position was that, hopefully, poison gas would not be necessary since due to the natural cowardice of the rebelling Iraqis it would not be necessary. If it turned out to be I'm sure he'd hardly have batted an eye.
Maybe he did, but that doesn't mean he wanted to use them. Better to have something and not need it than need it and not have it.
Please note: Britain actually did invade Russia after WW1, on Churchill's insistence.
