Upplagt kl. 14:05, torsdag 13 augusti 2009
Min sarkastiska artikel om stolpillerkonservatism väckte viss munterhet men även diskussion. Flera av Motpols skribenter seglade så in hos Tradition och fason och kom där i delo med en liten skara stolpillerkonservativa utan sakargument. De senare tillgrep snart censur för att få slut på debatten. Sådan är nu stolpillerkonservatismens själva kärna: feghet, uppblåst irrelevans och narcissistiskt ointresse för sanningen. Inget att orda om, egentligen.
Men det hela fick mig att tänka på herr Churchill, stolpillerkonservatismens husgud (jämte Thatcher). Jag tillhörde själv hans beundrarskara. En gång i tiden, vill säga. Jag var ung och godtrogen. Sedan började jag läsa historia på allvar, och kom så i beröring med verklighetens Churchill, till skillnad från myten. Snart nog fanns ingen beundran kvar. Däremot vämjelse, och skam över att ha varit så lättlurad. Den resan var nyttig, och ställde bl a en lång rad föreställningar om det senaste världskriget på ända. Jag föreslår att fler gör den resan.
Jag har därför letat fram några lämpliga texter. De sammanställer sådant som ingen historiker längre skulle bestrida. Tillåt mig så, mina damer och herrar, presentera Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill. Sådan han i själva verket var. Eller med historikern Ralph Raicos ord:
[W]hen all is said and done, Winston Churchill was a man of blood and a politico without principle, whose apotheosis serves to corrupt every standard of honesty and morality in politics and history.
Låt oss inleda med en längre text från Mises-institutet (vars ekonomiska ideologi jag långt ifrån delar). Därefter följer två andra studier (scrolla ned!). Den som vill gå djupare kommer att vilja läsa David Irvings mästerliga Churchill’s War [här] och Pat Buchanans Churchill, Hitler, and “The Unnecessary War”: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World [här].
Mycket nöje!
THE REAL CHURCHILL
by Adam Young [källa]
On February 4th, President Bush eulogized the life of Winston Churchill. The president described Winston Churchill as a “great man” and quickly zeroed in on the mistress that both Bush and Churchill share: war. “He was a prisoner in the Boer War, a controversial strategist in the Great War. He was the rallying voice of the Second World War, and a prophet of the Cold War.” Indeed, there doesn’t seem to have been a war—or an opportunity for war—that Churchill wasn’t associated with during his long career.
Bush also recited Churchill’s famous retort that “History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it” adding that “history has been kind to Winston Churchill, as it usually is to those who help save the world,” surely hoping that history will be kind to George W. Bush.
Except this history is a myth. The truth about the real Churchill—the Churchill that few know—is that he was “a man of the state: of the welfare state and of the warfare state” in Professor Ralph Raico’s turn-of-phrase. The truth about Winston Churchill is that he was a menace to liberty, and a disaster for Britain, for Europe, for the United States of America, and for Western Civilization itself.
Not since fictional personages like Hercules and Zeus, have so many myths been attached to one man. As we will see, the Winston Churchill we’re told about is not the Churchill known to honest history, but rather a fictional version of the man and his actions. And these words and actions have produced our mainstream “patriotic political myths” as John Denson calls them, which are merely the victor’s wartime lies and propaganda scripted into the ‘Official History.’ The Churchill mythology is challenged by honest history, and the reality about Churchill involves hard, but necessary truths.
Churchill the Opportunist
Of course, central to the neocon mythology built up around their almost deified idealization of Churchill is that he fought for (in Bush’s words comparing Tony Blair to Churchill), “the right thing, and not the easy thing,” right over popularity, principle over opportunism.
Except that isn’t true. Churchill was above all a man who craved power, and a man who craves power, craves opportunity to advance himself no matter what the cost.
When Churchill entered politics, many took note of his unique rhetorical talents, which gave him power over men, but it also came with a powerful failing of its own. During WWII, Robert Menzies, the Prime Minister of Australia, noted of Churchill “His real tyrant is the glittering phrase so attractive to his mind that awkward facts have to give way.”
However, Churchill had other failings as well. The Spectator newspaper said of Churchill upon his appointment as First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911: “We cannot detect in his career any principles or even any constant outlook upon public affairs; his ear is always to the ground; he is the true demagogue. . . .”
The great English classical liberal John Morley, after working with Churchill, passed a succinct appraisal of him, “Winston,” he said, “has no principles.”
Entering politics in 1900, Churchill (the grandson of a Duke and son of a prominent Tory) naturally joined the governing Conservative party. Then in 1904, he left the Conservatives and joined the Liberal party, and when they were in decline Churchill dumped them and rejoined the Conservatives, uttering his famous quote “It’s one thing to rat, it’s another to re-rat.” Churchill allegedly made his move to the Liberals on the issue of free trade. However, Robert Rhodes James, a Churchill admirer, wrote: “It was believed [at the time], probably rightly, that if Arthur Balfour had given him office in 1902, Churchill would not have developed such a burning interest in free trade and joined the Liberals.” Clive Ponting also notes that “. . .he had already admitted to Rosebery, he was looking for an excuse to defect from a party that seemed reluctant to recognize his talents.” Since the Liberals would not accept a protectionist, Churchill had to change his tune.
It’s not a surprise that this neoconservative administration and its apologists in the tamed media laud and venerate Churchill, for he was as President Bush described him; a man who was synonymous with war. Churchill loved war. In 1925, he wrote, “The story of the human race is war.” This is untrue, but Churchill lacked any grasp of the fundamentals of true, classical liberalism. The story of the human race is increasing peaceful cooperation and the efforts by some to stop it through war. However, for Churchill, periods without war offered nothing but “the bland skies of peace and platitude.”
Without principles or scruples, Churchill as a prominent member of the Liberal party government naturally played a role in the hijacking of liberalism from its roots in individualism, laissez-faire, free trade and bourgeois morality, to its transformation into the “New Liberalism” as a proxy for socialism and the omnipotent state in Britain and in America.
Churchill was also a famous opponent of Communism and of Bolshevism in particular. One of the reasons why Churchill admired Italian Fascism was Churchill believed that Mussolini had found a formula that would neutralize the appeal of communism, namely super-nationalism with a social welfarist appeal. This is a domestic formula for power that still appeals today, if the Bush Administration is any indication. Churchill went so far as to say that Fascism “proved the necessary antidote to the Communist poison.”
Then came 1941. Churchill made his peace with Communism. Temporarily, of course. Churchill gave unconditional support to Stalin, welcoming him as an ally, even embracing him as a friend, and calling the Breaker of Nations, “Uncle Joe.” In his single-minded obsession with destroying German National Socialism (while establishing his own British national socialism) and carrying on his pre-World War I British Imperialist vendetta to destroy Germany, Churchill completely failed to consider the danger of inviting Soviet power and communism into the heart of Europe.
Of course, his self-created mythology–chiefly through his own books–states that he sensed the danger and tried to warn Roosevelt about Stalin, but the records of the time do not prove this out. In fact, Churchill’s infatuation with Stalin reached the point where at the Tehran conference in November 1943, Churchill presented Stalin with a Crusader’s sword; Stalin, who had murdered millions of Christians, was now presented by Churchill as a defender of the Christian West.
But if one was to sum up Churchill’s passion, his overall reason for entering politics, it was the empire. The British Empire was Churchill’s abiding love. He fought to expand it, he defended it, and he created his decades-long hatred of Germany because of it. The Empire was at the center of his view of the world. Even as late as 1947, Churchill opposed Indian independence. When Lord Irwin urged him to bring his views on India up-to-date by talking to some Indians Churchill replied “I am quite satisfied with my views on India, and I don’t want them disturbed by any bloody Indians.” So much for democracy.
Churchill the Socialist
Churchill made a name for himself as an opponent of socialism both before and after the First World War, except during the war when he was a staunch promoter of war socialism, declaring in a speech: “Our whole nation must be organized, must be socialized if you like the word.” Of course, such rank hypocrisy was by now Churchill’s stock-in-trade, and not surprisingly, during the 1945 election, Churchill described his partners in the national unity government, the Labour Party, as totalitarians, when it was Churchill himself who had accepted the infamous Beveridge Report that laid the foundations for the post-war welfare state and Keynesian (mis)management of the economy.
As Mises wrote in 1950, “It is noteworthy to remember that British socialism was not an achievement of Mr. Attlee’s Labor Government, but of the war cabinet of Mr. Winston Churchill.”
Churchill was converted to the Bismarckian model of social insurance following a visit to Germany. As Churchill told his constituents: “My heart was filled with admiration of the patient genius which had added these social bulwarks to the many glories of the German race.” He set out, in his words, to “thrust a big slice of Bismarckianism over the whole underside of our industrial system.” In 1908, Churchill announced in a speech in Dundee: “I am on the side of those who think that a greater collective sentiment should be introduced into the State and the municipalities. I should like to see the State undertaking new functions.” Churchill even said: “I go farther; I should like to see the State embark on various novel and adventurous experiments.”
Churchill claimed that “the cause of the Liberal Party is the cause of the left-out millions,” and attacked the Conservatives as “the Party of the rich against the poor, the classes and their dependents against the masses, of the lucky, the wealthy, the happy, and the strong, against the left-out and the shut-out millions of the weak and poor.” Churchill berated the Conservatives for lacking even a “single plan of social reform or reconstruction,” while boasting that his “New Liberalism” offered “a wide, comprehensive, interdependent scheme of social organisation,” incorporating “a massive series of legislative proposals and administrative acts.”
Churchill had fallen under the spell of the Fabian Society, and its leaders Beatrice and Sidney Webb, who more than any other group, are responsible for the decline of British society. Here he was introduced to William, later Lord Beveridge, who Churchill brought into the Board of Trade as his advisor on social questions. Besides pushing for a variety of social insurance schemes, Churchill created the system of national labor exchanges, stating the need to “spread . . . a sort of Germanized network of state intervention and regulation” over the British labor market. Churchill even entertained a more ambitious goal for the Board of Trade. He proposed a plan whereby the Board of Trade would act as the economic “intelligence department” of the Government, forecasting trade and employment in Britain so that the Government could spend money in the most deserving areas. Controlling this pork would be a Committee of National Organisation to plan the economy.
Churchill was well aware of the electoral potential of organized labor, so naturally Churchill became a champion of the labor unions. He was a leading supporter of the Trades Disputes Act of 1906 which reversed the judicial decisions which had held unions responsible for property damage and injuries committed by their agents on the unions behalf, in effect granting unions a privileged position exempting them from the ordinary law of the land. It is ironic that the immense power of the British labor unions that made Britain the “Sick Man of Europe” for two generations and became the foil of Margaret Thatcher, originated with the enthusiastic help of her hero, Winston Churchill.
We can only conclude by Churchill’s actions that personal freedom was the furthest thing from his mind.
Churchill and the First World War
The Great War destroyed European culture and the commitment to truths. In their place, generations embraced relativism, nihilism and socialism, and from the ashes arose Lenin, Stalin and Hitler and their evil doctrines that infect contemporary culture. In the words of the British historian, Niall Ferguson, the First World War “was nothing less than the greatest error in modern history.”
In 1911, Churchill became First Lord of the Admiralty, and, during the crises that followed, used every opportunity to fan the flames of war. When the final crisis came, in 1914, Churchill was all smiles and was the only cabinet member who backed war from the start. Asquith, his own Prime Minister, wrote: “Winston very bellicose and demanding immediate mobilization . . . has got all his war paint on.”
Churchill was instrumental in establishing the illegal starvation blockade of Germany. The blockade depended on scattering mines, and classified as contraband food for civilians. But, throughout his career, international law and the conventions created to limit the horrors of war meant nothing to Churchill. One of the consequences of the hunger blockade was that, while it killed 750,000 German civilians by hunger and malnutrition, the youth who survived went on to become the most fanatical Nazis.
The Lusitania
Whether Churchill actually arranged for the sinking of the Lusitania on May 7, 1915, is still unclear, but it is clear that he did everything possible to ensure that innocent Americans would be killed by German attempts to break the hunger blockade.
A week before the disaster, Churchill wrote to Walter Runciman, President of the Board of Trade that it was “most important to attract neutral shipping to our shores, in the hopes especially of embroiling the United States with Germany.”
The Lusitania was a civilian passenger liner loaded with munitions. Earlier, Churchill had ordered the captains of merchant ships, including liners, to ram German submarines, and the Germans were aware of this. The German government even took out newspaper ads in New York warning Americans not to board the ship.
Churchill, by helping engineer the entry of the United States into the Great War, set in motion the transformation of the war into a Democratic Jihad. Wilsonianism lead to the eventual destruction of the Austrian Empire, and the creation of a vast power vacuum on Germany’s southeastern border that would provide fruitful opportunities and allies for Hitler’s effort to overturn the Versailles Treaty.
But Churchill was not a strategist. All he cared for, as he told a visitor after his Gallipoli disaster, was “the waging of war, the defeat of the Germans.”
Churchill Between the Wars
Churchill, who had been appointed Colonial Secretary, invented two client kingdoms, Transjordan and Iraq, both artificial and unstable states. Churchill’s aim of course was not liberty for oppressed peoples, as his admirers like to claim for him, but for Britain to dominate the Middle East to ensure that the oil wells of Iraq and the Persian Gulf were securely in British hands.
The Crash of 1929
In 1924, Churchill rejoined the Conservative party and was made Chancellor of the Exchequer, where he returned Britain to the gold standard but didn’t account for the British governments wartime inflation, which consequently severely damaged exports and ruined the good name of gold. But, of course, Churchill cared nothing for economic ideas. What interested him was only that the pound would be as strong as in the days of Queen Victoria, that once more the pound would “look the dollar in the face.” The consequences of this decision had a far-reaching and disastrous impact on western civilization and the consequent appeal of socialism, Nazism and communism: the Crash of 1929.
It was Churchill’s unrealistic exchange ratio that caused the Bank of England and the U.S. Federal Reserve to collude to prop up the pound by inflating the U.S. dollar, which in turn fueled the speculative boom during the 1920’s that collapsed when the inflating slowed.
Churchill’s fame—and his mythology—originates during the period of the 30’s, especially for neoconservatives, for whom it is always 1938. However, Churchill’s hard line against Hitler was little different from his usual warnings about pre-war Imperial Germany, and his hard line against inter-war Weimar Germany. For Churchill saw Germany at all times and in all ways as a threat to the British Empire. A threat that had to be destroyed and forever kept under heel. For instance, Churchill denounced all calls for Allied disarmament even before Hitler came to power. Churchill, like Clemenceau, Wilson and other Allied leaders, held the unrealistic belief that a defeated Germany would submit forever to the shackles of Versailles.
And what the neocons forget, or don’t know, is that Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin acknowledged in the House of Commons that, had they told the people the truth, the Conservatives could never have won the 1936 election. “Supposing that I had gone to the country and said that Germany was rearming and that we must be armed, does anyone think that our pacific democracy would have rallied to that cry?” It was Neville Chamberlain who began the rearmament of Britain after the Munich Crisis, the arms which Churchill would not have had during the Battle of Britain, including the first deployment of radar, which Churchill mocked while in opposition in the 1930s.
Moreover, Churchill’s Cassandra-like role during the ’30s emerged largely because Churchill moved from one impending threat to the next: Bolshevik Russia, the General Strike of 1926, the dangers of Indian independence, the abdication crisis in 1936. During the ’30s Churchill was the proverbial Boy Who Cried Wolf. Maybe his neocon admirers could have learned that lesson about Iraq.
But as in all things, even with this Churchill reversed himself. In the fall of 1937, he stated:
“Three or four years ago I was myself a loud alarmist. . . . In spite of the risks which wait on prophecy, I declare my belief that a major war is not imminent, and I still believe that there is a good chance of no major war taking place in our lifetime. . . . I will not pretend that, if I had to choose between Communism and Nazism, I would choose Communism.”
And in his book Step By Step written in 1937, Churchill had this to say about the Mortal Enemy: “. . .one may dislike Hitler’s system and yet admire his patriotic achievement. If our country were defeated, I hope we should find a champion as indomitable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations.” One has to wonder if Churchill was referring to himself in his hypothetical example.
The common mythology is so far from historical truth that even an ardent Churchill sympathizer, Gordon Craig, felt obliged to write:
It is reasonably well-known today that Churchill was often ill-informed, that his claims about German strength were exaggerated and his prescriptions impractical, that his emphasis on air power was misplaced.
Moreover, as a British historian noted: “For the record, it is worth recalling that in the 1930s Churchill did not oppose the appeasement of either Italy or Japan.”
Churchill and the Second World War
After Munich, Chamberlain was determined that Hitler would have no more easy victories, and when Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, Britain declared war on Germany, and Churchill was recalled to his old place as First Lord of the Admiralty. An astonishing thing then happened: the President of the United States by-passed all the ordinary diplomatic channels and initiated a personal correspondence, not with the Prime Minister, but with Churchill. These messages were surrounded by a frantic secrecy, and culminated in the imprisonment of Tyler Kent, the American cipher clerk at the U.S. embassy in London. Some of these messages contained allusions to FDR’s agreement prior to the war to an alliance with Britain, contrary to his public statements and American law.
Three months prior to the war, Roosevelt told King George VI that he intended to set up a zone in the Atlantic to be patrolled by the U.S. Navy, and, according to the King’s notes, the President stated that “if he saw a U boat he would sink her at once & wait for the consequences.” The biographer of George VI, John W. Wheeler-Bennett, considered that these conversations “contained the germ of the future Bases-for-Destroyers deal, and also of the Lend-Lease Agreement itself.”
In 1940, Churchill at last became Prime Minister, ironically enough when the Chamberlain government resigned over Churchill’s aborted plan to pre-emptively invade Norway. After France’s armed forces were destroyed by the Blitzkrieg, and the British army fled towards the Channel, Churchill the conservative, the “anti-socialist,” defiled the common law by passing totalitarian legislation placing “all persons, their services and their property at the disposal of the Crown,” i.e., into the hands of Churchill himself.
During the Battle of Britain, Churchill gave perhaps his most famous speech, in which he plagiarized the French Premier Georges Clemenceau, and where he uttered his famous phrase “If the British Empire and its Commonwealth lasts for a thousand years, men will say, “This was their finest hour!” This calls to mind another man’s boast about a thousand year Reich. Churchill also hinted at his plot to drag America into the war: “. . .we shall never surrender, and even if . . . this island . . . were subjugated . . . then our empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the Old.” But like Marxist Revolutionaries, Christian Millennialists and other assorted cranks, Churchill was not at all interested in “God’s good time” or any other presumed unearthly schedule, and he worked night and day to collude with Roosevelt to get America into the war.
As PM, Churchill continued his policy to refuse any negotiated peace. Even after the Fall of France, Churchill rejected Hitler’s renewed peace overtures. This, however, more than anything else, is supposed to be the foundation of his greatness. Yet what opportunities were lost to a free France and Britain and the Low Countries before 1940 to re-arm and negotiate military defense strategies? What of the time lost that could have been used to study the Blitzkrieg method of warfare before it crashed through France? The British historian John Charmley made the crucial point that Churchill’s adamant refusal even to listen to peace proposals in 1940 doomed what he claimed was most dear to him: the Empire and a Britain that was nonsocialist and independent in world affairs. One could add that by allowing Germany to overrun its weaker neighbors when peace was possible it probably also doomed European Jewry as well. How many more millions of Jews and other Europeans were murdered because of Churchill’s stupidity? But it is politically incorrect, and even possibly a hate crime to suggest that better alternatives were available during World War II than those made by the Allies. Just because something turned out one way does not mean that was the only way it could have turned out or was the best result. Somehow, it is controversial to say this.
The peace camp realized something that escaped Churchill the empire romanticist: even the British Empire and her vast resources alone could not defeat the concentrated power that Germany possessed in Europe. And even more after the Fall of France, Churchill’s war aim of total victory could be realized only by embroiling the United States in another world war.
As an aside to the French-haters, what they forget is that, if the U.S. army had met the Wehrmacht in 1940, it would have fared considerably worse than the French Army. National chauvinists, however, prefer their petty hatreds.
Involving America was Churchill’s policy in World War II, just as it was Churchill’s policy in World War I, and would be his policy again in the Cold War. Churchill put his heart and soul into ensuring Roosevelt came through.
In 1940, Churchill sent British agent “Intrepid” to the United States, where he set up shop in Rockefeller Center, where, with the full knowledge and cooperation of Roosevelt and the collaboration of federal agencies, “Intrepid” and his 300 agents “intercepted mail, tapped wires, cracked safes, kidnapped, . . . rumor mongered” and incessantly smeared their favorite targets, the “isolationists” (i.e., Jeffersonians) as nazis and fascists.
In June 1941, Churchill, looking for a chance to bring America into the war, wrote regarding the German warship, Prinz Eugen: “It would be better for instance that she should be located by a U.S. ship as this might tempt her to fire on that ship, thus providing the incident for which the U.S. government would be so grateful.”
Churchill also instructed the British ambassador to Tokyo, Sir Robert Craigie, “the entry of the United States into war either with Germany and Italy or with Japan, is fully conformable with British interests. Nothing in the munitions sphere can compare with the importance of the British Empire and the United States being co-belligerent.”
In August 1941, Roosevelt and Churchill met at the Atlantic conference. Churchill told his Cabinet “The President had said he would wage war but not declare it and that he would become more and more provocative. If the Germans did not like it, they could attack American forces. . . . Everything was to be done to force an incident.”
After the U.S. had officially entered the war, on February 15, 1942, in the House of Commons, Churchill declared, of America’s entry into the war: “This is what I have dreamed of, aimed at, worked for, and now it has come to pass.”
This deceptive alliance illustrates another of Churchill’s faults. His subordination of political aims to military planning. Churchill made war for the sake of making war, with little regard for the political results that follow. He once even told Asquith that his life’s ambition was “to command great victorious armies in battle.” And World War II was his opportunity. Churchill and Roosevelt were both willing to do anything to destroy the menace of Nazi Germany, at a time when Hitler had killed perhaps several hundred thousand, and to do so they would ally with Hitler’s former ally in the invasion of Poland, Joseph Stalin (the Soviet Union had even been invited to join the Axis in 1940), who had already murdered tens of millions. But why is it conventional wisdom that compromise with one dictator at a vital period would have been immoral while collaboration with an even greater dictator with genuine global ambitions was the mark of greatness?
The truth is Churchill cared for nothing but Britain. The lives, homes and cultures of non-Britons he took and destroyed without a care or second thought. What sort of ‘conservatism’ requires the murder of millions of defenseless innocents? Winston Churchill was a man who along with Roosevelt, Hitler and Stalin, probed just how far Western Civilization could fall in just six short years of time.
Churchill threw British support to the Communist Partisan leader Tito. What a victory for Tito would mean was no secret to Churchill. When an aide pointed out that Tito intended to transform Yugoslavia into a Communist dictatorship on the Stalinist model, Churchill retorted: “Do you intend to live there?” What a humanitarian.
Of course, in Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt were confronted with a man who had an overall political aim for the war. Stalin knew what he wanted to achieve from the destruction of Germany. For Churchill, his only aim was to beat Hitler, and then he would start thinking of the future of Britain and Europe. Churchill said it in so many words: “It was to be the defeat, ruin, and slaughter of Hitler, to the exclusion of all other purposes, loyalties and aims.”
Churchill’s aim was in his words, the “indefinite prevention of their [the Germans'] rising again as an Armed Power.” Not surprisingly, instead of making every effort to encourage and assist the anti-Nazi resistance groups in Germany, Churchill responded to the feelers sent out by the German resistance with silence, thus helping to prolong the war and the killing. Even more shockingly, Churchill had nothing but scorn for the heroic officers after their failed assassination attempt on Hitler in July 1944, even as Hitler was enjoying their filmed executions.
In the place of help, Churchill only offered Germans the slogan of unconditional surrender, which only prolonged the war further. And instead of promoting the overthrow of Hitler by anti-Nazi Germans, Churchill’s policy was all-out support of Stalin. Returning from Yalta, Churchill told the House of Commons on February 27, 1945 that he did not know any government that kept its obligations as faithfully as did the Soviet Union, even to its disadvantage.
The War Crimes
That Churchill committed war crimes—planned them, aided and abetted them, and defended them—is beyond doubt. Churchill was the prime subverter through two world wars of the rules of warfare that had evolved in the West over centuries.
At the Quebec conference, Roosevelt and Churchill adopted the Morgenthau Plan, which if implemented would have killed tens of millions of Germans, giving the Germans a terrifying picture of what “unconditional surrender” would mean in practice. Churchill was convinced of the plans benefits, as it “would save Britain from bankruptcy by eliminating a dangerous competitor.” That the Morgenthau Plan was analogous to Hitler’s post-conquest plans for western Russia and the Ukraine was lost on Churchill, who according to Morgenthau, drafted the wording of the scheme.
Churchill even brainstormed dropping tens of thousands of anthrax “super bombs” on the civilian population of Germany, and ordered detailed planning for a chemical attack on six major cities, estimating that millions would die immediately “by inhalation,” with millions more succumbing later.
But Churchill’s greatest war crimes involved the terror bombing of German cities that killed 600,000 civilians and left some 800,000 injured. Arthur Harris (”Bomber Harris”), the head of Bomber Command, stated “In Bomber Command we have always worked on the assumption that bombing anything in Germany is better than bombing nothing.”
Churchill brazenly lied to the House of Commons and the public, claiming that only military and industrial installations were targeted. In fact, the aim was to kill as many civilians as possible. Hence the application of “carpet” bombing in an attempt to terrorize the Germans into surrendering.
Professor Raico described the effect of Churchillian statesmanship: “The campaign of murder from the air leveled Germany. A thousand-year-old urban culture was annihilated, as great cities, famed in the annals of science and art, were reduced to heaps of smoldering ruins. . . .” No wonder that, learning of this, a civilized European man like Joseph Schumpeter, at Harvard, was driven to telling “anyone who would listen” “that Churchill and Roosevelt were destroying more than Genghis Khan.”
According to the official history of the Royal Air Force: “The destruction of Germany was by then on a scale which might have appalled Attila or Genghis Khan.” Dresden was filled with masses of helpless refugees running for their lives ahead of the advancing Red Army. The war was practically over, but for three days and nights, from February 13 to 15, 1945, British bombs pounded Dresden, killing as many as 135,000 people or more in three days. After the massacre, Churchill attempted to disclaim responsibility; even casually saying “I thought the Americans did it.”
The terror bombing of Germany and the killing of civilians continued as late as the middle of April, 1945. It only stopped, as Bomber Harris noted, because there were essentially no more targets left to be bombed in Germany.
In order to kill a maximum number of Germans, Winston Churchill dismissed politics or policy as a ’secondary consideration,’ and on at least two occasions said that there were “no lengths of violence to which we would not go” in order to achieve his objective. In fact he said this publicly in a speech given on September 31, 1943, and again in the House of Commons, on February 27, 1945, when unbelievable lengths of violence had already taken place. If Hitler had uttered this phrase, we would all cite it as more evidence of his barbarism. Yet, when Churchill utters it, his apologists palm it off as the resoluteness required of a great statesman, rather than describing it as an urge for mass, indiscriminate murder.
Of course, Churchill supported the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which resulted in the deaths of another 200,000 civilians. When Truman fabricated the myth of the “500,000 American lives saved” to justify his mass murder, Churchill felt the need to top his lie: the atomic bombings had saved 1,200,000 lives, including 1,000,000 Americans. It was all just another of Churchill’s fantasies.
Yet, after all this slaughter, Churchill would write: “The goal of World War II [was] to revive the status of man.”
Churchill and the Cold War
Among Churchill’s many war crimes, there are also those crimes and atrocities for which he is culpable that occurred following the war.
These include the forced repatriation of some two million old people, men, women, and children to the Soviet Union to their deaths. Then there were the massacres carried out by Churchill’s protégé, Tito: tens of thousands of Croats, Slovenes and other “class-enemies” and anti-Communists were killed.
In the wake of the armies of Churchill’s friend and ally, the mass deportations began. But Churchill was unmoved. In January 1945 he said: “Why are we making a fuss about the Russian deportations in Rumania of Saxons [Germans] and others? . . . I cannot see the Russians are wrong in making 100 or 150 thousand of these people work their passage. . . . I cannot myself consider that it is wrong of the Russians to take Rumanians of any origin they like to work in the Russian coal-fields.” Here Churchill, the great friend of liberty as Bush described him, approves of slavery. About 500,000 German civilians were enslaved to work in Soviet Russia, in accordance with the Yalta agreement where Churchill and Roosevelt agreed that slave labor constituted a proper form of “reparations.”
Then there was the great atrocity of the expulsion of 15 million Germans from their ancestral homelands in East and West Prussia, Silesia, Pomerania, and the Sudetenland, pursuant to Churchill’s mad plan to violently uproot the entire polish population and move Poland westward, which he demonstrated with a set of matchsticks, and to Churchill’s acceptance of the Czech leader Eduard Benes’s plan for the ethnic cleansing of Bohemia and Moravia. Around two million German civilians died in this process. An entire ancient culture was obliterated. This sort of cultural jihad used to be something conservatives opposed. Today’s neoconservatives instead, who evidently embrace the Marxist doctrine of sweeping away the past, would surely argue that in order to create, one must first destroy, or in that old Stalinist phrase, to make an omelet, you must first break a few eggs.
A large factor in the litany of Churchill’s war crimes was his racism. Churchill was an English chauvinist, a British racist, and like Wilson, loathed the so-called “dirty whites,” the French, Italians and other Latin’s, and Slavs like the Serbs, Poles, Russians, etc…. Churchill professed Darwinism, and particularly disliked the Catholic Church and Christian missions. He became, in his own words, “a materialist to the tips of my fingers,” and fervently upheld the worldview that human life is a struggle for existence, with the outcome the survival of the fittest.
In 1919, as Colonial Secretary Churchill advocated the use of chemical weapons on the “uncooperative Arabs” in the puppet state of Iraq. “I do not understand the squeamishness about the use of gas,” he declared. “I am strongly in favor of using poison gas against uncivilized tribes.” Some year’s later, gassing human beings to death would make other men infamous.
An example of Churchill’s racial views are his comments made in 1937: “I do not admit that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race, has come in and taken their place.”
In Churchill’s single-minded decades-long obsession with preventing a single hegemonic power from arising on the European continent that would pose a threat to the British Empire, he failed to see that his alliance with Stalin produced exactly that. “As the blinkers of war were removed,” John Charmley writes, “Churchill began to perceive the magnitude of the mistake which had been made.” Churchill is alleged to have blurted out after finally realizing the scale of his blunder: “We have slaughtered the wrong pig!”
But it was too late. For decades Churchill worked for the destruction of Germany. Yet only after Stalin had devoured half of Europe did this “great statesman” realize that destroying the ability of Germany to act as a counterbalance to Russia left Europe ripe for invasion and conquest by a resurgent Russia.
By 1946 Churchill was complaining in a voice of outrage about the Iron Curtain of tyranny that descended on Eastern Europe. But Churchill helped to weave the fabric.
With the balance of power in Europe wrecked by his own hand, Churchill saw only one recourse: to bind America to Europe permanently. Thus Churchill returned to his tried-and-true strategy, embroiling the United States in another war. This time a “Cold War” that would entrench the military-industrial complex and change America forever.
Conclusion
With his lack of principles and scruples, Churchill was involved in one way or another in nearly every disaster that befell the 20th century. He helped destroy laissez-faire liberalism, he played a role in the Crash of 1929, he helped start WWI, and by bringing in America to help, prolonged the war and created the conditions for the rise of Nazism, prolonged WWII, laid the groundwork for Soviet domination, helped involve America in a cold war with Russia, and pioneered in the development of total war and undermining western civilized standards.
Chris Matthews described Churchill as the “man who save[d] the honor of the 20th century.” Rather than this great accolade, Winston Churchill must be ranked with Karl Marx, Woodrow Wilson, Vladimir Lenin, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt as one of the destroyers of the values and greatness of Western civilization.
And it is fitting that the Library of Congress exhibition is entitled “Churchill and the Great Republic” because few men have done more to overthrow the American Republic(s) and institute the great centralized global war machine that has taken its place.
———————————————————
SHATTERING THE CHURCHILL MYTH: FACING FACTS, AND BECOMING ADULTS
by Arthur Silber [källa]
[I first published this essay on November 18, 2004. I offer it again now, primarily because of a recent entry from Jim Henley. In particular, I want to respond to this paragraph (emphasis added):
Speaking of Churchill, he’s a totem figure, I realize, because of his early, vocal warnings about Hitler. And I’ll give him that one. Wasn’t he also a bitter-ender regarding Ireland and India? Would England have been better off politically and morally if they’d drawn out violent campaigns even further against the liberation movements in those places? It seems hard to credit. On the other hand, Churchill wrote, with hindsight, that the US should have stayed out of World War I, so I resist the “stopped clock” explanation that Churchill got lucky because in Hitler he finally met a foreigner who conformed to his instincts. But I suspect that the lesson of Churchill may be that once in awhile, a hawk is showing great foresight; you just can’t, in advance, say when.
Jim Henley is an unusually perceptive man, and I very frequently agree with him. Here, however, even this evaluation gives Churchill far too much credit, just as a great many other people do. As the following demonstrates, Churchill's hatred of Nazism was, in fact, a hatred of everything German, and it had its roots in the old, endless rivalry between England and Germany for power on the world stage. It had precious little to do with the specific evils embodied by Hitler.
An appreciation of Churchill's actual, full record leads to only one conclusion: he was an entirely contemptible man, one whose policies led to destruction and death on an incomprehensible scale. I can only echo Ralph Raico's final judgment:
[W]hen all is said and done, Winston Churchill was a man of blood and a politico without principle, whose apotheosis serves to corrupt every standard of honesty and morality in politics and history.
The tenacity of the Churchill myth is instructive: the kind of idolatry focused on Churchill (and Reagan, and several others similarly situated — and even on Bush by his most ardent and self-blinded worshippers) reveals a gross kind of immaturity on the part of a distressingly large number of people. Without their Great Men to whom they can turn for protection in times of danger, they appear to feel utterly helpless and to believe they are doomed to destruction. That may represent an accurate judgment as to the courage of the idolators themselves but, as I discuss below, it also unmasks an attitude of boundless contempt for mankind in general. (At some point, I will be discussing the nature of this particular kind of widespread cultural immaturity in the series I began yesterday, Systems of Obedience.)
The tone of this essay, especially in my opening paragraphs, is admittedly quite heated. I remember how entirely fed up I was when I wrote it — fed up with the inane, ludicrous, and groundless defenses of Bush and our foreign policy, to say nothing of the comparisons to allegedly Great Men like Churchill. If people wish to defend Bush and the catastrophe of Iraq, they are certainly entitled to do so — but they would do all of us a favor, not least themselves, by finding arguments that do not disregard all the relevant facts, and that only insult their own and our intelligence.
I also feel more than entitled to point out on my own behalf that all the events that have transpired since I wrote this more than support my judgments. Besides, I have to confess that I rather like the style of this essay. When properly directed, anger and passion can result in writing with some color and imagination. I dare to think I might have achieved that to some extent in what follows.]
A sympathetic historian, Paul Addison, Churchill on the Home Front 1900-1955 (London, Pimlico, 1993), p. 438, phrases the same point this way: “Since [Churchill] never allowed himself to be hampered by a fixed programme or a rigid ideology, his ideas evolved as he adapted himself to the times.” Oddly enough, Churchill himself confessed, in 1898: “I do not care so much for the principles I advocate as for the impression which my words produce and the reputation they give me.” Clive Ponting, Churchill (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1994), p. 32.
For some of Churchill’s distortions [about "his role in World War II," as set forth in "the distorted histories he composed and rushed into print as soon as the war was over"], see Tuvia Ben-Moshe, Churchill: Strategy and History (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1992), pp. 329-33; Dietrich Algner, “Winston Churchill (1874-1965)” in Politiker des 20. Jahrhunderts, 1, Die Epoche der Wellkriege, Rolf K. Hocever, et al., eds. (Munich: Beck, 1970), p. 318 states that Churchill, in his works on World War II, “laid the foundation of a legend that is nothing less than a straightforward travesty of the historical truth. … But the Churchill version of World War II and its prehistory remains unshaken, the power of his eloquence extends beyond the grave.” Algner, incidentally, is an informed, scholarly critic of Churchill, and by no means a “right-wing radical.”
In 1925, Churchill wrote: “The story of the human race is war.” This, however, is untrue; potentially, it is disastrously untrue. Churchill lacked any grasp of the fundamentals of the social philosophy of classical liberalism. In particular, he never understood that, as Ludwig von Mises explained, the true story of the human race is the extension of social cooperation and the division of labor. Peace, not war, is the father of all things. For Churchill, the years without war offered nothing to him but “the bland skies of peace and platitude.” This was a man, as we shall see, who wished for more wars than actually happened.
Churchill’s devotees by no means hold his role in bringing America into World War II against him. On the contrary, they count it in his favor. Harry Jaffa, in his uninformed and frantic apology, seems to be the last person alive who refuses to believe that the Man of Many Centuries was responsible to any degree for America’s entry into the war: after all, wasn’t it the Japanese who bombed Pearl Harbor?
But what of the American Republic? What does it mean for us that a President collaborated with a foreign head of government to entangle us in a world war? The question would have mattered little to Churchill. He had no concern with the United States as a sovereign, independent nation, with its own character and place in the scheme of things. For him, Americans were one of “the English-speaking peoples.” He looked forward to a common citizenship for Britons and Americans, “a mixing together,” on the road to Anglo-American world hegemony.
But the Churchill-Roosevelt intrigue should, one might think, matter to Americans. Here, however, criticism is halted before it starts. A moral postulate of our time is that in pursuit of the destruction of Hitler, all things were permissible. Yet why is it self-evident that morality required a crusade against Hitler in 1939 and 1940, and not against Stalin? At that point, Hitler had slain his thousands, but Stalin had already slain his millions. In fact, up to June 1941, the Soviets behaved far more murderously toward the Poles in their zone of occupation than the Nazis did in theirs. Around 1,500,000 Poles were deported to the Gulag, with about half of them dying within the first two years. As Norman Davies writes: “Stalin was outpacing Hitler in his desire to reduce the Poles to the condition of a slave nation.” Of course, there were balance-of-power considerations that created distinctions between the two dictators. But it has yet to be explained why there should exist a double standard ordaining that compromise with one dictator would have been “morally sickening” while collaboration with the other was morally irreproachable. [All footnotes omitted; all emphases above added.]
On those unfortunate occasions over the past two years when I have been bombastically, excessively and ignorantly regaled with tales of the heroism, moral fortitude and unblemished character of the current, eminently undeserving occupant of the Oval Office, it has sometimes also been my regrettable fate to hear one George W. Bush favorably compared to other, allegedly similarly “great” historical figures. Prominent among these latter have been Ronald Reagan and Winston Churchill. It appears that Mr. Bush completes the Holy Trinity of Fearless, Implacable Destroyers of Ultimate Evil, Without Whom All Traces of Civilization Would Have Vanished from the Universe As We Know It.
I might begin by noting that one wonders just how many times Ultimate Evil will appear to threaten the future of mankind. If such Evil is truly “Ultimate,” surely that characterization places it in the same category as “unique,” does it not? (”Unique,” I ruefully note, is similarly abused: unique originally meant “being the only one,” although most people appear to forget that uniquely salient fact about its meaning.) But, to some extent at least, I have already covered that ground. I have also dealt with the actual record of Mr. Reagan [in a number of essays that may be reposted at some point], as opposed to Mr. Reagan’s rhetoric, which admittedly contained many inspirational and even libertarian-sounding passages. Would that he might have cared more about translating those passages into action here on the Earth he was supposedly saving, rather than about the more superficial effects they produced. But they did sound enormously attractive (and occasionally inspiring, as I say), and they certainly served to convince many people who ought to have known better that Mr. Reagan was a more transformative figure in historic terms than the facts bear out.
One might also be pardoned for having thought that at least some of these same misguided idolators might surely know better by now, but the occasion of Mr. Reagan’s death served to permanently dissolve unpleasant facts in the acid of grief and myth-making which appears to be one of those paradoxically celebratory rituals in which our disturbingly neurotic culture periodically indulges itself. I have dealt with the actual qualities exhibited by Mr. Bush in great detail in numerous entries here. One could legitimately describe Mr. Bush in many ways, but the facts are scarce and difficult of ascertainment to support characterizations on the order of “heroic” or embodying “moral fortitude” and “unblemished character.” Perhaps “bizarrely detached from reality,” or “profoundly anti-American,” or “incapable of forthright, coherent speech,” or “dedicated to obliterating individual rights” would be more to the point. No matter; Mr. Bush has now been sanctified by a landslide of historic proportions (or has he?), and facts that might undercut the already-burgeoning Bush Legend begin to vanish in the murky depths of uncertain collective memory. [In the year and a half since I wrote this, the general judgment of Bush appears, at long last, to be undergoing a significant shift. This is a very welcome change -- although it must be noted that it is several years, countless unnecessary deaths and grievous injuries, and many possibly irreversible and disastrous consequences too late. The evidence was there very soon after 9/11, but for far too many people, the demands of popular mythology take precedence over facts, and even over growing piles of corpses.]
One might also wonder about some of the underpinnings of this “Great Man” theory of history, which posits that absent these particular individuals, all manner of disastrous calamities would have overtaken pitiful, otherwise helpless humanity. Surely these worshippers of the Holy Trinity do not mean to dismiss all the rest of mankind as being entirely incapable of recognizing and defeating serious threats to their future…or do they? This “Great Man” theory becomes even more puzzling when it is offered, as it so often is, by people who simultaneously proclaim what they believe to be the ultimately determinative function of the ideas that a great number of men regard as true. If, as they claim, history would have been fundamentally altered had these great personalities not held power when they did, then ideas cannot be all that important, can they? But perhaps we can ponder these peculiarities, if not outright contradictions, of the views of the Worshippers of Great Men in more detail on another occasion.
For the moment, let us turn our attention for a while to the remaining pillar of the Holy Trinity of Civilization’s Saviours, Winston Churchill. The quotations set forth at the beginning of this entry are from Ralph Raico’s superb essay, “Rethinking Churchill,” which will be found in the equally superb and invaluable volume, The Costs of War: America’s Pyrrhic Victories. I recommend you purchase it immediately. I have mentioned Raico’s work before, at length in this essay about the critical turning point in America’s foreign policy, the Spanish-American War [also to be reposted]. It is worth noting again that the same people who idolize men such as Bush, Reagan and Churchill appear similarly ignorant about this all-important episode in American history. It seems that the myth of the United States as the sole nation in world history dedicated at all times to liberating the oppressed people of the world is as central to the idolizers’ psychology as their desperate need for the Saviour Father Figure, without whom none of us would be safe from harm. The fact that the United States sometimes employs means requiring the death of hundreds of thousands of Filipino civilians — or 100,000 Iraqis — is of no moment; the only significant element is the United States’ intentions, which are always impossibly pure, noble and transcendent. In the face of such high-sounding intentions, no matter how distant they may be from the actual results of the policies employed in fact, mounds of human corpses are a trivial detail. [See this more recent essay as well, which has much more about the Philippines episode.]
I can only aspire to such intellectual detachment from the sordid details of human death and suffering. It is a goal worthy of emulation in each and every moment of the comparatively paltry existences of lesser mortals, who look upon piles of broken human bodies and occasionally wonder: Why? What supposed purpose can possibly justify this? It appears that certain questions are too disturbing for some people to contemplate, although they would hasten to enlighten us as to how we are “missing the point” by considering them. “The point,” of course, is the Great Idea.
I will grant the Worshippers of the Saviours of Humanity — who also worship at the shrine of the Great Idea, a notion so “great” that it proves incapable of being reattached to facts here on Earth — that Churchill genuinely appreciated the Great Idea. Not for Churchill, any mere concern with messy details concerning adherence to principle or for the effects of the Great Idea on the lives of particular men. And what was the Great Idea which so animated Churchill’s life? Raico tells us (in the following excerpts, as in those above, I have added the emphases and eliminated footnotes):
Finally, there was what appeared to be the abiding love of his life, the British Empire. If Churchill stood for anything at all, it was the Empire; he famously said that he had not become Prime Minister in order to preside over its liquidation. But that, of course, is precisely what he did, selling out the Empire and everything else for the sake of total victory over Germany.
Raico notes that one other principle “for a long while seemed dear to Churchill’s heart” — anti-Communism. But Raico goes on:
Yet the time came when Churchill made his peace with Communism. In 1941, he gave unconditional support to Stalin, welcoming him as an ally, embraced him as a friend. Churchill, as well as Roosevelt, used the affectionate nickname, “Uncle Joe”; as late as the Potsdam conference, he repeatedly announced, of Stalin: “I like that man.” In suppressing the evidence that the Polish officers at Katyn had been murdered by the Soviets, he remarked: “There is no use prowling round the three year old graves of Smolensk.” Obsessed not only with defeating Hitler, but with destroying Germany, Churchill was oblivious to the danger of a Soviet inundation of Europe until it was far too late. The climax of his infatuation came at the November, 1943, Tehran conference, when Churchill presented Stalin with a Crusader’s sword. Those who are concerned to define the word “obscenity” may wish to ponder that episode.
I doubt that even episodes such as these will disturb the Churchill worshippers for long; they are as unconcerned with uncomfortable facts as Churchill himself was. “There is no use prowling round” the details of history, after all.
Speaking of forgetting uncomfortable facts, let us not forget this either:
Although his conservative idolators seem blithely unaware of the fact–for them it is always 1940–Churchill was one of the chief architects of the welfare state in Britain. The modern welfare state, successor to the welfare state of 18th-century absolutism, began in the 1880s in Germany, under Bismarck. In England, the legislative turning point came when Asquith succeeded Campbell-Bannerman as Prime Minister in 1908; his reorganized cabinet included David Lloyd George at the Exchequer and Churchill at the Board of Trade.
…
Churchill “had already announced his conversion to a collectivist social policy” before his move to the Board of Trade. His constant theme became “the just precedence” of public over private interests. He took up the fashionable social-engineering cliches of the time, asserting that: “Science, physical and political alike, revolts at the disorganisation which glares at us in so many aspects of modern life,” and that “the nation demands the application of drastic corrective and curative processes.” The state was to acquire canals and railroads, develop certain national industries, provide vastly augmented education, introduce the eight-hour work day, levy progressive taxes, and guarantee a national minimum living standard. It is no wonder that Beatrice Webb [one of the leaders of the Fabian Society] noted that Churchill was “definitely casting in his lot with the constructive state action.”
…
Besides pushing for a variety of social insurance schemes, Churchill created the system of national labor exchanges; he wrote to Prime Minister Asquith of the need to “spread … a sort of Germanized network of state intervention and regulation” over the British labor market. But Churchill entertained much more ambitious goals for the Board of Trade. He proposed a plan whereby:
["]The Board of Trade was to act as the ‘intelligence department’ of the Government, forecasting trade and employment in the regions so that the Government could allocate contracts to the most deserving areas. At the summit … would be a Committee of National Organisation, chaired by the Chancellor of the Exchequer to supervise the economy.["]
How odd that so many of Churchill’s current idolators would seem to disagree with every aspect of this “collectivist social policy.” No matter; there is a Myth to be maintained, and the facts be damned.
Raico moves further along the trajectory of Churchill’s career:
So far Churchill had been engaged in politics for 30 years, with not much to show for it except a certain notoriety. His great claim to fame in the modern mythology begins with his hard line against Hitler in the 1930s. But it is important to realize that Churchill had maintained a hard line against Weimar Germany, as well. He denounced all calls for Allied disarmament, even before Hitler came to power. Like other Allied leaders, Churchill was living a protracted fantasy: that Germany would submit forever to what it viewed as the shackles of Versailles. In the end, what Britain and France refused to grant to a democratic Germany they were forced to concede to Hitler.
Ironically–considering that it was a pillar of his future fame–his drumbeating about the German danger was yet another position on which Churchill reneged. In the fall of 1937, he stated:
["]Three or four years ago I was myself a loud alarmist. … In spite of the risks which wait on prophecy, I declare my belief that a major war is not imminent, and I still believe that there is a good chance of no major war taking place in our lifetime. … I will not pretend that, if I had to choose between Communism and Nazism, I would choose Communism.["]
For all the claptrap about Churchill’s “far-sightedness” during the 30s in opposing the “appeasers,” in the end the policy of the Chamberlain government–to rearm as quickly as possible, while testing the chances for peace with Germany–was more realistic than Churchill’s.
The common mythology is so far from historical truth that even an ardent Churchill sympathizer, Gordon Craig, feels obliged to write:
["]The time is long past when it was possible to see the protracted debate over British foreign policy in the 1930s as a struggle between Churchill, an angel of light, fighting against the velleities of uncomprehending and feeble men in high places. It is reasonably well-known today that Churchill was often ill-informed, that his claims about German strength were exaggerated and his prescriptions impractical, that his emphasis on air power was misplaced.["]
Moreover, as a British historian has recently noted: “For the record, it is worth recalling that in the 1930s Churchill did not oppose the appeasement of either Italy or Japan.” It is also worth recalling that it was the pre-Churchill British governments that furnished the material with which Churchill was able to win the Battle of Britain. Clive Ponting has observed:
["]the Baldwin and Chamberlain governments…had ensured that Britain was the first country in the world to deploy a fully integrated system of air defence based on radar detection of incoming aircraft and ground control of fighters…Churchill’s contribution had been to pour scorn on radar when he was in opposition in the 1930s.["]
The following is of critical importance, although this appears to be a subject still considered entirely off-limits by the Myth-Worshippers in our midst:
Even after the fall of France, Churchill rejected Hitler’s renewed peace overtures. This, more than anything else, is supposed to be the foundation of his greatness. The British historian John Charmley raised a storm of outraged protest when he suggested that a negotiated peace in 1940 might have been to the advantage of Britain and Europe. A Yale historian, writing in the New York Times Book Review, referred to Charmley’s thesis as “morally sickening.” Yet Charmley’s scholarly and detailed work makes the crucial point that Churchill’s adamant refusal even to listen to peace terms in 1940 doomed what he claimed was dearest to him–the Empire and a Britain that was non-socialist and independent in world affairs. One may add that it probably also doomed European Jewry. It is amazing that half a century after the fact, there are critical theses concerning World War II that are off-limits to historical debate.
Lloyd George, Halifax, and the others were open to a compromise peace because they understood that Britain and the Dominions alone could not defeat Germany. After the fall of France, Churchill’s aim of total victory could be realized only under one condition: that the United States become embroiled in another world war. No wonder that Churchill put his heart and soul into ensuring precisely that.
In connection with his remark about “doomed European Jewry,” Raico has this excerpt from The Goebbels Diaries
:
On March 27, 1942, Goebbels commented in his diary on the destruction of the European Jews, which was then underway: “Here, too, the Fuhrer is the undismayed champion of a radical solution necessitated by conditions and therefore inexorable. Fortunately, a whole series of possibilities presents itself for us in wartime that would be denied us in peacetime. We shall have to profit by this.” He added: “the fact that Jewry’s representatives in England and America are today organizing and sponsoring the war against Germany must be paid for dearly by its representatives in Europe–and that’s only right.”
No, I am not suggesting for a moment that Goebbels’ disgusting “justification” for the extermination of the Jews should be given any weight at all — although you can rest assured that certain defenders of the Great Man Myth will happily, if wrongly, seize on this detail to smear me and discredit all of these arguments if they should happen upon this essay. But what Raico and the other historians are pointing out, with a great number of facts to support their contention, is that Churchill’s determination to destroy Germany as a competing power — a Germany under any form of government, even a democratic one — and his total dedication to ensuring that Germany would forever remain under the “shackles” imposed by Britain and her allies had costs and consequences, and some of them were so dreadful that they defy comprehension.
Raico has a number of further details about Churchill’s hatred for everything German, whether it related specifically to Nazism or not, including these:
In October, 1944, Churchill was still explaining to Stalin that: “The problem was how to prevent Germany getting on her feet in the lifetime of our grandchildren.” Churchill harbored a “confusion of mind on the subject of the Prussian aristocracy, Nazism, and the sources of German militarist expansionism…[his view] … arose from a combination of almost racialist antipathy and balance of power calculations.” Churchill’s aim was not simply to save world civilization from the Nazis, but, in his words, the “indefinite prevention of their [the Germans'] rising again as an Armed Power.”
Little wonder, then, that Churchill refused even to listen to the pleas of the anti-Hitler German opposition, which tried repeatedly to establish liaison with the British government. Instead of making every effort to encourage and assist an anti-Nazi coup in Germany, Churchill responded to the feelers sent out by the German resistance with cold silence. Reiterated warnings from Adam von Trott and other resistance leaders of the impending “bolshevization” of Europe made no impression at all on Churchill. A recent historian has written: “by his intransigence and refusal to countenance talks with dissident Germans, Churchill threw away an opportunity to end the war in July 1944.” To add infamy to stupidity, Churchill and his crowd had only words of scorn for the valiant German officers even as they were being slaughtered by the Gestapo.
Raico’s essay contains much, much more, including many details concerning the profoundly revolting manner in which Churchill and Roosevelt eagerly surrendered much of Europe to Stalin and Soviet Russia, forever removing their own justifications for having eagerly allied themselves with such a monster.
Here is Raico describing what happened after Germany’s defeat:
And so we come to 1945 and the ever-radiant triumph of Absolute Good over Absolute Evil. …
The dark side of that triumph, however, has been all but suppressed. It is the story of the crimes and atrocities of the victors and their proteges. Since Winston Churchill played a central role in the Allied victory, it is the story also of the crimes and atrocities in which Churchill was implicated. These include the forced repatriation of some two million Soviet subjects to the Soviet Union. Among these were tens of thousands who had fought with the Germans against Stalin, under the sponsorship of General Flasov and his “Russian Army of Liberation.” …
Most shameful of all was the handing over of the Cossacks. They had never been Soviet citizens, since they had fought against the Red Army in the Civil War and then emigrated. Stalin, understandably, was particularly keen to get hold of them, and the British obliged. Solzhenitsyn wrote, of Winston Churchill:
["]He turned over to the Soviet command the Cossack corps of 90,000 men. Along with them he also handed over many wagonloads of old people, women, and children. … This great hero, monuments to whom will in time cover all England, ordered that they, too, be surrendered to their deaths.["]
…
Worst of all was the expulsion of some 15 million Germans from their ancestral homelands in East and West Prussia, Silesia, Pomerania, and the Sudentenland. This was done pursuant to the agreements at Tehran, where Churchill proposed that Poland be “moved west,” and to Churchill’s acquiescence in the Czech leader Eduard Benes’s plan for the “ethnic cleansing” of Bohemia and Moravia. Around one-and-a-half to two million German civilians died in this process. As the Hungarian liberal Gaspar Tamas wrote, in driving out the Germans of east-central Europe, “whose ancestors built our cathedrals, monasteries, universities, and railroad stations,” a whole ancient culture was effaced. But why should that mean anything to the Churchill devotees who call themselves “conservatives” in America today?
When one realizes that what such people are so zealous about “conserving” are only the myths without which their false image of themselves apparently would collapse, one understands why no number of facts such as these will make even a dent in their massive walls of denial. No number of deaths can compete with the desperate need to maintain a person’s precarious sense of psychological identity.
Interestingly enough, Raico notes that after the war “Churchill’s own expressions of profound self-doubt consort oddly with his admirers’ own expressions of triumphalism.” Indeed, in the preface to The Gathering Storm, the opening volume of Churchill’s history of World War II, he wrote:
The human tragedy reaches its climax in the fact that after all the exertions and sacrifices of hundreds of millions of people and of the victories of the Righteous Cause, we have still not found Peace or Security, and that we lie in the grip of even worse perils than those we have surmounted.
As I have often noted before, this is the pattern followed by all wars of the past one hundred years: World War I created greater dangers than had existed before that conflict, which dangers led to World War II, which led to the “even worse perils” that even Churchill himself finally recognized — the unrecognized tragedy and betrayal lying in the fact that it was the actions of men like Churchill and Roosevelt that made those “worse perils” possible, and inevitable.
Moreover, this is the same pattern we continue to follow today: Bush can keep repeating all he likes — and to the great, unending delight of his adoring, unthinking idolators — that the invasion and occupation of Iraq have made the United States and the world safer than they were before, but facts will not be obliterated by a rhetoric of lies and deception. And every expert who actually studies terrorism agrees that our continued occupation of Iraq, together with the constantly growing swath of destruction and death that the Iraqis’ increasing resentment makes unavoidable as long as we remain, has only increased the terrorist threat — and that our own actions recruit more new members to the terrorists’ cause than they could dream of doing themselves.
This, too, is history repeating. The British trod the same path in Iraq almost one hundred years ago, and finally had to leave, having accomplished nothing except destruction and death. If he were still alive today, Churchill no doubt would have forgotten that history, although he himself was involved in it — and would have urged Bush on the suicidal path he was determined to follow. In the face of mankind’s endless capacity for denial, coupled with its endless quest for revenge and bloodshed even when such destruction leads only to greater dangers than had previously existed, it is no inconsiderable miracle that we have managed to survive this long. But we should not, and cannot, count on miracles to preserve us indefinitely.
I am tempted to say to those who cling to their indispensable myths that they should simply grow up and be adults. Face the indisputable facts, including the unending trail of death that our choices have brought us to date, and then adjust your direction accordingly. If enough people did just that, we might have a chance.
To that end, pick up The Costs of War, read Raico’s essay and the other enormously valuable articles the book contains. And then perhaps we can agree as adults with Raico’s conclusion:
[W]hen all is said and done, Winston Churchill was a man of blood and a politico without principle, whose apotheosis serves to corrupt every standard of honesty and morality in politics and history.
That judgment need not be the end of the story, but the end only to lies and myths which are undercut on every side by the overwhelming weight of facts. If we seek new wisdom and a new direction, it can serve as renewal, and a new beginning — one founded on truth, and justice, and the value of a single human life.
For finally, that is all that truly matters: the irreplaceable, supreme value of a unique human being. Faced with the choice between the prospect of peace and happiness for that individual man or woman, or the lies we need only to maintain our vanity and myths, choosing should not be so difficult after all.
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Sist men inte minst, historikern Ralph Raicos studie i fem delar: RETHIKING CHURCHILL.
