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<font color="#002864" size="1" face="Verdana">http://www.mises.org/fullstory.asp?control=1450</font>
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<font face="Verdana" size="2"><font color="#002864"><strong><font size="5">The Real Churchill</font></strong></font>
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<p class="MsoBodyText"><font size="4">by Adam Young</font>
<p class="MsoBodyText">[Posted February 27, 2004]
<p class="MsoBodyText"><img alt src="http://www.mises.org/images3/churchill.gif" align="right" border="0" width="179" height="248">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.
<p class="MsoBodyText">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.
<p class="MsoBodyText">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.
<p class="MsoBodyText">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.
<p class="MsoBodyText"><strong>Churchill the Opportunist</strong>
<p class="MsoBodyText">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.
<p class="MsoBodyText">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.
<p class="MsoBodyText">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."
<p class="MsoBodyText">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...."
<p class="MsoBodyText">The great English classical liberal John Morley, after
working with Churchill, passed a succinct appraisal of him,
"Winston," he said,"has no principles."
<p class="MsoBodyText">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.
<p class="MsoBodyText">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."
<p class="MsoBodyText">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.
<p class="MsoBodyText">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."
<p class="MsoBodyText">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.
<p class="MsoBodyText">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.
<p class="MsoBodyText">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.
<p class="MsoBodyText"><strong>Churchill the Socialist</strong>
<p class="MsoBodyText">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.
<p class="MsoBodyText">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."
<p class="MsoBodyText">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."
<p class="MsoBodyText">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."
<p class="MsoBodyText">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.
<p class="MsoBodyText">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.
<p class="MsoBodyText">We can only conclude by Churchill's actions that
personal freedom was the furthest thing from his mind.
<p class="MsoBodyText"><strong>Churchill and the First World War</strong>
<p class="MsoBodyText">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."
<p class="MsoBodyText">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."
<p class="MsoBodyText">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.
<p class="MsoBodyText"><strong>The Lusitania</strong>
<p class="MsoBodyText">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.
<p class="MsoBodyText">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."
<p class="MsoBodyText">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.
<p class="MsoBodyText">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.
<p class="MsoBodyText">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."
<p class="MsoBodyText"><strong>Churchill Between the Wars</strong>
<p class="MsoBodyText">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.
<p class="MsoBodyText"><strong>The Crash of 1929</strong>
<p class="MsoBodyText">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.
<p class="MsoBodyText">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.
<p class="MsoBodyText">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.
<p class="MsoBodyText">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.
<p class="MsoBodyText">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.
<p class="MsoBodyText">But as in all things, even with this Churchill reversed
himself. In the fall of 1937, he stated:
<p class="MsoBodyText">"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."
<p class="MsoBodyText">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.
<p class="MsoBodyText">The common mythology is so far from historical truth
that even an ardent Churchill sympathizer, Gordon Craig, felt obliged to write:
<p class="MsoBodyText">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.
<p class="MsoBodyText">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."
<p class="MsoBodyText"><strong>Churchill and the Second World War</strong>
<p class="MsoBodyText">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.
<p class="MsoBodyText">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."
<p class="MsoBodyText">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.
<p class="MsoBodyText">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.
<p class="MsoBodyText">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.
<p class="MsoBodyText">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.
<p class="MsoBodyText">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.
<p class="MsoBodyText">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.
<p class="MsoBodyText">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.
<p class="MsoBodyText">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."
<p class="MsoBodyText">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."
<p class="MsoBodyText">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."
<p class="MsoBodyText">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."
<p class="MsoBodyText">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?
<p class="MsoBodyText">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.
<p class="MsoBodyText">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.
<p class="MsoBodyText">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."
<p class="MsoBodyText">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.
<p class="MsoBodyText">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.
<p class="MsoBodyText"><strong>The War Crimes</strong>
<p class="MsoBodyText">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.
<p class="MsoBodyText">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.
<p class="MsoBodyText">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.
<p class="MsoBodyText">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."
<p class="MsoBodyText">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.
<p class="MsoBodyText">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."
<p class="MsoBodyText">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."
<p class="MsoBodyText">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.
<p class="MsoBodyText">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.
<p class="MsoBodyText">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.
<p class="MsoBodyText">Yet, after all this slaughter, Churchill would write:
"The goal of World War II [was] to revive the status of man."
<p class="MsoBodyText"><strong>Churchill and the Cold War</strong>
<p class="MsoBodyText">Among Churchill's many war crimes, there are also those
crimes and atrocities for which he is culpable that occurred following the
war.
<p class="MsoBodyText">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.
<p class="MsoBodyText">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."
<p class="MsoBodyText">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.
<p class="MsoBodyText">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.
<p class="MsoBodyText">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.
<p class="MsoBodyText">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."
<p class="MsoBodyText">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!"
<p class="MsoBodyText">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.
<p class="MsoBodyText">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.
<p class="MsoBodyText">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.
<p class="MsoBodyText"><strong>Conclusion</strong>
<p class="MsoBodyText">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.
<p class="MsoBodyText">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.
<p class="MsoBodyText">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.
<p class="MsoBodyText"><span class="727300914-27022004">______________________</span>
<p class="MsoBodyText">Adam Young is co-founder of The Resume Store, a
Canadian-based service offering resumes and cover letters. Send him MAIL,
and see his Mises.org
Articles Archive.
<p class="MsoBodyText">Bibliography:
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