Winston Churchill has become a favourite punching-bag of the far-left in recent years. Some have even gone as far as to put him in the same moral category as Hitler. Since Churchill is seen as one of the great heroes of Western and liberal civilisation, the surest way of discrediting it is to discredit the man who helped to place it on stable foundations. An avalanche of slander and misinformation has characterised articles and books about Churchill ever since. To my shame, when I was a member of the International Marxist Tendency I promoted these lies. I should have known better, but it is not too late to correct my mistake.
Let us analyse an article published by the Marxist Student Federation, the youth wing of the IMT in Britain. This is part of a hilariously misnamed ‘Tell the Truth’ series which it has started recently. Of course, the purpose of these articles is to do the exact opposite of telling the truth. It is to spread lies and slanders against the great men of British and Western history, and fill the minds of our young people with nonsense. The blatant untruths begin with the very first paragraph:
Churchill was the son of Lord Randolph Churchill and a wealthy American heiress, Jennie Jerome. Churchill was conscious that he was part of a ruling class. He felt he was personally born to rule and was a man of extraordinary ambition. He dreamed from a young age of being a great journalist or war leader. His school performance, however, was mediocre and only on the third attempt did he make it into Sandhurst. His journalistic career meanwhile owed everything to his wealthy mother’s connections and little to talent.
There is universal agreement that Churchill was a boastful young man who dreamed of greatness. As a young man he once told a friend that one day, he would be called upon to save London and save the Empire in a time of great danger. This over-confidence actually played in Churchill’s favour when the moment did come for him to lead Britain through the turmoil of WWII. That part of the paragraph is correct. The bit about his school performance and his journalistic career, consists of bare-faced lies. Andrew Roberts, in his critically-acclaimed biography of Churchill, published in 2018, puts the record straight about Churchill’s schooldays:
In My Early Life, Churchill boated of how badly he had done in the entrance exam, and one of his school contemporaries, Sir Gerald Woods Wollaston (later Garter King of Arms), recalled that ‘The inconvenience likely to be caused by the rejection of Lord Randolph Churchill’s son’ probably played a part in his acceptance. Churchill claimed that ‘In all the twelve years I was at school no one ever succeeded in making me write a Latin verse or learn any Greek except the alphabet.’ This was untrue, as his school reports show.
…For all his later denials, Churchill was in fact something of a success at Harrow. At fourteen he won a prize for reciting no fewer than 1,200 lines of Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome without error, and a contemporary recalled that ‘he could quote whole scenes of Shakespeare’s plays and had no hesitation in correcting his matters if they misquoted.’
-Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny (London: Penguin Books, 2018), p.20
The International Churchill Society also firmly rebuts the charges:
A: See Jim Golland’s Not Winston, Just William? (Harrow: Herga Press 1988), a revisionist account of Churchill’s Harrow Schooldays — revisionist in that it proved that he was not the dunce he and others said he was. Golland noted that anyone who could recite 400 lines of Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome, and write a future history of an attack on Russia which presaged what actually happened in later years, could not be stupid.
Golland also said it unlikely that Churchill entered Harrow without knowing Latin (as WSC writes in My Early Life) — it was a prerequisite, even for Lord Randolph’s son. The bottom line is that Churchill was mediocre at what bored him, and very good at what interested him: English and History for example. At Sandhurst, which emphasized these subjects along with military tactics and strategy, etc., he finished near the top of his class.
So Churchill was guilty of self-deprecating flippancy when he talked of being a dunce at school. The evidence suggests that Churchill couldn’t have been further from being a hapless schoolboy. He did well at subjects he enjoyed, and not so well at subjects he disliked – like most people.
The article makes the utterly unsubstantiated assertion that Churchill’s journalistic career was entirely the work of his mother’s connections and not his talent. In fact, Churchill began his journalistic career precisely to escape financial dependence on his extravagant mother. Whilst Churchill undoubtedly made use of his mother’s influential connections, he showed literary talent from an early age:
Of course he had pedigree. His father was a noted orator; his mother wrote articles and a memoir, and edited her own literary journal, The Anglo-Saxon Review.[4] Churchill’s 1895 Cuban adventure would not have been possible without his mother’s introductions to Sir Henry Drummond Wolff, the British Ambassador in Madrid and former political colleague of Lord Randolph; and would not have got off to such an inspirational start in New York without her close personal friendship with Bourke Cockran.[5]
Time and again in this period we see young Winston pressing his mother to use her contacts to facilitate his assignments. In hindsight it is easy to forget that in these early years he was very much in the shadow of both parents. Indeed, in November 1900, when Major James B. Pond, self-styled “proprietor and manager,” became the New York agent charged with arranging Winston’s North American lecture tour, he invited Lady Randolph to “accompany your son on the voyage and witness his reception here….I need not add that it would doubly enhance the value of the lecture.” This makes clear that the now-Mrs. George Cornwallis-West, or “Lady Randolph Churchill-West” as some of the American press styled her, was at least as well known in east coast circles as her famous son.
But pedigree and contacts are not the whole story. Winston had talent and enthusiasm for writing, particularly for news reporting. His gift for language perhaps first manifested itself at school at Harrow, where he celebrated his learning of English in My Early Life.[7] He was wilful and rebellious, his independent nature asserted early, in a series of letters that he wrote to The Harrovian between October 1891 and June 1893, between ages sixteen and eighteen. In a letter of November 1891, signed “De Profundis,” he doesn’t hesitate to speak his mind:
The Class rooms provided for several forms are very bad. In some the light is meagrely doled out, as in the Old Music Room, the towers of the new Speech Room and Mr Welsford’s Room. In others, as the “cock-loft” the wind of heaven has free access from every quarter. Something ought to be done. Either the number of the school should not exceed the number for whom proper accommodation can be provided or new class rooms should be built. Since that conspicuous, though unsightly edifice, the Music Schools was erected with so much ease I would respectfully suggest the latter alternative.”[8]
This letter was apparently not published, but rejection might have encouraged him, and a month or so later he is writing again, this time under the pseudonym “Junius Junior,” about the poor performance of the school in the gymnasium display. All of his Harrovian pieces are witty, gently sarcastic, and critical in tone. There may well have been others. In October 1906, his old maths teacher, C.H.P. Mayo, wrote to congratulate Churchill on his biography of Lord Randolph, and to remind him of his first literary effort, which was apparently a criticism of the school concert for The Harrovian.
Churchill’s mother’s connection with Sir Henry Drummond-Wolff, the ambassador in Madrid, saw Churchill gain the permission he needed to go to Cuba in 1895 with his fellow officer, Lieutenant Reggie Barnes, and experience the raging guerrilla war between the Spanish colonists and the Cuban nationalists first-hand. Churchill used this as an opportunity to get his first job as a professional journalist, persuading the Daily Graphic to hire him as a war correspondent at five guineas an article. (Roberts, Walking with Destiny, p.34) Roberts discusses the beginning of Churchill’s journalistic career at length in his biography:
Churchill was under no illusions about his mother’s extravagance and the absolute necessity of providing for himself independently as soon as possible. ‘Except for my name, all the rest I had to work for, to fight for,’ he reminisced years later. ‘When I was twenty-two, with my small Army pay not covering expenses, I realized that I was…unable to live my life as I wanted to. I wanted learning and I wanted funds. I wanted freedom. I realized that there was no freedom without funds. I had to make money to get essential independence; for only with independence can you let your own life express itself naturally. To be tied down to someone else’s routine, doing things you dislike – that is not life – not for me…So I set to work, I studied, I wrote. I lectured…I can hardly remember a day when I had nothing to do.’
The key was the ‘noble’ English sentence. Once Churchill had discovered that he was capable of writing vividly to the right length under tight deadlines in war zones, he demanded ever higher rates and within five years he was the world’s best-paid war correspondent. From that, together with his books and related lectures, he had by 1901 amassed a fortune equivalent to £1 million today, enough to allow him to enter politics. Journalism taught him to be pithy and to hold his readers’ attention. Such clarity and liveliness were to be evident in his political speeches as in his highly readable articles. But for most of his life money continued to be an issue and he wrote regularly for the press until 1939.
(Roberts, ibid., pp.34-35)
If the IMT is correct about Churchill’s success as a journalist owing more to his mother’s connections rather than his talent, how on earth did he become the highest-paid journalist in the world? There were plenty of well-connected journalists around at that time. If Churchill had no talent, he would never have gotten as far as he did.
In the MSF article, we learn that:
Churchill had contempt for the working class and despised socialism, famously declaring, “Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy.” When a strike broke out in Tonypandy in Wales, as Home Secretary, Churchill sent troops into the Welsh valleys to violently suppress the movement. “If the Welsh are striking over hunger, we must fill their bellies with lead,” he said.
Churchill’s supposed contempt for the working-class is a standard canard of leftist demonology about him. Nothing could be further from the truth. Whilst Churchill was passionate in his hatred of socialism, he had a lifelong sympathy with the plight of the working-class. Inheriting his father’s One-Nation strand of Toryism, he believed it was the duty of aristocrats like himself to look out for the interests of the working-class as much as possible. Here is what Roberts has to say on the matter:
By December 1901, Churchill was acquiring a powerful social conscience, largely precipitated by his reading of Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree’s book Poverty: A Study of Town Life. ‘I see little glory in an Empire which can rule the waves and is unable to flush its sewers,’ he wrote to J. Moore Bayley, a friend of his father’s. ‘What is wanted is a well-balanced policy…that will coordinate development and expansion with the progress of social comfort and health.’ Rowntree’s 400-page book, which went through five editions in two years, was an extremely detailed investigation into the appalling poverty and squalor of the slums of York. ‘In this land of abounding wealth,’ it concluded, ‘during a time of perhaps unexampled prosperity, probably more than one-fourth of the population are living in poverty.’ Its message fitted in perfectly with the social-reform aspect of Tory Democracy that Churchill had inherited from his father, and his father from Disraeli.
Churchill wrote a long but unpublished review of Rowntree’s book. After sections on the definitions of poverty, the lack of nutrition in the diets of the poor, the wretched life of the casual labourer and issues of housing and rent, he addressed what was to his mind the central issue: that poverty was ‘a serious hindrance to recruiting’ for the Army and Navy, and bemoaned the future for the British Empire ‘supposing the common people shall be so stunted and deformed in body as to be unfit to fill the ranks the army corps may lack. And thus – strange as it may seem, eccentric, almost incredible to write – our imperial reputation is actually involved in their condition.’ Churchill concluded that statesmen ‘must in some degree be held responsible if the manhood of the British nation deteriorates so much that she can no longer provide a status of recruits fit to fall in line with our colonial brothers’. Far from an aberration separate from his belief in the Empire, his interest in social reform was in fact intimately bound up with it.
(Roberts, ibid., p.84)
The IMT also repeats the lie that Churchill unleashed troops on striking workers in Tonypandy, Wales, in 1911, when he was Home Secretary. It even makes up a quote that Churchill never said. This myth has been promoted throughout the years by leftist politicians and writers, but a lie does not become truth simply because it is repeated often enough. The International Churchill Society, among others, has corrected the record. The truth is that Churchill, working together with the Secretary of War, Haldane, agreed in response to a request from the local authorities to send troops as a precautionary measure. However, the troops were stopped before they reached Tonypandy, being stationed nearby whilst extra police were sent instead of the troops. Churchill even ordered that the troops should not come into contact with the rioters unless the police had initiated action against them. There is even some indication that the troops were received well by the local strikers as a restraint on the savagery of the police. Whilst the Tory press clobbered Churchill for not being harsh enough, others praised him for this decisive action, which may well have saved lives. Instead of praising Churchill for his restraint, leftist propagandists would rather wax lyrical about the imaginary martyrs of Tonypandy killed by the beast Churchill. Roberts corroborates this in his own work:
In early November, 25,000 miners went on strike in the Rhondda Valley in South Wales over pay. The Chief Constable of Glamorgan had 1,400 policemen there, but asked for more, and also for troops. Churchill sent 300 Metropolitan Police officers, and although troops were dispatched to the area under the command of General Sir Nevil Macready they were not deployed after serious rioting broke out on 7 and 8 November in Tonypandy in the Rhondda Valley, where sixty-three shops were damaged and looted. One striker was killed, even though the police used rolled-up raincoats to control the violence. Churchill’s decision not to use troops was criticized by The Times for showing weakness but praised by the Manchester Guardian as having ‘saved many lives’. Yet in Labour mythology Churchill was for decades held personally responsible for brutally suppressing the innocent workers of Tonypandy through military action.
‘Looking back at it now it is difficult to see what else a resolute Home Secretary could have done,’ admitted George Isaacs, a senior trade unionist at the time and later chairman of the Trades Union Congress. ‘On later occasions it could be said that Churchill was too ready to use troops, but on this occasion his influence seems to have been a moderating one.’ Churchill was in fact far from the ideological opponent of organized labour that he has been made to seem. At this point he had good relations with the trade unions, telling the TUC Parliamentary Committee in March 1911 that he was ‘powerfully impressed with the enormous value of the work which the Trade Union body are doing…It is of the greatest use to a public department like the Home Offfice that the study of these [industrial relations] questions…should be supplemented by the constant experience that you gentleman…are alone able to bring to bear upon the problems.’
(Roberts, ibid., pp.143-44)
Whilst Churchill did use troops at a later strike in Llanelli in South Wales in August 1911, this was during a series of severe riots which in some parts of Wales became tainted with anti-Semitism when the rioters began attacking Jews. Protection of the Welsh Jewish community was a factor in troops being sent. If recent events have proven anything, this is not the first time leftists have overlooked the sordid vice of anti-Semitic feeling. Churchill also used the troops to break a national rail strike that same month, but despite his tough stance on the strikers, he cleared the trade union officials of responsibility for the affair, and strongly supported the Trade Union Bill of 1913, which allowed trade unions to use their funds for political purposes. On that occasion, he said, ‘Representation in Parliament is absolutely necessary to trade unions…I consider that every workman is well advised to join a trade union…to protect the rights and interests of labour.’ A dock strike in late July 1912 was resolved peacefully, and the dockers’ leader, Ben Tillet, praised Churchill as a moderating influence, who had ‘turned a deaf ear to [the] clamours of the cowardly crew who would…have gloated over the killing of their fellow creatures.’ (Roberts, ibid., pp.144-145)
It should also be noted that as a leading member of the Liberal Party, Churchill worked closely with Lloyd George, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, to establish the welfare state in Britain. At this point in his career, Churchill was at his most left-leaning, and the speeches he made were electrifying in their populism:
After the Lords had rejected the Licensing Bill in November, Masterman recorded that Churchill ‘stabbed at his bread, would hardly speak’ and then pronounced, ‘We shall send them a Budget in June as shall terrify them; they have started the class war, they had better be careful.’ He seemed impervious to the fact that it was his own class he was threatening to assault.
At a meeting in Nottingham on 30 January 1909, Churchill made a remark that was to be hung around his neck for years afterwards. He described the Tories as ‘the party of the rich against the poor, of 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.’ Even as late as 1944, left-wing journalists would quote these words against him.
…Working closely together between 1908 and 1911, Churchill and Lloyd George, now Chancellor of the Exchequer, established their reputations as the foremost social reformers of the era. The increase in unemployment since the 1907-8 economic downturn persuaded Churchill to introduce labour exchanges, where unemployed workers were put in touch with potential employers. He recruited William Beveridge to establish them, and by March 1910 there were 214. He won shopworkers a half-holiday. The Old Age Pensions Act 1908 introduced a pension of five shillings a week (approximately £23 in today’s money) for 600,000 old people for the first time, costing £4 million per annum. ‘It is not much,’ Churchill was to say of the very modest pension provision, ‘unless you have not got it.’ Lloyd George and Churchill introduced the first nationwide compulsory unemployment insurance scheme in 1911, which by October 1913 had insured 14.7 million people through 236 local insurance committees and 23,500 societies and branches. Together they established the Port of London Authority, and passed the Coal Mines (Eight Hours) Act of 1908, which cut the number of hours that miners could be compelled to work, and the Coal Mines Act of 1911, which improved mining safety (and actually lessened the harshness of pit-ponies’ lives). They also planned to introduce an income tax allowance for parents, which was soon nick-named the ‘Brat’.
Churchill found a military metaphor for the process of helping the poor, equating it with going back to bring the rear-guard in’. He viewed all these as evolutionary, Tory Democrat measures, which would make Britain stronger in future crises, and especially in the event of war. The paternalist in Churchill wanted, in Masterman’s critical but essentially accurate phrase, ‘a state of things where a benign upper class dispensed benefits to an industrious, bien pensant and grateful working class.’
These reforms and others in the pipeline were extremely expensive. When the cost of eight new dreadnoughts was dded, a significant new income stream for the Treasury would be necessary to fund them. In April 1909 Lloyd George unleashed the naked class war that Churchill had predicted five months earlier, with his Finance Bill, soon nicknamed by Liberals the ‘People’s Budget’. In order to raise the extra £16 million, income tax would rise from 1s to 1s 2d in the pound (that is, from 5 to 5.83 per cent), a super-tax would be introduced on high incomes, as well as taxes on tobacco, alcohol, motor cars and petrol, and a halfpenny tax per pound on the value of undeveloped land, with death duties of 25 percent on property valued over £1 million, and a 20 per cent capital gains tax on land. This represented wealth redistribution on a scale unprecedented in recent British history, and could be guaranteed to provoke the Unionists’ opposition in the Lords. If that opposition could not be modified or overcome and the Lords refused to pass the Budget there would be a profound constitutional crisis.
…’This Budget will go through,’ Churchill assured an audience in Manchester in May, to loud cheers. ‘It will vindicate the power o the House of Commons.’ He described it as insurance against dangers at home and abroad, and added,’If I had my way I would write the word “insure” over the door of every cottage and upon the blotting-book of every public man, because I am convinced that by sacrifices which are inconceivably small, which are all within the reach of the very poorest man in regular work, families can be secured against catastrophes which otherwise would split them up forever…when through the death, the illness, or the invalidity of the bread-winner, the frail boat in which the fortunes of the family are embarked founders, and the women and children are left to struggle helplessly in the dark waters of a friendless world.’
…On 4 September, Churchill made a further incendiary denunciation of the House of Lords at the Palace Theatre in Leicester. ‘The wealthy’, he said in the course of a nearly 7,000-word speech, ‘so far from being self-reliant, are dependent on the constant attention and waiting of scores and sometimes even hundreds of persons who are employed in ministering to their wants.’ (He had clearly forgotten the 400 porters carrying his baggage in East Africa.) By then the Budget had spent 600 hours in Commons committees, where the Government had made some concessions, though tempers had frayed. He continued in his Leicester speech:
‘The issue will be whether the British people in the year of grace 1909 are gong to…allow themselves to be dictated to and domineered over by a miserable minority of titled persons, who represent nobody, who are responsible to nobody , and who only scurry up to London to vote in their party interests, in their class interests, and in their own interests.’
(Roberts, ibid., p.127, pp.129-131)
Spoken like a true enemy of the working-class!
Besides Churchill’s militant support for the People’s Budget and the incendiary, class war speeches he made at this point in time, he was notable for his staunch advocacy of prison reform, which at that time saw thousands of largely working-class men and women locked up for petty offences. Churchill’s commitment to bettering the lot of the working-class remained with him even into his peacetime premiership in the 1950s, when he preserved the reforms made by Attlee’s Labour Party. Indeed, Churchill was criticised by others in the Tory Party for being too soft on the unions, and giving in to their regular demands for wage increases. Above all else, Churchill sought social and class peace.
This shoddy, sorry excuse for an article goes on to bring up Churchill’s blunder over Gallipoli, a well-known fact which has not been covered up by historians, contrary to the preposterous claims of the IMT. Churchill undoubtedly erred, but he took full responsibility for the disaster, which haunted him for the rest of his life. He also learned valuable lessons that stood him in good stead during WWII. Not once in the war did he overrule his Chiefs of Staff if they all opposed him on something. He had come to appreciate his limits, something which cannot be said of the IMT’s heroes Lenin and Trotsky. Trotsky, no tactician himself, made a catastrophic blunder in the middle of the Russian Civil War by attacking the Czechoslovak Legion, provoking it to join the Whites in rebellion and seize large swathes of Russian territory. It cost the Bolsheviks much time, blood and treasure to regain the territory. Churchill’s controversial role during the General Strike is also well-known. But as passionately opposed to the General Strike as Churchill was, this extraordinary event in isolation cannot seriously be used to paint Churchill as an enemy of the working-class, unless that individual is a biased, far-left maniac who believes that all strikes are inherently righteous and that any action taken against them is inherently reactionary and evil. Churchill in fact sympathised with the miners, but opposed the general strike on the basis that it was a threat to British parliamentary democracy:
Churchill was more sympathetic to the miners than almost anyone else in the Cabinet, but nonetheless joined the unanimous vote to end the fruitless negotiations with the TUC on 2 May. As a Tory Democrat, he disliked the mine-owners’ version of laissez-faire capitalism. He did not think highly of his own cousin Lord Londonderry, who owned coalminers in Durham and who had rejected the Government’s compromise proposals. Churchill sympathized with the men who worked long, dangerous hours underground, yet he also knew that the elected Government could not give in to the threat of a General Strike. ‘It is a conflict which, if it is fought out to a conclusion,’ he said in the Commons as the Strike began, ‘can only end in the overthrow of Parliamentary Government or in its decisive victory. There is no middle course open…No door is closed; but on the other hand, while the situation remains what it is, we have no alternative whatever but to go forward unflinchingly and do our duty.’
(Roberts, ibid., pp.318-319)
The IMT also suggests that Churchill does not deserve credit for winning the war:
We are, nevertheless, taught that Churchill took a brave stand against fascism in Europe. However, the whole course of World War Two has been re- written by revisionist, ‘patriotic’ historians who have vastly exaggerated Britain’s role as a whole. It was the Soviet Union, rather than Britain, that tore the guts out of Hitler’s army. 80% of the Wehrmacht’s forces were thrown into action on the Eastern Front.
What this article does not mention is that Churchill and Roosevelt played an important role in helping keep the USSR in the war by sending them plenty of aid, using as many ships as they could spare, over the dangerous, U-boat infested wars of the Atlantic and Baltic. Moreover, the amount of time and resources the Germans wasted trying to conquer Britain in 1940 delayed the German assault on Soviet Russia. Had Churchill not been in charge in 1940, and Britain caved in, Hitler would have been free to deploy the full weight of his military on the Soviet Union months before he actually did. Moreover, if Trotsky’s moronic suggestions had been followed by the British working-class, Britain would have been plunged into a civil war between a Conservative government and party already inclined to make peace with Hitler, and communist insurrectionists. The likely result of this would not have been a revolutionary vanguard seizing power and inspiring all the workers of Europe to do likewise, but either a Nazi occupation of Britain, or a puppet government loyal to Nazism being set up. The Soviets would have been even better prepared if Stalin had used his peace deal with Hitler to make meaningful reparations, instead of dismissing any prospect of a German invasion, which British intelligence actually informed him of in advance.
The article also makes the monstrous assertion that Churchill was no better than a fascist, pointing out his sympathy for fascism during the 1920s. True, Churchill, blinded by his passionate anti-communism, supported fascism as a means of combating the spread of communism throughout Europe. He was not, however, convinced that fascism was the best solution for Britain. In his address to the electorate of Woodford in 1924, Churchill said, ‘This famous island is the home of Freedom and of representative government. We have led the world along these paths, and we have no need now to seek our inspiration from Moscow or Munich.’ As Roberts notes, ‘His reference to the attempted Munich Beer-Hall Putsch by Erich Ludendorff and Adolf Hitler of the previous November was an indication that he was closely watching events in Germany.’ However, he was not convinced that Britain needed a fascist government, saying at a meeting of the Chambers of Commerce in Belfast, in 1926, ‘Our society is very broadly and deeply founded. We are not in a position that we have to choose between various unconstitutional extremes.’ (Roberts, ibid., p.307 and p.318)
The fact remains that Churchill was one of the first politicians to warn of the dangers of German rearmament and the menace of Nazism, and at one point, the only man alerting his countrymen to the danger posed by Hitler. Just two months before Hitler came to power, Churchill made his first major speech about German rearmament:
I have respect and admiration for the Germans, and desire that we should live on terms of good feeling and fruitful relations with them, but we must look at the fact that every concession…has been followed immediately but a fresh demand…Now the demand is that Germany should be allowed to rearm. Do not delude yourselves. Do not let His Majesty’s Government believe….that all that Germany is asking for is equal status…That is not what Germany is seeking. All these bands of sturdy Teutonic youths, marching through the streets and roads of Germany, with the light of desire in their eyes to suffer for their Fatherland, are not looking for status. They are looking for weapons, and, when they have the weapons, believe me they will then ask for the return of lost territories and lost colonies and when that demand is made it cannot fail to shake and possibly shatter to their foundations every one of the countries I have mentioned, and some other countries I have not mentioned.
(Roberts, ibid., p.364)
In March 1933, in response to the victory of the Nazis in the rigged elections that took place that year, ‘Churchill responded…with his first Commons speech on the vital need massively to increase the size of the RAF as soon as possible, perhaps his most important message to Britain over the next six years. ‘The whole speech,’ concluded Bernays, ‘though a plea for realism, was really the resurrection of the war mentality.’ With that seeming contradiction lay Churchill’s great problem in a country and empire that had suffered so grievously in the Great War.’ (Roberts, ibid., pp.366-367)
Churchill did not stop there. Roberts goes on to recount Churchill’s formidable and stinging criticisms of the Nazi regime in its very early days:
‘When we read about Germany,’ he said on 24 March, on the day an Enabling Act gave Hitler full dictatorial powers, ‘when we watch with surprise and distress the tumultuous insurgency of ferocity and war spirit, the pitiless ill-treatment of minorities, the denial of the normal protections of civilized society to large numbers of individuals solely on the grounds of race…one cannot help feeling old that the fierce passions that are raging in Germany have not found, as yet, any other outlet but upon Germans.’
On 1 April, the persecution of the Jews in Germany began in earnest with a Government-orchestrated national boycott of all Jewish businesses and professions, enforced by Brownshirt thugs on the streets who sadistically assaulted and humiliated Jews at every opportunity. Churchill’s philo-Semitism, so rare on the Tory benches, was invaluable in allowing him to see sooner than anyone else the true nature of the Nazi regime. ‘I remember the tears pouring down his cheeks one day before the war in the House of Commons,’ Attlee recalled many years later, ‘when he was telling me what was being done to the Jews in Germany.’ On 13 April, Churchill condemned Hitler’s ‘most grim dictatorship. You have these martial or pugnacious manifestations, and also this persecution of the Jews…when I see the temper displayed here and read the speeches of the leading ministers, I cannot help rejoicing that the Germans have not got the heavy cannon, the thousands of military aeroplanes and the tanks of various sizes for which they have been pressing in order that their status may be equal to that off other countries.’ He warned that ‘As Germany acquires full military capability with her neighbours while her own grievances are still unredressed and while she is in the temper which we have unhappily seen, so surely should we see ourselves within a measurable distance of the renewal of general European war.
(Roberts, ibid., p.367)
There are many such quotes that could be provided, both from Roberts’ biography and other sources. The fact is that Churchill stood almost alone for many years against the threat of Nazi Germany, when everyone else was determined to appease the regime, including pacifist Labour politicians. This goes unmentioned by our Leninist friends. Churchill sought to preserve the Treaty of versailles from the encorachments of a revanchist Germany, and did not shrink from using every available avenue for this purpose, even when it damged his political career and cut him off from any prospect of office.
These Leninist loons also have the gall to state that Churchill’s views on race were no different than Hitler’s. Yet the quotes I have provided, and other evidence we have, suggests that this is nothing less than a monstrous slander. Churchill was a man of his time, and did believe in a hierarchy of races, and in the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race. However, his views, however old-fashioned, were not in the same category as Hitler’s exterminatory and genocidal racism. Rather, Churchill had the paternalistic belief that the Anglo-Saxons, as the superior race, should help lift up the other races. However problematic this view may be, it is mild compared to the horrific, murderous racism of an Adolf Hitler or a Saddam Hussein. To put Churchill in the same league as such loathsome individuals devalues the meaning of the word racism. Moreover, it is clear that he was no anti-Semite, but, like his father, a strong philo-Semite who defended the Jews in the darkest moment of their history, when the industrial might of a vengeful German nation-state was visited upon them in the most wicked and unconscionable way. This does not stop our friends at the Marxist Student Federation making the monstrous claim:
Ignored by historians of today is the fact that Churchill was himself an antisemite. He penned a notorious an- tisemitic article entitled ‘Zionism versus Bolshevism’, in which he divides Jews into ‘good’, patriotic Jews and ‘bad’, in- ternationalist, Bolshevik Jews. In the war of intervention against Soviet Russia, Churchill was at the forefront in render- ing eager assistance to the pogromist armies of General Denikin. And when the opportunity presented itself to bomb the Auschwitz extermination camp, Churchill refused to give it the go ahead.
Churchill’s famous 1920 article has often been used by his political opponents, the IMT among them, to spread the slander that he was an anti-Semite. It is very easy to do this if you take certain quotes out of context and garble the meaning of his words. What Churchill was doing was trying to explain why so many Jews were attracted to Marxism. The obvious answer was that they were persecuted and therefore resentful of the established order. It did not escape notice at the time that the leading figures of the Russian Revolution were Jewish. Richard Langworth, a Churchill expert, explains the full context behind the article on his website. Churchill distinguished between the majority of Jews, who, Churchill stressed, lived peaceably in their respective nations, and the minority of Jews who were attracted to Bolshevism. Churchill argued that the Jews should avoid the evils of Bolshevism and either become Zionists, or be good citizens of the countries they lived in. This is not an anti-Semitic belief – it was a viewpoint held by many Jews at the time, unless, of course, we are to regard any Jew that is adverse to communism as being racist against himself or herself, which is an obviously ludicrous proposition. Churchill was a strong supporter of Zionism from his early days, and was conspicuous in his philo-Semitism in an age where anti-Semitic prejudice among people of his class was notable. If the IMT regards Churchill’s separation of ‘good, patriotic Jews’ from ‘nasty, Bolshevik Jews’ itself anti-Semitic, then we must also regard the Marxist belief in ‘good, proletarian Jews’ and ‘bad, capitalist Jews’ to be equally anti-Semitic. And true, Churchill, as Secretary of State for Air and War, strongly advocated aid to the White Army in their battle with the communists. However, as Roberts notes in his biography (on page 275 to be exact), Churchill sought to make this aid contingent upon Denikin avoiding anti-Semitic pogroms. Whatever the rights and wrongs of Churchill aiding the Whites, he did so because of his anti-communism, not because he shared the Whites’ prejudices towards the Jews of Russia.
The cult leader, liar and charlatan Alan Woods, who is at the head of the IMT’s sinister and sordid enterprise, wrote an article back in November 2019 alleging that Churchill and other prominent Tories were anti-Semites. To my shame, I and other comrades uncritically shared this drivel on social media. I hereby apologise to Winston Churchill, his family and to the entire nation of Great Britain for having assisted this slanderous endeavour. In this disgusting article, Woods uses the infamous ‘Zionism and Bolshevism’ article as proof of Churchill’s anti-Semitism. We have already seen how baseless this charge is, but this does not prevent Woods from quoting an excerpt from the article, out of context, to prove that Churchill was an anti-Semite. Even the excerpt he selected, despite its ugly wording, still shows that Churchill distinguished between ‘International Jews’ (i.e. Bolsheviks/Anarchists) and the majority of Jews who were untainted by extremism. To say that this makes Churchill an anti-Semite is like saying that it is racist or Islamophobic to distinguish between Islamist extremists and terrorists and the majority of the Muslim populations in the world.
We also learn from Woods’ idiotic article that Churchill was an anti-Semite because he believed that Lloyd George should not allow too many Jews to sit in the Cabinet. Incidentally, this was only because Churchill feared that people who were anti-Semitic would take issue with the amount of ‘aliens’ governing the country. It had nothing to do with Churchill’s personal prejudices, which were non-existent as far as the Jews were concerned. One should not forget to mention that one of Churchill’s personal heroes was Benjamin Disraeli, the founder of One-Nation Conservatism, and the first (and so far only) Jewish Prime Minister of England, who was also a favourite of his father’s.
This sorry excuse for a human being then goes on to bring up an infamous 1937 article ghisot-written by the notorious Diston as more evidence of Churchill’s anti-Semitism:
In June 1937, the American magazine Liberty asked Churchill to write an article on the “Jewish problem.” Churchill entrusted the task to his ghost-writer Adam Marshall Diston, to whom he gave some suggestions. Churchill made some handwritten marks on the manuscript. The article expressed the idea that Jews themselves were responsible for anti-Semitism, by keeping themselves separate from the rest of society. It also contained objectionable stereotypes of Jews (Shylock’s pound of flesh, Jewish usurers, “bloodsuckers”, and so on).
…In the end, the article was not published, despite Churchill’s efforts to sell it. Apparently, he was quite happy to publish it under his own name and therefore assume full responsibility for the views contained in it. However, in 1940, Churchill refused permission to have the article published. By this time, Britain was at war with Nazi Germany and Mr Churchill was sitting in number 10 Downing Street. His office stated that it would be “inadvisable to publish the article… at the present time.” (my emphasis, AW)
Woods is lying again. The truth is that Churchill had no knowledge of this article until the war was underway. Martin Gilbert gives the truth:
Churchill, who was then writing on average an article a week, paid Diston—a journalist, a member of Sir Oswald Mosley’s New Party in its pre-fascist days, and a would-be Labour Party parliamentary candidate in 1935—to draft certain articles. Some of Diston’s other drafts were amended by Churchill and published with his amendments; a few were published unamended.
The article in question, “How the Jews Can Combat Persecution,” was however not published at all. This was fortunate, as it was offered for publication three times: twice in 1937, shortly after Diston wrote it, and once in 1940. Some have claimed the act of offering it to a publisher means that Churchill approved of it—but this was not the way his articles were offered.
In 1937, Churchill himself would not have offered the article personally. His private office did that, and was always most efficient. It is not clear that Churchill even read either the original or the retyped Diston article: neither have any markings on them by him, which suggests that he had not, since other Diston drafts are copiously red-penned. (my emphasis, AKM)
In 1940, the then-editor of his war speeches, Charles Eade, unearthed the article and suggested he publish it. But Churchill, alerted to its anti-Semitic overtones by secretary Kathleen Hill, would not permit publication.
Someone else’s opinions, in an unpublished article, which never appeared in print under Churchill’s name, cannot be laid at Churchill’s door.
A truly sensational lie in the MSF article is that Churchill did not give permission for Auschwitz to be bombed. Here is the truth, by the historian Martin Gilbert:
The fifth and final request of the Jewish Agency was, “that the railway line leading from Budapest to Birkenau, and the death camp at Birkenau and other places, should be bombed.”
WHEN Churchill was shown this request by Eden, he did something I’ve not seen on any other document submitted to Churchill for his approval: He wrote on it what he wanted done.
Normally, he would have said, “Bring this up to War Cabinet on Wednesday,” or, “Let us discuss this with the Air Ministry” Instead, he wrote to Eden on the morning of 7 July: “Is there any reason to raise this matter with the Cabinet? Get anything out of the Air Force you can, and invoke me if necessary.” I have never seen a minute of Churchill’s giving that sort of immediate authority to carry out a request.
Churchill’s meeting of July 7th gave Eden the full authority of the Prime Minister to follow up the request to bomb the railway lines to Auschwitz. As you know from the exhibition upstairs, two days later the deportations on the railway lines from Hungary to Auschwitz ceased, and the priority of the surviving Jews of Hungary, and of all those concerned with them in the West, Jews and governments alike, was the issue of protective documents to enable them to find some place where they might have a safe haven. I suppose it is a great tragedy that all this had not taken place on 7 July 1943 or on 7 October 1942. For when all is said and done, by 7 July 1944 it was too late to save all but a final 100,000.
There is a vast subtext,of which I have written in my book, Auschwitz and the Allies. The British officials did not know on 9 July that the deportations had ceased, so they had to deal with the Prime Minister’s request on the assumption that it still had some validity, and in the course of dealing with it, some of them revealed considerable distaste for carrying out any such instruction.
It is interesting, however, to note that when the request was put to the American Air Force Commander, General R. Eaker, when he visited the Air Ministry a few days later, he gave it his full support. He regarded it as something that the American daylight bombers could and should do. But as you also know, from the letter which is put up in the Museum, when the request reached Washington – indeed, on the five separate occasions when the request reached Washington – it was turned down. On the second occasion that it reached the Undersecretary for War, John J. McCloy, he told his assistant to kill it; and it was then effectively killed. The debate about bombing those particular lines continued for more than a month after the lines were no longer in use.
I SPOKE to a number of those who would have been involved in bombing the lines, as Churchill had wished, and even bombing the camp installations, had the deportations not stopped. One thing which greatly heartened me, from my perspective, from my window as a Jew, was that all the pilots and air crew I spoke to, who would have had to do the work, were emphatic that they would have done it, and were ashamed and angry that they had not been asked to do it.
I even found the young man who had taken that aerial photograph of the camp which is displayed in the Museum, a South African photo reconnaissance pilot. He was in extreme distress at the thought that, on the four separate occasions when he flew over the camp with his camera, he had no idea what it was he was flying over. He flew only an unarmed plane, but as he said to me very touchingly, “Had I known, I could at least have tipped my wing to show the people there that someone knew they were there.”
Churchill had no doubt that a terrible crime had been committed. As he wrote to Anthony Eden on the day that the escapees’ account of the truth about Auschwitz and the “unknown destination” reached him:
There is no doubt that this is probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world, and it has been done by scientific machinery by nominally civilised men in the name of a great State and one of the leading races of Europe. It is quite clear that all concerned in this crime who may fall into our hands, including the people who only obeyed orders by carrying out the butcheries, should be put to death after their association with the murders has been proved. Declarations should be made in public, so that everyone connected with it will be hunted down and put to death.
So as we can see, Churchill desperately wanted Auschwitz to be bombed, and the Americans shot down the scheme.
The MSF article repeats Churchill’s infamous quote about using gas on ‘uncivilised tribes’:
His views were streaked with racial bigotry that saw British imperialism as the natural master of the peoples of the world. When discussing the plight of Afghans and Kurds, the great humanitarian leader was quoted as saying, “I cannot understand this squeamishness about the use of gas”.
What they neglect to mention is that Churchill was referring to tear gas, not mustard gas. In the event, gas was not used and Churchill’s proposal was forgotten about.
Of the Indian people Churchill remarked, “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.” Indeed the great war leader thought little of allowing millions to starve in West Bengal in 1943 as a direct result of his government’s policies.
Here we have the old canard about Churchill being responsible for the Bengal Famine of 1943. As Martin Gilbert and others have explained, this is another slander. In fact, Churchill did everything he could to alleviate the famine. The cause of the famine was the cutting off of food supplies from Burma as a result of the Japanese occupation, combined with a cyclone that hit Bengal in 1942, causing crop failures, price increases and mass starvation. Within the constraints of a war that was being waged for national survival, the British government did as much as it could to send supplies over to India. It was insufficient, tragically so, but the British government did all it could. Churchill made ugly remarks about Indians to Leo Amery and others, at a time of high stress, partly out of frustration and partly as a form of politically incorrect humour. These remarks were undoubtedly callous and even racist, but they do not reflect Churchill’s genuine views on Indians, nor did they have any effect on government policy towards the famine. On pp.785-789 of his Churchill biography, Roberts discusses the Bengal famine and establishes that Churchill did indeed do everything he could to help India, suggesting that without his intervention, the famine may well have been even worse.
The MSF article concludes:
The real reason that Churchill and the British ruling class went to war against German fascism was to stop the threat that the German rival posed to British imperialism and the huge profits. Those profits were distilled from the misery, toil and hunger of Welsh miners and Bangali peasants alike. Winston Churchill was a lifelong imperialist, a defender of the worst atrocities of capitalism, and it is as such that he should be remembered.
The article began with lies, and it ends with lies. The record is clear – Churchill opposed German fascism for principled, ideological reasons. He believed Nazism to be ugly, sordid, brutal and at odds with the British way of life. He stood alone in the face of the threat when the rest of the British ruling class wanted to do a deal with Hitler. Churchill was undoubtedly a staunch defender of the British Empire, and regarded its loss after WWII as his greatest failure. But it is to his credit that he risked the British Empire in order to defeat the unique evil of Nazism. When in the 1930s he was warning of the dangers of appeasement, left-wing politicians were preaching pacifism. When he was fighting Hitler, Trotsky was preaching that there was no real difference between British imperialism on the one hand, and German imperialism on the other. Indeed, he suggested that the difference between them was like the difference between carriages on a train hurtling towards its ruin. Their hero, Trotsky, approved the Rapallo Treaty that saw the German military in the 1920s and 1930s cooperate with the USSR, as both sides worked to undermine the Versailles Treaty. Now these Trotskyist toerags would like to take the moral high ground for opposing imperialism and Nazism, whilst slandering those who actually fought it whilst they were twiddling their thumbs and gleefully anticipating a glorious socialist revolution. A finer combination of sanctimony and hypocrisy could not be found anywhere.
An excellent article and a very gracious apology.