The Tory media have gone almost apoplectic at John McDonnell having the nerve to state the truth that Winston Churchill was a villain not a hero. Of course, right-wing Labour MP's have been quick to distance themselves from McDonnell's comments, with Rachel Reeves on "Politics Live" ridiculously proclaiming that "Churchill won the war", before announcing that the gin soaked, colonialist, racist and anti-Semite Churchill was a hero of hers! Even Tory peer Danny Finkelstein had the honesty to declare that Churchill was a racist. Finkelstein is wrong, however, to claim that without Churchill he would not be alive, just as Andrew Neill on "Politics Live" was wrong in suggesting that without Churchill, Britain would have lost the war to Nazi Germany.
Taking these latter aspects of Churchill first, in relation to his supposed role in winning the war, it falls into that attitude to history much loved by the elites of raising the importance of individuals in history to ridiculously untenable levels. But, even besides the fact that victory in the war could not be placed at the feet of one individual, which thereby denigrates the role of the millions of ordinary people who actually fought and died in that conflict, the truth is that Churchill in WWII, was responsible for pushing through multiple strategies, against the professional advice of his generals, which then resulted in disaster. Those failures followed from Churchill's pursuance of his own pet projects, just as in WWI, his support for the Gallipoli campaign had resulted in disaster.
The truth is, of course, that Britain was effectively defeated in WWII, by the time of the disastrous and chaotic retreat from Dunkirk. No doubt, if the Tories have a propagandist of equal calibre to Churchill, today, they will describe a similar disastrous, and chaotic retreat from Europe, resulting from a No Deal Brexit, in similarly ridiculous terms to the way, Dunkirk has since been described as some kind of "victory", purely because tens of thousands more British soldiers were not killed or captured during that debacle. As Churchill himself said, history is written by the victors, and as he also said, he would write that history. Had Hitler pushed on at that point, the British Army would have been mostly destroyed at Dunkirk, and the door would have been open for an invasion of Britain. Hitler held back, probably because he continued to hold out the possibility of forming an alliance with Britain, against his real target, the USSR. Germany had been holding talks with Lord Halifax, for precisely that ambition.
In many ways, Churchill was rather like, the lucky generals that Napoleon described. It was not his military strategy that was significant, but the failures of Nazi Germany to press forward its advantage, along with its own strategic blunders, such as moving from the bombing of arifields to the bombing of cities during the Battle of Britain. Hitler, no doubt believed that there was a strong chance that Churchill would be dumped, as he still was not trusted by the British Tories. In a similar way to the potential for Corbyn's Labour Party to come to the aid of a floundering Theresa May today, over Brexit, so too it was Attlee's Labour Party that put Churchill into Downing Street in 1940. Even after he became Prime Minister, the Tories did not allow him top become Tory Party Leader, such was their distrust and distaste for him. And, by 1940, Britain had been defeated in more or less every encounter with the forces of Nazi Germany, and, by 1942, with Japan in South-East Asia, again in the latter respect due to the failed meddling of Churchill. Hitler hoped that Britain holed up in its island prison, cut off from the outside world, despite the still dominant role of the Royal Navy, which proved increasingly incapable of stopping German U-Boats from sinking vital supplies coming across the Atlantic, would be starved into submission, and that it would sue for peace, with Halifax replacing Churchill, supported by those same Tory newspapers, like the Daily Mail, that before the war had been vociferous champions of Mussolini's fascists, and Hitlers' Nazis, and with the Nazi supporting Edward VIII restored to the throne.
The idea that Britain won the war, is historical nonsense, and the idea that Churchill won the war, is even more historical nonsense. By 1940, Britain was already defeated, but Hitler miscalculated by not turning that defeat into reality, and instead turning his attention away from Britain towards his real target, the USSR, In the same way that Britain was effectively defeated by 1940, so too, Nazi Germany was effectively defeated by December 1941. It was defeated at the point that the USSR turned back the German army, outside Moscow, in a similar way to how the Tsar's forces had turned back those of Napoleon in 1812. From the point that the USSR, using forces it had pulled from the East, after the threat from Japan had disappeared, as Japan through its focus in to different channels, after its defeat in 1939, by the USSR, at Khalkyn Gol, the USSR continued to push the German forces backwards. Nazi Germany was defeated not by Britain, but the USSR, which lost 30 million people in the process of doing so. It was facilitated in that by the supplies of materials sent by the US, after it entered the war, which enabled the huge soviet war machine, to produce armaments and military equipment in unprecedented quantities, to back up its huge armed forces, and to do so with some of the most effective machines developed during the war.
It was only effectively after the USSR had defeated the German military, and after the US entered the conflict at the end of 1941, that Hitler's error in not invading Britain, was exposed, as it meant that his forces were now tied up, and any possibility of an invasion of Britain was out of the question, and huge deployments of US forces, material and weapons flowed to Britain, enabling it to re-enter the war actively, and with most effect in North Africa. If Churchill could be credited with anything it is with his relentless efforts to bring the US into the war on the side of Britain. But, it was the USSR and the US that won the war, not Britain, and certainly not Churchill.
Had Churchill not been Prime Minister, then its impossible to say whether some other Prime Minister would have been able to get US support. It is at least possible that some other Prime Minister might have been able to have sued for peace. Hitler had told Halifax that if Britain gave him a free hand in Europe, he would leave Britain's colonies alone, for example. Either way, after Germany's forces were defeated by the superior forces of the USSR in December 1941, and after Germany declared war on the US, in support of its ally Japan, after the US declared war on Japan, the writing was on the wall for both. At worst, Britain might have faced several years of occupation, and a Vichy style government, as France experienced. That would have tied up even more of Germany's forces, weakening it in the main fight against the USSR. But, the defeat of Nazi Germany would still have happened at the hands of the USSR.
So much, for Churchill's war efforts that lead people like Rachel Reeves to see him as their hero, and leads Finkelstein to forgive him for his well known, white supremacism, racism, and anti-Semitism. And, indeed, given Churchill's well known anti-Semitism, that has been brushed under the carpet in more recent times, it is odd that Finkelstein should see Churchill as a saviour of Jews like him, and without whom he thinks he would not be alive. The fact is that Churchill like much of the British ruling class and aristocracy during the 1920's and 1930's, were ardent proponents of both Mussolini and Hitler, as they took on the growing forces of the organised working-class in their countries, and acted as a bulwark against the USSR. British governments did little to support Jews across Europe, as they came under renewed pogroms from anti-Semitic forces, like the Nazis, despite widespread reports of what was happening. Even the much hyped role of Britain in respect of the evacuation of Jewish children, via the kindertransport, fails to mention the inadequate degree to which that was undertaken, and the opposition even that faced from within the establishment. And, of course, the main Zionist forces in Palestine, themselves saw Britain, and its colonialist politicians like Churchill as more of an enemy than Hitler, which is why they sought to form an alliance both with Nazi Germany, and with Mussolini's fascist Italy.
A look at Churchill's statements and actions show that he was a white supremacist bigot, and racist, as well as an anti-semite, whose views were extremist even for his day. Using words that could equally have come from the mouth of Goebbels or Hitler, Churchill, as an MP arguing for British expansionism wrote,
"the Aryan stock is bound to triumph".
When 14,000 black Africans died in British concentration camps in South Africa during the Boer War, he wrote only
“of his "irritation that Kaffirs should be allowed to fire on white men" .
When the Kurds rebelled against British domination he wrote,
"I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes...[It] would spread a lively terror."
Churchill argued that a couple of hundred of Gandhi's supporters should be stood against a wall and machine gunned to send out a message. And his solution to Gandhi was, that he
"ought to be lain bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi, and then trampled on by an enormous elephant with the new Viceroy seated on its back."
The economist Amartya Sen has shown that it was British policy that led to a terrible famine in India in 1943, which led to 3 million Bengalis starving to death. British officials begged Churchill to send food supplies to the area, but reminiscent of Tory policy in Ireland during the potato famine, Churchill refused. He said,
“I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion”
He complained that it was their own fault for "breeding like rabbits", and also said the plague was "merrily" culling the population.
When dying desperate people dragged themselves into the cities, Churchill responded with jeers. This hero of the Tory Party was a truly vile man, fitting of the party who's hero and representative he is. That Labour MP's like Rachel Reeves can revere him as their hero, just shows the extent to which they have fallen into the wrong party, in pursuit of their careers.
No comments:
Post a Comment