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Johann Hari was cited by Lou P, saying that 'Winston Churchill is rightly remembered for leading Britain through her finest hour -- but what if he also led the country through her most shameful hour? What if, in addition to rousing a nation to save the world from the Nazis, he fought for a raw white supremacism and a concentration camp network of his own? ... Can these clashing Churchills be reconciled? Do we live, at the same time, in the world he helped to save, and the world he helped to trash? ... So how can the two be reconciled? Was Churchill's moral opposition to Nazism a charade, masking the fact he was merely trying to defend the British Empire from a rival? ... If Churchill had only been interested in saving the Empire, he could probably have cut a deal with Hitler. ... In resisting the Nazis, he produced some of the richest prose-poetry in defence of freedom and democracy ever written. ... Ultimately, the words of the great and glorious Churchill who resisted dictatorship overwhelmed the works of the cruel and cramped Churchill who tried to impose it on the darker-skinned peoples of the world.' Hari falls into the trap like so many radicals when it comes to discussing Churchill. There was no contradiction between Churchill the arch-imperialist and racial supremacist and Churchill the wartime leader with his stirring speeches of resisting the Nazis. Churchill was one of the few British ruling-class figures who recognised that German imperialism in the late 1930s was going to explode violently across Europe and thus threaten British imperial interests by upsetting the political/economic/diplomatic balance of power which had served Britain so well for centuries. He knew that a clash was inevitable and approaching quickly, unlike some of his opponents who felt that war might be prevented or delayed. The problem facing Britain's ruling class was that there was a strong feeling against getting involved in another big war if it was presented as a crusade for God King and Country. Churchill, for all his patrician upbringing and manners, was shrewd enough to recognise that the war effort in Britain would only become popular and accepted by the masses if it was presented as a struggle for democracy and freedom. He knew how to play the populist card, using the slogans of the Popular Front, and this he did very effectively. Did he believe his own words about freedom and democracy? To some degree he did, even if only for Britain's population and not for that of the empire. He had worked politically within a bourgeois democracy for several decades, and he no doubt felt that it was a suitable way of running the political affairs of Britain. Had Britain been a more febrile place in its class relations, it may well have been different. He notoriously praised Mussolini long after Il Duce's brutalities were commonly known; even in the late 1930s he could write quite favourably about Hitler. Did Churchill find the Nazis repugnant? Many high bourgeois figures found the plebian Nazis unpleasant; how they regarded them otherwise depended upon whether such thugs were necessary to defeat the working class. They were not necessary in Britain, so he was able to look with disgust upon lower-class elements like the Nazis in other countries. Faced with the brutal evidence of the Nazis' crimes, Churchill was horrified, but then so were the top Nazi prisoners at Nuremburg when they had to observe the films of the very atrocities which they had set in motion. Churchill saw the Second World War as a quest to defend Britain's place in the world, and preserve its empire, by defeating its main European and Far Eastern rival. Germany and Japan were defeated, with a great deal of the work being done by the USA and the Soviet Union. Within three years of the war's end, the 'Jewel of the Crown' -- India -- was independent. Other colonies were to follow. The unofficial empire in Latin America had fallen to the dollar. Britain was bankrupted by the war effort, and Churchill himself was rejected convincingly by the electorate. An odd victory for him, I think. Paul F ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
