Rethinking Churchill

0:00My bet is that informed and toney opinion will finally come down on the side of Churchill. Indeed, Professor Harry Jaffa has already assured us that Churchill was not only the man of this century, but the man of many centuries, in an article in Modern Age. In a way, Churchill as man of the century would be totally appropriate. The 20th century has been the century of the state, of the welfare state and of the warfare state. And Churchill was, from first to last, a man of the state, of the welfare state and of the warfare state. At the start of Churchill's career, John Morley was the last of the great English classical liberals. Lord Morley resigned from the Asquith cabinet in the summer of 1914 over the decision to go to war.

0:47A few years before he had met Churchill, worked with him and passed a succinct judgment on him. Winston, he said, has no principles. Winston has no principles. Still, although I will try to show that this is the case, that Churchill had no principles, as Morley discerned, there was a tendency to Churchill's action and conduct through his career, a bias, and that bias was towards dismantling the barriers to state power. Now, please, I'm quite aware of, talk about David and Goliath, right?

1:32I'm thinking on Winston Churchill, who's, if we were ancient Greeks, he would have been a god, and many times over. So, please do not believe that I belong to the school of Churchill criticism of the character in The Producers by Mel Brooks. I don't think that Hitler was a better dancer than Churchill. I don't think that Hitler was a better dresser than Churchill. So this is not, in any sense, please believe me, from beginning to end, an apology for Nazism, obviously. I will freely concede that in 1940, Churchill was superb. It doesn't matter in that, that in the greatest of his speeches, we will fight them on the beaches, we will fight them in the streets.

2:17He plagiarized Clemenceau from Clemenceau's speech on the Ludendorff Offensive in the spring of 1918. Churchill played his self-appointed role magnificently. Yet, before 1940, the word that had been most closely associated with Churchill's name was opportunist. He had changed party affiliation twice, from conservative to liberal and back again. His move to the Liberals was allegedly on the issue of free trade, but then in 1930 he sold out free trade and accepted industrial protectionism. When he was at the Board of Trade before the First World War, he opposed increased armaments because he wanted to use the money for welfare, social welfare. Then in 1911 he became the head of the Admiralty, that is the Secretary of the Navy, and he pushed for bigger and bigger budgets, spreading wild rumors about the strength of the German Navy, of the Navy, just as in 1930 spread wild rumors about the strength of the German Air Force.

3:14The Germans were building up, obviously, but it was not that concentration on the Air Force and the bombers. Churchill lied about that because he wanted to give the idea that the Germans were building up to attack England and especially to annihilate London. There was nothing to that, as we know now. He attacked socialism before and after the First World War. While during the war, he promoted war socialism, which Professor Higgs told me about, calling for nationalization of the railroad, saying in the speech, quote, our whole nation must be organized, must be socialized, if you like the word. There was no anchor to him. He floated with the currents of opinion. Churchill's opportunism continued to the end. The 1945 election, he latched onto Hayek's road to serfdom and started attacking the Labor Party as totalitarian, whereas it had been Churchill in 1943 who accepted the beverage plan for the Total Welfare State and Tangent Management of the Economy and had announced it.

4:13Churchill himself had caved in on the welfare state and socialism. Actually, there were two principles that Churchill seemed to hold dear. One was anti-communism. He was an early and fervent opponent of Bolshevism. For years, he very rightly decried the bloody baboons and foul murderers of Moscow. His deep admiration of Benito Mussolini was rooted in his shrewd appreciation of what Mussolini had accomplished or what he thought Mussolini had accomplished. Mussolini found the one formula that in the revolutionary situation in Italy, Italy teetering on the brink of Leninist social revolution, the one thing that could counteract Leninism and that was hyper-nationalism with the social slavery. Mussolini invented that and for the first time defeated the communists and Churchill Hitler was infinitely grateful to Mussolini until Mussolini started to afford British foreign policy.

5:06And yet, the time came when Churchill made his peace with communism, he gave all-out support to Stalin, the moment that the Germans invaded. And I still have not seen it explained, I simply don't understand this, perhaps somebody can explain it to me. By that time, by June 1941, Hitler had, was an aggressor obviously, had killed thousands, and tens of thousands, brutalities in Poland, but by that time, Stalin had already killed most of his 20 million. On what basis is it simply obvious that England should have thrown all of its support to Stalin at that point, just as the United States and Roosevelt threw all of our support to this mass murderer? Churchill, just as well as Roosevelt, the myth has grown up about Churchill among conservatives, on Conservatives, but Churchill, just as much as Roosevelt, called Stalin Uncle Joe, and at the Tehran Conference, I hope, I see you're all seated, this is important, the Tehran Conference in November of 1943, he gave Marshal Stalin a Christian crusader's sword that had

6:13been in the possession of the British Crown, and if you're interested in pondering the and the meaning of the word obscenity, you might think about that, what that meant. Oh, but then, of course, there was the abiding love of his life, the British Empire. Churchill stood for anything, it was the Empire. He famously said that he had not become Prime Minister to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire, but that's exactly what he did, exactly what happened. You see, let me just mention in a moment, I'm about to get into a very important point about Churchill. People who knew him throughout his life, from Lord Escher in 1917, Robert Menzies, the Australian Prime Minister during the Second World War, other people throughout his career, remarked on a very strange thing about Churchill.

6:58Let me quote Lord Escher at an early point. Churchill handles great subjects in rhythmical language and becomes quickly enslaved to his own phrases. He deceives himself into the belief that he takes broad views when his mind is fixed upon one comparatively small aspect of the question. The Australian Prime Minister, who knew him in the Second World War, said, His real tyrant is the glittering phrase, so attractive to his mind that awkward facts have to give way. He was a man of words. He was a man of words. He was a man of action. But as we'll see, a man of action in a funny kind of way. Not on the level that a statesman is expected to be a man of action. What he loved above all is war. The things that were described to you, and I mean combat.

7:46The things that were described to you this morning, that was what Churchill loved. It started very early when he was a kid. He had a collection, you know, his father was the son of the Duke. He was from the Marlboro family. He had a huge collection of toy soldiers, 1500 of them. He played with them until he was a teenager, they were all British, he tells us, and he fought battles with his brother Jack, he was only allowed to have colored troops, and they were not allowed to have artillery.

8:19Stacking the odds. He went to Sandhurst rather than Oxford or Cambridge, that is a military academy, and throughout his life, that's the thing that excited him most, and one might say the only thing that really excited him. Everything else, writing, painting, family life, this was the period of recreation from war. As few modern men, Patton maybe is an example of that also, but as very few modern men have, he loved war. He even loved the bangs, as he said, that is the explosions. And he was very brave into fire, no doubt about that. He had lost his religion early when he was in India. in India, he said by reading Gibbon, sounds a little strange, but his view of life was a Darwinian view of the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest and he expresses this in his one novel, Savrula.

9:14Now Churchill, which may not be known to you, was one of the chief creators of the early welfare state in Britain. The liberals came in in 1906 and right away they started adopting the policy that Bismarck had imposed in Germany of social insurance, compulsory social insurance, the working class and then of the whole population. David Lloyd George and Churchill worked together on this and they were the ones who pushed it through. This was the first stage of the welfare state in Britain. Really the second big stage is after 1945 and as I'll show you Churchill was an accomplice in that also. Churchill said, I'm 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, stepping into new spheres of activity. But still we have to respect individualism. No man can be a collectivist alone or an individualist alone. He must be both an individualist and a collectivist. Now this is Churchill, good

10:12sample of Churchill as conservative philosopher, doesn't get much better. He by the way fell Well into the influence, he became very friendly with, guess who? Two of my favorite people in modern times, Sidney and Beatrice Webb. And it was one of her strategic dinner parties that she introduced him to a young protege of hers named William Beveridge, who then worked with him in this period before the First World War and then, of course, the Beveridge Report was the plan for the socialization and the total welfare state in Britain. Okay, in 1911, he became the first Lord of the Admiralty, that is, Secretary of the Navy. Naturally, he pushed for war. When the crisis came in 1914, his own Prime Minister said that nothing would do him but immediate mobilization. Winston's got all his war paint on as longing for a sea fight in the early hours of the morning to result in the sinking of the Gerbens and German ship. Lady Asquith described the upper elite, very top elite of the government,

11:15On that momentous night of August 4th, 1914, as the clock ticked and struck the last notes, the period for the ultimatum to be responded to by Germany had expired, they were going to be at war, and everybody's sad, everybody's looking at each other, and there's one exception. She said, and then the great doors of the drawing room burst open, and there was Winston and Churchill, All Smiles and Ready for Action. He loved war and it's something that we have to know about him. The First World War he was instrumental in setting up the hunger blockade of Germany. Let me mention to you, everything that I say in this talk, if you care to ask me afterwards about the source or further reading about it, please see me tonight or tomorrow, or if necessary you can write me, Carol Mises Institute. And I can The Hunger Blockade of Germany, which was illegal in the eyes of everybody except Britain.

12:19It made food for civilians contraband. It was not a closing blockade, but a blockade that was created just by throwing mines all around the place. You don't have to do that. That blockade finally cost the lives of about 750,000 German civilians. The time is coming when the establishment view of the 20th century is going to be shaken very badly. You see, people don't just come up with crazy ideas. I'm going to massacre all the Slavs, I'm going to massacre all the Jews, I'm going to massacre all the bourgeois and so on. There's a cause and effect involved here. And the first great bloodletting and the first total destruction of rules of morality was the First World War.

13:04Here's what one historian says. The victimized youth of Germany, of the First World War, the ones who survived the starvation, would have become the most radical adherents of Nazism, understandably. They were almost starved to death as little kids. Okay. I'm tempted to take a Hoppean surcharge here of an extra 20% or something. No, no, no. I see Lew there. It's not going to work. It's not going to work. Because we haven't even gotten to the Lusitania yet. Whether Churchill was directly involved in the sinking of the Lusitania is unclear, is controversial. One of the latest historians of British naval intelligence in the First World War, Patrick Beasley, says looking at what they did, it is impossible to think it was simply negligence.

13:58And in any case, whether he was directly responsible for the sinking of the Lusitania, he had set up the rules such that it was very likely that the Lusitania was going to be sunk. He told merchant ship captains, if you see a submarine, veer around and ram it and split it in two. The Germans knew this. They were not going to recognize the special status of merchant men from then on. The Lusitania, as you know, probably, was carrying munitions of war, millions of shells, hundreds of thousands of bullets, Hundreds of thousands of mortars, which again is against the law, against international law. No wonder the Germans sunk it and America didn't get into war then, but it put us on a collision course to war.

14:48As Wilson said to the Germans, you can't do that ever again. An American has a God-given right to travel in time of war through a submarine zone in an enemy, armed enemy, merchant ship carrying munitions of war, and if you fire on that, well, you're the great monsters of all time. Okay, now we can talk about Churchill's career in the First World War, which is very interesting, the Gallipoli disaster, but he went from one post to another. He moved over to the Conservatives because the Liberal Party was disintegrating and became Chancellor of the Exchequer. His most famous act when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer was to return to the gold standard but at the unrealistic pre-war parody, you can read about this in Murray Rothbard's book The Great Depression, which created tremendous problems with the British export trade and ruined the good name of gold.

15:50A.J.P. Taylor is certainly right. Most of these, almost all of these historians are very friendly to Churchill. They live through it. They identify with him. He's a great favorite. But some of them do criticize from time to time. And Taylor said, Churchill did not grasp the economic arguments one way or the other. What determined him again was devotion to British greatness. The pound would once more as look the dollar in the face. You see, this is a man who was moved by words and symbols and not things. Okay, his great claim to fame in the modern mythology begins with his hard line against Hitler in the 1930s. But we should understand that he had the same hard line against the Weimar Republic.

16:36He was against any kind of equality for Germany in armaments even before Hitler came to power. So that if you ask, we know what his war plan was to get a great coalition together with Stalin and attack Germany, but what was his peace plan? There was no peace plan. It was to defend Versailles and to act and live in this world of illusions that the British and French leaders lived in. The Germany who forever would accept this, would accept being a second or third class citizen. Okay, war came. Funny thing happened. Well, it's not funny that Churchill was recalled to his old job as First Lord of the Admiralty, but then a funny thing happened. The President of the United States initiated a special personal correspondence, not with the Prime Minister of Britain, but with the First Lord of the Admiralty.

17:29Unusual, to say the least. And this correspondence by Transatlantic Telephone and Telegraph and so on lasted throughout the whole war. In 1940, Churchill became Prime Minister and ousted Chamberlain. We know now that there was a strong peace party in the British government and British public opinion, but Churchill set his face against peace, that is negotiations with Hitler, and refused even to listen to what the Germans had to say. He said, and this can be repeated or illustrated again and again, Churchill said, I have only one aim in my whole life, and that is the defeat of Hitler and the Germans.

18:18Right, and then an interesting thing happened in June of 1941, as I mentioned to you, Hitler attack, Stalin and Churchill gave Hitler, gave Stalin all-out support, and that was to last until the last months of the war, as we'll see. The conservatives, beginning with Churchill himself, made up a mythology after the war that Roosevelt had been the dumb one, that Churchill had been very shrewd and was talking about the soft underbelly of Europe to send the British troops up there in order to block the Russians from taking of Budapest in Vienna. The problem is there is virtually no contemporary evidence for that in what he says to other cabinet members in their diaries and documents and anything. He gave a lot of different reasons for the soft underbelly. You might have mentioned that once or twice because he likes to use every possible argument, but the major reasons were not anti-Soviet strategy.

19:16So, the Soviet Union was in the war, but really Churchill understood that his gamble in rejecting German peace initiatives could not work unless he got America into the war. It was simply that England herself, the Dominions, could not invade Fortress Europe. The survey was his idea. America had to be brought into the war. If it was important in 1917 to bring America into the war, it was a sine qua non of Churchill's policy in the Second World War to bring America into the war. Somebody yesterday mentioned this, I think it was Mr. Denson, this very interesting book by Gore Vidal that my friend Bill Kaufman reviewed called Screening History.

20:11You have to read this, especially if you're of a certain age and maybe have a recollection of those times. Churchill never neglected anything. Fantastic energy, you have to give it to that, to him. He was a ball of energy. So among other things, he arranged to have a Hollywood, he arranged to have a British colony set up in Hollywood that, headed by his friend Alexander Korda, a great director and producer, which would come out with British films, I mean, virtually British films. You have to read this Gore Vidal chapter in his book, Swedish History. He says, as spectators of Hollywood productions, we served neither Lincoln nor Jefferson Davis, we served the crown.

20:56These pictures, one after the other, on the Northwest frontier, Omdaman, Balaclava, Lady Hamilton, and so on, as Vidal said, was making us all weirdly English. People thought, weird, we shouldn't be in English. Well that was Hollywood's contribution. That was maybe on a lower level. He neglected nothing. He set up William Stevenson, who afterwards, you can read the whole story in a book, called A Man Called Intrepid, in his office in Rockefeller Center, and his aim was to destroy the America First movement, to intercept mail, to tap wires, to spread rumors, to spread disinformation of Every Kind. It was William Stevenson who handed Roosevelt the famous map of South America.

21:49You might remember that at one time at a press conference, Roosevelt waved around a map of South America showing the Nazis dividing up South America and imposing and destroying all religion. Churchill and especially Roosevelt kept harping on the fact that the Nazis were Destroying all religion. I don't know what they thought was happening in the Soviet Union at the time. So this disinformation, as it turned out to be totally fraudulent as a British, I mean also insanely stupid, you understand? Was the German attack of South America via Dakar in Western Africa would involve? The logistics would be difficult. They couldn't get across the English Channel. Okay, but nonetheless, all this nonsense was retail to the American people.

22:39But really, the most important thing was what was happening in the highest levels, okay? And there'll be much to tell you. Let me just limit it to this, because here the British documents have been released finally after 30 years. On January 1st, 1972, the documents concerning the Atlantic Charter meeting released. I'm reading to you from the Associated Press item. Formerly top-secret British government papers made public today said that President Franklin D. Roosevelt told Prime Minister Winston Churchill in August 1941 that he was looking for an incident to justify opening hostilities against Nazi Germany. On August 19th, Churchill reported on aspects of the Newfoundland meeting that were not made public.

23:30Churchill said, he obviously was determined that they should come in. If we were to put the issue of peace and war to Congress, they would debate it for months. The President has said he would wage war but not declare it. 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. And that's the way it happened with McGreer and other ships. And while he didn't ignore the back door to war, as you can read in Richard Lamb, in the relevant chapter in Richard Lamb's book, Churchill as War Leader, we can talk about much of this. The fact of the matter is that Winston Churchill in the First and Second World War both used our people as he used the Greeks and the Turks. For all his gush about the English-speaking people and their great mission in history, we were pawns in his game.

24:19And afterwards, when you heard about Pearl Harbor, Churchill openly said, this is what I have dreamed of, this is what I have aimed for, this is what I have worked for constantly, and now it's come about. Okay. We could now, now we're talking about this great epic, the last good war. We could talk about the Churchill's attack on the French fleet at Marcelle Kabir. You're not really allowed to bombard the ships of your ally without a declaration of war. In wartime, that's considered. But let me try to make it clear to you. At one time there was a controversy When Stevenson's book came out, Bill Buckley had a column saying, yes, what would you expect a great man like Churchill to do?

25:20He had to do it, because he was acting against this terrible, terrible monster, Hitler. He had to fool America into coming into war. He had to lie to the American people. I think the only one who denies this now is Professor Harry Jaffer in his article in Modern Age, where he's indignant that anybody should say that Churchill somehow helped get America into the Second World War. Professor Harry Jaffer says, didn't the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor? What do you think, Churchill bombed Pearl Harbor? which shows you what happens after many years of close study of the works of Leo Strauss. You become a moron. You have to read that to believe it.

26:11Okay, ladies and gentlemen, we have now to deal with a number of war crimes, the first of which is the destruction of the cities of Germany. The aim was to destroy the cities, the aim was to kill civilians. Barmer Harris was Churchill's agent in this. If you want to know who Barmer Harris is, let me say that he was Churchill's general Sherman. And let that sink in, he was Churchill's general Sherman. They killed 600 or 700,000 Germans, they destroyed an urban culture of a thousand years. But it meant nothing to this great conservative. That's what I love. You know, real conservatives, Henry Regnery's, Eric Finpuret-Ledeen, those are real conservatives. And you read what they have to say about Churchill. Someone who blithely destroys one of the great centers and treasures of what we are in Western civilization. Okay? The highlight, of course, was the destruction of Dresden. For three nights and three days, Dresden was pounded with bombs. At least 30,000 people killed, perhaps as many as 100,000.

27:23That's Finger Palace, the Zemper Opera House, Our Lady's Church, the Frauenkirche, the Bruegel Terrace, overlooking the Elbe. We're in Turgenev's Fathers and Sons. Uncle Pavel says, I'm gonna go there to spend all of my last years at the Bruegel Terrace. That was obliterated together with everything else. If they had never heard of, they might never have heard It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed.

28:13Otherwise we shall come into control of an utterly ruined land. The destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of adult bombing. I feel the need for more precise concentration instead of acts of terror and wanton destruction. Churchill is the one who had instigated it, so Harris and the other air lords just throw it back in his face. What Churchill wanted to do was get this in the record. This is what his whole historical work is about. Of course he enjoyed writing history, but to create an image which the and the world will then have of him forevermore. But they threw this memo back. They refused to accept it. What are you trying to do? Pretend that you had nothing to do? We have the order. You said, let's start bombing things in the east. How about some of these big cities that haven't been bombed yet? So in church we have the butcher of Dresden.

29:03We have in Churchill the patron and mentor of Marshal Tito. His advisor once asked, once said to Churchill, you know, with all this aid we're sending Tito and the aid we're denying to Mihailovich, it's going to be a communist country. Churchill said, you intend Do you want me to live there? And then General Albert Wedemeyer says, okay, Churchill put Tito in charge of Yugoslavia, what happens to his so-called soft underbelly strategy? Tito's not going to allow, as in fact happened, Tito's not going to allow western armies to go through Yugoslavia, so he controls Yugoslavia. What is this fantasy of Churchill's, he pamperts Stalin, he hates Stalin, everything Stalin wanted for years.

29:53And now he starts looking around, getting very scared, you know, because we don't live there, he lives in Europe. He tells an aide, as the war is winding down, what is there going to be between the white snows of Siberia and the white cliffs of Dover? He might have asked himself that question before. I wonder what you think of a statesman who does not realize that the extinction of Germany in Europe has certain consequences. Right? Is this a Metternich? Is this a Bismarck? Or is this maybe a Woodrow Wilson, another Prince of Fools?

30:40We started with the welfare state, let me just end. We could talk about the repatriation of the Soviet citizens. Alexander Zoginitsyn in the Gulag Archipelagos election, but he did try to win it here, this was what he said in 1945, you must rank me and my colleagues as strong partisans of national compulsory insurance for all classes, for all purposes, from the cradle to the grave. An architect of the warfare state, an architect of the welfare state, it seems to me that There are a number of positions one could take on Churchill. It's tempting to see him as a flawed creature who was summoned somehow at a critical moment to do battle against a uniquely appalling evil, sort of like Merlin in that great Christian libertarian novel, that hideous strength, if you know that novel by C.S. Lewis. Merlin has that role.

31:44But the interpretation that appeals to me is quite different than he was from first to last, a man of blood, a man of the state, and the apotheosis, the ongoing apotheosis of Winston Churchill serves to corrupt every standard of honesty and morality in history and politics.

32:14Thank you for watching!