ZGram - 12/7/2001 - "Churchill's Unsettled Legacy"

[irimland@zundelsite.org]

Copyright (c) 2001 - Ingrid A. Rimland

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny

December 7, 2001

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

Once more, a book review of note:  CHURCHILL'S UNSETTLED LEGACY - A review
of David Irving's Churchill's War, Vol. 2.,

reviewed by Mark Weber ( weber@ihr.org ) :

[START]

It has been 14 years since the publication of the first volume of David
Irving's three-part biography of Britain's legendary wartime leader. This
second volume, subtitled "Triumph in Adversity," traces Winston Churchill's
career from June 1941 through July 1943, the pivotal period when, after
calamitous setbacks, the tide of war turned decisively in favor of the
Allies.

 With this handsome, meticulously referenced and generously illustrated
work (including many color photographs), Britain's best-known and most
controversial historian once again displays his extraordinary knack for
extracting information from overlooked diaries and suppressed records, and
his gift for turning mountains of data into well-crafted prose. This
measured, masterful examination of Britain's towering twentieth-century
premier is Irving at his best.

 It is difficult to avoid being impressed, even dazzled, by Churchill's
colorful personality, in comparison with which most political leaders of
the past 50 years seem pale midgets. From the pages of this book emerges a
vivid portrait of an often exasperating and sometimes callous man of quick
wit, myriad prejudices, puckish humor, arresting eloquence, and enormous
energy.

 As with Irving's other biographical works, this book's strength is also
its weakness. While it is packed with day-to-day and even hour-to-hour
detail, Irving sometimes, and perhaps unavoidably, neglects context and the
"larger picture." He sheds new light on Churchill's relations with major
and minor figures of the fragile Allied wartime coalition World War II,
including, for example, his deep, abiding loathing of "Free French" leader
Charles De Gaulle. Irving traces Churchill's wartime hypocrisy and
treachery -- most tragically toward the Poles, on whose behalf Britain had
declared war against Germany in 1939. Excessive space is devoted to
speculation about the July 1943 death of Wladyslaw Sikorski, prime minister
of Poland's London-based government in exile. Irving musters evidence to
suggest that Sikorski's death in a freakish airplane crash at Gibraltar was
not an accident, as officially announced, but instead may have been
secretly arranged by British authorities, perhaps on Churchill's order.

 As Irving notes, Churchill and other British officials received reports --
from Jewish agencies, from intercepted and decrypted secret German
dispatches, and from other sources -- of killings of Jews in the lands
under Axis rule. / 1 And yet, in his own six-volume history of the great
conflict, The Second World War, some 4,448 pages altogether, he made only
passing references to wartime Germany's harshly anti-Jewish policies (what
is now called "the Holocaust"), and no mention whatsoever of "gas chambers"
or "gassing." / 2

 Adding significantly to the work of such skeptical historians as John
Charmley (notably in his 1993 work, Churchill: The End of Glory), Irving
delivers here another powerful blow to Churchill's well-manicured image as
the heroic figure who "saved" Britain and "Western civilization."
Churchill, writes Irving in the introduction, "won the war in spite of
himself... Britain, in short, surrendered her own empire to defeat a
chimera conjured up by Winston Churchill, a putative danger from Nazi
Germany -- a threat which never existed except when Churchill needed to
call upon it. He sacrificed the substance to defeat the myth."

 During our own cynical era, when the reputations of once-towering figures
are routinely debunked and discredited, Winston Churchill is still held in
high regard. Churchill, says British-American writer Christopher Hitchens,
has become a "totem" of the Establishment. "His titanic standing depends
principally on a set of rotundly defiant speeches made in the years 1940
and 1941, when he staked everything on resistance to Hitler," writes
Hitchens. "...For innumerable readers and reviewers on both sides of the
Atlantic (Arthur Schlesinger prominent among them) the iconic status of
Churchill is an indispensable fact of life. If it can be shown that he was
a vain old fool, then their world would turn upside down." / 3

 In the view of the influential Jewish writer Charles Krauthammer -- a
Washington Post columnist (and fervent apologist for Israel) -- Churchill
is "the only possible" individual to be regarded as "Person of the
Century." Krauthammer explains: "Take away Churchill in 1940... and Britain
would have settled with Hitler -- or worse. Nazism would have prevailed.
Hitler would have achieved what no other tyrant, not even Napoleon, had
ever achieved: mastery of Europe. Civilization would have descended into
darkness." / 4  Henry Kissinger has called Churchill "the quintessential
hero." / 5

 Contributing not insignificantly to the durability of his reputation was
Churchill's lifelong philo-Semitism. Throughout his career, as Irving makes
clear in both the first and second volumes of his trilogy, Churchill was an
ardent booster of Jewish and Zionist interests. / 6  He believed Jews to be
"the most formidable and the most remarkable race which has ever appeared
in the world." In the words of British historian Andrew Roberts, Churchill
"felt an instinctive affinity for their genius as well as a historian's=92
respect for their trials, and he supported Jewish aspirations wherever they
did not clash with those of the Empire. He may have inherited this
philo-semitism from his father, but he certainly gave it a new lustre in
his own life." / 7

 The well-entrenched idealization of Churchill is part and parcel of a
drastically misleading view of World War II that Americans have been fed
for decades. One common deceit is to give the impression that Hitler sought
war against Britain and France, and that Germany aggressively attacked
those two countries. Routinely suppressed is the key fact that Hitler
strenuously sought to avoid conflict with Britain and France, and that it
was those two countries that declared war against Germany. As Irving points
out: "Britain was the one country of which Hitler consistently spoke
favourably. From 1918 to the day of his suicide in 1945 he avowed that his
one ambition had been to work in unison, even in grand alliance, with the
British empire. There is nothing to be found in the archives to contradict
our view that he meant it."

 Churchill's enduringly stellar image is all the more remarkable
considering that his views on a range of issues were, by today's standards,
hopelessly backward and politically incorrect. He was, for example, a
strong and seemingly sincere supporter of the British empire. / 8  In
November 1942, for instance, he declared: "Let me, however, make this
clear, in case there should be any mistake about it in any quarter; we mean
to hold our own. I have not become the King's first minister in order to
preside over the liquidation of the British Empire." / 9

 Along with most Britons (and Americans) of his era, he was also an
unabashed racist. Blacks he dismissed as "niggers" and "blackamoors." Arabs
were "worthless," Chinese were "chinks" or "pigtails," and dark races were
"baboons" or "Hottentots." Indians, in his view, were "the beastliest
people in the world, next to the Germans." / 10  Churchill not only favored
white supremacy in Britain, and disparaged racial mixing, but, as Irving
points out, wanted English-speaking whites -- whom he was not ashamed to
proclaim as a superior breed -- to rule the entire world. "We are
superior!," he exclaimed during a White House luncheon, to which vice
president Henry Wallace responded sarcastically: "So you believe in the
pure Anglo-Saxon race. Anglo-Saxondom =FCber alles!" / 11   Given such views=
,
it is not surprising, as Irving records, that Churchill and other
high-ranking officials were distressed over the impact on British society
caused by the wartime arrival of thousands of Black US servicemen. / 12

 Similar sentiments voiced by Irving earned censure during his
well-publicized lawsuit against Deborah Lipstadt. / 13 To Judge Charles
Gray's castigation of him as a "racist," for example, Irving retorted: "My
own feelings about race are precisely the same as 95 percent of the people
of my generation... If the British soldiers on the beaches of Normandy in
1944 could look forward to the end of the century and see what England has
become, they would not have bothered to advance another 40 yards up the
beach." / 14

 Although Churchill's harshly anti-Hitler rhetoric is well known, as late
as 1937, in his book Great Contemporaries, he was extolling the German
leader's "patriotic ardor and love of country." The story of Hitler's
struggle, Churchill went on, "cannot be read without admiration for the
courage, the perseverance, and the vital force which enabled him to
challenge, defy, conciliate, or overcome, all the authorities or
resistances which barred his path." / 15  In another publication from that
same year Churchill wrote: "One may dislike Hitler's system and yet admire
his patriotic achievement. If our country were defeated, I hope we should
find a champion as indomitable to restore our courage and lead us back to
our place among the nations." / 16

 Churchill is often praised for his outspoken criticism of his government's
policy in 1938 and early 1939 of "appeasement" of Hitler and Third Reich
Germany. In parliament his eloquent voice was nearly the only one raised
against Neville Chamberlain (whom he would succeed as prime minister in May
1940) for his short-lived effort to accommodate Hitler's demands for
self-determination for ethnic Germans living in what was then
Czechoslovakia, and, by extension, accepting German hegemony in central and
eastern Europe.

 But when Churchill himself held power as prime minister, he carried out a
policy of appeasement far surpassing that of his predecessor. The foreign
leader whom Churchill (and Franklin Roosevelt) appeased was not Hitler,
though, but rather the Soviet premier Stalin -- a dictator who, by any
measure, was a far more ruthless ruler then Hitler, and whose victims, by
all accounts, vastly outnumber those of the German leader. Churchill not
only cynically sanctioned Stalin's brutal hegemony over central and eastern
Europe, helping him dispose of the fates of many millions of people against
their will, he also collaborated with the Soviet ruler on issues of
military strategy.

 Although Churchill spoke out against the Soviet Union before and after the
war, during the war years he spoke cordially of the Soviet dictator. On
several occasions he praised Stalin, repeatedly calling him his "friend." /
17  Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the great Russian writer who was a prisoner in
Stalin's "Gulag" camps, has commented: "In their own countries, Roosevelt
and Churchill are honored as embodiments of statesmanlike wisdom. To us, in
our Russian prison conversations, their consistent shortsightedness and
stupidity stood out as astonishingly obvious..." / 18

 In Churchill's first address as prime minister -- the famous "blood, toil,
tears, and sweat" speech of May 13, 1940 -- he proclaimed his goal in the
war: "You ask, What is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is Victory --
victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror; victory, however long
and hard the road may be." Did those who thrilled to such defiant rhetoric
fully grasp what this meant? Were they really willing to support victory
"at all costs"? As it turned out, the cost was very high indeed.

 During the war Churchill made clear his simple aim in the great conflict:
"I have only one purpose, the destruction of Hitler, and my life is much
simplified thereby. If Hitler invaded Hell I would make at least a
favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons." / 19  In
keeping with that aim, Churchill refused even to consider Hitler's repeated
offers of peace, thereby condemning the people of Britain, and Europe, to
years of horrific warfare.

 In the early 1950s, historian Francis Neilson produced a stern portrait of
the British leader, The Churchill Legend, which remains worth reading
despite the passage of years: / 20

 >> Churchill had but one aim; only one desire. In The Grand Alliance he
states, "I have only one purpose, the destruction of Hitler, and my life is
much simplified thereby." It is his life that is to be satisfied. England?
Europe? Are they merely the arenas that provide the accessories of the
conflict? His life is to be "simplified" by throwing the world into chaos
again. His purpose is the destruction of one man; and the last chance to
maintain the culture of a thousand years must be abandoned because a
politician's life is to be "simplified."  <<

 Alan Clark -- historian and one-time British defence minister -- more
recently handed down a similarly harsh verdict of Churchill's war policy: /
21

 >> There were several occasions when a rational leader could have got,
first reasonable, then excellent, terms from Germany... The war went on far
too long, and when Britain emerged the country was bust. Nothing remained
of assets overseas. Without immense and punitive borrowings from the US we
would have starved. The old social order had gone forever. The empire was
terminally damaged. The Commonwealth countries had seen their trust
betrayed and their soldiers wasted... <<

 "Victory at all cost" also meant accepting the Allied "United Nations"
principles of egalitarianism and liberal democracy, which laid the
groundwork for the dismantling of empire and for a massive influx of former
imperial subjects, ushering in drastic changes in every area of life in
Britain (and the rest of Europe) in recent decades.

 In 1945, at the end of the terrible five-and-a-half-year conflict, Britain
did not "win" -- it merely emerged on the victorious side, together with
the two great powers that really did "win" the war: Soviet Russia and the
United States.

 British writer Peter Millar echoed this assessment a few years ago: / 22

 >> ...The accepted view that his [Churchill's] "bulldog breed"
stubbornness led Britain through its "finest hour" to a glorious victory is
sadly superficial. ...In no sense, other than the moral one, can Britain be
said to have won. She merely survived. Britain went to war ostensibly to
honour an alliance with Poland. Yet the war ended with Poland redesigned at
a dictator's whim, albeit Stalin's rather than Hitler's, and occupied,
albeit by Russians rather than Germans. In reality Britain went to war to
maintain the balance of power. But the European continent in 1945 was
dominated by a single overbearing power hostile to everything Britain stood
for. Britain, hopelessly in hock to the United States, had neither the
power nor the face to hold on to her empire.

 ... The "evil genius bent on world conquest" that most Americans believe
Hitler to have been, is a myth. The evil genius had more precise aims in
eastern Europe. A Britain that would have withdrawn from the fray and from
all influence in Europe to concentrate on her far-flung empire would have
suited him admirably. <<

 It is to his credit that Churchill acknowledged, on at least one or two
occasions, the tragedy of his own life's work. During a dinner with close
associates in early 1945 -- as his private secretary confided to his diary
-- a "rather depressed" Churchill was "saying that Chamberlain had trusted
Hitler as he was now trusting Stalin (though he thought in different
circumstances)..." / 23

 Three years after the end of the war, Churchill wrote: "The human tragedy
reaches it climax in the fact that after all the exertions and sacrifices
of hundreds of millions of people and of victories of the Righteous Cause,
we have still not found Peace or Security, and that we lie in the grip of
even worse perils than those we have surmounted." / 24  Later, reflecting
wistfully on his legacy as wartime leader, Churchill mused: "Historians are
apt to judge war ministers less by the victories achieved under their
direction than by the political results which flowed from them. Judged by
that standard, I am not sure that I shall be held to have done very well."
/ 25

 No man did more to bring about that "human tragedy" than Churchill
himself, who had devoted so much energy and effort to crafting the wartime
alliance that so greatly aided Stalin and the Soviet Union, the source of
the "worst perils." And, as David Irving painstakingly lays out in this
outstanding, unsparing work, no man among the Allied wartime leaders better
deserves to be judged by the results that flowed from his victories than
Britain's legendary wartime premier.

 ---------------------

 Notes  1. D. Irving, Churchill=92s War, vol. II, pp. 546-548.

 2. Robert Faurisson, "The Detail," The Journal of Historical Review,
March-April 1998, p. 19. Similarly, neither Dwight Eisenhower nor Charles
De Gaulle made any mention of Nazi gas chambers in his memoir of the war.

 3. C. Hitchens, "Whose History Is It?," Vanity Fair, Dec. 1993, p. 110.

 4. C. Krauthammer, "Einstein was wrong choice," Washington Post column, as
it appeared in The Press Democrat (Santa Rosa, Calif.), Jan. 2, 2000.

 5. Quoted by Ralph Raico, "Rethinking Churchill," in John V. Denson, The
Costs of War: America's Pyrrhic Victories (Transaction, 1997), p. 255.
Source cited: H. Kissinger, "With Faint Praise," New York Times Book
Review, July 16, 1995, p. 7.

 6. For example, Churchill wrote to Roosevelt in August 1942: "I am
strongly wedded to the Zionist policy, of which I am one of the authors."
=46.L. Loewenheim, and others, eds., Roosevelt and Churchill: Their Secret
Wartime Correspondence (New York: 1975), p. 234.

 7. Andrew Roberts, "Winston Replied That He Didn't Like Blackamoors," The
Spectator, April 9, 1994, p. 11.

8. D. Irving, Churchill's War, vol. I (1987), p. 437.

 9. Francis Neilson, The Churchill Legend (1954), p. 432; Quoted in part in
D. Irving, vol. II, p. 624. (Nov. 10, 1942)

 10. A. Roberts, "Winston Replied...," The Spectator, April 9, 1994, pp.
10-11; D. Irving, Churchill's War, vol. II, p. 624.

 11. D. Irving, Churchill=92s War, vol. II, p. 789.

 12. D. Irving, Churchill's War, vol. II, pp. 560-563.

 13. See M. Weber, "After the Irving-Lipstadt Trial: New Dangers and
Challenges," The Journal of Historical Review, March-April 2000, pp. 2, 6.

 14. M. Weber, "After the Irving-Lipstadt Trial," The Journal of Historical
Review, March-April 2000, p. 6. Incidentally, by any objective measure of
the term, Deborah Lipstadt herself deserves to be considered a "racist." As
undisputed evidence presented during the trial established, she publicly
opposes Jews marrying non-Jews, and supports Jewish supremacist rule in
Israel-Palestine.

 15. W. Churchill, Great Contemporaries (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons,
1937), p. 232. Quoted in: Francis Neilson, The Churchill Legend (Appleton,
Wisc.: C. C. Nelson, 1954), pp. 374-375.

 16. W. Churchill, Step by Step (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1939), pp.
143-144. Quoted in: Francis Neilson, The Churchill Legend (1954), pp.
373-374, 444.

 17. Examples or citations can be found in: Martin Gilbert, Winston S.
Churchill: Road to Victory, vol. VII (Boston: 1986), pp. 1031, 1035, 1066,
1173-1174, 1186, 1194, 1229, 1320. During the Feb. 1945 Yalta conference,
for example, Churchill declared: "It is no exaggeration or compliment of a
florid kind when I say that we regard Marshal Stalin's life as most
precious to the hopes and hearts of all of us... I walk through this world
with greater courage and hope when I find myself in a relation of
friendship and intimacy with this great man, whose fame has gone out not
only over all Russia but the world." (p. 1194).  In 1943 in Iran, at the
conclusion of the 1943 Tehran conference, Roosevelt, Stalin, Winston
Churchill, issued a joint statement that concluded: "We leave here friends
in fact, in spirit, and in purpose." Declaration of Dec. 1, 1943. Charles
A. Beard and Mary R. Beard, A Basic History of the United States (New York:
Doubleday, Doran, 1944), p. 530.

 18. A. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, vol. 1-2 (New York: Harper &
Row, 1974), p. 259n.

 19. W. Churchill, The Grand Alliance, p. 370. Quoted in: Francis Neilson,
The Churchill Legend (1954), pp. 411, 444.

 20. Francis Neilson, The Churchill Legend (1954), p. 444.

 21. Alan Clark, "A reputation ripe for revision," The Times (London), Jan.
2, 1993. 22. P. Millar, "Millar's Europe: Question over glory days," The
European (London), Jan. 7-10. 1993.

 23. Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill: Road to Victory, vol. VII
(Boston: 1986), p. 1232. (Feb. 23, 1945.)

 24. W. Churchill, The Gathering Storm (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948),
pp. iv-v (Preface)

 25. R. Boothy, Recollections of a Rebel (London: 1978), pp. 1830-184.
Quoted in: R. Raico, "Rethinking Churchill," in J. V. Denson, The Costs of
War (1997), p. 291.

[END]

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Source:  The Journal of Historical Review - July-August 2001 - pp. 43-47
Institute for Historical Review -- http://www.ihr.org/index.html

 Churchill=92s War: Triumph in Adversity (Vol. II), by David Irving. London:
=46ocal Point, 2001. Hardcover. Dust jacket. 1060 pages. Photographs.
Appendices. Source references. Index. (Available from the IHR for $50, plus
shipping.)

 Churchill=92s War: Triumph in Adversity (Vol. II), by David Irving. London:
=46ocal Point, 2001. Hardcover. Dust jacket. 1060 pages. Photographs.
Appendices. Source references. Index. (Available from the IHR for $50, plus
shipping.)  Reply-To: weber@ihr.org

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