Winston Churchill. His Times, His Crimes, by . Verso. 432 pp. £25
A review by Donald Sassoon, writer and professor of comparative European history
Flushing Winston Churchill Down the WC of History
In June 2022 Extinction Rebellion supporters threw red paint over a bust of Winston Churchill. The attack took place inside Churchill College, Cambridge (founded in 1960 in honour of the great man). They were obviously troubled about the status of Churchill, widely seen as the ‘man who defeated Hitler’, the man who ‘won the Second World War’, the kind of historical absurdities which acquire a certain status because they are repeated so often that one looks controversial simply by challenging them. In 2002 a survey concluded that Churchill was regarded as the greatest ever Briton, pipping Shakespeare, Darwin and Newton to the post. This was not just the demos speaking: the over-rated philosopher Isaiah Berlin described him in 1949 (in the conclusion of the section on Churchill in his Personal Impressions) as ‘the saviour of his country … the largest human being of our time’. The distinguished historian A. J. P. Taylor fully concurred. This should not be surprising: a recent Levada poll in Russia placed Stalin first among the most ‘outstanding’ figures in Russian history (and ahead of Pushkin!).
In 2021 Churchill College had appointed a Working Group on Churchill, Race and Empire which was supposed to re-examine the legacy of Winston Churchill. Then the college got cold feet. The idea turned out—surprise, surprise—as too controversial. Who wants anything controversial in universities these days? Besides, Boris Johnson, the ‘new’ Churchill was then still Prime Minister and had previously authored a ‘biography’ of Churchill, The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History, devastatingly reviewed by Richard Evans in the New Statesman with a felicitous and ferocious title: ‘“One man who made history” by another who seems just to make it up: Boris on Churchill’. The conservative think tank Policy Exchange, obviously upset at the endeavours of the working group, produced a pamphlet authored by Andrew Roberts (with a foreword by Nicholas Soames, Churchill's grandson) designed to trash some of the contributions to the working group. Roberts is also one of Churchill's more laudatory biographers—there must be hundreds—(Churchill: Walking with Destiny, 2018). He is now a lord, thanks to Boris.
It is true that taking down a statue, or daubing it with paint, does little to dismantle the Churchill myth. On the contrary, given Winston's popularity, it may enhance his stature. On one side, a widely respected national treasure, on the other a bunch of young ‘rebels’, whose knowledge of history seems rather limited. However, far more useful and effective than throwing paint at Churchill is Tariq Ali's book, which seeks not so much to flush WC down the toilet of history, but to reassign him to his rightful place as one of history's most over-rated figures. The over-rating, however, is likely to continue. The Wikipedia entry for Churchill almost entirely relies on staunchly pro-Churchill biographies, such as Martin Gilbert's six-volume official biography and that, a little more moderate, of Roy Jenkins (published in 2002 and entirely based on secondary sources) and picks the more acceptable bits from his life, passing over the least acceptable ones—not too difficult a task since he changed position regularly.
Tariq Ali's book certainly belongs to the anti-Churchill camp: the subtitle—His Times, His Crimes—leaves no one in doubt that this was going to be a demolition job. He joins Clive Ponting, a civil servant whistleblower, who noted in his 1994 biography of Churchill that the ‘national treasure’ drank far too much, was mean to his family, was excessively loquacious at meetings, was an imperialist, a warmonger who disliked suffragettes, blacks, Indians and even Catholics (‘the Catholic Church’, he declared, ‘has ruined every country where it has been supreme and worked the downfall of every dynasty that ruled in its name.’). Paul Addison, in his 2005 Churchill: The Unexpected Hero pointed out that Churchill had been regarded by many of his contemporaries as a ‘shameless egotist’, an opportunist ‘without principles’, unreliable, reckless and ‘amateur strategist with a passion for war and bloodshed’ and, a class warrior. More recently, in 2021, Geoffrey Wheatcroft produced another demolition job (Churchill's Shadow: The Life and Afterlife of Winston Churchill), which inevitably upset the Churchillophile Andrew Roberts. No wonder: Wheatcroft's Churchill is not just a self-centred racist, but also a hypocrite, a drunk, a military bungler, a careless father, and a mythmaker. As Lloyd George noted (privately) in 1934, Churchill ‘would make a drum out of the skin of his own mother in order to sound his own praises.’
It was the Second World War and how it was seen by British eyes that saved Churchill's reputation. This, however, did not stop the British electorate trouncing him in the 1945 elections—a wise electorate (those were the good old days!) obviously aware that nothing could be more alien to Churchill than peacetime reconstruction. Churchill was back in power in 1951, thanks to the dysfunctionality of the electoral system (more people had voted for Attlee), but he was an irrelevant and quite unmemorable Prime Minister. His main achievements were the bloody suppression of the Mau-Mau rebellion and securing Truman's support for a coup against Iran's then Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossadegh (appointed by a regularly elected parliament), for having dared to nationalise British assets.
The Churchill cult developed mainly after his death in 1965 and, according to Tariq Ali, escalated during and after the Falklands War when, for a little while, Britain ruled a few waves around some distant islands. Had Churchill died in 1939 he would be remembered, if at all, as one of the least successful Tory politicians of the twentieth century (the current century has already produced quite a few formidable claimants for the post). He certainly had a way with words, though perhaps his Nobel Prize for Literature was one of the Nobel's frequent dives into satire (like the Peace Prize to Henry Kissinger and to Menachem Begin).
Churchill always liked ‘adventures’ and—since there were no good wars when he was young—being a foreign correspondent seemed to provide more excitement than the military. In Ali's words, ‘War was an elixir, a cure-all for boredom and ennui, and more exciting than hunting since the targets were usually “savages”’. If you can't fight a war, you might as well go and have a look at one. In 1895 Churchill was in Cuba to cover the Spanish-Cuban war, siding, obviously, with the Spanish colonialists and describing the island as ‘calm’, unaware that it was plagued by smallpox, cholera and famine. Churchill later wrote that Cuba would have fared better had it been a British colony, not realising—as Tariq Ali notes—that it had been a British colony for less than a year until it was exchanged for Florida with the Spaniards in 1763. We don't know how happy Cubans were during the British reign, but we can guess how the thousands of slaves transported by the British into Cuba in the eleven months of British occupation must have felt.
The ‘great journalist’, using the family network, then moved to the Sudan (1898) where he celebrated the British victory against the outnumbered rebellious natives. He then proceeded to South Africa to cover the Boer War. His accounts do not mention the concentration camps, but there is plenty about himself.
He then entered politics as a Liberal. Quickly promoted to the post of Home Secretary (1910–11) he was a supporter of social welfare legislation, but did not hesitate to use repression against striking miners. He has been cursed to this day in Wales for his strong-armed repression of miners in Tonypandy—an episode which has remained controversial. His views at the time were the banal opinions of traditional conservatives. On women's suffrage he positioned himself with the more retrograde sections of the political class: women's suffrage, he declared, ‘is contrary to natural law and the practice of civilized states … only the most undesirable class of women are eager’ for this right since ‘those who discharge their duty to state—marrying & giving birth to children—are adequately represented by their husbands … I shall unswervingly oppose this ridiculous movement.’
The problem, if it is a problem, is that such views were only too common in Churchill's lifetime. Those who seek to defend him, when confronted with his numerous racist or misogynist remarks, say ‘Ah, but he was a man of his time’. This is true, but there were people, in his time, who denounced warmongering, supported the suffragettes and opposed colonialism. Churchill was not one of them. If, today, we find his remarks outrageous it is precisely because the progressive side fought back and changed the culture. Churchill, born a Victorian, remained a Victorian—but a retrograde one.
He did not last long as Home Secretary. In 1911 he was demoted to First Lord of the Admiralty. In May 1915 he was ousted by the Conservatives as a condition for them joining the war coalition. Then he held a series of minor Cabinet posts. His major war initiative, the Battle of Gallipoli, ended in a famous humiliating defeat, ‘a disaster that was never forgotten’. He never regretted it. Narcissist to the last, as Roy Jenkins (quoted by Tariq Ali) wrote, sometimes ‘self-doubt is called for, but self-doubt was never one of Churchill's attributes.’ When the war was over, he became Secretary of State for War. That was his post during the Irish War of Independence (1919–21) and on 25 March 1920, he despatched the notorious ‘Black and Tans’, paramilitaries, a torture and death squad, in a desperate but futile attempt to defeat the Irish rebellion. He then pushed for intervention in the Russian civil war, determined to ‘strangle the Bolshevik baby in its crib’. He failed there as well. Supporting an armed intervention to put the Tsar back on the throne showed that Churchill did not understand anything about what was going on in Russia, except that the Bolsheviks were the baddies. He was more successful in supporting the terror bombing of civilians in Iraq. True to form, Churchill, at the 1919 Peace Conference, wanted to preserve the use of gas as a method of warfare: ‘I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes.’
The problem with Tariq Ali's otherwise highly readable book is that he takes the subtitle, ‘his times’ a little too literally. When he discusses Churchill and Ireland, instead of contextualising Churchill's position and that of his contemporaries on the Irish conflict, he starts a twenty-page discussion on Irish revisionist historiography which bears only a slight connection to Churchill, beginning with several pages on the Society of United Irishmen's revolt of 1798 and proceeding all the way to the Easter Rising. Churchill's failed intervention in Russia turns out to be an occasion for Tariq Ali to devote plenty of historical details on Russian history from the 1905 revolution onwards. These regular departures into history and away from Churchill are often interesting. At times, however, Ali is completely off the mark, as when he tells us that the Italian Communist Party, after 1945, was an outfit run by Stalinists such as Togliatti who was not ‘a clever politician’, a view not even Togliatti's most ferocious Italian critics would hold. (He was, unquestionably, one of the cleverest politicians in postwar Italy.) Some homework was needed here.
Was Churchill an outlier or was he simply going with the trend? He was not much good at anything. In 1924 he got a ‘real’ job: Chancellor of the Exchequer. Devoid of the most elementary knowledge of economics, he turned out to be one of the worst Chancellors ever. His decision to return to the gold standard in 1925 was a major mistake, leading John Maynard Keynes to produce his acerbic pamphlet, The Economic Consequences of Mr Churchill, in which he called Churchill's statements ‘feather-brained’ and what he did ‘silly’. Of course, poor Churchill, unlike the clever Liz Truss, was simply doing what his Treasury ‘experts’ told him.
In 1926, the miners went on strike; a strike which Churchill regarded as inspired by Bolshevik agitators, though the British Communist Party had only some 5,000 members. Labour got into power in 1929, but was ineffectual and soon formed a national government with the other parties—a Conservative government in all but name. But Churchill was out of power until, thanks to the Labour Party, he was brought into the 1940 coalition government as Prime Minister.
His great achievement was to have been against appeasement, but that was probably because he was a warmonger. He would have been in favour of all the wars in the post-1945 period (Suez, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and so on). In the 1930s, he got it right. Earlier in the 1920s, he got it wrong. On meeting Mussolini in 1927, he wrote, to the later embarrassment of sycophantic biographers, ‘I could not help being charmed, like so many other people have been, by his gentle [sic] and simple [sic] bearing and by his calm, detached poise in spite of so many burdens and dangers.’ What he really liked about Mussolini was his struggle ‘against the bestial appetites of Leninism.’ And, of course, Churchill was on the side of Franco during the Spanish Civil War.
Sometimes, and I say this with some regret, Ali is too severe: when the Japanese invaded China in 1937, Churchill looked the other way. In the 1,065 pages of Churchill's Memoirs of the Second World War (1959), the Japanese 1937 massacre in Nanjing, one of the worst crimes of the Second World War, is barely mentioned. But, as Tariq Ali acknowledges, most of the historians of WW2 do not mention it either. Eurocentrism dictates that the Second World War started in 1939 when Hitler invaded Poland, not in 1937 when Japan invaded China. There was little international knowledge of the Nanjing massacre until the 1960s and very little until the 1990s.
Of all the charges laid against Churchill during the war, the most serious is that he did not do much to prevent, or at least to alleviate, the Bengal famine of 1943 (between 2 and 3 million dead—Tariq Ali goes for a higher figure). He refused to declare a state of emergency and to reverse the policies that caused starvation. That was criminal, but the wartime coalition included Attlee and Bevin and they should also share the blame. The only ones to come out relatively ‘clean’ were Leo Amery, secretary of state for India, and Field Marshal Archibald Wavell, viceroy of India. Amery, hardly a man of the left (he was an intransigent defender of the Empire), wrote: ‘On the subject of India, Winston is not quite sane … I don't see much difference between his outlook and Hitler's.’ For Churchill, the starvation of the ‘anyhow under-fed Bengalis’ was not serious. Wavell pointed out that the famine ‘was one of the greatest disasters that had befallen any people under British rule’. The famine is not mentioned in the Oxford History of The Twentieth Century. It is not mentioned in Max Hastings's lengthy Finest Years, on Churchill's war and not even mentioned in Paul Addison's otherwise balanced biography of Churchill.
The French Revolution? I didn't know that Robespierre, Marat and Danton were Jewish…but if Churchill thought so…This movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt [Adam Weishaupt, founder of the Illuminati was not a Jew—DS] to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxemburg (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States), this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing. It played … a definitely recognisable part in the tragedy of the French Revolution.
Tariq Ali has done a good job at having another go at the national idol, but I fear the cult is far from over. As Bertolt Brecht's Galileo exclaims, with a heavy heart: ‘Unglücklich das Land, das Helden nötig hat’ (Unhappy is the land that needs a hero).
Donald Sassoon, published in January 2023
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