Comments (6)

• Mark Koyama

• As a regular reader of this website, I agree entirely with the sentiment that our political leaders do not deserve to be eulogised in the way that they are. Given that he was recently voted the greatest Britain ever on a BBC poll, and given the way Neo-Cons love to band his name around, Churchill's reputation probably could do with being taken done a notch or two. Nevertheless, I believe that in presenting a one-side and unhistorical attack on Churchill, Adam Young, seriously damages his own case. Most of all I strongly object to the relativism that leads Young to place Churchill in the same category and Hitler and Stalin.
  Certainly Churchill was no saint: he was ruthless, arrogant, often indifferent to human suffering and of course, many of his views are politically incorrect by today's standards. In this respect Churchill should be compared with past British statesmen like Disraeli and Palmerstone who believed it was their duty to advance British interests. But considering the wrongs he committed apart from what good he achieved, and by considering it out-of-context, I believe to be disingenuous in the extreme. Government is inherently coercive and in wartime political leaders will be responsible for killing innocents, and Roosevelt and Churchill were no exception. But by my morally standards (and I hope, most other peoples), their actions can in no way be regarded as qualitatively indistinguishable from Hitler's or Stalin's and Adam Young's analysis implies. To blur the differences between the evils waged by Nazism in particular with those that occurred in the struggle to destroy Nazism is surely both morally wrong and irresponsible.

  A few other points I wish to make refer to problem's I found with Young's unhistorical approach. Churchill did not hate Germany as Young claims, his assessment of Germany as a long-run threat to British interests followed from the analysis of almost every British leader from William III. From the Nine Years War (1688-1697) fought against Louis XIV of France, Britain has always opposed any attempt made by either France, Russia or Germany to dominate continental Europe. Germany was the strongest country in Europe from 1870 to 1945, it followed according to the reasoning that long governed British political thinking, that British interest would conflict with German interests if Germany was ever to use her strength to dominate Europe. It follows that after WW2 Churchill was interested in strengthening Germany against the Soviets. Churchill was not responsible for destroying the balance of power nor was he responsible for destroying western civilisation. Likewise contra-Young, for Britain to make peace with Nazi Germany in 1940 would be to surrender her traditional role not preserve it. There was a lot of wish-thinking going on in Britain in the 1930s which explains the support for appeasement and it was Churchill's virtue that he saw threw it. Like Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan and indeed Osma Bin-Laden, Hitler's designs would always have led to war certainly with Britain and probably with America too eventually, not because of what Britain or America did but because of who they were. Churchill saw this when other's didn't and moreover he had the abilities to combat this evil (other British leaders saw it too, only later and though they may have been morally superior individuals, they lacked Churchill's pugnacious ruthlessness, which was sadly necessary).

  Similarly Allies had no real choice but to ally with Stalin in 1941 and Churchill would have been willing to ally with anyone but it was Roosevelt who was charmed and taken in by Stalin rather than Churchill. And it was Churchill not Roosevelt who wished to drive East in 1945 to save as much of Europe from the Communists, and who tried (in vain) to defend Polish independence from Russia.

  Less importantly, Churchill's understanding of economics was spotty and he always subordinated economic concerns to political ones. These are sound and important criticisms of the man. Nevertheless in the 1920s and early 1930s he stood up for the 'Treasury View' against proto-Keynesian for state-funded public works. Pegging the Pound to Gold at the post-war parity in 1925 was a mistake yet as W.H. Hutt argued, to do otherwise would have been to renege on past agreements. According to Young this led 'the Bank of England and the U.S. Federal Reserve to collude to prop up the pound by inflating the U.S. dollar, which in turn fueled the speculative boom during the 1920's that collapsed when the inflating slowed'. This is not so. After 1925 Sterling was overvalued thus gold was fleeing Britain and going to America and France; this was expected to inflate America prices and thus equilibrate Britain and America. However far from colluding with the Bank of England, the Fed neutralised all the gold coming in, thus preventing it from translating into price inflation. I am surprised that Young is ignorant of this, considering the fact that the Austrian interpretation of the Great Depression hinges upon the argument that the 1920s witnessed an inflationary boom despite the fact that prices failed to rise.

  Lastly, a recent work, Dresden by Frank Taylor attacks the revisionist accounts of Allied Bombing Young seems to depend on inciting that particular attack as a war-crime. The attack was indeed dreadful but the figure Young gives 135,000 is the figure given by the Nazi's and used by Nazi-apologist David Irving - Taylor estimates that 40,000 were killed though we will never know for sure. It is also clear that the city was being used for armaments and was a way-station for troops and equipment going to the Eastern front. Needless to say, this does not excuse the brutally that war engendered even on the Allied side.
  

• Published: February 27, 2004 1:37 PM

• Adam Young

• Churchill's hatred of Germans stemmed from his social darwinism, his view that Germany was a competitor that must be destroyed and I do not think hatred is too strong a word to describe Churchill's glee in plotting and carrying out the mass murder of millions of Germans.

  Churchill's alleged foresight regarding Stalin is more of Churchill's self-propaganda. In his famous Fulton, Missouri "Iron Curtain" speech in 1946, Churchill said "I have strong admiration and regard for the valiant Russian people and for my wartime comrade Marshal Stalin.... The Russian-dominated Polish government has been encouraged to make enormous and wrongful inroads upon Germany, and mass-expulsions of Germans on a scale grievous and undreamed of are taking place." Well, not undreamed of by Churchill at least, as it was at the Potsdam conference where he demonstrated to Stalin using matchsticks how Poland could be moved westward. And when General Wladyslaw Anders pointed out to Churchill that these mass deportations would be inhuman for the Germans as well, Churchill replied that 6 million Germans had already perished and more would soon join them.

  One point of the article was that without Churchill's disastrous involvement in the First World War, there wouldn't have been a Weimar Republic and a Nazi dictatorship, and a Communist regime in Russia. Hitler and WWII didn't just emerge out of nowhere. Decisions and choices laid its foundation. And many of these were made by Churchill.

  Churchill himself alluded to it on April 8, 1945: "This war should never have come unless, under American and modernizing pressure, we had driven the Habsburgs out of Austria and Hungary and the Hohenzollerns out of Germany. By making these vacuums we gave the opening for the Hitlerite monster to crawl out of its sewer onto the vacant thrones. No doubt these views are very unfashionable."

  And who conspired to bring in the Americans, turning the war into a Democratic Jihad?

  I hardly think the 20th century would have turned out worse than it did had the Germans won WWI, or more likely, without U.S. intervention, a stalemate and compromise peace would have arisen that would have discredited the Kaiser, the Czar and most other politicians and likely would have secured peace in Europe for at least a generation or two or maybe more.

  One of the Cold War architects of the policy of Soviet containment, George F. Kennan, wrote in 1951:

  "I would like to say a word about the total result of these two world wars in Europe. These wars were fought at the price of some tens of millions of lives, of untold physical destruction, of the destruction of the balance of forces on the Continent – at the price of rendering western Europe dangerously, perhaps fatally, vulnerable to Soviet power. Both wars were fought, really, with a view to changing Germany: to correcting her behavior, to making the Germans something different from what they were. Yet, today, if one were offered the chance of having back the Germany of 1913 – a Germany run by conservative but relatively moderate people, no Nazis and no Communists, a vigorous Germany, united and unoccupied, full of energy and confidence, able to play a part again in the balancing-off of Russian power in Europe – well, there would be objections to it from many quarters, and it wouldn't make everybody happy; but in many ways it wouldn't sound so bad, in comparison with our problems of today. Now, think what this means. When you tally up the total score of the two wars, in terms of their ostensible objective, you find that if there has been any gain at all, it is pretty hard to discern."

  I stand by my comments that Churchill helped destroy the balance of power on the Continent by his short-sightedness regarding the destruction of Germany, the alliance with Stalin and his refusal to deal with the anti-Nazi resistance. And because of his waging war, in the words of General Albert C. Wedemeyer "more like an Indian chieftain from the Arizona Territory intent upon obtaining the largest possible number of enemy scalps" he rightly belongs in that class of criminals who destroyed western civilization.

  Classical liberals/libertarians have lost so much to the depredations of statists. Are we required to applaud them when they claim to be uplifting humanity by wholesale slaughter? I don't think so.

  As to the gold issue I quote Murray Rothbard, pg. 143 from his America's Great Depression:

  "In short, Britain insisted on returning to gold at a valuation that was 10-20 percent higher than the going exchange rate, which reflected the results of war and postwar inflation. This meant that British prices would have had to decline by about 10 to 20 percent in order to remain competitive with foreign countries, and to maintain her all important export business. But no such decline occurred, primarily because unions did not permit wage rates to be lowered. Real-wage rates rose, and chronic large-scale unemployment struck Great Britain, Credit was not allowed to contract, as was needed to bring about deflation, as unemployment would have grown even more menacing---an unemployment caused partly by the postwar establishment of government unemployment insurance (which permitted trade unions to hold out against any wage cuts). As a result, Great Britain tended to lose gold. Instead of repealing unemployment insurance, contracting credit, and/or going back to gold at a more realistic parity, Great Britain inflated her money supply to offset the loss of gold and turned to the United States for help. For if the United States government were to inflate American money, Great Britain would no longer lose gold to the United States. In short, the Amencan public was nominated to suffer the burdens of inflation and subsequent collapse in order to maintain the British government and the British trade union movement in the style to which they insisted on becoming accustomed."

  I also don't think I am wrong for insisting on libertarian principles, on a libertarian website, that the ends never justify the means and that the targeting of non-combatants, under the self-serving ruse that its required for the greater good, can never be legitimized, otherwise what is the standard of civilized behavior in war and peace? Good intentions? Rhetoric? Whether 40,000 or 135,000 or one million people were killed in the terror bombing of Dresden, the number does not legitimate what is considered an atrocity when the Nazis do it.

  I say it again, the methods used by the Allies left little distinction between the Nazis, the Soviets and the so-called civilized West. As libertarians, we are not to defend and legitimize those actions, because Churchill, FDR and their programs -like those of the Nazis and Soviets- are not our principles, our ideals. Churchill and his ilk are the ones responsible for laying the groundwork for wars and future wars and for the destruction of human liberty that has grown throughout the past century.

  Churchill said about himself: "I do not care so much for the principles I advocate as for the impression which my words produce and the reputation they give me."
  

• Published: February 29, 2004 1:49 PM

• Tracy Saboe

• Winston Churchill said:
  "America should have minded her own business and stayed out of the World War. If you hadn't entered the war the Allies would have made peace with Germany in the Spring of 1917. Had we made peace then there would have been no collapse in Russia followed by Communism, and Germany would not have signed the Versailles Treaty, which has enthroned Nazism in Germany. If America had stayed out of the war, all these 'isms' wouldn't today be sweeping the continent in Europe and breaking down parliamentary government, and if England had made peace early in 1917, it would have saved over one million British, French, and American and other lives."

  The quote's from.
  http://www.harrybrowne.org/articles/Ignorance.htm

  I always thought this was a little hypocritical because, it was Churchill coluding with the US government that encouraged Wilson to decieve us into war.

  Tracy

• Published: February 29, 2004 5:37 PM

• Mark Koyama

• I agree entirely that WW1 was an absolute disaster and that the evils of the 20th century largely stem from its aftermath. And in hindsight it was American involvement in WW1 that led to the Allied victory, Versailles etc. Churchill along with Wilson, Lloyd George, and a host of German and Russian political leaders bears a degree of responsibility for the disaster. Nevertheless I am not convinced that Churchill bears the decisive responsibility for this as you claim. The recklessness of the German high command in the led up to WW1 and in attacking US shipping was more important surely? Nor was Churchill responsible for the treaty of Versailles, which disastrously punished Germany with onerous reparations and an unnecessary war guilt clause, thus antagonizing the German people without substantially weakening the nation's power of recovery. I also wish to emphasis that the entry of America into the war cannot be blamed for the Communist Revolution in Russia because the Tsarist state had collapsed militarily in 1916. In discussions with Britain in on November 5 1916, the German's stated their conditions regarding an armistice: in the East they demanded the creation of independent Poland thus making a compromised peace with Russia impossible. The Tsarist regime was overthrown early 1917 and in October the Bolsheviks seized power.

  I agree that the atrocities committed by the Allies should not be hidden nor casually justified because Allied intentions were better or because the means justified the ends. Nevertheless I believe that this can and should be done without falling in a relativism that collapses moral distinctions between say Churchill and Hitler, or Churchill and Stalin.
  The brutality displayed by both sides in WW2 never fails to shock me. Dresden was an atrocity. My only reason for picking up on it was because some writers with less congenial viewpoints than Adam Young have used the term common term: war crime to equate Allied actions such as the bombing of Dresden with the Nazi’s actions towards Jews, homosexuals, gypsies etc. Now I am not suggesting that Adam Young does anything of sort. Nor I am suggesting that the civilians killed during Allied bombings were necessarily any less innocent than those killed by Nazi raids, or indeed those killed in concentration camps. All I am saying is that in discussing such events we retain moral distinctions. No libertarian need applaud the actions of statists – but democratic statism is much more benign than its Nazi or Soviet variants. And as a Briton, I confess that had I been alive in 1940 I would have been glad that a ruthless old warrior like Churchill, whatever his faults was leading my country. Had WW2 been like earlier wars and were it not for the nature of the Nazi enemy, I doubt very much that Churchill would be acclaimed like he is, and I know that my own views on him would be different.

  I also standby my argument concerning the return to Gold and the 1920s, though this is probably not the time to pursue it.

• Published: March 1, 2004 7:33 AM

• tom canavan

• As a first-time reader at the Von Mises site, I read "The Real Churchill" with interest. However, I found it less useful than it might have been, because of the failure to identify quotes and otherwise to give sources for the facts alleged against Churchill. The scanty bibliography is of little help. An article with such an ambitious agenda ought, I think, to be more carefully documented. Nevertheless, it provided food for thought (and a useful starting point for my discussion group.)

  Tom Canavan

• Published: April 14, 2004 10:12 PM

• tom canavan

• As a first-time reader at the Von Mises site, I read "The Real Churchill" with interest. However, I found it less useful than it might have been, because of the failure to identify quotes and otherwise to give sources for the facts alleged against Churchill. The scanty bibliography is of little help. An article with such an ambitious agenda ought, I think, to be more carefully documented. Nevertheless, it provided food for thought (and a useful starting point for my discussion group.)

  Tom Canavan

• Published: April 14, 2004 10:12 PM