Irving spills beans on Churchill, total criminal on-the-take; now u know why Iriving is hated

[Apollonian]

Irving on Churchill​

Dismantling Churchillian Mythology

Theodore J. O'Keefe

Link: http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v07/v07p498_Okeefe.html

World-class historian David Irving is no stranger to readers of the IHR's Journal of Historical Review. His address to the 1983 International Revisionist Conference, which appeared in the Winter 1984 Journal of Historical Review ("On Contemporary History and Historiography"), was something of a primer on Irving's revisionist historiographical method. It was spiced as well with tantalizing hints of new directions in Irving's research and new book possibilities arising from them.

Not the least among Irving's revelations were those that touched on Winston Churchill, descendant of one of England's greatest families and leader of his nation and its empire (as he still thought it) at what many of his countrymen and many abroad still regard as Britain's "finest hour." Readers will recall that Irving exposed several instances of Churchill's venality, cowardice and hypocrisy, including Churchill's poltroonish posturing at the time of the German air raid against Coventry and the facts of Churchill and his cronies' secret subvention by the Czech government.

It will also be recalled that in his lecture Irving spoke of his projected book on Winston Churchill, which at the time was to be published in the U.S. by Doubleday and in Great Britain by MacMillan, two great firms entirely worthy of an author who has been churning out meticulously researched historical bestsellers for a quarter of a century. As has been pointed out in recent issues of the IHR Newsletter, Irving's challenges to the reigning orthodoxy have become so unbearable to the Establishment that both these major houses refused to print the books as written. The task has now [1986] been undertaken by a revisionist operation in Australia. Nearing completion is the first volume of Irving's new book Churchill's War.

Last year David Irving made a world-wide speaking tour, visiting North America (the U.S. and Canada), Australia, South Africa, and Europe. He lectured on a wide range of topics pertaining to the troubled history of our century, with his customary flair for the pointed phrase and the telling anecdote. During one of his lectures, delivered at Vancouver, British Columbia, on March 31, 1986, Irving offered a series of mordant new facts and insights on the life and career of Winston Churchill.

At the outset of his lecture, Irving remarked that the late Harold MacMillan (Lord Stockton), recently targeted by Nikolai Tolstoy (The Minister and the Massacres) for his role in the forcible deportation of tens of thousands of anti-Communist Cossacks, Byelorussians, Ukrainians, and others to the U.S.S.R. after World War lI, had stated that Irving's Churchill book would "not be published by his company, over his dead body." Clearly Lord Stockton's recent demise didn't alter things at MacMillan, however.

Then Irving let out an electrifying piece of information:

The details which I will tell you today, you will not find published in the Churchill biography. For example, you won't even find them published in Churchill's own biography because there were powers above him who were so powerful that they were able to prevent him publishing details that even he wanted to publish that he found dirty and unscrupulous about the origins of the Second World War.

For example, when I was writing my Churchill biography, I came across a lot of private papers in the files of the Time/Life organization in New York. In Columbia University, there are all the private papers of the chief editor of Time/Life, a man called Daniel Longwell. And in there, in those papers, we find all the papers relating to the original publication of the Churchill memoirs in 1947, 1949, the great six-volume set of Churchill memoirs of the Second World War. And I found there a letter from the pre-war German chancellor, the man who preceded Hitler, Dr. Heinrich Brüning, a letter he wrote to Churchill in August 1937. The sequence of events was this: Dr. Brüning became the chancellor and then Hitler succeeded him after a small indistinguishable move by another man. In other words, Brüning was the man whom Hitler replaced. And Brüning had the opportunity to see who was backing Hitler. Very interesting, who was financing Hitler during all his years in the wilderness, and Brüning knew.

Brüning wrote a letter to Churchill after he had been forced to resign and go into exile in England in August 1937, setting out the names and identities of the people who backed Hitler. And after the war, Churchill requested Brüning for permission to publish this letter in his great world history, The six-volume world history. And Brüning said no. In his letter, Brüning wrote, 'I didn't, and do not even today for understandable reasons, wish to reveal from October 1928, the two largest regular contributors to the Nazi Party were the general managers of two of the largest Berlin banks, both of Jewish faith and one of them the leader of Zionism in Germany."

Now there is a letter from Dr. Heinrich Brüning to Churchill in 1949, explaining why he wouldn't give permission to Churchill to publish the August 1937 letter. It was an extraordinary story, out of Churchill's memoirs. Even Churchill wanted to reveal that fact. You begin to sense the difficulties that we have in printing the truth today. Churchill, of course, knew all about lies. He was an expert in lying himself. He put a gloss on it. He would say to his friends, "The truth is such a fragile flower. The truth is so precious, it must be given a bodyguard of lies." This is the way Churchill put it.

Irving went on to describe several sources of secret financial support enjoyed by Churchill. In addition to money supplied by the Czech government, Churchill was financed during the "wilderness years" between 1930 and 1939 by a slush fund emanating from a secret pressure group known as the Focus.

Irving on the Focus:

The Focus was financed by a slush fund set up by some of London's wealthiest businessmen -- principally, businessmen organized by the Board of Jewish Deputies in England, whose chairman was a man called Sir Bernard Waley Cohen. Sir Bernard Waley Cohen held a private dinner party at his apartment on July 29, 1936. This is in Waley Cohen's memoirs ... The 29th of July, 1936, Waley Cohen set up a slush fund of 50,000 pounds for The Focus, the Churchill pressure group. Now, 50,000 pounds in 1936, multiply that by ten, at least, to get today's figures. By another three or four to multiply that into Canadian dollars. So, 40 times 50,000 pounds -- about $2 million in Canadian terms -- was given by Bernard Waley Cohen to this secret pressure group of Churchill in July 1936. The purpose was -- the tune that Churchill had to play was -- fight Germany. Start warning the world about Germany, about Nazi Germany. Churchill, of course, one of our most brilliant orators, a magnificent writer, did precisely that.

For two years, The Focus continued to militate, in fact, right through until 1939. And I managed to find the secret files of The Focus, I know the names of all the members. I know all their secrets. I know how much money they were getting, not just from The Focus, but from other governments. I use the word "other governments" advisedly because one of my sources of information for my Churchill biography is, in fact, the Chaim Weizmann Papers in the State of Israel. Israel has made available to me all Churchill's secret correspondence with Chain Weizmann, all his secret conferences. It is an astonishing thing, but I, despite my reputation, in a kind of negative sense with these people, am given access to files like that, just the same as the Russian Government has given me complete access to all of the Soviet records of Churchill's dealings with Ivan Maisky, Joseph Stalin, Molotov and the rest of them. I am the only historian who has been given access to these Russian records. It is a kind of horse trading method that I use when I want access to these files, because it is in these foreign archives we find the truth about Winston Churchill.

When you want the evidence about his tax dodging in 1949 and thereabouts, you are not going to look in his own tax files, you're going to look in the files of those who employed him, like the Time/Life Corporation of America. That's where you look. And when you're looking for evidence about who was putting money up for Churchill when he was in the wilderness and who was funding this secret group of his, The Focus, you're not going to look in his files. Again, you're going to look in the secret files, for example, of the Czech government in Prague, because that is where much of the money was coming from.

Irving then revealed further details of Churchill's financing by the Czechs, as well as the facts of Churchill's financial rescue by a wealthy banker of Austro-Jewish origins, Sir Henry Strakosch, who, in Irving's words, emerged "out of the woodwork of the City of London, that great pure international financial institution." When Churchill was bankrupted overnight in the American stock market crash of 1937-1938, it was Strakosch who was instrumental in setting up the central banks of South Africa and India, who bought up all Churchill's debts. When Strakosch died in 1943, the details of his will, published in the London Times, included a bequest of £20,000 to the then Prime Minister, eliminating the entire debt.

Irving dealt with Churchill's performance as a wartime leader, first as Britain's First Lord of the Admiralty and then as Prime Minister. The British historian adverted to Churchill's "great military defeat in Norway, which he himself engineered and pioneered," and mentioned the suspicion of Captain Ralph Edwards, who was on Churchill's staff at the time, that Churchill had deliberately caused the fiasco to bring down Neville Chamberlain and replace him as prime minister, which subsequently happened.

Irving spoke of Dunkirk:

In May 1940, Dunkirk, the biggest Churchill defeat of the lot. It wasn't a victory. It wasn't a triumph. Nothing for the British to be proud of. Dunkirk? If you look at the Dunkirk files in the British archives now, you will find, too, you're given only photocopies of the premier files on Dunkirk with mysterious blank pages inserted. And you think, at first, how nice of them to put these blank pages in to keep the documents apart. Not so. The blank pages are the ones that you really want to be seeing. In some cases, of course, the blank pages are genuinely censored with intelligence matters. But the other blank pages are letters between Churchill and the French Prime Minister, Paul Reynaud, which revealed the ugly truth that Churchill, himself, gave the secret order to Lord Gort, the British General in command of the British expeditionary force at Dunkirk, "Withdraw, fall back," or as Churchill put it, "Advance to the coast." That was Churchill's wording. "And you are forbidden to tell any of your neighboring allies that you are pulling out. The French and the Belgians were left in the dark that we were pulling out.

I think it's the most despicable action that any British commander could have been ordered to carry out, to pull out and not tell either his allies on his left and right flanks that he was pulling out at Dunkirk. The reason I knew this is because, although the blanks are in the British files, I got permission from the French Prime Minister Paul Reynaud's widow. His widow is still alive. A dear old lady about 95, living in Paris. And guiding her trembling hand, I managed to get her to sign a document releasing to me all the Prime Minister's files in the French National Archives in Paris. And there are documents, the originals of the documents which we're not allowed to see in London. and there we know the ugly truth about that other great Churchill triumph, the retreat to Dunkirk. If peace had broken out in June of 1940, Churchill would have been finished. No brass statue in Parliament Square for Mr. Winston Churchill. He would have been consigned to the dustbin of oblivion, forgotten for all time and good riddance I say, because the British Empire would have been preserved. We would, by now, have been the most powerful race -- can we dare use the word, the British race, the most powerful race on Earth.

Irving pointed out that Churchill rejected Hitler's peace offers in 1939, 1940, and 1941. (Irving supports the thesis that Rudolf Hess's flight to Scotland was ordered by the Führer). Irving pinpointed one critical moment, and supplied the background:

The crucial moment when he managed to kill this peace offensive in England was July 1940. If we look at the one date, July the 20th, this I think was something of a watershed between the old era of peace, the greatness of the British Empire and the new era, the new era of nuclear deterrent and the holocaust, the nuclear holocaust. July 20, 1940: Mr. Churchill is lying in bed that Sunday out in Chequers, when he gets a strange message. It's an intercept of a German ambassador's telegram in Washington to Berlin. It's only just been revealed, of course, that we were reading all of the German codes -- not only the German Army, Air Force and Navy Codes, but also the German embassy codes. And if you're silly enough to believe everything that's written in the official history of British Intelligence, you will understand that the only reason that they released half of the stories is to prevent us from trying to find out the other half. And what matters is that we are reading the German diplomatic codes as well. On July 20th, the German ambassador in Washington sent a message to Berlin saying that the British ambassador in Washington had asked him very quietly, very confidentially, just what the German peace terms were. This, of course, was the one thing that Churchill could never allow to happen, that the British find out what Hitler's peace terms are. He sends an immediate message to the foreign office, to Lord Halifax, saying, "Your ambassador in Washington is strictly forbidden to have any further contacts with the German ambassador, even indirectly." They were communicating through a Quaker intermediary.

Now, on the same day, Churchill sent a telegram to Washington ordering Lord Lothian, the British ambassador in Washington, to have nothing to do with the German ambassador. And the same day, he takes a third move to ensure that the peace moves in Britain are finally strangled at birth. He orders Sir Charles Portal to visit him at Chequers, the country residence of British prime ministers. Sir Charles Portal was Commander in Chief of Bomber Command. Now what is the significance? Well, the significance is this. Up to July 1940, not one single German bomb has fallen on British towns. Hitler had given orders that no British towns are to be bombed and, above all, bombing of London is completely forbidden and embargoed. Churchill knows this, because he's reading the German code. He's reading the German Air Force signals, which I can now read in the German files. Churchill is reading the signals, and he knows that Hitler is not doing him the favor.

Hitler is still hoping that this madman in England will see reason or that he will be outvoted by his cabinet colleagues. So he's not doing Churchill the favor of bombing any English towns. Churchill is frantic because he thinks he's being outsmarted by Hitler. On July the 20th he sends for Sir Charles Portal, the Chief of Bomber Command, and he says to Sir Charles Portal, as we know from records from Command to the Air Ministry, "When is the earliest that you could launch a vicious air attack on Berlin?" Sir Charles Portal replies to Winston, "I'm afraid we can't do it now, not until September because the nights aren't long enough to fly from England to Berlin and back in the hours of darkness. September, perhaps, and in September we will have the first hundred of the new Sterling bombers ..." But he also says, "I warn you, if you do that, the Germans will retaliate. At present they're not bombing English targets, they're not bombing civilian targets at all and you know why. And if you bomb Berlin, then Hitler will retaliate against English civilian targets." And Churchill just twinkles when he gets this reply, because he knows what he wants.

We know what he wants because he's told Joe Kennedy, the American Ambassador - Joseph P. Kennedy, father of the late President - "I want the Germans to start bombing London as early as possible because this will bring the Americans into the war when they see the Nazis' frightfulness, and above all it will put an end to this awkward and inconvenient peace movement that's afoot in my own Cabinet and among the British population." I've opened Kennedy's diary. I've also read Kennedy's telegrams back to the State Department in Washington. They're buried among the files. You can't find them easily, but they are worth reading, and you see in detail what Churchill was telling him. What cynicism. Churchill deliberately provoking the bombing of his own capital in order to kill the peace movement. He's been warned this would be the consequence, but he needs it. And still Hitler doesn't do him the favor.

Irving then gave a detailed account of the cynical maneuverings of Churchill to escalate the aerial campaign against Germany's civilian population to the point at which Hitler was driven to strike back against Britain's cities, supplying the spurious justification for the R.A.F.'s (and later the U.S. Army Air Force's) monstrous terror attacks against centuries-old citadels of culture and their helpless inhabitants.

The British historian further expanded on a theme he had touched on in his address to the IHR's 1983 conference: Churchill the drunkard. Irving substantiated his accusation with numerous citations from diaries and journals, the originals of which often differ from heavily laundered published editions. He concluded his address with an anecdote of a ludicrous incident which found Churchill pleading with William Lyon Mackenzie King, wartime prime minister of Canada, to shift production in his country's distilleries from raw materials for the war effort to whiskey and gin, twenty-five thousand cases of it. According to Mackenzie King's private diary, the Canadian prime minister tore up Churchill's memorandum on the subject at precisely twenty-five minutes to eight on August 25, 1943, and Sir Winston had to soldier on through the war with liquid sustenance from other lands and climes. As Irving emphasized, Churchill's drunken rantings, often during cabinet meetings, disgusted many of his generals, as when, at a meeting on July 6, 1944, the prime minister told his commanders to prepare to drop two million lethal anthrax bombs on German cities. Of this meeting Britain's Flrst Sea Lord, Admiral Cunningham, wrote, according the Irving: "There's no doubt that P.M. is in no state to discuss anything, too tired, and too much alcohol."

Irving's demolition of the Churchill myth, based on a wealth of documentary evidence, most of which has been studiously avoided by the keepers of the Churchill flame, may constitute his most important service to Revisionism. The legendary V-for-victory- waggling, cigar-puffing "Winnie" is for many of a centrist or conservative bent the symbol and guarantee that Britain and America fought and "won" the Second World War for traditional Western values, rather than to bleed Europe white and secure an enormous geopolitical base for Communism.

Irving's Churchill biography promises to make trash of such authorized studies as that of Martin Gilbert (which has already been described in private by one Establishment historian as "footnotes to Churchill's war memoirs"). The publication of the first volume of Churchill's War later this year should be an historiographical event of the first importance.


From The Journal of Historical Review, Winter 1986 (Vol. 7, No. 4), pp. 498 ff.

 

[Apollonian]

Winston the spendaholic: He teetered on the brink of bankruptcy and was saved by secret backhanders. Yet a new book on Churchill's finances reveals he spent £40,000 a year on casinos and £54,000 on booze​

Churchill spent most of his life swimming in a mountain of personal debt
Gambled equivalent of £40,000 a year on holidays to the south of France
Had £54,000 bill from his wine merchant, including £16,000 for Champagne
Secret benefactor gave him £1million in 1940 as he became Prime Minister

By David Lough For The Daily Mail

Published: 16:36 EST, 11 September 2015 | Updated: 06:29 EST, 12 September 2015

Link: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...s-spent-40-000-year-casinos-54-000-booze.html

[ck for neat pictures at site link, above]


The confession was a startling one, in light of the great man he became. ‘The only thing that worries me in life is — money,’ wrote Winston Churchill, then aged 23, to his brother, Jack. ‘Extravagant tastes, an expensive style of living, small and diminished resources — these are fertile sources of trouble.’

Indeed they were. For the qualities that were to make Churchill a great war leader came very close to destroying him time and again during his career, as manic optimism and risk-taking plunged him repeatedly into colossal debt.

In the Thirties, when he was a married man with four dependent children and already borrowing more than £2.5 million in today’s money, he would gamble so heavily on his annual holiday in the South of France that he threw away the equivalent of on average £40,000 every year.

Qualities that were to make Churchill a great war leader came very close to destroying him time and again during his career, as manic optimism and risk-taking plunged him repeatedly into colossal debt. But he became one of Britain's greatst heroes and is here receiving the Honorary Freedom of the City of Westminster

Qualities that were to make Churchill a great war leader came very close to destroying him time and again during his career, as manic optimism and risk-taking plunged him repeatedly into colossal debt. But he became one of Britain's greatst heroes and is here receiving the Honorary Freedom of the City of Westminster

In my own career, advising families on tax affairs and investments, I have never encountered addiction to risk on such a scale as his.

To a biographer, one of Churchill’s most convenient characteristics is that he left his own bank statements, bills, investment records and tax demands in his archive, despite the evidence of debt and profligate gambling they reveal.

In contrast to his well-documented periods of anxiety and depression, when the ‘black dog’ struck him, there were phases when he gambled or traded shares and currencies with such intensity that he appeared to be on a ‘high’ — devoid of inhibition, brimming with self-confidence and energy.


As a result, he left behind a trail of financial failures that required numerous bailouts by friends, family and admirers.

And it was only by a wildly improbable intervention, almost an act of God, that he wasn’t bankrupt in 1940 instead of Prime Minister: as war loomed, a secret benefactor wrote two cheques for well over £1 million to clear Churchill’s debts.

His inventive efforts at tax avoidance would spell scandal if attempted by any politician today.

In the Thirties, when he was a married man with four dependent children and already borrowing more than £2.5 million in today’s money, he would gamble so heavily on his annual holiday in the South of France that he threw away the equivalent of on average £40,000 every year

In the Thirties, when he was a married man with four dependent children and already borrowing more than £2.5 million in today’s money, he would gamble so heavily on his annual holiday in the South of France that he threw away the equivalent of on average £40,000 every year

One of Churchill’s most convenient characteristics is that he left his own bank statements, bills, investment records and tax demands in his archive, despite the evidence of debt and profligate gambling they reveal. He's pictured here riding in a motor lauch in the harbor at Safi, Morocco

One of Churchill’s most convenient characteristics is that he left his own bank statements, bills, investment records and tax demands in his archive, despite the evidence of debt and profligate gambling they reveal. He's pictured here riding in a motor lauch in the harbor at Safi, Morocco

Though he wrestled to control his spending all his life, the defining disaster of Winston’s financial career was the Wall Street Crash of 1929.

Churchill always told his friends his losses in the Stock Market collapse amounted to $50,000 — or £500,000 today. But that is only part of the story.

These were Winston’s years in the wilderness when, having served for a term as Chancellor of the Exchequer, he was suddenly out of power.

This was not without its benefits, for at last he was able to devote time to writing books and churning out newspaper columns to keep the bank at bay.

As a result, he left behind a trail of financial failures that required numerous bailouts by friends, family and admirers

As a result, he left behind a trail of financial failures that required numerous bailouts by friends, family and admirers

In return for his high fees as a journalist, Churchill’s friends among the press proprietors expected colourful copy that ran against the conventional political wisdom. He delivered it, but his trenchant commentaries made rehabilitation within the political establishment very difficult.

The problems began when he embarked on a North American tour to promote his book on World War I, The World Crisis, accompanied by his brother Jack and son Randolph.

He travelled through Canada by private railcar, sleeping in a double bed on board with a private bathroom. ‘There is a fine parlour with an observation room at the end,’ he wrote to his wife Clemmie, ‘and a large dining room which I use as the office. The car has splendid wireless installation, refrigerators, fans, etc.’

Surrounded by these modern marvels, Churchill began to trade again in shares and commodities. He was intoxicated by Canada’s money-making opportunities, especially in exploration for oil and gas.

Gripped by investment fever as he reached the prairies, he wired his publisher to demand an advance on his royalties, boasting of the profits he could grasp if he acted without delay.

To allay Clemmie’s concerns, he told her of the cash he was making by selling his book at public appearances — 600 copies in Montreal alone — and casually announced he had ‘found a little capital’ with which he ‘hoped to make some successful investments’.

He plunged tens of thousands of dollars into oilfields and rolling stock, assuring his bankers that, ‘I do not expect to hold these shares for more than a few weeks’.

In the States, he stayed with media tycoon William Randolph Hearst and bought stakes in electrical ventures and gas companies, before heading to California where he indulged in late-night parties with Hollywood’s movie elite and toured the studios.

In contrast to his well-documented periods of anxiety and depression, when the ‘black dog’ struck him, there were phases when he gambled or traded shares and currencies with such intensity that he appeared to be on a ‘high’ — devoid of inhibition, brimming with self-confidence and energy

In contrast to his well-documented periods of anxiety and depression, when the ‘black dog’ struck him, there were phases when he gambled or traded shares and currencies with such intensity that he appeared to be on a ‘high’ — devoid of inhibition, brimming with self-confidence and energy

After lunch with Charlie Chaplin on the set of his latest film, City Lights, Churchill boarded Hearst’s yacht and wrote to Clemmie that he had banked £1,000 (£50,000 today) by cashing in some shares in a furniture business called Simmons.

‘You can’t go wrong on a Simmons mattress,’ he crowed — but failed to mention that he had $35,000 (a third of a million pounds today) still invested with them.

His buying had spiralled out of control. Everything he could raise was plunged into U.S. stocks, in businesses from foundries to department stores.

His brokers sounded warnings by telegraph: ‘Market heavy. Liquidating becoming more urgent. Will await your telephone. Your bank still losing gold & there are rumours of increase in bank rate.’

Churchill ignored them. In four days he bought and sold $420,000 in shares — or more than £4 million-worth now.

It was like a drug to him. ‘In every hotel,’ he told Clemmie, ‘there is a stock exchange. You go and sit and watch the figures being marked up on slates every few minutes.’

The crash was inevitable. At the opening bell in the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday, October 24, 1929, prices fell by an average of 11 per cent.

He wrestled to control his spending all his life, the defining disaster of Winston’s financial career was the Wall Street Crash of 1929. Churchill told his friends his losses in the Stock Market collapse amounted to $50,000 — or £500,000 today. But that is only part of the story. Pictured in 1958 with hipping magnate Aristotle Onassis

He wrestled to control his spending all his life, the defining disaster of Winston’s financial career was the Wall Street Crash of 1929. Churchill told his friends his losses in the Stock Market collapse amounted to $50,000 — or £500,000 today. But that is only part of the story. Pictured in 1958 with hipping magnate Aristotle Onassis

Churchill kept buying, confident of recouping his losses, right up to the moment he boarded an Atlantic liner to return home. By the time he reached Chartwell, his home in Kent, he was poorer by $75,000 (£750,000).

But instead of pulling in his horns, he tried to recoup — and within six months had lost another $35,000 (£350,000).

His efforts to cling to some kind of solvency became desperate. He borrowed money wherever he could — from his brother, his bank, his brokers, his publishers and newspaper editors. He arranged another speaking tour in America and took out insurance against its cancellation — then used the General Election of 1931 as an excuse for postponing and claiming his £5,000 (£250,000) indemnity.

He traded the insurers one of his oil paintings, in a deal he described as ‘highly confidential’.

Once the election was behind him, he set off to America — but, in his fraught state, stumbled into disaster.

Having arranged to meet a business associate in New York, he grabbed a taxi. But in his hurry, he forgot to take the man’s address. After a fruitless hour trying to find the building, he climbed out of the cab — and was hit by a car.

These were Winston’s years in the wilderness when, having served for a term as Chancellor of the Exchequer, he was suddenly out of power. This was not without its benefits, for at last he was able to devote time to writing books and churning out newspaper columns to keep the bank at bay

These were Winston’s years in the wilderness when, having served for a term as Chancellor of the Exchequer, he was suddenly out of power. This was not without its benefits, for at last he was able to devote time to writing books and churning out newspaper columns to keep the bank at bay

Even this was used as a means to scrape money together. He wrote a newspaper article about the accident, syndicated it worldwide for £600 (£30,000) and then claimed medical insurance on the spurious grounds he was ‘totally disabled’.

When the underwriters protested that he was still able to earn money from journalism, his broker retorted that he could not physically write — the article had been dictated to a secretary. Mere talking, he insisted, should not be classed as work. The insurers paid up.

Such sharp practice was not confined to his insurance claims. He told the Inland Revenue he had retired as an author, which entitled him to defer a large income tax bill.

To avoid paying tax on book royalties, he sold the rights and successfully argued that the money he received was not income but capital gains, which at the time was exempt from tax.

He borrowed money from his children’s trusts, and even cut down his drinking — not to curb his expenses, but to win a bet with the press baron Lord Rothermere, who wagered him £600 that Churchill would not drink any brandy or undiluted spirits for a whole year.

Churchill took the bet, reasoning to Clemmie that money won gambling was not subject to tax. But he turned down a bigger bet, £2,000 [£100,000], that he could not remain teetotal for 12 months.

‘I refused,’ he explained, ‘as I think life would not be worth living.’

In fact, his accumulated bills for alcohol came to £900 (£54,000). His gambling was even more costly — 66,000 francs (about £50,000) in a single holiday at a casino in Cannes in 1936, for example.

Clementine’s excesses were little better. That year, her bill at Harrods ran to more than 80 pages, with accounts, too, at Selfridge’s, Harvey Nichols, Peter Jones, Lillywhite’s and John Lewis.

Faced with a £900 [£54,000 today] demand from his wine merchants Randolph Payne & Sons in 1936, Churchill checked the bill and found the total came to even more — £920

Faced with a £900 [£54,000 today] demand from his wine merchants Randolph Payne & Sons in 1936, Churchill checked the bill and found the total came to even more — £920

Attempts at economising were feeble. Three servants were dismissed, with a saving of £240 [£14,400] and the same amount was cut from the laundry bill. The temperature of the swimming pool at Chartwell was also reduced in a bid to halve heating costs.

But by 1938, as the European situation with Hitler and Mussolini became critical, Churchill had run out of resources. Both Chartwell and his house in London were up for sale but had attracted no buyers.

CHURCHILL SANK 454 BOTTLES OF BUBBLY IN JUST TWO MONTHS

Faced with a £900 [£54,000 today] demand from his wine merchants Randolph Payne & Sons in 1936, Churchill checked the bill and found the total came to even more — £920 [£55,200], including £268 [£16,080] spent on champagne: ten magnums, 185 bottles and 251 pints of it.n At the outbreak of World War I, Churchill was smoking a dozen cigars a day, at about £13 a month [£1,300] — and he had not paid his suppliers, J Grunebaum & Sons, for five years.

Swimming in personal debt (about £1.5m today), Churchill announced some drastic household cutbacks in 1926, the year of the General Strike. The cost of food, servants and running a car were to be halved. ‘No champagne is to be bought,’ he warned his wife. ‘Only white or red wine will be offered at luncheon or dinner. No more port is to be opened without special instructions. Cigars must be reduced to four a day.’ The economy drive lasted less than three months.

On his way home from a Mediterranean cruise in 1927, Churchill — then Chancellor of the Exchequer — dropped in on the casino at Dieppe and, playing baccarat, lost £350 — the equivalent of £17,500 today.

Winston holidayed in the South of France 12 times during the Thirties and always gambled at the casinos. He came home a winner only once.

During World War II, his personal spending on wine, spirits and cigars was £1,650 a year [£66,000].

In a two-month spell in 1949, Churchill and his house guests at Chartwell drank 454 bottles of champagne, 311 bottles of wine, 69 bottles of port, 58 bottles of brandy, 58 bottles of sherry and 56 bottles of Black Label whisky.

.
His journalism could no longer even cover his back-taxes, and he had borrowed to the limit against his life insurance policies. Creditors were clamouring on all sides.

His overdraft had reached £35,000 (more than £2million) and his brokers were demanding an immediate payment of £12,000 (£720,000). His attempts to bargain were ignored.

‘For a while,’ he admitted, ‘the dark waters of despair overwhelmed me. I watched the daylight creep slowly in through the windows and saw before me in mental gaze the vision of Death.’

Salvation came from an unexpected quarter. Churchill turned to his friend Brendan Bracken, co-owner of The Economist, to find him a rescuer. Bracken, in turn, approached his business partner, Sir Henry Strakosch, who was a fervent admirer of Churchill. He was also immensely wealthy.

Two months earlier, at Bracken’s request, Churchill had visited Sir Henry at his house in Cannes. The 68-year-old, who had made his fortune at the helm of South Africa’s gold-mining Union Corporation, had been unwell and Bracken described him as a ‘lonely old bird’.

This slightest of introductions paid colossal dividends.

Sir Henry, a naturalised Briton born in Austria, regarded Churchill as the one politician in Europe with the vision, energy and courage to resist the Nazi threat.

He had no hesitation in paying off £12,000 (about £660,000 today) of his share-trading debts.

Neither man ever spoke publicly about the rescue. Churchill kept knowledge of it to a very tight circle that did not include his bank or his lawyers.

Sir Henry’s only reward was to be nominated for The Other Club, the dining society based at the Savoy in London that Churchill had founded with his fellow political maverick F. E. Smith.

At the outbreak of war in 1939, Churchill was appointed First Lord of the Admirality, with a salary of £5,000 (£250,000 today) — exactly what it was when he was last given this Cabinet post, 25 years earlier in 1912. The pay, though substantial, was nowhere near enough to cover his expenditure, let alone the interest on his outstanding loans, which totalled £27,000 [£1.6 million].

For years he had been working on his three-volume History Of The English-Speaking Peoples, but despite his prodigious output, he had been unable to deliver the finished manuscript and collect his fee. The book had got no further than the American Civil War, but undaunted, Churchill declared it to be finished.

Swimming in personal debt (about £1.5m today), Churchill announced some drastic household cutbacks in 1926, the year of the General Strike. The cost of food, servants and running a car were to be halved. ‘No champagne is to be bought,’ he warned his wife. ‘Only white or red wine will be offered at luncheon or dinner

Swimming in personal debt (about £1.5m today), Churchill announced some drastic household cutbacks in 1926, the year of the General Strike. The cost of food, servants and running a car were to be halved. ‘No champagne is to be bought,’ he warned his wife. ‘Only white or red wine will be offered at luncheon or dinner

His publisher, Cassell’s, was dismayed at such an abrupt ending.

All protests were dismissed: Churchill was too busy to write any more. Reluctantly, Cassell’s paid up, which enabled him to pay £2,000 (£100,000 today) of overdue taxes and settle wine merchants’ bills that topped £3,000 (£150,000).

On May 10, 1940, as Hitler’s armies surged through Holland and Belgium, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain resigned, and by evening King George VI had asked Churchill to form a government. Today, the choice of man seems inevitable, but at the time there was consternation.

‘Seldom can a Prime Minister have taken office with the Establishment so dubious of the choice and so prepared to find its doubts justified,’ wrote one of Downing Street’s private secretaries, Jock Colville.

Churchill’s salary as PM might have doubled to £10,000 (£500,000), but with the highest rate of income tax standing at 97.5 per cent, virtually all of it went to the Inland Revenue.

Just two weeks after the Dunkirk evacuation, in June 1940, the Prime Minister was facing an ultimatum from Lloyd’s Bank for interest on his £5,602 overdraft (£280,100).

Once again, Sir Henry came to the rescue with a cheque for £5,000 (£250,000). The receipts show a flurry of payments to shirt-makers, watch-repairers and, naturally, wine merchants.

Despite rationing, food and drink flowed at Chequers, the Prime Minister’s official residence. King George sent pheasant and venison from Balmoral, and the Admiralty agreed to double the wine budget, providing that all consumption was for diplomatic purposes.

On his way home from a Mediterranean cruise in 1927, Churchill — then Chancellor of the Exchequer — dropped in on the casino at Dieppe and, playing baccarat, lost £350 — the equivalent of £17,500 today

On his way home from a Mediterranean cruise in 1927, Churchill — then Chancellor of the Exchequer — dropped in on the casino at Dieppe and, playing baccarat, lost £350 — the equivalent of £17,500 today

That condition proved no problem: Churchill was determined to enlist the military might of the United States and American guests became frequent visitors to Chequers.

To pare back the tax demands, Churchill tried every possible ruse, even assigning some of his earnings as an author to his son Randolph, who was taxed at a lower rate.

This subterfuge could save £1,500 (£75,000) but it made Churchill uneasy — not least because Randolph’s gambling was even more reckless than his own.

What finally rescued Churchill’s finances, and put him on a stable footing for the rest of his life, was Hollywood.

In 1943, an Italian immigrant film producer paid him £50,000 (£2.5million) for the movie rights to his biography of his ancestor, the military genius Lord Marlborough.

The death of Sir Henry Strakosch in October 1943 brought a legacy of £20,000 (£1million) as well as cancelling a loan.

As D-Day approached, Churchill was solvent for the first time in 20 years. By the end of the war, he had collected another £50,000 (£2.5million) for the film rights to his History Of The English-Speaking Peoples.

And a further colossal bonus came when he was unexpectedly ousted from Downing Street by the voters in July 1945: on the day of his resignation, offers began to flood in from publishers around the world for his war memoirs.

Winston holidayed in the South of France 12 times during the Thirties and always gambled at the casinos. He came home a winner only once

Winston holidayed in the South of France 12 times during the Thirties and always gambled at the casinos. He came home a winner only once

Traditionally, generals and admirals who won great victories were rewarded by Parliament. Earl Haig, the Army’s commander-in-chief during World War I, was awarded £100,000 (£500,000) in 1918.

There could be no such payment for an ex-Prime Minister. But a group of his admirers came up with a scheme to buy Chartwell for the National Trust, then rent it back to the Churchills for a nominal sum. Churchill was delighted.

Despite this unaccustomed security, he was not above seizing a chance to bypass the taxman.

As bidding for his memoirs topped $1 million (£12.5million) from an American consortium, Churchill was investigating another scheme: by gifting his entire personal papers, including future memoirs and diaries, to a trust in his children’s name, he figured he could avoid most tax on his writings.

He planned to pen his books for a smaller fee, under the pretext of ‘editing’ them.

This editing proved to be thirsty work. When Churchill decamped to Marrakech in Morocco to work on the manuscript in 1947, his entourage’s drinks bill for five weeks came to more than £2,100 (£73,500).

In a two-month spell in 1949, Churchill and his house guests at Chartwell drank 454 bottles of champagne, 311 bottles of wine, 69 bottles of port, 58 bottles of brandy, 58 bottles of sherry and 56 bottles of whisky

In a two-month spell in 1949, Churchill and his house guests at Chartwell drank 454 bottles of champagne, 311 bottles of wine, 69 bottles of port, 58 bottles of brandy, 58 bottles of sherry and 56 bottles of whisky

One of his secretaries wrote home: ‘The money here aren’t ’arf going!’

It continued to ‘go’ for the rest of his life. By the time he became PM again in 1951, his annual expenses were about £40,000 (£1 million), much of it on a staff of Swiss nurses and footmen, all of them vetted by MI5.

But now the honours flowed in. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature, a tax-free £12,000 (£300,000). He turned down a dukedom on the grounds that a dukedom without a great landed estate would be an embarrassment.

When he died aged 90 on January 24, 1965, the world mourned. But some had a particular reason to regret his passing: they would never see such a customer again.

In France, Madame Odette Pol-Roger instructed that a black band of mourning should be placed around the label of every bottle of her family’s champagne.


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[Apollonian]

The Real Churchill​

Link: https://mises.org/library/real-churchill

02/27/2004•Adam Young


On February 4th, President Bush eulogized the life of Winston Churchill. The president described Winston Churchill as a "great man" and quickly zeroed in on the mistress that both Bush and Churchill share: war. "He was a prisoner in the Boer War, a controversial strategist in the Great War. He was the rallying voice of the Second World War, and a prophet of the Cold War." Indeed, there doesn't seem to have been a war—or an opportunity for war—that Churchill wasn't associated with during his long career.

Bush also recited Churchill's famous retort that "History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it" adding that "history has been kind to Winston Churchill, as it usually is to those who help save the world," surely hoping that history will be kind to George W. Bush.

Except this history is a myth. The truth about the real Churchill—the Churchill that few know—is that he was "a man of the state: of the welfare state and of the warfare state" in Professor Ralph Raico's turn-of-phrase. The truth about Winston Churchill is that he was a menace to liberty, and a disaster for Britain, for Europe, for the United States of America, and for Western Civilization itself.

Not since fictional personages like Hercules and Zeus, have so many myths been attached to one man. As we will see, the Winston Churchill we're told about is not the Churchill known to honest history, but rather a fictional version of the man and his actions. And these words and actions have produced our mainstream "patriotic political myths" as John Denson calls them, which are merely the victor's wartime lies and propaganda scripted into the 'Official History.' The Churchill mythology is challenged by honest history, and the reality about Churchill involves hard, but necessary truths.

Churchill the Opportunist

Of course, central to the neocon mythology built up around their almost deified idealization of Churchill is that he fought for (in Bush's words comparing Tony Blair to Churchill), "the right thing, and not the easy thing," right over popularity, principle over opportunism.

Except that isn't true. Churchill was above all a man who craved power, and a man who craves power, craves opportunity to advance himself no matter what the cost.

When Churchill entered politics, many took note of his unique rhetorical talents, which gave him power over men, but it also came with a powerful failing of its own. During WWII, Robert Menzies, the Prime Minister of Australia, noted of Churchill "His real tyrant is the glittering phrase so attractive to his mind that awkward facts have to give way."

However, Churchill had other failings as well. The Spectator newspaper said of Churchill upon his appointment as First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911: "We cannot detect in his career any principles or even any constant outlook upon public affairs; his ear is always to the ground; he is the true demagogue. . . ."

The great English classical liberal John Morley, after working with Churchill, passed a succinct appraisal of him, "Winston," he said, "has no principles."

Entering politics in 1900, Churchill (the grandson of a Duke and son of a prominent Tory) naturally joined the governing Conservative party. Then in 1904, he left the Conservatives and joined the Liberal party, and when they were in decline Churchill dumped them and rejoined the Conservatives, uttering his famous quote "It's one thing to rat, it's another to re-rat." Churchill allegedly made his move to the Liberals on the issue of free trade. However, Robert Rhodes James, a Churchill admirer, wrote: "It was believed [at the time], probably rightly, that if Arthur Balfour had given him office in 1902, Churchill would not have developed such a burning interest in free trade and joined the Liberals." Clive Ponting also notes that ". . .he had already admitted to Rosebery, he was looking for an excuse to defect from a party that seemed reluctant to recognize his talents." Since the Liberals would not accept a protectionist, Churchill had to change his tune.

It's not a surprise that this neoconservative administration and its apologists in the tamed media laud and venerate Churchill, for he was as President Bush described him; a man who was synonymous with war. Churchill loved war. In 1925, he wrote, "The story of the human race is war." This is untrue, but Churchill lacked any grasp of the fundamentals of true, classical liberalism. The story of the human race is increasing peaceful cooperation and the efforts by some to stop it through war. However, for Churchill, periods without war offered nothing but "the bland skies of peace and platitude."

Without principles or scruples, Churchill as a prominent member of the Liberal party government naturally played a role in the hijacking of liberalism from its roots in individualism, laissez-faire, free trade and bourgeois morality, to its transformation into the "New Liberalism" as a proxy for socialism and the omnipotent state in Britain and in America.

Churchill was also a famous opponent of Communism and of Bolshevism in particular. One of the reasons why Churchill admired Italian Fascism was Churchill believed that Mussolini had found a formula that would neutralize the appeal of communism, namely super-nationalism with a social welfarist appeal. This is a domestic formula for power that still appeals today, if the Bush Administration is any indication. Churchill went so far as to say that Fascism "proved the necessary antidote to the Communist poison."

Then came 1941. Churchill made his peace with Communism. Temporarily, of course. Churchill gave unconditional support to Stalin, welcoming him as an ally, even embracing him as a friend, and calling the Breaker of Nations, "Uncle Joe." In his single-minded obsession with destroying German National Socialism (while establishing his own British national socialism) and carrying on his pre-World War I British Imperialist vendetta to destroy Germany, Churchill completely failed to consider the danger of inviting Soviet power and communism into the heart of Europe.

Of course, his self-created mythology--chiefly through his own books--states that he sensed the danger and tried to warn Roosevelt about Stalin, but the records of the time do not prove this out. In fact, Churchill's infatuation with Stalin reached the point where at the Tehran conference in November 1943, Churchill presented Stalin with a Crusader's sword; Stalin, who had murdered millions of Christians, was now presented by Churchill as a defender of the Christian West.

But if one was to sum up Churchill's passion, his overall reason for entering politics, it was the empire. The British Empire was Churchill's abiding love. He fought to expand it, he defended it, and he created his decades-long hatred of Germany because of it. The Empire was at the center of his view of the world. Even as late as 1947, Churchill opposed Indian independence. When Lord Irwin urged him to bring his views on India up-to-date by talking to some Indians Churchill replied "I am quite satisfied with my views on India, and I don't want them disturbed by any bloody Indians." So much for democracy.

Churchill the Socialist

Churchill made a name for himself as an opponent of socialism both before and after the First World War, except during the war when he was a staunch promoter of war socialism, declaring in a speech: "Our whole nation must be organized, must be socialized if you like the word." Of course, such rank hypocrisy was by now Churchill's stock-in-trade, and not surprisingly, during the 1945 election, Churchill described his partners in the national unity government, the Labour Party, as totalitarians, when it was Churchill himself who had accepted the infamous Beveridge Report that laid the foundations for the post-war welfare state and Keynesian (mis)management of the economy.

As Mises wrote in 1950, "It is noteworthy to remember that British socialism was not an achievement of Mr. Attlee's Labor Government, but of the war cabinet of Mr. Winston Churchill."

Churchill was converted to the Bismarckian model of social insurance following a visit to Germany. As Churchill told his constituents: "My heart was filled with admiration of the patient genius which had added these social bulwarks to the many glories of the German race." He set out, in his words, to "thrust a big slice of Bismarckianism over the whole underside of our industrial system." In 1908, Churchill announced in a speech in Dundee: "I am 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." Churchill even said: "I go farther; I should like to see the State embark on various novel and adventurous experiments."

Churchill claimed that "the cause of the Liberal Party is the cause of the left-out millions," and attacked the Conservatives as "the Party of the rich against the poor, the classes and their dependents against the masses, of the lucky, the wealthy, the happy, and the strong, against the left-out and the shut-out millions of the weak and poor." Churchill berated the Conservatives for lacking even a "single plan of social reform or reconstruction," while boasting that his "New Liberalism" offered "a wide, comprehensive, interdependent scheme of social organisation," incorporating "a massive series of legislative proposals and administrative acts."

Churchill had fallen under the spell of the Fabian Society, and its leaders Beatrice and Sidney Webb, who more than any other group, are responsible for the decline of British society. Here he was introduced to William, later Lord Beveridge, who Churchill brought into the Board of Trade as his advisor on social questions. Besides pushing for a variety of social insurance schemes, Churchill created the system of national labor exchanges, stating the need to "spread . . . a sort of Germanized network of state intervention and regulation" over the British labor market. Churchill even entertained a more ambitious goal for the Board of Trade. He proposed a plan whereby the Board of Trade would act as the economic "intelligence department" of the Government, forecasting trade and employment in Britain so that the Government could spend money in the most deserving areas. Controlling this pork would be a Committee of National Organisation to plan the economy.

Churchill was well aware of the electoral potential of organized labor, so naturally Churchill became a champion of the labor unions. He was a leading supporter of the Trades Disputes Act of 1906 which reversed the judicial decisions which had held unions responsible for property damage and injuries committed by their agents on the unions behalf, in effect granting unions a privileged position exempting them from the ordinary law of the land. It is ironic that the immense power of the British labor unions that made Britain the "Sick Man of Europe" for two generations and became the foil of Margaret Thatcher, originated with the enthusiastic help of her hero, Winston Churchill.

We can only conclude by Churchill's actions that personal freedom was the furthest thing from his mind.

Churchill and the First World War

The Great War destroyed European culture and the commitment to truths. In their place, generations embraced relativism, nihilism and socialism, and from the ashes arose Lenin, Stalin and Hitler and their evil doctrines that infect contemporary culture. In the words of the British historian, Niall Ferguson, the First World War "was nothing less than the greatest error in modern history."

In 1911, Churchill became First Lord of the Admiralty, and, during the crises that followed, used every opportunity to fan the flames of war. When the final crisis came, in 1914, Churchill was all smiles and was the only cabinet member who backed war from the start. Asquith, his own Prime Minister, wrote: "Winston very bellicose and demanding immediate mobilization . . . has got all his war paint on."

Churchill was instrumental in establishing the illegal starvation blockade of Germany. The blockade depended on scattering mines, and classified as contraband food for civilians. But, throughout his career, international law and the conventions created to limit the horrors of war meant nothing to Churchill. One of the consequences of the hunger blockade was that, while it killed 750,000 German civilians by hunger and malnutrition, the youth who survived went on to become the most fanatical Nazis.

The Lusitania

Whether Churchill actually arranged for the sinking of the Lusitania on May 7, 1915, is still unclear, but it is clear that he did everything possible to ensure that innocent Americans would be killed by German attempts to break the hunger blockade.

A week before the disaster, Churchill wrote to Walter Runciman, President of the Board of Trade that it was "most important to attract neutral shipping to our shores, in the hopes especially of embroiling the United States with Germany."

The Lusitania was a civilian passenger liner loaded with munitions. Earlier, Churchill had ordered the captains of merchant ships, including liners, to ram German submarines, and the Germans were aware of this. The German government even took out newspaper ads in New York warning Americans not to board the ship.

Churchill, by helping engineer the entry of the United States into the Great War, set in motion the transformation of the war into a Democratic Jihad. Wilsonianism lead to the eventual destruction of the Austrian Empire, and the creation of a vast power vacuum on Germany's southeastern border that would provide fruitful opportunities and allies for Hitler's effort to overturn the Versailles Treaty.

But Churchill was not a strategist. All he cared for, as he told a visitor after his Gallipoli disaster, was "the waging of war, the defeat of the Germans."

Churchill Between the Wars

Churchill, who had been appointed Colonial Secretary, invented two client kingdoms, Transjordan and Iraq, both artificial and unstable states. Churchill's aim of course was not liberty for oppressed peoples, as his admirers like to claim for him, but for Britain to dominate the Middle East to ensure that the oil wells of Iraq and the Persian Gulf were securely in British hands.

The Crash of 1929

In 1924, Churchill rejoined the Conservative party and was made Chancellor of the Exchequer, where he returned Britain to the gold standard but didn't account for the British governments wartime inflation, which consequently severely damaged exports and ruined the good name of gold. But, of course, Churchill cared nothing for economic ideas. What interested him was only that the pound would be as strong as in the days of Queen Victoria, that once more the pound would "look the dollar in the face." The consequences of this decision had a far-reaching and disastrous impact on western civilization and the consequent appeal of socialism, Nazism and communism: the Crash of 1929.

It was Churchill's unrealistic exchange ratio that caused 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.

Churchill's fame—and his mythology—originates during the period of the 30's, especially for neoconservatives, for whom it is always 1938. However, Churchill's hard line against Hitler was little different from his usual warnings about pre-war Imperial Germany, and his hard line against inter-war Weimar Germany. For Churchill saw Germany at all times and in all ways as a threat to the British Empire. A threat that had to be destroyed and forever kept under heel. For instance, Churchill denounced all calls for Allied disarmament even before Hitler came to power. Churchill, like Clemenceau, Wilson and other Allied leaders, held the unrealistic belief that a defeated Germany would submit forever to the shackles of Versailles.

And what the neocons forget, or don't know, is that Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin acknowledged in the House of Commons that, had they told the people the truth, the Conservatives could never have won the 1936 election. "Supposing that I had gone to the country and said that Germany was rearming and that we must be armed, does anyone think that our pacific democracy would have rallied to that cry?" It was Neville Chamberlain who began the rearmament of Britain after the Munich Crisis, the arms which Churchill would not have had during the Battle of Britain, including the first deployment of radar, which Churchill mocked while in opposition in the 1930s.

Moreover, Churchill's Cassandra-like role during the '30s emerged largely because Churchill moved from one impending threat to the next: Bolshevik Russia, the General Strike of 1926, the dangers of Indian independence, the abdication crisis in 1936. During the '30s Churchill was the proverbial Boy Who Cried Wolf. Maybe his neocon admirers could have learned that lesson about Iraq.

But as in all things, even with this Churchill reversed himself. In the fall of 1937, he stated:

"Three or four years ago I was myself a loud alarmist. . . . In spite of the risks which wait on prophecy, I declare my belief that a major war is not imminent, and I still believe that there is a good chance of no major war taking place in our lifetime. . . . I will not pretend that, if I had to choose between Communism and Nazism, I would choose Communism."

And in his book Step By Step written in 1937, Churchill had this to say about the Mortal Enemy: ". . .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." One has to wonder if Churchill was referring to himself in his hypothetical example.

The common mythology is so far from historical truth that even an ardent Churchill sympathizer, Gordon Craig, felt obliged to write:

It is reasonably well-known today that Churchill was often ill-informed, that his claims about German strength were exaggerated and his prescriptions impractical, that his emphasis on air power was misplaced.

Moreover, as a British historian noted: "For the record, it is worth recalling that in the 1930s Churchill did not oppose the appeasement of either Italy or Japan."

Churchill and the Second World War

After Munich, Chamberlain was determined that Hitler would have no more easy victories, and when Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, Britain declared war on Germany, and Churchill was recalled to his old place as First Lord of the Admiralty. An astonishing thing then happened: the President of the United States by-passed all the ordinary diplomatic channels and initiated a personal correspondence, not with the Prime Minister, but with Churchill. These messages were surrounded by a frantic secrecy, and culminated in the imprisonment of Tyler Kent, the American cipher clerk at the U.S. embassy in London. Some of these messages contained allusions to FDR's agreement prior to the war to an alliance with Britain, contrary to his public statements and American law.

Three months prior to the war, Roosevelt told King George VI that he intended to set up a zone in the Atlantic to be patrolled by the U.S. Navy, and, according to the King's notes, the President stated that "if he saw a U boat he would sink her at once & wait for the consequences." The biographer of George VI, John W. Wheeler-Bennett, considered that these conversations "contained the germ of the future Bases-for-Destroyers deal, and also of the Lend-Lease Agreement itself."

In 1940, Churchill at last became Prime Minister, ironically enough when the Chamberlain government resigned over Churchill's aborted plan to pre-emptively invade Norway. After France's armed forces were destroyed by the Blitzkrieg, and the British army fled towards the Channel, Churchill the conservative, the "anti-socialist," defiled the common law by passing totalitarian legislation placing "all persons, their services and their property at the disposal of the Crown," i.e., into the hands of Churchill himself.

During the Battle of Britain, Churchill gave perhaps his most famous speech, in which he plagiarized the French Premier Georges Clemenceau, and where he uttered his famous phrase "If the British Empire and its Commonwealth lasts for a thousand years, men will say, "This was their finest hour!" This calls to mind another man's boast about a thousand year Reich. Churchill also hinted at his plot to drag America into the war: ". . .we shall never surrender, and even if . . . this island . . . were subjugated . . . then our empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the Old." But like Marxist Revolutionaries, Christian Millennialists and other assorted cranks, Churchill was not at all interested in "God's good time" or any other presumed unearthly schedule, and he worked night and day to collude with Roosevelt to get America into the war.

As PM, Churchill continued his policy to refuse any negotiated peace. Even after the Fall of France, Churchill rejected Hitler's renewed peace overtures. This, however, more than anything else, is supposed to be the foundation of his greatness. Yet what opportunities were lost to a free France and Britain and the Low Countries before 1940 to re-arm and negotiate military defense strategies? What of the time lost that could have been used to study the Blitzkrieg method of warfare before it crashed through France? The British historian John Charmley made the crucial point that Churchill's adamant refusal even to listen to peace proposals in 1940 doomed what he claimed was most dear to him: the Empire and a Britain that was nonsocialist and independent in world affairs. One could add that by allowing Germany to overrun its weaker neighbors when peace was possible it probably also doomed European Jewry as well. How many more millions of Jews and other Europeans were murdered because of Churchill's stupidity? But it is politically incorrect, and even possibly a hate crime to suggest that better alternatives were available during World War II than those made by the Allies. Just because something turned out one way does not mean that was the only way it could have turned out or was the best result. Somehow, it is controversial to say this.

The peace camp realized something that escaped Churchill the empire romanticist: even the British Empire and her vast resources alone could not defeat the concentrated power that Germany possessed in Europe. And even more after the Fall of France, Churchill's war aim of total victory could be realized only by embroiling the United States in another world war.

As an aside to the French-haters, what they forget is that, if the U.S. army had met the Wehrmacht in 1940, it would have fared considerably worse than the French Army. National chauvinists, however, prefer their petty hatreds.

Involving America was Churchill's policy in World War II, just as it was Churchill's policy in World War I, and would be his policy again in the Cold War. Churchill put his heart and soul into ensuring Roosevelt came through.

In 1940, Churchill sent British agent "Intrepid" to the United States, where he set up shop in Rockefeller Center, where, with the full knowledge and cooperation of Roosevelt and the collaboration of federal agencies, "Intrepid" and his 300 agents "intercepted mail, tapped wires, cracked safes, kidnapped, . . . rumor mongered" and incessantly smeared their favorite targets, the "isolationists" (i.e., Jeffersonians) as nazis and fascists.

In June 1941, Churchill, looking for a chance to bring America into the war, wrote regarding the German warship, Prinz Eugen: "It would be better for instance that she should be located by a U.S. ship as this might tempt her to fire on that ship, thus providing the incident for which the U.S. government would be so grateful."

Churchill also instructed the British ambassador to Tokyo, Sir Robert Craigie, "the entry of the United States into war either with Germany and Italy or with Japan, is fully conformable with British interests. Nothing in the munitions sphere can compare with the importance of the British Empire and the United States being co-belligerent."

In August 1941, Roosevelt and Churchill met at the Atlantic conference. Churchill told his Cabinet "The President had said he would wage war but not declare it and that 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."

After the U.S. had officially entered the war, on February 15, 1942, in the House of Commons, Churchill declared, of America's entry into the war: "This is what I have dreamed of, aimed at, worked for, and now it has come to pass."

This deceptive alliance illustrates another of Churchill's faults. His subordination of political aims to military planning. Churchill made war for the sake of making war, with little regard for the political results that follow. He once even told Asquith that his life's ambition was "to command great victorious armies in battle." And World War II was his opportunity. Churchill and Roosevelt were both willing to do anything to destroy the menace of Nazi Germany, at a time when Hitler had killed perhaps several hundred thousand, and to do so they would ally with Hitler's former ally in the invasion of Poland, Joseph Stalin (the Soviet Union had even been invited to join the Axis in 1940), who had already murdered tens of millions. But why is it conventional wisdom that compromise with one dictator at a vital period would have been immoral while collaboration with an even greater dictator with genuine global ambitions was the mark of greatness?

The truth is Churchill cared for nothing but Britain. The lives, homes and cultures of non-Britons he took and destroyed without a care or second thought. What sort of 'conservatism' requires the murder of millions of defenseless innocents? Winston Churchill was a man who along with Roosevelt, Hitler and Stalin, probed just how far Western Civilization could fall in just six short years of time.

Churchill threw British support to the Communist Partisan leader Tito. What a victory for Tito would mean was no secret to Churchill. When an aide pointed out that Tito intended to transform Yugoslavia into a Communist dictatorship on the Stalinist model, Churchill retorted: "Do you intend to live there?" What a humanitarian.

Of course, in Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt were confronted with a man who had an overall political aim for the war. Stalin knew what he wanted to achieve from the destruction of Germany. For Churchill, his only aim was to beat Hitler, and then he would start thinking of the future of Britain and Europe. Churchill said it in so many words: "It was to be the defeat, ruin, and slaughter of Hitler, to the exclusion of all other purposes, loyalties and aims."

Churchill's aim was in his words, the "indefinite prevention of their [the Germans'] rising again as an Armed Power." Not surprisingly, instead of making every effort to encourage and assist the anti-Nazi resistance groups in Germany, Churchill responded to the feelers sent out by the German resistance with silence, thus helping to prolong the war and the killing. Even more shockingly, Churchill had nothing but scorn for the heroic officers after their failed assassination attempt on Hitler in July 1944, even as Hitler was enjoying their filmed executions.

In the place of help, Churchill only offered Germans the slogan of unconditional surrender, which only prolonged the war further. And instead of promoting the overthrow of Hitler by anti-Nazi Germans, Churchill's policy was all-out support of Stalin. Returning from Yalta, Churchill told the House of Commons on February 27, 1945 that he did not know any government that kept its obligations as faithfully as did the Soviet Union, even to its disadvantage.

The War Crimes

That Churchill committed war crimes—planned them, aided and abetted them, and defended them—is beyond doubt. Churchill was the prime subverter through two world wars of the rules of warfare that had evolved in the West over centuries.

At the Quebec conference, Roosevelt and Churchill adopted the Morgenthau Plan, which if implemented would have killed tens of millions of Germans, giving the Germans a terrifying picture of what "unconditional surrender" would mean in practice. Churchill was convinced of the plans benefits, as it "would save Britain from bankruptcy by eliminating a dangerous competitor." That the Morgenthau Plan was analogous to Hitler's post-conquest plans for western Russia and the Ukraine was lost on Churchill, who according to Morgenthau, drafted the wording of the scheme.

Churchill even brainstormed dropping tens of thousands of anthrax "super bombs" on the civilian population of Germany, and ordered detailed planning for a chemical attack on six major cities, estimating that millions would die immediately "by inhalation," with millions more succumbing later.

But Churchill's greatest war crimes involved the terror bombing of German cities that killed 600,000 civilians and left some 800,000 injured. Arthur Harris ("Bomber Harris"), the head of Bomber Command, stated "In Bomber Command we have always worked on the assumption that bombing anything in Germany is better than bombing nothing."

Churchill brazenly lied to the House of Commons and the public, claiming that only military and industrial installations were targeted. In fact, the aim was to kill as many civilians as possible. Hence the application of "carpet" bombing in an attempt to terrorize the Germans into surrendering.

Professor Raico described the effect of Churchillian statesmanship: "The campaign of murder from the air leveled Germany. A thousand-year-old urban culture was annihilated, as great cities, famed in the annals of science and art, were reduced to heaps of smoldering ruins. . . ." No wonder that, learning of this, a civilized European man like Joseph Schumpeter, at Harvard, was driven to telling "anyone who would listen" "that Churchill and Roosevelt were destroying more than Genghis Khan."

According to the official history of the Royal Air Force: "The destruction of Germany was by then on a scale which might have appalled Attila or Genghis Khan." Dresden was filled with masses of helpless refugees running for their lives ahead of the advancing Red Army. The war was practically over, but for three days and nights, from February 13 to 15, 1945, British bombs pounded Dresden, killing as many as 135,000 people or more in three days. After the massacre, Churchill attempted to disclaim responsibility; even casually saying "I thought the Americans did it."

The terror bombing of Germany and the killing of civilians continued as late as the middle of April, 1945. It only stopped, as Bomber Harris noted, because there were essentially no more targets left to be bombed in Germany.

In order to kill a maximum number of Germans, Winston Churchill dismissed politics or policy as a 'secondary consideration,' and on at least two occasions said that there were "no lengths of violence to which we would not go" in order to achieve his objective. In fact he said this publicly in a speech given on September 31, 1943, and again in the House of Commons, on February 27, 1945, when unbelievable lengths of violence had already taken place. If Hitler had uttered this phrase, we would all cite it as more evidence of his barbarism. Yet, when Churchill utters it, his apologists palm it off as the resoluteness required of a great statesman, rather than describing it as an urge for mass, indiscriminate murder.

Of course, Churchill supported the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which resulted in the deaths of another 200,000 civilians. When Truman fabricated the myth of the "500,000 American lives saved" to justify his mass murder, Churchill felt the need to top his lie: the atomic bombings had saved 1,200,000 lives, including 1,000,000 Americans. It was all just another of Churchill's fantasies.

Yet, after all this slaughter, Churchill would write: "The goal of World War II [was] to revive the status of man."

Churchill and the Cold War

Among Churchill's many war crimes, there are also those crimes and atrocities for which he is culpable that occurred following the war.

These include the forced repatriation of some two million old people, men, women, and children to the Soviet Union to their deaths. Then there were the massacres carried out by Churchill's protégé, Tito: tens of thousands of Croats, Slovenes and other "class-enemies" and anti-Communists were killed.

In the wake of the armies of Churchill's friend and ally, the mass deportations began. But Churchill was unmoved. In January 1945 he said: "Why are we making a fuss about the Russian deportations in Rumania of Saxons [Germans] and others? . . . I cannot see the Russians are wrong in making 100 or 150 thousand of these people work their passage. . . . I cannot myself consider that it is wrong of the Russians to take Rumanians of any origin they like to work in the Russian coal-fields." Here Churchill, the great friend of liberty as Bush described him, approves of slavery. About 500,000 German civilians were enslaved to work in Soviet Russia, in accordance with the Yalta agreement where Churchill and Roosevelt agreed that slave labor constituted a proper form of "reparations."

Then there was the great atrocity of the expulsion of 15 million Germans from their ancestral homelands in East and West Prussia, Silesia, Pomerania, and the Sudetenland, pursuant to Churchill's mad plan to violently uproot the entire polish population and move Poland westward, which he demonstrated with a set of matchsticks, and to Churchill's acceptance of the Czech leader Eduard Benes's plan for the ethnic cleansing of Bohemia and Moravia. Around two million German civilians died in this process. An entire ancient culture was obliterated. This sort of cultural jihad used to be something conservatives opposed. Today's neoconservatives instead, who evidently embrace the Marxist doctrine of sweeping away the past, would surely argue that in order to create, one must first destroy, or in that old Stalinist phrase, to make an omelet, you must first break a few eggs.

A large factor in the litany of Churchill's war crimes was his racism. Churchill was an English chauvinist, a British racist, and like Wilson, loathed the so-called "dirty whites," the French, Italians and other Latin’s, and Slavs like the Serbs, Poles, Russians, etc.... Churchill professed Darwinism, and particularly disliked the Catholic Church and Christian missions. He became, in his own words, "a materialist to the tips of my fingers," and fervently upheld the worldview that human life is a struggle for existence, with the outcome the survival of the fittest.

In 1919, as Colonial Secretary Churchill advocated the use of chemical weapons on the "uncooperative Arabs" in the puppet state of Iraq. "I do not understand the squeamishness about the use of gas," he declared. "I am strongly in favor of using poison gas against uncivilized tribes." Some year’s later, gassing human beings to death would make other men infamous.

An example of Churchill's racial views are his comments made in 1937: "I do not admit that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race, has come in and taken their place."

In Churchill's single-minded decades-long obsession with preventing a single hegemonic power from arising on the European continent that would pose a threat to the British Empire, he failed to see that his alliance with Stalin produced exactly that. "As the blinkers of war were removed," John Charmley writes, "Churchill began to perceive the magnitude of the mistake which had been made." Churchill is alleged to have blurted out after finally realizing the scale of his blunder: "We have slaughtered the wrong pig!"

But it was too late. For decades Churchill worked for the destruction of Germany. Yet only after Stalin had devoured half of Europe did this "great statesman" realize that destroying the ability of Germany to act as a counterbalance to Russia left Europe ripe for invasion and conquest by a resurgent Russia.

By 1946 Churchill was complaining in a voice of outrage about the Iron Curtain of tyranny that descended on Eastern Europe. But Churchill helped to weave the fabric.

With the balance of power in Europe wrecked by his own hand, Churchill saw only one recourse: to bind America to Europe permanently. Thus Churchill returned to his tried-and-true strategy, embroiling the United States in another war. This time a "Cold War" that would entrench the military-industrial complex and change America forever.

Conclusion

With his lack of principles and scruples, Churchill was involved in one way or another in nearly every disaster that befell the 20th century. He helped destroy laissez-faire liberalism, he played a role in the Crash of 1929, he helped start WWI, and by bringing in America to help, prolonged the war and created the conditions for the rise of Nazism, prolonged WWII, laid the groundwork for Soviet domination, helped involve America in a cold war with Russia, and pioneered in the development of total war and undermining western civilized standards.

Chris Matthews described Churchill as the "man who save[d] the honor of the 20th century." Rather than this great accolade, Winston Churchill must be ranked with Karl Marx, Woodrow Wilson, Vladimir Lenin, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt as one of the destroyers of the values and greatness of Western civilization.

And it is fitting that the Library of Congress exhibition is entitled "Churchill and the Great Republic" because few men have done more to overthrow the American Republic(s) and institute the great centralized global war machine that has taken its place.

 

[Apollonian]

 

[Apollonian]

'Darkest Hour': Great Movie, Defective History ​

Link: http://ihr.org/other/darkesthour

By Mark Weber
April 2018

“Darkest Hour” – a portrayal of Winston Churchill during grim days of World War II – is a box office success, and an inspiration for jaded and hero-hungry viewers. For his outstanding portrayal of the wartime British leader, Gary Oldman has justly earned an Oscar. But while it’s an artistic achievement and grand entertainment, “Darkest Hour” is badly flawed history.

The film’s story unfolds over a few weeks in the spring of 1940. Following the stunning German success against British and French forces in Norway, parliament has lost faith in the ability of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain to continue leading the nation. Churchill, who is well known for his fierce hostility toward Hitler and Germany, is called on to head a new and more broad-based government. In spite of grave misgivings about his judgment and temperament – shared by the King and many colleagues, including leaders in his own party – Churchill becomes prime minister.

In the climatic concluding scene from “Darkest Hour,” Gary Oldman portrays Winston Churchill as he delivers his “Never Surrender” address to parliament, June 4, 1940.

On the battlefield things quickly go from bad to worse. German forces overwhelm the British and French on the European mainland, and the remaining hard-pressed British troops are forced to retreat across the Channel from Dunkirk. With the country facing a military disaster without parallel in modern history, key members of his own inner circle press Churchill to open peace talks with Germany before their negotiating position weakens further.

Not entirely sure of what to do next, Churchill seeks to understand the mood of ordinary citizens, above all to gauge their willingness to endure much greater suffering and hardship if Britain keeps fighting, including the horrors of a possible invasion.

In a key episode of the film, and one that is entirely fictional, he abruptly gets out of his chauffeur-driven car on a busy street to descend – for the first time in his life – into an Underground station to meet with ordinary Londoners. The people he speaks with unanimously express their determination to carry on the fight, no matter what. Fortified by this supposedly representative sampling of the public spirit, Churchill then delivers his famous “We Shall Never Surrender” speech to a cheering parliament, a masterful oration that concludes the film on a rousing note.

In fact, Churchill had little respect for public opinion. Throughout his career, his views on the great issues of the day were often at odds with those of most citizens, or even most members of his own Conservative Party. He was justifiably regarded as a maverick.

When Chamberlain returned from Munich in September 1938 after concluding a settlement of the “Sudetenland” crisis with the leaders of Germany, France and Italy, most Britons welcomed him home with feelings of gratitude and relief. The public overwhelmingly approved what most regarded as a reasonable settlement of a crisis that had threatened to set off a new European war. Churchill’s outspoken scorn for the Munich agreement and, more generally, for Chamberlain’s “appeasement” policy toward Hitler’s Germany was sharply at odds with the general mood. It was precisely because his zealous hostility toward Hitler and Germany had been so drastically out of step with the attitude of most members of his own party that he was chosen to replace the less belligerent Chamberlain as prime minister.

Perhaps the most humiliating expression of just how out of touch Churchill was with the concerns and hopes of most Britons came in July 1945, some weeks after the end of the war in Europe. In the first general elections since before the outbreak of war, British voters decisively rejected Churchill and the Conservatives in a surprising upset that put the Labour Party into power.

Winston Churchill, in 1942

“Darkest Hour” reinforces the widespread belief that Churchill’s speeches played a crucial role in sustaining British morale. A scholar who has carefully looked into the matter has found that this view is largely a myth. After examining government documents and surveys, as well as contemporary diaries of ordinary people, professor Richard Toye of the University of Exeter concluded that there is “little evidence” that Churchill’s oratory was important in bolstering British wartime resolve.

“Churchill's first speeches as prime minister in the dark days of 1940 were by no means universally acclaimed,” says Prof. Toye. “Many people thought that he was drunk during his famous 'Finest Hour' broadcast, and there is little evidence that they made a decisive difference to the British people’s will to fight on.” As he explains in his book, The Roar of the Lion, Toye was surprised by the results of his research.

He also examined Home intelligence reports and mass observational archives to learn what people thought of Churchill’s speeches at the time compared with what they later remembered, or thought they remembered. His famous “Never Surrender” address in parliament was never broadcast, but people convinced themselves they heard it. “It was never broadcast, though it was reported on the BBC by an announcer and quoted in the press,” Prof. Toye points out. “However, people claim to remember having heard this famous speech from June 1940, even though they hadn't. It was recorded for posterity along with others of his wartime speeches nine years later.”

Churchill’s reputation as a great orator is based on a handful of often-repeated passages from just a few of his many addresses. While those memorable phrases are undeniably stirring, they are also exceptional. All too often his speeches were verbose, meandering, difficult to understand, and sprinkled with misrepresentations and factual errors.

The rousing “Never Surrender” speech that concludes “Darkest Hour” is pure theater. In fact, Hitler never asked for, or sought, Britain’s capitulation. He only wanted Britain to cease its war against Germany.

As one who for years had voiced great admiration for the British, Hitler as chancellor worked for German-British friendship. He was immensely pleased when the two countries concluded an important naval agreement in 1935. When Britain declared war against Germany in 1939, he was shaken and dismayed. Still, he continued to reach out to Britain’s leaders, both in public and through diplomatic channels, to somehow bring an end to the fighting.

After the spectacular German victory over French and British forces in May-June 1940, and French acceptance of an armistice, Hitler made a bold effort to end the war. In a major address that was broadcast on radio stations around the world, he dramatically appealed to the leaders in London, and to the British people, for an honorable end to the conflict. It was Churchill who insisted on continuing, as he put it, to “wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might” in pursuit of “victory at all costs.”

In the historic address that concludes “Darkest Hour,” Churchill rouses support for his war policy by suggesting that peace with Hitler would mean swastika banners flying over London. This is nonsense. Even in countries that were allied with Germany during World War II, such as Finland and Bulgaria, swastika flags never waved over their cities.

Churchill had been contemptuous of his predecessor’s conditional appeasement policy toward Germany. But after he became prime minister, Churchill adopted his own policy of even more far-reaching appeasement – this time toward the Soviet Union. Although Churchill told the world that Hitler could not be trusted, he repeatedly proclaimed his whole-hearted trust and confidence in Soviet dictator Stalin.

When Britain declared war against Germany in 1939, leaders in London claimed that they were obliged to do so because the Hitler regime threatened Poland’s independence. But after five and a half years of war, and in keeping with Churchill’s policy of collaboration with Stalin, Poland’s independence was stamped out, this time by the Soviet regime.

“Darkest Hour” reinforces the widely held impression, which Churchill himself encouraged, that an honorable or lasting peace with Hitler was simply not possible. But as he himself later acknowledged, that’s simply not true. In a confidential message of Jan. 24, 1944, Churchill wrote to Soviet premier Stalin: “I am sure you know that I would never negotiate with the Germans separately ... We never thought of making a separate peace even in the years when we were all alone and could easily have made one without serious loss to the British empire and largely at your expense.”

Especially in 1940 or 1941, a British leader could readily have reached an agreement with Hitler whereby Britain would have kept its sovereignty, its great naval fleet, and its empire. To be sure, this would have meant acknowledging German hegemony in eastern Europe. But at the end of the war, Britain accepted Soviet Russia’s harsher and more alien dominion over this region.

Given Hitler’s respect for the independence and neutrality of Sweden and Switzerland throughout the war years, he certainly would have respected the sovereignty of the much more solidly defended Britain. As it was, Britain emerged from the death and destruction of World War II not so much a victor, but rather as a subordinate ally of the real victors – the United States and the Soviet Union.

John Charmley

The British leader’s famous “We shall never surrender” speech was little more than “sublime nonsense,” says British historian John Charmley. “In sharp contrast to all those admirers who have strenuously denied that an honourable peace could have been made in 1940 or 1941,” Charmley explains, “Churchill knew better. Peace could have been made. It would not have depended upon 'trusting' Hitler, but rather upon the presumption that he would be bound to come into conflict with Stalin.”

Alan Clark -- historian and one-time British defense minister – has given a similarly harsh verdict of Churchill's war policy: “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 U.S. 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 ...”

Alan Clark

British journalist and author Peter Millar affirms this assessment: “... 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.”

Given all this, it’s perhaps not surprising that Churchill later reflected with some chagrin on the war’s outcome. A few years after the end of the fighting, he wrote in this memoirs: “The human tragedy reaches its 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.”


For Further Reading

Patrick J. Buchanan, Churchill, Hitler and 'The Unnecessary War': How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World. New York: Crown, 2008.

Patrick J. Buchanan, “Did Hitler Want War?,” Sept. 1, 2009.
( http://buchanan.org/blog/did-hitler-want-war-2068 )

John Charmley, Churchill’s Grand Alliance, Harcourt Brace/ Harvest, 1996

John Charmley, Churchill: The End of Glory. Hodder and Stroughton, 1993

Christopher Hitchens, “The Medals of His Defeats: Winston Churchill,” The Atlantic, April 2002.
( http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/04/the-medals-of-his-defeats/306061/ )

Adolf Hitler, Reichstag address of July 19, 1940
( http://www.ibiblio.org/pha/policy/1940/1940-07-19b.html )

Peter Millar, “Millar's Europe: Question over Glory Days," The European (London), Jan. 7-10, 1993.

Kevin Myers, “Everything People Believed About Hitler's Intentions Toward Britain Was a Myth Created by Churchill,” Irish Independent (Ireland), June 19, 2012.
( http://www.independent.ie/opinion/c...-was-a-myth-created-by-churchill-3143805.html )

Michael Phillips, “'Darkest Hour' Review: For Gary Oldman, Churchill Role is V for Victory,” Chicago Tribune, Dec. 6, 2017.
( http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/movies/sc-mov-darkest-hour-review-1201-story.html )

M. Robinson, “Winston Churchill’s Wartime Speeches Did Not Inspire ...,” Daily Mail (Britain), August 20, 2013.
( http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...mous-finest-hour-address-claims-academic.html )

David Sims, “Darkest Hour Is a Thunderous Churchill Biopic,” The Atlantic, Nov. 27, 2017
( https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/11/darkest-hour-review/546497/ )

David Smith, “Churchill 'In the Year of Trump': Darkest Hour Feeds America’s Love for Winston,” The Guardian (Britain), Nov. 26, 2017.
( https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/nov/26/darkest-hour-winston-churchill-gary-oldman )

F. Stieve, What the World Rejected: Hitler’s Peace Offers, 1933-1939.
( http://ihr.org/other/what-the-world-rejected.html )

V. Thorpe, “The Actor Who Was Churchill’s Radio Voice,” The Guardian/ Observer (Britain), Oct. 29, 2000.
( https://www.theguardian.com/media/2000/oct/29/uknews.theobserver )

Mark Weber, “The 'Good War' Myth of World War Two,” May 2008.
( http://www.ihr.org/news/weber_ww2_may08.html )

Mark Weber, “Winston Churchill: An Unsettled Legacy,” The Journal of Historical Review, July-August 2001
( http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v20/v20n4p43_Weber.html )

 

[Apollonian]

The Lies About World War II​

May 13, 2019 | Categories: Articles & Columns | Tags: | Print This Article Print This Article

Link: https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2019/05/13/the-lies-about-world-war-ii/

Paul Craig Roberts

In the aftermath of a war, history cannot be written. The losing side has no one to speak for it. Historians on the winning side are constrained by years of war propaganda that demonized the enemy while obscuring the crimes of the righteous victors. People want to enjoy and feel good about their victory, not learn that their side was responsible for the war or that the war could have been avoided except for the hidden agendas of their own leaders. Historians are also constrained by the unavailability of information. To hide mistakes, corruption, and crimes, governments lock up documents for decades. Memoirs of participants are not yet written. Diaries are lost or withheld from fear of retribution. It is expensive and time consuming to locate witnesses, especially those on the losing side, and to convince them to answer questions. Any account that challenges the “happy account” requires a great deal of confirmation from official documents, interviews, letters, diaries, and memoirs, and even that won’t be enough. For the history of World War II in Europe, these documents can be spread from New Zealand and Australia across Canada and the US through Great Britain and Europe and into Russia. A historian on the track of the truth faces long years of strenuous investigation and development of the acumen to judge and assimilate the evidence he uncovers into a truthful picture of what transpired. The truth is always immensely different from the victor’s war propaganda.

As I reported recently, Harry Elmer Barnes was the first American historian to provide a history of the first world war that was based on primary sources. His truthful account differed so substantially from the war propaganda that he was called every name in the book. https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/20...consciousness-and-false-historical-awareness/

Truth is seldom welcomed. David Irving, without any doubt the best historian of the European part of World War II, learned at his great expense that challenging myths does not go unpunished. Nevertheless, Irving persevered. If you want to escape from the lies about World War II that still direct our disastrous course, you only need to study two books by David Irving: Hitler’s War and the first volume of his Churchill biography, Churchill’s War: The Struggle for Power .

Irving is the historian who spent decades tracking down diaries, survivors, and demanding release of official documents. He is the historian who found the Rommel diary and Goebbles’ diaries, the historian who gained entry into the Soviet archives, and so on. He is familiar with more actual facts about the second world war than the rest of the historians combined. The famous British military historian, Sir John Keegan, wrote in the Times Literary Supplement: “Two books stand out from the vast literature of the Second World War: Chester Wilmot’s The Struggle for Europe, published in 1952, and David Irving’s Hitler’s War.

Despite many such accolades, today Irving is demonized and has to publish his own books.

I will avoid the story of how this came to be, but, yes, you guessed it, it was the Zionists. You simply cannot say anything that alters their propagandistic picture of history.

In what follows, I am going to present what is my impression from reading these two magisterial works. Irving himself is very scant on opinions. He only provides the facts from official documents, recorded intercepts, diaries, letters and interviews.

World War II was Churchill’s War, not Hitler’s war. Irving provides documented facts from which the reader cannot avoid this conclusion. Churchill got his war, for which he longed, because of the Versailles Treaty that stripped Germany of German territory and unjustly and irresponsibly imposed humiliation on Germany.

Hitler and Nationalist Socialist Germany (Nazi stands for National Socialist German Workers’ Party) are the most demonized entities in history. Any person who finds any good in Hitler or Germany is instantly demonized. The person becomes an outcast regardless of the facts. Irving is very much aware of this. Every time his factual account of Hitler starts to display a person too much different from the demonized image, Irving throws in some negative language about Hitler.

Similarly for Winston Churchill. Every time Irving’s factual account displays a person quite different from the worshiped icon, Irving throws in some appreciative language.

This is what a historian has to do to survive telling the truth.

To be clear, in what follows, I am merely reporting what seems to me to be the conclusion from the documented facts presented in these two works of scholarship. I am merely reporting what I understand Irving’s research to have established. You read the books and arrive at your own conclusion.

World War II was initiated by the British and French declaration of war on Germany, not by a surprise blitzkrieg from Germany. The utter rout and collapse of the British and French armies was the result of Britain declaring a war for which Britain was unprepared to fight and of the foolish French trapped by a treaty with the British, who quickly deserted their French ally, leaving France at Germany’s mercy.

Germany’s mercy was substantial. Hitler left a large part of France and the French colonies unoccupied and secure from war under a semi-independent government under Petain. For his service in protecting a semblance of French independence, Petain was sentenced to death by Charles de Gaulle after the war for collaboration with Germany, an unjust charge.

In Britain, Churchill was out of power. He figured a war would put him back in power. No Britisher could match Churchill’s rhetoric and orations. Or determination. Churchill desired power, and he wanted to reproduce the amazing military feats of his distinguished ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough, whose biography Churchill was writing and who defeated after years of military struggle France’s powerful Sun King, Louis XIV, the ruler of Europe.

In contrast to the British aristocrat, Hitler was a man of the people. He acted for the German people. The Versailles Treaty had dismembered Germany. Parts of Germany were confiscated and given to France, Belgium, Denmark, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. As Germany had not actually lost the war, being the occupiers of foreign territory when Germany agreed to a deceptive armistice, the loss of approximately 7 million German people to Poland and Czechoslovakia, where Germans were abused, was not considered a fair outcome.

Hitler’s program was to put Germany back together again. He succeeded without war until it came to Poland. Hitler’s demands were fair and realistic, but Churchill, financed by the Focus Group with Jewish money, put such pressure on British prime minister Chamberlain that Chamberlain intervened in the Polish-German negotiations and issued a British guarantee to the Polish military dictatorship should Poland refuse to release German territory and populations.

The British had no way of making good on the guarantee, but the Polish military dictatorship lacked the intelligence to realize that. Consequently, the Polish Dictatorship refused Germany’s request.

From this mistake of Chamberlain and the stupid Polish dictatorship, came the Ribbentrop/Molotov agreement that Germany and the Soviet Union would split Poland between themselves. When Hitler attacked Poland, Britain and the hapless French declared war on Germany because of the unenforceable British guarantee. But the British and French were careful not to declare war on the Soviet Union for occupying the eastern half of Poland.

Thus Britain was responsible for World War II, first by stupidly interfering in German/Polish negotiations, and second by declaring war on Germany.

Churchill was focused on war with Germany, which he intended for years preceding the war. But Hitler didn’t want any war with Britain or with France, and never intended to invade Britain. The invasion threat was a chimera conjured up by Churchill to unite England behind him. Hitler expressed his view that the British Empire was essential for order in the world, and that in its absence Europeans would lose their world supremacy. After Germany’s rout of the French and British armies, Hitler offered an extraordinarily generous peace to Britain. He said he wanted nothing from Britain but the return of Germany’s colonies. He committed the German military to the defense of the British Empire, and said he would reconstitute both Polish and Czech states and leave them to their own discretion. He told his associates that defeat of the British Empire would do nothing for Germany and everything for Bolshevik Russia and Japan.

Winston Churchill kept Hitler’s peace offers as secret as he could and succeeded in his efforts to block any peace. Churchill wanted war, largely it appears, for his own glory. Franklin Delano Roosevelt slyly encouraged Churchill in his war but without making any commitment in Britain’s behalf. Roosevelt knew that the war would achieve his own aim of bankrupting Britain and destroying the British Empire, and that the US dollar would inherit the powerful position from the British pound of being the world’s reserve currency. Once Churchill had trapped Britain in a war she could not win on her own, FDR began doling out bits of aid in exchange for extremely high prices—for example, 60 outdated and largely useless US destroyers for British naval bases in the Atlantic. FDR delayed Lend-Lease until desperate Britain had turned over $22,000 million of British gold plus $42 million in gold Britain had in South Africa. Then began the forced sell-off of British overseas investments. For example, the British-owned Viscose Company, which was worth $125 million in 1940 dollars, had no debts and held $40 million in government bonds, was sold to the House of Morgan for $37 million. It was such an act of thievery that the British eventually got about two-thirds of the company’s value to hand over to Washington in payment for war munitions. American aid was also “conditional on Britain dismantling the system of Imperial preference anchored in the Ottawa agreement of 1932.” For Cordell Hull, American aid was “a knife to open that oyster shell, the Empire.” Churchill saw it coming, but he was too far in to do anything but plead with FDR: It would be wrong, Churchill wrote to Roosevelt, if “Great Britain were to be divested of all saleable assets so that after the victory was won with our blood, civilization saved, and the time gained for the United States to be fully armed against all eventualities, we should stand stripped to the bone.”

A long essay could be written about how Roosevelt stripped Britain of her assets and world power. Irving writes that in an era of gangster statesmen, Churchill was not in Roosevelt’s league. The survival of the British Empire was not a priority for FDR. He regarded Churchill as a pushover—unreliable and drunk most of the time. Irving reports that FDR’s policy was to pay out just enough to give Churchill “the kind of support a rope gives a hanging man.” Roosevelt pursued “his subversion of the Empire throughout the war.” Eventually Churchill realized that Washington was at war with Britain more fiercely than was Hitler. The great irony was that Hitler had offered Churchill peace and the survival of the Empire. When it was too late, Churchill came to Hitler’s conclusion that the conflict with Germany was a “most unnecessary” war. Pat Buchanan sees it that way also. https://www.amazon.com/Churchill-Hi...ds=Pat+Buchanan&qid=1557709100&s=books&sr=1-3

Hitler forbade the bombing of civilian areas of British cities. It was Churchill who initiated this war crime, later emulated by the Americans. Churchill kept the British bombing of German civilians secret from the British people and worked to prevent Red Cross monitoring of air raids so no one would learn he was bombing civilian residential areas, not war production. The purpose of Churchill’s bombing—first incendiary bombs to set everything afire and then high explosives to prevent firefighters from controlling the blazes—was to provoke a German attack on London, which Churchill reckoned would bind the British people to him and create sympathy in the US for Britain that would help Churchill pull America into the war. One British raid murdered 50,000 people in Hamburg, and a subsequent attack on Hamburg netted 40,000 civilian deaths. Churchill also ordered that poison gas be added to the firebombing of German civilian residential areas and that Rome be bombed into ashes. The British Air Force refused both orders. At the very end of the war the British and Americans destroyed the beautiful baroque city of Dresden, burning and suffocating 100,000 people in the attack. After months of firebombing attacks on Germany, including Berlin, Hitler gave in to his generals and replied in kind. Churchill succeeded. The story became “the London Blitz,” not the British blitz of Germany.

Like Hitler in Germany, Churchill took over the direction of the war. He functioned more as a dictator who ignored the armed services than as a prime minister advised by the country’s military leaders. Both leaders might have been correct in their assessment of their commanding officers, but Hitler was a much better war strategist than Churchill, for whom nothing ever worked. To Churchill’s WW I Gallipoli misadventure was now added the introduction of British troops into Norway, Greece, Crete, Syria—all ridiculous decisions and failures—and the Dakar fiasco. Churchill also turned on the French, destroying the French fleet and lives of 1,600 French sailors because of his personal fear, unfounded, that Hitler would violate his treaty with the French and seize the fleet. Any one of these Churchillian mishaps could have resulted in a no confidence vote, but with Chamberlain and Halifax out of the way there was no alternative leadership. Indeed, the lack of leadership is the reason neither the cabinet nor the military could stand up to Churchill, a person of iron determination.

Hitler also was a person of iron determination, and he wore out both himself and Germany with his determination. He never wanted war with England and France. This was Churchill’s doing, not Hitler’s. Like Churchill, who had the British people behind him, Hitler had the German people behind him, because he stood for Germany and had reconstructed Germany from the rape and ruin of the Versailles Treaty. But Hitler, not an aristocrat like Churchill, but of low and ordinary origins, never had the loyalty of many of the aristocratic Prussian military officers, those with “von” before their name. He was afflicted with traitors in the Abwehr, his military intelligence, including its director, Adm. Canaris. On the Russian front in the final year, Hitler was betrayed by generals who opened avenues for the Russians into undefended Berlin.

Hitler’s worst mistakes were his alliance with Italy and his decision to invade Russia. He was also mistaken to let the British go at Dunkirk. He let them go because he did not want to ruin the chance for ending the war by humiliating the British by the loss of their entire army. But with Churchill there was no chance for peace. By not destroying the British army, Hitler boosted Churchill who turned the evacuation into British heroics that sustained the willingness to fight on.

It is unclear why Hitler invaded Russia. One possible reason is poor or intentionally deceptive information from the Abwehr on Russian military capability. Hitler later said to his associates that he never would have invaded if he had known of the enormous size of the Russian army and the extraordinary capability of the Soviets to produce tanks and aircraft. Some historians have concluded that the reason Hitler invaded Russia was that he concluded that the British would not agree to end the war because they expected Russia to enter the war on Britain’s side. Therefore, Hitler decided to foreclose that possibility by conquering Russia. A Russian has written that Hitler attacked because Stalin was preparing to attack Germany. Stalin did have considerable forces far forward, but It would make more sense for Stalin to wait until the West devoured itself in mutual bloodletting, step in afterwards and scoop it all up if he wanted. Or perhaps Stalin was positioning to occupy part of Eastern Europe in order to put more buffer between the Soviet Union and Germany.

Whatever the reason for the invasion, what defeated Hitler was the earliest Russian winter in 30 years. It stopped everything in its tracks before the well planned and succeeding encirclement could be completed. The harsh winter that immobilized the Germans gave Stalin time to recover.

Because of Hitler’s alliance with Mussolini, who lacked an effective fighting force, resources needed on the Russian front were twice drained off in order to rescue Italy. Because of Mussolini’s misadventures, Hitler had to drain troops, tanks, and air planes from the Russian invasion to rescue Italy in Greece and North Africa and to occupy Crete. Hitler made this mistake out of loyalty to Mussolini. Later in the war when Russian counterattacks were pushing the Germans out of Russia, Hitler had to divert precious military resources to rescue Mussolini from arrest and to occupy Italy to prevent her surrender. Germany simply lacked the manpower and military resources to fight on a 1,000 mile front in Russia, and also in Greece and North Africa, occupy part of France, and man defenses against a US/British invasion of Normandy and Italy.

The German Army was a magnificent fighting force, but it was overwhelmed by too many fronts, too little equipment, and careless communications. The Germans never caught on despite much evidence that the British could read their encryption. Thus, efforts to supply Rommel in North Africa were prevented by the British navy.

Irving never directly addresses in either book the Holocaust. He does document the massacre of many Jews, but the picture that emerges from the factual evidence is that the holocaust of Jewish people was different from the official Zionist story.

No German plans, or orders from Hitler, or from Himmler or anyone else have ever been found for an organized holocaust by gas and cremation of Jews. This is extraordinary as such a massive use of resources and transportation would have required massive organization, budgets and resources. What documents do show is Hitler’s plan to relocate European Jews to Madagascar after the war’s end. With the early success of the Russian invasion, this plan was changed to sending the European Jews to the Jewish Bolsheviks in the eastern part of Russia that Hitler was going to leave to Stalin. There are documented orders given by Hitler preventing massacres of Jews. Hitler said over and over that “the Jewish problem” would be settled after the war.

It seems that most of the massacres of Jews were committed by German political administrators of occupied territories in the east to whom Jews from Germany and France were sent for relocation. Instead of dealing with the inconvenience, some of the administrators lined them up and shot them into open trenches. Other Jews fell victim to the anger of Russian villagers who had long suffered under Jewish Bolshevik administrators.

The “death camps” were in fact work camps. Auschwitz, for example, today a Holocaust museum, was the site of Germany’s essential artificial rubber factory. Germany was desperate for a work force. A significant percentage of German war production labor had been released to the Army to fill the holes in German lines on the Russian front. War production sites, such as Auschwitz, had as a work force refugees displaced from their homes by war, Jews to be deported after war’s end, and anyone else who could be forced into work. Germany desperately needed whatever work force it could get.

Every camp had crematoriums. Their purpose was not to exterminate populations but to dispose of deaths from the scourge of typhus, natural deaths, and other diseases. Refugees were from all over, and they brought diseases and germs with them. The horrific photos of masses of skeleton-like dead bodies that are said to be evidence of organized extermination of Jews are in fact camp inmates who died from typhus and starvation in the last days of the war when Germany was disorganized and devoid of medicines and food for labor camps. The great noble Western victors themselves bombed the labor camps and contributed to the deaths of inmates.

The two books on which I have reported total 1,663 pages, and there are two more volumes of the Churchill biography. This massive, documented historical information seemed likely to pass into the Memory Hole as it is inconsistent with both the self-righteousness of the West and the human capital of court historians. The facts are too costly to be known. But historians have started adding to their own accounts the information uncovered by Irving. It takes a brave historian to praise him, but they can cite him and plagiarize him.

It is amazing how much power Zionists have gotten from the Holocaust. Norman Finkelstein calls it The Holocaust Industry. There is ample evidence that Jews along with many others suffered, but Zionists insist that it was an unique experience limited to Jews.

In his Introduction to Hitler’s War Irving reports that despite the widespread sales of his book, the initial praise from accomplished historians and the fact that the book was required reading at military academies from Sandhurst to West Point, “I have had my home smashed into by thugs, my family terrorized, my name smeared, my printers [publishers] firebombed, and myself arrested and deported by tiny, democratic Austria—an illegal act, their courts decided, for which the ministerial culprits were punished; at the behest of disaffected academics and influential citizens [Zionists], in subsequent years, I was deported from Canada (in 1992), and refused entry to Australia, New Zealand, Italy, South Africa and other civilized countries around he world. Internationally affiliated groups circulated letters to librarians, pleading for this book to be taken off their shelves.”

So much for free thought and truth in the Western world. Nothing is so little regarded in the West as free thought, free expression, and truth. In the West explanations are controlled in order to advance the agendas of the ruling interest groups. As David Irving has learned, woe to anyone who gets in the way.

 

[Apollonian]

Here's Libertarian historian, Ralph Raico, on the Churchill subject

 

[Apollonian]

Time to Foreclose on the Churchill Cult​

Portrait, Winston Churchill. By artist Donald Sheridan (2014)Credit: Creative Commons

Link: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/time-to-foreclose-on-the-churchill-cult/

October 15, 2018 12:01 am
Paul Gottfried

In a recent broadside in National Review against “ill-informed critics of Churchill,” Ben Shapiro mocks his opponents by reminding them that they “would be speaking German if he (Churchill) had not led the fight against Hitler.” If that’s the worse that would have happened had the Third Reich prevailed, it would have been an exceedingly small price to pay for such an outcome.

I offer this comment as someone who grew up speaking German and who still regards it as his second mother tongue. According to Shapiro, those who dare criticize Churchill are mostly “a variety of groups ranging from Indians to Sudanese to Asian tribes.” These quibblers, he writes, are fixated on Churchill’s “racial comment” which “have taken out of context to slander his achievements.” Supposedly those who dwell on Churchill’s imperialist ideas or slurs about lesser breeds are uniformly on the left and mistakenly believe that “an ounce of sin washes away a lifetime of heroism.”

But Shapiro never demonstrates that Churchill spent his entire life engaged in heroic action. He properly recognizes his heroism in standing up to Nazi Germany; and he notes that Churchill “successfully led Great Britain through the most dangerous time in her history.” But was this a more dangerous period than when Churchill’s ancestor the Duke of Marlborough opposed the expansive despotism of Louis XIV, which threatened both England and the European continent in the early 18th century? What about the heroism of William Pitt the Younger, Britain’s very young prime minister who kept his country fighting on against Napoleon and his empire after other countries had deserted the cause?

It’s also not clear in what way we attack the West “by savaging the civilizational history” that Churchill embodied. Are we not allowed to write critically about someone whom Shapiro, and presumably National Review, want us to admire for his presumed “lifetime of heroism”?

Unfortunately there was a lot in Churchill’s life that was not particularly heroic—it’s striking that our current conservative establishment is willing to “contextualize” away “bigoted” statements made by Churchill, while ranting against Churchill contemporary H.L. Mencken, when he made his own. But then Mencken supposedly took the wrong side in World War One, in which he was effusively pro-German, while Churchill did everything in his power to poison Anglo-German relations before that cataclysm, which he regarded as inevitable. This came after Churchill helped foment the Boer War in South Africa, which enabled the British Empire to swallow up the Transvaal and other parts of South Africa. Later as First Lord of the Admiralty, he imposed on Imperial Germany a starvation blockade that resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths. This blockade wasn’t lifted until several months after the hostilities had ended. In the Second World War Churchill supported the terror bombing of German cities, at a time when these population centers could no longer defend themselves and when the war was all but lost.

In March 1946 at Fulton, Missouri, Churchill warned about an “iron curtain” descending on Eastern Europe, but during the war he had been at least as willing as FDR to accommodate Stalin. At Yalta the prime minister worked to preserve the British Empire by shamelessly praising Stalin and the Soviet Empire. His positions in trying to hold on to British India in the face of widespread native opposition receive ample treatment from John Charmley, Roy Jenkins, and other non-authorized biographers. Eventually this preoccupation became Churchill’s stubborn obsession.

Perhaps the most staggering catalogue of Churchill’s sins can be found in a long essay and a number of lectures produced by a Taft Republican and visceral isolationist Ralph Raico. Contrary to what Shapiro tells us, the most passionate critics of Churchill have been on the pre-neoconservative Right; and Raico, a trained German historian, comes out of that venerable conservative tradition. Churchill was certainly not the hero of the Right before the neoconservatives elevated him to that eminence. Not all the praise bestowed on him is of course baseless. Much of it stems from Churchill’s opposition to a Nazi regime that almost managed to exterminate European Jewry.

Unfortunately what is admirable about Churchill is blown up into a “lifetime of heroism,” with sometimes embarrassing effects. For example, Churchill’s belligerent opposition to the Kaiser’s Germany is seen through lenses shaped by his later resistance to Hitler. During and before the First World War the British and Americans—we are led to believe—were already combatting a German evil that eventually spawned Hitler’s regime. Furthemore, if Churchill later urged treating colonial subjects a bit roughly, it may be explained that he was just trying to prepare the natives for Anglo-American democracy. What Canadian political theorist Grant Havers ridicules as “the Churchill cult” has been transformed into a religious faith that no one is allowed to question without forfeiting his membership in Western civilization.

Trying to look at the historical problem more dispassionately, it seems to me that great political figures are usually morally flawed; and this was doubtless true of Churchill. According to his biographer Charmley, Churchill “exulted” at the opportunity of going to war. On the eve of the Great War, he prepared for a European-wide conflict “not only in the sense of making sure the Fleet was ready but also in trying to influence opinion in that direction within the Cabinet.” His passion for armed conflict was almost insatiable. Needless to say, one could find the same defects in other historical luminaries on whom we confer the appellation “great.”

Not all political greats have won the struggles they engaged in. Although one can admire the aristocratic character of Robert E. Lee, this was a commander who lost a war he never wanted. A fervent admirer of Lee, Churchill might also have seen himself on the losing side of history. Charmley maintains that his subject symbolized his country’s “end of glory.” Throughout his life, he stood for the British Empire, British independence, and an “anti-socialist vision of England.” In the end, Churchill watched all three vanish.

 

[Apollonian]

Winston Churchill has as much blood on his hands as the worst genocidal dictators, claims Indian politician​

'This is a man the British would have us hail as an apostle of freedom and democracy,' says author

Link: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/...roor-melbourne-writers-festival-a7936141.html

Maya Oppenheim | @mayaoppenheim |
Friday 8 September 2017 12:30 |

Dr Tharoor first rose to prominence after his heartfelt speech at Oxford Union, discussing the economic toll British rule took on India, in July 2015 went viral

An Indian politician has put Winston Churchill in the same category as some of “the worst genocidal dictators” of the 20th century because of his complicity in the Bengal Famine.

Dr Shashi Tharoor, whose new book Inglorious Empire chronicles the atrocities of the British Empire, argued the former British Prime Minister’s reputation as a great wartime leader and protector of freedom was wholly miscast given his role in the Bengal famine which saw four million Bengalis starve to death.

In 1943, up to four million Bengalis starved to death when Churchill diverted food to British soldiers and countries such as Greece while a deadly famine swept through Bengal.

During an appearance at the Melbourne writers’ festival broadcast by ABC, the Indian MP noted Churchill’s orders related to Australian ships carrying wheat at Indian docks.

UK needs museum on empire's 'divide and rule' of India, says author

“This is a man the British would have us hail as an apostle of freedom and democracy, when he has as much blood on his hands as some of the worst genocidal dictators of the 20th century,” he said to applause.

READ MORE

He added: “People started dying and Churchill said well it’s all their fault anyway for breeding like rabbits. He said ‘I hate the Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion’.”

Dr Tharoor, a former Under-Secretary of the UN, also gave an extensive description of British colonial exploitation and annihilation of traditional Indian industries such as textiles which reduced it to “a poster child of third world poverty” by the time the British left in 1947.

The 5 of the worst atrocities carried out by the British Empire

Show all 5

He said the “excuse that apologists [of British empire] like to make is, it’s not our fault, you just missed the bus for the industrial revolution. Well, we missed the bus because you threw us under its wheels.”

This is not the first time Dr Tharoor has voiced his frustrations about the way Churchill is remembered by the history books. In March, he argued the former PM who led Britain to victory in World War Two should be remembered alongside the most prominent dictators of the twentieth century.

“This [Churchill] is the man who the British insist on hailing as some apostle of freedom and democracy," the author told UK Asian at a launch for his book. "When to my mind he is really one of the more evil rulers of the 20th century only fit to stand in the company of the likes of Hitler, Mao and Stalin".

The British Empire’s homophobic legacy could be overturned in India

He added: “Churchill has as much blood on his hands as Hitler does. Particularly the decisions that he personally signed off during the Bengal Famine when 4.3 million people died because of the decisions he took or endorsed."

"Not only did the British pursue its own policy of not helping the victims of this famine which was created by their policies. Churchill persisted in exporting grain to Europe, not to feed actual ‘Sturdy Tommies’, to use his phrase, but add to the buffer stocks that were being piled up in the event of a future invasion of Greece and Yugoslavia”.

“Ships laden with wheat were coming in from Australia docking in Calcutta and were instructed by Churchill not to disembark their cargo but sail on to Europe,” he added. “And when conscience-stricken British officials wrote to the Prime Minister in London pointing out that his policies were causing needless loss of life all he could do was write peevishly in the margin of the report, ‘Why hasn’t Gandhi died yet?'"

Dr Tharoor first rose to prominence after his heartfelt speech at Oxford Union, discussing the economic toll British rule took on India, in July 2015 went viral.

 

[Apollonian]

Winston Churchill's shocking use of chemical weapons ​

The use of chemical weapons in Syria has outraged the world. But it is easy to forget that Britain has used them – and that Winston Churchill was a powerful advocate for them

Link: https://www.theguardian.com/world/s...nston-churchill-shocking-use-chemical-weapons

Giles Milton
Sun 1 Sep 2013 14.30 EDT First published on Sun 1 Sep 2013 14.30 EDT

Secrecy was paramount. Britain's imperial general staff knew there would be outrage if it became known that the government was intending to use its secret stockpile of chemical weapons. But Winston Churchill, then secretary of state for war, brushed aside their concerns. As a long-term advocate of chemical warfare, he was determined to use them against the Russian Bolsheviks. In the summer of 1919, 94 years before the devastating strike in Syria, Churchill planned and executed a sustained chemical attack on northern Russia.

The British were no strangers to the use of chemical weapons. During the third battle of Gaza in 1917, General Edmund Allenby had fired 10,000 cans of asphyxiating gas at enemy positions, to limited effect. But in the final months of the first world war, scientists at the governmental laboratories at Porton in Wiltshire developed a far more devastating weapon: the top secret "M Device", an exploding shell containing a highly toxic gas called diphenylaminechloroarsine. The man in charge of developing it, Major General Charles Foulkes, called it "the most effective chemical weapon ever devised".

Trials at Porton suggested that it was indeed a terrible new weapon. Uncontrollable vomiting, coughing up blood and instant, crippling fatigue were the most common reactions. The overall head of chemical warfare production, Sir Keith Price, was convinced its use would lead to the rapid collapse of the Bolshevik regime. "If you got home only once with the gas you would find no more Bolshies this side of Vologda."The cabinet was hostile to the use of such weapons, much to Churchill's irritation. He also wanted to use M Devices against the rebellious tribes of northern India. "I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes," he declared in one secret memorandum. He criticised his colleagues for their "squeamishness", declaring that "the objections of the India Office to the use of gas against natives are unreasonable. Gas is a more merciful weapon than [the] high explosive shell, and compels an enemy to accept a decision with less loss of life than any other agency of war."

He ended his memo on a note of ill-placed black humour: "Why is it not fair for a British artilleryman to fire a shell which makes the said native sneeze?" he asked. "It is really too silly."

Read more

A staggering 50,000 M Devices were shipped to Russia: British aerial attacks using them began on 27 August 1919, targeting the village of Emtsa, 120 miles south of Archangel. Bolshevik soldiers were seen fleeing in panic as the green chemical gas drifted towards them. Those caught in the cloud vomited blood, then collapsed unconscious.

The attacks continued throughout September on many Bolshevik-held villages: Chunova, Vikhtova, Pocha, Chorga, Tavoigor and Zapolki. But the weapons proved less effective than Churchill had hoped, partly because of the damp autumn weather. By September, the attacks were halted then stopped. Two weeks later the remaining weapons were dumped in the White Sea. They remain on the seabed to this day in 40 fathoms of water.

 

[Apollonian]

Did Winston Churchill pimp out his son's wife to rich Americans so they would help Britain win the war? Randolph believed so, says book charting the thundery yet intensely loving bond between the two men ​

Link: http://www.yourdestinationnow.com/2021/03/did-winston-churchill-pimp-out-his-sons.html

March 21, 2021
  
The salon in the boat was full of gold and silver ashtrays in the form of seashells, gold taps made in the shape of dolphins, and a 2,000-year-old Cretan mosaic dancefloor that could be converted at the touch of a switch into a swimming pool.

No wonder Winston Churchill revelled in the luxury of what he called ‘the monster yacht’, Christina. However, his wife Clementine loathed it and was suspicious of its owner, the Greek millionaire Ari Onassis.

The tycoon treated Churchill with filial reverence. Sometimes when Clementine’s back was turned, he sank to his knees and spooned extra caviar, which the former Prime Minister ate ‘like toast’, into his mouth.

It was the summer of 1963 and, Churchill, aged 88 and in increasingly poor health, invited his son Randolph to join them on his tenth trip on the yacht.

At first during the cruise, Randolph treated his father with affection and respect.

But one night, he erupted into a rage, accusing him of having encouraged his wife Pamela’s seduction of important American men during the war.

Winston stared at his son with brooding fury before retiring, still shaking, to his cabin, where his secretary, Anthony Montague Browne, feared he might suffer a stroke. There, the two men sipped whisky and soda until Winston grew calm.

It was clear that Randolph must leave the ship.

‘Anthony,’ Randolph said, ‘I do so very much love my father but something always goes wrong between us.’

Randolph (pictured) was offered a parliamentary seat in Preston \u00BF under the terms of the wartime coalition, he would not face a challenge \u00BF and on October 8, 1940, Winston beamed as his anointed heir made his ceremonial entry into the Commons

From the moment his only son was born in 1911, a delighted Winston Churchill wanted to ensure Randolph’s childhood would be better than his own.

Winston had hero-worshipped his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, the politician and social whirlwind who had died at 46. He learned his speeches by heart, took his politics unquestioningly and always pondered whether his father would approve of his decisions.

But whenever he’d tried to begin a serious conversation with his father, he had been snubbed pitilessly.

‘He wouldn’t listen to me or consider anything I said. There was no companionship with him possible and I tried so hard and so often. He was so self-centred no one else existed for him,’ Winston once said. So he vowed to treat his own son very differently. In an attempt to create an intimate father-son bond, Winston praised Randolph to the heavens and told him stories about their illustrious ancestors. He transmitted all his obsessions, ideas and prejudices.

Guests to the family home, Chartwell, were introduced by Winston to his son before his wife – which infuriated Clementine. Winston was unapologetic. He was preparing his son to be prime minister one day.

At dinner, the precocious Randolph enraptured his father, holding forth on the great events of the day to men such as David Lloyd George and Max Beaverbrook.

Not everyone found the experience to their taste. Randolph’s cousin, Peregrine Churchill, said: ‘My uncle was a great man but a frightful bully. So was my cousin Randolph. All those overpowering egos!’ But Winston dismissed criticisms of his son, including those of his teachers at Eton.

There were sometimes rows, but the moment always came when Winston kissed his son and told him that he had not meant to be unkind. Clementine was less forgiving.

Randolph believed she hated him. Indeed, at one point she began to fear her overbearing son, and instructed her staff never to leave her alone with him.

From the moment his only son was born in 1911, a delighted Winston Churchill wanted to ensure Randolph’s childhood would be better than his own. They are pictured together at the seaside in 1912

As the 1920s wore on, Winston involved his schoolboy son more closely in his political life, inviting him to give speeches on the campaign trail. Randolph became his father’s chief cheerleader. In turn, Winston made it clear that success was all that counted. A career outside the Cabinet was worthless.

In 1929, Winston took his son on a tour of the US and Canada. In California, they stayed at media mogul Randolph Hearst’s estate. Winston wrote to Clementine: ‘Randolph enjoyed himself immensely. He got off at once with Mrs Hearst junior [the young wife of one of the tycoon’s sons]. They spent the greater part of the time in the sapphire bathing pool – occasioning some anxiety to the husband, some vigilance from Mrs H senior, & some relief to me when the young lady departed.’

Winston did not tell his wife that Randolph had surprised him by climbing through his bedroom window after losing his way to a midnight assignation with Mrs Hearst.

Throughout their tour, Randolph regularly disappeared. On one occasion, he reappeared in his pyjamas with an actress.

Being in his father’s company had been exhilarating and he felt closer than ever to Winston, who was always telling him how clever and talented he was.

Now a student at Oxford, it became clear that Randolph considered university a tiresome formality before his gilded political career could begin. He led a sybaritic lifestyle of drunkenness and socialising.

An appalled Winston sent him a letter that could have been a carbon copy of the letters his own father sent to him: ‘Your idle & lazy life is very offensive to me. You appear to be leading a perfectly useless existence… You give nothing in return for the many privileges & favours you have hitherto received. I must therefore adopt a different attitude towards you for your own good.’

The difference was that Winston cared what happened to Randolph in a way his own father never had about him. Randolph replied that Oxford had nothing more to offer him.

His father, somewhat reluctantly, relented, on condition that Randolph find a job. He opted to take ‘up the calling for which no credentials or examinations are required – journalism’.

He wrote articles for Lords Beaverbrook and Rothermere, and earned a salary editing a magazine for chemicals company ICI while living with the future poet laureate John Betjeman in Mayfair. Randolph’s friends were brittle, witty Bright Young Things: Evelyn Waugh, Diana and Nancy Mitford. They lunched at the Ritz and went to parties where the guests got so drunk they ‘could not speak, only bark and bite’.

Randolph was louder, ruder and funnier than anybody else. He drank more, gambled more, and slept with more women than anyone. He spent more, too.

After Winston threw a 21st birthday party for him at Claridge’s, the journalist Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart wrote in his diary. ‘What an amazing thing privilege and position still are in England! Here is a boy who, born in a less privileged circle, would have had to work hard and make his own way.

‘As it is, he is lazy, lascivious, impudent and, beyond a certain rollicking bumptiousness, untalented, and everything is open to him. One thing position has given him is good looks and charm.’

Throughout the 1930s, the lives of father and son grew ever more tightly entwined. They drank and dined together; holidayed and gambled together; confided in each other; their friendships overlapped and, increasingly, so did their professional lives.

Randolph was seemingly more brilliant than his father. But his sallies into society were laced with uncertainty. As he entered the room, there was a crackle of fear. When Randolph got bored, he started fights. Many were scandalised by his affair with the wife of the Anglo-Irish banker-turned-journalist Lord Castlerosse.

No matter how often father and son screamed insults at each other, no matter how searing the pain of the betrayal over Pamela, Winston Churchill was the only person Randolph truly loved

Winston was entertained by his son’s tumultuous behaviour and arranged for his large gambling debts to be paid off from a family trust. He collected examples of his son’s repartee – the more ‘Churchillian’ the better. He continued to shower him with love, which was reflected back doubled in force.

But to Randolph’s frustration and Winston’s disquiet, he had not put his foot on the first rung of the political ladder.

Then, in January 1935, the Daily Mail sent Randolph to cover a by-election in Wavertree, Liverpool, which the Conservatives had won in 1931 with a majority of 29,973.

To the dismay of his father, Randolph suddenly decided to stand as an independent against the official Conservative candidate. Winston was worried he would split the Tory vote. He was right. Labour took the seat and many in the Conservative Party never forgave Randolph.

He then failed in a number of other elections until, with war looming, he joined his father’s old regiment, the Fourth Hussars.

Almost as soon as war was declared, Randolph dashed around London in a panic, insisting he needed a Churchill heir in case he was killed in action.

Though he was sleeping with the vaudeville actress Claire Luce, and in love with the unhappily married Laura Charteris (who had left her husband, taking her baby, the nanny, her Pekinese and a monkey), neither would marry him. He was rejected by eight women in two weeks. Finally, someone said yes. The Honourable Pamela Digby had wide, deep-blue eyes, pink flushed cheeks and auburn hair.

Presented as an ingenue, she had already had affairs with older men and knew how to get them to pay her bills. She was bold, ambitious and did not care what anybody thought about her.

Randolph duly proposed. Both were aware of the transactional nature of the engagement: Randolph wanted a son, while Pam wanted glitter and fun.

Clementine’s doubts were whether it was fair to inflict her son’s drunkenness, gambling, philandering and rudeness on his wife. But in the early months of 1940, all this was forgotten. Pamela was pregnant.

Winston seemed the most excited. A letter Pamela wrote to Randolph captures her father-in-law’s pleasure: ‘His eyes lit up with great joy when I told him of our child.’

Before the war, Randolph had as much access to his father as he wanted. But that changed when Winston became Prime Minister in 1940. There were three chiefs of staff and two private secretaries at his side. They did not like Randolph.

Indeed, senior civil servant Jock Colville wrote that he was ‘one of the most objectionable people I had ever met: noisy, self-assertive, whining and frankly unpleasant.’

The pregnant Pamela moved into a Downing Street annexe when Randolph was posted away for training and the Churchills treated her like another daughter.

Randolph struggled with the new situation. Winston had always encouraged his outspokenness, but his son couldn’t see this was no longer appropriate. Or that he had become a crown prince without hope of succession, kept near because he was essential to his father’s peace of mind.

He was often drunk at Chequers and liable to pick fights with anyone, including senior Army officers. Once, he arrived at Downing Street ‘dead drunk’ at 6am and, far more seriously, had left secret military maps in his car.

But then things took a turn for the better. Randolph was offered a parliamentary seat in Preston – under the terms of the wartime coalition, he would not face a challenge – and on October 8, 1940, Winston beamed as his anointed heir made his ceremonial entry into the Commons.

Two days later, Randolph’s son, Winston, the future Tory MP, was born in his grandfather’s four-poster bed at Chequers. Randolph, meanwhile, was in bed with another man’s wife in London – the actress Diana Napier.

He was then posted to Cairo. One of his new acquaintances in Egypt was society hostess Maud ‘Momo’ Marriott, daughter of an American financier and the wife of a colonel in the Scots Guards.

She was sophisticated, with long red fingernails and simple, beautifully cut clothes. Although Momo denied it, everyone else in Cairo assumed, correctly, that she and Randolph were lovers.

Randolph did not, however, limit himself to one mistress. He was often seen fondling his Egyptian girlfriends at Madame Badia’s nightclub, and caused a scandal by bringing whores through the doors of the Mohammad Ali Club.

Meanwhile, Pamela was left to cope alone with a young baby and Randolph’s huge debts, which she cleared by taking a £12-a-week job at the Ministry of Supply and selling her wedding presents and much of her jewellery. Before long, his absence felt like a liberation. By March 1941, she had moved into a room at the Dorchester hotel, where she thrived. She was regularly seen in the company of influential older men, often Americans – one man in particular…

By the beginning of 1941, President Roosevelt sent his top ‘expediter’, Averell Harriman, to London. He was invited to Chequers at a moment during the war when American help was desperately needed. Winston liked him instantly. Pamela thought him the most beautiful man she had ever seen.

Harriman, too, also impressed. She was ‘delicious’, he said.

They first slept together at the Dorchester in mid-April in the middle of a heavy air raid. They cared for each other, but theirs was essentially a relationship that suited two people who collected people who might be useful.

At first, they kept the affair secret. And nobody asked too many questions when she moved into a suite at the Dorchester with Harriman and his daughter from his first marriage.

They moved in the highest circles and she passed on what she gleaned to Winston, saying: ‘If anything, Winston made it easier for the two of us to see each other outside London by inviting both of us to Chequers nearly every weekend.’

Randolph knew nothing. Indeed, his father wrote to him in June 1941 to say that Harriman was on his way to Egypt and could he do everything to make his trip enjoyable and fruitful. Over ten days, the two men toured military installations and discovered they liked each other’s company. The helpful and ebullient Randolph greatly impressed the man who was cuckolding him.

‘Find Randolph most delightful and stimulating travelling companion. Beginning to understand your weakness for him,’ Harriman wrote in a telegram to Pamela. In parallel, Randolph wrote to his wife that the American was ‘absolutely charming... He spoke delightfully about you, and I fear I have a serious rival.’

One night, Randolph chartered a dhow for a small party and boasted to Harriman of his affair with Momo. For years to come, he would be haunted by the thought that this indiscretion had unwittingly contributed to the end of his marriage. It was less the thought of the break-up of the relationship itself that troubled him. In a sense, by producing an heir, it had already served its purpose. What stung Randolph was that his marriage’s collapse set in motion a chain of consequences that would change his bond with his father for ever.

Randolph returned to London in January 1942, but his marriage was on the rocks. ‘He was a wonderful person,’ Pamela recalled years later. ‘But once a week was enough.’ They argued about money, but mostly Randolph criticised the way Pamela lived. He hated her frequent absences in London and the way young Winston had, as he saw it, been abandoned.

Pamela sought solace in the company of the Harrimans; Randolph at the bar at gentlemen’s club White’s, where he heard hints about Pamela’s adultery. He reacted furiously, drinking too much then spreading ‘malicious inventions’ about his wife.

He told friends that his father had not just condoned her affair, he had encouraged it because of Harriman’s importance to Britain.

He confronted his father but Winston denied knowing about the affair and accused Randolph of mistreating the mother of his son.

Neither man could stop himself from saying words they knew would wound the other grievously.

Randolph vowed never to speak to his father again. Not long afterwards, he walked out on Pamela.

Randolph knew his relationship with his father contained a paradox. Winston venerated courage, but Randolph’s desire to be where bullets flew risked causing his father devastating grief.

Nevertheless, he volunteered to go on an SAS raid to Benghazi in Libya – an experience he later described to his father as ‘the most exciting half-hour of my life’.

Even a serious crash on the way back that killed a man and left Randolph with crushed vertebrae could not dampen his enthusiasm.

Randolph later parachuted into Yugoslavia to make contact with Tito’s partisans at their secret headquarters and was again injured. But his undoubted courage did nothing to build bridges with his father.

Back in London, Randolph arrived drunk at Downing Street for dinner and bellowed at his parents, his sister Sarah and the chiefs of staff that his wife was a whore, naming her lovers. There is no record of how comprehensive Randolph’s list was. Her many conquests included the journalist Ed Murrow and Major General Fred Anderson, the American air force commander.

Randolph turned on his parents and when Sarah – ‘the only member of his family who ever liked him’, according to Evelyn Waugh – protested, he hit her in the face.

Winston went deathly white and Clementine thought he was on the brink of a heart attack. When Winston could talk once more, he summoned the Marines to eject his son. The violence of the encounter left the family stunned. It became the talk of the Carlton Grill, the bar of White’s and the Commons smoking room. It had long been known that Winston had spoiled his son. Now, they said, he was afraid of him.

All the while, Randolph retained his conviction that great things awaited him, even after he lost his seat in the 1945 Labour landslide.

His devotion to his father remained almost religious, but the war had changed Winston, who no longer took delight in his son’s rumbustious behaviour.

Still in his 30s, but deeply unhappy, Randolph grew fat and grey. He staggered around London, uttering gratuitous insults. He ruined parties, gatecrashed dinners, immolated old friendships. There were nights when he was thrown out of three hotels before dawn.

He became ‘a shambling, pitiful object, much like King Lear on the heath’. The next day, he would be assailed with regret, his bright pink eyes streaming tears.

Worse, as far as Randolph was concerned, was the way in which his father started to treat him as a failure – a situation that did not change until he was persuaded to permit him to write his authorised biography.

Randolph’s reaction: ‘Millions!’ he said. ‘It will make us millions!’ He also felt that it proved his father still had confidence in his abilities. However, it was melancholy, more than anger, that came to dominate the final phase of their relationship.

Trapped in a cage built by his father, Randolph never had a chance to ask himself whether the ‘Churchill’ path was what he truly wanted.

He barely outlived his father. He wanted desperately to survive long enough to finish his biography of the man who still dominated his life.

But his own declining health meant that he had only a tiny chance of doing so. He died on June 6, 1968, aged 57.

Randolph never lived up to his father’s extravagant hopes for him – he did not even come close.

One thing remained true, however. No matter how often father and son screamed insults at each other, no matter how searing the pain of the betrayal over Pamela, Winston Churchill was the only person Randolph truly loved.

 

[Apollonian]

Why did a Nazi leader crash-land in Scotland?​

By Steven Brocklehurst
BBC Scotland News
Published 10 May

Link: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-56908183

Rudolf Hess (1895 - 1987), German politician and wartime deputy of Adolf Hitler, during a public speech.

One of the most bizarre episodes of World War Two unfolded on a farm to the south of Glasgow on 10 May 1941.

A German airman parachuted out of his Messerschmitt Bf 110 just before it crashed near Floors Farm in Eaglesham.

He was promptly arrested by a pitchfork-wielding local farmer who took him to his farmhouse before alerting the authorities.

The German identified himself as Captain Alfred Horn and demanded to see the Duke of Hamilton because he had an important message for him.

•Hess landing in Scotland recalled

The next morning the duke, whose home was Dungavel House, about 12 miles from the crash site, was brought to meet the mystery airman who revealed himself as Rudolf Hess, deputy Fuhrer of The Third Reich, Adolf Hitler's long-time friend and ally.

Hess, who was positioned behind only Hermann Goering in the succession hierarchy of the Nazi regime, told Hamilton he wanted to broker a peace deal between Britain and Germany.

"Understandably Hamilton was a bit taken aback by all this," says Dr James Crossland, reader in international history at Liverpool John Moores University.

May 1941: The debris of the Messerschmitt ME-110 from which Rudolf Hess bailed out over Eaglesham on his historic lone flight to Scotland to plead for an Anglo-German peace on the eve of Germany's attack on Russia.

image captionThe debris of the Messerschmitt from which Rudolf Hess bailed out over Eaglesham [ck site link, above, top]b

Why had a prominent Nazi flown for almost 1,000 miles on a solo mission over enemy territory in the middle of a war before coming down in a field in central Scotland?

And why did Hess have the mistaken belief that Hamilton wanted to broker a peace deal on terms acceptable to Hitler?

Dr Crossland said the strange nature of the story had led to some "enduring" conspiracy theories over the intervening years, including claims that the flight was promoted by a group in Britain wanting to overthrow Churchill and negotiate peace.

However, the historian says declassified documents point to Hess being misinformed about the level of support for a peace deal and embarking on a desperate flight of fancy.

In the early stages of the war there had been attempts by important intermediaries to make a deal but these had dried up after Churchill came to power in May 1940, Dr Crossland says.

Hess believed there was a blood bond between the British and the Germans and the common enemy was the Soviet Russians.

In the late summer of 1940 he asked his contacts if there were Britons who wanted to talk peace.

It was a friend of Hess's called Albrecht Haushofer who brought up the name of the unsuspecting Duke of Hamilton, whom he had met in Berlin before the war.

Haushofer wrote to Hamilton in order to make contact but never received a reply. It has since transpired that the letter was intercepted by MI5.

30th January 1941: L-R: German dictator Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945), Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels (1897 - 1945), Nazi deputy Rudolf Hess (1894 - 1987), Dr. Robert Ley (1890 - 1945), SS leader Hans Lammers (1879 - 1962) and an unidentified man sit at a table during a Nazi Party gathering at the Berlin Sports palace on the eighth anniversary of Hitler's chancellorship of Germany.

image copyrightGetty Images
image captionRudolf Hess (3rd left) with other leading Nazi figures, including Adolf Hitler, in January 1941

By April 1941, Hess was desperate. He had been practising with his aircraft, waiting for Hamilton to indicate he was ready to talk.

He went back to Haushofer who told him there were still people who wanted peace.

Dr Crossland says Hess interpreted this as the go-ahead and made the fateful decision to fly to Britain.

"From Hess's point of view, the alleged existence of people who are dissenting towards Churchill's stance was enough to assume that these people were ready to overthrow Churchill and make a peace with Hitler," he says.

Dr Crossland says: "Hess was a very desperate man, he quite naïve, he was delusional and so for him this made all the sense in the world."

Why was Hess so desperate?

Dr Crossland says Hess was one of Hitler's earliest adherents. He served time with him in Landsberg Prison, following the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923.

"At one time he was possibly the closest thing Hitler had to a real friend," Dr Crossland says.

But by WW2 his star was waning within the inner circle of the Third Reich and he was often derided and made fun of by other leading figures.

"He did have a certain amount of desperation to reclaim the favour of Hitler," Dr Crossland says.

Dr Crossland says the official story is that this was a flight undertaken by a deluded man who got bad information and believed something that was not real.

He says conspiracy theories were borne of a period where there were gaps in the historical record but many of these have been filled by the declassification of papers which have pushed the burden of evidence towards the conventional reading of events.

After his arrest Hess was examined by Dr Henry Dicks whose first impression was of a "schizoid psychopath".

As their talks progressed, Dr Dicks was struck by Hess and Hitler's admiration of the British, despite Germany having the upper hand in the war at that time.

Dr Dicks thought an affection for the British may have been why Hess chose to make his solo flight to Scotland.

Hitler said he had no knowledge of what Hess was trying to do and the Nazi Party soon declared him insane.

•Inside the mind of Hitler's deputy

In 1946, Hess was sentenced at the Nuremberg trials to life imprisonment. He died at Spandau prison in 1987, at the age of 93.

The fact that Hess was kept in the prison alone after other Nazi figures were released in 1966 led to assumptions that he was being held because they did not want his true story to ever get out.

•How Britain supported the early release of Rudolf Hess

However, files released in 2017 show the British government petitioned the Soviets on multiple occasions to release Hess.

"If there was something to hide about Hess's knowledge it does seem peculiar that the British government would want him released to tell his side of the story," Dr Crossland says.

He said that for scholars of WW2 the Hess story was "curiosity" but it merited no more than a couple of paragraphs in most historians' account of the war.

"It is enduringly bizarre and I engage with it on that level," Dr Crossland says.