The end of January 2015 has seen the British Tories, helped along by their press and the BBC, re-enacting Winston Churchill’s funeral of 50 years ago. This anniversary is an absurd and empty charade, concocted to bolster their flagging fortunes in the lead up to the next general election. We take this opportunity to reprint a few truths about Britain’s ‘great leader’ – a racist, anti-working class bigot, from a review of Clive Ponting’s book on Churchill.
World War II, Churchill and the big lie
from FRFI 120, August/September 1994
Publishers are usually quick to take advantage of anniversaries to boost sales and the 50th anniversary of D-Day in June was no exception. Rehashed, relived and reinvented – the events of June 1944 were played out on screen and in print. Clive Ponting’s book on Churchill, however, does not fit into this category. He does not just destroy Churchill’s reputation – which was substantially self-manufactured anyway – he also attempts to grasp the real stuff of bourgeois leadership and the myths which are invented and reinvented to keep the idea alive.
Bourgeois history requires the creation of heroes and, rarely, even heroines, to drive events and to embody the ruling ideology for future generations. In the 20th century, Britain’s ‘greatness’ is vested in the figure of Churchill – the small nation that fought heroically and almost alone to defeat the foreign barbarians; the British bulldog, courageous and independent; the lonely and eccentric Prime Minister who stood defiant while others crumbled, spending lonely nights solving the nation’s ills in a Whitehall bunker. The myth of great nationhood and great leader are deviously intertwined. No wonder, then, that there were shrieks of horror when Ponting’s Churchill hit the bookstands – both myths were threatened with dissolution.
Churchill was a deeply unpleasant, snobbish little git, who from an early age decided that he was destined to be a great leader. His military exploits as a cavalry officer in India were designed to reap maximum publicity and his occasional heroism, helped by dum dum bullets and a profound contempt for ‘the native’, was contrived to bring renown. In the absence of opportunities for self-promotion, Churchill invented heroic acts for himself. The lack of a family fortune (his was squandered by his syphilitic father) did not prevent him from living in the lap of luxury – all his life he was attended by a valet who dressed and undressed him, tied his shoelaces, knotted his tie, turned on the bath taps (even when Churchill was in it), and dried him afterwards. He treated his wife and children contemptuously as a distraction from his political ambitions. His escape from a Boer prison in the Boer war was in fact achieved at the expense of two compatriots who had planned the escape, scuppering their own chances.
It takes Ponting 900 pages to encompass the activities of the liar Churchill from his birth in 1874 to his death in 1965 – and it is beyond the scope of this review to consider them all. Nonetheless there are certain themes. Ponting constantly refers to Churchill’s racism, formed during his brief spell in India. It was ever present in Churchill’s political career – from the enforcement of slave labour conditions for Chinese labourers in South African mines to his obsessive concern during the Second World War that the British people viewed black GIs more favourably than the whites and treated them with more respect than the US authorities liked. He asked the US to withdraw all black soldiers from British soil and was relieved that the invasion on D-Day solved the problem of ‘racial pollution’.
But Churchill’s racism was not a personal peccadillo: it was not just ‘typical’ of his contemporaries. For Churchill it was at the very heart of his imperialist political standpoint. The white races, in particular the British, were superior. The Empire was vital to Britain’s wealth and status; the Arabs, the Indians, ‘natives’ everywhere were necessarily subject to this overwhelming truth: ‘I do not admit, for instance, 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, or at any rate, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place’ (Churchill on the Arabs in Palestine, p254). For Churchill, war was the most appropriate means of conducting international affairs.
This racist imperialist necessarily also had profound contempt for the working class and a passionate hatred for socialism. After the First World War the dole was introduced for unemployed servicemen, and became a general benefit for the unemployed. In 1925 Churchill objected in violent language: ‘“It is profoundly injurious to the state that this system should continue; it is demoralising to the whole working class population … [it is] charitable relief; and charitable relief should never be enjoyed as a right.” In future, if Churchill had his way, the huge number of unemployed families would have to depend on private charity once their insurance benefits were exhausted. The Government might make some donations to charities but money would only be given to “deserving cases”.’ (p304).
By 1924 Churchill had become Chancellor of the Exchequer and his first act was to reapply the Gold Standard at 1914 levels – a measure wholly in favour of the City of London and extremely detrimental to manufacture. Unemployment rocketed as a result. By 1926 Churchill was eager for a show-down with the unions and three days into the General Strike argued for an indemnity to be given to the armed forces to put down the strike by any means necessary. The defeat of the strike concentrated his ideas on revenge, with proposals for withdrawal of relief for miners’ families (‘becoming habituated to an indigent idleness’) which were too foul even for his fellow Tories. Churchill detested Bolshevism, as well he should, reserving for it special vitriol strongly reminiscent of Nazi tirades against the Jews: ‘swarms of typhus-bearing vermin’. In the War Office in the early 1920s he approved the use of gas against the Red Army – a weapon he was always happy to use against ‘non-whites’: ‘I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas … I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gases against uncivilised tribes’ (p258).
Above all Churchill was not a bellicose dinosaur left over from an imperialist age. He was a real embodiment of the imperialist ideology – and the myth still dominates Britain. Compare Churchill’s record to Mrs Thatcher’s. Modern Tories fastened on to Churchill’s rotting corpse. Thatcher’s determination to destroy the miners in 1984 could have been modelled on Churchill’s behaviour during the General Strike. Thatcher’s ‘culture-swamping’ speech against immigration, and unswerving support for apartheid South Africa were the very stuff of Churchillian ‘statesmanship’. Listen to the echo across the years: Churchill on the unemployed; Portillo and the squirt Lilley on the unemployed. And although Britain now rarely goes to war without the US in charge, Thatcher eagerly sent her Task Force to quell the ‘native’ invasion of the Falklands, sank the Belgranoand then lied about it without blinking.
Carol Brickley
Churchill, Clive Ponting, Sinclair Stevenson,1994, 900pp, £20.
