By Andrew
Roberts
Tuesday, March
09, 2021
When I started writing books about
Winston Churchill and his contemporaries 30 years ago, virulent
Churchill-hatred was confined to fascists, Marxists, and the swivel-eyed loons
of the “green ink brigade” (so called for their vividly penned letters to the
editor). Today, however, it has metastasized into the academy and is in danger
of becoming received wisdom on the Left there — which in practice in the modern
academy means everywhere.
One might have hoped that this vicious new
atmosphere of Churchill-hatred that is being actively fostered in our
seats of higher learning would at least not have been furthered at Churchill
College, Cambridge, which was created specifically to honor his memory. There,
surely, his strengths and weaknesses might have been debated in an atmosphere
of objectivity and scholarship. It is, after all, the site of the Churchill
Archives Centre, which houses all his papers.
Yet it was at the college, on February 11,
that a symposium titled “The Racial Consequences of Mr Churchill” was held,
featuring a panel of three confirmed Churchill detractors and chaired by a
fourth in the person of Professor Priyamvada Gopal, who tweeted that “White
lives don’t matter” at the time of the BLM demonstrations last summer.
Now, Churchill undoubtedly made many
mistakes in his 65-year political career and can rightly be criticized for
genuine blunders, but on February 11 a series of bizarre, unhistorical, and totally
factually incorrect assaults were made at the college that bears
his honored name. One might expect that in any serious, seminar-like
discussion at top universities like Cambridge there would be some attempt to
provide balance and objectivity. But on this occasion, the evening descended
into a free-for-all of unrestrained Churchill-hatred.
Professor Kehinde Andrews of Birmingham
City University sneered that Churchill had not fought personally in the Second
World War: “I mean, was it Churchill out there fighting the war? Cause I’m
pretty sure it wasn’t; I’m pretty sure he was at home.” Ignoring the fact that
Churchill was 65 when the war broke out, and thus way past the age of
conscription, in fact Churchill showed great personal bravery, going up onto
the Air Ministry roof during the Blitz and traveling 110,000 miles outside the
U.K., often within the radius of Luftwaffe fighters. (On one occasion his plane
was struck by lightning while crossing the Atlantic.)
“I’m pretty sure that if Churchill wasn’t
there,” Professor Andrews went on, “the war would have still ended in the same
way, right?” Wrong. As Clement Attlee, Churchill’s deputy prime minister, said,
“Without Churchill, Britain might have been defeated.” Churchill’s speeches
stiffening morale in 1940, and his stopping Britain from making peace with
Hitler, gave the world (and especially the United States) twelve months to arm
against the Nazis. It was then largely Churchill’s grand strategy that was
adopted by the Western Allies for the rest of the war.
Dr. Onyeka Nubia of Nottingham University
then claimed that Churchill “was — I’m not saying a lame duck, but he was part
of a policy that was in fact being organized by Lord Beaverbrook, by Aneurin
Bevan, by Clement Attlee, and individuals such as that nature.” Quite apart
from the fact that Dr. Nubia was mixing up Aneurin Bevan (who was never in
Churchill’s government) with Ernest Bevin (who was minister of labor in it), he
was quite wrong about Churchill’s position in his ministry, which was preeminent,
as is evidenced by the fact that he was never once overruled on war strategy.
“I mean Churchill wasn’t even that popular
at the time,” alleged Professor Andrews. “I mean, he was never elected and
after this war effort where he supposedly single-handedly led the world against
the Nazis he actually lost the election.” In fact we know from Gallup Polls
that support for Churchill remained above 80 percent throughout the war —
dipping briefly for a single month to 78 percent — and thrice reached an astounding
peak of 93 percent. No other British prime minister has ever attained
comparable results. He lost the 1945 election because we do not have a
presidential system in this country, but one that is based on constituencies:
Churchill won his constituency with 73 percent of the vote, before six years
later winning the 1951 general election.
“The British Empire was far worse than the
Nazis,” claimed Professor Andrews. “It lasted far longer; it killed far many
more people.” This abominable lie went entirely unchallenged at Churchill
College, even though it is demonstrably untrue under any metric one cares to
choose. Under the British Empire, for example, the population of India nearly
tripled, whereas the population of Poland fell by 17 percent under the Nazis.
Under the British Empire, life expectancy for Indians doubled, whereas the
Nazis murdered 6 million Jews. Under the British Empire, education,
communications, infrastructure, medicine, freedom of speech, parliamentary
institutions, the rule of law, universities, economic development, and domestic
peace hugely flourished in the majority of places for the majority of the time,
whereas in the Nazi Empire most were all but destroyed.
The specious parallel between the British
Empire and the Nazi regime was taken a step further with the claim that
Churchill himself espoused views in line with the genocidal ideology that
underpinned the Nazis’. Professor Andrews stated that “this idea that Jewish
people get racialized into the subhumans who the Nazis then dispose of, that
very much is eugenics, and that very much is the racial science which, again,
Mr. Churchill was absolutely supportive of.” Of course the professor was right
to assert that what the Nazis practiced in their attempted extermination of
Jews as a race was based on Hitler’s profound belief in the “racial science” of
eugenics. He was totally wrong, however, to present Churchill as an avowed
eugenicist.
In fact, Churchill flirted briefly with
the notion of eugenics, for 18 months during his time as home secretary. Having
read a pamphlet about Indiana’s state-administered “sterilization of
degenerates,” which seemed to him to present a persuasive and humane argument
for eugenics on the grounds of mental incapacitation, Churchill in 1910 argued
for the inclusion of this policy in the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act. He soon
realized the implications such a policy would have on civil liberties — of
which he was always a staunch defender — and quickly and firmly abandoned the
idea. He is also often accused of personally attending eugenics conferences,
which is completely untrue.
Setting aside the fact that these were
views Churchill held for only a brief period during his early political career,
a decade before the founding of the Nazi Party, there is a key distinction to
make between the eugenic views he then considered and the eugenic views that
formed the basis of the Nazi ideology. Whereas the Nazi conception revolved
primarily around race, Churchill never showed support for racial eugenics: the
belief that measures should be taken to control the reproduction or population
size of certain groups on the basis of race. Moreover, unlike the murderous
atrocities that the Nazis carried out, the eugenic measures Churchill
considered — though horrific by today’s standards — never extended beyond
sterilization, which he had initially believed was preferable to the
then-existing practice of confining the mentally ill in institutions, in that
this would at least enable them to live their lives in relative liberty.
Related to the unfounded claim that
Churchill ever believed in racial eugenics was the claim that he was a white
supremacist. “They called it in their time an Anglo-Saxon idea of superiority,”
claimed Dr. Nubia. “These are the terms that Churchill uses predominantly, as
well as English, in his 37 books written on the question of English identity.
Within his books speaking about the English-speaking world, he talks about how
the Anglo-Saxon race, the English race, have achieved that position on the
basis of ethnicity, culture, language, and dominance, and he speaks about how
this ethnic group with their own identity might have something spiritual about
them that sets them above their cousins, the Germans.”
Although Churchill did indeed publish 37
books, the only ones that were “written on the question of English identity”
were the four volumes of his History of the English-Speaking Peoples,
in which skin color is entirely absent. Dr. Nubia was unable to produce a
single quotation from any of Churchill’s books — for which Churchill won the
Nobel Prize in Literature — to justify his claim that they further a “white
supremacist” cause. In fact in all of his writings, speeches, letters, and
papers, Churchill referred to the term “Anglo-Saxon race” on only two occasions,
both of them in a historical rather than racial context.
Nor does it follow from the premise that
Churchill believed that the English race as an “ethnic group with their own
identity might have something spiritual about them that sets them above their cousins,
the Germans” that Churchill therefore had a “white supremacist perspective.”
This obviously has nothing to do with skin color, which does not differ between
Britain and Germany; he had, instead, a nationalist perspective.
Dr. Nubia and Professor Andrews are
mistaken in their conclusion that, to quote the latter, Churchill was “the
perfect embodiment of white supremacy.” There is no evidence that Churchill
approached the question of the superiority of nations and peoples from a color
angle. To him the question was about peoples, nationalities, ideologies, and
power blocs, and the degree to which people were civilized, rather than about
different racial groups in the present-day sense of the phrase.
Churchill was a paternalist who believed
that Britain had a profound moral duty to improve the lives of the native
peoples of the empire, but it was incidental that they exhibited different
phenotypes. The flaw with the “white supremacist” narrative is that Churchill
never argued that whites per se had a responsibility to civilize people of
other races; he believed Britons specifically had a responsibility, through the
empire, to carry out this calling. Besides, “supremacist” is not a fitting word
because the role of Britain was never seen as being one of domination, but
rather of trusteeship.
A racist or white supremacist tends to
want bad things to happen to nonwhites, whereas Churchill dedicated his life to
protecting Punjabi farmers from invading Afridi and Taliban tribesmen, Sudanese
civilians from the Khalifa’s slave-trading, Cape Coloureds from the Afrikaaner
republics, Indians from the Japanese (who from 1941 to 1945 killed 17 percent
of the Filipino population), and the Basuto people from apartheid South Africa,
among very many other examples. As Churchill put it:
We will
endeavour as far as we can to advance the principle of equal rights of
civilised men irrespective of colour. . . . We will not — at least I will
pledge myself — hesitate to speak out when necessary if any plain case of
cruelty or exploitation of the native for the sordid profit of the white man
can be proved.
Far from holding the extreme, hateful
views ascribed to him by Dr. Nubia and Professor Andrews on the question of
racial identity, Churchill actively rejected racially based injustice. He was
simply an ardent patriot who felt great pride in Britain’s global civilizing
mission. Churchill’s intentions were both noble and moral.
Ever anxious about the welfare of those in
Britain’s colonies and protectorates, Churchill insisted that “our
responsibility to the native races remains a real one.” Throughout his entire
life — from when he was a young man onward — his actions to this end spoke
louder than his words. For instance, as the Churchill historian Richard
Langworth observes, “From his first encounter with South Africa in 1899,
Churchill stood up for native rights. That was an uncommon thing among
Victorian Englishmen. After the Boer War, he publicly and privately emphasized
fair play for black Africans.” Churchill was also a supporter of Indian rights
in South Africa from very early on, even when his contemporaries opposed them,
for which he was seen as a radical. Gandhi would later praise Churchill for
having stood up for Indians’ rights in South Africa in 1906.
What is especially perplexing is that
Churchill College, of all institutions in Britain, should have organized an
event of such clearly premeditated malice and character assassination. While
most people, not just in Britain but throughout the world, are grateful for Churchill
and his contribution to civilization, it was at the college named after him
that his reputation was viciously sullied. Yet fortunately, for all the
baseless allegations made against him, we can take solace in what Churchill
himself observed: “Truth is incontrovertible. Panic may resent it. Ignorance
may deride it. Malice may distort it. But there it is.”
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