Winston Churchill

Winston Churchill

Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill (30 November 1874 – 24 January 1965) was a British aristocrat, liberal politician and writer, who was later the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in a National Government from 1940 to 1945. He was defeated in the 1945 General Election, and became the leader of the opposition. He again became Prime Minister for the Conservative Government from 1951 to 1955. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953.

Criticisms of him have been extensive and on a wide range of issues.

Before World War II

Churchill commanding the 6th Battalion, the Royal Scots Fusiliers, 1916

During his army career, Churchill saw combat on the Northwest Frontier in British India, in the Sudan, and during the Second Boer War, during which he also gained fame and notoriety, as a war correspondent. He also served in the British Army on the Western Front during First World War and commanded the 6th Battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers.

At the forefront of the political scene for almost sixty years, he held many political and cabinet positions. Before the First World War, he served as President of the Board of Trade and Home Secretary during liberal governments. In the First World War, he served as First Lord of the Admiralty, Minister of Munitions, Secretary of State for War, and Secretary of State for Air. During the interwar years, he served as Chancellor of the Exchequer.

"No other British public figure worked as hard to bring Britain into World War I as did Churchill. This has been admitted in the recent book, Twelve Days, by the English writer George Malcolm Thomson on the crisis of 1914. It is common knowledge that Churchill was the leader of the British war party from 1936 onward, having told General Robert E. Wood in that year that: "Germany is getting too strong; we must smash her." He not only cooperated with the war party in Britain but also worked closely with Bernard Baruch and the other powerful warminded Americans."

Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty was instrumental in establishing the blockade of Germany, including also of food to civilians, causing mass starvation and mass deaths. See also The World Wars and mass starvation.

Churchill was also First Lord of the Admiralty when the 1915 Sinking of the RMS Lusitania occurred and contributed to the American entry into the war. This has caused theories on the attack being deliberately enabled with Churchill being involved, as discussed in the article on the sinking and the external links listed there.

Also during World War I, Churchill was responsible for one of Britain's most spectacular defeats, at Turkey's Gallipoli, the disastrous attempt to force the Dardanelles in 1915, and was compelled to resign.

The Focus

Churchill with Lord Halifax in 1938

David Irving has stated that "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 [...] 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. [...] And when you're looking for evidence about who was putting money up for Churchill when he was in the wildemess 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 l938, it was Strakosch, who was instrumental in setting 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 newspaper included a bequest of £20,000 to the then Prime Minister, eliminating the entire debt."

Also "in 1936, he forged links with the informal London pressure group known as The Focus, whose purpose was to open the eyes of the British public to the one great menace, National Socialist Germany. "The great bulk of its finance came from rich British Jews such as Sir Robert Mond (a director of several chemical firms) and Sir Robert Waley-Cohn, the managing director of Royal Dutch Shell, the latter contributing £50,000." Focus was to be useful in expanding Churchill's network of contacts and in pushing for his entry into the Cabinet."

World War II

Huge portraits of Churchill and Stalin, Brisbane, Australia, 31 October 1941

Stalin, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill at the Tehran Conference, November 1943

Churchill, Truman and Stalin in Potsdam in 1945

Churchill waving the Victory sign to the crowd in Whitehall on the day he broadcast to the nation that the war with Germany had been won, 8 May 1945

See also: Battle of Britain

After the outbreak of the Second World War, Churchill was again appointed First Lord of the Admiralty. Following the resignation of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain due to ill health on 10 May 1940, he became Prime Minister and led Britain throughout World War II.

Irving has criticized Churchill for the "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 has also criticized Churchill for that "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."

A major criticism is of him making great efforts to prevent peace and rejecting several peace offers by Hitler (and the one by Rudolf Hess). Churchill has been argued to have turned down opportunities to get “first reasonable, then excellent, terms from Germany.”

Churchill has also been stated to have deliberately starting bombing civilian targets in Germany, in order to cause Germany to retaliate against civilian targets (which had previously been avoided) in order to destroy the peace movement, in order help bring the United States into the war, and in order to take pressure from the military targets that were being bombed. "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.""

Franklin D. Roosevelt has been argued to even before WWII started to have covertly promised to help in a war with Germany. After the war started, Churchill extensively cooperated with Roosevelt in order to bring the United States into the war. Both leaders have been argued to have attempted to provoke both Germany and Japan to attack the United States. See also Allied psychological warfare on covert British propaganda actions in the United States.

"''On 19 August 1941, Churchill told his war cabinet that FDR was doing all he could to provoke an attack by the Axis powers—information which came to light only in 1972. Churchill said:

[Roosevelt] was obviously determined that they [the US] should come in. … The president said to me that 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 being done to force an ‘incident.’ The president has made it clear that he would look for an ‘incident’ which could justify him in opening hostilities."

"After the fall of France, Churchill demanded that the French surrender their fleet to Britain. The French declined, promising that they would scuttle the ships before allowing them to fall into German hands. Against the advice of his naval officers, Churchill ordered British ships off the Algerian coast to open fire. About 1500 French sailors were killed. This was obviously a war crime, by anyone's definition: an unprovoked attack on the forces of an ally without a declaration of war. At Nuremberg, German officers were sentenced to prison for less. Realizing this, Churchill lied about Mers-el-Kebir in his history, and suppressed evidence concerning it in the official British histories of the war." Also, a seldom mentioned aspect of the Allied bombings was that "there were nearly as many Frenchmen killed by Allied air attacks as there were Englishmen killed by Germans."

In Yugoslavia, Churchill supported Communist partisans and withdrew support to non-Communist partisans, apparently relying on false information provided by the Communist infiltrator James Klugmann. "As for the "human costs" of Churchill's policy, when an aide pointed out that Tito intended to transform Yugoslavia into a Communist dictatorship on the Soviet model, Churchill retorted: "Do you intend to live there?"" The regime established by Tito adhered to the usual Communist pattern of Red Terror and mass killings of various groups. See also James Klugmann.

More generally, the supposed anti-Communist Churchill agreed (at, for example, Tehran and Yalta) to Stalin occupying half of Europe and to the Soviet mass deportations and mass forced labor of many millions of Germans and non-Germans (and that caused mass deaths).

""Most shameful of all was the handing over of the Cossacks. They had never been Soviet citizens, since they had fought against the Red Army in the Civil War and then emigrated. Stalin, understandably, was particularly keen to get hold of them, and the British obliged. Solzhenitsyn wrote of Winston Churchill: He turned over to the Soviet command the Cossack corps of 90,000 men. Along with them he also handed over many wagonloads of old people, women, and children…. This great hero, monuments to whom will in time cover all England, ordered that they, too, be surrendered to their deaths."

See also the article on claimed mass killings of Germans by the WWII Allies, which mentions Churchill and the Jewish German émigré Frederick Lindemann, Churchill's friend and scientific advisor.

See also the article on The World Wars and mass starvation and in particular the section on Greece.

War effects

Winston Churchill with the influential Jewish fiancier Bernard Baruch

BLM agitators sprayed "Was a Racist" onto the Churchill statue in Central London in 2020

The book Churchill: The End of Glory British historian John Charmley argued that "Contrary to his image as a farsighted statesman, Churchill was actually preoccupied with “short- and medium-term considerations,” writes Charmley. “I have only one purpose,” Churchill himself explained during the 1940–41 period, “the destruction of Hitler, and my life is much simplified thereby.” In blindly pursuing this “one purpose,” writes Charmley, the simplistic British leader condemned hundreds of thousands – if not millions – to death and suffering, financially ruined Britain, and ensured the survival of the Soviet tyranny. Churchill’s fanatic determination to continue a war that Britain had no possible chance of winning alone inevitably bankrupted the country, shattered its social order, and reduced it to a second-rate power."

"Surveying the situation in 1945 it was hard to argue that Britain had won in any sense save that of avoiding defeat … Churchill stood for the British Empire, for British independence and for an “anti-socialist” vision. By July 1945 the first of these was on the skids, the second dependent upon America, and the third had vanished in a Labour [party] election victory."

Another view "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 honor 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."

Irving has made somewhat similar comments.

A 2016 article on a book on the views of Britons who lived during WWII stated that "Nearly 400,000 Britons died. Millions more were scarred by the experience, physically and mentally. But was it worth it? Her answer - and the answer of many of her contemporaries, now in their 80s and 90s - is a resounding No. They despise what has become of the Britain they once fought to save. It's not our country any more, they say, in sorrow and anger. [...] Immigration tops the list of complaints."

Hitler on the war with Britain

Hitler had already in Mein Kampf expressed great admiration for Britain and a desire for an alliance.

Mark Weber and Greg Raven has written that "Far from seeking conflict with Britain, Hitler was aghast when that nation’s leadership used the pretext of an attack against Poland to declare war against Germany on September 3, 1939. “Even if the British win,” he remarked a few weeks later, “the real victors would be the United States, Japan and Russia.”

In his speeches of October 6, 1939 (following the successful conclusion of the Polish campaign) and July 19, 1940 (in the wake of the stunning defeat of France), Hitler dramatically appealed for a reasonable end to a conflict that, if continued, could bring only catastrophe for Germany and Britain, and indeed for all Europe.

General Franz Halder, chief of the Army General Staff, noted in his diary in 1940 that Hitler “accepts that he may have to force Britain to make peace; but he is reluctant to do so, because if we do defeat the British in the field, the British empire will fall apart. Germany will not profit therefrom. We should be paying with German blood for something from which only Japan, America and others would draw benefit.”

In an extemporaneous speech delivered in Berlin on October 3, 1941, when his power seemed all but unassailable, Hitler took note of his nation’s cordial relations with Italy, Hungary, Finland, Japan and other countries, and then went on to declare:

Unhappily, however, not the nation I have courted all my life: the British. Not that the British people as a whole alone bear the responsibility for this, no, but there are some people who in their pigheaded hatred and lunacy have sabotaged every such attempt at understanding between us … As in all the years I strove to achieve understanding whatever the cost, there was Mr. Churchill, who kept on shouting, “I want a war!” Now he has it."

Less politically correct views on race and eugenics

Churchill has been stated to have had various less politically correct views on race issues and to have been a supporter of eugenics. This has sometimes been censored in descriptions of Churchill, in order to present a more politically correct image.

"Along with most Britons (and Americans) of his era, he was also an unabashed racist. Blacks he dismissed as “niggers” and “blackamoors,” Arabs were “worthless,” Chinese were “chinks” or “pigtails,” and dark races were “baboons” or “Hottentots.” Indians, in his view, were “the beastliest people in the world, next to the Germans.”[10] Churchill not only favored white supremacy in Britain, and disparaged racial mixing, but, as Irving points out, wanted English-speaking whites – whom he was not ashamed to proclaim as a superior breed – to rule the entire world. “We are superior!,” he exclaimed during a White House luncheon".

Mass immigration in the postwar period

Despite these views, Churchill did not effectively act against the increasing mass immigration when he was again Prime Minister between 1951 and 1955.

This has been argued to be partly explained by his age and due to suffering a stroke in 1953. Another argued explanation is that Britain allowed all Commonwealth citizens automatic entry and many of his advisors were afraid that restrictions would hurt foreign relations.

"In Eminent Churchillians, Andrew Roberts quotes people who worked closely with Churchill, and who probably had the sentiments typical of the period. One of Mr. Churchill’s private secretaries remembered that “at that time it seemed a very good idea to get [coloured] bus conductors and stuff.” A junior minister complained that “it was becoming hard to find somebody to carry your bags at the station.” As one minister put it later, “we were just stalling and hoping for the best.” After Churchill resigned, the internationalist Anthony Eden took over, and any hope of serious immigration control was lost."

Another explanation is that the Allied psychological warfare that Churchill had prominently supported (and that included claims that "Nazi" racial views had caused various atrocities) contributed to the increasing postwar race denialism (such as the 1950 The Race Question declaration) and related denial of mass immigration problems.

The immigration actually started before Churchill became prime minister in 1951. A notable example was the arrival of SS Empire Windrush with 417 Black immigrants from Jamaica. Various Jewish associations have been stated.

Drunkeness

"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 countries’ 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, oftcn during cabinet mectings, 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 First Sea Lord, Admiral Cummingham wrote, according to Irving: "There's no doubt that P.M. is in no state to discuss anything, too tired, and too much alcohol.""

Relationship with Jews

"Churchill’s close connection to British Jews dated back at least to 1904. Gilbert (2007: 9) explains that “this was the first but not the last time that Churchill was to be accused by his political opponents…of being in the pocket, and even in the pay, of wealthy Jews.” Makovsky (2007) describes Churchill’s father’s longtime association with “Jewish financial titans,” and notes that Churchill himself “came to count many of [his father’s] wealthy Jewish friends as his own” (p. 46)."

Churchill in 1920 wrote an article about the relationship between Jews and Communism, titled Zionism versus Bolshevism: A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People. It included statements such as "the schemes of the International Jews. The adherents of this sinister confederacy are mostly men reared up among the unhappy populations of countries where Jews are persecuted on account of their race. Most, if not all of them, have forsaken the faith of their forefathers, and divorced from their minds all spiritual hopes of the next world. This movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxemburg (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States), this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing. It played, as a modern writer, Mrs. Webster, has so ably shown, a definitely recognizable part in the tragedy of the French Revolution. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the Nineteenth Century; and now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire."

Despite such stated early views, Churchill was from early on a strong Zionist. One stated explanation is that Churchill believed that Zionism would deflect Jews from supporting leftist views to becoming partners with European imperialism in the Arab world.

The very influential Jewish financier Bernard Baruch had powerful positions during both WWI and WWII. He was also a "prominent confidant" of both Churchill and Roosevelt. "As Sherwood (1948: 111) recounts, Churchill—then still First Lord of the Admiralty—said this to Baruch: “War is coming very soon. We will be in it and you (the United States) will be in it. You (Baruch) will be running the show over there, but I will be on the sidelines over here.”"

See the section on "The Focus" on Jewish financial support to Churchill.

A December 1939 Churchill memorandum stated that "…it was not for light or sentimental reasons that Lord Balfour and the Government of 1917 made the promises to the Zionists which have been the cause of so much subsequent discussion. The influence of American Jewry was rated then as a factor of the highest importance, and we did not feel ourselves in such a strong position as to be able to treat it with indifference. Now, in the advent of [an American] Presidential election, and when the future is full of measureless uncertainties, I should have thought it was more necessary, even than in November, 1917, to conciliate American Jewry and enlist their aid in combating isolationist and indeed anti-British tendencies in the United States.”

Zionist leader, and later Israel's first President, Chaim Weizmann wrote in a letter to Churchill that "There is only one big ethnic group [in America] which is willing to stand, to a man, for Great Britain, and a policy of ‘all-out aid’ for her: the five million Jews. From [Treasury] Secretary Morgenthau [Henry, Jr.], Governor [Herbert] Lehman, Justice Frankfurter, down to the simplest Jewish workman or trader… It has been repeatedly acknowledged by British Statesmen that it was the Jews who, in the last war, effectively helped to tip the scales in America in favour of Great Britain. They are keen to do it—and may do it—again."

See also the article on Claimed mass killings of Germans by the WWII Allies, which mentions Churchill and the Jewish German émigré Frederick Lindemann, Churchill's friend and scientific advisor.

However, after WWII, in his book The Gathering Storm, Churchill denied the existence of Jewish influence and described such claims as "delusional thinking".

Churchill and the Holocaust

As Prime Minister during WWII, Churchill was ultimately responsible for the British part of Allied psychological warfare during the war, including regarding the Holocaust.

Regarding revisionist views on what Allied intelligence actually found on the Holocaust during the war, see Holocaust documentary evidence: Spies, cracking of all German message codes, and other intelligence gathering activities.

"Despite all of the authoritative declarations Churchill made or supported during the war with regard to the “reality” of the Nazi extermination of the Jews, when the war ended he made an astonishing statement that casts doubt on the sincerity of all of these wartime pronouncements. In a speech before the House of Commons on 1 August 1946, he emphatically declared that he knew nothing of the alleged Nazi mass murder of Jews while the Second World War was taking place. We quote him verbatim: “I must say that I had no idea, when the war came to an end, of the horrible massacres which had occurred; the millions and millions that have been slaughtered. That dawned on us gradually after the struggle was over. [...] The reader should take careful note of the implications of Churchill’s words. If Sir Winston was not aware during the war of the alleged mass killings of Jews, and if he and his associates realized only after the war ended that these supposed mass murders took place, then all of his “authoritative” declarations we listed above about the mass murder of Jews taking place during the war were just unconfirmed and baseless allegations in his estimation."

The three Allied leaders Eisenhower, Churchill, and de Gaulle wrote very extensive works describing their memories of World War II. "In this mass of writing, which altogether totals 7,061 pages (not including the introductory parts), published from 1948 to 1959, one will find no mention either of Nazi "gas chambers," a "genocide" of the Jews, or of "six million" Jewish victims of the war."

Critics of this have stated that Churchill's first book has a sentence stating "The wholesale massacre by systematised processes of six or seven millions of men, women and children in the German execution camps". However, this does not mention Jews, genocide, or gas chambers, and is arguably surprisingly little on the topic, especially considering that Churchill's The Second World War book series consists of six volumes in the hardcover edition and twelve volumes in the paperback edition.

Quotes

Much work, Ladies and Gentlemen, has been done upon this task by the exertions of the Pan-European Union which owes so much to Count Coudenhove-Kalergi and which commanded the services of the famous French patriot and statesman Aristide Briand.

—Winston Churchill, Zurich, 19 September 1946

See also

• Finland in the Eye of the Storm
• Altmark incident

External links

• Winston Churchill's shocking use of chemical weapons
• Winston Churchill's 'bid to nuke Russia' to win Cold War - uncovered in secret FBI files
• 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

Revisionist journals

• Winston Spencer Churchill
• Churchill Wanted to "Drench" Germany With Poison Gas
• Irving on Churchill
• New Biography Assails Churchill’s War Record
• An Unsettled Legacy: Book Review
• Churchill, International Jews and the Holocaust: A Revisionist Analysis
• Churchill Discreetly Veiled, Part 1
• Winston Churchill Discreetly Veiled, Part 2