Winston Churchill nostalgia?

In recent weeks, the high-profile Socialist Unity blog in Britain (ranked 420,070 by Alexa; by comparison Lenin’s Tomb is number 363,494 in traffic) has featured articles that attempt to salvage the reputation of Winston Churchill within the context of commemorating the WWII “people’s antifascist coalition”.

My first reaction to this effort has been disgust but on a deeper level I have to wonder what would explain this retrograde development. To an extent, it might be a kind of knee-jerk reaction against the Socialist Workers Party in Britain. Since Socialist Unity has a deep animus toward these comrades, one wonders if they are simply putting a plus where their chief bogeyman puts a minus. If Alex Callinicos vilifies Churchill, then why not find nice things to say about the British imperialist warlord?

It should be stressed that the valentines to WWII and Churchill have been written by Andy Newman, who is responsible for most of the original content on Socialist Unity—for better or for worse. I have been told that Newman was a member of the SWP for a brief time (along with possibly half of the people living in Britain) so maybe we are just dealing with the case of the embittered ex-member. I for one have trouble understanding this as a political-psychological reaction. As an ex-member of the dreadful American SWP and one of its harshest critics, I am less inclined to take a position 180 degrees opposed to their own as a matter of principle. For example, if the Militant newspaper denounces the escalation of the war in Afghanistan, you won’t find me supporting it. And so on.

Andy Newman

But I think the more likely explanation for this softness on Churchill has more to do with the peculiarities of the British culture and historical memory than anything else. Although I can only state this as a kind of speculation, it would seem that Britain never went through the “revisionist” debunking of WWII that the USA did.

With the rise of the New Left in the USA, American foreign policy was subjected to a penetrating review based on new sources of information such as State Department memorandums, etc.. Since Vietnam was being prosecuted by LBJ, a veteran New Dealer, there was a tendency for WWII to be scrutinized in a way that had not taken place since progressive historian Charles Beard’s day. Although he was a bit older than some of the other “revisionists”, Howard Zinn delivered what amounts to knockout blow to the “good war” pretensions of WWII in “People’s History of the USA”.

Zinn, who developed a hatred for the war while serving as a bombardier, would probably be disgusted by the advertisements for WWII t-shirts that can be found in the post titled “Popular Front Against Fascism” and which celebrate mass killing gangs as if they were soccer teams.  One t-shirt, a snappy looking gray model with an American air force emblem, is described this way: “The roundel on this shirt is from the Pacific and features the colours and markings of a US Navy Vought F4U-1D Corsair, 152 Squadron VF-84 aboard USS Bunker Hill (CV-17), February 1945.” This led one commenter to observe:

One of those shirts celebrates something quite specific: the US Navy’s F4U Courier. I tried to explain the history of this aircraft, and why I think it’s inappropriate to use such imagery on your shirt. It wasn’t a tool in the fight against fascism, it was a tool of US imperialism during the War in the Pacific. And later, in the war against the people of the Korean peninsula, where it was used to pioneer the use of napalm–later “perfected” in Vietnam.

I just think you should be a little bit sensitive about the imagery you use, especially if the proceeds from the shirts go to good movement causes. I really believe that celebrating the Corsair is one step away from putting the Enola Gay on a shirt. After all, wasn’t the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki part of the “People’s War Against Fascism”, too?

I could not help but think that the low profile kept by Britain during the Vietnam war might have reduced the irritant factor that led young American historians to examine past wars ruthlessly, as Karl Marx would have put it.

I also wondered if the continuing prestige of the British CP historian’s group might have also played a role. Except for Herbert Aptheker, there were no American historians who had the prestige and influence of an Eric Hobsbawm and company.  Although none of these historians were blind followers of the CP, they were unlikely to challenge nostrums about the “good war”. In some sense this was understandable because the USSR’s war with Nazi Germany was progressive. But trying to find anything good to say about Winston Churchill would seem a hopeless task, although Andy Newman does get an “e” for effort.

In a post titled Sir Winston Churchill and the Anti-Fascist War, Newman describes a virtual social democrat.

… Churchill played a perhaps indispensible role in the defeat of Hitler; and his coalition government oversaw a deep radicalisation of British society, that Churchill did nothing to arrest. As he himself explained his principle was that he would support any measure that was bone fide necessary to win the war: this included an unprecedented degree of government planning and regulation of the economy. The Tory Lord Woolton explained: “We arrived at a position in which, in time of war, the practices that would be normal under a socialist state seemed to be the only practical safeguards for the country”.

When I brought up the topic of 6 to 8 million Bengalis dying because of British wartime policies that caused a famine, I was treated like a skunk at a garden party by Newman and his supporters, including Paul Fauvet, a signer of the Euston Manifesto who wrote: “Louis Proyect’s tactic is to change the subject. He doesn’t want to talk about Churchill’s role in World War II, so he talks about the Bengal famine instead.” Meanwhile, Newman also chastised me for “prioritising the entirely secondary issue of India…”

It should be understood that Paul Fauvet’s intervention was in line with the general approach of the “decent left” which is to regard WWII as a kind of authorization in advance for imperialist war ever since 1945. That is why it has been so essential for every rotten imperialist war in the past 20 years or so to be recast as a new WWII against a new Hitler, at one point Slobodan Milosevic and at another point Saddam Hussein.

As one might expect, Christopher Hitchens has been one of the fiercest opponents of the “revisionists” on WWII, since their vindication would effectively rob him of the moral justification he needed to support the war in Iraq. In a Newsweek article titled “A War Worth Fighting“, Hitchens argues:

Is there any one shared principle or assumption on which our political consensus rests, any value judgment on which we are all essentially agreed? Apart from abstractions such as a general belief in democracy, one would probably get the widest measure of agreement for the proposition that the second world war was a “good war” and one well worth fighting. And if we possess one indelible image of political immorality and cowardice, it is surely the dismal tap-tap-tap of Neville Chamberlain’s umbrella as he turned from signing the Czechs away to Adolf Hitler at Munich. He hoped by this humiliation to avert war, but he was fated to bring his countrymen war on top of humiliation. To the conventional wisdom add the titanic figure of Winston Churchill as the emblem of oratorical defiance and the Horatius who, until American power could be mobilized and deployed, alone barred the bridge to the forces of unalloyed evil. When those forces lay finally defeated, their ghastly handiwork was uncovered to a world that mistakenly thought it had already “supped full of horrors.” The stark evidence of the Final Solution has ever since been enough to dispel most doubts about, say, the wisdom or morality of carpet-bombing German cities.

Oddly enough, this item could have appeared on either “Harry’s Place” or the Socialist Unity blog—a problem for the left in no uncertain terms.

While it is unfortunately behind a subscriber’s firewall, there was an article by Ernest Mandel in the May/June 1986 New Left Review titled “The Role of the Individual in History: The Case of World War Two” that is far more interested in the relationship of class forces than in Churchill’s personal or psychological dispositions. He writes:

The case of Churchill affords another sort of corroboration for Plekhanov’s view of the relationship between decisive personalities and the requirements of class rule. Traditional historiography, whether admiring or critical of Churchill’s previous historical roles, has been almost unanimous in lauding his move into 10 Downing Street, at the head of a coalition government including the Labour Party, as a major turning point in the war. Churchill undoubtedly embodied the unshaken resolve of the British ruling class and of the broad majority of the British people not to capitulate to Germany under any circumstance. But by romanticizing his personal attributes, rather than starting from an analysis of the activities of larger social forces, most bourgeois historians fail the test of comparative example. For the central question is not what accidents of biography made Churchill as an individual more decisive than Chamberlain (or, similarly, distinguished de Gaulle from Pétain), but why Churchill was able to rally a majority of his class and people around himself while de Gaulle remained an isolated figure in France in June 1940.

Of course the fact that the French armed forces had just suffered a humiliating defeat, while the British were able to evacuate most of their defeated army to their island fortress, made a difference. But then again in 1940 most knowledgeable observers—including the American ambassador, Jospeh Kennedy—considered Britain’s position as fundamentally hopeless. Meanwhile France, while broken in the Ardennes, still possessed an undefeated fleet (the second largest in Europe), a large army in North Africa—stronger than what the British had at their disposal—a significant air reserve, and an intact colonial empire. It was, thus, by no means clear that the British had the certain means to resist invasion, or, conversely, that the French were utterly defeated or without options for continued national resistance.

In fact the real difference between the British and French situations was less their military predicaments than the predispositions of their ruling classes. The French bourgeoisie had become increasingly defeatist for sound, materialist reasons. It had shown itself economically and militarily incompetent to guarantee the Versailles system in the face of Germany’s aggressive expansion and rearmament. Even more to the point, it was primarily obsessed with containing its own working class, which had become a higher political priority than the attempt to defeat German competition. The British bourgeoisie, on the other hand, was neither demoralized nor defeatist. It had already beaten its own labour movement, first economically in 1926, then politically in 1931–35. At the same time its world position (even if rapidly being overtaken by the United States) was still stronger than Germany’s, although Hitler’s hegemony over Europe clearly endangered the British Empire. Moreover, the British elite were convinced that eventual support from the United States, together with the raw material and manpower resources of the Empire, made continued war against Germany a realistic strategy.

The moment was dramatic and full of dangers, but the future seemed largely guaranteed, provided Britain could weather the immediate crisis. ‘If we hold out for three months, we shall be facing victory in three years,’ Churchill correctly prophesied in a secret speech to the House of Commons. And Churchill was the almost ideal choice to stiffen British resolve until the Americans entered the war. That is why, after having been considered for years a maverick and has-been figure, a voice crying in the wilderness, he could be suddenly resurrected as the deus ex machina of his class. By an abrupt turn of events, and of social needs, the wilderness had been filled with millions of people.

Perhaps my antipathy toward Winston Churchill has been ratcheted up a few degrees by recent readings in Nicholson Baker’s “Human Smoke”, a most controversial book written in the “revisionist” spirit of Howard Zinn. While Baker is a novelist by trade, this book is nonfiction assault on the bogus reputation of the “good war” with Winston Churchill and FDR getting the brunt of his well-researched darts. I want to particularly call attention to this vignette on Churchill:

Winston Churchill was readying his book Great Contemporaries for the press. It was August 1937. In it was his article on Hitler, written a few years earlier. “Those who have met Herr Hitler face to face in public business or on social terms,” he said, “have found a highly competent, cool, well-informed functionary with an agreeable manner, a disarming smile, and few have been unaffected by a subtle personal magnetism.” Despite the arming of Germany and the hounding of the Jews, “we may yet live to see Hitler a gentler figure in a happier age,” Churchill wrote. He was doubtful, though.

Churchill also included a short piece on Leon Trotsky, king in exile of international bolshevism. Trotsky was a usurper and tyrant, Churchill said. He was a cancer bacillus, he was a “skin of malice,” washed up on the shores of Mexico. Trotsky possessed, said Churchill,

the organizing command of a Carnot, the cold detached intelligence of a Machiavelli, the mob oratory of a Cleon, the ferocity of Jack the Ripper, the toughness of Titus Oates.

And in the end what was Trotsky? Who was he? “He was a Jew,” wrote Churchill with finality. “He was still a Jew. Nothing could get over that.” He called his article “Leon Trotsky, Alias Bronstein.”

UPDATE

Andy Newman apparently considered himself slandered by me. You can read his complaint here.

Since his commenting software refused to allow my entire reply to be posted (hmmm), I am posting here:

God, what a blizzard of words over a supposed “slander”. I don’t know anything about Newman’s past membership in the SWP except what Richard Seymour told me. I surmised that he was only in the group briefly because he seems to have retained nothing he learned there. A sieve would have absorbed more of the abc’s of Marxism.

With respect to the awful Eustonites, I don’t consider Paul Fauvet, who was a respectable radical journalist in a previous lifetime, to be a “supporter” of Socialist Unity politics in general. His cranky presence here should disabuse anybody of that notion. It should have been clear that he was a supporter of Newman’s position on WWII and that is all. I apologize for allowing such a confusion to take place.

Getting back to the real problem, there is still that regrettable blind spot about Empire. After angrily claiming that I quoted him out of context on India, he attempts to put his views into the real context:

Well yes, when discussing the course of the second world war, the Indian theatre was secondary. I have consulted several respected history books of the period, and the general histories rarely mention India at all. Angus Calder’s, “The People’s War” a standard history of the Home Front only mentions India once in the whole 750 pages.

Where the hell does Andy think the Bengali grain went? To throw at weddings? The god-damned grain went to British troops. The Bengali people were sacrificed in order to keep the soldiers fed. If this is “secondary” to the war, then Andy deserves an F in geopolitics.

Basically, the myth of a “people’s war against fascism” cannot be sustained when the “good guys” caused the death of more Indians in pursuit of war aims than the number of Jews killed by Hitler. Churchill and Hitler were both enemies of the working class. The British working class enjoyed a greater degree of democratic rights and welfare state provisions because its ruling class had a huge empire. The Second World War was a clash largely because of conflicting imperial goals. To bracket out the imperial question as “secondary” is Eurocentric.

Finally, Andy should stop squealing like professional wrestler who has been fouled by an opponent. When Andy accused me of colluding with Sinophobes who raise the “yellow peril”, a real slander, I handled it with aplomb since it was so obviously bullshit. I wonder if his long-winded squeal reflects an tacit understanding that my words hit their mark. Slanders tend to fall off the victim like spittle but the truth has a way of sticking to the bone.

UPDATE 2

Martin Wisse comments on the debate: http://cloggie.org/wissewords2/2009/09/12/dudefight-or-what-do-the-bengalis-matter/