It is the all or nothing need of some that is the problem. Churchill was a bigot, To believe he wanted the English empire to continue because he was a great egalitarian is silly. These views just don't negate Churchill's greatness. Not to see that speaks more about those who hold that view than Churchill.
17
I regularly quote Stalin's observation that "History is written by the winners." in discussing history with visitors as part of my job. I then joke that Stalin was a real laugh-a-minute kind of a guy.
I know full well that there is really nothing funny about a paranoid mass-murderer like Stalin. But I am explaining why some well documented parts of our history do not make it into textbooks and TV and movies if they are not part of the Story of America as it was taught to me in the late '50s and early 60s.
Churchill was an imperialist, a royalist, a racist, etc. But the things he was wrong about do not prove he was wrong about Everything. Likewise Washington, Jefferson, Nat Turner, Lincoln, and MLK Jr need to be seen as flawed, very human people worthy of being quoted when the quote is informative and relevant. As does The Merchant of Venice.
15
You can write all the flattering Churchill biographies that you want and combine that with all his literary acumen. It does not take away the fact that the man was a racist through and trough and his actions caused immense pain and suffering to the people of the former British colonies.
For the brilliance that Bret occasionally writes with, it is in such shallow offerings that he sells himself short.
11
In 1899, blacks in the Cape of Good Hope could own property and vote on the same footing as whites. Unfortunately, Rhodes and the other colonial administrators of the time who were behind the Anglo-Boer war started the process of removing those rights.
1
To me, the historical record of Churchill is one of which the pluses outweigh the negatives. WW2 was the apex of political leadership in the 20th Century. His pro-empire stands left much to desired and Gallipoli was a disaster as was his Mid East policy (Iraq after WW1).
I would be very interested in talk with General Vo Nguyen Giap if it was truthful and forthcoming. How did you go from one platoon of 34 men and 2 women to the modern PAVN that took Saigon in 1975. Likewise with Ho- his thoughts on living in US, London and Paris and attending the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919.
In that Peace Conference, Churchill and Ho intersect-One seeks to expand and pro-long the empire- the other seeks an end to white European dominance of SE Asia ( US also in Philippines).
Churchill, Ho and Giap all possessed an unshakable belief in their abilities and iron wills forged in interminable struggles.
2
I wish Scott Kelly had not demurred to the Twitter mob.
Churchill saved Europe.
That alone makes him a great man.
No one is without blemishes.
Two superb movies last year, “Churchill” (Brian Cox) and “The Darkeat Hour” (Gary Oldman).
Highly recommend both.
15
There is a lot more evidence of Churchill's racism, especially in staving his Indian colonies, than is cited here. Bret Stephens understandably is skimpy with those facts see that they would weaken his narrative. This speech at the Oxford Union, and the facts here have never been rebutted, provides a welcome infusion of truth to counter Stephens' parade of lies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7CW7S0zxv4
We reconcile ourselves to the decadence of the past if we choose to overstate the achievements of the past while ignoring its many demons and their misdeeds. I await Stephens' next hosanna for the African dictators whose regimes could also use some rehabilitation. I will not hold my breath.
8
As an American who lived in India in the early 1950s and as a specialist in European history, I have never admired much about Churchill except his inspirational role in World War II.
He spent the 1930s in political exile not because of his opposition to Hitler but because he refused to accept the Conservative Party's decision to grant eventual independence to India. At heart, I think, Churchill was a stopped clock, stuck in the colonial mentality of the Boer-War era in which he came of age.
But even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
14
This must be a different Churchill than the duplicitous, lying and inhumane Churchill that negotiated with Ireland between 1916 and 1923. The same man who did not protest at the the atrocities of the Black and Tans in the Irish countryside and the murders by the British Specials in the cities. A man, in my humble opinion, of low morals and had only an extremely poor understanding of honesty.
10
Will Mr. Stephens now praise Stalin for leading the Red Army to victory over the Wehrmacht in WWII while putting his murder of many millions of his own people into "historical perspective"? Stalin was, after all, a man of the 20th Century and he should not be judged by 21st Century sensibilities.
It was the Red Army that defeated Nazi Germany not the armies of the US and Great Britain. The greatest irony of history is that Western Civilization was saved by the worst system/person our species has ever produced .
12
Great piece; thank you.
4
Thank goodness I am a nobody who has done nothing. With no record of accomplishment I am free to criticize those who have made positive contributions to the good of mankind. And without fear that someone will call me out for having left the toilet seat up when I was ten years old. Churchill was brilliant and he was flawed, and it gave him strength and boundaries. Few of us, certainly not I, would have survived the brilliant highs and devastating lows of his life to accomplish anything.
20
A 'True Brit', flaws, warts and all. Rule Britannia!
3
This article is looking for another western white hero that they can worship. The plain truth is that no one is perfect and every "hero" comes with warts. The real question is if you think that those warts are worthy of the worship of the hero? Here is where we divide along "party" lines. Those who are affected by the warts and those who aren't. We can always study "heroes", warts and all and understand them better. There is no need of worship where warts are totally ignored and one gets this article of only praise. Sorry, but Churchill is still a very evil man in my book who denigrated and trampled on people of color, like me. I would be a fool to consider him a hero, just like I would be a fool to consider Trump as a savior of colored people.
5
Apparently elementary education is no better in GB than it is here.
2
I'll take Churchill's imperialist paternalism over Nazism. And I'm grateful for the Soviet army's stand at Stalingrad. That doesn't make me a conservative or a communist, just a realist.
Trump, however, is truly a major disaster. And he's really such a pathetic figure. And the worst, the very worst of the United States.
8
Churchill had great faults, but he was a great man. Few people today realize that if Churchill had not been Prime Minister in June and July 1940, Britain would likely have made a peace with Germany that would have left Hitler as master of Europe. Had that happened, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union (as it would have), it would most likely have won. The Battle of Britain took place because of Churchill's vision, tenacity and bravery, and it was one of the truly decisive battles of history, even though it only decided that the war would go on. In the summer of 1940, continuing the war was the hope of mankind. Churchill saw that and acted brilliantly to make victory possible.
20
"...suffered as a child under the remote glare of a contemptuous father and a self-indulgent mother; fought valiantly in four wars by the time he was 25; and earned his own living through prodigious literary efforts that ultimately earned him a Nobel Prize..."
"And that's what makes it all right, all right, all right, all right. That's what makes it all right."
--Elvis Presley in "Kissin' Cousins"
1
Are we so arrogant and self-righteous that we cannot imagine that our own descendants might judge our moral stances harshly?
7
The democratic propagandists of today are weaponizing the democratic bigotry of the past. Their targets are certain democrats whose best acts, indeed republican acts, rose above democracy and its evils. A fellow world leader, my cousin Franklin, remains a liberal democratic icon, despite his democratic bigotry of inciting an attack by Japan and of putting Americans of Japanese descent into concentration camps. One wonder how long that will last or whether the hypocrisy of democratic demagoguery will prevail.
3
To the victims of British imperialism and particularly the millions of Bengali sufferers who died because of this man's niggardliness and racist policies he will be remembered as a great villain. It's difficult for the white tribalists to empathise with the suffering of other tribes. Such is our world.
7
For those who like this new biography of Churchill; take a look at the classic 3 volume biography of Churchill by William Manchester....
(Note: the third volume was mostly written by others, as Manchester's health declined).
1
Churchill inspires. Live or dead. I you haven't been inspired, then you haven't used your eyes to read and haven't kept your mind open.
3
Churchill was also a strong supporter for Zionism. Stephens forgot to mention that one, but I suspect it may be part of Stephens admiration for Churchill.
3
One of his more pertinent comments was "Some men abandon their party for the sake of their principles. Others, their principles for the sake of their party". Plenty of examples of the second option among the congressional deplorables.
3
Yes, yes, and yes.
Such abject ignorance of history! Churchill wasn't just a "product of his time", but a war criminal with serious blood on his hands.
Shashi Tharoor summarizes it well:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/global-opinions/wp/2018/03/10/in-winston-churchill-hollywood-rewards-a-mass-murderer/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.282f978bda87
Some excerpts:
* He wanted to use chemical weapons in India but was shot down by his cabinet colleagues, whom he criticized for their “squeamishness,” declaring that “the objections of the India Office to the use of gas against natives are unreasonable.”
* Thanks to Churchill, some 4 million Bengalis starved to death in a 1943 famine. Churchill ordered the diversion of food from starving Indian civilians to well-supplied British soldiers and even to top up European stockpiles in Greece and elsewhere. When reminded of the suffering of his Indian victims, his response was that the famine was their own fault, he said, for “breeding like rabbits.”
[Here are some pictures from the famine, which people in Bengal still remember daily.
https://historycollection.co/40-images-tragic-bengal-famine-1943/]
* In Kenya, Churchill either directed or was complicit in policies involving the forced relocation of local people from the fertile highlands to make way for white colonial settlers.
* In Afghanistan, he claimed that Pashtuns “needed to recognise the superiority of [the British] race” and that “all who resist will be killed without quarter.”
8
I cannot think of any revered leader that did not have some fault as well as virtues, or any villainous dictator that did not do something that was not completely evil. After all, Trump probably dotes upon his children.
If you think Churchill can be dismissed with a single epithet, reflect upon how trivial and inconsequential that makes your own life.
9
There is so much critical to be said about WSC, and I've said much of it in classes over the years. However by the late 1930s WSC was able to clearly discern the moral difference between Stalinism and Hitler's Nazism. This is clearly stated in his speech to the Commons stating the policy of aiding the USSR in its struggle against the Germans. FDR shared this moral vision.. On the other hand Harry Truman stated in 1941 that the US should aid the Russians against the Germans, and if the Russians appear to be winning, the US should aid the Germans. So much for moral vision. Truman meant what he said and by the time he made this public comment there was clear evidence of German genocide against the Jews of Europe. There is much to criticize about Churchill, but for two years he was the essential and necessary man. This stands out despite the romanticization of Churchill career as soldier, politician, author, and sponger on the rich, and the neglect of his many failures. In 1937 a book appeared on Churchill's life as a politician - the title "Winston Churchill: A Study in Failure."
The one thing I can't stand is revisionists. The study of history is to put yourself in that persons mind during their time they lived, not todays enlightened thinking. If you were an average Brit in 1895 to 1935 you'd think just like Churchill. If you were a pioneer crossing Americas plains heading West in 1870 you'd have a rifle across your lap watching for "savages". It's easy to dismiss the social conventions of the time and denounce them.
12
One more conservative attempt to whitewash Churchill's bigotry and racism. Cherry-picking quotes cannot absolve Churchill from his horrifying views about other human beings just because they were from Britain's colonies. He did not call for punitive action against the perpetrator of the Jalianwala Bagh Massacre. When his advisers pointed out the death toll of the British-created Bengal famine, over 1.5 million, Chuchill remarked "Relief will do nothing, for Indians breed like rabbits". This man was no noble leader. Unfortunately, history is always written by the victors.
3
Re: his racist attitudes, keep in mind the times in which he lived: he was born just 9 years after our Civil War.
He united and bolstered a nation in great peril, he fought for his country, and stated his views honestly. Is there another politician in recent memory who can claim the same?
6
"In Britain, a 2008 survey found that 20 percent of teenagers thought Churchill was a fictional character but 58 percent thought Sherlock Holmes was real." - NY Times, 1.15.18
The above statement pretty much sums it up doesn't it.
It's not just the U.S. that is guilty of raising and educating a generation of functional idiots.
Equally depressing are the numbers of "Flat earthers" who subscribe to utter nonsense despite the somewhat hard to argue with evidence provided by Columbus' westward journeys.
My Grandmother, bless her heart, lived through an incredible period of progress on this planet. In her lifetime, she saw the development of electricity, nuclear power, flight, the automobile, vaccination, radio, television and space exploration.
Ooops, scratch that last one. She went to her grave insisting that we never landed a man on the moon, that it was nothing more than an elaborate staged event.
What is it about human beings that makes them cling to obvious falsehoods when faced with unpleasant "truths" like climate change/global warming. Or creationism over evolution.
I mean is it any easier to believe in the vision of some bearded genius deity thinking up various improvements in the development of the human species than it is to subscribe to the notion that permutations in humans which don't contribute to the continuation or survival of the species fall by the wayside.
Well. I guess when you think about it, a bearded genius deity is more believable.
2
perhaps Mr. Stephens should read the book Churchill's Secret War by Madhusree Mukherjee to appreciate the famine Churchill unleashed on India during WW II. i fully appreciate what Churchill did to defeat Hitler but that does not absolve him of his starving of millions of Indians to death. He never would have thought of letting (white) Britishers starve; perhaps he was ok with letting the brown skinned citizens of the Empire die?
2
Since Churchill’s Mother was American, why did Kennedy need to offer Churchill honorary American citizenship? Couldn’t Churchill have claimed citizenship on his own?
3
There are few people one can say who have, by themselves, changed history. Winston Spencer Churchill is one of them. But for Churchill it is possible, if not likely, that the United Kingdom would have acquiesced in Germen hegemony over Europe. He, more than anyone, convinced the British government and the British people that they should fight on.
And now for something controversial... What would the world look like if he hadn't been heeded? If Britain had "counted her eggs" and decided that, with the Empire intact, all was well with the world.
It is not as farfetched as it sounds. What we know now of Nazi Germany's excesses and its racial policies, including its attempt to eradicate European Jewry, was hidden at the time. As far as the British were concerned, the German armed forces had mostly behaved according to the rules of war, and what they had seen of their capabilities was quite impressive.
In view of the pact that existed between the Nazis and the Bolsheviks, Churchills's determination to fight on is even more impressive. He didn't know at the time that in June '41 war would break out between them or that later that year the US would be shocked into overcoming its isolationist tendencies by Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor.
Was it a deep understanding of human nature, or a bold gamble, we can't know, but me must recognize his merits. A truly remarkable man.
7
One must remember in summer 1940, after the Germans swept through France, Britain was all that was undefeated. Hitler had a non-aggression pact with Stalin. Britain had no allies, US had vowed to remain isolationist, not wanting to involve in another World War. Churchill was the right man at the right time. It's sad. People, especially young people, in the US know so little of history, even of the last century. Maybe that is why we tend to repeat it.
5
The British very sensibly voted him in for war & out for peace.
2
If Winston Churchill mobilized the English language,
And sent it into battle,
Individual-1 bowdlerized it,
And summoned its death rattle.
Dunkirk was not a victory. It was a betrayal of the French Army which was still in the field.
The Gallipoli disaster which cost 150,000 British Empire lives in 2015 is directly attributable to Churchill's strategic folly. Nothing at all was gained in the campaign.
Read the war diaries of Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke who was Chief of the Imperial General Staff during the Second World War and read the record of many insanely drunken post-midnight Churchill phone calls. Then you will begin to see the true measure of Churchill's "greatness."
2
I love the sentence “ an antidote to idiocy “ it sure resonates with me pertaining to conversations with Republicans with the current administration.
1
I collect interesting quotes and try to source every one. I can't find the Churchill quote re South Africa. Does someone have a credible source for it in Churchill's writings?
Wow, thanks for sharing your sympathy for this vile creep, who thought that people like me were a beastly people with a beastly religion, who said about other peoples "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, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place." and many thanks to the NYT to continue publishing white western supremacists such Bret Stephens while not offering anyone else a chance to respond.
5
A book well worth reading, one of those fascinating, creative and unexpected reviews that make one think about these historical figures. Many connections to today too
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/23/books/review/churchill-and-orwell-thomas-e-ricks.html
Revisionist history seems to have won everywhere.
Churchill, like Lincoln, and like so many other now reviled historical persons, was a human being of his era. Judging him by the politically correct standards of ours is wrong and ignorant.
7
Churchill wouldn’t have been a climate change denier.
1
It's also dishonest in the extreme to pretend that only present day people have a problem with Churchill. Presumably the Sudanese and Iraqis that he murdered for the crime of wanting to rule themselves weren't great fans.
His own Secretary of State for India had this to say about Churchill and Hitler.
"Leopold Amery, Churchill's own Secretary of State for India, likened his boss's understanding of India's problems to King George III's apathy for the Americas. Amery vented in his private diaries, writing "on the subject of India, Winston is not quite sane" and that he didn't "see much difference between [Churchill's] outlook and Hitler's.""
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/02/03/the-dark-side-of-winston-churchills-legacy-no-one-should-forget/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.9494f421606c
Churchill had this to say about Indians.
"I hate Indians. They are a beastly people. The famine is their own fault for breeding like rabbits."
Somehow these quotes don't appear in Stephens column.
Interesting. If someone politically at odds with Stephens had said anything like that about Stephens' group, Stephens would be sure to mention it at every opportunity.
Churchill also allowed the incarceration and torture of one Hussein Onyango Obama, a Kenyan who had the audacity of believing that Kenyans, not Brits, should rule Kenya. Were it not for the fact that his grandson became President of the United States, we wouldn't know about his case.
3
One more thing about defeat and early retirement, “ in defeat early retirement and a fat job as a lobbyist “
pay attention to what Samuel D has written. people need to go back and learn history. he was a Monster
1
Comparing Theresa May to Churchill is like comparing Chamberlain to Churchill, the only she has in common is two arms and two legs.
1
This is a great line (obviously):
We live in a time in which decent and otherwise sensible people are surrendering too easily to the hectoring of morons or extremists.
The twitter mob promotes these sorts of PC norms because smug virtue signaling is the newest form of conspicuous false piety. These people are rightly lampooned as unthinking conformists.
5
In the maelstrom of international politics, it is sometimes difficult to accurately discern real causes and effects, and to therefore assign blame and award kudos accurately. If "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken.", then I should state that I have not read that. I have read his Napoleon, however. It might be as well to recall that George Seldes, when interviewing the German Kaiser, was told that it was the U.S. soldier which brought about Germany's defeat in W.W.I, and also the view of defenders at Stalingrad who said that the advancing Germans "...looked like Olympic athletes." There are a scant number of opinions which indicate that Churchill goaded Hitler into an expansionist policy, which ultimately was his (Hitler's) undoing. The setting and circumstances of war had changed drastically from the late nineteenth century, but not, apparently, the experience of it for aristocrats. Churchill could afford, presumably, to be awakened in the middle of the night to view films of The Battle of Stalingrad, which is not altogether different from the question posed by the Kaiser on the W.W.I battlefield :"Am I so hated?" One can read or not, and still draw one's own conclusions without being characterized as a moron or an extremist, as one can when confronted by a seemingly endless stream of propaganda. One thing is certain, the subject of this editorial's fulfilled ambition was the institution of cadastral surveys in India.
“In Britain, a 2008 survey found that 20 percent of teenagers thought Churchill was a fictional character but 58 percent thought Sherlock Holmes was real.”
What?!
1
Author Anderew Roberts also wrote a bio of Lord Halifax, part of the British group who with Chamberlain would appease Germany, and a contender for prime minister instead of Churchill.
Roberts made this crucial point in his cspan talk:
“It's one of those pivotal moments in history that if Halifax had been Prime Minister, we could have gone down a very, very dangerous path. If we'd made peace with Hitler then, he would have been able, instead of using 50-70% of his planes on the attack on Russia, he could have used them all.
In the north he got to a thousand-day siege and in the center he got to the subway stations of Moscow, and in the south he captured Stalingrad. What would he have done with twice as many planes is terrifying to consider. And without America being in the war at the moment."
So imagine if Britain had not sent their RAF planes up against Nazi bombers, and then Russia had not been able to hold out. And Germany had added them to its conquering army.
2
This headline and article say more about NY Times Op-Ed writers and conservative obsessions than about what the U.S. needs to deal with idiotic behavior. Worshiping Churchill is a sure sign that the writer was trained as a doctrinaire conservative. I'm sure that misguided David Brooks worships Churchill too, and William Kristol previously. Churchill, who had admirable qualities, is a panacea for conservatives.
1
Churchill saved Western civilization. Did he have flaws as a man and a politician? Yes. Did he believe in democratic government by the people Yes, he did? Did he have beliefs we no longer share but were held by a majority in the US and the UK at the time? Yes. Did he belive in individual personal liberty? Yes. Freedom of speech? Of religion? Yes.Was he willing to fight and die for them? Yes.
In the course of a career in public life of almost fifty years, did he say or write things politicians today would "walk back?" Yes. Did he rally the British and the Western world against the Nazis? Yes. Did he lead British, British Commonwealth and Imperial troops to victory. Yes. This includes the largest volunteer army in the world, the 2.5 million men of the British Indian Army which fought valiently around the world. Trump would only be fit to clean his cesspool. We should thank God that he became Prime Minister of England when he did.
11
Mr. Stephens is a ceaseless defender of Israel and regularly defames its critics as anti-semites. Is he not familiar with Churchill's vile anti-Jewish screed written in 1920, when British noblemen had far more license to publicly announce their bigotry.
Here's a sample:
"[I]t may well be that this same astounding race [the Jews] may at the present time be in the actual process of producing another system [Bolshevism] of morals and philosophy, as malevolent as Christianity was benevolent, which, if not arrested, would shatter irretrievably all that Christianity has rendered possible."
"In violent opposition to all this sphere of Jewish effort rise the schemes of the International Jews. . . . 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."
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Zionism_versus_Bolshevism
1
Churchill: “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion. The famine was their own fault for breeding like rabbits
2 to 3 million who died in the Bengal Famine of 1943.
To put the death toll from Bengal Famine of 1943 in perspective, the total civilian death toll for Britain in WWII was 60K to 70K. WWII overall death toll - 70 to 85 million.
10 million, one third of Bengal’s population, who died in the Bengal Famine of 1770.
Failed monsoons trigger drought and crop failure in Bengal periodically. But prior to the British India Company and British ruling the land, previous rulers of Bengal had prevented mass famine. Government triggered famines were a favorite tool of democide for British colonial rule. British also helped to trigger severe famines 1783, 1866, 1873, 1892, 1897 and lastly 1943-44, with land being diverted from rice production to money making jute and indigo, overtaxing, no rice reserves for droughts (rulers prior to British had adequately managed these droughts) - the one in 1943, of course, impacted by WWII, Japan taking over Burma next to Bengal. The same type of English policies created the Great Famine of Ireland, 1845-1849 - over 1 million dead, 1 million emigrated, 20-25% loss of Ireland’s population.
Churchill was key in defeating Hilter, saving the world from Nazism. He should always be admired for that leadership alone.
But he was also a racist, colonialist responsible for millions of deaths - that’s part of his legacy also.
9
Great leaders are only human.
We are creatures of our times. What was perfectly acceptable then is anathema today.
Jefferson knew slavery was morally repugnant yet owned slaves. Sally Hemings, his slave and dead wife's half-sister gave birth to his children and he never freed her.
Why do we put people on pedestals only to tear them down?
Why is it so hard to honor great leaders, accepting them warts and all?
I think a big problem with our politics today is that some of us demand perfection in our public officials and will tear them down when they inevitably prove themselves to be.. human. Others will elevate heinous grifters because it suits their pocketbooks or satisfies their grievances.
It's hard for me to understand why anyone would seek high office when they know they will be put under a microscope.
Didn't Trump understand that all his crimes would be exposed when he became President? Is he really that stupid?
Churchill drank...a lot. Somehow he managed to defy Hitler and save the world. Go figure.
5
Bret Stephens just fell in my esteem by about a 1000 notches. This piece is opinionated and completely lazy. I do not think he has spent even 5 minutes bothering to research some of the things he talks about.
I think Churchill did great things and was great in some respects. But he was also despicable in others. One of the many things which apall me about us as a society is our inability to live with this. That not everything has to be pure as the driven snow or completely dirty as garbage!
Churchill was culpable in killing 3 million Indians in the 1943 Bengal famine. He achieved in 1 year 50% of what it took Hitler 12 years to do to Jews.
To support the opposite point Stephens has lazily and selectively copied the comment from Arthur Herman about the fall of Burma and that this was wartime.
A 1 minute research would have also yielded the following lines from Wikipedia -
In response to an urgent request by the Secretary of State for India (Leo Amery) and the Viceroy of India (Wavell), to release food stocks for India, Churchill responded with a telegram to Wavell asking, if food was so scarce, "why Gandhi hadn't died yet".
Churchill also said the famine was the fault of the Indians breeding like rabbits. He said many other despicable things.
Papering over this kind of behaviour by saying he used "racially insensitive" remarks is itself despicable.
There were food stocks rotting in warehouses in India while the famine was on.
This piece is frankly shameful.
6
Your premise is false. The GOP has been practicing an irrational version of "in defeat defiance" since Nixon.
Churchill who did good at keeping up the Esprit De Corp of the British populace during WWII is otherwise basically El Trumpo with brains and skills.
In essence he is responsible for as many or more deaths as Hitler or Stalin or Pol Pot or any other wanton large scale murderer throughout history.
That is not extremism it is historical fact.
My favorite historian of 20th century wars is Sir Max Hastings. In his book on Churchill, Hastings makes the case that Churchill was the only candidate for Prime Minister in 1940 who would never seek to negotiate with Hitler to end the conflict. Britain had its back to the wall after Dunkirk, with few allies, and overcoming Germany seemed impossible. Churchill was a great man.
3
Winston Churchill was a true hero to many of us. He was a giant. When adversity was overwhelming he didn't surrender. Please remember that the nazis started WWII with about 10 miilion soldiers as compared to England's 3 million.
Europe was easily conquered. "Is Paris burning?" It is difficult to imagine how he was able to think clearly during those dark years..
In addition he showed long-term vision. No, Hitler's Third Reich did not last 3,000 years. No, Stalin's Soviet Union's Iron Curtain did not last 100 years.
The BBC's Spanish Speaking Services helped to inform Latin America about Churchill's Fifth Symphony's victory jingle. "Ta ta tataaa", the "V" in Morse code.
Winston Churchill was a hero in Latin America too. Many thanks to "Atalaya" the BBC's voice in Spansh. A Colombian born immigrant.
Yes, we are informing our grandsons about Winston Churchill's achievements.
Churchill: “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion. The famine was their own fault for breeding like rabbits."
Now imagine if Churchill had instead said: “I hate Jews. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.”
Imagine if the 2 to 3 million who died in the Bengal Famine of 1943 were Jewish.
To put the death toll from Bengal Famine of 1943 in perspective, the total civilian death toll for Britain in WWII was 60K to 70K. WWII overall death toll - 70 to 85 million.
Imagine that the 10 million, one third of Bengal’s population, who died in the Bengal Famine of 1770 were Jewish.
How would Stephens feel about Churchill then? Of course, Churchill was a strong proponent of Zionism, so maybe Stephens would still admire Churchill.
Failed monsoons trigger drought and crop failure in Bengal periodically. But prior to the British India Company and British ruling the land, previous rulers of Bengal had prevented mass famine. Government triggered famines were a favorite tool of democide for British colonial rule. British also helped to trigger severe famines 1783, 1866, 1873, 1892, 1897 and lastly 1943-44, with land being diverted from rice production to money making jute and indigo, overtaxing, no rice reserves for droughts (rulers prior to British had adequately managed these droughts) - the one in 1943 also, of course, impacted by WWII, Japan taking over Burma next to Bengal. The same type of English policies created the Irish Potato Famine.
4
The absolute worst thing one can say about Churchill was that he was truly a war lover.
Without his vote in the Grey Cabinet in 1914 England would never have entered World War I.
He advocated it despite the treaty that did not require England to be a part of it.
Without England in that war, chances are Germany would have won, Hitler would not have taken place and Russia might have remained an Imperial monarchy.
Churchill advocated for war at every opportunity, switching parties five times in order to try to continue the empire. The debacle called the 20th century has Winston Churchill running throughout as the most influential.
Yet despite his efforts, the British Empire collapsed, the Pound lost its reserve currency status, and England now suffers mass immigration from its former colonies - The Price of Empire.
1
Another attempt to blindly glorify Churchill and white wash his flaws and somehow justify any misdeed as necessary for the larger good. As some readers have pointed out, he was definitely a great wartime PM, and kudos to him for standing up to the Nazis, but he was a terrible peace time PM, who was seen a warmonger and an imperialist. No wonder he was rejected by the British people after WWII.
3
Churchill’s comment about John Foster Dulles is perfectly suited to Trump: “He’s the only bull I know who carries his china shop around with him.”. I adore Churchill. He was prescient. He saw the danger of Hitler long before others. Churchill knew Churchill was a great man.
2
..".Surrendering too easily to to the hectoring of morons or extremists". Churchill was an admirer of Hitler long after it was obvious that he was tyrannical fascist. He made antisemitic remarks, once referring to Russian Bolshevik leadership as "Semitic conspirators". Worse than the remarks, during his term as Prime Minister during WW2 he kept in place a White Paper policy that severely impeded Jews from entering Palestine consigning thousands to the hands of the Nazi's. He is at least as indirectly responsible for as many as many deaths as Schindler was responsible for Jewish lives saved..His mistaken, wrong headed and imperialistic adventures and policies from South Africa to India led to the loss of untold number of lives. His view of an imperialistic Island Empire (Ireland escaped and Scotland may one day also) help continue Imperialism long past its due date. In passing his Turkish misadventures during WW1 should not go unmentioned....He was a remarkably good writer, as was the fascist and Nobel Prize winner Knut Hamsun as well as the colonialist Rudyard Kipling. He was a gifted orator who kept England strong during WW2 and helped secure the allied victory. It may not be proper to surrender to the "hectoring of morons". It may also be advisable not to swallow righteous encomiums of right wing pundits.
1
Reading a new book about Churchill makes one think: who among today's politicians will perhaps one day be accorded such cult status? (Obviously in the age of sophisticated falsification everyone is also a candidate for character assassination, but we can't shut up shop and go home just because of Facebook).
George H.W. Bush, Barack Obama, Al Gore; George Soros? Has Charles de Gaulle already been elevated in his own country to a kind of sainthood? Amazing, too, how many Frenchmen revere Napoleon Bonaparte.
I had the privilege of reading one of Churchill's wartime speeches to the school assembly on the day after his death - I have never before or since had to read aloud anything to touch it. He spoke to men's hearts and for me it was probably the first and only time that I felt proud to be British.
(Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini on the other hand made speeches which today make us cringe with embarrassment...)
1
"We live in a time in which decent and otherwise sensible people are surrendering too easily to the hectoring of morons or extremists. Think of Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain and the hard-core Brexiteers."
As Mrs. May herself would say: let's be CLEAR about this issue! What the "hard-core Brexiteers" want is to implement Britain's withdrawal from the European Union, which is what a majority of the British public voted for in the recent referendum.
What Mrs. May appears to want is to subvert that democratic decision and ensure that Britain stays in the European Union. She is, however, not honest and straightforward about her intentions and continues to say one thing while apparently working toward another.
To those who feel the need to shoe-horn Trump into everything, remember that Churchill found admirable qualities in... Hitler:
"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 admirable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations." From "Great Contemporaries," 1937.
If Churchill didn't suffer from Hitler Derangement Syndrome, there may be hope yet for the Trumpedly Deranged...
https://emcphd.wordpress.com
1
Who is perfect? Historical figures such as Churchill, Washington, and Jefferson are venerated not because they were perfect, but because or the great things they did. Heck, Rev. King cheated on his wife dozens of times, does that mean we ignore his great works for civil rights? How about Ghandi, who referred to Hitler as "a friend," supported the Indian caste system, was racist toward the blacks of South Africa … and so on. Do we discard his amazing accomplishments because he was not perfect? I don't think so.
1
Once again Mr Stephens has got it all wrong. Sir, you are certainly entitled to your opinion but not your own facts.Churchill was absolutely, positively a racist and white supremacist. The bravery he displayed during his military service stands in it’s own merits. His belief that the South African coastline was one of God’s most beautiful creations for “white men” speaks for itself.
1
It’s unfair to have a long angry rant about the current state of the UK in reference to the present, the past and Churchill’s legacy in Mr Stephens’ column, as he is not guilty of it, so instead I’ll just say this: I am absolutely sick to death of hearing people summon up the ghost of Churchill as some appeal to “Great Britishness” during this Brexit shambles. It speaks to this British superiority complex, exceptionalism and refusal to face the reality of the modern UK’s place in the world. This has given us Brexit. I think we could do better than Boris Johnson doing his best Churchill impression (he wrote a book on him!) in front of crowds who are all in agreement, with quotes and calls and halcyon memories (though he himself was not born then), inbetween comparing the Brussels parliament to concentration camp guards or viewing the EU as the Fourth Reich led by a Hitler-esque Merkel.
It’s toxic. You can both honour and/or remember the past - with all its controversies that need to be faced up to - without getting stuck in it. But that is what we have done.
Sigh.
1
He was a great man if you think of him from white European perspective.
To anyone in South Asia, especially given the facts that have been brought out in the last 10 years, he was a genocidal racist. He was responsible for more deaths than Pol Pot (though Mao and Hitler exceeded in this department).
Greatness is bestowed easily, but to be hallowed in history, one has to take a reckoning of faults. Churchill has many, which make me take exception to some glowing opinion of him.
I love Brett Stephens though :)
17
The second sentence of the third paragraph is extremely offensive and stands testament to your Americocentrism and ignorance of the betrayal of democracy in the UK.
"20 percent of teenagers thought Churchill was a fictional character but 58 percent thought Sherlock Holmes was real."
I don't understand why anyone would find this statistic surprising. Do you remember the history you learned in high school? Adults take for granted just how much students don't understand about history.
I can barely tell you a single thing I learned in US History I or II. However, I can tell you absolutely everything I learned at Waterloo Village or Historic Williamsburg. I remember the smell of Gettysburg. I remember how the grass felt at Yorktown. I can tell you how the stones at Nuremberg are warm in the sun. I can tell you how the Tower of London is cold and damp. I've walked across air craft carriers from WWII and Vietnam. I've explored the decks of ships older than most states. Some are older than the United States. Some are older than Britain. I can tell you how a mummy's hair smells. I can feel the comb last used to brush her hair.
High school doesn't cover history by half. I found college even worse. Archaeology though? Well, the subject inspires an interest all its own. You start reading as much as you can because so much doesn't make sense. There isn't anyone left alive to explain it to you either. You're left with a puzzle where most of the pieces are missing. However, you're interacting intimately with someone long dead and you absolutely know it. That's how history comes alive.
4
@Andy: It depends upon where one went to school. At public school in Valparaiso, Indiana and at Indiana University-Bloomington, I received an excellent education in history.
3
I’m no fan of Brett Stephens but we do: “...live in a time in which decent and otherwise sensible people are surrendering too easily to the hectoring of morons or extremists.” Extreme thinking right and left, extreme politics, leverage, climate. Speaking of extremes...
Think of elected Republicans who in 2011 watched fellow conservatives join the Brits in latching on to Russian oil money and doing Russian laundry. Enter Donald Trump and his own private security that goes with running casinos and hotels making Republican and Russian oligarch feral eyes grow wide. (Think of the Jeff Bridges and Jon Hamm movie “Bad Times At The El Royale” updated)
Outsider Republicans and insiders like Stephens watched unelected Republican’s Ron Paul, Pat Buchanan, “Rev.” Franklin Graham praise Czar Putin over their own President in 2014. What did Mueller/Comey think when they saw Giuliani on Fox News in 2014 praising Putin’s leadership in the Ukraine? The FBI saw the Ebola scare, saw Dr Ben Carson on Fox News talking ab’t Ebola urine in US drinking water, saw Russia shoot down a civilian airliner, the price of oil reach $25, saw American contractor Ed Snowden living in Russia and had a good idea where their fellow Republicans, Ron and Rand Paul, Rudy Giuliani were going long before Nov 2016.
We live, apparently, in the age of 'the ministry of truth', which is not part of some all-seeing, all encompassing Big Brother government (Sorry G. Orwell) but is instead an element of the self-righteous mob that seeks to rewrite all history in it's own PC image.
Poor Winston! Tossed down the 'memory hole' , along with so many others. No one is safe. Who is next? FDR, because he failed to come to the rescue of the Jews in 1941? Or Lincoln because he was uncertain, even ambivalent, about how to deal with 4 million former slaves suddenly liberated?
At least wherever you are Winston. according to some people's lights, in heaven or hell, you can console yourself with the notion that only 1/5 of British youth think you are fictional. About as many people in the US that swear the moon landings never happened and that deny the holocaust.
3
Churchill: “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion. The famine was their own fault for breeding like rabbits."
Now imagine if Churchill had instead said: “I hate Jews. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.”
How would Stephens respond to those words?
2 to 3 million people died in Bengal Famine of 1943 - in part triggered by the policies of the Churchill led British colonial government.
5
Only Churchill kept England in the war, alone. His will never wavered. I forgive him everything negative in his history if only for one sentence he said to his Cabinet after the disaster/deliverance at Dunkirk: " Of course, we will fight on ".
2
I wised up and checked the author of this column first and discovered it is not worth reading. Bret is a trumpian hack that has nothing of value to offer.
2
Hear hear
We shall be forever indebted to Churchill for his leadership during WWII. But as someone who has spent a considerable amount of time in India as a Fulbright scholar, I strongly disagree with Mr. Stephens' characterization of Churchill's role during the infamous Bengal famine. The "evidence" is far more damning than a few jokes at the Indians' expense. Did he really need to sink thousands of Bengali boats, thereby not only making them unable to transport their goods to market but also making it impossible to fish? There is plenty of evidence that Churchill diverted food from the populace to support the British troops. Where is the evidence that he supplied "whatever food he could"? Was it really necessary to burn the remaining crops? Other countries, the U.S. included, tried to convince Churchill to allow in food aid. He refused. Millions died in a human-made and manipulated crisis virtually unknown to Americans but known to every Indian person, especially those in West Bengal. Nothing is ever black and white, but minimizing this tragedy by writing "alleged" or putting genocide in quotes (thereby casting doubts on its reality) is colonialism at its worst. Calculating that millions would die is in a different category than a "difficult choice."
7
In the 1940’s, Churchill thwarted then, with America engaged, defeated the Nazi juggernaut.
In 2017, Neo-Nazi’s seig heil Trump in the nation’s capital then march months later in Charlottesville, maiming and murdering, depicted as “very fine people” by the U.S. President.
Can you imagine Churchill, Roosevelt, and Eisenhower if they had seen what we have had to see these last two years in America?
5
Maybe the author would have felt a little different and a little more sympathy if he had actually a connection to British India.
There is deep anger and shame among the heart of every person of Indian origin for what happened during the British Raj. The policies of wartime colonial India which Churchill
2
Where is the other half of the argument, where the author addresses Churchill's fondness for barbed-wire with people of color on the other side? I accept the great man's complexity, but clearly Bret Stephens does not. This isn't Churchill, it's the shiny facsimile the GOP keeps dropping into the Oval Office every few years.
If only the U.S. had an equally complex, visionary leader. A man of wealth and privilege who overcame his own personal setbacks (maybe polio?) and went on to lead a great nation against Nazism.
4
Re: understanding Churchill
Must the reader pick from only these two options ? Seems quite limiting. Both options have the capacity to, at the least, miscommunicate, and at the worst, spread massaged lies.
Let’s not kid ourselves: we are all subject to the mores of the times in which we live. Learning as we live and acknowledging mistakes is the only way to real understanding both of our own times and this past.
1
When I read the quotes from one of the 'Colonies' of the former Empire I thought well there won't be any praise of Churchill here from those down under.
I was thinking of his failed attempt to open a second front at the Dardanelles and Gallopoli, a rallying cry for Aussies and Kiwis ever since, though Passchendael was far more horrifying to them -and the Canadians who relieved them.
When I got to the end with the author's inducement that a society needs to celebrate the achievements of it's great men I thought what's missing here of an analysis of Churchill's need for action juxaposed to his failure to understand another simple wisdom, that if one doesn't study history and it's failures -(including one's own) we're bound to repeat them.
The mad attempts to invade at Dieppe spring to mind.
Churchill deliberately excluded a critical discussion of that failure- at the cost of so many Canadians, in his autobiography.
One doesn't criticize when the others involved include a dubiously beloved, pompous figure like Montgomery or the Queen's twit of a cousin Mountbatten.
The phrase cannon fodder used by my Grandfather a career officer in the RCR, was how he saw his men, all Colonials, treated by the British high command during his years in England and France during WWl.
Luckily his sons were not on that beach in France during WWll.
Great piece, my question is, where are the editorial boards of the higher-brow news outlets? Why does it have to be explained in a disavow-able opinion piece? If fools and those with a giant chip on their shoulder can lay waste to any part of our history which does not pass this year's iteration of what is socially acceptable, then what is going to happen to our society?
the author states that Churchill sent whatever food he could spare during the great Bengal famine. this directly contradicts research done by Amartya Sen and others. can the author or someone else cite a reference for this claim?
5
Douthat's view of Churchill's role in "the perpetration of a “genocide” in India after a cyclone-caused famine in 1943" is ridiculous. He says, "Evidence for this is that he used racially insensitive humor during the crisis. Except that Churchill did send whatever food he could spare, Japan was threatening India from Burma, the rest of world was at war, and difficult choices had to be made."
For an opposing view, see this article summarizing the works of a well-known Indian author and diplomat: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/world-history/winston-churchill-genocide-dictator-shashi-tharoor-melbourne-writers-festival-a7936141.html
2
You trying to tell me that Sherlock Holmes is not real?
"Earlier this year, the retired astronaut Scott Kelly posted a harmless tweet quoting Winston Churchill’s famous line, “In victory, magnanimity.” Left-wing Twitter went berserk, and Kelly felt obliged to grovel." I am so thankful that I haven't gone all Twitter, or tweety, or what ever. I didn't hear of any of this.
And I don't know if inserting this bit above into a piece about Churchill was a jab or an insult to US lefties.
But I can tell you this; there hasn't been a republican in our government who could be considered in the same breath as Winston Churchill since Dwight Eisenhower. Especially Reagan.
My only real complaint about Churchill was the mess he and the British left in the Middle East after WWI.
Yes, Churchill will forever be remembered for his courage, decisive and farsighted leadership at critical moments, and towering accomplishments in other walks of life. But is it necessary to whitewash his racist views and more importantly actions which had a hugely negative impact on tens of millions of people?
This paragraph: “One of the alleged crimes for which Churchill is now blamed is the perpetration of a “genocide” in India after a cyclone-caused famine in 1943. Evidence for this is that he used racially insensitive humor during the crisis. Except that Churchill did send whatever food he could spare, Japan was threatening India from Burma, the rest of world was at war, and difficult choices had to be made.” - is far removed from and contrary to the well researched and documented facts. It was not insensitive humor but deliberate actions that have been examined in detail by many historians.
4
“because the battles and struggles of the Elizabethan and Napoleonic wars were then taught in schools, so the stories of Drake and Nelson were well known to his listeners.”
Was Irish history taught in schools? Apparently not.
Where is the mention of Churchill's role in fomenting the debacle known today as The Troubles?
I am currently reading Churchill's six volume history of WWII and have seen him through the prism of many books about the war, particularly biographies of Dwight Eisenhower. What I find most compelling in Churchill's writing is not the content per se but the magnificent language. His prose seems Shakespearean at times. Churchill was a truly great man, with his virtues instrumental in saving us from Hitler. He was a man of Victorian and Edwardian England, with some of the attendant flaws, but the small-minded idealogues who nip at his reputation now know little history.
This is an eternal moral dilemma: what should be the attitude of the progeny of a doting and living parent if convincing evidence surfaces that he is a vile human being outside the narrow confines of his immediate family?
In the case of Churchill, Mr. Stephens does not make any attempt to not live up to the stereotype of the western conservatives who resolve this dilemma by choosing the worst possible option: not only ignore the evidence of the unwholesome behavior but trivialize it.
2
As a vietnam vet, he is one of the guys I would welcome having next to me in a surrounded foxhole.
1
As an American who lived in India in the early 1950s and as a teacher of European history, I am not a great admirer of Churchill except for his leadership in World War II. A previous British poster gave an excellent analysis of how that leadership could have proved disastrous if it had continued immediately after the war and prevented decolonization.
Churchill found himself in political exile in the 1930s not because he spoke out against Hitler but because he refused to countenance the Conservative Party's promise of eventual independence for India. He was rather like a stopped clock, stuck in the attitudes of the Boer-War era in which he came of age.
But even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and World War II was definitely one of those times.
He was
4
From BMJ--British Medical Journal on line---
“Without Winston Churchill the NHS would not exist.”
"In his March 21, 1943 broadcast Churchill spoke of the need to establish a National Health Service on 'broad and solid foundations', to provide national compulsory insurance 'from cradle to grave', and to ensure far wider educational opportunities and 'fair competition' so extended that Britain would draw its leaders from every type of school and wearing every kind of tie'.
Quoted from Martin Gilbert's "Churchill: A Life". Page 742."
and … “a National Health Service 'to be shaped by Parliament and made to play a dynamic part in the life and security of every family and home'.
Gilbert, page 847"
That is enlightened leadership. Now in 2018, the United States of America, once a role model of democracy, still doesn’t have health care for all –for ‘the security of every family and home’. And whatever Obamacare has managed to achieve is under strong attack by the GOP and their judges.
For America, the battle for universal health care is about to begin.
Can our politicians mobilize the English language and send it into battle? And enable the US to attain generations-old standards of other civilized nations?
Brett Stephens came not (really) to praise Churchill, but to use him as a prop for a series of cheap, specious, and straw man arguments against progressive critiques of social inequalities.
We can't fully understand racism, bigotry, misogyny - or understand history - Or put behaviors in a robust context - by banning any mention of if such things, or any mention of people with those views. Or dismissing anything good they did because we find they had certain beliefs. That's the same as pretending those ideas don't exist, and pretending that they do not arise from innate human tendencies.
Author Andrew Roberts can be witty and caustic when apt. Cspan has a video of his 2016 speech at the Churchill Center,
" Andrew Roberts --- Winston Wept: The Extraordinary Lachrymosity and Romantic Imagination of Sir Winston Churchill”. He gave plenty of examples of how Churchill was just plain sensitive--- he cried tears more than most leaders.
Here’s a zinger line from Robert’s talk, answering an audience question --- did any other politicians ever exhibit such ‘lachrymosity’? So who else cried a lot?
This was in 2016, and Roberts got a big audience laugh with this zinger:
“I think it would be helpful at the moment for the candidates to cry, rather than the whole of the nation, in the election at the moment.”
(from transcript).
Well, we the people have cried plenty. Much of the public is going through boxes of Kleenex daily watching the constantly worsening news since the election of the Drumpf---who will never shed a tear for anybody.
We need to summon up the courage of a Churchill to get through the next 2 years.
We should note Churchill spent most of his time in India reading books out loud in order to overcome a horrible speech impediment. He begged his way into almost every military assignment he ever saw in his youth. He was ruthlessly brutal to any opposition. He used his aristocratic background to diminish public figures of much greater meritocratic value. He was an absolutely raging alcoholic. And, yes, he helped militarize the Japanese against expanding US naval interests in the Pacific leading directly to Pearl Harbor.
Excellent orator but drastically overrated. The man was a friend to himself. He only served the global interest in so far as England's interests were concerned. This is why the US-Soviet compromise on Berlin was allowed to proceed. Churchill knew the Cold War was coming and he conceded responsibility to the US for the consequences. The sanctity of Britain became the burden of America.
We can talk about principle but the issue will always boil down to national sovereignty. England fears the continent no matter what political philosophy takes charge. Churchill was as much a Brexiteer as any other Englishman.
I'll give respect where respect is due but let's not blow this out of proportion. Churchill was as much responsible for Gallipoli as he was for anything else.
Amen. Btw, the lingua franca is English, not German. It is easy to oppose past decisions without hearing incoming of any type.
1
Can one hope that, for children today, there will be no memory of a president named trump, except as, perhaps, a character in animation, or a pejorative adjective?
Churchill was the greatest wartime leader in the history of humanity.
The idea of the possible perfectibility of humankind is the seed of tragedy.
All he did was to save the World!! That works for me.
Attacking an unbalanced caricature with a selective canonization does not help us approach a rounded portrait, let alone truth.
The last sentence is just plain inscrutable.
1
Born in Victoria's reign, Churchill had one foot firmly planted in the 19th century: a Great Britain which ruled a quarter of the earth and its human population; and the other in the 20th, the century in which colonialism, at least the Victorian variety of it, became extinct.
Yet, no other leader of Great Britain, in its existential war with Hitler, could probably have pulled his country through in 1939-1945.
That being the case, it's not surprising that Churchill has had no shortage of critics over the years. Yes, it's possible to be both and Churchill admirer and a realist at the same time, as I consider myself.
Brilliant article. And an illustration that, quite frankly and simply, both right and left have the tendency to dumb things down. What do we do? I am quite conservative by nature, but have subscribed to the NYT for over 30 years. I find their editorial board quite predictable and narrow minded, but will continue is to read. There is always hope. Have a great Holiday.
1
AS I READ CHURCHILL'S Admonishment, In defeat, defiance, I hear the melody "Why oh why Delilah?" And when I read Orwell's anthem in Animal Farm--Beasts of England, beasts of Ireland, Beasts of every land and clime, Hearken to my joyful tidings
Of the golden future time." I hear Beethoven's setting to Schiller's Ode to Joy (which admittedly I find to be the most excruciating joy I've ever heard--maychance that is why they call the noises accompanying orgastic passions, "les petites morts.") But never mind. Whatever Churchill's utterances, he rallied the British with, We Shall Never Withdraw! While Trump is rallying the US by whining to Kim Jung On, You build my hotels? Mr. Little Rocket Man? Trump brought that blank check back signed, sealed and delivered. In his dreams. For Trump provides no anodyne for the excruciating torment to which he subjects the English tongue. And all other parts!
Churchill is one of those few colossal figures who manage to make virtually anyone following them seem smaller than life. A great and brilliant man and a savior of civilization. Thanks for this timely and timeless commentary. And here's to the idiocy of Twitter (and was ever a 'service' better named).
Churchill is solely responsible for 3 Million Indians starving to death in Bengal, India during WW II. He took away all the grain grown there to feed his troops.
When the Canadians and the Australians begged him to divert one of their ships laden with wheat to Bengal to relieve the suffering he refused and sent it on to England as reserve food for his troops. The man is a monster as far as Indians are concerned.
2
How ironic that a white American man, part of a (mostly) white nation that violently rejected British imperialism, seems to think that the quintessential British racist imperialist was a nice guy (because he was ruling over non-whites he considered inferior).
This is one long apologia for imperialism. There's never any interest in whether the peoples of Africa or Asia wished to be ruled by the British.
Perhaps we should look to see what another famous Englishman had to say about imperialism.
"I know nothing about British or American imperialism in the Far East that does not fill me with regret and disgust."
"The treatment of colour nearly always horrifies anyone going out from Britain, & not only in South Africa."
-J.R.R. Tolkien
2
What's the worry? We now have a Churchillian Boris Johnson, who's brought us Brexit (instead of the Gallipoli offensive and the 1926 return to the Gold Standard), as well as his own Churchill biography.
To paraphrase Marx, the first time as Shakespearean drama, the second time as Shakespearean farce.
Whereas we Americans have to settle for the pitiful figure of Trump.
7
By all means give credit where it is due. Churchill was a war time hero whose greatest achievement was to channel the collective will of his people in defiance against evil. But don't push it. The same traits that endeared him during a perilous time morphed into immoderate utterances in peace time some of which were and remain appalling. We should be grateful to him for his service to his country but we ought to be wary of overgilding his laurels. There are others like MLK and Gandhi who prevailed over hatred and ignorance not because of their rambunctiousness but because they demonstrated a kind of humility and decency whilst avoiding demonizing their opponents which they believed would prevail in the long view. They even died for it. Behold those heros.
13
“In defeat, defiance” is another great Churchillian maxim, and it’s hard to name a single political figure today who embodies it — as opposed to, say, “in defeat, early retirement to avoid a difficult primary.”
In a just world, Paul Ryan and Jeff Flake would both read that graph and cringe.
7
Where are the conservative heros of today Mr. Stephens? The answer of course is there are none, they are all gone. Mr. Stephens must retreat to the past to extoll the virtues of conservatism. The liberal horror to which he responds in this column is of course a tweet. Churchill would be baffled, dismayed and amused.
6
“The decadence of the present”. This is what will be uncovered by future historians as they sift through the ashes of the fallen American empire. The Trump presidency will be as incomprehensible to them as the rein of Caligula in Ancient Rome is to us. The record of “what was it like to live in those times” will be lost with the collapse of today’s network technology and all that will be left will be random complaints saved on scraps of old silicon revealing a people who talked about problems but who were afraid to solve them. They will say to themselves how lucky they are not to have lived in those terrible times.
8
Churchill, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, JFK, Pierre Trudeau - pick any important historical figure of the 20th or any other century and you will inevitably be able to “label” them with a behavioural trait (racist, alcoholic, adulterer, sexual predator, egotist, etc.) which is considered unacceptable by today’s or any day’s standards. Most of us common folk would also fail that test, but I am sure would argue that “we held those views” or “did those things” when we were younger or not well informed and that we have “grown”. To go back into history, as some have done with Gandhi, for example, find one quote, or focus on one action taken or not taken, and to discount all of the other achievements of that person’s entire life based on that one instant is not just unfair, it is expecting perfection, which will always lead to disappointment. That some of the folks who are being so judgemental of historical figures are simultaneously able to justify supporting those who, not only have achieved nothing, but who have obvious and massive soul- and nation-destroying moral flaws, is truly incomprehensible. Maybe it’s the fault of the failed education system or of media over-saturation, but we need people to think more about these complex issues and not act like lemmings and go over a cliff.
13
Inevitably all human beings are flawed. Historical figures, of course, make it easier for us to see their flaws. Anyone with a modicum of understanding of history knows this. In America, the vast majority of people are not conversant with world history or even geography for that matter. They tend to view things in black and white. Of course, this does not work when it comes to living breathing human beings. For my part, I say let's praise Churchill when we should, but not paper over his flaws. He was a man, after all, not a god.
7
Praise him for sure but the fact is he was a bigot by any standard of any period. I despise the man. All I can say is that white people will say that he was a great man reading books like this. The fact is that Churchill was responsible for the death of millions.
2
Thank you for his column, Mr. Stephens. I admonish you with another of Churchill's maxims: "Never give up, never give up, never give up.
4
To judge people who lived in the past by the standards of today is a fool's errand. It's pointless and hopeless, and everyone will fall short. Churchill, like most of us, was a man of great contradictions. He may have held racist views, but at the same time he defeated one of the most evil racists history has ever known. Some of his beliefs may seem appalling to us now, but when we look at the totality of his life and work, his strengths are numerable and remarkable, and without him Europe and the world would be very different today.
16
Did Churchill actually display "magnanimity" in victory? Let's set aside twitter hectoring and look at some evidence--evidence provided by Andrew Roberts on page 881 of his new biography: "Equating the mild-mannered Clement Attlee who had served Churchill loyally and well throughout the Coalition Government, for much of it as his deputy, to the Gestapo was clearly absurd, and it cost the Conservatives votes." In his long life, I'm sure Winston Churchill displayed plenty of magnanimity. However, fresh off the greatest victory of his life, his June 4, 1945 broadcast attacking Attlee was a shameful low point, worse than "absurd." And British voters tossed Churchill overboard--not just for that shameful lack of magnanimity, but the low blow didn't help the Tories.
Excellent article.Thank you!
A flawed man, as certainly Churchill was, allows us to have access to his great qualities (as I have yet to know of such a person without any flaws) and he therefore gives us permission to at least try to pursue greatness for the good of others, bumbling along, falling, getting up, trying again. His condition of being, well, human, endears me to him, all the more. And I loved that he took naps, :) even during recurring Blitz campaigns conducted by the Germans.A great man. A great leader.
5
As public education declines, there is a parallel erosion of the fundamental values necessary for Democracy. Our present political crisis is a direct result of the failure of public education that began in the educational reforms of the 1970’s and continues to this day.
10
Some things puzzle me that probably shouldn't, if only because I should get used to conventional behavior. There's an aspect of that opening anecdote about Scott Kelly that puzzles me.
I know that the propagation of taboos and the springing of gotchas are games people play in American society today, but I don't understand why those who come under attack cave in so readily. What exactly can be done to a retired astronaut, or to most of us who don't stand to lose our livelihoods? For that matter, why should even public figures lack the gumption to talk back?
Is it just that there's now a general fear of being seen out of step? I associate that fear with high-school days (though I myself perversely made a point of not doing what everybody was doing, and almost rebelled when my anxious parents bought me a madras shirt).
Whatever became of that hallowed Americanism, "Sue me"? Was it demobilized and sent to Siberia while the nation slept?
6
The United States has been indifferent to history generally and its own in particular. Instead we simply mythologize American exceptionalism. By doing so, generations of Americans have been deprived of historical villians and heroes they might use to instill revulsion for contemporary rogues and reverence for the heroes of our own era.
We all learn our values from example. Our failure to teach the human virtues and vices from real examples of real people without creating Saints and Satans makes learning morality more difficult in each generation.
2
Almost every praising and rebuke in the comments are quite true. So be it. Why can't both be equally admitted, with the former celebrated, and the latter excoriated, as they should be. H
The most salient point for out time is his charm, eloquence and wit. Of wit, Trump has not a whit.
7
To those who judge the words and actions of those from 50 years ago, your words and actions may look similarly wrong 50 years from now.
Maybe 50 years from now unnecessary late term abortions after the fetus can feel excriciating pain will be viewed in outrage.
Maybe 50 years from now when meat is grown in industrial facilities, the raising and killing of animals will provike outrage.
Maybe 50 years from now, treating any person differently for any reason because of race will be an outrage.
Maybe 50 years from now, blocking any speech by government or non government or individuals will be seen as an outrage.
Maybe 50 years from now, judging the actins of those in the past by current standards will be seen as an outrage.
5
I am a man of the left roughly where social democracy, democratic socialism and green politics meet. Yet, I agree with Mr. Stephens about Churchill. Flawed, yes. Who isn't? But when it really mattered he saved the world .
His role in Asquith's great reforms before WW Iwas major. This was the government that passed a people's budget, hobbled the House of Lords forever, began the welfare state.
When I visited Chartwell, his home, I walked by the hut where he worked and I found myself crying. I am only partly Jewish, but Churchill saved my life.
In my book, the two greatest leaders of the 20th century are Churchill in the first half and Mandela in the 2nd half. Both did their hardest work before they came to power and both summoned the courage of their peoples because they had demonstrated unusual courage. Churchill in being written off as a has-been (the wilderness years) for warning about Hitler and the need to rearm. Mandela for emerging from 27 years in prison prepared to lead a nation out tyranny into democracy.
11
To reprise Mr. Churchill, Mr. Stephens is a modest journalist, with much to be modest about.
6
An historic, inspiring quote--- "Churchill mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.”
Compare to our current president.
Trump mobilizes, then demeans and disgraces the English language. He sends it into daily battle to insult any opposition, to fight against -- not for-- the rule of law. And to show disrespect for the American people and democracy.
5
Churchill et al were men of their times. Had they been born today, they'd not have espoused the values they did generations ago. Just as many of their critics today, had they been born earlier, would've been guilty of the very sins they now so loudly decry.
7
Truly a wonderful biography of a great man. Thank God he, and not Halifax, replaced Chamberlain in 1940. What was most fascinating to me was how he really appears to have been destined for his heroic role- the number of times he narrowly escaped death in war and in accidents ( including when he was run over in traffic on 5th Ave in 1931 when he looked the wrong (English) way) was amazing. And what a great sense of humor (yet another human trait lacking in our current “leader”.)
10
After Churchill had lost the 1945 election, he came back to the Commons and walked round alone for a bit. He was met at the door of the barber's shop by the Commons barber whom he knew and had cut his hair for years. The barber tried to say what everyone who had gone through the war felt, somehow. He told Churchill how sorry they all were about the election result. An eyewitness told me the respnse he got when I worked in the Commons in the early sixties, when Churchill was still an MP. "Get back in your shop" snarled the great man "and don't presume to discuss politics with me".
6
It's too bad Robert E. Lee did not have such a retrospective.
3
Berating liberals for criticism of Churchill is easy. To face up to the flaws of an icon difficult.
Churchill was considered a failure before he came to power in the 1940s. His urging of the Gallipoli campaign ended with abject failure, led to his resignation, and followed him into WW2. When he pushed for another underbelly invasion, US generals were more than just skeptical. They saw diversion from D-Day.
When WW2 ended, the British people were quick to vote him out. His domestic policies were not as good as Stephens may think.
Churchill was an imperialist. He detested Ghandi and ridiculed his dress when he came to England concerning Indian independence.
Churchill was Colonial Secretary when major decisions were made about the Middle East. Decisions that reverberate until today.
Those who dare criticize idols make easy targets. To question a Churchill, Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, etc. is to invite sharp rebuttals. Heroes are to be admired, not placed among the plebeians.
The sad truth may be that all these “great” figures of history are just as “human” as the obscure. They are complex with both noble and flawed characteristics. Creating a hagiography does a disservice. It produces a flawless marble not a man, and it would overlook the failings that are inherent to our species.
9
Warts and all, Churchill was among the greats.
6
My father was born in Scotland. His father, my grandfather, served as a private and rifleman in the Lincolnshire regiment for over 20 years. He shared at least two battlefields with Churchill. They were both members of Lord Kitchener’s expedition to the Sudan in 1898. My grandfather had two campaign medals related to Sudan, for battles at the Atbara River and at Khartoum. Churchill wrote a book on the expedition called “The River War” since both battles took place along the Nile. Afterwards, they both went to the Boer War in South Africa. Churchill and I had fathers born in the UK and mothers from upstate New York. I am a retired Air Force colonel, and when I was sent Vietnam in 1966, I brought a collection of Kipling’s poems. “So ship me somewheres east of Suez”, which they did.
8
"Finally: Churchill, notes Roberts, was able to rouse Britain 'because the battles and struggles of the Elizabethan and Napoleonic wars were then taught in schools, so the stories of Drake and Nelson were well known to his listeners.' That also cannot be said of us today."
The phenomena of tribalism, Trumpianism, and alt-right conservatism which has challenged global political dynamics since 2010 parallels Stephens' observations. It can be argued that the generations which have been so quick to reflexively reflect their frustrations with perceived short-changing ceased being schooled in the devastating consequences of similarly reactionary thinking that placed Hitler, Mussolini, Hirohito, and Stalin in power prior to WWII.
Unlike previous generations, who knew first-hand the horrors of WWII, what led us into it, and its aftermath, 1950s prosperity in which wealth and opportunity were relatively evenly distributed dominate post-WWII generational memories. Attention to inter-word-war history, at least at the secondary school level, which is what most voters have experienced, generally diminished beginning in the 1960s.
When viewed in this light, it's little wonder that we find ourselves inhabiting the regressive world that we live in today. Until our secondary education catches up with the contemporary world, and the lessons that past erratic behaviors only will produce similarly catastrophic results are emphasized, we only can expect our situation to grow worse over time.
4
@Peter G Brabeck....the media never mentions the 1950s and after, of prosperity in which wealth and opportunity were relatively evenly distributed ---compared with today. If the media would bring these comparisons into discussions, the public would be armed to argue with the GOP's exploitive policies.
Stephens won't mention this.
1
Perhaps Shakespeare said it best and succinctly; "The evil that men do lives after them. The good is oft interred in their bones."
6
How sadly ironic that, while Churchill and our current ‘leader’ (aka Individual-1) were both born on third base, the former pursued a higher calling that challenged him to score many hard fought victories as well as suffer quite a few humiliating defeats, he willed himself, his country and his allies to turn the tide and help save the free world as he knew it then. The latter, however, has never been anything more than an indulgent grifter who cheated his way to the top yet still couldn’t legitimately claim victory because of his fears, his insecurities and his amorality … a cruel narcissist whose only goal was to put himself above others, above the law and above his country by betraying it to its most powerful sworn enemy for his own personal greed. His next act could be prison.
While both men have been judged as far from perfect, the accomplishments of one will always outweigh those of the other. Alas, they’ll never be in the same class!
6
“Being born into “privilege” is ipso facto a privilege.”
Arguing against this basic fact, particularly as it relates to a man born into Victorian Britain, makes me wonder if Stephens actually understood any part of Churchill’s life.
If Churchill had been born the son of a coal miner, he never would been able to attend Harrow no matter how smart he was. He never would have been commissioned an officer in the 4th Hussars no matter how brave he was. A son of a coal miner had no realistic chance of becoming a MP in 1900, even he were a particularly brave army sergeant major or a particularly intelligent autodidact. How then could he have achieved his later high offices?
Churchill was undoubtedly driven and hard-working, but none of that would have resulted in the prime minsiter we know from the history books had he not significant advantages in his birth. That’s being born into privilege is ipso factor privilege, no matter how much conservatives and duck and weave around the obvious facts.
4
I was born the son of a Scottish immigrant who worked in the WV coal mines for over ten years after high school. He sought a better job in Niagara Falls, where I was born. Thanks to a competitive NY State Regents exam, I was awarded a modest scholarship good for any college in the state. I commuted to what is now SUNYB and received a degree in engineering and an ROTC commission in the Air Force. Due to poor vision, I volunteered to become a weather officer and my first year was spent at NYU studying meteorology, which I enjoyed much more than engineering, and decided to stay in the service. Three years later, I was sent to MIT for two years (1962-64) where I receive masters degrees in Meteorology and Aeronautics-Astronautics. I retired as a colonel. So it can be done. Thanks to lucky timing, three of my classmates at MIT joined the club of 12 moon walkers. They were Aldrin, Mitchell and Duke.
3
@JSK I’m very happy for you that you did so well in life. However, I’m not sure how it is relevant to my point or this article. Stephens is saying Churchill’s story disproves the idea that being born into privilege is a privilege unto itself. And unless I’m misunderstanding your story, you are not Churchill and you were not born into Victorian Britain. You did not become the British prime minister. Your story, impressive as it is, has no bearing on how much Churchill’s high birth gave him crucial access with which he got opprtunities that made him prime minister.
1
If we could just find those perfect people who always said and did the perfect things.
Folks who make perfect decisions with imperfect data.
Sigh.
5
At the end of “Saving Private Ryan”. the leading character, a platoon leader played by Tom Hanks, is killed. His dying words, spoken to the saved Private Ryan, are “Earn this.” We have failed our father’s sacrifice. Our children are ignorant because we have failed to educate them. As a result, our grandchildren will probably have to repeat it.
12
Sir Winston Churchill was a Victorian who lived most of his life in the 20th century. There is no doubt that had he not become Prime Minister in 1940 the UK may very well have given in to Hitler. He was a man of his times and as a historian myself I believe it is wrong to judge the past by the present. In his army career Churchill proved himself courageous. I believe he well deserves the recognition as one of the greatest British premiers in history it is just a pity that we don't have his like in our current parliament.
9
It is oh-so-easy for those of us living in this .....ahem.... enlightened modern age to condemn those in the past for being products of the era they lived in and that shaped their lives and their weltanschuungen.
People are going gonzo bashing Washington for slaveholding and Lincoln for not being fast enough on the button for emancipation.
People are being unjustifiably pilloried for hewing to some of the conventional wisdom of the age they hail from. Every day, some new prominent figure is rhetorically flogged in the public square.
It is the world the way it is in your time that shapes your life, not the way it will be centuries hence.
This is a form of intellectual puerility that grates on my nerves. It is the unnerving arrogance of the present. Remember, this country elected Trump. It is now wallowing in his revolting prejudices and doing so with breathtaking moral confidence. So, it's perhaps time to give others their due in a thoughtful fashion.
9
What is missing from this is that Churchill was a politician, elected and in office for 50 years!. Years that included two World Wars, a Great Depression, the successful and peaceful integration of the working man into The State, the transformation of The Empire into A Commonwealth. In all of which he acted while remaining an engaged parliamentary politician.
Extraordinary! How did he do it?
He had a certain genius and courage but above all through application and hard work. When he became Minister of Munitions in 1917 and ran the industrial side of WW1 he installed a camp bed in his office annex for the duration
8
What an outstanding article. Thanks Bret-political correctness has truly gone rouge.
3
There are too few mega-heroes these days unless, alas, we are restricted to the silver screen variety. At university I studied comparative religion and was fortunate enough to be introduced to Joseph Campbell's Hero With a Thousand Faces. Every culture reveres the Hero & Heroine (C.S. Lewis - Till We Have Faces). Today, it's mostly sports celebrities who undertake the road to initiation/journey/defeat victory/transformation/redemption. For our own sake, we hunger for stories of those who mirror our own struggles yet in a magnified manner. For me, Churchill is one such hero. Say what you want about his shortcomings, and there were many, but Western Civilization teetered on the brink of an abyss in the not-too-distant past and this one person - against all reason and all odds - stood up to a manifest darkness and rallied the free world: The Last Great Lion
11
May is no Churchill. She is not much planner, strategist, or negotiator either.
After keeping none of her specific, key promises to voters, she should feel inadequate and embarrassed. She also misled the UK saying 'No deal is better than a bad deal.' Her deal was so bad, she had to withdrew it from a vote.
Standard economic theory says free trade ensures all possible benefits. Well, not really. China has done way better than the US, which gave China access to the US's huge consumer market. We did the same for Germany, Japan, Formosa, and the Korea. Those were not smart free-trade moves for us either.
What is smart? Both sides subject to the same rules on the same things. Lack of tariffs is no assurance either. Non-tariff barriers can bar trade just as effectively. Ask Japan.
The EU is basically a cartel protecting members from free trade as much as it promotes free trade within. Outside the EU WTO rules CAN apply. To get WTO rules with nations inside the EU, one must negotiate with each nation individually.
The EU's other imagined gains accrue mainly to its getters not to its givers (like the UK).
EU currency is solid for the present.
Its Central Bank the same.
Its rules are great for hobbling initiative.
Its unelected government is a danger to democracy.
The UK will surely face adjustments outside the EU, but none so great it cannot overcome. The longer the UK is out of the EU, the easier the UK should overcome any adjustment hardships.
My Christmas present to me! Can't wit to start it. No telling when I will finish it. But I shall read him in the towns and on the beaches.
8
many thanks for your incisive and accurate summation of mr. churchill. can't wait to read the new bio. i found william manchester's trilogy fascinating and a must read for those who wish to see the great man close-up and appreciate his brilliance. he shared some of the faults of his generation, as we all do. that makes him human.
6
Agree. I’m close to finishing the first book of Manchester’s, so far, really brilliant trilogy biography.
He was a man of his time, but also prescient about the future of nations, nation-states, communism and dictators in many ways.
I really think it’s unfair to judge all politicians of a time because they share, to whatever degree, the values of those times. There have always been progressive voices throughout history, but they didn’t always start there.
Churchill was a conservative, but he saw fairness and equality as the future. And remained true to himself.
A far cry from what “conservative” seems to be about now.
Importantly, he grew into his ideas.
5
Has the third volume of Manchester’s biography of Churchill been published?
We are all a product of our times, and our attitudes should be judged accordingly. Opinions and comments deemed acceptable or indeed progressive today may seem outrageously bigoted fifty years from now—assuming civilization still survives in the absence of leaders like Churchill with the principles, courage and compassion to put their country's and planetary interests ahead of their own, even when in disgrace with fortune and the court of public opinion.
11
As a full throated progressive, I am concerned that those of us who find it nesessary to tear down historical figures and make sure that everyone "deserving" of judgement and is then firmly corrected in regards to thier short comings, are spending thier time, energy and focus on the wrong thing. Time spent being criticle, especially in regard to some historicle figures, is time not spent defining, promoting and pursuing a progressive agenda for the future. We all know what ugly looks like. What people don't need is for those who would feel the need to judge it as such, shoving it down everyones throat because there are those who feel the need to do so. As if we dont get it? People do. What changes thier mind is not being corrected, but being accepted and empowered. We sometimes become what we hate and those of us in the progressive movement who feel the need to correct everyone and everything, drive those who might listen toward those who will keep them safely in the pardigm that keeps them from growing toward the betterment of all. Just my two cents .
7
Since Roberts managed to turn out an equally enthusiastic biography of Napoleon, I have my doubts on this one.
Is his oeuvre great men, or merely big ones?
1
I have heard that many Indians keep portraits of the Queen on their walls. I haven't heard of anyone so far who keeps a picture of Churchill.
1
I generally enjoy reading your columns - your arguments are well crafted and your erudition quite enjoyable. Despite not agreeing with many of your positions, I think of you as a great writer and a very intelligent person. This is part of the reason I feel shocked and deeply dismayed by your assertion that - Being born into “privilege” is (NOT) ipso facto a privilege. Really?
A poor child born in the slums, malnourished and deprived of opportunities for growth is not, according to you, someone with less privilege than Churchill? Churchill was educated, obviously well fed, enjoyed deep connections to powerful people, had money, was male and white - variables that allowed him to be in a position to lead his nation. Without them, he would not have had the requisite education or the necessary leisure to learn and develop his person. Without his social class and deep connections to powerful people who saw him as like them he would not have had the necessary support to ascend to power. The fact that Churchill used his privilege well to do some good things for the world does not mean he was not privileged. Why do the powerful deny that the positions of power they occupy are not entirely natural or a product of their "talent and intellect" only, but a function of their position in the social order. Why do elites like you deny this simple and self-evident fact?
8
Please read the piece again. I think you missed the nuances. Good column about a great if troubled man.
I am currently writing a screenplay about his wife Clementine Hozier Churchill who was equally remarkable. I have come to understand through a year of research, that warts and all he was the most extraordinary human being, far surpassing FDR and so many others. Churchill grew intellectually (his mind was dazzling) and emotionally as a human being in his life, admitted mistakes and learned from them. Very few leaders are strong and confident enough to do that. When death threats were waged against Gandhi he reached out to let Gandhi know and offered England’s resources to stop them. His early realization of the depth of Hitler’s madness and where it could lead made him prescient. His clear understanding of the poison of nationalistic thinking a decade before the rest of the world made him a visionary. His marriage was one of equals and a true love relationship. He was deeply compassionate and must be viewed through lens of his time. Because we live in a world that’s so ignorant of history we lose the thread of his message which was peace.
17
“He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle,” John F. Kennedy said (stealing a line from Edward Murrow)....
I fondly remember Murrow's great "I Can Hear It Now" recordings on which that line was first spoken. But Murrow didn't write the script; that credit goes to Fred Friendly.
6
Mr. Churchill diverted shiploads of Australian grain that had arrived in India to ease the famine (some say caused by British policies). He sent the grain to Europe and British soldiers, to increase reserve stocks.
Perhaps a necessary tough decision, but some have estimated that over four million Bengalis died because of this and similar decisions. Dr Shashi Tharoor, in his book Inglorious Empire, quotes Churchill: ‘I hate the Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion’, suggesting that Churchill's compassion for the Indians was not great.
7
The Irish potato “famine” followed the same pattern. While millions of Irish either died or emigrated after a crop blight. The English were sending Irish beef to London.
I have been enduringly disappointed that William Manchester was never able to complete the third volume of his biography of Churchill. I hope that this volume will fill in some of the gaps. I also hope that this volume recounts some of Churchill’s hilariously biting exchanges with Violet Asquith.
My favorite exchange of Churchillian quips however was with George Bernard Shaw: Shaw invited Churchill to attend the opening of one of his plays and to bring a friend “if you have one”. Churchill relied that he regretted he could not attend the opening but would attend the second performance “if there is one”.
15
Old boy, you're getting pretty worked up over a single tweet by a brave hero of our own.
Such over reaction usually means there is more to the story.
3
Take him or leave him, but what's interesting here is the love "conservatives" have for authority figures, the insistence that others likewise pay tribute, and the fury at those who decline to worship the shrine.
The Cult of St. Ronnie is the more obvious example, but there's no shortage of other figures, as long they're not liberals, since the principle (worship) is what's at issue.
What if the cliches about the personality traits of right-wingers are all true?
7
Bravo. Aren't we all just trying by trial and error to become more human. That was Churchill. Additionally, his quick wit was emblematic of his enormous creativity. This combined with an iron will made him extraordinary. If each of us could just seek our better angels instead of letting triggered anger turn into vitriol. God bless this noble soul. As to the historian, I have read about Churchill voluminously and I hope this man still found something new to engage the reader in a lengthy work. Your short work here is elegant. Gary Oldham in a recent film also brought Churchill to life. We miss him. Thank you.
14
It is possible to recoil from people’s ugly deeds, while simultaneously venerating them for their moments of glory.
For me, not the most flag-waving of folk who has a deep love of the gentle soul of the English countryside and less so for flags, jingoism or pomp, this moment never fails to make my blood run hot, a lump appear in my throat and a break in my voice:
“We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight on the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender...”
10
Absolutely.
Terrific show done years ago at the Morgan about Churchill. Difficult to keep eyes from welling up at the words that kept Hitler from conquering the earth.
1
Whenever one of my normally wonderful students refuses to acknowledge the virtues of historically impolitic figures, I ask them which social vices later historians will fault them for. Sanctimony, alas, never comes up.
19
The example Churchill gives us today?
You don't need to know much about Churchill to reflect on the example he gives us today but which is so sorely lacking in our world. Nor do you need to know much about Beethoven or Shakespeare or Leonardo Da Vinci or Charles Darwin or Einstein or Freud or any of the other towering geniuses.
The primary lesson they offer is the importance of the great synthetic, creative, totalizing, radiating, comprehensive mind. Our modern world seems to favor rather the opposite mind: One which depends as much as possible on other people and has a limited, marketable skill set. We offer in the modern world any number of reasons for the decline of great towering geniuses, whether theories that science can no longer advance for this reason or that without teamwork and decline of the great solitary individual, or that politics is extremely dangerous if allowing great individuals to thrust themselves forward, but it's undoubtable we live in a greatly impoverished world, with all great artists and scientists and leaders virtually past, and something of the theory that society is supposed to advance, get better, develop without really much emphasis on any individuals within society, as if we are not only perfecting collective behavior, thought and action without emphasis on the individual but that the individual is the problem to the realization of humanity and the thorn in the side of the theory of history.
I doubt Churchill is even possible today.
9
Well said!!!
1
Any quote taken out of context can be used to make a point; "in defeat, defiance" seems to be the approach taken by Republicans at the state level in Wisconsin, where Scott Walker managed to strip incoming Democrats of the power they won at the ballot box in November. Yes, some Republicans have opted to retire from Congress rather than be defeated at the polls, but others are defying the will of the voters who ousted them from office, and it would've been better to be GRACIOUS in defeat rather than defiant, in order to preserve the integrity of America's democratic process.
8
Whether Churchill is a hero or a villain by today's standards is irrelevant. He did not live in the culture of the 21st century and can only be judged in relation to the beliefs that prevailed in his own time.
I would speculate that even the most self-righteous of today's justice warriors might well have been slave owners if they had lived as part of such a culture in earlier times. In fact, their demonstrated conformity to the beliefs of their friends and associates makes that even more likely. And I would venture to predict that even the most virtuous and self-satisfied of us will not stand up well against whatever standards and norms apply a century from now.
22
Thank you for this timely and insightful column on Winston Churchill who, bar-none, was the greatest statesman of the 20th century. There’s little doubt among today’s best and brightest historians that without Churchill’s determination and leadership World War II might have ended another way. An incredibly courageous and brilliant man Churchill was and America is the benefactor of his remarkable accomplishments.
12
I have searched but cannot find it, but an unforgettable moment. A history of WW2. The first mention of Winston Churchill. Asterisk. Footnote, "The savior of his country"
1
My introduction to Oregon's 2018 Biennial Climate Report leads with this quote: “Owing to past neglect, in the face of the plainest warnings, we have now entered upon a period of danger. . . . The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences. . . . We cannot avoid this period; we are in it now.” Winston Churchill, in the House of Commons, November 1936. For all his failings, Churchill's vision and courage on critical issues at critical inflection points are virtues in all too short supply today. Our children will suffer greatly for their absence.
19
I was born and raised in India. My parents lived through the WWII years as teenagers. While there is no doubt that Churchill harbored racist view points and spoke contemptuously of non-whites, he also was a great leader for the Britain of his time.
As such, my father was a great admirer of Churchill's leadership skills. This despite living through Churchill's complicity in the great famine in Bengal.
18
I am using this book (one of about 20 I have about this man) precisely in the way Bret Stephens recommends-as an antidote to the present. I also use Churchill as an inspiration when work seems to overwhelm-any trial I face pales before his work during the war. He was a magnificently imperfect man, but he was the man of his hour in May 1940. Made many mistakes but did not let them silence him. Got depressed (the Black Dog) but found ways to rise above and beyond it (e.g. Painting as a Pastime). The definition of a great man-which is not the same as a perfect man. btw if you read this book you need to put it on a pillow...
17
I thoroughly enjoyed reading your piece about Winston Churchill. The part that saddens me is that 20 percent of British youth believe he was a fictional character. That fact simply illustrates the failure of our educational system. I believe it is essential to teach young people about the heroes (imperfect as they were) who have shaped our world of today. The internet can and should be used for so much more than vapid entertainment and a place to anonymously insult those with whom we disagree. It is the desire of my heart that we, the human race, can collectively choose a brighter path for tomorrow for each and every one of us. To accomplish that goal, we must learn from those who have gone before.
9
Consider that attitudes change so much that most of us could not sit down and have a civil conversation with people as they were 50 years ago. Hostility would quickly develop as the different attitudes became apparent. The interaction would be even worse with people from earlier centuries. There is no point in carrying on about these differences. Accept the fact that human culture evolves and hopefully we improve with time. Accept what we consider was good in the past, and learn from what we consider was not. However, for those of you who are so dogmatic about this: be prepared for the likelihood that young folks living 50 yrs from now will find your ideas to be offensive and intolerable. Better to apologize now.
6
@Bill Fifty years? I think you are totally wrong about this. For *some* people, perhaps. But not all. You can say the same thing about people today.
@Hayford Peirce I have been alive long enough to see ideas that were taken for granted are now considered offensive. For example, folks who are anti-gay rights can expect widespread and vocal opposition, whereas attitudes were the opposite 50 years ago.
1
I read “The Last Lion” by William Manchester when I was on a month long trip without any distractions. It was a slog but worth it; he was an extraordinary human, a Victorian man who was PM during the nuclear age. Nobody is perfect but I certainly can’t imagine anyone whose accomplishments so outweighed his faults like Churchill.
14
I am a big fan of Churchill but it is nonsense to elevate any figure from history to either the heroic or denigrate to the demonic. They were all flawed human beings who, at the moment in history in which they lived, made some great, life and history changing, contributions. They also made some huge mistakes and often, as human beings are inclined to do, acted selfishly.
It is unfortunate that how we think about them in retrospect has less to do with a careful and dispassionate analysis of history but rather with what tribe we currently identify.
Many of the commenters here echo the remarks in Douthat’s column on “WASPs.” The vituperation and hatred, based on little more than cultural identity, is another marker of continual cultural and intellectual decline.
6
Someone of note once said that all political lives end in failure. This is as it should be in a world of constant change, a sort of Third Law of Politicaldynamics.
Churchill had many political lives during his long life and in accordance with the above Law must have had many failures. He did and very many people suffered unnecessarily from those failures.
Accordingly, Churchill is lionised and demonised in accordance with the competing needs of the 'now'. Usually along tribal lines and to the detriment of his value to the present.
Leaders lives are important if only to show that their flaws are a reflection of ourselves and the human condition.
6
"We reconcile ourselves to the decadence of the present only if we choose to remain ignorant of the achievements of the past."
I do not agree with every policy nor applaud every social attitude Churchill expressed. I will forever argue that Churchill was the right person to head the Government in the U.K. at the start of World War II. I just read Andrew Roberts' Churchill biography; it is a fascinating portrait of a man who overcame complete parental indifference and bullying to become the salvation of a nation. Did he do everything right? Of course not. Do we have any leaders today who could hold a candle to Churchill's determination and undying devotion to true public service? No.
As long as people today CHOOSE to be ignorant of the lessons of past history, we are doomed to suffer the atrocities of authoritarian leaders. Churchill has lessons to teach us all about how to resist authoritarian bullying.
15
Churchill was a great speaker who moved his audience with literarily superb prose. So, in a different way, was Hitler. So is Trump, who moves his audiences with incoherent, almost illiterate prose.
There are probably Churchill speeches defending aspects of the British Empire; these speeches might be very eloquent but we would not find them inspiring. If he had led Britain to a vain and bloody fight against an invading army that had clearly won, how would we hear these speeches?
1
@sdavidc9 Well, if Hitler had won WW II, then I guess we would all be Nazis and copies of his speeches would all have been destroyed. So, we not hear or read his speeches.
I am reminded of the current attacks on Gandhi. Nobody is either the perfect hero nor the demon their detractors choose to make of them. For an objective view of Churchill, I recommend Mancuroc's post in this board (see NYT and Reader Picks).
For a description of the attempt to blind people to the wonderful efforts of Gandhi, I recommend this, and please get back the opening bit and read about what he actually did. We need more of this, if we are to survive our wasteful age and work together to survive the increasing difficulties of climate change and toxic waste. inequality, and climate injustice.
"Gandhi for the Post-Truth Age: The icon’s legacy is no longer secure, but he anticipated much about our current political moment."
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/22/gandhi-for-the-post-truth-age
3
arrgh, typo. Please get
"past" the opening of the New Yorker review, which is fascinating and a reminder of what one man did to help the people.
1
Presentism is a barrier to understanding the past. As a young journalist, Churchill wrote important analysis of the advantage technology conferred on British armies fighting in Africa. Later, as war minister, he had plans to turn the south west of Ireland into a kind of gulag where he might oversee the final defeat of all resistance in Ireland. History, and the Irish diaspora from America to Australia, intervened. Churchill's words on racism in America are still chilling: "The tentacles of slavery spread widely through the Northern “free” states, along every channel of business dealing and many paths of political influence…” It wasn't only a Dixie thing.
1
Let's give Churchill his leadership during the Second World War. But let's not forget that his choices meant that millions died of starvation in India so that the war effort could be sustained. What "he could spare" wasn't enough. This is not an alleged crime. Denouncing the 1919 massacre in Amritsar doesn't absolve him of that. And he never made secret of his contempt for Hindus and their religion as a whole.
So in our disgust with Trump let's not get carried away and declare Churchill a saint.
12
My Stephens says that thanks to all those millions of Indians dying we now have the freedom to condemn him for it. We must all be so grateful.
Good point, but I don’t think anybody said saint. Churchill, like Kipling, was pretty much a “white man’s burden,” kinda guy.
The sad part is, that’s an improvement over the clowns currently running the GOP. All the racism, none of the sneaking feeling of moral responsibility.
1
This is a rather appalling article, verging on genocide denial. The use of scare quotes for 'genocide' in West Bengal, in which 2-4 million people were starved to death, ignores the decades of scholarship by Indian historians that shows that Winston Churchill's decision to not provide aid was willful and malicious, and cannot just be hand waved off by claiming "it was wartime" and "difficult decisions had to be made(odd that such excuses are never applied to Stalin). Stephens pretends that such scholarship doesn't exist, or isn't relevant. That's one of a long list of Churchill's crimes, from his support of poison gas attacks against Arab and Kurdish villages as Secretary of State for War('I am strongly in favor of poison gas attacks against uncivilized tribes' said Churchill), to authorizing the notorious 'Black and Tans' paramilitaries who brutalized and murdered civilians in Ireland. Or, in his second term as British Prime Minister, the incarceration and torture of tens of thousands of Kenyans during the repression of the Mau Mau uprising in the 1950's. None of these barbarities are cancelled out by the fact that Churchill made some nice speeches. It's not 'political correctness' to insist on honoring the memory and humanity of British imperialism's victims. It's simple human decency and a respect for historical accuracy.
28
You make some good points, but they’re counterbalanced by more than just some nice speeches.
It could be argued that Churchill saved democracy in Europe during the 20th century. But for Churchill, would the United States have passed Lend-Lease, giving England the armaments needed to fend off a German invasion? Without England as a base, how would D-Day have been executed, if at all? We might have had a century of brutal totalitarianism in Europe and Asia, instead of 5 years.
Churchill himself was instrumental in prosecuting the war. His recount is thick with tables of ships and men and cannons and planes readied month by month, year upon year. He was keenly aware of the existential threat Hitler presented and, unlike many contemporaries, of the stubbornness and pride and resolve of his countrymen.
A man born in 1899 is bound to have different views that one born in 1999. Sure, he was a paternalistic colonialist. Perhaps one day our progeny will wonder at our wanton destruction of the atmosphere, justified by jobs, progress, and prosperity.
When Stalin robbed Eastern Europe of freedoms only recently won with much bloodshed, a bigot might have shrugged at the plight of so many Slavs. Churchill urged a vigorous fight for liberty and democracy. I’d say that counts as idealism over prejudice.
3
@Samuel D Kenya's Mau Mau uprising was the first terror campaign of the modern era, as the 'freedom fighters' used ghastly atrocities and torture to force their Kikuyu tribesmen to support their unpopular guerilla war against the Brits. Colonialism in Kenya was probably the most benign and benevolently paternalistic the world has ever seen. Unlike many colonial powers, the Brits had prepared Kenya for independence by building a modern functioning government and infrastructure, and trained thousands of Kenyans to run it. Not surprisingly, they reacted in shock and horror to the barbaric cruelty of the Mau Mau terrorists.
Of course, the Mau Mau became the government upon independence, and like all victors, they have written the history, painting themselves as noble patriots, the colonists as brutal oppressors. Those patriots went on to create one of the world's most corrupt countries, riven by tribalism and undermined at every turn by the bottomless greed of anyone fortunate enough to gain public office, with the Kikuyu descendants of the terrorists firmly in charge. That, sadly, is the legacy of the Mau Mau.
2
One of the reasons Churchill is justifiably revered and reviled is that he thought strategically and not just tactically. As the film “Darkest Hour” recounts, he willingly sacrificed the garrison at Calais to preserve the beachhead at Dunkirk.
He allowed the bombing of Coventry to preserve the secrecy of the Enigma code. He persuaded Roosevelt to focus on Europe while delaying American advances in the Pacific.
In advancing all of these strategic priorities he may may be viewed as monstrous if focusing only on the horrific damage his priorities allowed. He may also be viewed as a genius if examining the overall suffering his strategic priorities prevented.
It's refreshing to see Churchill getting the respect and admiration that he deserves (despite those despicable character flaws that mark him as a man of his own time.)
It's dispiriting to see otherwise tolerant individuals like Stephen's (and some of his commentators) so contemptuous of Donald Trump for the character flaws that mark him as a man of his time.) While he never will be characterized as glib or literary, he has accomplished much in the two years while under the most intense (and irrelevant) attacks in recent political history. He will be remembered most for his defiant defense of the The American State and his many actions to promote its sustainability.
3
@Septickal
Would appreciate your providing some - as much as you can, in fact - detail about what exactly shows PT "... has accomplished much in the two years ... " and about what is included in this definition of "The American State."
Yes, there is a word limit on comments but, without a good deal more, this one is but unsupported assertion.
This is a hugely important essay for two (2) reasons.
1) All of us need to remember the remarkable achievements of Sir Winston Churchill. This is especially true for our young people.
2) The Twitter back lash described is the primary reason why I DO NOT USE THIS PLATFORM. If people want to know what I think, there are forums available for me to articulate; without dealing with those miscreants who troll on Twitter.
9
From the minute he replace Prime Minister “ peace in our time “. Gave hope to the citizens of London during the German bombing. Saved the island from invasion. Worked with Roosevelt to defeat Germany and Japan. Never trusted Stalin. And was adored and admired by not just the English, but by citizens all around the world. And yet, right after the war, those same British citizens voted him out of office. Go figure.
7
Scott Kelly is an Astronaut. Is it really conceivable that he apologized over his anodyne compliment of Churchill, one of the seminal leaders of the last 100 years. Please, someone tell me that’s a joke or his Twitter was hacked. I just can’t accept that he really apologized. No way. If true, things are worse than I thought..
13
I object to putting the word genocide in quotes. It belittles the systemic crimes perpetrated against the Indian people by Churchill, and his government. The famine was not one that happened in the natural course of time, it was the direct result of British policies on the Indian subcontinent, because their food supplies were being diverted. Something like 4 million people died. Shrugging it off because it happened in the opposite side of the world, in a different time, to a people deemed different than you, does not make it any less monstrous.
9
He, practically alone, stood up to Hitler and Naziism. None of us can imagine what the world would be now had he not done that.
As Time magazine recognized, he was The Person of the 20th Century.
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@Ed Wasil Well stated. We might be speaking German or Russian today had Churchill, Roosevelt, and others not lived.
11
@Ed Wasil
Hmmm... As I remember, perhaps wrongly, Time picked Einstein as The Person of the 20th Century.
3
@Ed Wasil
And he stood for racism of his own, and used policy to exacerbate famine that caused millions of death (https://www.amazon.com/Churchills-Secret-War-British-Ravaging-ebook/dp/B003VTZXC2).
He fought for the freedom of those he called his own while advocating slavery for those on whose shoulders he and his nation stood and profited.
3
Was it Bismarck who said people who like laws and sausages should never watch either one being made? I imagine the same thing could be said about crafting imperial and colonial policy, whether building or trying to unwind an empire, and wartime policy.
In either case, as to law and policy, practicality is going to have to be the main ingredient, I think, and we can celebrate people who know how to do these things while adding as much high-mindedness as possible to the recipe.
Objective, method, timing, sequence, and pace are all very important and all governed in part by what is possible at any given moment.
I’m grateful to the people who worked to build a world in which there was less war, more prosperity, and less need to build prosperity on the misery and subjugation of others.
The people who worked to achieve all that were not perfect, but I have no reason to think I could have done a better job than the likes of Churchill, FDR, Eisenhower, George Marshall, and the people they worked with. I’m not even confident I could have done a better job than McNamara. Some perspective is in order.
7
@Jack
His high mindedness was a very sophisticated form of propaganda he used to cover for consciously evil deeds which he openly took great pleasure in.
So should Churchill be considered a god up in the firmament, or is the sainthood Mr Stephens wishes to bestow upon Churchill enough?
Churchill was no saint, he was also no demon. Mr Stephens hagiography does not to the man justice anymore than one sided claims of Churchill’s detractors of whom there were many, some with just cause.
Magnanimity does not require us to throw out reason. It should not demand that we scrub our histories clean, so our heroes become pure. It requires compassion, it requires understanding, and sometimes it requires the realization that most people have things about them to extol, and also things to condemn.
People like Mr Stephens...
2
There are two (2) ways to look at political correctness: (a) how far your opinion deviates from the average person in any given social milieu, or (b) whether or not you exceeded some established boundary condition.
The internet has compounded the deviation problem because political correctness is now tested across many cultures. For example, the normative rules for tipping at a restaurant vary dramatically across the globe. Today, more than ever: when in Rome do as the Romans do. This means you can't address the deviation problem until you first define the social milieu.
The boundary conditions come in the form of posted 'Terms and Conditions of Use' or 'community standards'. These too can be subjectively interpreted and enforced, but at least they provide some guidance for the problem.
2
So, Mr. Stephens, where is our modern day 'Churchill' in the GOP or anywhere?
We need him (or her!) now more than ever.
5
Brett Stephens; You are so wrong!! The Bengal famine happened because Churchill horded grains for his army, not by cyclone. Churchill’s bigotry is well documented. Amartya Sen, the Nobel Laureate has shown how the distribution of food grain was the cause of this calamity. This research was cited in his Nobel prize announced. Being chamion of emoure indeed is racist . NYT ought to fact check its columnists.
7
This is a stunning book.
In the 1980s, I met both of the great Churchill biographers of the time, Martin Gilbert and William Manchester. Both of their books are outstanding. Manchester's book is still a joy.
This book by Mr. Roberts, incredibly, is better.
4
Churchill was great for turning to his engineers to solve his problems. The landing craft, tank, & mulberry docks were crucial assets drawn up, engineered & produced out of his mind.
In our time we need a world leader who can hire an engineering staff to give us the systems and machines that will save us from collapsing our food chain.
Churchill is great for having big tools and big systems for them made. He was a romantic pragmatist. -A realistic romantic pragmatist with goals so clear his people supported him when it mattered.
4
Did Churchill want to continue world war 2 to fight the russians?
@RebeccaTouger
Yes; he could not convince FDR of how dangerous Stalin was. He was right about the loss of Eastern Europe. FDR was ill; we were tired of endless war.
1
I'm afraid this piece rather shies away from some of the more ghastly views held by Churchill. He was in favour of using poison gas on "uncivilized tribes" and his thoughts on Jews and Native Americans are beyond the pale. https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2002/nov/28/features11.g21
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@Nullius:
Yes, he wouldn't exactly fit in at a party set in the 21st century, what is your point?
Mine is that he was a human of his own era, as are we all.
6
@Nullius I agree and the list is much longer and involves despicable actions, not only truly racist views. His war strategies were mad and involved treating Indian troops very badly, and using the former ‘Dominions’ of mainly whites - Canadians, Australians and so on, quite unscrupulously. The evidence is most soundly shown by the way his government was thrown out of office immediately after war ended. The Labour Government was the bravest that Britain has ever had, so far.
2
@Nullius....ghastly views?
See Andrew Roberts Nov 5 on cspan re his book. Transcript and video. I watched it. He says his research showed it was tear gas, not poison or mustard gas
And Roberts quote:
“Unlike many of his background and age, he liked Jews. He'd grown up with Jews, his father had liked Jews, he thought the Jews gave the ethics to world civilization… he felt comfortable around Jews.”
Also....Churchill and the Jews, by Martin Gilbert:
“In 1921, while in Jerusalem, Winston Churchill described the Jewish system of ethics as “incomparably the most precious possession of mankind, worth in fact the fruits of all other wisdom and learning put together.”
and--- “Churchill was the peerless champion of the Jewish people.”
Churchill's friend Sir Edward Spears once confided to Martin Gilbert, " Even Winston had a fault. He was too fond of Jews."
See, nobody's perfect!
9
This is a welcome piece by Bret Stephens. The many comments here cover the sweep of Churchill's eventful and controversial life, and one may be left to wonder which Churchill is the one who actually lived his life. The answer of course is, nearly all of them. I personally think his frailties and errors demand context--often very elaborate context-- to be fully understood, and his strengths can stand on their own merit. What comes out in the end, to my mind, is indeed a hero, especially measured against the sniveling, fraudulent politicians of today. Besides, I've never been able to get too angry with a person who writes great copy.
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@Robert The best orator of England!
14
His prose makes me think of Shakespeare. I dog ear pages of his history of WWII to mark some of the best of his phrases.
2
@Robert. Well said, sir.
1
he can't be all bad who who behaves as Orson Welles describes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpqwY7QL7r8
The most authoritative biography backed up with actual document is "Churchill's War", by he-whose-name-cannot-be-mentioned. Christopher Hitchens it confirmed as a piece of valid academic work making significant contributions to our understanding of the REAL Churchill. It contradicts this columnist's hagiography.
Winston Spencer Churchill was a white supremacist nationalist colonial apartheid xenophobic bigot by his father's British and mother's American nature and nurture. Churchill is an iconic poisonous symbol of the worst demons of our human nature.
Churchill was no Mahatma K. Gandhi nor Nelson R. Mandela nor Martin L. King, Jr. nor Frederick Douglass nor Martin Delany nor Malcolm X.
4
Bout he saved us by his iron will and we followed him!!
@Blackmamba Please describe for us the world you envision had Churchill not saved Britain from the Germans. It is highly unlikely that you would be writing aggrieved letters to the editor today.
1
I was hoping that when "you know who" , with fanfare, moved Churchill's bust into his office, something might rub off. Some glimmer of majesty, progress, and leadership. No such luck.
2
Maybe Trump thinks the bust of Churchill is really the bust of the Wizard from Oz. There is some resemblance. Hey, he used smocking instead of smoking. A lot of resemblance there also.
My parents and their friends thought the world of Churchill and cried at his funeral. They sincerely believed he had saved England. Warts and all, he still did a lot of good and, even better, was able to unify a nation.
3
People are complicated as is history. It does not diminish the accomplishments of the great women and men of history to truly study the entirety of their lives. Doing so inevitably finds mistakes, compromises, and moments when they did not meet even their own highest expectations. Trying to force human beings into cookie-cutter images of perfection turns the fascinating study of how individuals rise above their own limitations for rare moments of transcendent leadership into Parson Weems-like fables of unlikely infallibility.
Winston Churchill was a great leader and a flawed human being. He did great things over the course of a long career and he also made mistakes over the course of a long life. His WWII leadership will forever be his legacy, but ignoring his mistakes and all-too-human failings (military, moral, financial) before and after WWII diminishes his life and his success. Trying to turn him into an example of the perfect leader reduces his usefulness as an example and worst of all, it makes him boring. The great lesson of his life and the knowledge that provided his strength as a leader during WWII was that perseverence overcomes adversity.
History is not enhanced by trying to make it simple and straight forward.
10
It is not passing strange. Mr. Stephens, that what remains of the "conservative movement" in the United States has rushed to embrace an autocratic buffoon that Churchill would have so utterly despised? If you have need of food for thought, meditate on that. There can be no greater example of "the decadence of the present" than the Republican partisans who are the direct heirs of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. Senator Orrin Hatch is an outstanding example.
8
A good and inspiring report on Churchill. Dogmatics to the dog pound!
Here's something Churchill would never have done: mock a woman, a victim of sexual assault, in public, before a screaming mob.
Yes, I know, pointing out that Churchill is better than Trump is like shooting ducks in a barrel.
But here's the thing. This very same Bret Stephens who finds criticism of Churchill so maddening and writes about "the decadence of our times," this very same columnist APPLAUDED when Trump mocked Dr. Ford. His theory was that good people - you know, Republicans - need to be bullies.
So please, get off the high horse. As you try to clean up the decadence, start with yourself.
16
I understand your anger at something that did not happen.
Churchill is arguably the most consequential person of the 20th century, even though he died in 1965. There is much room for debate but at the end of his life the Nazis (and the Japanese militarists) had been defeated and the Soviet Union contained (barely) without a shooting war. All that while writing Nobel Prize winning history.
11
Thank for this informative editorial, which highlights the greatness of Churchill, while serving as an antidote to the shallow & ill-informed demonizations of historical figures who deserve much more nuanced evaluations. No one is perfect, & honestly, some of the diatribes against famous people of the past echoes the worst of the old communist regimes, with their systematic re-writing of history, erasures & persecutions of those who didn't fall into line with readjustments to facts. Historical figures need to be assessed within the ethical & moral framework of their own eras. Autres temps, autres moeurs.
5
It seems to me that most of us, across every facet of today’s society, are “guilty” of some or many of the all to common deficiencies that may have been present in W.C. But I see none of the greatness in anyone.
6
@Dan : Good comment. But your words contain their own exposition: "I see none of the greatness in anyone." That has as much to do with you (us all) as with our would-be leaders.
@Des Johnson Agreed. My short comings are many. I could provide a list of witnesses
Sigh. I suspect you're right, and it's not hard to see other things dropping from the national memory. December 7 is barely remembered as Pearl Harbor Day. I forget what the others are....
7
@Stephen Beard
I agree. I noticed that this December 7 I did not see any mention of Pearl Harbor at all, not on television or newspapers. I could be wrong but I was looking for it. Maybe it is trump sucking all the oxygen from the airwaves with his scandals.
1
"The limits of my language are the limits of my world." This observation, I believe, came from the philosopher Wittgenstein.
And so, in mobilizing the English language and being so completely skilled and learned in doing so, it comes as no surprise that Churchill's oratory alone more than helped save civilization from being swallowed up by the life-denying fascists of his day.
By the same token, Trump's vestigial, juvenile grasp of the English language bequeathed to him as his birthright has left him with a seriously limited concept of the world, one that might fit on the head of a pin with plenty of room to spare. He literally cannot conceive a sustainable worldview let alone one of sufficient majesty to inspire. This is but one of many ways that he continues to impoverish your country and the world itself.
Between your country and himself, Trump continues to believe himself to be the greater. Such a twisted belief suggests a pathology of language.
The United States of American deserves better. Obviously.
8
The Churchill biography that Stephens cites was written by Andrew Roberts, who describes himself a "extremely right-wing".
For example, Roberts supported the Iraq War and waterboarding. Why doesn't Stephens use a less partisan source for his analysis.
6
“We reconcile ourselves to the decadence of the present only if we choose to remain ignorant of the achievements of the past.”
These resonate for me more than any others in Mr Stephens’ column. Can we get back to teaching history and literature in our schools? The only way to overcome the ignorance that is rife in these times and creates the environment that liars and revisionists thrive is to talk of the victories AND the sins of the past.
4
Hopefully this will be posted and not held back as off-topic, but it seems as if in the age of hyperbole in which we live, it would be useful to either better define, or refine when we use the word "genocide", or come up with a better word to describe events from history. This is particularly relevant when we try to compare man made famines, whether in India, or Ethiopia, or Ukraine, or Ireland, or 1920s Lebanon, to ethnic violence in places like Rwanda, Ottoman-era Turkey and Iraq, Sudan, Syria, or Burma or eastern Europe. It also arises in instances of mass population transfer (ie of Greeks and Turks in the 1920s, or ethnic Germans expelled from Czechoslovakia but not killed after WWII), where the death of people isn't the intended goal, so much as their forced relocation is.
Precise language is important, and when our language is so imprecise as to lose meaningful distinctions, it becomes that much easier to label figures from history, and current political figures, as irredeemably and completely evil. That type of all-or-nothing, black and white thinking in which people become convinced of their own righteousness and the inherent evil of their opponents poses a far greater danger of the death of innocents than appreciating Churchill does.
5
Every time I read Churchill biographies, and I do every ten years or so, I am struck by the utter shallowness of his leftist critics - then and now.
7
But, his critics on the right were deep thinkers?
And he was also an alcoholic and smoked too many cigars.
But he did seize the day and save it.
6
Drank and smoked too much?
How do you figure that?
He saved the world and lived to age 90.
By contrast, his main opponent across the Channel was an anti-smoking, teetotaling vegetarian who lived to be 56, then killed himself (I’m leaving out some details).
7
@Joshua Schwartz
“too many” is a judgement call.
@Joshua Schwartz
Living long life nullifying Churchill's vices, absolutely. Cheers.
1
My respect for Winston Churchill runs to this, warts and all: if I had to pick one person in history I would like to have a meal and discussion with about their life, their views, their thoughts, their trials, their experiences, it would be Winston S. Churchill.
229
@Richard Thompson Jr, Churchill is on my list, too. FDR is near the top.
12
George Orwell would be a close second.
2
Totally disgusted and disheartened by Trump, I have been bingeing on Churchill lately -- watching movies about him, reading parts of half-a-dozen books and listening to his wartime speeches.
(Roberts' book sits in front of me now, but at 1301 pages is daunting; I'm thinking about trying the audio book that runs 50 hours.)
A staunch liberal in his younger days, Churchill ultimately became a blood, sweat and tears conservative through and through.
His one big idea for England -- before, during and after the war -- was KBO, “keep buggering on.” There were no big schemes in him then for rapidly solving all of his country’s social problems.
Churchill’s whole life stands as a rebuke to Trump. Everything he was, Trump is not.
Where we could find a truth-teller like him today, I do not know. He certainly doesn’t exist in the Republican Party. If there were any real Churchills around when Trump got started, they have long since departed for the coast or retreated into alcohol and drugs.
Democrats would be wise to emulate him in his later years. Piling one empty social promise onto another in 2020 is the road to certain defeat. Best leave that to Trump and the Republicans who have already sickened the country by promising everything and delivering nothing but trouble and heartache.
325
@A. Stanton. The book is wonderful and I’ve read most of his biographies. Give it a go, you won’t be sorry.
9
@A. Stanton Do try the audio book. I read on the train, 1 hour each way, but the hard copy was too heavy to lug into the City and back each day. The audio book is perfect for traveling and also I think for busy people - “read” while and where you can.
9
@RCT Just to add that the Kindle works too, but not when you don’t have a seat!
5
This is similar to the question of whether taking down statues of Robert E Lee, etc. will inevitably lead to us taking down statues of George Washington. The truth is, it's okay to admire historical figures with serious faults in belief or behavior (such as Churchill or Washington). Indeed, it's tough to find any historical figure who didn't likely hold some beliefs that we would find distasteful or horrifying today.
The key elements are (1) we are admiring people for still qualities, behaviors, and ideas that are still admirable today. Churchill's staunch defiance of Nazi tyranny. Washington's self-sacrificing commitment to the creation of a democratic republic. These are the things they are most remembered for and what we admire. Lee, by comparison, was a great strategist and gracious, but he made the choice to fight to preserve slavery in the south. (2) We can acknowledge that they weren't perfect. Washington owned slaves. Churchill had racist beliefs. We certainly don't need to ignore, minimize, or deny these faults.
I believe that the defining idea of progressivism is that humanity can become better over time. Indeed, I think humans we have done just that. We should understand that our world is built on a history that was often ugly and dark. Still, certain people had the courage, discipline, and moral virtue to work to make the world of the present better than the world of the past. I hope that we are good enough to make our children's future better than that present.
432
@Edward Swing Robert E. Lee was a traitor to the United States. George Washington wasn't. Big difference.
34
@Edward Swing Sadly, the veneration of Lee can be contrasted by the "lost cause" condemnation of Longstreet, a Confederate general arguably as able and possibly strategically wiser than Lee. But almost universally considered a "scalawag" in the post-war South for actively assisting his old friend Grant in implementing Reconstruction and reuniting the nation. How many statues does he have. compared to Lee?
22
Although I agree with every point you make, I think it is important to identify two critical facts that also separate Washington from Lee. First, he freed his slaves after having first accumulated a trust fund to care for the young until they became adults and care for the elderly after they could no longer work. Second, Washington came of age in a time when slavery was the dominant economic system across every country and every inhabited continent. Slavery had been the dominant economic system for the entire 5000 years of recorded human history prior to Washington’s birth. The astonishing thing about our founding fathers was not that they owned slaves, but that they seriously questioned the morality of slavery. By the time Lee decided to fight in defense of the south, slavery had been abolished in almost every empire and every economy across the globe (only the southern US, Brazil and Cuba continued to allow slavery). Even the Russian Czar freed his serfs in 1860. In the “four score and seven years” that separated Washington’s world from Lee’s, slavery had transformed from the dominant economic system to a economically obsolete system kept alive only by the racism of its adherents. Washington and Lee lived in very different worlds and the morality of Washington’s choices in light of the world he inhabited stand in stark contrast to those of Lee.
41
This is an excellent column and I am going to buy the book!
3
Well, we are looking for leadership today. Mitch McConnell just isn’t it.
Of course, war is a strong and visible motivator. Churchill had a lot of help there in distilling the problem to be faced.
But today we have less visuable problems, but more compelling. Global warming, opioid addiction, wildly unequal wealth distribution.
Can we find a golden tongued orator to crystallize these issues and rally the citizenry to oppose the 1/4% who think everything is just fine? Bernie almost made it, but the Oligarchs defeated him. Who is next?
1
As a citizen a quarter of my life away from becoming history, I have come to understand the importance of a citizenry well educated in it.
What has happened to our schools where all focus seems to be on material accomplishment and the culture of our country's history no longer joins us as a people?
Worse, we are learning separate and contradicting histories, including things like the true cause of the Civil War- was it all about state's rights? Not according to the vast majority of modern historians- but history in our public schools is now politicized in a very dangerous and divisive way.
No one should be able to graduate from a public high school without a clear grasp of the basics of our countries history, and not a sanitized, mythological version designed only to inspire patriotism. When our past greatness is vastly exaggerated we become disillusioned with the present. Without realistic expectations, the people lose their ability to resist demagogues.
8
Right on target. As a professor who mixes sociology and history in a variety of classes taught over many years, I can testify that our students know ever less about history and desperately need to be educated about models of human greatness in historical context. Churchill had flaws but his actions need to be judged in the context of his own time, and not by the perfectionist and moralistic (not to be confused with moral) so-called standards of the present. Rebecca West noted that the English thought that the death of Gladstone left them bereft, as if without a father; but when Churchill appeared it was “straight from Shakespeare.” Listening to those speeches truly touches the heart of anyone who is not spiritually dead or brainwashed by ideology. It should be made mandatory for all our politicians and students if for no other reason than in order to understand just how small they are so they can aspire to become better.
474
@Veljko Vujacic
Thank you, professor. You give me hope that informed and independent thought are alive and well in Russia under the stewardship of people like yourself.
41
@Veljko Vujacic - Many of those who self-appoint to sit in judgment today the actions of the past would find error in Jesus, Mohammad, and Buddha. The standards they demand of historical figures are those they so often fail as our contemporaries. Hindsight is truly always 20-20. Foresight is much rarer, and never so clear as the judgment of the present... Vision is a risk the critics fail to dare.
47
@Veljko Vujacic
The study of History in American schools has been essentially eliminated in favor of Social Studies. Universities and colleges may require a class or two at best. Lamentations about the abysmal ignorance of our students has been an ongoing complaint for many years. Who is to lead a movement to bring History back to American schools and higher education? Especially since most educators do not seem interested.
10
The overwhelming presence of "information" via the Internet and television has caused a reaction against learning -- learning that is enjoyable and that leads to enlightenment.
Churchill's magical use of the English language in the grand tradition of Milton, Shakespeare, Austin, Bronte and so many others may exist beyond the interest and the understanding of many of today's readers and listeners. (What ever became of listening? Of delighting in the well-written, well-spoken word?)
Compare the reports written and read by Ed Murrow during and after World War Two with today's commenters.
For many including Donald J. Trump, "history is bunk."
Children and adults today are mesmerized by flashy visual images
and explosions of every sort. The careful crafting of song lyrics seems to have been mostly extinguished years ago.
Fortunately, thoughtful parents and educators are curbing technology, hoping to recall a time in this nation when
written and spoken words made a difference.
Requiring Churchill studies would seem a golden pathway to knowledge.
Doug Giebel, Big Sandy, Montana
347
Oh, for crying out loud. You’re living in a golden age of fabulous English, and you think the language has grown decadent?
Bob Dylan. Pynchon. Tom Waits. Le Guin, Delany, Terry Pratchett. Margaret Atwood, Ishmael Reed, Barack Obama. King. Mandela, leonard Cohen, Morrison, Naipaul...oh, never mind. That’s the short list, chosen at random, and you’re faint of heart?
24
@Robert,
I would add Gordon Lightfoot to your list. Bob Dylan once said of him that when he hears a Lightfoot song that he wishes it would never end.
14
@Robert Unfortunately, Dylan is over 70. Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen are two of my absolute favorites, but both are dead...
5
Of course Churchill made big blunders. Gallipoli leaps to mind. Churchill had to be slapped down because he wouldn't agree to get out of India. The British claimed all of South Africa when Cecil Rhodes found out their was a bonanza of gold there. So Churchill's famous escape from the Boars was one of one nasty imperialist power against another. Churchill had his shining moment when he rallied the British against the Nazis.
2
I'm about as left as you can be in America, but I lived as a Brit under both Churchill's terms as Prime Minister. I was an infant when he first became PM, but having absorbed much of his history, I have some perspective on him.
He is neither the villain that Bret attributes to "left-wing Twitter" (I don't give Twitter or its ilk the time of day), nor the unvarnished hero that he describes.
His record is pro-Empire and pro-colonial. Post-war Britain decolonized the Empire sometimes with a peaceful transfer of power but elsewhere with violent reluctance. Had Churchill won the first post WW II election, decolonization would have been far more reluctant with disastrous results, especially on the Indian sub-continent where communal strife was already bad enough. Churchill was notoriously any-labor. He mishandled Britain's finances as finance minister in the 1920s. He had his share of failures in WW I, such as the Gallipoli campaign.
He was the right man at the right time for WW II but the Brits turfed him out after the war; because of his peacetime record, they didn't trust him to build the "land fit for heroes" that they wanted.
His wartime leadership and his use of the language to bring out the Brits' spine were supreme. His speeches lived on in their collective memory long after he delivered them. To me, WW II redeemed all his faults. Britain could use another Churchill in Britain's worst crisis since WW II - Brexit. But there's not one in sight.
710
@mancuroc
Dilly, Dilly. I too have enjoyed studying this great man's life. Read Randolph's biography to get a son's vision of a great man. What a LIFE!
25
@mancuroc
Few human beings regarded in positive terms as "great" lived what most consider perfect lives. Bias, error and the many character flaws human beings are heir to exist side by side with remarkable accomplishments. My guess: we are more fascinated by defects than virtues.
History's lessons about human behavior don't seem to have changed very much over the centuries.
Doug Giebel, Big Sandy, Montana
11
@mancuroc
Play fair.
Indeed the Brits turfed him out after the war, but they then re-elected him next time around.
And Gallipoli? His strategy was sound, but the tactical impimentation by the joint military was atrocios.
13
If I remember right—and I probably don’t--Mrs. Pynchon—the fictitious publisher of the newspaper on Lou Grant TV series once said something about only ever having known one infallible man—her husband—and he was wrong 60% of the time.
1
I think you have a winner too Mr. Stephens:
"We reconcile ourselves to the decadence of the present only if we choose to remain ignorant of the achievements of the past."
The loss (if we ever had it) of a common American history (and modern world history too) curriculum that is not biased to favor the white men and including all of the exterminations and abuses as well as the achievements of noted figures is a problem. As is the absence of proper American civics classes.
The citizenry needs to be educated (especially now) in these areas to be in a better position to sift through the rash of fake news and bogus opinion awash on the internet.
If we fail to learn from history we allow ourselves to be entrapped by ignorance.
8
Churchill may well have been a racist, and why not? So many of our friends and neighbors are today. We don't have to reach into the past to find people to be angry about. We should take what we can from the past -- like great quotations -- then spend our energy improving the future for our children and for their children. Do we have the luxury of debating a long-dead Englishman while 7-year-olds are dying in ICE custody in our own country?
6
@Emma Ess
That poor girl was denied food and water for several days by her completely neglectful parent.
She is a victim of and human traffickers and some in our country to encourage and enable illegal immigration (i.e., Democrats, sanctuary city advocates), not our border personnel.
That anyone could think otherwise is astonishing.
Awesome piece. Love Churchill. Always have. Makes me want to run out to buy the book. They don't make men like him anymore. More's the pity.
4
Today in politics too many people are too busy trying to keep their jobs rather than do them. Churchill had a great mind, a great drive and was fearless. He also made mistakes and was a product of his time and stood on the wrong side of some things by today's standards and mores. So what, most historic figures do including Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and FDR.
When Churchill was defiant as during the outbreak of WWII you can read that the people stood behind him even if the politicians who looked for an easy way out, did not. No one should forget Chamberlain's "Peace in our time" appeasement. Unfortunately, today, too many world leaders have never heard a shot fired in anger and don't know the real misery of fighting a war. Tough guys like Trump, who didn't go to Vietnam because his feet hurt and Bolton, who didn't go because in 1970 he thought there was no way to win so why go are pretty quick to put other lives in jeopardy now that they are to old to be at the front and yell "follow me!" Churchill was what the world needed in especially in 1940, we could use more of him today...
8
I don't care who you're quoting, if the phrase "In victory, magnanimity" requires groveling apologies, we are in a deep dark abyss.
16
@Tim C
Why does being magnanimous or merciful equate to groveling? Far from it.
1
Like all great men he had his faults - Washington and Jefferson were slave owners, for example - but let him be judged, like them, by the totality of his contributions to others. After the dashing of the Munich hopes (for which Chamberlain gets a bum rap: Britain was in no mood to contemplate the loss of a second generation - and was Sudetenland all that different to Crimea?) Britain needed a leader. A leader is only as good as the led, and from time to time that leader has to look back to make sure they are still following. The history of Churchill as leader is the story of those who survived the Blitz, who planted crops on the fields and roadsides and gardens, and who gave up their spare saucepans to be melted down into aeroplanes. Who is the potter, pray, and who the pot?
4
You forgot to mention he was an accomplished painter. He turned to painting when times got really rough. Will men like Churchill ever walk upon the world's stage again to give us guidance in difficult times? Or will social media trivialize each and everyone of us.? To develop greatness one needs privacy to think, to paint.
9
Surely, the Churchill most average citizens know is the one-dimensional super-hero who saved the liberal democracies of the West. Witness the numerous worshipful feature films of recent years. If someone points out that he was also an alcoholic, insensitive, rash racist, why shouldn't we know that as well? I'm looking forward to reading the book.
3
If saving the world from the Nazis and being one of the greatest speakers and writers of English in history won't do it for you, then I give up.
And quick! It's said that he was at a dinner party seated next to Lady Astor, and was being his provocative self. Provoked, she is supposed to have said "Winston, if I were your wife I'd put poison in your soup." To which he replied, 'Nancy, if I were your husband, I'd drink it." Most people couldn't have come up with that one in a week; Churchill had it instantly. What a guy!
23
So nothing can be quoted from Churchill?
Insofar as Churchill being one of the "Greatest leaders", well he was. Holding the line against Hitler in the early years of WW2 earned him that title - his racism and ethnocentrism notwithstanding.
9
From some of these comments, I find it hard to know what racism is. Certainly it was slavery and certainly Jim Crow. Certainly it's Republican senators who hated Mr. Obama and thwarted him at his every step. Or landlords who won't rent to middle-class blacks.
Were Theodore Roosevelt's comments after his trip to Africa, from which he came out opining that Africans need to be better educated before a democratic Africa could be successful, racism?
I could say the same for the United States: that a certain segment of our population's decades-long rejection of education, literature, art, and science might mean that some white people just can't be trusted to vote. This republic of ours just isn't going the way our Founding Fathers hoped.
1
First, thank you for book reference about Churchill! Equally puzzled by the reaction to Scott Kelly's post. I would not be surprised that a considerable percentage of Americans have no idea who Churchill was and that he, by his personal courage and leadership in the face of a nearly overwhelming NAZI military threat, essentially saved Western Civilization. As the saying goes "We speak English instead of German because of Churchill!"
9
And there's also the dark, imperialist side of Churchill, the one who said that Gandhi “ought to be lain bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi, and then trampled on by an enormous elephant with the new Viceroy seated on its back." And, “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.” He also blamed the famine that Stephens mentions, in which millions of Indians died, on the native population for "breeding like rabbits," never mind that the Brits drained India's resources for use in the war.
12
He called for the military to descend upon striking Welsh miners. He ignored the London Fog and he worked behind Montagu's back during the formation of Pakistan that caused the deaths of millions to this day.
But he employed an earnest tenor conservatives such as Mike Pence practice without meaning to this day.
When you begin to laud those that conspired for an empire building that collapsed what are you doing?
3
He had no problem throwing the Polish nation under the bus at the end of WWII.
2
@EB
red army - 15 million ? strong- was right there-- no way brits or us ready to start the next war...sad fate of poland as usual...
11
As I recollect things, Churchill's "India" included India (cobbled together from a collection of what we might think of as feudal city states), Bengal (Bangladesh), Burma (Myanmar), and Pakistan, all in all a conglomerate of hundreds of millions of people with no existing tradition of national government and burdened with disparate faiths, ethnicities, and traditions. In fact, the British had been building for more than a century the common system of courts, schools, language, railways, infrastructure, and government bureaucracy that this historical "India" finally gained control of after WWII.
So, yes, through the first half of the 20th century, Churchill not surprisingly believed that this complex collection of people was not yet ready for independence and predicted that if this "India" gained independence too early the consequences might well be dire for the people of minority groups and religions spread across the vastness of the "nation." Surely the history of "India" that has followed suggests he was right to be worried.
10
@Don Blume Not sure how the history of “India” that followed suggests anything close to his worries. Using your argument and looking at all the countries with their histories with minorities, none of them deserve their freedom. But appreciate your thoughts for us heathens and still carrying on the mantle of “white man’s burden”.
And Churchill left us with lots of great quotes. Two of my favorites:
"Democracy is is the worst form of government - except for all the others that have been tried from time to time."
"The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of misery."
16
We will suffer as a society if we continue down the path of requiring our ancestors to have been saints lest their contributions be erased, and allowing the loudest and shrillest to sit in judgment.
45
The great paradox of conservatives is they are all idolators looking for heroes to worship but free marketers that deregulate and unleash the greed and thievery in mankind. Douthat is constantly looking for a catholic icon to genuflect to, Stephens to bust of Churchill or anyone not Trump (never mind his support of Republicans helped create the monster he loathes).
Put in some regulations that finance elections, regulate markets and stiffen the jail time for offenders and mankind will be much better off than reading up on Churchill or Jesus.
9
@Laurence Bachmann
You lament the machinations of a free market as unleashes ‘greed and thievery in mankind’ yet somehow ignore the demonstrated abuses inherent in those who lust for the power to lord over us politically.
@Laurence Bachmann
Best comment; perfectly sums up Stephens and Douthat.
1
"We live in a time in which decent and otherwise sensible people are surrendering too easily to the hectoring of morons or extremists."
This cannot be repeated enough in today's America. There are always fringe people in every era, right, left or some odd combination, always ready to foist upon the rest of us their warped zealotry. What has changed of late, however, is that far too many people and businesses and "leaders" immediately cave in, issue groveling mock apologies or take actions in response that deny the rest of us the product, service, idea, or whatever, opposed by some vocal extremists.
How did we become so weak and hyper-sensitive? When did we adopt the position that any criticism must be taken immediately at full face value and kowtowed to? It is a disgrace and not serving the nation and our society well.
25
In re to privilege:
I think if Churchill had been asked, he would have readily acknowledged preferring "the opportunity to bear up under the immense weight of inner expectation that came with being born to a historic name" to, for example, experiencing first-hand the high rates of violence in America’s most highly segregated, most deeply impoverished, and blackest and brownest neighborhoods.
5
The prevalent problem these days is that we have ended up in a society which promotes stupidity, ignorance and mediocrity as virtues to be beheld and cherished.
Emotions and feelings have replaced common sense, logic and intellectual prowess. The sad thing is that these can exist in a balanced manner, in a combination where one need not exclude the other.
You add to that nauseous mix a profound lack of understanding and knowledge of history and it becomes quite apparent how we have painted ourselves into this corrosive and self-destructive corner.
Woe unto us indeed...
19
When the adjective “Churchillian” is used, it is generally to denote leadership qualities like courage and steadfastness in the face of adversity, and inspirational and eloquent rhetoric appealing to what is the best in our natures.
If one day “Trumpian” officially makes its way into the dictionary, it will only denote xenophobia, racism, misogyny, cowardice and crude and inflammatory rhetoric meant to appeal to the worst in human nature.
Winston Churchill will go down in history as a great (if imperfect) statesman. Donald Trump is his polar opposite.
21
Churchill was a great man, warts and all. He truly cared about his country. He risked his life and reputation to defend his principles. And he was a master of the English language. Most of today's politicians are cowardly little opportunists who don't come remotely close to measuring up to Churchill.
23
Comments about WC in India quite miss the truth: Though the rice crop was lower than average it was not so low that a famine needed to occur. But WC moved the food to feed British troops in Burma, locked down the Bengali boats that generally moved the rice across Bengal. And referred to Hindus in most disparaging terms -- terms which we would now call racist as they were called then. Mr. Stephens would be well served to read Amartya Sen (Nobel Prize Winner) on the famine. You might say this was a 'tough' decision in war time or you might say WC was responsible for genocide. But at least tell the truth about the circumstances.
11
I note the elegant way Churchill mobilized the English language, powerful and soaring, and compare it to the way our current fearless leader mobilizes it, 140 confused and salacious characters at a time. I weep.
17
It is interesting that today’s ‘age of information’ is also a new age of ignorance.
17
@Christopher I think it could become a helpful axiom that "too much information, indiscriminately distributed, equals ignorance."
3
We’re all victims of artificial intelligence
Unmentioned in the article is Churchill’s lifelong companions—his “black dog” of depression coupled with the relentless energy of hypomanic conviction which harnessed to his hypergraphia produced books-worth of quotations (some cited here) and inspired a nation to never quit in the face of Nazi aggression. Was he successful because of or in spite of his “bipolar” mind? Yes and yes.
One can make the case that it was his making in wartime, undoing in peace. Thankfully he found the near-perfect career, perfectly timed to make the biggest difference. Misquoting Voltaire, if Churchill did not exist, we would have had to invent him. Ahead of his time, and a product of his time, we can yet be grateful he lived when he did; had the gifts that he had; and the ambition, education and wherewithal to put them in service to Nazi defeat.
15
the ending of "Dunkirk" when the young rescued survivor reads churchill's 'we will fight them on the beaches...' in the newspaper... well I choke up thinking about it. Most of my mother's family were slaughtered, infants included, by the nazis in lithuania..if the brits led by Churchill had not held out, no d-day, no atlantic alliance... no world as we know it...
24
Not sure if Churchill rehashing has any cause and effect of what's happening in Britten now. Current Britten introverted mime thought has me wondering it's future relevance as a global society evolves.
Bravo, Brett, for reminding readers how great a man Winston Churchill was and how great his legacy is. He, along with Washington and Lincoln, have been my lifetime heroes. Courage and conviction and the intellectual capacity to convey them so effectively not only to their peers but also to every one of the people they led were remarkably rare attributes all should embrace.
It is a shame that our youth, as a result of the forces of ignorance in our society, have been denied the opportunity to learn, thus understand, their incalculable contributions to our civilization, particularly to the freedom we hold so dear. Ignorance is not bliss.
24
@MCH These young people need to learn world history---The Huns, the Goths,the Persians,the Kahns, each empire killing whole civilzations.Churchill bad?-----I say to my 95 year old Vets"thanks to you I'm not speaking German." Thank you Churchill!!!
7
If you want to learn about who Winston Churchill really was I recommend reading "First Lady: The Life and Wars of Clementine Churchill" by Sonia Purnell. A fascinating read. His wife, Clementine, was a big influence on his courting the Labor Party voters so that he could win election. She campaigned for him and advocated for the working class and women. Winston needed her persuasion to see that the brunt of the sacrifices of war was made by the men and women of the working class. He needed to acknowledge them.
Like most great leaders, he wasn't all brilliance and goodness. He had his flaws. He wrote many books and made money but he also had support from wealthy friends when he over spent on his "privileged" lifestyle and needed financial help.
5
Without him, Britain would have made peace with Hitler, making an American effort against Nazi Germany insurmountably difficult.
I would point out, though, that after the October 1942 victory of El Alamein, Churchill’s wartime leadership abilities declined. He and his generals were against a cross-channel invasion, and Churchill persisted in the ‘Soft Underbelly’ strategy, going up the Italian boot, into Slovenia, Austria, etc., to get to Berlin.
6
Before you condemn the Brits over their European strategy, it’s important to remember that their views were formed by the WWl experiences of the British army. Churchill’s desire to invade the continent via Italy and Southern France was based on the fear that a direct assault across the English Channel would result in another front vs front statement that killed hundreds of thousands of British soldiers 25 years earlier.
13
@Purity of
russians conquered paris?? better check your history on that...
2
It was a collation of allied forces which conquered Paris in 1814, consisting of armies from Russia, Prussia and Austria, but they were led by the Russian Tzar, Alexander I. However, his terms for Paris, and France in general, were much more lenient than anything the Soviet army under Stalin would have imposed, and they withdrew after Napoleon abdicated and went into exile. Stalin would have never let go such a prize.
2
Great column.
It's interesting viewing the reader comments. Quite a bit of cherry picking the flaws in Churchill if you are anti-Winston and picking the many outstanding qualities if you are pro-Churchill.
He was a truly great man, but he was, like all men, imperfect.
So it goes. The man absolutely stands head and shoulders above most politicians of any era.
After the Gallipoli disaster, where the strategy was superb, but the slowness of execution ruined the day, Churchill at 40 volunteered to serve in the WWI trenches. He was truly brave, willing to risk his life for his country on many, many occasions. Here today, the GOP politicians won't even risk giving up their office for the good of the country, won't call out an unfit POTUS for the good of the nation. Cowardice is fashionable.
No, Mr. Stephens did a fine thing in this op-ed.
92
@David Shapireau
I don't always agree with Mr. Stephens' op-Eds, yet this article is indeed one of the finest at a time of great tumult.
8
“Cowardice is fashionable”. You get to the heart of it. The land of the free and the home of the brave is now operating by the rules of cowardice at every level. When did fear take over the minds of this country? All the pathos of the decline of the Republican Party (and its little brother, the Democrats) is due to the visible paranoia and fear from which all decisions are made. Standing up for ones country means by definition standing up to all special interests and working for the common good. Those ruled by fear have given up on the possibility of a common good and are only in it to save themselves. America is a disgrace to its own history and a laughing stock to the world and yet there is no effect of shame or recognition of humiliation. We only think media thoughts and so are ruled by the laws of entertainment and the greed of corporations. We are happy when told to be happy and mad when told to be mad. We vote the way the advertisements tell us to vote and then wonder why nothing gets done. Great leaders do not generate viral ratings so they are removed from media before the masses ever see them. What we see are the cookie cutter leftovers of the entertainment machine which now operates its reality show out of the White House. If you don’t read you don’t know. That’s why the dictators burn the books. That’s why today’s leaders live through the visual and not the written word. And the perfect leader for our time is the first president who can’t read.
1
Of all the consequential decisions I have made in my life, the decision to attend a liberal arts college was among one of the best. Yes, even 50 years ago my parents were questioning the occupational value of the courses I was taking in history, literature, and philosophy---which, turned out to be highly valued in managerial positions requiring sound reasoning and judgment over particular skill sets. Putting aside the vocational arguments for or against a BA degree, is the academic habit of always questioning assumptions---looking for evidence and bias in my own thinking---and, although often done poorly, stepping out who I am and attempting to see the world from other lived experiences. Watching our contemporary masters of the universe---from the Zuckerberg technocrats to the Trump know nothings---we see the cost of of devaluing course structures that made us more human.
40
@ACJ
Some excellent points - but is the liberal arts education of today the same as it was 50 years ago? You speak of the "academic habit of always questioning assumptions", a valid element of the classic liberals art experience, but it seems that in many cases today the opposite is happening. Instead modern students are taught NOT to question, NOT to hear other views, experiences or opinions, to be intolerant of anything which violates but one orthodoxy lest you be caused stress or discomfort at hearing what you neither know nor believe in. And we are seeing the negative consequences of that approach.
14
@George S I am afraid you have been watching too much Fox News. I teach Philosophy in a state school in California, and I can you that my colleagues and I do no such thing. There are places where the students (and various outside agitators who come to campus) behave that way. But we professors are often on the front lines fighting this attitude. Remember the professor who brought Charles Murray to the Vermont campus, had prepared a carefully worded rebuttal to him, and was wounded while defending his right to speak.
@Teed Rockwell
No, I’m not (I actually watch and read a wide variety of things in order to be better informed). I don’t need to be “told” anything by Fox - or MSNBC on the other side - that I don’t complement with my own observations. I can see, hear and read the statements and ideas of the colllege generation. It may not be universal, mercifully, but don’t deny it exists!
And more and more, teaching History is seen as lost of time and money. Check the curriculums.
5
Great piece of writing on a great leader. Thanks.
10
The decadence of this time as Mr. Stephens like to go on about and continues to whine about in this article is a direct result of his philosophy which is essentially I know more than anybody.
Mr. Churchill for all his steel and erudition was an Imperialist, you have to accept that. He was a colonialist, you have to accept that. And that colonialist mentality is not conservatism, no matter how you dress it up.
But it is the mentality of a nation with a thousand bases around the planet and an attitude exemplified by Mr. Stephens.
9
I recall some many years ago that Herman
Melville came under severe criticis for his drunken abuse of his spouse, even to the degree that colleges were considering dropping study of his works.
Mark Twain was aware of and ignored criticism of his use of the offensive N word in his writings.
Offensive or not, men and women who hold views we find offensive also MAY offer insights and wisdom with respect to our time here and behavior that leads to triumph over evil.
We should be circumspect in removing their voices and opinions from our presence.
19
@AWENSHOK Was Twain really criticized for the use of the N word during his time? It was widely used then, even by African-Americans.
Bret,
I consider myself politically center left. I agree with you that one cannot just right Churchill off as a right wing colonialist who tried to keep his vision of empire alive for too long.
Having said that, he also stood against Hitler as a bulwark for the Allies- he and Roosevelt should be credited with saving the world from totalitarianism.
He was turned out in 1946 because the British people had had enough of war time government and felt he could not deliver on the social programming that was needed.
He also was in the wrong on Indian independence...his feeling about empire was wrong headed and dated.
Bottomline, though I perceive him as a positive historic statesmen because he stood alone against Hitler and was responsible for saving England, when his own party was thinking of surrendering.
15
I have Churchil's six volumes on WWII on my bookshelf and have reread them several times. Just this past week, I have pulled down the first volume, "The Gathering Storm" to peruse it as background to understanding Trump's attempts to engage with todays group of Dictators. The contrast between Churchill and Trump is an elephant to a mouse! I presume not to identify who is the mouse.
14
He became an extraordinary leader and what the British needed to survive and win WWII.
When our constitutional crisis arrives--and it may be soon--hopefully someone will emerge to lead us through it.
22
i love the article! too often modern day morals/or lack thereof are applied to historical figures. people like churchill, washington and lincoln made the world and nation we live in today. for those that want to rail on them for not being "woke"enough please go back to your safe spaces. the majority of people will continue to honor and try to emulate these giants.
18
Churchill was one of the most amazing individuals of the 20th Century. He did more to save the world from the Nazis and the communists than anyone else. More than that, he lived a life that was simply amazing. A courageous soldier, a politician who was counted out and came back many times, an incredibly inspiring leader during his nation's darkest hour, a wonderful orator and writer. Churchill is an individual to be admired and aspired to. Was he perfect; no. But he was a devoted husband who adored his wife along with being a completely devoted public servant. Maybe most of all, he was an extremely interesting man. I reject a political correctness that doesn't recognize greatness in a man like Churchill.
27
Well argued points throughout, Mr. Stephens, except for one. The allegations against Churchill relating to the 1943 famine in India can be argued from both sides, but the evidence calling his actions into question are based on more than the fact that "he used racially insensitive humor during the crisis."
4
Don't forget that Churchill was a racist.
12
@Jana No more than 90% of whites at that time. One can say Abraham Lincoln was a racist, he abhorred slavery but as most people of European descent did think Africans were intellectually inferior.
20
@serban
By today's standards I would think more like 98% would be classified as racists. How dare they not be "woke" like the high moral beings we are today.
2
But ultimately evolved, showing true strength of character. Because he understood both racism and its folly, had he lived our country may have been very diffferent.
,@serban
2
Also accredited to Churchill when asked which leader he admired most--His response “Mussolini, because he was able to murder his son-in-law.”(Churchill hated daughter Sarah Churchill husband)............
20
“In Britain ... 20 percent of teenagers thought Churchill was a fictional character but 58 percent thought Sherlock Holmes was real.”
Priceless ... .
Also, a logical consequence of venerating superheroes in popular culture — Spiderman, Wonderwoman, Bruce Willis ... .
And that was a decade ago. Those teenagers are young adults now, which means they’re voters. What percentage voted for Brexit, do you think (or dare)? 58%?
So-called “Brexit” is a Russian trap. Its implementation, folly. Sheer folly, actually — something already revealed by the tortuous negotiations between Prime Minister May and “Brussells”, as its called, contemptuously— like trying to surgically divide Siamese Twins without killing both. Folly on the same plane as Chamberlain’s Appeasement policy towards Hitler during the 1930, Appeasement Churchill strenuously opposed.
Of course, they probably know nothing about that either, or think its fictional, the stuff of movies and novels. But Superman is real!
90
Your metaphor is apt. Russian is the only player that wins with Brexit.
6
Unlike Spiderman and Wonderman, Bruce Willis is, allegedly, neither fictional or a superhero.
1
There is nothing more despicable than the contemporary, lazy, ignorant dismissal of the heroes of the past who created the enlightenment and protected it and bequeathed it to us. To those pompous, supercilious brats, I say you deserve Trump. He is you.
570
@T Bravo!
14
My thoughts exactly! We have somehow become the great judges of all. Maybe, just maybe we might even do something good!
14
@T
Indeed, T. And you can be assured that the masses that gave us Herr Drumpf consider the "Enlightenment" as turning the bulbs on in their abodes.
15
Thanks to Churchill, World War II went on years longer than it should have. How many US lives were sacrificed to British imperialist ambitions? Sound strategists, General Marshall and the other US generals wanted to attack the Germans in Europe--to smash the enemy main forces directly. But the old Tory Churchill persuaded President Roosevelt to first invade North Africa and then Italy, to preserve Britain's domination of the Mediterranean. Before America rescued them, the British Imperialists were defeated in Norway, ran away in Singapore and were routed in Tobruk--nothing but defeats--and were two weeks away from running out of food . . . . In 1918, Churchill was behind using British forces to invade and attack the Russian Revolution . . . . In the 1920s, he pioneered dropping poison gas bombs on civilian populations in Iraq . . . In Ireland, His Lordship is remembered as the man who unleashed the infamous "black and tans," the scum of England's prisons, to terrorize the Irish . . . Even the famous defiant "We will fight them on the beaches" speeches, which Americans so admire, had little effect on the British public at the time, according to surveys taken by the BBC. They were far more impressed by the one British victory--sinking the French fleet! A big problem was Churchill's out of control alcoholism. He would address the House of Commons in the afternoon, but not broadcast the same speech until that evening--many many brandys and scotches later.
30
@Red Allover The comments about Churchill's pre-WWII errors of strategy and judgment (and the list could easily be extended) are well-taken. The point about the Second Front however is not.
Churchill's desire to postpone the cross-Channel invasion was grounded in his concern that this unprecedented vast seaborne military invasion was far from guaranteed to succeed against the battle-hardened German defences (hence Eisenhower's preparation of dual press releases on June 6, 1944, in the event of either victory or defeat). The invasion of Italy was designed to, and did, draw German forces away from the Western Wall. The North Africa campaign that preceded it was necessary to provide a base for the cross-Mediterranean assault. Regaining naval control of the Mediterranean (lost in 1941) was essential to supplying Allied (not just UK) forces in the Pacific Theatre via Suez rather than the far longer and slower Cape route. Etc.
And the impact of Churchill's speeches taken as a whole - rather than commenting on any one instance, however famous - is better testified to by the innumerable statements to this effect from those who actually lived through the war (like my own late father or Churchill's previous biographer, the late Roy Jenkins) than by tendentious assertions to the contrary.
7
@Red Allover Good thing American soldiers didn't take the German army head-on in Europe early in the war. As they learned at the battle of the Kasserine Pass in Tunisia in 1943, it is they who would have gotten their inexperienced army smashed to pieces.
4
@Red Allover As an unabashed fan of Churchill, I am trying very hard to be thoughtful in this response. As for the British being on the brink of defeat in 1941, that is hardly the case. The Battle of Britain had been won, and the Nazis had embarked on their invasion of Russia which would be their ultimate undoing. We do not know the impact of invading France in 1942 rather than North Africa. I have studied this extensively, and we don't know how it would have turned out. We do know that the U.S. Army was not ready to fight and had a very difficult time in North Africa. I say this with a long Army career behind me. It is possible that the Allies would have been bogged down in France, Britain would have had to divest itself of its positions in North Africa leaving the Italians to control the mideast oil for the Axis. You can't wish away America's 2,000 mile supply lines over U boat infested waters and the challenges of supporting an Army in France. The influence of the Great War on military thinking at that time, and the desire to avoid a repeat of trench warfare in France was very strong. As for Churchill's wartime leadership, there was not another politican in Britain who could have replaced him at that time. Britain probably would have sued for peace without Churchill in 1940. The US would have been isolated with Japan closing in on one side and the Nazis on the other. As for his alcoholism, perhaps we could use a drinker like Churchill over the teetotaling Trumpster?
15
Haven't there been enough books about Churchill--who fought against Indian independence. who screwed up at Gallipoli, who was an anti-Semite, a lousy father, and a lousy strategist? Why not a new biography of Neville Chamberlain, who was responsible for Britain being prepared for World War II. I am tired of hero worship.
18
@Diogenes Neville Chamberlain was responsible for Hitler’s ascent to power by turning a blind eye to appease the pacifists. Building up the military means nothing if you allow the enemy to build up their military 3 to 1 in the same period.
6
@Diogenes Churchill was far from faultless. His strategic judgment was erratic (though perhaps no more so than most, just far more visible, better remembered and endlessly disputed: the Dardanelles, for instance, was a perfectly smart notion intended to redress the bloody stalemate on the Western Front, undermined by inadequate resources and poor generalship).
But it's generally a good idea to criticise historical figures for the faults they actually had, not those they didn't. Accusing Churchill of anti-semitism is just bizarre: if anything he was a philo-Semite (unlike most of his class at the time) and - rightly or wrongly - strongly pro-Zionist. His parenting skills, whatever little relevance they might have to his historical reputation, were also a good deal better than most of his peers and compared extremely favourably to the appalling neglect Churchill suffered at the hands of his own feckless parents.
The claim that Chamberlain prepared Britain for the war is true *only* to the degree that, eventually and under immense political pressure (spearheaded by Churchill), he belatedly supported the rearmament that he (both as PM and Chancellor) and his predecessor Baldwin had grossly neglected throughout the 1930s and in denial of the growing Nazi threat.
Hero worship is always a bad idea. But so is ill-informed iconoclasm for its own sake.
11
@Diogenes Anti-Semite? Surely you're joking sir.
2
One wonders if Bret Stephens and the rest of the Churchill crowd think that the Holodomor or the Armenian genocide were "difficult choices". The perpetrators of those atrocities could have equally cogent defenses written for their actions.
9
"We reconcile ourselves to the decadence of the present only if we choose to remain ignorant of the achievements of the past."
Great ending. While reading the editorial, I immediately said to myself; one cannot fully understand men and women of Churchill's stature without adjusting for context. Time, place and acculturation matter.
Sherlock Holmes may not have been real, but he's famous for starting his investigations by saying, "Assume nothing!"
I wish more people would listen, and overcome their cognitive biases!
104
@Texan
Sherlock Holmes is real in the same way that God is real.
In their way, both are very real.
@will nelson No, they are both works of fiction.
All said and done,Mr Churchill was not only a politician but a statesman.We cant find a person of his acumen in today's politics of Great Britain.As in life,he fought with death also and did not surrender to it for days.
26
American Citizenship is such a magical thing - Roosevelt is judged much more harshly fro the interment of a few 1000 Japanese-American citizens than Churchill is for presiding over the deaths of 3 million people supposedly under his care.
6
@Etymologist that is an extremely flawed comparison, and it holds no water without at least some elaboration and some facts.
4
While the initial point that one should be able to quote somebody appropriately and not be taken to task for that somebody's negative traits is true, Bret Stephens selectively seems all too eager to whitewash the evils of a very problematic figure in modern world history.
Churchill ordered the slaughter of innocent German civilians during WWII. He invaded a neutral Iran to serve his own interests. He helped trigger and oversee the mass famine in Bengal, destroying millions of lives while he refused aid assistance and denigrated Indian Hindus as not worth saving. He also said that Aborigines and Native Americans did not suffer any injustices because they were inferior to Western man and deserved to be conquered. And he had no problem entertaining the possibility of using poison gas against uppity Arabs who did not want to be ruled by British colonialism.
Normative Western natural law principles show that one is not permitted to engage in evil in order to achieve good. Also, one is not permitted to invert hierarchical binding moral responsibilities: UK had a firm obligation as India's rulers to provide for the common good of the Indian people, as well as to respect Iran's sovereignty. There was no UK iron-clad moral obligation to be waging war with Japan and/or Germany.
19
@Rob
"Churchill ordered the slaughter of innocent German civilians during WWII." Please name one WWII leader on any side that did not order, in one way or another, "the slaughter of innocent civilians". I assume you are referring to the area bombing of German cities? The US 8th Air Force was no slouch in that department either without even mentioning the Pacific.
3
@Rick Yes, the bombing of the cities. Only recently have I seen pictures of Dreden's human remains for the first time, as revolting as any WWII human remains photos I have ever seen.
Is that going to be the moral defense for murderous decimation: everyone was doing it so I can too?
@Rick. Or mentioning Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
1
Mr.Kelly is a brave astronaut, but his apology
brings to mind the words of Mark Twain to the effect that physical bravery ,while good,
is not nearly as important as moral bravery.
he should never have apologized to the
narrow minded yahoos who would not know
greatness in a leader if it fell on their heads.
Churchill was a great man, not a perfect one.
we should all live such great ,flawed lives.
144
@Frank Tell that to the survivors of the massacre of Gallipoli and the Dardanelles. Churchill almost single handedly was responsible for the death of tens of thousands of Australians and New Zealanders through pure and lazy errors of judgement. Colonials (Australians, New Zealanders, Canadians, Nepalese and Indians) were all expendable in Churchill's world. So please read up on this man you so admire. He is not as great as he tells us he is,
3
@MartinC: He and FDR saved
the world from the horrors of
Nazism, so I think that while
we can condemn some rash
decisions he made during the
first world war, we must really
acknowledge that the good
overwhelms the bad.
1
Mr. Stephens rightly points out that Churchill had virtues. Unfortunately, his approach to history is that his vices also are virtues. It would be easy to list examples of Churchill's incompetence on some issues and outright racism on others. But instead, let me just say that if Mr. Stephens applies his theory of leadership at home, then he needs to stop criticizing the occupant of the Oval Office, because it's ok to say some bad things when the policies you like are being approved. And if anyone can be said to be implementing the kinds of policies Mr. Stephens has long wanted--climate change denial, promotion of white male privilege at the expense of people of color and women, for example--it is the occupant of the Oval Office.
21
In a week I had to acknowledge the fine education I received at The Protestant School Board of Greater Montreal. We studied British and American history and learned one man's meat is another man's poison. I learned of British and American resolve and Churchill and Cromwell were both the best and worst of men.
I am a Jew and by tradition we look for balance. I look at Brexit and despite everybody knowing it is insane policy and will not do anybody any good they are going to do it. The American story is equally insane as the nation is polarized and the wounds may never heal. One political party believes empirical evidence that is often only sociological and the other party believes in political and social dogma that often totally psychological.
The argument is 2500 years old and as we are on the verge of creating a much better world the Luddites on the left and right want to destroy all the machines.
Hannah Arendt was a real Jewish philosopher and understood the banality of evil. Let us stop the search for perfection and maybe we can again look for balance. Goldilocks had it correct.
45
@Moe I'm glad you're looking for balance as a Jew. As someone of mainly Irish extraction, I see the name Cromwell, all I can see is the population of Ireland suddenly shrinking by 300,000 or so after he arrived to "put down a rebellion."
It kind of sounds like the mother of all pogroms. Did the Cossacks every wage an attack that size on the shtetls? How much balance should I be willing to seek there?
The film "The Wind That Shakes the Barley" opens with one of Churchill's Black and Tans shooting an Irish lad when he refuses to give his English name and will only respond with his name in Gaelic.
I can admire what Churchill did during WWII. Absolutely. 110%. But the Black and Tans he created specialized in attacking Irish civilians and their property and are beyond redemption. There is no excuse for what they did. Ireland was going to be independent no matter what Churchill thought or wanted. But more people suffered in the process, thanks to him.
3
The ability to coin great maxims does not a great man make! If one is making the case for his greatness as a writer and orator, that's one thing. One can also make the case for his very significant contributions to the cause of Britain and Empire. Beyond that and a few stray remarks he made, usually quoted out of context, he was a racist and and an imperialist to the core. If you can condone these dimensions of his thought, his words and his actions as being merely "of his times", then elevate him by all means to the tabernacle of the Lord. Trump has. I'll pass.
18
@Shyam While today we conflate racism and imperialism, there are good reasons to argue that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (Churchill was born in 1874 - "the last Victorian") this was not so straightforward. Of course Churchill held views that today we regard as intolerable, and he was far from devoid of racial prejudices. He was an imperialist to the core, for sure. But he was, by the standards of his time and class, a good deal *less* racist than one might expect. For example, he recognised Nazi antisemitism and condemned it, in terms, far earlier than most and with more passion than others in the British governing class of the time. The point is surely neither to whitewash historical figures nor to condemn them for their failure to meet our contemporary cultural standards (which will in their turn be found grotesquely wanting by our 22nd-century descendants) but to estimate them by the standards of their own times.
3
Winston Churchill is my hero. So there....
15
Well Bret, finally something we agree upon.
3
The Irish may be excused for demurring as regards Mr Churchill. I recommend de Valera's May 1945 response to Mr Churchill's victory speech as at least a partial corrective.
11
@Pat That would be the de Valera who signed the condolences book at the German Embassy upon receiving the news of Hitler's death?
5
Barry Yes, it is the same. This was indeed one of the great blemishes (one of very many) that mark the career of de Velara. But when it is seen in the context of the issue of Irish neutrality in the War it takes on a different light. De Valera had to enforce, in no uncertain terms, the validity of the Free State. After all it was Churchill who in the 1921 negotiations was instrumental in the matter of the Irish ports. It is a vexed topic -- as are all Anglo Irish topics, but de Valera had to insist upon the Irish reading of the 1921 Treaty as an agreement between two States -- Ireland and the United Kingdom whereas Churchill was tempted to interpret the Treaty as a creation or creature of the UK Parliament -- and thus presumably a Dominion matter. Had de Valera acceded to the British over the ports this could have been seen as undermining the Irish interpretation of the Treaty as between two sovereign peoples. De Valera was not only standing upon the republican constitution of 1937 but also, and more critically, upon the validity of the Treaty. I suspect that the Irish may have had a different attitude towards the ports had it been a different PM in Westminster. Churchill's role in the 1921 era of Anglo Irish relations reverberated in the 40's .
2
I agree with the author that Churchill was a product of his time. Nothing more. I'm sure it must have taken Bret Stephens quite a lot of time to dig out a few favorable comments about India that Churchill made to ax his own political grind. Churchill was vehemently against the independence of India. He called Gandhi a "half-naked seditious fakir." Churchill said that Indians will never be able to govern themselves. However, the economic statistics conclusively prove that the British governed India extremely poorly. After independence all indicators of quality of life and economic well being have improved much faster than during the entire British rule. Churchill was an arch-Imperialist and a racist, no doubt. He was also a literary titan and so was Rudyard Kipling, who was another racist. Their morality was relative, power-based and rooted in their own era. Times have changed. World has moved forward. There is no need to sing paeans of Churchill from a hypothetical historical point of view, particularly after we have gained a better perspective on history. If Churchill had his way, the world would still have India under British with millions dying each year from man-made famines and pipe-smoking Churchills blaming the brown man for that.
39
@Ravi Srivastava:
"Pipe smoking?"
Churchill never smoked pipes - only cigars.
That he lived to age 90 is remarkable, particularly considering his prodigious alcohol intake.
2
@Ravi Srivastava
Spot on, Ravi. I see this column as mere chin music extolling the defeated emotions of the current ruling class in western european (sic) democracies. They resent that their heroes were mostly immoral people who couldn't think beyond their own; and that their established world order is based on chicanery and thievery and worse, it is crumbling before them.Most or all of europe subsists on the vulgar spoils of plunder sugar coated by the current legal and geopolitical order that repeatedly varnishes it.
It is kinda ludicrous (but expected) for Bret to say all these great things about a a man who treated more than half the world atrociously poorly, largely because his oh-so-eloquent literary genius. Was it so far beyond Bret's capability to understand that perhaps Churchill sent anything at all to India in 1943 because they loved to say that "India is Britain" and that they were really saving their own skin with that action?
2
It's sad that Scott Kelly had to backtrack. Another example of political correctness -- which should consist of basic politeness and not denigrating another's race, religion, sex, or orientation -- going too far.
14
Churchill and FDR are two of my heroes. I am listening to the Robert’s bio while commuting to and from work.
Each man had flaws typical of his era and class. Yet each was a tower of strength and decency, and without the two of them the entire world could have fallen victim to one of the most evil ideologies in human history.
I would never have apologied for that tweet and I’m sorry that Scott did. Anyone who was offended is ignorant.
56
That vile ideology never went away. It is ascendant in the motives of Trump and his base and its policies are damaging the civic life for the rest of us. Corporate interests will never stand in the way of fascism since profits can be made under democratic or fascist governments. A corporate ruled government will not save us. Only people with non corporate values that do not rate policies in terms of profits can even see the danger around us. But such people are not funded by today’s corporate financed electoral system. It is now only the radicals who have workable answers and they must operate at the fringes of the broken system. It is up to the people to lift up one of these radicals at this moment of need and elevate them to where they have the power to stop fascism before it destroys us.
1
Amazing to know at points greatness met--JFK with Churchill and before Churchill with Mark Twain---
2
Mr. Stephens would do well by reading the January 26, 2015 BBC report, “The 10 greatest controversies of Winston Churchill's career.” He would be enlightened by learning about Churchill’s – views on race, views on use of poison gas, actions during Bengal famine, statements about Gandhi, attitudes towards Jews, and attitudes towards Islam.
Mr. Stephens concludes his veneration of Churchill by saying, “We reconcile ourselves to the decadence of the present only if we choose to remain ignorant of the achievements of the past.” But, to quote Shakespeare, “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.”
So, it must be belatedly with Churchill – because for far too long, his portrait as a heroic war time Prime Minister tended to overshadow the man’s frailties. It isn’t Churchill’s achievements that have been ignored; it’s his failings that were glossed over. I haven’t read Andrew Roberts’s “brilliant new biography” on Churchill but the tenor of Mr. Stephens’ column suggest that Churchill’s shortcomings have once again been skimmed over or ignored.
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29701767
32
Well considered essay. Thank you.
4
The anti-Churchill backlash is a bit overstated. There have been at least two feature films about Churchill in the last three years and who knows how many documentaries. The hugely successful film, Dunkirk, is all but dedicated to him. And, as noted in the article, the biographies just keep coming. Yes, indeed, Churchill was in power during the twilight of British imperialism (a never ending source of interest on PBS). And he never met a war he didn't like. If he had his way, both World War I and World War II would have gone on for several more years as a struggle against the Soviets. But even here both the audience that likes war stories and the audience that thinks fighting the Soviets would have been a good idea, greatly outnumbers the people who would make an issue out of admiring Churchill.
10
Churchill: greatest man of the 20th Century.
14
Another great Englishman, George Orwell, warned of the consequences of losing our own history. It's no accident that American's decline in educational achievement has gone hand-in-hand with the rise of the Party of Trump. Americans not only lack knowledge of their own history of First and Second Amendment jurisprudence, they've lost all memory of Republican Dwight Eisenhower's warnings about the threat of a military/industrial establishment. The result is a nation that believes our founders intended the citizenry to regard money as speech while toting automatic rifles in schoolyards and chapels.
Churchill was great because he rose above the pressures of his times. Today, too many citizens are too poorly equipped to resist the conforming pressures of ignorant opinion. The result is a nation easily led into the perilous darkness of racism, xenophobia, and paranoid delusion.
61
Richard Burton studied Churchill's life as he prepared to play him on television. This was his assessment:
"I hate Churchill and all of his kind... They have stalked down the corridors of power all through history... What man of sanity would say on hearing of the atrocities committed by the Japanese against British prisoners of war, 'We shall wipe them out, every one of them, men, women, and children. There shall not be a Japanese left on the face of the earth?' Such simple-minded cravings for revenge leave me with a horrified but reluctant awe..."
And in fact Churchill's whole career was marked by a remarkable eagerness for violence. He was eager to bring violence to places from India to Sudan to Ireland to keep them under the absolute control of a brutal empire. He responded to strikes with violence. He called World War I "delicious" and recklessly threw away thousands of lives at Gallipoli. He advocated for the use of poison gas as humane when employed upon "uncivilized" peoples. He was an early enthusiast of bombing civilian targets, and of Agent Orange. After World War II, with colonial violence winding down, he helped spread Cold War violence to every corner of the globe. He helped establish the western standard of supporting right-wing dictatorships as the antidote to communism. He was also a consistent and virulent racist.
These are the "achievements of the past" that reconcile us to the injustices and wars of the present. An antidote to hagiography is needed too.
46
@Bluelotus
Churchill stood alone against Hitler and the military power of the Third Reich which decimated the Continent and murdered approx. 1M innocent Jews. The Japanese imprisoned British men, tortured them, starved them, and beheaded them in front of those prisoners. Did we cripple Japan's commercial shipping lanes? Did that cause a Pacific war with Japan aligned with the Axis? Yes. World wars are complicated events. However; Hitler was not complicated; he was a sociopathic demagogue who caused death and destruction. At the end he couldn't face the consequences and poisoned himself, his mistress and her children. We would not better off if the Axis had won WWll. We are free to write letters to our free press without fear. Think about Trump's designation of our press as "the enemy of the people"; those are the words of a demagogue. Because we are a free people with the rule of law, we have Mueller, a former Marine, to speak for us without fear. Mueller will win his last battle; and, we will be grateful to him for fighting a criminal grifter in the WH.
Churchill spent his life seriously attempting to protect and improve life for the British people. Was he perfect? Certainly not, but we will not find the perfect among the human.
He was born to the untitled branch of a titled family, not usually a straight line to greatness. He overcame his own shortcomings and learned from his mistakes and the mistakes of those around him. His vision and determination was a major reason that the world was freed from the tyranny of the Third Reich. No, he was not perfect. But we should be incredibly grateful that he was who he was.
44
Churchill : “ Never, never, never give up “.
Trump : “ Never, never, never do the right thing “.
Devolution, GOP style.
19
@Phyliss Dalmatian
Yes, it’s “ give IN “. Damn autocorrect.
4
Oh boy... ANOTHER bio of Churchill (not to mention his multi-volume autobiography). Just what the world needs. Now if only someone would write another Lincoln biography!
5
Mr. Stephens glosses over Churchill's role in the death of three million brown people in the Calcutta famine and quickly dismisses the revulsion that this sorry episode should cause in anyone - not just on the basis of current moral framework of this age but of any era - by attributing such reactions to humor. Hahaha. Very funny.
He would do well to read the thoroughly researched book, 'Churchill's Secret War' ( http://madhusree.com/churchill.html ) if he really wants to understand why the brown people do not consider Churchill the hero that the conservatives continue to believe him to be despite all the evidence.
12
I enjoy your insightful opinion pieces, Bret, but in praising Churchill to the sky, you make the common mistake of overlooking the darker side of heroes lauded for their uncommon this and valiant that. You gloss over the fact that Churchill was a racist who believed in the superiority of the White Race, a trait he shared with Hitler. About Indians that the British ruled for 200 years through treachery and 'divide and conquer,' he said, "I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion." He called Mahatma Gandhi a "half-naked fakir." Historians may rewrite history, being in thrall to their subjects, but they cannot change facts. Evidences abound that Churchill was indifferent to the plight of Indians during the 1943 famine. He thought of the famine as the natural culling of a people who bred 'like rabbits.' You call this 'racially insensitive humor?' On the contrary, it reflected his world-view and philosophy that people with darker skins were inferior in every way. Yes, Japan was threatening India from Burma but England used Indians to fight Japan in the service of the Empire. When England finally defeated Japan, the empire abandoned its obligations to the soldiers and their families. The current Rohingya catastrophe is to some extent a reflection of that. Churchill is a hero to colonialists and empire-seekers but he is no hero to people of color. Cherry picking his virtues to draw lessons for our times is fundamentally flawed and potentially dangerous.
29
“He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle,” John F. Kennedy said (stealing a line from Edward Murrow) in awarding Churchill honorary United States citizenship in 1963. Of which leader now in office could that be said today — in any language?"
Worse still, in our modern time, our 'leaders' try to do it in 280 characters or fewer. Bad spelling, poor grammar and incoherence... and fail, miserably. Who will quote Trump even two years after he's gone?
12
Its only to a conservative that the death of 3 million people is a "difficult choice" and not a complete moral failure.
19
It may be time for Stephens to defend Churchill, a first rate mind, but few need him to do so.
Ironically, Churchill would have looked upon Bret's writings with amusement. He hated equivocations and sly word games which camouflage savage ideology.
11
"Except that Churchill did send whatever food he could spare,"
Ah yes. The rest of the world had to be fed by Australian grain on ships that were forbidden to discharge in India and ordered to sail onwards and deposit their cargoes in unused stockpiles in Europe for the rest of the world. A paltry two or three million people died because Churchill could not spare a morsel. The man who fought to liberate a continent of whites fought hard to deny liberty to an equal number of coloreds. Other than that and a few more significant negative things, he was a GREAT man. How unfair that he had to bear the burden of privilege.
19
Churchill’s chief virtue is this: At the apogee of his power, he was not corrupted. He was at the end what he was at the beginning: a steadfast, committed Englishman, a patriot in love with his country, its people, and above all its language. To read Churchill and to read about Churchill is to grasp the potential and limitations of greatness. Churchill himself acknowledged that we are all worms but he intended to be a glowworm. And so he was.
24
Churchill held important position when Britain colonized much of the world.
Churchill also "mobilized the English language" and said things like this:
"In 1937, he [Churchill] told the Palestine Royal Commission: '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, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.'" https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29701767
Churchill also said Gandhi "ought to be lain bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi, and then trampled on by an enormous elephant with the new Viceroy seated on its back."
Yeah, someone to admire.
22
Churchill was a great man, the right person to lead Britain when Hitler rose to power.
But he was also a racist. You can read the apologetics and condemnations of Churchill in various places online and no doubt towards the end of the famine the British did help. But according to what I’ve also read, there were Australian ships full of wheat that sailed by India when food was needed. So I would guess Churchill is not quite the innocent Stephens claims he was. Here is one link giving the other side of the story—
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/soutikbiswas/2010/10/how_churchill_starved_india.html
14
Oh, the irony of Trump looking up to Winston Churchill! Of course, Trump's notion of imitating Churchill is pathetically superficial.
Well, in any case, England sure needs a Churchillian leader to now materialize and rescue Europe from the catastrophic Brexit vote...
2
"In Britain, a 2008 survey found that 20 percent of teenagers thought Churchill was a fictional character but 58 percent thought Sherlock Holmes was real."
That calls to mind the rebuke of The Ancient to a mocking youth from Shaw's "Back to Methuselah":
"Infant, one moment of the ecstasy of life as we live it would strike you dead."
5
"We live in a time in which decent and otherwise sensible people are surrendering too easily to the hectoring of morons or extremists." I couldn't agree more, I just wish you would take your own advice.
What you rightly regard as hectoring when retired astronaut Scott Kelly was derided for quoting Winston Churchill is somehow transformed into righteous anger as long as you are doing it. This piece could be credited if it was not part of a larger pattern in which you repeatedly show no desire whatsoever to employ persuasion to achieve anything, and instead belittle any who you view as acting improperly, or dare to disagree with you. You constantly look under rocks for liberal malfeasance, while you ignore, excuse, or justify everything the G.O.P. does. You give token criticism of Trump, then invariably back almost everything he does, no matter how awful, all the while disparaging and ridiculing any who think differently.
Many truly "decent and otherwise sensible people" have no intention of surrendering to hectoring and understand that it's a problem whether it comes from the political left or the political right. Since you consistently refuse to take this balanced position the only conclusion is that you wish to silence those you disagree with, yet still remain free to engage in the very activity you accuse those on the left of committing. It means if you are really serious about stopping hectoring, it needs to stop everywhere, starting with you.
12
Statesmen, not politicians. We need more of them. Although it’s worth remembering that without Hitler and World War II, Churchill might well have been forgotten, as the debacle of Gallipoli was laid at his feet during WW I and it took him a long time to live it down. He rose to handle a crisis in his late 60’s and managed to spearhead an amazing defiant response to global evil, in spite of his own demons. Interesting to think that he was the first prime minister the current queen Elizabeth worked with. There seems to have been a marked decline in competence between then and now!
10
''It is because Churchill made the judgments he did that his latter-day detractors live in a world free to make judgments about him. ''
In English,not German
24
After all these years, I remember how embarrassed I was that Lyndon Johnson sent Hubert Humphrey, his Vice President, to Churchill's funeral instead of going himself.
5
Churchill's 6 volume memoirs of World War II is a great read. It shows him to be a master politician, military strategist and story teller. His very close cooperation with Roosevelt to conduct the war contrasts sharply with the present isolationism. The victors of World War II laid the foundation for the following decades of peace and growing prosperity around the world.
31
@hourcadette
The appointment of Gen. George Marshall to rebuild European democracies was genius, as was the appointment of MacArthur to rebuild Japan as a democracy. Patton may have been an autocrat; however his drive to Berlin possibly kept Stalin from taking all of Germany. Trump, had he lived then, would have been a draft dodger, as he is now.
"I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest."
- Winston Churchill, October 1, 1939
“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”
- Trumpty Dumpty July 27 2016
If American citizens had even the slightest bit of critical thinking skills, knowledge of civics and history or just plain good judgment, we never would have come close to installing a Matryoshka-Doll-In-Chief into the Oval Office.
But here we are, with millions getting their news from Facebook, the Fascist Flag-Waving Corporate State Run Fake News channel and hate radio as America's brains are systematically disemboweled by Grand Old Propaganda while America's Trump Toilet overflows with stupidity, greed, corruption and Kremlin-style oligarchy as far as the eye can see.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
- Thomas Jefferson
As long as America maintains a vibrant Party of Stupid pulling its collective IQ down into a right-wing authoritarian drainage ditch, Trumpistan - America's newest Soviet satellite republic - and Russian-Republican oligarchy will flourish and wages, healthcare, facts and the future will be ripped away from the Grand Old Peasants.
Pachyderm Spongiform Encephalopathy is killing us.
292
It is clearer than ever that education is the key. Without it we are lost.
12
@Socrates:" If American citizens had even the slightest bit of critical thinking skills, knowledge of civics and history or just plain good judgment,"
If that were the case we would not see the rush by many liberal and progressive thinking US citizens towards "Medicare for all".
If that were the case we would have NYC liberals and progressives in the streets protesting against the racially segregated public school system in NYC. Or they would take a hard honest look inward look at their position on race. But there probably aren't enough therapists in the state of NY to handle the workload resulting from that.
1
@Socrates
Thomas Jefferson. Winston Churchill Benjamin Netanyahu, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump were and are all white supremacist nationalist evil prejudiced bigots.
Russia did not enslave Africans in America. Russia did not treat Africans in America separate and unequal. Russia did not imprison the 40% of 2.3 million Americans in prison who are black like Ben Carson.
In the 2016 Presidential election 92% of black people voted for Hillary Clinton including 88% of black men and 95% of black women.
While 58% of white people including 62% of white men and 54% of white women voted for Donald Trump.
1
"We reconcile ourselves to the decadence of the present only if we choose to remain ignorant of the achievements of the past." Evangelicals and Republicans take note. The parable of the lady with flexible values comes to mind. Churchilll was at a dinner party when the subject of ladies of the night was broached. A high toned lady remarked that she could not imagine any woman debasing herself like that. Churchill asked if the woman would sleep with him for a few pounds and the women grew angry and said certainly not. Churchill replied "what about a million pounds?" the woman hesitated slightly but asked "What do you think I am?' To which Churchill replied "We've already established what you are, we're just haggling over the price." We all have our baser instincts but they can be forgiven if we are on the right side of history. Evangelicals and Republicans have shown they will sell themselves to the lowest bidder. The least they could have done to save their souls was to haggle.
55
@Rick Gage Always thought G. B. Shaw said that.
1
It’s tragic to hear that one-fifth of teens in England think Churchill is fictional. They will be unlikely to have the opportunity I had during a time or an illness, when I made a choice to stay interested and optimistic. I read Churchill’s volumes of WWII. I remembered Churchill’s writing tickled the heart and brain. If I could just immerse in his beautiful, precise, and often surprising choices of vocabulary, and to read the very human account of his courage and doubts under such appalling pressure, it would be a positive step. It was the right choice.
37
@Vmerri....who told you that 1/5 of British teens think Churchill is fictional? Maybe it was US teens? Thank you.
Bret, I was a liberal Churchill admirer from my early twenties through middle age.
I must have owned every Churchill volume that Martin Gilbert ever wrote, a host of other multi- and single-volume biographies, numerous collections of his speeches, both in print and on LP, the complete WWII memoirs, and other assorted writing.
The book that shook my Churchill admiration to the core was Steven Kinzer "All the Shah's Men" - his retelling of the overthrow of the Mossadegh government in 1953, a tragedy in which Winston played a leading role.
After reading Kinzer, it was impossible for me to see Churchill in the same light - as a peerless defender of democracy.
The Brits had entered into a sweetheart deal with the Shah's corrupt father, a deal that rendered Iran's primary natural resource worthless to them, while its citizens went hungry - and yet Churchill insisted that a corrupt bargain with the father of an ousted despot continue in place.
When Mossadegh naturally refused, as any patriot and nationalist would have, Churchill cowardly enlisted John Foster Dulles, Kermit Roosevelt, and the Eisenhower administration to do his dirty work. And we Americans have been living with the aftermath of the Iranians' discover of our role in that coup d'etat ever since.
Most biographies of Churchill pay scant attention to his second stint as Prime Minster; but it is the sins of those latter years that we live with today.
193
A great observation, Matthew Carnicelli.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat
33
@Matthew Carnicelli-
Churchill was no saint, wasn’t infallible but was excitable, especially by moments of inspiration that swept through him.
Fantastic ideas galloped through his mind. Sometimes they came in staccato bursts, other times in long waves. These had to be curbed, or rebutted, by his military advisers, military specialists forced to fight campaigns of argument against Churchill the military generalist. But, without him, Britain couldn’t have continued the war, which means Nazi Germany would still be with us today.
Think about that, and what it would mean, in the course of your travels.
27
@Steve Singer
As a former Churchill buff, I know precisely what role he played in the Second World War.
I also know what role he played in the overthrow of a legitimate government that dared only to preserve its precious natural resources - and how that overthrow continues to haunt us to this day.
It's time to see historical figures in their totality - the good, the bad, and the unforgivable, and not simply as cardboard heroes or villains.
In fact, one could argue that if Winston hadn't been such an erratic figure in pre-WWII British politics, he might have actually risen to power in time to prevent Hitler from dominating Europe in the 1930s. But for that to have happened, he likely would have had to confront his alcoholism (and accompanying depression).
23
We went to see 'Young Winston', and afterward shared a glass of brandy in his honor. He proposed the following day, and we married on December 14, 1972, forty-six years ago.
Not all of us are surrendering to this presidency and its administration, but distancing ourselves to see more clearly, learning to be detached, while growing in compassion for the most vulnerable among us.
There are plenty of decent and true Americans in our midst not to feel the need to give up in the face of one of the darkest hours in our history.
Being born into "privilege" is a child who is loved. Churchill loved his American mother, Jennie, and it is uncanny to find this fine review of this new biography by Andrew Roberts on the eve of one's wedding anniversary.
Thank you, Mr. Stephens.
50
The only antidote to Trumpism is reading. We need to demand that children read the great works and the speeches of great men and the histories of their civilization. This is the bedrock of knowledge, and media studies and computer programming must come second. And the wasteland that is television should be seen as the vice that it truly is, a type of psychological addiction that can destroy a mind. And educated person can handle tv and the media, an ignorant person has no capacity to resist and will be manipulated and brainwashed. We should turn off all television transmitters in the red states and make users pass a comprehensive history and civics exam to get access. If they can’t then they have to read books until they can. The ignorant can’t cure themselves, it is up to those with knowledge to take control of the mentally unprepared and act as their guardians until they prove that they are capable of informed thought. In some cases this will mean that entire states must be subject to marshal law until their schools are improved and their electorate is educated. Naturally people in red states should not be allowed to vote until they can pass the same type of exam. Such a solution can easily be implemented and enforced and has the advantage that the people subjected to it will thank us all after it is over. We need to do this before the next election.
We need nuanced evaluation of the past and those who lived in it. History and historiography is all about competing and often wildly variant interpretations of the past. Taking Churchill as an example, we can praise his progressive Liberal reforms in the 1907-10 era and courageous wartime leadership while criticising his racial attitudes and defence of imperial rule in India etc. We don’t need hagiography or vilification-just considered appreciation of human success and an awareness of faults and flaws.
75
"It is because Churchill made the judgments he did that his latter-day detractors live in a world free to make judgments about him."
Nailed it.
391
@ted Presiding over the deaths of 3 million people is a valid judgement?
8
@ted
I don't know. Turns out the Germans are the true winners in Europe right now, and the Brits have lost the Empire. No sense in pining for the past.
Better to learn from your mistakes than repeat them, I say. WASPs surrender easily, it turns out, but I suppose Mr. Stephens, raised by a rich businessman in Mexico before he abandoned the country (and likely didn't clean up after he polluted it making his money), is still wanted to see himself in WASP America, if only to protect his own privileges to pass on to his son.
Rootless men tend to run. Nttawwt. See Roger Cohen as well.
11
@ted
I'm sorry, but this article (epitomized by this ridiculous temper-tantrum of a line) is based on an absurd view of history that assumes we can know how things would have turned out if things were different (such as, if Churchill hadn't existed, or if he'd stopped the shipments of food from India to Britain to ease the Bengal famine).
The world has billions of parallel actors, not just a few, and these actors interact in ways that can never be predicted. The removal of one can change the whole in ways that often bear no simple comparison to prior states. This was empirically proved by Konrad Lorenz in the 60s (the so-called "butterfly effect"), but was always clear to social thinkers like Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, or Karl Popper.
As a result, events happen and then lucky people get seen retrospectively as the architects of the chaos. As Churchill himself noted, history would be kind to him because he intended to write it.
Yes, of course Churchill has a mixed legacy, but to insist on recognition for his actions in 1939-45 above, say, his role in the Russian Civil War (that was galvanized and amplified by his massive shipments of weapons and supplies, until it destroyed Russia, cemented the power of the Bolsheviks, and thus doomed the 20th century) is absurd. Examine all the facts, and hold the contradictions side-by-side, or you cannot be taken seriously. The search for goodies and baddies is infantile.
37
Churchill was beyond question one of the biggest men of the 20th century; he stands with Lincoln as a great leader through a terrible war, and as an author.
He lead a swashbuckling younger life as war correspondent and military officer, rode cavalry and played polo, and held more positions in the English government than anyone can keep track of.
Bret glosses over Churchill's hard-nosed British colonialism, and penchant for saying extreme things; Churchill proclaimed in 1920 that Gandhi should be bound hand and foot and crushed with an elephant ridden by the viceroy.
Churchill suffered being cast out of government after world war II, and then returned to lead it a decade later.
What a life!
42
Children are a market. Corporations make money by getting children (and us all) interested in objects or activities connected to corporate money making. What is taught in schools is not connected to corporate money making, so corporations have an interest in turning the attention of our children and us (and training them and us to turn our attention) towards matters connected with selling us things.
Training our children to be consumers deliberately gets in the way of training them for other things, such as excellence or citizenship or adult life. To leave a child free from possession by consumerist competition is to leave money on the table (which is the ultimate sin in the world of free enterprise).
Churchill grew up in a different world, one in which business success was looked down on by many, who used other standards to judge things. This world stood in the way of consumerist competition and has been largely swept aside. We need something that can stand against consumerist competition, but it will have to come from new places since the traditional, establishment places were impotent against Trump.
42
A classic example of a man who's words made men think. Erudite and verbose with a vocabulary that far exceeded any of our present day politicians.
He knew what he was talking about, he had the experience to impart that knowledge. When we think of leaders, he is there with the best. Not that we all agreed with him, he had his detractors, but he was a man for his time.
That 20% of young Brits think he was a fictional character, only shows their public has followed the path of the denizens of our conservative states. It is not our our their schools that have failed, it is the culture of their social circles. It only takes a few rabid followers to energize a vocal minority that takes over rational discourse.
The acceptance of beliefs despite contrary objective evidence is the sign of a decaying society. we see a cadre following a dishonest autocrat and believing what he says, is the truth. If what you believe does not exist, what you possess is not consciousness, it is an empty mind.
62
@David Underwood
Except that it's the Left, not conservatives, who are vilifying Churchill for not having 21st century views.
11
Because the right agrees with his 19th century views.
A great man with great virtues and great faults who saved England during its darkest hour.
He weaponized the English language to put some spine into its citizens.
He was one of the few in history who rose to the occasion and perhaps even surprised himself.
223
While I think it is fine to admire the very human Winston Churchill for his achievements, I don't think it is necessary to deify him.
91
@Donald Seekins
Who's deifying him? Very few people.
6
@Donald Seekins Let us not deify but stand in awe, because there are so few 20th century figures - living or dead - who can match the breadth and significance of his accomplishments.
19
@Donald Seekins You don’t? He and FDR saved the world from Hitler. That’s grounds for deification as far as I’m concerned.
21