May 2008

The New Relevance of Winston Churchill

Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War:
How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World
by Patrick J. Buchanan
Hardback, 501 pages, $29.95
Crown Publishers, New York

or most Americans, the circumstances leading to World War II probably seem irrelevant today. No doubt that is especially true of baby boomers for whom -- except the veterans and their families -- even the Vietnam War, which ended more than 30 years ago, seems like ancient history.

The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan in President Bush's "war on terror" are the world-historical events that command our attention today.

But today's world is the product of WWII, and if we seek to understand our world, we ought to know how it came to be. After all, the absence of historical knowledge makes us naive. As Cicero put it, "to be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to be ever a child."

Reading Pat Buchanan's lastest book, Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War is one way to grow up real fast.  More thunderbolt than book, it shatters old myths and illuminates what the subtitle promises: "How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World."  Marshaling a powerful array of historical fact and scholarly opinion, Buchanan challenges the liberal establishment's deeply entrenched versions of the two world wars that decimated European civilization. 

For Buchanan, WWII was phase two of what he calls the Great Civil War of the West that began with WWI. That civil war resulted in the deaths of 100 million Europeans, the triumph of Communist tyranny in Eastern Europe and China (where millions more were sent to their graves), the dissolution of the British Empire, and the ascendence of imperial-minded elites in the U.S. who killed off the old Republic built by America's Founders.  Buchanan argues that those two horrific wars were not inspired purely by noble sentiments in pursuit of international justice and morality, but were instead largely the result of catastrophic blunders for the West, most of them committed by ambitious British statesmen, including the widely esteemed Winston Churchill.

The picture of Churchill that emerges from Buchanan's fascinating history is far less flattering than the one carefully cultivated by his admirers.  A graduate of the Royal Military Academy, Churchill was a militarist and imperialist, serving variously as First Lord of the Admiralty, Minister of Munitions, and Secretary of State for War. It was an ambitious Churchill who helped push England to declare war on Germany in 1914, and for that must bear some of the responsibility for the tragic consequences that followed. Among them is the harsh Treaty of Versailles imposed on Germany that, as Buchanan shows, serious and fair-minded historians today agree was a viscious injustice that prepared the soil for the rise of HItler and Naziism.  Churchill loved war, declaring six months into WWI, "I know this war is smashing and shattering the lives of thousands every moment and yet -- I cannot help it -- I enjoy every second." And it was Churchill who, departing from the West's military tradition that sought to limit hostilities to combatants, advocated as military strategy the mass slaughter of enemy civilians through what he himself forthrightly called "exterminating attack[s] by very heavy bombers" in WWII, which set the stage for the grotesque "mutual assured destruction" doctrine of the nuclear age. He also advocated the use of poison gas against Iraqis in 1920, and against German civilians in 1944. He even secretly proposed an anthrax attack on pastures throughout Germany to infect cattle and thereby kill millions of civilians, though the attack was never carried out despite tests conducted off the Scottish coast on Gruinard Island, which Buchanan reports was "not cleared of contamination until 1990."

The worst blunder for European civilization was Churchill's collusion with Stalin.  Buchanan notes that Churchill's territorial concessions to Stalin in 1945 were "far worse" than Neville Chamberlain's concessions to Hitler at Munich. At the infamous meeting in Yalta, Churchill (with Franklin D. Roosevelt's hearty consent) consigned 100 million Europeans to live under Communist oppression.

England's attitude toward Poland attracts much of Buchanan's attention, for it was England's unconditional war guarantee to the Poles that triggered the European-wide conflagration. Under tough scrutiny, England's behavior with respect to Poland seems morally erratic at best, and sinister at worst.   With a no-strings-attached guarantee from England to defend Poland in case of hostilities from Germany, Polish leaders confidently refused to negotiate with Hitler over the return of Danzig, taken from Germany in the Treaty of Versailles. Hitler had offered the Poles a guarantee of their borders and an anti-Comintern alliance with Germany in return for Danzig.  The British historian B. Liddell Hart concedes, "on Hitler's part it was a remarkably moderate demand."  The effect on Hitler of the British guarantee and Poland's refusal to negotiate was like poking a tiger with a stick.  He was quite willing to use force to settle accounts.  Although the English guarantee was described by Chamberlain as designed to preserve "Polish independence," when both Germany and Russia divided up Poland, England declared war only on Germany.

Churchill had declared in Parliament, "The preservation of Poland and the integrity of Poland must be regarded as as a cause commanding the regard of all the world."  Enland had decided to turn a localized German-Polish conflict into a continental war.  But as the end of the war approached, fought ostensibly to preserve Poland's integrity, Churchill handed  Poland and its people over to Soviet Russian control at Yalta in full compliance with Stalin's "non-negotiable" demand.  If England went to war to save Poland, England failed.

But why now should we be concerned about these controversies of long ago?

"There has arisen among America's elite a Churchill cult," Buchanan writes, and that cult helps propel America's military adventures today.  The cult's neoconservative followers believe Churchill is the model for how American statesmen should respond to every crisis in the world.  America's new political elites regularly paint every adversary as "a new Hitler,"  from Muammar Khaddafi and Saddam Hussein to Slobodan Milosevic. It is this mindset, argues Buchanan, that drove the U.S. to its disastrous invasion of Iraq.  "If not exposed, it will produce more wars  and more disasters," he writes, and one day bring on a war of the same Churchillian magnitude that ruined the British Empire.