August 15, 2013

Finest Hour 118, Spring 2003

Page 22

BY LARRY ARNN

Perhaps Churchill Believed in Real Liberation

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There is a war on. The enemy has raided across the border, not this time into India, but into New York City and Washington, DC. The Mideast is in turmoil. America and Britain have gone into the government changing business in Afghanistan and Iraq. Putting a name to these actions, a senior British diplomat has called for a new form of Empire.

How interesting that so many should pick this time to renew their acquaintance with Winston Churchill. Roy Jenkins, an MP in the socialist Labour Party that Churchill fought all his life, has written a biography calling Churchill the greatest modern Prime Minister (FH 114). Oxford historian Geoffrey Best has written the finest among many short biographies of Churchill under the subtitle “A Study in Greatness” (FH 111). HBO has done a special, “The Gathering Storm,” that is surely the finest drama ever made about Churchill (FH 115). Taking notice of the trend, the Atlantic Monthly has published a cover article on Churchill by Christopher Hitchens (FH 114). Though Hitchens attempts more blame than praise, his blaming is contrived mostly and unwittingly from sorry old slanders long disproved, and he falters at the end into grudging respect.

The first remarkable thing about this new attention to Churchill is how favorable it is about the man as war leader and enemy of Hitler. The second is the uniform finality with which it rejects Churchill’s idea of empire.

The documentary and biographies do a good job describing the 1930s rearmament debate. Jenkins’s strength was that he was himself a politician, and he often recounts the political conversations that happen behind the scenes with insight. His book being much longer than that of Best, who tells the story in the mere 350 pages. He manages by writing essays on each period of Churchill’s life. He summarizes what is happening with clarity and a high degree of accuracy, and he has a good understanding of what Churchill is thinking and what he means. Alas, there are exceptions.

We deal with just one of them here: India. Neither Best nor Jenkins is at his best when discussing this topic. “The Gathering Storm” is just as bad, with blessed brevity on the subject.

Roy Jenkins calls his chapter on India “Unwisdom in the Wilderness.” Geoffrey Best takes the same line. He begins by congratulating the National Government that proposed and accomplished Indian constitutional reform for this attitude:

“[The plan of Indian constitutional reform] proceeded from the basis that British Imperial theory, notwithstanding the gibes of Leninists and indigenous nationalists, was sincere in its declared principle that overseas territories were held by the British for the benefit of their inhabitants…and for only so long as it took those inhabitants to acquire the capacities and capabilities to govern themselves.”

But Churchill threw himself into “a reactionary posture.” Best comments that some in Churchill’s crowd “talked as if” Winston were “en route to a political coup,” and adds, “something of that sort may have been in his mind….” Goodness. It is impossible to track from this statement who said what. One hopes that Best means only a coup to win the premiership in the parliamentary party committee. The vagueness of this criticism matches an absence of facts that is the character of this whole chapter.

Churchill, Best accurately reports, believed that as soon as the British began to leave, the “Hindus and Muslims would begin to slaughter one another.” Moreover, he continues, Churchill had no “serious knowledge about Indians or any other nonwhite peoples.”

Best does not mention that the Hindus and Muslims did begin to slaughter one another, including Gandhi, at least in the number of hundreds of thousands; that they ultimately partitioned the country into two separate states, both now possessing nuclear weapons and having fought several wars between them. Recently the Indian army conducted major military maneuvers along the Pakistani border. Pakistani terrorists, the friends of Osama bin Laden, attempted recently to invade the Indian Parliament and kill those within it. Tensions, as they say in international coverage, remain high.

Churchill, moreover, had very considerable experience both with India and with “nonwhite peoples.” He had fought in Afghanistan and served in India. He had fought in both northern and southern Africa. He had been Secretary of State for the Colonies, in which post he had negotiated the founding of Arab states and supported the founding of modern Israel. He had done this on the spot in the Middle East, just over a decade earlier.

In his books on the Boer War Churchill had written that the real issue between the Boers, who were South Africans of Dutch extraction, and the English was that the former “would never accept the equality of the Kaffir.” In a 4th of July speech in 1918, when America and Britain were allies in the First World War, he had said of the Declaration of Independence that “by it we lost an empire, and by it we also preserved an empire. By applying its principles and learning its lessons we have maintained our communion with the powerful Commonwealths our children have established beyond the seas.”

Now, India was not part of the Commonwealth, and it was not self-governing. Why, one may ask, was India not entitled to the same treatment as Australia, Canada or New Zealand?

Churchill addresses that question at considerable length in his many speeches on the Indian question. He asserts repeatedly the right of the Indians to govern themselves. For example, in August 1930: “let me…reaffirm the inflexible resolve of Great Britain to aid the Indian people to fit themselves increasingly for the duties of self-government. Upon that course we have been embarked for many years, and we assign no limits to its ultimate fruition.” This is a common theme and cannot be missed by anyone who reads the speeches.

At the same time he holds that India is not ready to exercise self-government. He mentions the division between Muslim and Hindu. He mentions the pervasive illiteracy, the other differences of religion, the division into royal kingdoms, the caste system. He mentions the fact that peace and order have reigned in India under British rule, and because of that the population has grown, and so Britain bears a responsibility for at least the people who are part of the increase.

The weight of these things is hard to feel now, when India is becoming a great nation, growing a modern economy in large parts of it, building a middle class, and achieving peaceful alternation in power of its chief parties. More than sixty years have passed. The hope that India may now present was distant in those days.

We may however soon enough have cause to understand these things again. We are talking of building democracy in places like the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Iraq, and North Korea. We will not find this easy to do. Let us say, for example, that we form the view that children in some distant land should not be taught the method and the Tightness of suicidal murder of civilians. Let us say that they should not be taught to kill people because of their race or religion, and also their families should not be paid large sums when they do it. Let us say that teenagers should not be instructed how to carry ugly bombs around as if they were knapsacks. Let us say that we propose to stop this. This is a lot to prevent.

Whether we act under the authority of an international bureaucracy, as the British diplomat Robert Cooper suggests, or under the authority of the UN, or under American authority, we will find that we are interfering in the closest matters of local policy. We will need to regulate what happens in villages and little towns, in their schools and perhaps—for this is where the problem often is—in their houses of worship. We may try to find local leaders who are responsible and good and put them in power. In that case we will be choosing their rulers, and by that principle we will be tempted if they fail us to look for others replace them, and replace them again if need be.

Churchill said there would be bloodshed in India if the British left, and there was. We are now on a global quest to prevent bloodshed in our own cities. We are acting on at least one of the principles that Churchill embraced. In his book on the war he fought in Afghanistan as a young man, Churchill entitles the last chapter “The Riddle of the Frontier.” He writes that it is very hard to go into Afghanistan and subdue the raiding tribesmen. Our troops, recently winning a glorious victory, are however still engaged in the work. We have not found Osama.

Churchill writes that it is also hard to hold a defensive line, ever at the ready, along the great border, when the tribesmen may rest when they please and strike where they wish. He favors the more active policy. Both are full of difficulty.

Now we have a greater cause than Churchill had in 1897 to make the choice. If we wait, we may lose not a building, but a city. Mr. Warren Buffet, who is in the insurance business, has written that we are bound to do precisely this. In earlier days he would sometimes explain that he makes large margins in the insurance business because his company is big and sound enough to handle the biggest risks. One year he may lose, but most years he wins. But this terrorism, he says, is a risk too big for him— and he is the biggest. Only the government, he says, is big enough. But the government is all of us. How long would it take us to replace the immeasurable value in people and things that can be found today in New York City, if that is the place? And it may not be just one place.

Before we blush and mumble that Churchill was a racist—which he was not—we should think how things are now. If the past is the key to the future, then perhaps some reflection on our own problems in the present might sometimes explain to us better the problems of the past. Here is a moment when we might revisit not the new, but the old kind of liberalism, upon which Churchill built his view of empire.

There is honor of Churchill in these recent works. Maybe we are on the way back. We have a way to go. 

ENGLISH SPEAKING PEOPLES is a periodic series of articles which consider Churchill’s wisdom and experience in the light of current events. Responsible opposing opinion is welcome and will be published. Dr. Arnn is President of Hillsdale College in Michigan. This article is taken from his review in, and published by kind permission of, the Claremont Review of Books, , www.claremont.org, Spring 2002.