August 2, 2013

Finest Hour 122, Spring 2004

Page 28

BY LARRY P. ARNN


We can tell that we are at war because the incidence of quotations of Winston Churchill has risen. It is because we do not recur to him enough when we are at peace that we are so often at war.

The current conflict is a serious one. We can best understand the danger we face from thinking a little about some points that were common over many decades in Churchill’s thinking about war.

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Begin with the fact that we have been attacked with devastating effect at home. The taking of civilian casualties is always a sign of effectiveness in an enemy and danger to a polity. It is after all the function of military forces in any just society to protect the civilian population from harm. From this point of view we have been attacked more seriously than at any time in our history. Our enemies are both feverish in their hatred of us and calculating, to varying degrees, in their methods.

Much of Islam is in a fever. Gripped in a violent ideology that vaunts race and rules despotically, and having at their disposal great wealth, these otherwise backward Islamic societies are formidable. They are masters of guerrilla techniques. They have been deploying them for many decades against Western powers. They control some weapons of great power, and they seek the worst kinds of weapons earnestly.

These militant Islamic forces are linked to China through Pakistan and Iraq especially. China is also linked to North Korea, which has made an explicit threat to export a nuclear weapon or weapons to terrorists. In this relationship the terrorists constitute a delivery system that complicates both our previous and current doctrines about terrorists. Neither massive retaliation nor ballistic missile defense is well adapted to confronting this threat.

Meanwhile the allies are divided. Some of them have close commercial and diplomatic relations with one or more of the powers named above. All of them trade vigorously with China, as do we. China is a more conventional sort of opponent, in that it occupies a vast and valuable territory, has a large population, and possesses a serious military that is improving by urgent steps. It claims for itself the status of great power. These are the traditional elements of strength, and they make China both potentially formidable and actually vulnerable in ways that we are accustomed to calculate. The Arab and the Muslim states, with their ties to terrorists, and their use of civilians as a key striking force, present different but related problems.

These problems tend to divide Anglo-Americans from their allies. Some of them are possessed of an ideology not so different from the complex of fears and hopes that animated the decade of appeasement that preceded the Second World War.

Jacques Chirac has something in common with Stanley Baldwin when he says that war is always failure. His speeches have something of the cast of Baldwin’s famous statement, in which Baldwin used the unpardonable word “futile”:

I must confess that the more I have studied the question the more depressed I have been at the perfectly futile attempts that have been made to deal with this problem. I think it is well also for the man in the street to realize that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed.

This sentiment, honestly confessed, goes far to explain the paralysis that gripped the British and French governments after the accession of Hitler. The recent shenanigans in the United Nations are not so different from the sanctions on Italy, from which many League members profited: “Willing to strike yet afraid to wound,” as Churchill said.

Chirac has something in common with the French statesmen who gutted the League of Nations sanctions against Italy, and the British and French statesmen who sold out Czechoslovakia. Amidst all this frequent talk of Churchill by some, there is a remarkable similarity to his political adversaries among many others.

Before we are too quick to condemn them in the name of Churchill, it is only fair we consider whether they might not find some sanction for their own opinions in those of the great man. I think perhaps we shall be able to find some if we look.

It is, after all, easy to think of Churchill, in relation to his peers, as merely belligerent and defiant, while they were more perceptive to the longer and larger dangers of war. Baldwin we can remember today as a sensitive man who hated war, and give him some measure of respect for feeling so. But this contrast between Churchill and Baldwin, as it happens, is not true.

In truth Churchill had warned much more sharply, in much more fearsome terms, of the danger of modern war. He had seen it on the battlefield at Omdurman, where the Dervishes charged with a magnificent valor, and were mowed down before they were in plain sight by a British force who found the work “tedious.”

In his article, Shall We Commit Suicide?, Churchill proclaimed that the story of the human race is war, and that war was becoming so terrible that it compassed the destruction of all mankind. And the worst thing of all, he wrote, was that it was in the power of man himself to decide how these weapons might be used.

Shall We Commit Suicide? was first published in 1924, but the same idea, fully developed, is to be found in one of the first great speeches Churchill gave in the House of Commons, in 1901. He said:

In former days, when wars arose from individual causes, from the policy of a minister or the passion of a king, when they were fought out by small regular armies of professional soldiers, and when their course was retarded by the difficulties of communication and supply, and often suspended by the winter season, it was possible to limit the liabilities of the combatants. But now, when mighty populations are impelled on each other, each individual severally embittered and inflamed, when the resources of science and civilization sweep away everything that might mitigate their fury, a European war can only end in the ruin of the vanquished and the scarcely less fatal commercial dislocation and exhaustion of the conquerors. Democracy is more vindictive than Cabinets. The wars of peoples will be more terrible than those of kings.

And in Shall We Commit Suicide? Churchill gave warnings that sound just like those of Jacques Chirac and his counterparts in France, Germany and elsewhere today. Churchill ends this dark and powerful essay:

Against the gathering but still distant tempest the League of Nations, deserted by the United States, scorned by Soviet Russia, flouted by Italy, distrusted equally by France and Germany, raises feebly but faithfully its standards of sanity and hope… .Yet it is through the League of Nations alone that the path to safety and salvation can be found. To sustain and aid the League of Nations is the duty of all. To reinforce it and bring it into vital and practical relation with actual world politics by sincere agreements and understanding between the great powers, between the leading races, should be the first aim of all who wish to spare their children torments and disasters compared with which those we have suffered will be but pale preliminary. 

Notice the relationship between this prescription and the diagnosis that precedes it. Churchill wishes in this essay to raise a fear. He himself has seen the reason to fear. He himself has been on the battlefield, when brave soldiers are mown down without hope of victory by the power of modern weapons. When Jacques Chirac says that war is always failure, he gives rise to many jokes about French courage. But he makes a point that one can find powerfully stated, again and again, in the writings of a statesman of undoubted courage, Winston Churchill. And when Chirac turns from his fear to counsel with the United Nations, one can find an exact precedent for his policy in Winston Churchill.

This problem of modern weapons and their effect on war and politics is of course still with us today. It is, if anything, more severe than the problem that Churchill faced in his time. In the caves and shanties of Afghanistan, American soldiers found literature carefully assembled about how to make a nuclear weapon. We know that plans were afoot to use crop dusters to sow anthrax or smallpox or some other toxin across the cities and the fields of America. We know that the terrorists have succeeded better than the Japanese or the Germans in destroying civilians. Just one episode that realizes their fondest hopes will change the world foreverโ€”and such an episode is no longer an impossibility. Indeed, it is hard not to imagine it.

What wisdom can we glean from Churchill that might apply to the current problem? The key may be found, I believe, in the important qualifications that Churchill placed upon his hopes for the League of Nations. It must be, he said, “reinforced and brought into vital and practical relation with actual world politics….” It must not be “airy and un-substantial.” It must be capable of “guarding the world from its dangers.”

How is this to be achieved? Churchill supplies the answer in his famous speech in Fulton, Missouri, on 5 March 1946. There he repeats, emphasizes, and elaborates his endorsement of a “League of Nations,” now called the “United Nations Organization.” But he supplies the context and purpose of its operation much more plainly. Two great goals of American and British foreign policy, he says, must be to eliminate those two marauders, war and tyranny. War and tyranny must be confronted with force. In the distinction between tyranny and free or just government lies the central idea. Against whom must force be used? The answer is: against those unjust rulers who treat their own people badly and threaten their neighbors.


“English-Speaking Peoples” is an occasional opinion series applying the Churchill example to a consideration of current affairs; contrary opinions are always welcome and will be published. Dr. Arnn is President of Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, Michigan, and an academic adviser to The Churchill Centre. This speech was delivered to the Churchill Centre academic dinner at the American Political Science Association Convention in Philadelphia, 29 August 2003.

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