May 5, 2013

Finest Hour 151, Summer 2011

Page 12

The Special Relationship – Why Study Churchill? The American Alliance, for One Thing

Churchill’s modernity of thought, originality, humanity, constructiveness and foresight find no better expression than in his lifelong quest for close relations with the United States.

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By Martin Gilbert

The Rt. Hon. Sir Martin Gilbert CBE, the official biographer of Sir Winston Churchill since 1968, has published almost as many words on his subject as Churchill wrote, and has honored Finest Hour with his contributions for nearly thirty years. This article, first published in FH 60 in 1988, has been revised and expanded in accord with the theme of this issue.

Why study Churchill?” I am often asked. “Surely he has nothing to say to us today?” Yet in my own work, as I open file after file of Churchill’s archive, from his entry into Government in 1905 to his retirement in 1955 (a fifty-year span), and my present focus on completing the 1942 Churchill War Papers volume, I am continually surprised by the truth of his assertions, the modernity of his thought, the originality of his mind, the constructiveness of his proposals, his humanity, and, most remarkable of all, his foresight.

Nothing was more central to Churchill’s view of the world than the importance of the closest possible relations with the United States. “I delight in my American ancestry,” he once said. Not just his American mother, but his personal experiences in traveling through the United States, starting in 1895 when he was just twenty-one, gave him a remarkable sense of American strength and potential.

On 13 May 1901, when Britain and the United States were on a collision course over the Venezuela-British Guiana boundary, Churchill told the House of Commons, in only the third time he had spoken there: “Evil would be the counselors, dark would be the day when we embarked on that most foolish, futile and fatal of all wars—a war with the United States.”

Churchill held his last Cabinet fifty-four years later, on 5 April 1955. In his farewell remarks to his Ministers, he said: “Never be separated from the Americans.” For him, Anglo-American friendship and cooperation, of the closest sort, was the cornerstone of the survival, political, economic and moral, of the Western World.

Although Churchill was never blind to American weaknesses and mistakes with regard to the wider world, his faith was strong that when the call came, as it did twice in his lifetime, for America to come to the rescue of western values and indeed of western civilisation, it would do so, whatever the initial hesitations.

His foresight covered every aspect of our lives, both at home and abroad. He was convinced that man had the power—once he acquired the will—to combat and uproot all the evils that raged around him, whether it was the evils of poverty or the evils of mutual destruction. “What vile and utter folly and barbarism it all is”—such was his verdict on war.

Once a war had been thrust on any nation, Churchill was a leading advocate of fighting it until it was won, until the danger of subjugation and tyranny had been brought to an end. He was equally certain that, by foresight and wisdom, wars could be averted: provided threatened states banded together and built up their collective strength. This is what he was convinced that the Western world had failed to do in the Baldwin-Chamberlain era, from 1933 to 1939.

Churchill always regarded the Second World War as what he called the “unnecessary war,” which could in his view have been averted by the united stand of those endangered by a tyrannical system. Forty years later, in the Cold War, Churchill’s precept was followed. The result is that the prospects for a peaceful world were much enhanced.

Churchill also believed in what he called (in 1919) “the harmonious disposition of the world among its peoples.” This recognition of the rights of nationalities and minorities is something that, even now, the leading nations are addressing. One of his hopes (1921) was for a Kurdish National Home, to protect the Kurds from any future threat in Baghdad. In 1991 and again in 2003, Britain, along with the United States, took up arms against that threat; and in 2011 the two countries are a leading part of the coalition to protect the people of Libya from another tyrant.

Democracy was Churchill’s friend; tyranny was his foe. When, in 1919, he called the Bolshevik leader Lenin the “embodiment of evil,” many people thought it was a typical Churchill exaggeration. “How unfair,” they exclaimed, “how unworthy of a statesman.” While I was in Kiev in 1991, I watched the scaffolding go up around Lenin’s statue. The icon of seventy years of Communist rule was about to be dismantled, his life’s work denounced as evil by the very people who had been its sponsors, and its victims. They knew that Churchill had been right from the outset: Lenin was evil, and his system was a cruel denial of individual liberty.

From the first days of Communist rule in Russia, Churchill did not doubt for a moment that the Communist system would be a blight on free enterprise and a terrible restraint on all personal freedoms. Yet when he warned the American people in 1946, in a speech at Fulton, Missouri, that an “Iron Curtain” had descended across Europe, cutting off nine former independent States from freedom, he was denounced as a mischief-maker.

Whatever Britain’s dispute or disagreement with the United States might be, Churchill was firm in refusing to allow Anglo-American relations to be neglected. In 1932 he told an American audience, in words that he was to repeat in spirit throughout the next quarter of a century: “Let our common tongue, our common basic law, our joint heritage of literature and ideals, the red tie of kinship, become the sponge of obliteration of all the unpleasantness of the past.”

Churchill was always an optimist with regard to human affairs. One of his favourite phrases, a Boer saying that he had heard in South Africa in 1899, was: “All will come right.” He was convinced, even during the Stalinist repressions in Russia, that Communism could not survive. Throughout his life he had faith in the power of all peoples to control and improve their own destiny, without the interference of outside forces. This faith was expressed most farsightedly in 1950, at the height of the Cold War, when Communist regimes were denying basic human rights to the people of nine capital cities: Warsaw, Prague, Vilnius, Riga, Tallinn, Budapest, Bucharest, Sofia and East Berlin.

At that time of maximum repression, at the height of the Stalin era, these were Churchill’s words, in Boston: “The machinery of propaganda may pack their minds with falsehood and deny them truth for many generations of time, but the soul of man thus held in trance, or frozen in a long night, can be awakened by a spark coming from God knows where, and in a moment the whole structure of lies and oppression is on trial for its life.”

Churchill went on to tell his audience: “Captive peoples need never despair.” Today the captive peoples of Eastern Europe have emerged from their long night. The Berlin Wall has been torn down. Tyrants have been swept aside. The once-dominant Communist Party is now an illegal organisation throughout much of what used to be the Soviet empire.

In every sphere of human endeavour, Churchill foresaw the dangers and potential for evil to triumph. Those dangers are widespread in the world today. He also pointed the way forward to the solutions for tomorrow. That is one reason why his life is worthy of our attention. Some writers portray him as a figure of the past, an anachronism with out-of-date opinions. In portraying him thus, it is they who are the losers, for Churchill was a man of quality: a good guide for our troubled decade, and for the generation now reaching adulthood.

One of the most important and relevant lessons that we can learn from Churchill today is, I believe, the importance of our democracies and democratic values, something that we in the West often take for granted. On 8 December 1944, when the Communist Greeks were attempting to seize power in Athens, Churchill told the House of Commons: “Democracy is no harlot to be picked up in the street by a man with a Tommy gun. I trust the people, the mass of the people, in almost any country, but I like to make sure that it is the people and not a gang of bandits from the mountains or from the countryside who think that by violence they can overturn constituted authority, in some cases ancient Parliaments, Governments and States.”

I would like to end with the seven questions Churchill first asked publicly in August 1944, when he was in Italy, watching the former Fascist country grappling with the challenges of creating a new government and framework for its laws and constitution. Churchill set out seven questions to the Italian people that they “should answer,” in his words, “if they wanted to know whether they had replaced fascism by freedom.” The questions were:

“Is there the right to free expression of opinion and of opposition and criticism of the Government of the day?

“Have the people the right to turn out a Government of which they disapprove, and are constitutional means provided by which they can make their will apparent?

“Are their courts of justice free from violence by the Executive and from threats of mob violence, and free from all association with particular political parties?

“Will these courts administer open and well-established laws, which are associated in the human mind with the broad principles of decency and justice?

“Will there be fair play for poor as well as for rich, for private persons as well as for Government officials?

“Will the rights of the individual, subject to his duties to the State, be maintained and asserted and exalted?

“Is the ordinary peasant or workman, who is earning a living by daily toil and striving to bring up a family, free from the fear that some grim police organization under the control of a single Party, like the Gestapo, started by the Nazi and Fascist parties, will tap him on the shoulder and pack him off without fair or open trial to bondage or ill-treatment?”

“These simple, practical tests,” he added, “are some of the title deeds on which a new Italy could be founded.”

After the war, Churchill was to repeat these same seven questions whenever he was asked on what freedom should be based, and on how a truly free society could be recognised. They are questions that we should learn by heart, and ask of each country that struggles to build freedom. In an ideal world, they are questions that every Member State of the United Nations should be able to answer in the affirmative. It is for the generation entering into adulthood today to try to make that happen.