Putting Labour's Case for Mao

Lots of words have been written about Winston Churchill in recent days, but none better than Daniel Finkelstein's column in The Times in which he concludes that Britain's wartime leader was still a 'great man' despite his obvious character flaws.

Now Martin Luther King was a terrible adulterer, as everyone knows, yet that doesn't stop MLK being recognised as a hero of America's civil rights movement - and rightly so.

Although I'm not so sure than many people would agree with Labour's Diane Abbott assessment that China's Mao Tse-Tung "on balance, did more good than harm".

Labour used to be a 'broad church' in which leftists like Diane Abbott, John McDonnell and Ken Livingstone all found a home, but the sad truth is that under Jeremy Corbyn the lunatics - the political ideologues - have taken over the asylum.    



  

Winston Churchill was a racist but still a great man

By Daniel Finkelstein - The Times

Even though the wartime prime minister was a lifelong white supremacist his strengths far outweigh his weaknesses


If it wasn’t for Sir Winston Churchill, I wouldn’t be alive. This isn’t a romantic statement. I think that a cold, hard view of my family’s history and his reveals it to be true.

In May 1940 there were others who understood better than him the chances of Britain being able to withstand Nazi Germany, but few with his appreciation of what was at stake, of what surrender or peace terms might mean. He insisted on resistance and defeated the strong lobby that sought a deal with Hitler. Had he not done so, things would have been very different.

So the best historical accounts support the claim that Churchill was indispensable to victory, that his behaviour at this critical moment saved European liberty and democracy. And if this is true, then he saved my family too. If Britain had sued for peace in 1940, I don’t think my parents would still have been alive by 1945.

Which is why, with some trepidation, I add this. When Churchill’s modern critics, such as the Green Party MSP Ross Greer, say that he was a white supremacist, they are right.

Churchill justified British imperialism as being for the good of the “primitive” and “subject races”. Perhaps his clearest statement came in 1937 when he said: “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 those people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, or, at any rate, a more worldly wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.”

And he was also a supporter of eugenics, supporting the segregation of “feeble-minded” people and showing an interest in the possibility of sterilisation lest the breeding of “unfit” people pose “a very terrible danger to the race”.

So to call him a white supremacist is nothing but the truth. And it is never a good idea to deny the truth. To insist that for Churchill to be a great man he must never have thought or done anything bad is to insist that the world is divided into good and bad people and you can only be one or the other.

It is also to insist that great progressive acts — and saving Europe in 1940 was surely one of the greatest — can only be carried out by progressive people. Yet Lord Shaftesbury supported the factory acts while opposing the great reform bill, Asquith was a great liberal who opposed votes for women, and Christabel Pankhurst had a soft spot for Mussolini.

New histories of the American revolution are commendably frank about the founding fathers’ attitude to slavery. In his biography of George Washington, Ron Chernow correctly devotes a lot of space to his subject’s ownership of slaves. Washington was still a great man but his slaveholding was an abomination. And a large part of him knew it too. To leave it out in order to deify the first president doesn’t just fail to portray Washington with all his flaws, it renders much of the early politics of the United States (and arguably its current politics) incomprehensible.

Similarly, to talk only of Churchill as a hero, though hero he was, while ignoring his attitudes to empire and race is bad history both of the man and of Britain.

It is common to respond to Churchill’s critics by saying that it is anachronistic to apply modern standards to a politician who first entered parliament during the reign of Queen Victoria. Yet while his attitudes may have been more common, they were by no means universal. Indeed, Churchill’s diehard views on Indian independence made him a dissident in his own party and separated him from more liberal Conservatives who later became allies on appeasement.

Duff Cooper, the cabinet minister who resigned over the Munich agreement with Hitler, wrote years later that he regarded Churchill’s determination to block any move towards dominion status for India as “the most unfortunate event that occurred between the two wars”.

Churchill’s early warnings on the rise of Germany were ignored largely because his position on the empire had made his judgment suspect. So his racial ideas (by race he often meant people or national characteristics) are a vital part of his history. Indeed his confidence in ultimate victory in 1940 came partly from his mystical belief in the superiority of the British “race” over the Prussians who had once been a “barbarous tribe”. At the same time this outlook may have led him to underestimate the power of Japan, which seized Singapore in 1942 after the largest surrender of British-led troops in history.

Acknowledging the truth of Churchill’s views allows one to deal with the more outlandish idea that he was a “mass murderer”, a charge that often accompanies criticism of his racial views. Historians still debate whether his attitude to the Bengal famine of 1943-44 was callous or whether, even though the Allies were desperately stretched, he did what he could and that his actions saved lives. But the idea that he was a mass murderer, either in Bengal or in the Middle East where he ordered gas to be used, is a wild one.

A proper and rigorous account of Churchill’s life reveals him to be a flawed person with erratic judgment, but his greatness remains intact. And no one need fear acknowledging the truth. But there is something else at play, something beyond Churchill. It is hard for one generation not to be irritated when its ideas and assumptions are challenged by the new generation. We think we have done our best to reach an enlightened view of the world and it can be annoying to have our heroes and values questioned.

This irritation is a feeling profoundly to be resisted. Because questioning values and re-examining our heroes is how we make progress and how we learn. Even if Churchill’s views were not merely standard for his age and background but actually universal that would not exempt them from criticism. Indeed, it would make the need for criticism more urgent. We learn something when we appreciate that among those common views were attitudes that were powerful, shaped the modern world and were wrong.

To make progress through robust debate among free people and never to be afraid to say what needs saying — that was the real meaning of the victory Churchill won.

daniel.finkelstein@thetimes.co.uk