Sixty million people were butchered, burnt, blown apart, starved or otherwise reduced to dust in the two great conflagrations of the 20th Century.
Who was responsible for their deaths? And in the interests of a more humane conduct of human affairs today, what lessons can we still learn from the catastrophic errors of judgement, the misguided aspirations and the hubris that were responsible for that inferno of suffering?
1914
No-one who lived through WWI is alive today and most of the surviving combatants of WWII are now over a hundred. Soon there will be none. Is it therefore still relevant to obsess about the causes of those conflagrations, their purpose or legitimacy? To concern oneself with a war that ended 106 years ago might seem a bit like social butterflies of the flapper generation concerning themselves with lessons offered by the Napoleonic wars. And yet the visceral outrage that I feel regarding the two great wars of the 20th Century is undiminished by the passage of time and continues to haunt my conscience in large measure because the reckoning for those responsible for all that death and suffering remains outstanding, and I fall prey – again at the visceral level – to a blinding anger directed at the elite governing classes primarily of Britain that were responsible for that carnage, but who have never been named and shamed.
And as I hope to show, there is a lesson relevant to all of us today that can come from an understanding of the causes of those conflicts.
The image that most dependably provokes my outrage is the widely attested impromptu game of football played between British and German soldiers in the no-man’s land between the battle lines on Christmas day, 1914. These were not primarily soldiers, they were simply people whose humanity extended to a commonly shared religious faith, people with a love for football, for the women in their lives and for their family ties, people who loved beer, and comradeship, singing and the modest joys of working men’s lives. There were no ideological differences between them, nor any threat of conquest. What act of evil placed them in military opposition to one another for four years of meaningless slaughter? Has this episode now become merely a matter for desiccated scholarship and informed historical judgement? For some, maybe, but I want that evil exposed, I want white hot indignation rather than even-handed judgement, and I want moral retribution.
Were I to be living in Britain I could not bring myself to wear a poppy on Armistice Day, not because I don’t admire heroism, but because to do so would be a betrayal of the soldiers and civilians who died in wars arising from a whim of their political leaders – wars rightly described by the American scholar Patrick Buchanan as “unnecessary”. For me the poppy is not a symbol of courage and patriotism, but a symbol of the myth of leadership.
All of this I readily concede is a coarse-resolution optic on the causes of those conflicts, but in recent times I have endeavored to refine that optic in order to get to grips with the actions of the major players in those disastrous events, and to achieve some finality of judgement regarding culpability. With the help of Buchanan’s book, Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War, one name is etched indelibly in the book of infamy: Winston Churchill’s.
It is no easy matter to arrive at such a judgement. There is no doubting Churchill’s captivating personality and his distinguished human characteristics: he was undoubtedly courageous, he was energetic and vigorous, he was charismatic, witty and well read, a master of articulation in the language he loved, a fine artist in watercolours, the builder by hand of an impressive garden wall, a man of robust good health and a man of unquestionable substance. It could never be said that life was ever wasted on him. He loved one woman all his life, he thrived on spirited conversation and the company of talented people, and he quaffed gallons of good alcohol in a spirit of joie de vivre, which endears him greatly to me. I believe I would have been entranced to have shared his company at the endless social gatherings he presided over at his country seat, Chartwell, in the years after the 1945. So, to find myself holding him so largely accountable for the great cataclysms of the 20th Century, and then – inevitably – for the millions of deaths they caused, is a serious disorientation of my predilections. Yet I remain steadfast in making the charge, and notwithstanding all the compliments I have paid him, I can only say that humanity would have been saved from a charnel house of slaughter had Churchill never been born.
My first misgivings about Churchill arose when I came across his much-quoted bon mot: “There is nothing in life so exhilarating as to be shot at with no result.” Even making allowance for this as a manifestation of juvenilia, it reeks of bravado born of a solipsism in terms of which war is a game entailing the regrettable death of others, never oneself, and it presages his grotesquely insouciant comment just weeks before the outbreak of WW1: “Why, I would not be out of this glorious delectable war for anything the world could give me.”
It is way beyond the scope of a short article such as this to provide any kind of detailed analysis of the origins of either of the great wars, which are in any case the subject of hundreds of books many of which will be known to the readers of these columns, but I will boldly stride in where the more professional go with caution: in 1914 neither Britain nor its empire was ever in any way threatened by Germany, the Germans had agreed to limit the size of their navy to no more than 60% of the Royal Navy, the Kaiser was resolutely pro-British, the Germans were racial and linguistic cousins of the British, none of the many ruling monarchs of the various European empires or nation states wanted war, there were many notable voices in the British parliament and the British press against Britain’s’ involvement in a European war, the assassination of Frans Ferdinand and Balkan rivalries were irrelevant to the British, and finally Britain had no treaty obligations to go to war… and yet, in spite of all of these factors, it went to war. Why?
Even on the spurious grounds assembled as a cause for war in July and August 1914, Asquith, Loyd George and Grey went reluctantly. Churchill went buoyantly. He had been scandalizing his peers in the weeks prior to the meetings with his war-mongering comments, some of which were characterized by that jejune insouciance which we have already tasted. It is no exaggeration to say that he was ecstatic at the prospect of war. He writes to his wife: “Everything tends towards catastrophe and collapse. I am interested, geared up and happy,” and even six months into war, when tens of thousands of British soldiers are lying dead at Ypres, he writes in a letter: “… I am so happy. I know this war is smashing and shattering the lives of thousands every moment and yet – I cannot help it – I enjoy every second.”
The reasons given for war were, firstly, the sanctity of Belgium’s neutrality, secondly, Britain’s debt of honour to France should it ever be threatened by war, and, perhaps lastly and least, in order to moderate Germany’s ambition for European hegemony. Had any of those assembled at the cabinet meetings of the 2nd and 3rd August put up a spirited and a rationally based objection to going to war, Churchill’s war aims would have been defeated. It would only have taken one voice to spell out the unequivocal consequences of the war being contemplated: the certain death of hundreds of thousands of young men, hardship for the nation as a whole, massive social disruption and the destruction of Britain’s sovereign wealth. What national self-interest could those consequences be thought of as serving? But it was Churchill’s mindless bellicosity that carried the day.
The reasons given for going to war were spurious. The 1839 treaty recognizing Belgium’s neutrality placed no obligation on Britain to go to war to protect that neutrality, and – irony of ironies – Churchill was himself to be the first to violate the neutrality of many other countries once war had broken out, including Turkey’s, Denmark’s, and Holland’s. To replace the non-existent treaty obligation to protect Belgium’s neutrality the cabinet cabal substituted for it an obligation of “honour” – the sense of noblesse oblige cultivated on the playing fields of Eton and Harrow. In this case a small and a weak nation – Belgium – was being bullied by a large and a strong nation, Germany, and Britain’s obligation was to protect the underdog. Admire the invocation of honour as a casus belli if you like, yet once war had been declared on behalf of brave little Belgium, Britain sent its Expeditionary Force over the Channel not to Belgium but to France. The mandarins discharged their sense of honour not by means of personal sacrifice but by sub-contracting it to members of the British working classes, who faced conscription by 1916. As for Churchill, he is on record as having despised the Belgians. Shakespeare was also an Englishman, but he offered a different take on the value of honour:
Can honour set a leg? no: or
an arm? no: or take away the grief of a wound? no.
Honour hath no skill in surgery, then? no. What is
honour? a word. What is in that word honour? what
is that honour? Air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it?
he that died o’ Wednesday. Doth he feel it? no.
Doth he hear it? no. ‘Tis insensible, then. Yea,
to the dead. But will it not live with the living?
no. Why? detraction will not suffer it. Therefore
I’ll none of it. Honour is a mere scutcheon: and so
ends my catechism.
Henry IV, Part 1
As far as France was concerned, there was no treaty obligation on Britain to intervene militarily on its behalf. The 1904 agreement of mutual defence had been brokered by British and French generals acting without authority, and it had never been ratified by either the British cabinet or by Parliament. In fact, had it ever been placed before Parliament it would have been summarily repudiated, along with any sense of either obligation or honour to fight as France’s military ally. Besides all of this, France’s exposure to war was in large measure of its own making, having signed a treaty of mutual dependency with Russia in 1894, a treaty which placed France in exactly the danger it ostensibly sought to avert – war with Germany. Churchill was complicit in keeping that 1904 agreement covert because he wanted war.
Had the members of the British Cabinet stopped to formulate the issues before them differently they may have reached a different decision, and saved thereby a million or so British lives and a million or more German lives. No doubt the formulation they used would have been something like this: “It is in Britain’s interest to go to war with Germany to save France,” and this is the formulation used by all historians, without exception, to re-examine that decision today. But you might think very differently about the nature and the consequences of the issue were you to formulate it as follows: “It is in the interests of the British people to go to war with the German people to save the French people?”, which prompts the necessary question “Why is it in the interests of the British people to save the French people, especially if they must do so at the cost of their lives?.” Apart from a few middle-class Francophiles, did the British people give a fig for the well-being and safety of the French?
And we must also come to terms with quite what is meant by a term such as “the national interest,” for it begs the questions: what possible national interest can be served by the death of hundreds of thousands if not millions of the very people who the “national interest” is putatively regarded as serving?
And here’s where we may learn a lesson for the decisions we make today: Question: “Should America go to the military assistance of Taiwan if it were to be invaded by China?” The answer to such a question will inevitably be given in global geo-political terms, and revolve around issues of “national interest.” But pose the question differently: “Should Americans provide military assistance to the Taiwanese if the Taiwanese are invaded by the Chinese” and I suspect a different answer would be given, for it is not an abstraction – “America” – that pays the price of giving such assistance but living, breathing and feeling American people.
Among others it was said by Woodrow Wilson that WWI was undertaken to protect democracy. How ironic. The Churchill-inspired British decision to go to war was never made by a cabinet vote, it was not put to a parliamentary vote, and least of all was it put to the British people. The declaration of war was made and signed on the 4th August by King George V at Buckingham Palace by the exercise of his “crown prerogative”. We should remind ourselves that the best way to protect democracy is to practise it.
After the declaration of war Churchill made a number of grievous errors of judgement, none more so than his decision to attack Turkey through the Gallipoli peninsula. It was a calamitous decision arising from his arrogant under-estimation of Turkish fighting prowess and his over estimation of the small flotilla of geriatric warships he sent to initiate the campaign. Gallipoli defined a nadir in the horror of war. Yet it was fought by combatants who had no natural antipathy, and gives rise once again to a contemplation of the hopeless irrationality of warfare: here were largely untrained troops from Australasia and India fighting Turks with whom they had no quarrel for the benefit of a mother country that was in the nature of being a distant third party to the combatants of both sides. The campaign ended with 113,000 dead and no advantage gained or lost for either side.
In war, as in life, anyone can make an error of judgement, but you would think there would have to be consequences of remorse and shame for the person whose judgement and decision resulted in so purposeless and bloody an outcome. True, Churchill resigned as First Sea Lord, but after recovering his composure as a lieutenant colonel on the western front, he was soon back in the role of the great leader of men, and far from struggling with a sense of remorse at the pity of war, he was the man who, after the Germans had surrendered and signed an armistice in 1918, mounted a total naval blockade of Germany’s civilian population for more than six months until the Treaty of Versailles put the final nail into the coffin of the German nation. It was an action that resulted in both death and desperate hardship for the civilian population of Germany, notably the women and the children. But fast forward to WWII and you find that this is the same man who authorizes wholesale slaughter of the German civilian population by means of an unending campaign of fire bombing.
What would the consequences have been for the world had Churchill’s bellicosity not won the day in August 1914? The lives of 900,000 British and Dominion men would have been saved; far fewer Frenchmen would have died; the British people would not have been bankrupted; the colonies of the British Empire would not have entered the war, and 60,000 Empire troops at Gallipoli would not have been slaughtered; the USA would not have entered the war; Lenin might have been left stranded in Vienna and the Bolshevik revolution averted. Since Germany had no stated aims for the conquest of France, the likelihood is that Germany would have withdrawn its troops on condition that France repudiated its treaty with Russia and declared an armistice with Germany. There would have been no Versailles, no Hitler, no death camps and no WWII. More speculatively it is likely that Turkey would have stayed neutral with far-reaching consequences for an alternative to Sykes-Picot in the Middle East. Germany and Russia would have neutralized one another and established a border somewhere in Eastern Europe. All of this could have been accomplished had Churchill given just half a thought to the consequences of the war he so desperately wanted and for which he must carry a heavy burden of blame.
It might be helpful to remind ourselves that it is people who make war, not nations, and that it is people who must accordingly be held to account. A character in Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front tellingly reminds us how inappropriate it is to anthropomorphize nations. In answer to the question, “how do wars begin?” one character says: “Usually when one country insults another,” in response to which another character says: “I don’t get it. A German mountain can’t insult a French mountain, or a river, or a forest, or a cornfield.” Quite so. In metaphorical terms, Britain went to war to help friends in need – Belgium and France – but as Lord Palmerston had rightly said, “nations have no permanent friends or allies, only permanent interests.”
It is at this stage of my account that I must offer my own view that treaties and alliances are the cause of war, not its avoidance. For this reason, I believe – counterintuitively no doubt – that Nato is an inducement to war and should be abandoned forthwith. No national obligation could or should be considered binding, and every crisis should be considered strictly on a contemporary real-time consideration of the interests of the inhabitants of a nation. The effect and consequence of alliances are always coercive, for if this were not so, there would be no need for alliances to exist
1939
In September 1939 Neville Chamberlain, having abandoned his much better policy towards Hitler erroneously called appeasement, declared war against Germany, and gave Churchill the outcome he had so assiduously pursued throughout the 1930s with his repeated (but unsuccessful) demands for re-armament. It is hard to know quite what kind of war Churchill was expecting his proposed programme of re-armament to allow Britain to fight. It could not have been a defensive war. No nation on planet earth was threatening Britain or its empire with any act of aggression, and if there was one person in the world who admired that empire more than Churchill, it was Hitler, a resolute Anglophile. And if it was a war of aggression that Churchill contemplated, then a war against whom and to what end? Hitler’s stated territorial ambitions were in Eastern Europe, an area of neither strategic nor emotional nor racial importance to Britain. His aims were largely although not exclusively geared to restoring what had been lost at the Treaty of Versailles, and they were aims largely recognized by the British political establishment as being legitimate. I will go on to hazard some suggestions in regard to Churchill’s irrational war aims, but before doing so, I would seek some preliminary insight by reflecting on one of his many wartime speeches that elicit universal approbation, but that throw some unexpected light on the irrationality of his posture.
“You ask, What is our policy … what is our aim? I can answer with one word: Victory – victory at all costs … for without victory there is no survival.”
Fine oratory dulls the organs of perception, and when my admiration for these noble sentiments wanes, I begin to examine them a little more critically. “Victory” – but why did Britain find itself in the situation of having so self-importantly to define its policy as “victory,” when after all it was engaged in a war of choice? It would have been both irrational and irresponsible had it declared war without confidently assuming “victory.” And under such circumstances victory could not be considered a “policy.” Doing so implies that Britain was the defendant in a struggle for survival not of its making. But it was neither a defendant nor an unwilling aggressor, it was a would-be conqueror of a country to which it had no rights of occupation or control, and which had never represented a threat to itself. You cannot go to war because you are being out-competed as an industrial or even a military power; under these circumstances your only option is to compete harder.
“…without victory there is no survival” is tendentious. If they are to mean anything they mean not only that it was an act of supreme recklessness to have taken Britain voluntarily into a war that had the potential for imperiling its survival, and it implies that there had been no alternative to the war, conveniently overlooking the fact that it was a war of choice. And without America’s financial assistance and later entry into the War, there would indeed have been no survival. Churchill’s bellicosity was matched only by his foolhardiness.
And why victory “at any cost”? Again, fine words. But it is foolish to commit oneself to an objective of any sort “at any cost.” Sometimes the cost is too high, and the cost that Churchill cajoled Britain into paying in order to satisfy his personal vendetta against Hitler was far too high. It was bankruptcy that reduced Britain then and forever after to the status of a vasal nation to the USA, to say nothing of the cost paid in the lives of its citizens, and in the deracination of their standard of living.
Churchill’s words have the patina of nobility, but they are bluster, formulated to shape a version of reality that served his conception of himself as a great war hero, and I cannot but feel there is more than a hint of Othello’s self-dramatising tendencies about them, the Othello who rejoices in “the big wars that make ambition virtue.”
In May 1940 Churchill described Germany as “a monstrous tyranny never surpassed in the dark lamentable catalogue of human crime”, a sentiment I suspect most people would agree with today. But was it true? By this time, as was well known to Churchill, Stalin’s tyranny had caused the deaths of some 20-million of his own Slavic people. I see his comment as an easy means of demonizing his adversary and therefore justifying not only his desire for war, but the cruelties of his own side it entailed, to say nothing of the cruelties of Stalin’s devising. I would like to know exactly what Churchill meant by the phrase “monstrous tyranny,” and in what exactly he located that tyranny, without which his hyperbolic allegation has the characteristic of being a pro forma kind of indignation. Why does he not in this context make specific reference to Hitler’s anti-semitism, for instance? Or was that not what Churchill was thinking about?
Whether Churchill was prescient or not I do not know, but at the time of making this speech the Nazis had not yet established any of their extermination camps, and it is Buchanan’s speculative but plausible view that their establishment in 1942 was a consequence of the certain prospect of annihilation the Nazi high command faced by this stage in a war against the combined armies of Russia, Britain, the USA and France. The effect of such a prospect served to annul what tiny vestige of moral compunction that might have inhibited them from their programme of industrialised genocide. But even if this were not the case, it is certain that a neutral Britain could have done more to mitigate the plight of the German Jews than it did by going to war.
Here is the justification for my claim that it is on Churchill’s hands that the blood of so many of those slaughtered in WWII must stick. In the first place I ask why it was that Churchill nurtured so deep, so abiding, so selective and so irrational a hatred of Hitler, a hatred altogether out of proportion to the danger he represented not only to Britain but to Europe as a whole. In a podcast made to defend Churchill’s reputation, the late Christopher Hitchens used an arresting metaphor which has lodged in my mind ever since. “Churchill,” said Hitchens, “detested Hitler so much that he could not so much as bear to breathe the same air as him.” Why?
It cannot have been for Hitler’s antisemitism, for although Churchill was no anti-semite, I have not been able to find a single utterance by Churchill on the plight of Jews in Germany, I certainly don’t believe he went to war with Germany to save the Jews of Germany and Eastern Europe, and had he done so his mission would have to be regarded as a catastrophic failure, for not a single Jewish life was saved by the British in the War.
Could it have been because Hitler was a murderer of his political opponents? I don’t believe so. Churchill had himself no great refinement of moral sensibility to the demands of realpolitik, as his record in India shows, as his authorisation of the bombing of German civilians shows, as his willingness to blockade the women and children of Germany in both world wars shows, and finally as his friendship with Stalin so graphically shows. Was it Hitler’s territorial ambition? No, because Hitler’s territorial ambitions were largely to correct the injustices perpetrated at Versailles. British statesmen repeatedly acknowledged that Hitler’s territorial demands were not unreasonable, and it was this view that facilitated Chamberlain’s amicable Munich meeting with Hitler in 1939, and his joyful proclamation, “peace in our time”. Was it because Hitler represented a threat of invasion of Britain? Hardly.
Churchill excoriated Chamberlain for his reconciliation with Hitler at Munich, which accommodated Hitler’s ambitions in Czechoslovakia, but why was Churchill so ostensibly concerned about the fate of a ragtag state consisting of five or six unconnected races of people that had been cobbled together at Versailles, and whose fate had no bearing on Britain’s wellbeing?
Hitler was an unqualified admirer of the British and their empire, and he saw Germany and Britain as natural allies. He bitterly regretted Churchill’s enmity and the outbreak of war, and nurtured a hope of reconciliation between the two nations even after war had broken out, so much so in fact that – astonishingly – he instructed his generals in writing to limit their aggression against the British forces trying to escape Europe at Dunkirk. Did Hitler aspire to global domination? Buchanan finds no evidence of such an aspiration.
In other areas of life, Churchill shared Hitler’s proclivities– on the need for neo-Darwinian eugenics programmes to weed out the weak and protect the strong, and for his abhorrence of Bolshevism, and there was very little daylight between the two men on blood and race as the core determining ingredients of human worth. It seems unlikely, but in Hitler did Churchill see a competitor for the accolade of the century’s greatest leader? Was he jealous of Hitler?
In the absence of any other explanation for Churchill’s hatred, I speculatively put it down to an irrational personal obsession born of his well-attested Germanophobia. Churchill was of course a mandarin of the highest level of the British aristocratic class, and maybe this provoked a sense of disdain for Hitler’s low-born vulgarity, a corporal not equipped by birth or education for the task of ruling great nations. Whatever it was, an uncontrollable sense of personal animus was no basis upon which to take Britain into the bloodiest war of the 20th Century.
In the second place I reflect on the extraordinary selectivity of Churchill’s moral and strategic judgement that allowed him to enlist the friendship of Stalin in his crusade against Hitler – Stalin, the greatest destroyer of humanity that at that point in the 20th Century the world had ever seen. The record shows that Churchill did not simply enlist Stalin’s help as a necessary ally in a just war against evil, but extended the hand of personal friendship to him, knowing full well what the record of Stalin’s tyranny showed, and in doing so he greatly extended rather than curtailed the suffering that Britain’s nominal war aims were supposed to serve.
The Poland situation which began the War, tragic as it was, had an element of the theatre of the absurd about it. Country A (Britain) declares war on country B (Germany) because B Invades country C (Poland). Despite its promise, A does nothing to help C, on whose behalf it had declared war on B. Then B makes an alliance with country D (Russia), as a result of which D invades C from the East, and – if possible to comprehend – D’s soldiers are even more rapacious in C than B’s soldiers. Then B falls out with D, and so A makes an ally of D, and allows D to occupy and govern C, the country in whose defence A originally went to war with B to prevent. Churchill is the man who presides over the sea of blood all of this entails.
The great and inescapable irony of his pact with Stalin is that, in order to save Europe from one “monstrous tyranny,” he imposed upon it an even greater tyranny, and one that was to last nearly 50 years after the end of the War. Enlisting Stalin as an ally was an act of moral depravity, of political opportunism, of shameless hypocrisy and of cold-blooded indifference to the mass murder of millions of solders and of civilians, including women and children. Sometimes it may be necessary to use the Devil’s money to do God’s work, but to use the Devil’s money to do the Devil’s work is entirely another matter. Buchanan gets it right: “Yes Hitler had to be stopped, but did stopping one man need to cost the lives of 50-million others?”
Britain’s engagement in the two great wars of the 20th Century is almost universally believed to have been a blessing on mankind. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is hard to think of a single issue, event or outcome which would not have turned out better for humanity had Britain remained disengaged from both conflicts. But Queen Elizabeth II, acting on behalf of her decimated and impoverished people, made Churchill – architect of Britain’s sanguinary expeditions into war – a Knight of the Garter. Now it is time for a revision of the man’s reputation, for never have so many owed so much to the hubris of one man.
From the South African point of view, there is no reason for us to find any cause to admire Churchill. We lost 23,000 men in the two wars – some of who were black South Africans prohibited from bearing arms. For what?
Looking into a deeper context for the curse that afflicted nearly all of humanity in the 20th Century, I see that the same curse on humanity still prevails today. It is the curse brought upon us by our sycophantic submission to “great” men – and occasionally women – who believe that humanity needs for its survival and betterment the control and guidance they – the great – must provide, and we fall repeatedly into their hands by willingly subcontracting our lives to them, thereby abrogating our right to be the sole guardians of our thoughts, our bodies, our values and our choices.
Helped by one of the great philosopher-poets of our time – Bob Dylan – I can reduce the lesson we can learn from the two great conflagrations of the 20th Century to three words: “Don’t follow leaders”.
Postscript
“So oft it chances in particular men
That for some vicious mole of nature in
them—
As in their birth (wherein they are not guilty,
Since nature cannot choose his origin),
By the o’ergrowth of some complexion,
Oft breaking down the pales and forts of
reason,
Or by some habit that too much o’erleavens
The form of plausive manners—that these
men,
Carrying, I say, the stamp of one defect,
Being nature’s livery or fortune’s star,
Their virtues else (be they as pure as grace,
As infinite as man may undergo)
Shall in the general censure take corruption
From that particular fault.
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet
[Image: By Yousuf Karsh, colorisation : Madelgarius – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=138543648]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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