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History
Forgave Churchill
Why
Not Blair and Bush?
by
Mickey Z.
July
19, 2003
On
July 17, 2003, U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair addressed a joint meeting of the
U.S. House and Senate. The subject of WMD, of course, was on the front burner.
"If
we are wrong, then we will have destroyed a threat that was at its least responsible
for inhuman carnage and suffering,'' Blair said. "I am confident history
will forgive.''
Blair's
confidence is justified. History has forgiven U.K. leaders for plenty. How
else, for example, could U.S. News and World Report have dubbed Winston
Churchill "The Last Hero" in a 2000 cover story? In that article, Churchill
was said to believe in "liberty, the rule of law, and the rights of the
individual."
As
Sir Winston himself declared: "History will be kind to me for I intend to write
it."
This
is precisely why so few of us ever discuss Churchill as a war criminal or
racist. In 1910, in the capacity of Home Secretary, he put forth a proposal to
sterilize roughly 100,000 "mental degenerates" and dispatch several
thousand others to state-run labor camps. These actions were to take place in
the name of saving the British race from inevitable decline as its inferior
members bred.
History
has forgiven Churchill for his role in the Allied invasion of the Soviet Union
in 1917. England's Minister for War and Air during the time, Churchill
described the mission as seeking to "strangle at its birth" the Bolshevik
state. In 1929, he wrote: "Were [the Allies] at war with Soviet Russia?
Certainly not; but they shot Soviet Russians at sight. They stood as invaders
on Russian soil. They armed the enemies of the Soviet Government. They
blockaded its ports, and sunk its battleships. They earnestly desired and
schemed its downfall."
Two
years later, Churchill was secretary of state at the war office when the Royal
Air Force asked him for permission to use chemical weapons against "recalcitrant
Arabs" as an experiment. Winston promptly consented (Yes, Churchill's
gassing of Kurds pre-dated Hussein's by nearly 70 years).
"I
am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes," he
explained, a policy he espoused yet again in July 1944 when he asked his chiefs
of staff to consider using poison gas on the Germans "or any other method
of warfare we have hitherto refrained from using." Unlike in 1919, his
proposal was denied...not that history would not have forgiven him anyway.
In
language later appropriated by the Israelis, Winston Churchill had this to say
about the Palestinians in 1937: "I do not agree that the dog in a manger
has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very
long time. I do not admit that right. 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 these people by the
fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put
it that way, has come in and taken their place."
When
not scheming a Bolshevik downfall, gassing the uncivilized, or comparing
Palestinians to dogs, Churchill found time to write soulmate Benito Mussolini.
In January 1927, Sir Winston gushed to Il Duce, "if I had been an Italian,
I am sure I would have been entirely with you from the beginning to the end of
your victorious struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of
Leninism." Even after the advent of WWII, Churchill found room in his
heart for the Italian dictator, explaining to Parliament in 1940:"I do not
deny that he is a very great man but he became a criminal when he attacked
England."
Mussolini's
criminality aside, Churchill certainly took note of Axis tactics...cavalierly
observing that "everyone" was bombing civilians. "It's simply a
question of fashion," he explained, "similar to that of whether short
or long dresses are in."
Sir
Winston must have been a slave to fashion because he soon ordered a fire-bombing
raid on Hamburg in July 1943 that killed at least 48,000 civilians, after which
he enlisted the aid of British scientists to cook up "a new kind of
weather" for larger German city.
In
his wartime memoirs, Winston Churchill forgave himself for the countless civilians
slaughtered in Dresden. "We made a heavy raid in the latter month on
Dresden," he wrote benignly, "then a centre of communication of
Germany's Eastern Front."
Surely
the Nazis were hiding WMD there, right?
Mickey Z. is the author
of The Murdering of My Years: Artists and Activists Making Ends Meet (www.murderingofmyyears.com) and
an editor at Wide Angle (www.wideangleny.com).
He can be reached at: mzx2@earthlink.net.