Churchill was no warmonger, Cooper and Carlson!

 

Winston Churchill is, today, hung, drawn, and quartered as a warmonger and “the chief villain of the Second World War”.[1]  Darryl Cooper in coming to that view does say, however, that he might be, could be, possibly is, speaking a bit hyperbolically of Churchill. Given the full content of his comments on Churchill, we should not hesitate to say that Cooper is indeed promoting the notion that Churchill was a villainous leader. Cooper needs to be honest enough to own his own rhetoric.

 

I’m not going into Cooper’s arguments here, for they are, for the most part, farcical. I want to draw our attention to a different side to Churchill than that normally described when it comes to war: his strong resolve for peace. The following comments are based on Churchill’s various speeches to the English Parliament on Thursday, March 23, 1933, not long after Hitler came into power in Germany (January 30, 1933).

 

Churchill unequivocally states:

 

“Our first supreme object is not to go to war. To that end we must do our best to prevent others from going to war. But we must be very careful that, in so doing, we do not increase the risk to ourselves of being involved in a war if, unfortunately, our well-meant efforts fail to prevent a quarrel between other Powers.”[2]

 

Churchill strenuously wished to evade war, calling it the “first supreme object”. He doubles-down on this determination by saying, “we must do our best to prevent others from going to war.” So, not only did Churchill say we must strive to avoid war, he added we must labor in helping others to avoid it, too.

 

It is after this he stated that in pursuing the two supreme goals mentioned above, that Britain must not run the risk of actually encouraging war. On the face of it, this statement by Churchill seems almost like a piece of philosophical mumbo-jumbo. It was not, however. The British Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, had called for quotas in armaments, so that that the balance-of-arms, so to speak, would be somewhat even across the board amongst the powerful nations of Europe. Although Churchill had been for long enough a fervent advocate of arms reduction, MacDonald's particular proposal was not only dangerously naive but it was very much ill-timed.

-Churchill: always for arms reduction and quotas, but this process should have started immediately after WW1 (1918);

-MacDonald: formerly against the big powers sitting down to reduce arms, but now (1933) sold on it, and proposing a model that tried to equalize the powers. 

-Churchill argued that MacDonald's conversion to the big-powers arms reduction was too late, and it was also too late to impose further reductions. France had been diminished and was extremely worried; and Germany was growing in strength and confidence. 

 

The background of Churchill’s position is, of course, WW1 and the agreements between the Allied states, including Britain and France, over against Germany. In the aftermath of WW1, Germany was allowed an army of only 100,000 men, could not use conscription, was banned from making submarines, and there was no German air force. Hitler immediately began to undermine all these restrictions in 1933. Talk after talk after talk ensued in order to ‘keep the peace’ and to subdue any notion of war. At that time, Britain (MacDonald) was not too concerned, but both Churchill, and more so, France, were, however.

 

Churchill explains the exact dilemma as to quotas:

 

“It seems to me that, at a moment like this, to ask France to halve her army while Germany doubles hers—that is the scale of figures—to ask France to halve her air force while the German air force remains whatever it is—I am aware that there is no military air force permitted to remain —such a proposal, it seems to me, is likely to be considered by the French Government at present, at any rate, as somewhat unseasonable.”

 

The overall point Churchill is making is that, by all these talks about disarmament, and reductions in arms, France was getting more and more sensitive to its diminishing power to wage war, and Germany was growing in its awareness of its potential for war.

 

Lest it be thought that Churchill was actually against disarmament, and was secretly seeking to encourage rearmament in the light of the German threat, we should hear out Churchill again:

 

“I have always hoped and believed that a continuance of a long peace and the pressure of taxation would lead to a gradual, progressive neglect of armaments in all countries….”

 

Yet, MacDonald had, according to Churchill, never personally weighed up the effects of the quotas that he was proposing for disarmament. He merely assigned the task to others. Churchill accused MacDonald of passing on a hugely serious task to underlings. MacDonald ought to have directed the entire report, said Churchill, and then he would have seen for himself what his quotas were really going to do.

 

Even now, MacDonald was guilty with many others of speaking so highly in public of quotas and changes for the sake of continued peace, only to allow, behind the scenes, committees to vote down these proposals. All of this dithering and rhetoric merely stirred up passions and fears, says Churchill.

 

Churchill was also afraid that Britain, being honorable, would be, as a result of France’s diminution, burdened with an unbearable task. Due to Britain’s commitment to helping France, according to the Locarno Treaty of 1925, if France were forced to reduce is military, and war broke out, the Brits would have to pick up the tab, as it were, and help make up the military deficit of France. This would necessarily press Britain into war, and, also make them an immediate target for Germany.

 

To Churchill, MacDonald was too late to the party. Churchill was always for discussions between the great powers to reduce armaments, but MacDonald had only recently turned to that position (and subsequently commissioned a report on arms reduction). To Churchill there was at one point the opportunity to reverse, or reduce, some of the harsh measures on the German nation by the Treaty of Versailles (June, 1919). But now it was too late.

 

In his speech, far from baying for the blood of the enemy, Churchill used searing rhetoric and reasoned arguments to tear MacDonald to shreds, but was always respectful to the Prime Minister, never nasty.

 

Churchill did not want war. He even pushed for other nations to not go to war. He believed that the Germans had been harshly treated in some ways at Versailles and something ought to be done about it. He did believe, strongly, in peace talks, maintaining the peace, and reasonable compromises. He was fully committed in principle to disarmament and arms quotas. However, these things should have been done in the proper season, at the right time. Most unfortunately, the MacDonald government was late to the party, for it had been extremely naïve for too long, allowing Britain’s power to be diminished and that of France, too. For all MacDonald’s well-meaning efforts he had achieved the opposite goal to that which he had set out to establish.

 

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[1] Tucker Carlson, “Darryl Cooper: The True History of the Jonestown Cult, WWII, and How Winston Churchill Ruined Europe,” YouTube, September 2, 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOTgPEGYS2o&ab_channel=TuckerCarlson.

[2] “Orders of the Day. Volume 276: debated on Thursday 23 March 1933,” UK Parliament, https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/1933-03-23/debates/ab5cfd96-0c7f-4c20-b66a-f58f955645bc/OrdersOfTheDay.