Churchill, Churchill, Churchill. An historical figure of immense stature. Born a Victorian, he lived to see The Beatles and the sixties begin to swing. He was a cultured man, a writer, an artist. He was in the trenches of WWI, he hobnobbed with Hollywood film stars. He met Einstein, and could turn a witticism to rival Wilde’s. And yet, he is also a locus of division.
There’s so much to admire about Churchill before you even get to the kicking Hitler in the unmentionables thing, but that too was good.
However, these points that warrant admiration are not the whole story. I could list a number of what might be considered black marks, such as his ordering in troops to quell strikers. Australians will remember the absolute screw up of Gallipoli.
The big one, though, is the Bengal famine. Millions died, and it’s complicated, but the quick version is that those resources were redirected to the war effort that would make for the aforementioned assault upon the nether regions of Adolf Hitler.
Suffice to say, that Churchill is a very significant historical figure is beyond dispute, but then, you could say that much as readily of the purportedly monoglobar Hitler. Renown has often proved to be anything but a character reference.
Churchill is very far from being universally loved, but did we need cuddly?
The criticism, the, sometimes, hatred, is readily understood (it need not be agreed with, but it can be understood) by anyone who isn’t a total bigot. If your granny starved in Bengal, that’s going to stick with you. I have myself always believed that Churchill was a bit of a git who got himself redeemed by circumstances. Come the hour, come the man. It took a Churchill to withstand the Nazis, who, it should be remembered, were being very successful for the first couple of years of WWII.
If the other side is fielding Adlof Hitler, you’re an idiot if, in response, you field Mahatma Gandhi. The Nazis were raging across Europe, conducting the most extensive genocide in human history. For the job of opposing and defeating him, fluffy bunnies need not apply.
The self-righteous and their indulgence in absolute morality
Why am I going into all this? Well, because some who wish to support the UK’s rejoining the EU are getting squeamish about our side invoking Churchill as a prime mover of the EU.
I’m fully alive to the many dimensions in which Churchill may be criticised, but that doesn’t mean inconvenient facts evaporate. It is the Brexiter lobby who play that game, and pro-Europeans must not stoop to that level. We must not because what we stand for is valuable, indeed, essential to the wellbeing of the UK. One of the things we stand for is the basing of judgement upon facts, upon evidence. The fact that Churchill was instrumental in getting the ball rolling on Europe is there. It is a statement of fact that, after the experience of two world wars, Churchill was instrumental in establishing the great project, the unprecedented project in all human history, of binding nations together in such a way as to make their going to war with each other almost impossible, thereby to establish peace in Europe, to maintain it, insist on it, to consign us to an endless jaw-jaw that would preclude war-war.
It is a demonstrable fact that he did this, and it is a demonstrable fact that it has worked.
And it is therefore fair to point to him as the godfather of the EU.
The naked mendacity of the Brexit lobby
However, we’ve all seen the Brexit lobby attempt to co-opt and pervert Churchill’s works and words into an argument for the destabilizing of Europe preparatory to their patron’s invasion of Europe (and I there refer to Putin of course, Patron by proxy of many Brexit supporters, and I do so because of the vast sums of Russian money that have been bankrolling some members of the Tory party for a couple of decades now. This is a matter of record, donations registered as interests, which admits of a conjecture as to what might not have been registered…). This makes it absolutely necessary and imperative that we claim Churchill, in all his glory and infamy, as the godfather of the EU, because their attempt to present him as against the EU, their attempt to co-opt the authority he bears as the war leader that withstood Hitler, and to do so in the service of an authoritarian project, shows the profound duplicity and mendacity of the Brexit lobby in very high relief.
The truth
The European project he kicked off in 1948 with The Council of Europe was always intended to end war in Europe. War had raged back and forth across the continent almost constantly for a thousand years – the sheer normality of war might be difficult for many people to grasp these days (because Churchill’s project worked). To pervert that achievement, as the Brexiters have attempted, is an act of evil, but, more importantly to our purposes, it is a demonstrably dishonest act which gives us the key to judging how far we should trust anything else they might say.
The Brexit lobby are attempting to rewrite history in order to betray the struggle and victory of our grandparents, so that they can then return the mass population of the UK to a state not so very removed from serfdom, our access to law severely restricted, our rights curtailed, our access to any redress against an elite intent on raping this nation of its wealth entirely blocked.
And we can show they are doing this based upon one total and key lie. Churchill was not anti-European. Churchill, for all his faults, came through two world wars, said “never again”, and created what would become, in time, the EU, as his means of delivering that promise. And it has worked.
And famine, and soldiers deployed against the civilian population, and failures in previous wars, and much besides, are all worthy of examination, and judgments can fairly be drawn, but none of that changes the fact that the man, for all his faults, created what would become the EU, with the express intention of ensuring an end to war in Europe, it worked (for no EU members have gone to war with each other), and the Brexit lobby are dismantling that, and deliberately prostituting a lie of Churchill to do it. And we can prove it. And in proving it, we show them up as mendacious and duplicitous. And that is important. In understanding this lie, we have the key to demonstrating to the country that the Brexit lobby have been pushing lies all along.
Don’t play moral Top Trumps. That’s a Brexiter game
So, no, your squeamishness over Churchill is not a contribution to our cause, nor is it an expression of reality, any more than is Farage’s posturing. By all means, demand the legacy of Churchill be answerable for the bad stuff, but don’t you start editing out bits of fact that you believe are contrary to your agenda because a) they aren’t (Churchill can be the godfather of the EU, and the guy who took decisions that resulted in famine), and b) that’s what the other side do, and if we are to deserve our victory, it must be because we don’t do what they do, we are different, we are honest, and reality, the facts, the evidence, warts and all, will be respected.
