Part 1: Defense, defense

Senator Packwood, Justice Gillette, members and guests of the Chartwell Society: I welcome you, if only virtually, so you won’t even be able to throw rolls if I say something silly. Taking his first tv screen test, Sir Winston muttered: “Even though we have to sink to this level, we always have to keep pace with modern improvements.” At least you’ve made me put on a tie, which I haven’t done since the 2019 Hillsdale College Cruise.

Like everyone in our cowed and whipped world,  I bow before the awesome powers of the Wu Flu.[1] Defense, defense! We need a spark from God knows where, as Churchill said. Because if we’re prepared to be frightened and ruled by fear, then the only thing to do is fight to the last.

Seems we’ve heard such words before…

At least those alive and sentient on this day 81 years ago heard them—when as Jim Westwood says, Lord Halifax was not summoned to Buckingham Palace. It was that other fellow, the “half-breed American.” A civil servant remarked: “I spent the day in a bright blue new suit from the Fifty Shilling Tailors, cheap and sensational looking, which I felt was appropriate to the new Government.”

I’d like to quote Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn, whom you hosted two years ago: “If nature has changed to the point where people are ready to be despotized, then they’re going to be despotized, because there are always those ready to do that to them, and there are a lot of them right now. Ultimately that means the end of self-government, where the ordinary person gets to decide anything.”

The alternative is the promise Churchill held out, which as Dr. Arnn says is also the promise of America: “That each of us is entitled, under the laws of nature and of nature’s God, to live a full and human life.”[2] But if we believe in that alternative, we’re going to need greatness and leadership.

Experts and the mental pandemic

I never thought I’d see the day when we would grow accustomed to the idea that free people should be policed on the advice of experts who disagree with each other and reverse themselves. Dr. Arnn often quotes something young Winston wrote to H.G. Wells in 1902, when Churchill was only 28:

“I cannot think that there can ever be a society governed by experts,” he wrote. “Expert knowledge is narrow knowledge…practical decisions involve weighing all the factors.”  Five decades later he remarked: “Scientists should be on tap, but not on top.” [3]

No one can be an expert about all the factors involved in, say, Covid. And even as the pandemic eases, the mental pandemic continues. Ironically, the most virulent expressions of mental distemper—the most ferocious tocsins—are over here, and diminish as you move east. They’re weaned somewhat in London, and lose steam in Paris, where President Macron, leader of the free world, speaks for the defense. Not one French statue shall be toppled, not one street renamed, he says, because they are part of our history.

By the time you get to Prague, or Budapest or Bratislava, in the old Warsaw Pact, the tocsins are barely detectable. Thirty years ago, who would have guessed? It’s incredible that the capital which ought to be in the best position not to slide over the cliff is where we are most afflicted with the mental pandemic.

Cancel Culture

And Winston Churchill, of all figures, is a prime target of people drunk with the madness called cancel culture. We in the Churchill Studies business—and that includes you, for you know more about him than most—have adopted a siege mentality. Indeed Andrew Roberts and I contemplated organizing a rapid response defense team to confront each new lie as it erupts. We thought to use a friendly newspaper or cable channel. We gave it up when we realized the reality. Such is the mental pandemic that few who have made up their minds would let us try to change them.

It’s especially noticeable on social media, a fountain of ignorance Churchill never had to confront. In his day when you said something you usually signed your name to it. Anonymity is, I suspect, part of what drives the worst outbursts on Twitter.

Andrew has a much larger megaphone because of his inciteful biography, Churchill: Walking with Destiny. It’s the Churchill volume to read if you read only one. In March he teamed up with a brilliant young Ethiopian, Zewditu Gebreyohanes, in a point by point refutation of a one-sided panel in Cambridge, home of the Churchill Archives of all places, which relegated Winston Churchill to the outer reaches of Nazism.

Their response to “The Racial Consequences of Mr. Churchill” is on Hillsdale’s Churchill website. Read it and you’ll marvel at the willful ignorance and slipshod history of the panelists. They remind me of Churchill’s description of orators who, “Before they get up, they do not know what they are going to say; when they are speaking, they do not know what they are saying; and when they sit down, they do not know what they have said.”[4]

Some racist…

Moreover, wrote Roberts and Gebreyohanes,

a racist or white supremacist wants bad things to happen to non-whites, whereas Churchill dedicated much of his life to protecting: Punjabi farmers from invading Taliban tribesmen, Sudanese civilians from the Khalifa’s slave-trading, Cape coloureds from the Afrikaaner republics, Indians from the Japanese (who killed 17% of the Filipino population from 1941 to 1945), amongst many other examples.[5]

As Churchill put it:

We will endeavour…to advance the principle of equal rights of civilized men irrespective of colour. We will not—at least I will pledge myself—hesitate to speak out when necessary if any plain case of cruelty of exploitation of the native for the sordid profit of the white man can be proved.[6]

Ms. Gebreyohanes’ part in all this is one of the most encouraging things about the defense effort. She can’t be accused of any of the biases they like to throw at old-time Churchillians. (Incidentally, while working on this paper, she filled me in on what Ethiopians think of Haile Selassie, their famous leader. She says it is much less than Churchill thought of him when he was thrown out by Mussolini in 1936.)

Take Bengal…please

The Hillsdale College Churchill Project has benefitted from the work of prominent Indian historians, on the long, badly misrepresented role of Churchill in the Bengal Famine: the hottest topic in the broad array of “Churchill Derangement Syndrome.”

Zareer Masani, biographer of Indira Gandhi, painstakingly describes Churchill’s efforts to alleviate the famine:

The true facts about food shipments to Bengal, amply recorded in the British war cabinet and government of India archives, are that more than a million tons of grain arrived in Bengal between August 1943, when the war cabinet first realised the severity of the famine, and the end of 1944, when the famine had petered out. This was food aid specifically sent to Bengal, much of it on Australian ships, despite strict food rationing in England and severe food shortages in newly-liberated southern Italy and Greece.[7]

Dr. Masani noted that the deplorable things Churchill said about Indians, always quoted over the Bengal famine, were in fact aimed at Delhi separatists, not the Indian people. Further, they have mainly one source—Leopold Amery, his Secretary of State for India.

Churchill loved to tweak the excitable Amery. He never dreamed that 75 years later, Amery’s diaries would be dredged up to prove he hated brown people. In fact Churchill made fun of everyone: Britons, Arabs, Americans, Chinese, Italians, Albanians, regardless of whether they were white or any other color.

Churchill respected peoples…

…when they deserved respect. “I cannot see any objections to Indians serving on His Majesty’s Ships where they are qualified and needed,” he wrote in 1942, “or, if their virtues so deserve, rising to be Admirals of the Fleet.”[8] Later in his war memoirs he wrote:

The unsurpassed bravery of Indian soldiers and officers, both Moslem and Hindu, shine forever in the annals of war…. Upwards of two and a half million Indians volunteered to serve in the forces, and by 1942…were coming in at the monthly rate of fifty thousand…. The response of the Indian peoples, no less than the conduct of their soldiers, makes a glorious final page in the story of our Indian Empire.[9]

In July 1944, over lunch with the Indian statesman Sir Ramaswamy Mudaliar, a member of the war cabinet, Churchill was heard to say “the old notion that the Indian was in any way inferior to the white man must disappear.” He was quoted as saying: “We must all be pals together. I want to see a great shining India, of which we can be as proud as we are of a great Canada or a great Australia.”[10]

Reality checks, honest debates

Tirthankar Roy of the London School of Economics led the defense against the leading text of the British Empire Hate Lobby. He showed that under the Raj, things got better not worse for the Indian masses by almost every standard of measurement: “As a society that had invented the idea that the touch of another person could cause pollution,” Dr. Roy wrote…

India did not need the British to know how to oppress and degrade other people. British rule, imposed from the outside, unleashed forces of change, weakening this home-grown cruelty. The Depressed Classes welcomed the British as their deliverers from age-long tyranny and oppression by the orthodox Hindus. The migration of millions of Indians from servile labour back in their villages to mines, factories and plantations all over the Empire created the possibility of real freedom. Of course, after the war, most Indians believed the British needed to leave for India to thrive. But they did not think that the British were the root of India’s problems.[11]

Abhijit Sarkar of Oxford wrote a controversial thesis suggesting that Muslim-Hindu prejudices were at the heart of the food shortages:

The All-India Grand-Assembly pursued the famine for political purposes. It alleged that the Muslim Bengal government was creating new Muslim grain traders, undermining the established Hindu traders. It publicized the government’s failure to avert the Bengal famine to prove the economic “unviability” of creating a separate Pakistan.[12]

There is much debate about Dr. Sarkar’s theories among Indians. I’m happy to say that we’ve published both the pros and cons, made in good faith, and a desire for the truth.

Defense international

We are proud to welcome scholars East and West in defense and debate of accurate history. A “Churchill Derangement Primer,” which you can find on my website, lists every accusation and attack from “A is for Aryans” to “W is for White Supremacy,” providing links where you can find sober, honest, footnoted discussion of the charge in question. The truth doesn’t always favor Churchill. But the average isn’t too bad.

For instance, we have published “Hearsay Doesn’t Count: The Truth about Churchill’s Use of Racial Epithets.” I ran every offensive racial or ethnic slur through our digital resource. A hundred million words by and about Churchill, including his own books, articles, speeches, letters and papers.

I began nervously—didn’t know what the result would be. I found that they are extremely rare. For example, I could find not one instance of Winston Churchill using the n-word, or even being quoted using it, though Leo Amery used it frequently. Will the historians who consistently accuse Churchill of it revise their screed? We’re waiting.

Churchill’s defense also benefits from the fact that he is as respected as ever among the broad mass of people. Six months ago Richard Cohen established an independent Facebook group called simply “Winston Churchill.”  You can post anything you want there. About 95% of the posts are positive and they come from all over the world. In six months—I’m amazed by this—the group has grown to nearly 20,000 members. In India, Amman Merchant and Herbert Anderson have established blogsites puncturing Churchill slander. And Hillsdale’s Churchill Project has 60,000 subscribers. These are encouraging numbers.

Continued in Part 2: Precepts for the Defense of Churchill

Endnotes

[1] The morning after, I was accused of using a “racist term” (Wu Flu). I looked up the euphemism in the Urban Dictionary, which would say it’s racist if it were. Such is the “mental pandemic” that it sets the terms of the debate by labeling something racist. If you dissemble, you acknowledge it. So don’t dissemble! Wuhan is not a race. China is not a race. If everything today is racist, then we’re all racists.

[2] Larry P. Arnn, Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar, Franklin, Tennessee, 26 April 2021. Audio link to be posted later.

[3] Winston S. Churchill to H.G. Wells, April 1902. WSC to Anthony Montague Browne, ca. 1959 in Montague Browne, Long Sunset (London: Cassell, 1995), 265.

[4] WSC on Lord Charles Beresford, 20 December 1912, in Richard M. Langworth, Churchill by Himself (New York: Rosetta Books, 2016), 325.

[5] Andrew Roberts and Zewditu Gebreyohanes, “Cambridge: ‘The Racial Consequences of Mr. Churchill,’ a Review,” Hillsdale College Churchill Project, 14 March 2021. (All websites cited were accessed in May 2021.)

[6] WSC, House of Commons, 28 February 1906, in Randolph S. Churchill, Winston S. Churchill, vol. 2, Young Statesman 1901-1914 (Hillsdale, Mich.: Hillsdale College Press, 2007), 163.

***

[7] Zareer Masani, “Churchill and the Genocide Myth: Last Word on the Bengal Famine,” Hillsdale College Churchill Project, 27 January 2021.

[8] WSC to Admiral Little, 14 October 1939, in Martin Gilbert, The Churchill Documents, vol. 14, At the Admiralty, September 1939-May 1940 (Hillsdale College Press, 2011), 240.

[9] WSC, The Second World War, vol. 4, The Hinge of Fate (London: Cassell, 195o), 182.

[10] Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny (New York: Viking, 2018), 785.

[11] Tirthankar Roy, “The British Raj According to Tharoor; Some of the Truth, Part of the Time,” Hillsdale College Churchill Project, 7 August 2020.

[12] Abhijit Sarkar, “The Effect of Race and Caste on Relief in the Famine, Hillsdale College Churchill Project, 29 January 2001.

The following is my foreword only to an analysis of the recent Churchill College panel, by Zewditu Gebreyohanes and Andrew Roberts. They followed a maxim of Randolph Churchill in the official biography: “I am interested only in the truth.” Every Churchill scholar is in their debt.

Foreword

Eighty-eight years ago Hitler became Chancellor of Germany and the Oxford Union passed a resolution: “That this House refuses in any circumstances to fight for King and Country.” A week later Winston Churchill said: “We have all seen with a sense of nausea the abject, squalid, shameless avowal made in the Oxford Union. We are told that we ought not to treat it seriously. The Times talked of ‘the Children’s Hour.’ I disagree. It is a very disquieting and disgusting symptom.”

Eight decades later Churchill himself is the target of disquieting and disgusting symptoms. Last year the Oxford Union resolved: “This House believes the British Empire is a national disgrace.”Three speakers argued the affirmative. The lone aberrant was the historian Zareer Masani. “I single-handedly contested a blatantly partisan motion and was constantly heckled,” he writes, “with no attempt by the chair or secretary to maintain order.” (Dr. Masani’s doughty riposte can be seen here.)

This year on 11 February, Cambridge, Oxford’s sometime rival, chimed in with a panel, “The Racial Consequences of Mr. Churchill.” The title spins off John Maynard Keynes’s 1925 critique, The Economic Consequences of Mr. Churchill. The difference was that Keynes, a scholar, offered a serious intellectual argument.

The racial imaginarium

Unlike Oxford, Cambridge, didn’t bother to hold an alleged debate. No panelists were historians. One confused Ernest Bevin with Aneurin Bevan. All three, and the moderator, agreed. Sir Winston was a racist basking in the wartime legend he created. The British Empire was worse than the Third Reich.

Herewith two fastidious seekers of truth, Andrew Roberts and Zewditu Gebreyohanes, respond to the Cambridge panel, point by point.

As in 1933, there are those who tell us not to take this seriously. Trimmers who profess admiration for Churchill excuse it by saying that, after all, it’s only free speech. A better description would be flagrant injustice. We can argue all day about the pros and cons of Winston Churchill or the British Empire or the American Founding. If we do it seriously, with respect and intellectual curiosity, we advance our ability to draw our own conclusions.

But “a seat of learning,” as Charles Moore wrote in the Daily Telegraph, “must uphold learning.” To salt a panel with prejudiced speakers, presenting only the negatives, allowing no contrary opinion, is not serious academic enquiry. It is blindness by those who never hear the other side, don’t want to hear it, and don’t want others to hear. It’s character assassination. Or at least, confession of the weakness of the argument.

“If all you have is a hammer…”

The reaction to Roberts/Gebreyohanes was not long in coming. Instead of engaging on any single one of their points, it consisted of pejoratives. They produced “a dishonest and racist paper.” They want “academics of colour who challenge the Empire shut down.” In other words: disagree with us and you’re a racist.

An old saying provides the answer to that: If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Click here to read Roberts/Gebreyohanes.

From one crater to another

No sooner does the campaign for Churchill’s memory quell emissions from one crater than another one erupts. The campaign to delegitimize Churchill as Hero continues, but the main volcanos have already erupted. Now we have the odd subsidiary crater spouting the same old stuff. Not much is new, so this is only for the record.

On July 1st in Forbes emitted “Churchill the Failure: The Paraxodical Truth about the Best and Worst Leaders.” This was sent to their corrections department (no reply):

* * *

The author makes insightful points about leadership. He then constructs a narrative about Churchill based on the eruptions of critics who crop evidence to suit themselves. (1) Racial slurs in Churchill’s conversation are extremely rare. (2) Without the diaries of Leo Amery, hearsay evidence cited to show Churchill’s “hate” of Indians would not exist. Indeed, Amery’s own diaries include racist terms Churchill never used. (3) Churchill in WW2 praised “2.5 million Indian soldiers and officers, both Moslem and Hindu [and] the response of the Indian peoples, no less than the conduct of their soldiers.”

(4) Amery’s alleged Churchill quotes are all from 1942-44. In that period, according to Indian historian Tirthankar Roy: “Almost everything Churchill said about Indians was related to the nationalist movement. Negotiating with nationalists during the war could be pointless and dangerous because the moderates were demoralized and the radical nationalists wanted the Axis to win. No prime minister would be willing to fight a war and negotiate with the nationalists at the same time.” (5) In truth, Churchill and his Cabinet pulled out every stop to alleviate the Bengal Famine. Arthur Herman, Pulitzer nominee for Churchill and Gandhi, writes: “Absent Churchill, the Bengal Famine would have been worse.”

If we condemn Churchill for the rare racial epithet, should we also condemn Amery, who made them wholesale? What about Gandhi, who said nothing about the famine? In South Africa Gandhi wrote that whites should be “the predominating race.” Blacks, he said, were “troublesome, very dirty and live like animals.” Gandhi racist? Surely not. We must look at the total picture of every historical figure. Amery served honorably. Gandhi led India to independence. Churchill saved civilization. All three were good and decent men. But there are differences.

The Crater Halifax: death of a thousand Post-It notes

In Halifax, Nova Scotia, protestors surrounded the Nemon statue of Churchill in a “Walk Against Winston.” There was no spray-paint or attempts to pull it down. These polite folk were armed with Post-It notes. They included the familiar litany of false charges, out of context quotes. Of course there was hearsay from Leo Amery (see above): “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.”

Terry Reardon replied on behalf of the Churchill Society Canada: “Attacks on Winston Churchill in the Canadian media are nothing new. On our website are replies to articles in the Toronto Star and the National Post.”

Reardon referenced Arthur Herman’s definitive article on the Bengal famine (above). It laid out fact after fact on the causes of, and Churchill’s actions to alleviate, food shortages. He also attached Churchill’s 8 October 1943 directive to the new Viceroy, Lord Wavell, which is even more definitive. From The Churchill Documents, vol. 19, 421:

Every effort must be made, even by the diversion of shipping urgently needed for war purposes, to deal with local shortages…. Every effort should be made by you to assuage the strife between the Hindus and Moslems and to induce them to work together for the common good. No form of democratic Government can flourish in India while so many millions are by their birth excluded from those fundamental rights of equality between man and man, upon which all healthy human societies must stand…. The declarations of His Majesty’s Government in favour of the establishment of a self-governing India as an integral member of the British Empire and Commonwealth of Nations remain our inflexible policy.

* * *

The reply, from one of the Walk Against Winston organizers: “Churchill and his government’s policies directly and unquestionably contributed to massive death and suffering in the case of the Bengal Famine. While Churchill’s role in opposing Hitler is significant historically, I don’t think the masses of brown and black people who he and his fellow ruling elites colonized, dispossessed, exploited, and consigned to oblivion would agree with your laudatory and rose-coloured characterization.”

How do you answer people who refuse to rebut or even acknowledge facts? They know what they think.  They’ve read their Twitter and Facebook. It is all generalities, without a source or a reference. Don’t bother them with the truth. They’ve already made up their minds.

Déjà vu all over again

An article called “Rethinking Churchill” ran on ORF, a website founded in 1990 “at the juncture of ideation tempered by pragmatism.” In a two-part article, the author repeated the same charges refuted three years ago by Soren Geiger for the Hillsdale College Churchill Project: “By my count, he makes twenty-two distinct claims about or against Winston Churchill in his 900-word article,” Mr. Geiger wrote. “I could deal with each of these one at a time. But here I will examine some of the most serious. In so doing, I aim to reveal his allegations against Churchill as unfounded and his historical analysis as embarrassingly sloppy.” To read, click here.

In ORF, the author adds another one: “The vaingloriously self-serving but elegant volumes [Churchill] authored on the World War II led the Nobel Committee, unable in all conscience to give him an award for peace, to grant him, astonishingly enough, the Nobel Prize for Literature — an unwitting tribute to the fictional qualities inherent in Churchill’s self-justifying embellishments.”

This may play well in the Twitterverse. Few there will know that Churchill’s prize in literature came before his vainglorious self-serving WW2 volumes were complete. The Nobel Committee cited his works of “historical and biographical description.” They particularly singled out Marlborough and My Early Life. You can look it up. So much for that crater.

Reader response

Mr. Geiger’s article above is entitled, “Winston Churchill the Racist Warmonger.” Scroll to the comments and you will find a reader reply. It mainly repeats all the above points, which the reader had clearly accepted. I responded. Most of it you’ve heard before. But for ease of reference, I include it here:

Dear Reader: Thank you for reading. Not a bad idea at all.

(1) Now please read Arthur Herman, “Absent Churchill, the Bengal Famine would have been worse.” (2) Next read “Churchill on India,” particularly Churchill’s words to Gandhi and Nehru—hardly those of a despiser. Churchill believed India should have self-government; what he opposed—and, yes, acted against—was the Congress Party’s Brahmin dominance. Hence Churchill to Ghanshyam Das Birla: “Mr. Gandhi has gone very high in my esteem since he stood up for the Untouchables.” And Gandhi’s reply: “I have got a good recollection of Mr. Churchill when he was in the Colonial Office and somehow or other since then I have held the opinion that I can always rely on his sympathy and goodwill.”

(4) Next, read Indian historian Tirthankar Roy: “Everything [Churchill] said about Indians and the Empire was related to the Indian nationalist movement. Negotiating with Indian nationalists during the war could be pointless and dangerous because the moderate nationalists were demoralized by dissensions and the radical nationalists wanted the Axis powers to win on the Eastern Front. No prime minister would be willing to fight a war and negotiate with the nationalists at the same time.” (5) Before you accept Leopold Amery’s hearsay Churchill quotes, read “Churchill’s ‘Racist Epithets’” to learn how many occurred in Amery’s (but not Churchill’s) everyday speech. Was Amery mouthing Churchill, or himself?

* * *

(6) For what Churchill really thought about Indians read “The Indian Contribution in WW2”: “The glorious heroism and martial qualities of the Indian troops who fought in the Middle East, who defended Egypt, who liberated Abyssinia, who played a grand part in Italy, and who, side by side with their British comrades, expelled the Japanese from Burma…. The unsurpassed bravery of Indian soldiers and officers, both Moslem and Hindu, shine for ever in the annals of war.” This man hated Indians?

(7) On “poison gas,” read “Churchill and Chemical Warfare,” and learn the difference between tear gas (which he unfortunately labeled “poison”) and the gasses Germans began using in wartime. On “Aryan stock,” read “Churchill Derangement Syndrome,” for where and when he said it (and see last paragraph below). In the same piece, note that the “camel dung” crack is hearsay.

Nor is it possible to excuse Churchill as “a man of his time.” In fact he was far in advance of his time. From ages 25 to 80, examples abound of his concern for the rights of peoples of all colors, particularly in South Africa (you can read about that, too).

Bottom line: Churchill was human. He made mistakes, sometimes big ones. His language is almost absent of racial slurs, but he did believe a hierarchy of races existed back then. That is not the remarkable fact. The remarkable fact is that he consistently defended human rights. One has only to read to learn—something besides outbursts on the Twitterverse.

The “pernicious vermin” crater

The “stone him” crater

Fighting back: “The truth is great, and shall prevail.” *

Increasing signs that the search for truth survives. *”Don’t bother to read the comments”—same old stuff.

Why Churchill’s Leadership was Indispensable, Joseph Laconte, National Review.

“Churchill Out of Context,” Editorial Board, Toledo Blade

G. P. Taylor: “Stop Snowflakes and BBC Denigrating Winston Churchill,” Yorkshire Post

Cathy Gungell, “Is it Time to Stop Calling Churchill a Racist?“, UK Conservative Woman

Dominic Sandbrook, “Why should we be forced to pay for a BBC that portrays Winston Churchill as a mass murdering racist?”, Daily Mail

Edward G. Marks, “In Defense of Keeping Churchill’s Name on School,” Bethesda Magazine 

Bradley Gitz, “The Age of Dumb,” Arkansas Democrat-Gazette:  “In London, fake anti-fascists fighting imaginary fascists vandalized a statue of a real anti-fascist who fought real fascists by the name of Churchill. Or as another wag more succinctly put it, ‘Wait till they hear about the guys he fought against.'”

Thoughtful articles by historians

Heartening in the face of all this is the determined pursuit of truth by Indian scholars. Thanks and a tip of the hat to:

Video: “The Case for Churchill”

Churchill historian Andrew Roberts in a fair and balanced interview by Darren Grimes. Among other shibboleths, he covers Churchill “quotes” in his doctor’s diaries (minute 19). These were often imaginative afterthoughts, added twenty-five years later.

Dr. Roberts’ biography, Churchill: Walking with Destiny, calmly lays out the unvarnished truth, including Churchill’s flaws and mistakes. But as Roberts says, it’s easier to scrawl “racist” on a statue than it is to read a 1000-page book.

Edited transcript: The original speech included certain subjects covered earlier and elsewhere. These are summarized below, and provided with links to the original texts. The video, which is unabridged, includes questions and answers with the audience.

Churchill’s World of 1932

Eighty-seven years ago, Churchill was here in Michigan, in Detroit, Grand Rapids and Ann Arbor, on a U.S. lecture tour. East, west, north, and south he rode the rails, “living all day on my back in a railway compartment and addressing in the evening large audiences.” He concluded, startlingly for someone with his background, that it was the hardest work he’d had in his life.

In Detroit on February 5th, Hindu demonstrators protested his opposition to the Government of India Act. A dozen detectives supplemented his faithful bodyguard, Walter Thompson. Only a few weeks before, he’d been knocked down and nearly killed by a car in New York City. His first words on regaining consciousness were, “They almost got me that time, Thompson!” Imagine how that would have changed history.

Though fearless of protestors, Churchill never talked about domestic politics abroad—a practice that today seems almost antique. His 1932 lectures were consistent with a lifelong theme: Anglo-American unity. On March 1st in Ann Arbor, he railed against rash proposals for disarmament in the face of tyrannies: National Socialism and Soviet Socialism, which he compared to the North and South Poles, equally uninhabitable. The English-Speaking Peoples, he said, must unite to combat the world’s miseries. I thank Dick Marsh of Ann Arbor, who is with us today, for these details.

Current Contentions

Alas the noble sentiments that drove Churchill all his life have lately taken backstage to violent contentions, spread by the Internet, particularly social media, and bad movies from The Crown to Viceroy’s House. Not a month passes when he is not accused of something dreadful, from xenophobia and racism to misogyny and war crimes. Farhad Manjoo wrote in The New York Times: “Thanks to the malleability of digital media and the jet fuel of network virality, a digital lie can spread more quickly, and cause more damage, than an analog one.”

Confronting this busy industry is a goal of the Hillsdale College Churchill Project, and our web department, “Truths & Heresies.” Last year the cacophony got so loud that, with one of our contributors, Andrew Roberts, we contemplated a “Rapid-Response Team.” Writing for a major newspaper, we’d answer each flapdoodle as it came. Unfortunately, the only paper interested was Britain’s The Sun. And Andrew and I didn’t think it dignified to publish scholarly rebuttals alongside photos of starlets in string bikinis.

Churchill is attacked more broadly today than in 1940. Back then, the Nazis just called him a drunk. Today’s critics tear him down with a longer litany: his self-centeredness; his liking for gas warfare and carpet bombing; the rude things he said about Hindus or Jews or Muslims; his disdain for anyone other than card-carrying Englishmen.

Policy critiques range from what he did—like defending Antwerp and attacking the Dardanelles—to what he didn’t do—not bombing Auschwitz, not saving Poland at Yalta. That last item is about the only thing the Soviets didn’t accuse him of after the war. See “Assault on Churchill,”

Where do people get these notions?

The Indian historian Zareer Masani offered a crisp explanation in “Churchill a War Criminal? Get Your History Right.” These attacks are “skillfully orchestrated by a few articulate and ambitious individuals, publicity-hungry detractors [who accuse him of having] more blood on his hands than Hitler, Stalin and Mao put together. There was a time when such absurd comparisons would have been dismissed as the ravings of fantasists. But today they attract a Twitter following of gullible millions, happy to swallow the tallest tale if it’s retweeted often enough. Bashing Churchill [has] become a sure-fire way of attracting a mass following, selling potboiler books and reviving flagging political careers.”

No serious historian claims Churchill was infallible. It diminishes him to treat him as superhuman. Accomplished scholars have catalogued his controversies. It is fair to consider them. But not assassins who create imaginary sins by selective editing.

The electronic lynch mob uses Twitter and Facebook and the online tabloids. They remind me of a quip by the late Umberto Eco: “Social media,” he said, “gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community. Then they were quickly silenced, but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It’s the invasion of the idiots.”

Gertrude Bell to Scott Kelly

Following Walking with Destiny, Andrew Roberts’ excellent Churchill biography, one reviewer accused him of failing to say Churchill’s actions in the Middle East drove the Arabist Gertrude Bell to suicide. That’s a new one!  It was getting so that we actually welcomed new ones.

At the 1921 Cairo Conference, Bell got all she wanted from Churchill: break-up of the Ottoman Empire; Arab states in Iraq and Jordan; her choice of kings on their thrones. She died five years later, but always spoke well of Churchill. Incidentally, it was Bell who talked him out of creating a separate Kurdistan. In retrospect, that would have avoided much trouble. Particularly for the Kurds.

Another critic said Churchill’s biggest gaffe as Chancellor of the Exchequer was to fix the pound at $4.10 in 1929, causing unemployment in the 1930s. In fact the pound, which was worth only $3.66 in 1920, rose to its prewar level of $4.80 by 1929. The devaluation to $4.10 occurred when Britain left the Gold Standard in 1931, over two years after Churchill had left office. A post-World War I recession caused the pound to sink, not the other way round.

* * *

Next, retired U.S. astronaut Scott Kelly innocently tweeted that Churchill was “one of the greatest leaders of modern times.” “Like a meteor storm bombarding a capsule in orbit, furious trolls attacked Kelly on social media,” reported the London Evening Standard. Churchill was a bigot, a mass-murderer and a racist.

Kelly groveled: “Did not mean to offend by quoting Churchill…. “I will go and educate myself further on his racist views which I do not support.” The newspaper mocked his meek collapse: “Of course Churchill was a great leader. It was utterly craven of Scott Kelly to apologize for saying so. The only space the astronaut ought to concentrate on is that between his ears.”

The Crown

I’m going to describe four current contentions I thought might especially interest you. Since our subject is Churchill and the Movies, let’s start with a really bad film series.

No sooner had I admired the fair, mostly balanced and accurate PBS TV series Churchill’s Secret (on his June 1953 stroke) than I was grumbling through Netflix’s The Crown. It’s about the present Queen’s ascent to the throne, and her first years as monarch.

Is it really so big a deal? Not in itself. But thanks to The Crown we’ll inevitably be told by somebody that Churchill’s stroke was kept from the Queen, that he “forced” her to move to Buckingham Palace, that he painted the same scene repeatedly in his Black Dog of despair. Productions like The Crown suggest that truth and accuracy matter less than style and perception; that reality must bend to fit the creator’s mindset. For details see  “The Crown: A Not So Crowning Achievement.”

Lady Castlerosse

We move now to the pastime of attacking Churchill’s character. Last year Britain’s Channel 4 aired a breathless documentary, “Churchill’s Secret Affair.” In the 1930s, they said, Churchill conducted a four-year affair with Doris Delevingne, Lady Castlerosse. The romance took place at the Riviera villa of the American actress Maxine Elliott, where they were occasional guests.

This was a profitable whopper for the tabloid internet. One newspaper even produced a witness, the attractive model Cara Delevingne, Doris’s grand-niece. “It was a tradition in our family,” she explained. “My mother told me.” It took me 2500 words to unravel this one in The American Spectator, and I’m not going to bore you with that. (For details see “Too Easy to be Good: The Churchill Marriage and Lady Castlerosse.”)

The Bengal Famine, 1943

Most popular by far among drive-by ambushes is the 1943-44 famine in Bengal, India. The most comments we get on it are from Indians, which is understandable. The Bengal food shortage was the greatest humanitarian crisis in India’s history. Up to three million Bengalis died. Proportionally, think 16 million Americans.

Gary Oldman’s Oscar for the Churchill film Darkest Hour was protested in the Washington Post by the Indian politician Shashi Tharoor. “Hollywood rewards a mass murderer,” and the Indian Express called WSC “an unpopular racist.” As Churchill once cracked, “The Hon. Member is never lucky in the coincidence of his facts with the truth.”  (For details see “Bengal Famine: The Hottest of Churchill Diatribes.”

The email we received from Indians on Churchill is remarkably balanced. One critical writer admitted that the British in India ended slavery and Sutti; and helped to remove the caste system. Sutti, as you may know, was the practice of wives throwing themselves (or being thrown) on top of their dead husbands’ funeral pyres. “The ladies went to their deaths with dignity, in the manner of a celebration,” read one account.

Well, if all the British did was to remove slavery, abolish Sutti, and attack the caste system, those were pretty big things. Very many of Churchill’s remarks on India show him to be a man who exalted above all, despite his imperialist upbringing, the rule of law under a just constitution—inspired in India’s case by Britain’s. That was another good thing the old Raj left in its wake. Along, of course, with cricket.

Welsh Strikers, 1910-11

Finally, just last month came another outburst, reviving a “golden oldie” nursed by British socialists for over a century: that Churchill sent the army to kill strikers in the Rhondda Valley, Wales in 1910-11. The Guardian went right to work. “Do you consider Winston Churchill a hero or a villain?” they asked John McDonnell, the Labour Party shadow chancellor of the exchequer. “Villain,”  Mr. McDonnell shot back: “Tonypandy.” A two-word gotcha! The Guardian then supplied an inaccurate rehash of the Tonypandy riots, where Churchill is supposed to have sent troops to attack strikers.

McDonnell was crushed under a massive reaction by press and public—a sign that the truth is winning. Ironically, back in the day, the same Guardian was defending Churchill for his moderation. (See “Churchill, Tonypandy and ‘Poundland Lenin.'”)

In 1965 the BBC interviewed surviving Welsh strikers, including Will Mainwaring, who had been one of the youngest militants in the South Wales coalfields. Half a century on, he still spoke with pride of championing the miners and of his record as a protestor. Of Churchill’s decision to send troops to the Rhondda in 1910 Mainwaring said:

We never thought that Winston Churchill had exceeded his natural responsibility as Home Secretary. The military did not commit one single act that allows the slightest resentment by the strikers. On the contrary, we regarded the military as having come in the form of friends to modify the otherwise ruthless attitude of the police forces.

Churchill’s Defenders Welcome Allies

For forty years, much of my work has been to defend Churchill’s good name from ignorance, some of it around for a century. It still circulates, but I’ve noticed how little now goes unchallenged.

Whenever a slander surfaces nowadays, the Hillsdale College Churchill Project is inundated with email asking us to proclaim the truth. And we’re not alone. Many sources—the Churchill Archives Centre, the various Churchill societies, academics, press and the public online, share the defense. This is an encouragement to us, to balanced biographers, and to anyone who wishes to understand the greatest Briton. The only thing worse than fighting with allies, as Churchill said, is fighting without them.