Churchill on free speech

Would we have collaborated with Hitler?

An article and a television review from the Daily Telegraph ( London), Monday 20 February 2017.

 (1) Would the British have collaborated with the Nazis? (Nigel Jones).

(2) SS-GB (BBC; reviewed by Jasper Rees).

Some would have fought to the end like Churchill, but others would have accepted Nazi occupation

 NIGEL JONES

 A swastika flag flutters over Buckingham Palace . The crash of SS jackboots echoes along Downing Street . Such images will become familiar over the nest few weeks as the BBC screens its adaptation of SS-GB, Len Deighton’s chilling portrayal of Britain under Nazi occupation.

     But we don’t really need Deighton’s brilliant novel to tell us what might have happened had the [Second World War] ended differently. We already know.

     We know because the Nazis had made meticulous plans for how they would rule a conquered Britain , including a blacklist of hundreds of prominent people who had expressed their dislike of Hitler’s ré­gime and were marked for arrest and execution.

     Top place on the blacklist went, of course, to Winston Churchill. He pledged that he and his Cabinet would fight until they lay on the ground choking on their own blood.

     But would Britain have resisted to the last? The evidence suggests the response would have been much meeker than Churchill’s growled defiance.

     That evidence exists in the archives of Mass Observation, Britain ’s first public opinion organisation, at Sussex University . Respondents often express strong doubts about eventual British victory, and even exhibit a worrying admiration for Nazi “achievements”.

     Churchill himself would have died in the last ditch, smoking gun in hand, but some of his colleagues were not made of such stern stuff. Several would have gone, cap in hand, to seek a “reasonable” accommodation with a triumphant Hitler, and would almost certainly have played prominent parts in a Vichy-style puppet government.

     Surprisingly, they might not have included the Fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley. Mosley had taken against Hitler when they met in Berlin in 1936 at his wedding to Diana Mitford and disliked receiving orders from anyone, even Hitler.

     The real collaborators would have been led by the Duke of Windsor, the former King Edward VIII. He had often expressed fawning regard for the Nazi ré­gime and even made a shameful pilgrimage to pay court to the Führer at his Bavarian home, the Berghof.

     Others included Lord Halifax, the foreign secretary, and even Britain ’s First World War premier, David Lloyd George. He called Hitler a “great man”, and refused to join Churchill’s government because he wanted to play the role of Britain ’s Pétain: an old hero recalled from retirement to lead the country in its hour of defeat.

     More dangerous than these vain old men was Halifax ’s deputy at the Foreign Office, Rab Butler, an apostle of appeasement who despised Churchill as a “half-American adventurer” and sought to make treasonable contact with the Nazis, via a Swedish intermediary, to negotiate a peace deal. Another Tory appeaser was former MI6 agent Sam Hoare.

     Churchill distrusted all these men and neutralised them. Windsor was sent to the Bahamas , and Halifax and Hoare exiled as ambassadors to the United States and Spain . Butler was consigned to a harmless domestic role in education policy. Mosley and Mitford stayed locked up in Holloway prison until 1943, when the invasion threat had passed.

     But how would a Britain run by such traitors, and overseen by the Nazis, have functioned?

     Hitler, an admirer of the British Empire , might have given us an easier ride than France, let alone the Slavic Untermenschen in eastern Europe. But the British would have felt the Nazi lash, especially if they showed the slightest dissent.

     British Jews would have died in the Holocaust just like their counterparts in the rest of Europe . A British Resistance would have been met with ruthless repression.

     In the Channel Islands, given up by Churchill in 1940 as impossible to defend, we see the model for how Nazi rule would have looked in Britain . The bailiffs who ran Jersey and Guernsey were kept in place by the occupiers in return for slavish obedience. Notoriously, they compiled lists of non-islanders, including Jews, some of whom were deported and killed.

     The truth is that occupation of Britain would have exposed the best and worst in human nature. Some would have been heroes, risking torture and death to shelter Jews or take armed action against the invader. Some would have collaborated: denouncing neighbours, betraying friends, demeaning themselves in their submission to tyranny. Most of us would have kept our heads down and tried to muddle through, surviving as best we could.

Read more at telegraph.co.uk/opinion

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Why politics today can’t give us the heroes we need

Mark Triffitt, University of Melbourne

Churchill, Roosevelt (FDR and Eleanor), JFK and Thatcher – depending on your politics, they’re all political heroes.

We place them on a pedestal because their special qualities set them apart. Through far-sighted action, they persevered and succeeded (mostly) in the face of adversity and often ridicule.

It was American writer Joseph Campbell who first alerted us to the perpetual and profound influence of heroes in our daily lives. Campbell’s seminal book The Hero with a Thousand Faces – written more than five decades ago – highlighted how the “hero” story pervades every culture and creed.

While heroes come in various guises, the underlying themes that make their stories so compelling – daring, vision and strength – are largely the same. Heroes transcend the limitations of our world. In doing so, they give us a glimpse of our own potential and inspire us to achieve more.

For Campbell, such is the ubiquity of the “hero” story that it represents the central narrative of humanity. That’s why everyone – and every system – needs their heroes.

What has become of political heroes?

Much has been made of the depth of public disillusionment with our current democratic system. Campbell’s “hero” thesis may provide another guide to understanding this. It may also help us understand how and why we must address it.

After all, who would we say are our political heroes now?

On a global stage, some might point to Barack Obama or perhaps Angela Merkel. But generally the well is almost dry. This is evidenced by opinion polling showing trust in, and respect for, politicians at record lows across most Western democracies.

Kevin Rudd’s record level of voter support was an improbable and temporary state of affairs. AAP/Dean Lewins

In Australia, political heroes are non-existent. From time to time we believe we have one in our midst. Think of Kevin Rudd’s stellar rise to leadership. Likewise with Mark Latham, Malcolm Turnbull, Julia Gillard and even Tony Abbott (before things went pear-shaped for the current government).

The pattern has become depressingly predictable. The “next big thing” steps onto the political stage to intense hope and excitement. Finally, we hope, here’s the political hero we’ve been looking for.

Then they are ripped down in quick time. Some personal failing inevitably emerges, or some skeleton falls from the cupboard.

‘Gotcha’ politics tears down leaders

We blame the declining quality of our elected representatives for this chronically sad state of affairs. Their personal strengths and characteristics have seemingly deteriorated to such an extent that politics has become an arena almost exclusively of “anti-heroes”.

When they’re not ripping off taxpayers with shonky entitlements, they’re disconnecting themselves from the real world with arcane ideological and factional fights. When they should be fixing the big problems of our age, they obsess over childish finger-pointing and three-second soundbites.

Certainly, the argument has merit. Politics has increasingly become an echo chamber where many MPs have only ever been professional politicians, or emerged from a narrow band of professions that lead to politics.

Inside this bunker, individual behaviour and values gravitate to mediocrity and group-think – the antithesis of hero qualities.

John F. Kennedy’s 1963 speech in Berlin rang around the world, but he may never have become president in today’s political system. EPA

But consider this. What if JFK, with all his charisma and oratory, entered American politics now? How long before he would be tagged as a philandering creep riding into power on the coattails of his Nazi-appeasing father?

And Churchill? Would the English public and press allow the person responsible for the strategic farce of Gallipoli to become their leader in the second world war? And would Australia fight alongside him?

And what about Churchill’s “black dog”? Any sniff of mental instability in today’s political world effectively spells the end of leadership, or leadership ambitions.

Their times were far different. There were no social media or “liar” hashtags. There were much fewer “gotcha” campaigns aimed at carpet-bombing the reputation of rival politicians. There was no internet to instantly cross-reference and fact-check anything and everything a politician has ever thought, said or done.

But that is exactly the point. Today’s media and social environment no longer allows any politician – no matter how well-meaning, smart or brave he or she is 98% of the time – to be put on a pedestal for any length of time.

In this era of hyper-transparency, no potential political hero gets out of here alive.

No time or space for redemption

But heroes are more than just about reputation and credibility. In the hero’s journey, as Campbell highlighted, redemption is a central part of the story. Heroes overcome their personal flaws by acting decisively and strategically to create a better world.

But this means having the scope and time to think coherently and deeply about this future world. It means heroes having at their disposal the economic and social policy levers that they can deftly shift to deliver on their vision. It means taking control of the future by leading the rest of us bravely into a world where we otherwise would not dare to venture.

All this is basically impossible in today’s political environment. In essence, our system – and the politicians who inhabit it – is on the verge of being “de-futured” and “de-levered”.

Our political system still assumes the world around it moves in a comparatively slow way. So it shackles parliaments to drawn-out decision processes, which are meant to give our elected representatives time and scope to decide on policy action.

In the meantime, our hyper-sped 21st-century world passes it by, forcing politicians to retreat into the only sphere of action they can control, namely the short term.

Our system assumes that our elected representatives, despite their flaws, are still the prime decision-makers on policymaking. In the meantime, our hyper-expert world has turned them into comparative dunces.

It assumes that national parliaments will always be the predominant realm that decides what, in terms of policy, will have a major and ongoing impact on the citizens they represent. Yet our hyper-scaled, globalised world turns parliaments into bit players.

None of the assumptions our system depends upon to function make sense in the context of massive changes wrought by globalisation and the internet over the last two decades.

A leader afflicted today by the ‘black dog’ of depression is unlikely to tower over politics like Churchill did. EPA/Facundon Arrizabalaga

So, encased in a system that takes away the ability to act in a heroic way, would a Churchill or Roosevelt of today succeed as they did before? Or would they fail miserably? More likely the latter.

A new model may let heroes emerge

What this underscores is the urgent need to reform our current configuration of democratic politics.

There is any number of potential solutions. These include a shift to deliberative democracy, which effectively gives citizens much more direct input into policy-making. This recognises that politicians no longer have all, or even some, of the answers.

Other solutions include using collaborative, internet-based technology to promote quicker policy decisions that still allow for transparency and significant public input. They also include stronger transnational forums to address the problems of a globalised world, which no single country or parliament can tackle.

Under these proposals, political heroes may no longer come from the political class. What may emerge is a different kind of hero – the citizen-politician. They not only promote change like a Gandhi or Martin Luther King, but are also put into the driver’s seat to enact important policy and turn their vision of a brave new world into reality.

Either way, Campbell’s hero thesis should alert us to why reforming our political system is the most important challenge of our time. A system without heroes diminishes all of us. It is also a system that cannot survive.

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This article was co-published with DemocracyRenewal.

Mark Triffitt is Lecturer, Public Policy at University of Melbourne.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. (Reblogged by permission). Read the original article.

Churchill on politicians

“For my own part I have always felt that a politician is to be judged by the animosities which he excites among his opponents. I have always set myself not merely to relish but to deserve thoroughly their censure”. – Winston Churchill at the Institute of Journalists dinner, November 17, 1906.

Winston Churchill on optimism

Churchill on appeasers

“An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.” – Winston Churchill

The day Churchill saved Britain from the Nazis

October 13, 2014 By BORIS JOHNSON’S COLUMNS in ARTICLES 0 5

The question before the meeting was very simple. Should Britain fight? Was it reasonable for young British troops to die in a war that showed every sign of being lost? Or should the British do some kind of deal that might well save hundreds of thousands of lives?

I don’t think many people of my generation are fully conscious of how close we came to such a deal. There were serious and influential voices who wanted to begin “negotiations”.

It is not hard to see why they thought as they did. The War Cabinet was staring at the biggest humiliation for British armed forces since the loss of the American colonies, and there seemed no way back.

Everyone in that room could imagine the consequences of fighting on. They knew all about war; some of them had fought in the Great War, and the hideous memory of that slaughter was only 22 years old. There was scarcely a family in Britain that had not been touched by sorrow. Was it right – was it fair – to ask the people to go through all that again? And to what end?

It seems from the Cabinet minutes that the meeting more or less kicked off with Halifax. He went straight to the point.

The Italian embassy had sent a message, he said: that this was Britain’s moment to seek mediation via Italy. This was not just a simple overture from Mussolini: it was surely a signal from his senior partner. Coiling itself round Whitehall and penetrating the heart of the House of Commons, it was a feeler from Hitler.

Churchill knew exactly what was going on. He told Halifax to forget it. Britain had been at war with Germany, and had been since September 1 the previous year. It was a war for freedom and for principle. The minute Britain accepted some Italian offer of mediation, Churchill knew that the sinews of resistance would relax. A white flag would be raised over Britain.

So he said no to Halifax. In another country, the debate might therefore have been at an end. But that is not how the British constitution works: the prime minister is primus inter pares – first among equals; he must to some extent carry his colleagues with him; and to understand the dynamics of that conversation, we must remember the fragility of Churchill’s position.

He had been prime minister for less than three weeks, and it was far from clear who were his real allies round the table. Attlee and Greenwood, the Labour contingent, were broadly supportive; and the same can be said for Sinclair the Liberal. But it was the Tories on whom he depended for his mandate – and the Tories were far from sure about Winston Churchill.

Lord Halifax, second left, and Neville Chamberlain, third left, meeting Mussolini in Rome

From his very emergence as a young Tory MP he had bashed and satirised his own party; he had then deserted them for the Liberals, and though he had eventually returned to the fold, there were too many Tories who thought of him as an unprincipled opportunist.

Halifax had been over to see Hitler in 1937 – and he had an embarrassing familiarity with Goering. But in his own way, Halifax was a patriot as much as Churchill.

He thought he could see a way to protect Britain and to safeguard the Empire, and to save lives; and it is not as if he was alone. The British ruling class was riddled with appeasers and pro-Nazis. It wasn’t just the Mitfords, or the followers of Sir Oswald Mosley.

In 1936 Lady Nelly Cecil noted that nearly all of her relatives were “tender to the Nazis”, and the reason was simple. In the Thirties, your average toff was much more fearful of Bolshevism, and communisms’ alarming ideology of redistribution, than they were fearful of Hitler. Indeed, they saw fascism as a bulwark against the reds, and they had high-level political backing.

David Lloyd George had been so dazzled by the Führer that he compared him to George Washington. Hitler was a “born leader”, declared the befuddled former British prime minister. He wished that Britain had “a man of his supreme quality at the head of affairs in our country today”. This from the hero of the First World War!

The Daily Mail had long been campaigning for Hitler to be given a free hand in eastern Europe, the better to beat up the bolshies. “If Hitler did not exist,” said the Mail, “all western Europe might now be clamouring for such a champion.”

The Times had been so pro-appeasement that the editor, Geoffrey Dawson, described how he used to go through the proofs taking out anything that might offend the Germans. The press baron Beaverbrook himself had sacked Churchill from his Evening Standard column on the grounds that he was too hard on the Nazis. Respectable liberal opinion – theatre types like John Gielgud, Sybil Thorndike, GB Shaw – was lobbying for the government to “give consideration” to talks.

Of course, the mood had changed in the last year; feelings against Germany had hardened. All I am saying – in mitigation of Halifax – is that, in seeking peace, he had the support of many British people, at all levels of society. And so the argument went on, between Halifax and the prime minister, for that crucial hour.

It was a stalemate; and it was now – according to most historians – that Churchill played his masterstroke. He announced that the meeting would be adjourned, and would begin again at 7pm. He then convened the Cabinet of 25, ministers from every department – many of whom were to hear him as prime minister for the first time.

The bigger the audience, the more fervid the atmosphere; and now he made an appeal to the emotions. Before the full Cabinet he made a quite astonishing speech – without any hint of the intellectual restraint he had been obliged to display in the smaller meeting.

He began calmly enough: “I have thought carefully in these last days whether it was part of my duty to consider entering into negotiations with That Man.”

And he ended with this almost Shakespearean climax: “And I am convinced that every one of you would rise up and tear me down from my place if I were for one moment to contemplate parley or surrender. If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.”

At this the men in that room were so moved that they cheered and shouted, and some of them ran round and clapped him on the back.

Churchill had ruthlessly dramatised and personalised the debate. By the time the War Cabinet resumed at 7pm, the debate was over; Halifax abandoned his cause. Churchill had the clear and noisy backing of the Cabinet.

Within a year of that decision – to fight and not to negotiate – 30,000 British men, women and children had been killed, almost all of them at German hands. Weighing up those alternatives – a humiliating peace, or a slaughter of the innocents – it is hard to imagine any modern British politician having the guts to take Churchill’s line.

He had the vast and almost reckless moral courage to see that fighting on would be appalling, but that surrender would be even worse. He was right.

‘The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History’ (Hodder & Stoughton, £25) can be ordered for £22 plus £1.95 p&p from books.telegraph.co.uk. Boris Johnson will be taking part in a Q&A with Gaby Wood on October 23 at Imperial College London