Winston Churchill: His Times, His Crimes

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So, Churchill’s standing during the war was not as people imagine. The propaganda machine had to work full time. His famed speeches were delivered direct to the BBC recording studios. They didn’t record parliament in those days, and so the criticisms of him made in the House of Commons were only to be found in Hansard. Seeking to associate Churchill with the alleged excesses of the British Army in the Second Boer War, Ali claims the then-leader of the Liberal Party, Sir Henry Campbell Bannerman, spoke of “barbarous” soldiers. He didn’t. He said the colonial authorities were using “methods of barbarism”, which they were in having concentration camps for Boer women and children: this is not remotely the same thing. Lateline – 31/05/2016: Interview: Tariq Ali, British writer and commentator". Abc.net.au. 31 May 2016 . Retrieved 28 January 2017. The best way to see the early Churchill is in the context of social conflict between his own ruling elite and a working class which was rising in most parts of Britain, as well as the nationalist movement that was reshaping Ireland. The chapter on Ireland is extremely important because today Churchill is being glorified. A whole number of Irish historians on the payrolls of British universities have presented the national liberation struggle in Ireland as something unfortunate, terrible and awful. One historian refers to the 1916 Easter Rising as a “terrorist outrage”—mindless violence against a legitimate government. A year later, Churchill’s decision to crush the political movement allied with Greece’s Communist-led resistance, the most effective in Europe, and to substitute a monarch with the help of fascist sympathizers was conveyed to Britain’s commanding officer in the Greek capital, General Scobie: if the Greeks refused to be disarmed, he should treat the situation as a colonial counter-insurgency campaign. “You may make any regulations you like,” he told the general. “Do not…hesitate to act as if you were in a conquered city where a local rebellion is in progress.” Scobie duly established a reign of terror in the country to end the Communist insurgency. Among the litany of the war’s direst mass atrocities were those carried out by the British in Greece.

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Fear of Mirrors Arcadia Books (4 August 1998). ISBN 978-1-900850-10-0; University of Chicago Press (10 Aug 2010). ISBN 978-1-906497-15-6CHURCHILL [ From within his coffin]: England! Y’ stupid old woman. Clapped out. Undeserving, Unthankful. After all I did for you, You bloody tramp! Heffer, Simon (10 May 2022). "Tariq Ali's Churchill biography is a Marxist insult to history". The Daily Telegraph . Retrieved 12 May 2022. Archives". tariqali.org. Tariq Ali. Archived from the original on 20 April 2015 . Retrieved 24 April 2015. Ali's book is a helpful corrective to the cult of Churchill that has come to dominate British culture. His study makes one thing clear: there is ultimately no path to a socialist and internationalist future without challenging this legacy. Liam Kennedy, Jacobin Who and what was Churchill? Was he anything more than a plump carp happy to swim in the foulest of ponds as long as his own career and the needs of the Empire (in his own mind there was no difference between the two) were fulfilled? A little more, perhaps, but not too much. What accounts, then, for his elevation to a cult figure? Churchillism

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That is a grotesque error. The decision was taken by the King himself, advised by his private secretary, Lord Stamfordham, which too is an indisputable matter of record. Lloyd George, by then prime minister, offered asylum to the Romanovs when people of Ali’s Marxist-Leninist cast of mind were preparing to shoot them, but he was overruled. And the stupid decision to return to the Gold Standard didn’t result in the economic crisis of 1929: it simply made the crisis worse when it came by other means. Further research would have revealed how horrified Churchill was by Haig’s plans for the Somme: he is on record as telling Maurice Hankey, the future cabinet secretary, so, just before the barrage started. Churchill wasn’t even in government, but is found guilty by association. Ali says that in 1918 “the political leaders of Britain, including Churchill, abandoned the cousin of George V [Nicholas II of Russia] to his fate”. Lindsey German welcomes Tariq Ali’s dismantling of the myth of the imperialist warmonger Churchill in Winston Churchill: His Times, His Crimes Tariq Ali, Winston Churchill: His Times, His Crimes (Verso 2022), 448pp. Only one prime minister is honoured with a statue on the grounds of the Australian National University. Despite the university’s name, it is not an Australian. Rather, the stern face of Britain’s war-time prime minister Winston Churchill greets students on the Canberra campus. Although the ANU was founded in 1946, the Churchill statue is not a gesture of post-war admiration. A replica of a statue in Parliament Square, London, it is owned by the Winston Churchill Trust and was erected in 1985.Despite them all, Churchill remains the gold standard of crisis leadership and the example to whom people most often point these days when analyzing the actions of Volodymir Zelensky. Ali would do well, then, to reflect on why a broad spectrum of the political center has always admired Churchill and why Ali, a man of the far left, now finds himself in agreement about Churchill with far-right historian David Irving. Ali's examination remains an important corrective to the hagiographic praise that Churchill receives to this day. Andrew Moravcsik, Foreign Affairs

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Ali is strongest when using primary material to paint Churchill as a racist opportunist. He is weakest when suggesting that his mission was to create an “umbilical chord made of piano wire” so the Americans would continue his work in perpetuity. I wanted to correct that. Irish history is incredibly rich in terms of resistance. For example, if a storm hadn’t delayed the French landing at Bantry Bay in 1796, if the French revolutionary army had linked up with the republican leader Wolfe Tone and taken Ireland, who knows what the result would have been. We can’t say. We can, however, show that the divide between Protestants and Catholics within Ireland is relatively new; Tone, who led the United Irishmen, was a Protestant. Churchill ism is like the warp of British political culture through which all the main tendencies weave their different colours. Although drawn from the symbol of the wartime persona, Churchillism is quite distinct from the man himself. Indeed, the real Churchill was reluctantly and uneasily conscripted to the compact of policies and parties which he seemed to embody. Yet the fact that the ideology is so much more than the emanation of the man is part of the secret of its power and durability. For most of his life, as Ali shows, Churchill was a man out of time. Out of step with public opinion, his nonchalance towards the Beveridge Report helped him snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in 1945. Likewise, his war record was far from immaculate. Disregarding his generals in his attempt to take the Dardanelles, Churchill’s campaign ended in humiliating defeat. The same fate met the British contingent of 15,000 sent to prop up the White Army and ‘strangle the Bolshevik baby in its crib’. In 1990, he published the satire Redemption, on the inability of the Trotskyists to handle the downfall of the Eastern bloc. The book contains parodies of many well-known figures in the Trotskyist movement. In 1999 Ali strongly criticised NATO intervention in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the piece Springtime for NATO, [19] and book Masters of the Universe? NATO's Balkan Crusade in which he negated extent and nature of crimes committed by Serbian forces in Bosnia and Kosovo. [20] He also defended denialist claims espoused by figures such as Diana Johnstone and Edward S. Herman. [21] [22] [23]

Winston Churchill: His Times, His Crimes is a 2022 book by British-Pakistani writer, journalist, political activist and historian Tariq Ali. In it, Ali discusses Winston Churchill's racial and imperialist views.

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Tariq Ali’s new book, Winston Churchill: His Life, His Crimes, has absolutely predictably been seized upon by Conservatives and their newspapers as a weapon in the ‘culture wars’ that they are doing their very best to incite. The culture wars are, they hope, a way to distract attention from the both their ideologically driven incompetence, their open corruption and their full-blooded assault on the living standards and working conditions of working class and middle class families, accompanied by the continued dismantling of the welfare state. It is worth noticing here that at the recent Police Federation conference, there were police officers complaining to an unmoved Home Secretary of having to use food banks to feed their families! Such is the state of Britain under the Johnson government. They certainly don’t want to encourage people to actually read the book for themselves and to make up their own minds regarding the case that Ali presents. Instead, they want to discredit the book and its author, that goes without saying, but also to use it to rally the troops for the culture wars. Churchill is the greatest Briton, the embodiment of Britishness, of everything that made Britain Great , indeed the Conservative Party itself is a Churchillian enterprise, and Ali’s book is yet another example of how the left threaten all that. Forget about the cost of living crisis, the country faces a bigger threat: Churchill is being called to account for his crimes. Of course, it won’t work despite the best efforts of the Daily Telegraph and one can only wonder how much British Conservatives must envy the success of the Republican right in the United States in propagating their culture wars agenda, but we must never drop our guard. Not every book on Churchill is bad. For example, I strongly recommend Clive Ponting’s biography, Churchill (Sinclair-Stevenson, 1994). However, no one else has provided the setting in the same way, and I hope to have created a reference book for people looking for an alternative view. They may disagree with it, but it’s there. It would also be dull to mechanically repeat stuff exposed before, even if by good historians.Can Pakistan Survive?: The Death of a State (1983). ISBN 978-0-8052-7194-2; (1991) ISBN 978-0-86091-260-6