Revisiting History: The Unlikely Campaign to Vilify Winston Churchill

[billd766]

7 hours ago, thaibeachlovers said:

Had Britain opted for neutrality, Hitler would have conquered the Soviet Union, and more than the estimated 20 to 40 million deaths of Barbarossa would have occurred. The Soviets only survived due to massive support of allied weapons, which was only possible because of Britain. Perhaps Soviet deaths don't count for you.

Actually without the US supplies of Lease Lend the UK could not have supplied anything like the amount of supplies that the Soviet Union required.

 

The UK was fighting a war against Germany in Europe, Germany and Italy in the Mediterranean and in North Africa, Japan in Burma, India and parts of the Far East with the help of the ANZUK forces, the Indian Forces, South African and East African Forces and as far South as the Falkland Islands, and that was about the time when Japan attacked Hawaii and Pearl Harbour and the US joined in full time.

[RayC]

4 minutes ago, Cameroni said:

I don't see why you would be struggling. The point made was very clear:

 

Churchill wanted to retain the Empire. Germany offered a peace that would have allowed him to keep it. However, Churchill decided not to take the offer and as a consequence lost the Empire.

 

Whether Hitler would have gone to war with Britain and the empire is another question, but looking at what Britain had to offer in terms of resources and living space, it's unlikely he would have invaded Britain. For what gain? He saw the Empire as a bulwark against Communism, that was Hitler's real fear. And Churchill too feared the communists.

 

Churchill was an imperialist; no one is denying that. However, he did not view maintaining the Empire as an end in itself.

 

Churchill's prime objective was to maintain the security and sovereignity of the UK. Churchill correctly identified the threat posed by Hitler as early as 1932 and realised - again correctly - that defeating Hitler was of upmost priority. Everything else was tangential to that.

[Cameroni]

3 minutes ago, RayC said:

 

Churchill was an imperialist; no one is denying that. However, he did not view maintaining the Empire as an end in itself.

 

Churchill's prime objective was to maintain the security and sovereignity of the UK. Churchill correctly identified the threat posed by Hitler as early as 1932 and realised - again correctly - that defeating Hitler was of upmost priority. Everything else was tangential to that.

 

No, that's not the case. If he were only concerned about the UK, he could have had peace in 1940 and know the UK would be able to have peace. 

 

“Imperialism was Churchill’s true religion,” and inevitably this came with “a belief in and promotion of racial and civilisational superiority.” For Churchill, the empire was the “prism” through which he saw “almost everything else at home and abroad.” Indeed, as Ali sums him up, Churchill “was, above all, an imperial activist,” someone who “wanted to fight, to kill and, if necessary to die for . . . the British Empire.” Needless to say, the realities of colonial warfare were such that killing was much more likely than dying. While the centrality of Churchill’s imperialist politics cannot be doubted for even a moment, he was also very much concerned with how the glory of empire could be used to glorify and immortalize himself. 

 

https://catalyst-journal.com/2022/09/the-spirit-of-churchill-elitism-and-british-empire#:~:text=As Ali insists%2C “Imperialism was,up%2C Churchill “was%2C above

[RayC]

18 minutes ago, Cameroni said:

 

No, that's not the case. If he were only concerned about the UK, he could have had peace in 1940 and know the UK would be able to have peace. 

 

“Imperialism was Churchill’s true religion,” and inevitably this came with “a belief in and promotion of racial and civilisational superiority.” For Churchill, the empire was the “prism” through which he saw “almost everything else at home and abroad.” Indeed, as Ali sums him up, Churchill “was, above all, an imperial activist,” someone who “wanted to fight, to kill and, if necessary to die for . . . the British Empire.” Needless to say, the realities of colonial warfare were such that killing was much more likely than dying. While the centrality of Churchill’s imperialist politics cannot be doubted for even a moment, he was also very much concerned with how the glory of empire could be used to glorify and immortalize himself. 

 

https://catalyst-journal.com/2022/09/the-spirit-of-churchill-elitism-and-british-empire#:~:text=As Ali insists%2C “Imperialism was,up%2C Churchill “was%2C above

 

There is nothing in the article to support any of the statements which are made. It is merely Marxist rhetoric.

 

I would suggest that a pertinent question is, 'What use is an Empire if you cannot control it?'.

 

The idea that if Churchill had signed a peace accord with Hitler in 1940, then the UK would have been left with complete autonomy to manage its' - and the Empire's - affairs is imo, at best naive and deluded.

[Cameroni]

49 minutes ago, RayC said:

 

The idea that if Churchill had signed a peace accord with Hitler in 1940, then the UK would have been left with complete autonomy to manage its' - and the Empire's - affairs is imo, at best naive and deluded.

What makes you say that?

[mistral53]

I doubt that whoever wrote this blurb actually watched the entire episode in question - or this is a willful distortion of what Cooper actually tried to convey. In the end, the subtle message that is pushed here is that any discussion about history is worse than blasphemy, and has to be shouted down to make sure we commoners all understand history as written by the victor is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth....... a totally laughable argument. The reader - or listener - should be wary when a subject is beyond debate, any 'fact' that must not be debated or revisited (revised?) is most likely false or fake.

 

In my defense - or offense to some - I have watched the entire 2:19 minutes. There is nothing in there to be scared of, and while this is the first time I heard of Cooper and listen to him, I found his strength is in his ability be open to what scares most less read people. I do understand why Carlson will never have a big following on here - he had the audacity to say out loud what we all know....... English food sucks!

[Yagoda]

12 hours ago, Patong2021 said:

 

I consider him a personal hero. A man's man. Never a coward, always bold and fearless. Driven by his sense of duty, he was a man of destiny.    He is judged now using the criteria of the 2020's. He was liberal and progressive by the standards of the 1900's.

 

 

 

The people came back to him and he served from 1951 to 1955 as PM.

Dude plunged with his horse into a Wadi filled with spear and sword waving Mahdist fanatics while armed with nothing but a C96 Mauser and a sword and rode out the other side.

 

Anybody here ever shot a C96? Try one.  Churchill was a real man.

Edited September 11 by Yagoda

[RayC]

51 minutes ago, Cameroni said:

What makes you say that?

 

I think that you are moving into trolling territory.

 

However, one last time. When Hitler came to power in Germany, he quickly set about dismantling the German constitution. Hitler did not believe in democracy. Surely even you will concede that?

 

Ergo the idea that Hitler would have allowed the UK to remain a democracy and hold a fair and fair general election is absurd. Pushing the absurdity even further, if such elections were, in fact, held the prospect that Hitler would have permitted Atlee - a socialist - or Churchill - his avowed enemy - to form a government is patently ridiculous.

[Cameroni]

6 minutes ago, RayC said:

 

 

However, one last time. When Hitler came to power in Germany, he quickly set about dismantling the German constitution. Hitler did not believe in democracy. Surely even you will concede that?

 

Ergo the idea that Hitler would have allowed the UK to remain a democracy and hold a fair and fair general election is absurd. Pushing the absurdity even further, if such elections were, in fact, held the prospect that Hitler would have permitted Atlee - a socialist - or Churchill - his avowed enemy - to form a government is patently ridiculous.

Why would Hitler busy himself with what government Britain has? What difference would it make to him?

 

Sure, he did not like democracy, but why would he care what system the UK has, or what gov ernment? There was no underlying animosity in ideological terms between Nazism and British Imperialism that reached the same degree as the animosity between Nazism and Communism. 

 

Germany would have had the colonies in the East, the British would have had their Empire. There's not even geographic competition between the two.

[placeholder]

11 hours ago, Cameroni said:

 

I think you're trying to misrepresent my words and you're not succeeding very well. What I said was very clear, that Churchill wanted to retain the empire. Since he lost the emire by fighting Germany, his only real chance to retain it would have been to accept Germany's peace offer.

 

The two were linked, because the reason he opposed Germany so early on was that Churchill saw Germany as a threat to the empire.  The empire was his big love, and Germany was his big hate because it endangered the empire in his mind.

 

But he lost it fighting Germany. Had he accepted the peace offer, perhaps he would  have kept it for longer.

I guess I'm going to have to zero in even more on what you wrote: 

 

"That's really what Churchill wanted. "

 

How is one supposed to construe that comment except to mean that preserving the Empire was his primary concern? And what evidence do you have for that?  I mean, apart from your mind reading.  As Martin Gilbert pointed out, Churchill stood out before the war during the 30's as someone who bitterly opposed  Nazi racialism and understood the threat it posed.

[thaibeachlovers]

20 hours ago, Cameroni said:

 

Did you accept the Allies killing  23,000 women, children and the elderly in one night, like in Hamburg or 100,000 like in Tokyo or 150,000 like in Hiroshima?

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo

 

It's not a question if we accept it. Neither Churchill nor Chamberlain knew of the death camps or Einsatzgruppen in June 1940 when the German peace offer was rejected.

IMO you are deflecting. I asked if it was acceptable to you that Germany conquered the East with the death camps as long as Britain wasn't affected. I didn't ask if Churchill knew about them.

[thaibeachlovers]

20 hours ago, Cameroni said:

Did you accept the Allies killing  23,000 women, children and the elderly in one night, like in Hamburg or 100,000 like in Tokyo or 150,000 like in Hiroshima?

Rather less than the number the Germans killed in The Soviet Union, and I am not familiar with how many Chinese the Japanese killed, but I suspect it was in the millions.

[Cameroni]

3 hours ago, placeholder said:

 

 

How is one supposed to construe that comment except to mean that preserving the Empire was his primary concern? And what evidence do you have for that?  I mean, apart from your mind reading.  As Martin Gilbert pointed out, Churchill stood out before the war during the 30's as someone who bitterly opposed  Nazi racialism and understood the threat it posed.

Churchill bitterly opposing racism, that's sadly a  complete joke.

 

 "Churchill is on record as praising “Aryan stock” and insisting it was right for “a stronger race, a higher-grade race” to take the place of indigenous peoples. He reportedly did not think “black people were as capable or as efficient as white people”. In 1911, Churchill banned interracial boxing matches so white fighters would not be seen losing to black ones. He insisted that Britain and the US shared “Anglo-Saxon superiority”. He described anticolonial campaigners as “savages armed with ideas”.

 

Even his contemporaries found his views on race shocking. In the context of Churchill’s hard line against providing famine relief to Bengal, the colonial secretary, Leo Amery, remarked: “On the subject of India, Winston is not quite sane … I didn’t see much difference between his outlook and Hitler’s.”

 

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/17/why-cant-britain-handle-the-truth-about-winston-churchill

 

. He thought nothing of ordering planes to kill civilian colonial peoples in the Middle East in strategic bombing which pre-dated what he ordered with the Strategic bombing directive.

 

"Winston Churchill, secretary of state for war and air, estimated that without the RAF, somewhere between 25,000 British and 80,000 Indian troops would be needed to control Iraq. Reliance on the airforce promised to cut these numbers to just 4,000 and 10,000. Churchill's confidence was soon repaid.

An uprising of more than 100,000 armed tribesmen against the British occupation swept through Iraq in the summer of 1920. In went the RAF. It flew missions totalling 4,008 hours, dropped 97 tons of bombs and fired 183,861 rounds for the loss of nine men killed, seven wounded and 11 aircraft destroyed behind rebel lines. The rebellion was thwarted, with nearly 9,000 Iraqis killed. Even so, concern was expressed in Westminster: the operation had cost more than the entire British-funded Arab rising against the Ottoman Empire in 1917-18.

 

Churchill was particularly keen on chemical weapons, suggesting they be used "against recalcitrant Arabs as an experiment". He dismissed objections as "unreasonable". "I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes _ [to] spread a lively terror _" In today's terms, "the Arab" needed to be shocked and awed. A good gassing might well do the job."

 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/apr/19/iraq.arts

 

Not only would Churchill forego all remnants of civilisation or moral behaviour in the pursuit of killing for the empire, he himself would have died for the empire. 

 

“Imperialism was Churchill’s true religion,” and inevitably this came with “a belief in and promotion of racial and civilisational superiority.” For Churchill, the empire was the “prism” through which he saw “almost everything else at home and abroad.” Indeed, as Ali sums him up, Churchill “was, above all, an imperial activist,” someone who “wanted to fight, to kill and, if necessary to die for . . . the British Empire.” Needless to say, the realities of colonial warfare were such that killing was much more likely than dying. While the centrality of Churchill’s imperialist politics cannot be doubted for even a moment, he was also very much concerned with how the glory of empire could be used to glorify and immortalize himself. 

 

https://catalyst-journal.com/2022/09/the-spirit-of-churchill-elitism-and-british-empire#:~:text=As Ali insists%2C “Imperialism was,up%2C Churchill “was%2C above

 

It's pretty clear Empire was all to him.

[Cameroni]

45 minutes ago, thaibeachlovers said:

IMO you are deflecting. I asked if it was acceptable to you that Germany conquered the East with the death camps as long as Britain wasn't affected. I didn't ask if Churchill knew about them.

 

I think that's irrelevant, it would have happened that  way either way.

[Cameroni]

43 minutes ago, thaibeachlovers said:

Rather less than the number the Germans killed in The Soviet Union, and I am not familiar with how many Chinese the Japanese killed, but I suspect it was in the millions.

If you put two murderers next to each other and one killed 360 and the other 180, would they not both be seen as equally repugnant?

[RayC]

@Cameroni: Are you a diplomat? If not, I think that you should consider a change of career. 

 

I can't think of any other thread where so many individuals with so many disparate political opinions have been so united in their view.

 

Congratulations. Take a bow, sir. It's down to you and your posts👏

[Cameroni]

2 minutes ago, RayC said:

@Cameroni: Are you a diplomat? If not, I think that you should consider a change of career. 

 

I can't think of any other thread where so many individuals with so many disparate political opinions have been so united in their view.

 

Congratulations. Take a bow, sir. It's down to you and your posts👏

 

Oh I realise how popular Churchill is. It's understandable, he's had an amazing life, an interesting character, a witty mind, and he was courageous. This is all true. However, it is also true that Churchill was a greater racist than most Nazis, argued for gas warfare, experimented on bombing civilians in the middle East in the 20s., and made the world endure war which, in the West, could have ended in 1940.

 

"I cannot understand this squeamishness about the use of gas," he wrote in a memo, external during his role as minister for war and air in 1919.

"I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes," he continued.

 

"People sometimes question why on Earth did people not listen to Churchill's warnings about Hitler in the late 1930s," says Charmley, "to which the short answer is that he'd used exactly the same language about Gandhi in the early 1930s."

 

"Churchill was very much on the far right of British politics over India," says Charmley. "Even to most Conservatives, let alone Liberals and Labour, Churchill's views on India between 1929 and 1939 were quite abhorrent."

 

Despite supporting Zionism, Churchill was also anti-semitic:

 

A 1937 unpublished article - supposedly by Churchill - entitled "How the Jews Can Combat Persecution" was discovered in 2007. "It may be that, unwittingly, they are inviting persecution - that they have been partly responsible for the antagonism from which they suffer," it said. "There is the feeling that the Jew is an incorrigible alien, that his first loyalty will always be towards his own race."

 

His views on Islam were not much different:

 

Weston was quoting from Churchill's 1899 book The River War, in which he wrote: "How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia [rabies] in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy.

 

And to cap it all even Churchill's official biographer Martin Gilbert says Churchill was corrupt:

 

"In return for a fee of £5,000 two oil companies, Royal Dutch Shell and Burmah Anglo-Persian Oil Company [later BP], asked him to represent them in their application to the government for a merger," Gilbert's official biography stated.

 

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29701767

[thaibeachlovers]

2 hours ago, Cameroni said:

 

I think that's irrelevant, it would have happened that  way either way.

That's still deflecting but I accept you are not going to give me a straight answer on that.

 

Had the allies not helped The Soviets the death toll would have far exceeded the  actual number as Hitler apparently considered Slavs subhuman, and we know what happens in situations like that.

[thaibeachlovers]

2 hours ago, Cameroni said:

If you put two murderers next to each other and one killed 360 and the other 180, would they not both be seen as equally repugnant?

At those numbers yes, but when one side kills up to 40 million through a policy of extermination behind the front lines ( plus a few million in it's own land and in pacified countries ) and the other kills a million or so in an active war, It's hardly a similarity. Britain did not bomb Dresden after the Germans surrendered.

[thaibeachlovers]

38 minutes ago, Cameroni said:

Oh I realise how popular Churchill is.

Not with me. He was a somewhat despicable person, but I'll be eternally grateful to him for saving the world from the Nazis.

If I were to meet him by some deviation in time, I might shake his hand in gratitude, but I'd never invite him to my home.

 

 

I'll let an Irish patriot say it as she says it better than I could.

https://winstonchurchill.hillsdale.edu/irish-rapscallions/

 

I am an Irish patriot. Yet if you want to know what I think about all that, I think: “So what?”….I know what Churchill did besides being insulting about Muslims and the rest of us. If I put him in the scales of virtue against the German and Japanese war machines, Churchill wins, always, and in such an overwhelming way that I must forgive his earlier sins.

Edited Thursday at 10:24 AM by thaibeachlovers

[placeholder]

2 hours ago, Cameroni said:

Churchill bitterly opposing racism, that's sadly a  complete joke.

 

 "Churchill is on record as praising “Aryan stock” and insisting it was right for “a stronger race, a higher-grade race” to take the place of indigenous peoples. He reportedly did not think “black people were as capable or as efficient as white people”. In 1911, Churchill banned interracial boxing matches so white fighters would not be seen losing to black ones. He insisted that Britain and the US shared “Anglo-Saxon superiority”. He described anticolonial campaigners as “savages armed with ideas”.

 

Even his contemporaries found his views on race shocking. In the context of Churchill’s hard line against providing famine relief to Bengal, the colonial secretary, Leo Amery, remarked: “On the subject of India, Winston is not quite sane … I didn’t see much difference between his outlook and Hitler’s.”

 

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/17/why-cant-britain-handle-the-truth-about-winston-churchill

 

. He thought nothing of ordering planes to kill civilian colonial peoples in the Middle East in strategic bombing which pre-dated what he ordered with the Strategic bombing directive.

 

"Winston Churchill, secretary of state for war and air, estimated that without the RAF, somewhere between 25,000 British and 80,000 Indian troops would be needed to control Iraq. Reliance on the airforce promised to cut these numbers to just 4,000 and 10,000. Churchill's confidence was soon repaid.

An uprising of more than 100,000 armed tribesmen against the British occupation swept through Iraq in the summer of 1920. In went the RAF. It flew missions totalling 4,008 hours, dropped 97 tons of bombs and fired 183,861 rounds for the loss of nine men killed, seven wounded and 11 aircraft destroyed behind rebel lines. The rebellion was thwarted, with nearly 9,000 Iraqis killed. Even so, concern was expressed in Westminster: the operation had cost more than the entire British-funded Arab rising against the Ottoman Empire in 1917-18.

 

Churchill was particularly keen on chemical weapons, suggesting they be used "against recalcitrant Arabs as an experiment". He dismissed objections as "unreasonable". "I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes _ [to] spread a lively terror _" In today's terms, "the Arab" needed to be shocked and awed. A good gassing might well do the job."

 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/apr/19/iraq.arts

 

Not only would Churchill forego all remnants of civilisation or moral behaviour in the pursuit of killing for the empire, he himself would have died for the empire. 

 

“Imperialism was Churchill’s true religion,” and inevitably this came with “a belief in and promotion of racial and civilisational superiority.” For Churchill, the empire was the “prism” through which he saw “almost everything else at home and abroad.” Indeed, as Ali sums him up, Churchill “was, above all, an imperial activist,” someone who “wanted to fight, to kill and, if necessary to die for . . . the British Empire.” Needless to say, the realities of colonial warfare were such that killing was much more likely than dying. While the centrality of Churchill’s imperialist politics cannot be doubted for even a moment, he was also very much concerned with how the glory of empire could be used to glorify and immortalize himself. 

 

continuing to oppose  “Imperialism was,up%2C Churchill “was%2C above

 

It's pretty clear Empire was all to him.

Churchill had huge flaws, no doubt. Huge blind spots. His attitude towards Indians and middle easterners was disgraceful.. But what I said was that he opposed the Nazi's racism. The Nazis racism treated people that Churchill regarded as white, Jews and Slavs, amongst others,  as subhuman. Nothing in the quotes you have provided establishes that Churchill prized empire  over or even equally to his repugnance at Nazism. Just an assertion from some author. And if Churchill prized empire so highly why is it that he endangered the UK's grasp on it by continuing to oppose Hitler once Japan attacked the Singapore, Hong Kong, etc? 

[thaibeachlovers]

19 hours ago, billd766 said:

Actually without the US supplies of Lease Lend the UK could not have supplied anything like the amount of supplies that the Soviet Union required.

 

The UK was fighting a war against Germany in Europe, Germany and Italy in the Mediterranean and in North Africa, Japan in Burma, India and parts of the Far East with the help of the ANZUK forces, the Indian Forces, South African and East African Forces and as far South as the Falkland Islands, and that was about the time when Japan attacked Hawaii and Pearl Harbour and the US joined in full time.

I am aware of that, but there is a limit to the detail I can put on any one post. If one wants to take me literally, that is up to them, but I try to believe that other posters that know something of the topic are capable of filling in the gaps for themselves without me having to lead them by the nose. Perhaps I'm wrong and those that read my posts don't know much of the subject, in which case I apologise, but I'm not going to revert to Janet and John type posts. I'll put a link where necessary, but it's up to others to interpret my ramblings as best they can.

[Evil Penevil]

The 10-ton (Nazi) elephant* in this thread is the notion Hitler made a serious peace offer to Great Britain in 1940.  That's NOT the case.

 

                                                              

 

On July 19, 1940, Hitler gave a speech to the Reichstag that included a vague peace offer to Great Britain as well as insults to Churchill and threats of destruction to the country  and British Empire.  "Hitler made it clear that rejection of his appeal to 'reason' would result in a 'final' attack upon Britain with every resource that Germany could throw into the battle."  https://www.upi.com/Archives/1940/07/19/Hitler-offers-Britain-peace-or-destruction/6824181303557/

 

Back in 1940,  most  non-Germans recognzed the speech was propaganda, not a serious overture.   Because it's better to have primary sources rather than a steady stream of Wikipedia links, I'll quote at length  the US journalist William Shirer , who heard the speech in person and wrote about it in his award-winning bestseller The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.  Shirer said he noted in his diary the day of the speech that  “'As a maneuver calculated to rally the German people for the fight against Britain, Hitler’s speech was a masterpiece. For the German people will now say: ‘Hitler offers England peace, and no strings attached. He says he sees no reason why this war should go on. If it does, it’s England’s fault.’

"And was that not the principal reason for giving it, three days after he had issued Directive No. 16 to prepare the invasion of Britain? He admitted as much—beforehand—to two Italian confidants, Alfieri and Ciano. On July 1 he had told the ambassador: …It was always a good tactic to make the enemy responsible in the eyes of public opinion in Germany and abroad for the future course of events. This strengthened one’s own morale and weakened that of the enemy. An operation such as the one Germany was planning would be very bloody… Therefore one must convince public opinion that everything had first been done to avoid this horror…

 

"In his speech of October 6 [when he had offered peace to the West at the conclusion of the Polish campaign—W.L.S.] he had likewise been guided by the thought of making the opposing side responsible for all subsequent developments. He had thereby won the war, as it were, before it had really started. Now again he intended for psychological reasons to buttress morale,  so to speak, for the action about to be taken.46 A week later, on July 8, Hitler confided to Ciano that he would stage another demonstration so that in case the war should continue—which he thought was the only real possibility that came into question—he might achieve a psychological effect among the English people… Perhaps it would be possible by a skillful appeal to the English people to isolate the English Government still further in England."

(Shirer, William L.. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (p. 1168). RosettaBooks. Kindle Edition)

 

Shirer gave a sentence from the speech, "I can see no reason why this war must go on," and then noted Hitler "was not more specific than that. He made no concrete suggestions for peace terms, no mention of what was to happen to the hundred million people now under the Nazi yoke in the conquered countries."  (Shirer, William L., The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (pp. 1166-1167). RosettaBooks. Kindle Edition.}

 

It's interesting that Hitler wasn't able to fool many British or Americans back in 1940 with his phony peace offer, but appears to have succeeded 84 years later.  Bottom line:  Churchill didn't reject peace with Gemany; he rejected a propaganda ploy.

 

*I am aware it's a pre-Nazi swastika on the elephant at the entrance to the Carlsberg  Brewery in Copenhagen.

[placeholder]

3 minutes ago, Evil Penevil said:

The 10-ton (Nazi) elephant* in this thread is the notion Hitler made a serious peace offer to Great Britain in 1940.  That's NOT the case.

 

                                                              

 

On July 19, 1940, Hitler gave a speech to the Reichstag that included a vague peace offer to Great Britain as well as insults to Churchill and threats of destruction to the country  and British Empire.  "Hitler made it clear that rejection of his appeal to 'reason' would result in a 'final' attack upon Britain with every resource that Germany could throw into the battle."  https://www.upi.com/Archives/1940/07/19/Hitler-offers-Britain-peace-or-destruction/6824181303557/

 

Back in 1940,  most  non-Germans recognzed the speech was propaganda, not a serious overture.   Because it's better to have primary sources rather than a steady stream of Wikipedia links, I'll quote at length  the US journalist William Shirer , who heard the speech in person and wrote about it in his award-winning bestseller The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.  Shirer said he noted in his diary the day of the speech that  “'As a maneuver calculated to rally the German people for the fight against Britain, Hitler’s speech was a masterpiece. For the German people will now say: ‘Hitler offers England peace, and no strings attached. He says he sees no reason why this war should go on. If it does, it’s England’s fault.’

"And was that not the principal reason for giving it, three days after he had issued Directive No. 16 to prepare the invasion of Britain? He admitted as much—beforehand—to two Italian confidants, Alfieri and Ciano. On July 1 he had told the ambassador: …It was always a good tactic to make the enemy responsible in the eyes of public opinion in Germany and abroad for the future course of events. This strengthened one’s own morale and weakened that of the enemy. An operation such as the one Germany was planning would be very bloody… Therefore one must convince public opinion that everything had first been done to avoid this horror…

 

"In his speech of October 6 [when he had offered peace to the West at the conclusion of the Polish campaign—W.L.S.] he had likewise been guided by the thought of making the opposing side responsible for all subsequent developments. He had thereby won the war, as it were, before it had really started. Now again he intended for psychological reasons to buttress morale,  so to speak, for the action about to be taken.46 A week later, on July 8, Hitler confided to Ciano that he would stage another demonstration so that in case the war should continue—which he thought was the only real possibility that came into question—he might achieve a psychological effect among the English people… Perhaps it would be possible by a skillful appeal to the English people to isolate the English Government still further in England."

(Shirer, William L.. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (p. 1168). RosettaBooks. Kindle Edition)

 

Shirer gave a sentence from the speech, "I can see no reason why this war must go on," and then noted Hitler "was not more specific than that. He made no concrete suggestions for peace terms, no mention of what was to happen to the hundred million people now under the Nazi yoke in the conquered countries."  (Shirer, William L., The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (pp. 1166-1167). RosettaBooks. Kindle Edition.}

 

It's interesting that Hitler wasn't able to fool many British or Americans back in 1940 with his phony peace offer, but appears to have succeeded 84 years later.  Bottom line:  Churchill didn't reject peace with Gemany; he rejected a propaganda ploy.

 

*I am aware it's a pre-Nazi swastika on the elephant at the entrance to the Carlsberg  Brewery in Copenhagen.

Thanks for the enlightenment. As for the swastika, I remember being briefly shocked when I saw the covers of the collected works of Rudyard Kipling decorated with elephants and swastikas. As for Hitler's adoption of it...

 

"The icon was chosen by the party to represent its goal of racial purification in Europe. Hitler and his Nazi Party believed that a line of pure Germanic ancestry originating in the Aryan race—a grouping used to describe Indo-European, Germanic, and Nordic peoples—was superior and that other, less-superior races should be ousted from Europe. Ancient Indian artifacts once owned by Aryan nomads were found to frequently feature the swastika, and the symbol was co-opted from its ambiguous historical context in the region to exert the dominance of so-called Aryan heritage."

https://www.britannica.com/story/how-the-symbolism-of-the-swastika-was-ruined

[Cameroni]

2 hours ago, thaibeachlovers said:

Not with me. He was a somewhat despicable person, but I'll be eternally grateful to him for saving the world from the Nazis.

If I were to meet him by some deviation in time, I might shake his hand in gratitude, but I'd never invite him to my home.

 

 

I'll let an Irish patriot say it as she says it better than I could.

https://winstonchurchill.hillsdale.edu/irish-rapscallions/

 

I am an Irish patriot. Yet if you want to know what I think about all that, I think: “So what?”….I know what Churchill did besides being insulting about Muslims and the rest of us. If I put him in the scales of virtue against the German and Japanese war machines, Churchill wins, always, and in such an overwhelming way that I must forgive his earlier sins.

 

It's funny that people would credit Churchill for saving the world from the Nazis, that honour should really go to the millions of Russians who left their blood on the battlefield against the Wehrmacht, unlike Churchill. In reality Churchill and the British played an exceedingly minor role in the actual defeat of the Wehrmacht.

 

It's easy to forgive Churchill's sins if they didn't affect you, but the people in India whose relatives he starved to death, the people in Iraq whose relatives he had killed, and the children, women and old people who were turned into living torches by his strategic bombing campaign might see it differently.

[Cameroni]

2 hours ago, placeholder said:

Churchill had huge flaws, no doubt. Huge blind spots. His attitude towards Indians and middle easterners was disgraceful.. But what I said was that he opposed the Nazi's racism. The Nazis racism treated people that Churchill regarded as white, Jews and Slavs, amongst others,  as subhuman. Nothing in the quotes you have provided establishes that Churchill prized empire  over or even equally to his repugnance at Nazism. Just an assertion from some author. And if Churchill prized empire so highly why is it that he endangered the UK's grasp on it by continuing to oppose Hitler once Japan attacked the Singapore, Hong Kong, etc? 

It seems very clear that Churchill prized the British empire above everything. He was willing to die for it, and willing to kill any number of civilians for it, even gas them if necessary.

 

Churchill's early opposition to Nazi Germany no doubt stemmed from  his awareness that Germany would be economically and militarily stronger than Britain and that this would endanger the existence of the British Empire as he knew it.

 

 

[placeholder]

3 minutes ago, Cameroni said:

It seems very clear that Churchill prized the British empire above everything. He was willing to die for it, and willing to kill any number of civilians for it, even gas them if necessary.

 

Churchill's early opposition to Nazi Germany no doubt stemmed from  his awareness that Germany would be economically and militarily stronger than Britain and that this would endanger the existence of the British Empire as he knew it.

 

 

Thanks for making 2 assertions  that don't support your claim that Churchill's motivation was primarily due to his attachment to the British Empire.

Churchill was also willing to die in WW1 in the trenches.

As Martin Gilbert pointed out, he was vociferously opposing Hitler's Aryan ubermensch ideology when it was not an issue being addressed by most.

And now you seem to be contradicting yourself. On the one hand, you claim that Churchill had no rational reason to oppose Germany but on the other you posit an awareness that eventually Germany would pose such a threat. Make up your mind.

[thaibeachlovers]

20 minutes ago, Cameroni said:

It's funny that people would credit Churchill for saving the world from the Nazis,

Not at all. Had Britain not been a base off the coast of Nazi ruled Europe for American war supplies to be on shipped to Russia, Russia would likely have failed to defeat the Germans, and Stalin would probably have moved beyond the Urals, where the Germans would have ignored him.

The allied invasion of D Day would never have happened, and Europe would likely still be German ruled.

 

Don't forget that a Briton in Britain developed the computer which defeated Enigma, which allowed supplies from American to even cross the Atlantic.

 

You may claim that Stalin could have defeated the Germans without American arms, but I vehemently disagree on that.

[thaibeachlovers]

19 hours ago, Cameroni said:

What makes you say that?

Reality?

[thaibeachlovers]

33 minutes ago, Cameroni said:

It's easy to forgive Churchill's sins if they didn't affect you, but the people in India whose relatives he starved to death, the people in Iraq whose relatives he had killed, and the children, women and old people who were turned into living torches by his strategic bombing campaign might see it differently.

The human world is a barbarous and dark place and humans have been murdering each other since humans existed. We just got better at murder in the 50,000 or so years since. At this rate it won't be long before the last 2 humans on the planet try to kill each other.