Authors: Winston Churchill
Never Give In! (19 page)
The discussion got so hot and angry, and all those animals began thinking so much about horns and teeth and hugging when they argued about the peaceful intentions that had brought them together that they began to look at one another in a very nasty way. Luckily the keepers were able to calm them down and persuade them to go back quietly to their cages, and they began to feel quite friendly with one another again.
In May 1929, when the Liberals returned to office, in support of a minority Labour Government, Churchill found himself out of office for more than ten years. From the early 1930s, first over India, then over Appeasement in the face of a re-arming Germany, Churchill found himself ever more alienated from the leadership and mainstream of the Conservative Party, to the point where, by the late 1930s, when Hitler was on the rampage in Europe, Churchill could count his political friends and allies in Parliament on the fingers of one hand.
With prescience and clarity, he saw that the world was heading for catastrophe. Convinced that the disaster could be averted, he did all in his power to warn the peoples of Britain, the United States and Western Europe of the dangers, but none would listen. Repudiated and reviled as a ‘war-monger’, these were the years when he was most sternly put to the test. From the point of view of sheer moral courage and dogged determination, I have no doubt that this was Winston Churchill’s ‘Finest Hour’.
The Munich crisis, in which the British and French Governments shamefully betrayed the independence of Czechoslovakia in the hope of appeasing Hitler’s appetite for aggression, proved the turning point. Initially the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, was hailed as the man who saved the peace. But, as the months slipped by, not only Chamberlain but, increasingly, the British public came to see they had been duped and that Churchill had been right all along. Thereafter, there was an ever more insistent demand for Churchill’s return to office.
‘A SEDITIOUS MIDDLE TEMPLE LAWYER’
23 February 1931
Winchester House, Epping
One of the Labour Government’s first actions was to propose, with Conservative support, Dominion status – including self-government – for India, something to which Churchill was firmly opposed. This speech with its fierce attack on the Hindu nationalist leader Mahatma Gandhi caused offence and was much criticised, not only in India, but in Britain as well.
Now I come to the administration of India. In my opinion we ought to dissociate ourselves in the most public and formal manner from any complicity in the weak, wrong-headed and most unfortunate administration of India by the Socialists and by the Viceroy acting upon their responsibility. It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the viceregal palace, while he is still organising and conducting a defiant campaign of civil disobedience, to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor. Such a spectacle can only increase the unrest in India.
18 March 1931
Royal Albert Hall, London
Churchill, who had had many years’ experience of India as a soldier, was firmly convinced that the effective removal of British power would lead, not only to the demise of the British Empire, but to large scale inter-communal violence and bloodshed between Hindus and Muslims. Tragically, he was to be proved right in this. Nonetheless, by his stand be alienated a large element of the Conservative Party, at a time when, shortly, he would need every friend and political ally he could muster.
To abandon India to the rule of the Brahmins would be an act of cruel and wicked negligence. It would shame for ever those who bore its guilt. These Brahmins who mouth and patter the principles of Western Liberalism, and pose as philosophic and democratic politicians, are the same Brahmins who deny the primary rights of existence to nearly sixty millions of their own fellow-countrymen whom they call ‘untouchable’, and whom they have by thousands of years of oppression actually taught to accept this sad position. They will not eat with these sixty millions, nor drink with them, nor treat them as human beings. They consider themselves contaminated even by their approach. And then in a moment they turn round and begin chopping logic with John Stuart Mill, or pleading the rights of man with Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
While any community, social or religious, endorses such practices and asserts itself resolved to keep sixty millions of fellow-countrymen perpetually and eternally in a state of sub-human bondage, we cannot recognise their claim to the title-deeds of democracy. Still less can we hand over to their unfettered sway those helpless millions they despise. Side by side with this Brahmin theocracy and the immense Hindu population
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angelic and untouchable castes alike
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there dwell in India seventy millions of Muslims, a race of far greater physical vigour and fierceness, armed with a religion which lends itself only too readily to war and conquest. While the Hindu elaborates his argument, the Muslim sharpens his sword. Between these two races and creeds, containing as they do so many gifted and charming beings in all the glory of youth, there is no intermarriage. The gulf is impassable. If you took the antagonisms of France and Germany, and the antagonisms of Catholics and Protestants, and compounded them and multiplied them ten-fold, you would not equal the division which separates these two races intermingled by scores of millions in the cities and plains of India. But over both of them the impartial rule of Britain has hitherto lifted its appeasing sceptre. Until the Montagu–Chelmsford reforms began to raise the question of local sovereignty and domination, they had got used to dwelling side by side in comparative toleration. But step by step, as it is believed we are going to clear out or be thrust out of India, so this tremendous rivalry and hatred of races springs into life again. It is becoming more acute every day. Where we to wash our hands of all responsibility and divest ourselves of all our powers, as our sentimentalists desire, ferocious civil wars would speedily break out between the Muslims and the Hindus. No one who knows India will dispute this.
November/December 1931
Lecture Tour of the United States
Having lost, in the Great Crash of 1929, the greater part of all he had earned by his writing and lecturing in the first thirty years of his adult life, Churchill launched forth on a major Lecture Tour of the United States. The excerpt quoted here is from his speech notes.
He took the strongest exception to Prohibition, both on political grounds, as well as those of personal inconvenience. The Editor’s father, Randolph, who two years earlier, as an 18-year-old student, had accompanied his father on a similar tour of Canada and the United States, had been made responsible for several variously shaped ‘medicine’ bottles, containing a brownish liquid originating not a million miles from Scotland!
We have on the other hand, I think, been more successful than you in attacking the frightful social evils of intemperance. In our country, as in yours, an enormous amount of misery, poverty and crime, of broken lives and ruined homes arose from alcohol. . . . But we have used different weapons. We have used the weapon of taxation and regulation. We have not hesitated to handle the evil thing . . . treating it as a practical matter, like a disease, rather than as a moral issue.
‘BANDS OF STURDY TEUTONIC YOUTHS’
23 November 1932
House of Commons
1932 marks the start of Churchill’s campaign to warn his fellow-countrymen and the world of the dangers of Allied disarmament in the face of relentless German rearmament. The Nazi ‘Blackshirts’ and ‘Brownshirts’ were already throwing their weight around and, a bare ten weeks after this speech, Adolf Hitler was elected Chancellor of Germany.
On the other side there is Germany, the same mighty Germany which so recently withstood almost the world in arms; Germany which resisted with such formidable capacity that it took between two and three Allied lives to take one German life in the four years of the Great War; Germany which has also allies, friends and associates in her train, powerful nations, who consider their politics as associated to some extent with hers; Germany whose annual quota of youth reaching the military age is already nearly double the youth of France; Germany where the Parliamentary system and the safeguards of the Parliamentary system which we used to be taught to rely upon after the Great War are in abeyance. I do not know where Germany’s Parliamentary system stands today, but certainly military men are in control of the essentials.
Germany has paid since the war an indemnity of about one thousand millions sterling, but she has borrowed in the same time about two thousand millions sterling with which to pay that indemnity and to equip her factories. Her territories have been evacuated long before the stipulated time – I rejoice in it – and now she has been by Lausanne virtually freed from all those reparations which had been claimed from her by the nations whose territories have been devastated in the war, or whose prosperity, like ours, has been gravely undermined by the war. At the same time, her commercial debts may well prove ultimately to be irrecoverable. I am making no indictment of Germany. I have respect and admiration for the Germans, and desire that we should live on terms of good feeling and fruitful relations with them; but we must look at the fact that every concession which has been made – many concessions have been made, and many more will be made and ought to be made – has been followed immediately by a fresh demand.
Now the demand is that Germany should be allowed to rearm. Do not delude yourselves. Do not let His Majesty’s Government believe – I am sure they do not believe – that all that Germany is asking for is equal status. I believe the refined term now is equal qualitative status, or, as an alternative, equal quantitative status by indefinitely deferred stages. That is not what Germany is seeking. All these bands of sturdy Teutonic youths, marching through the streets and roads of Germany, with the light of desire in their eyes to suffer for their Fatherland, are not looking for status. They are looking for weapons, and, when they have the weapons, believe me they will then ask for the return of lost territories and lost colonies, and when that demand is made it cannot fail to shake and possibly shatter to their foundations every one of the countries I have mentioned, and some other countries I have not mentioned.
Besides Germany, there is Russia. Russia has made herself an Ishmael among the nations, but she is one of the most titanic factors in the economy and in the diplomacy of the world. Russia, with her enormous, rapidly increasing armaments, with her tremendous development of poison gas, aeroplanes, tanks and every kind of forbidden fruit; Russia, with her limitless manpower and her corrosive hatreds, weighs heavily upon a whole line of countries, some small, others considerable, from the Baltic to the Black Sea, all situated adjacent to Russian territory. These countries have newly gained their independence. Their independence and nationhood are sacred to them, and we must never forget that most of them have been carved, in whole or in part, out of the old Russian Empire, the Russian Empire of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great. In some cases these countries are also in deep anxiety about Germany.
I am sure that I have not overdrawn the picture. I have marshalled the facts, but I have not overdrawn the picture. Can we wonder, can any reasonable, fair-minded, peace-loving person wonder, in the circumstances, that there is fear in Europe, and, behind the fear, the precautions, perhaps in some cases exaggerated precautions, which fear excites? We in these islands, with our heavy burdens and with our wide Imperial responsibilities, ought to be very careful not to meddle improvidently or beyond our station, beyond our proportionate stake, in this tremendous European structure. If we were to derange the existing foundations, based on force though they may be, we might easily bring about the very catastrophe that most of all we desire to avert. What would happen to us then? No one can predict. But if by the part we had played in European affairs we had precipitated such a catastrophe, then I think our honour might be engaged beyond the limitations which our treaties and agreements prescribe.
We must not forget, and Europe and the United States must not forget, that we have disarmed. Alone among the nations we have disarmed while others have rearmed.
‘PONTIFICAL, ANONYMOUS MUGWUMPERY’
22 February 1933
House of Commons
Here Churchill seeks to debunk the claim of the British Broadcasting Corporation to speak for Britain. Throughout the greater part of the 1930s the BBC unashamedly supported the appeasement policies of the Government and, with rare exception, did their best to deny Churchill access to the airwaves.
These well-meaning gentlemen of the British Broadcasting Corporation have absolutely no qualifications and no claim to represent British public opinion. They have no right to say that they voice the opinions of English or British people whatever. If anyone can do that it is His Majesty’s Government; and there may be two opinions about that. It would be far better to have sharply contrasted views in succession, in alternation, than to have this copious stream of pontifical, anonymous mugwumpery with which we have been dosed so long. I am very much encouraged by this Debate. I think there is a general feeling in the House, even among the Liberals, a minority, and it may be an increasing minority, that I am championing fair play and free speech. This Debate, if it is properly interpreted and enforced, may mean the opening of a new, wider and freer use of this great instrument, which if it is opened to the political life of the nation can only bring enhancement to the strength of the State, and set upon more permanent foundations the institutions which this small island has evolved.