The real riddle is why he cosied up to Stalin
Dresden. Tonypandy. Gallipoli. Bengal. Winston Churchill’s reputation has withstood an array of charges, made by each generation with their own prejudices. Whereas in the 1970s it was Richard Burton and Jim Callaghan accusing him of a vendetta against the Welsh miners, today it’s racism, imperialism and white supremacy. The words ‘Was a Racist’ were scrawled on his statue in Parliament Square during last year’s Black Lives Matter demonstrations. Earlier this week police protected the statue at a rally as protesters chanted ‘Protect women, not statues’.
Last month Cambridge academics held a panel on ‘The Racial Consequences of Mr Churchill’, in which the country’s wartime leader was attacked for his ‘white supremacist perspective’, which supposedly informed his devotion to British Empire. One panellist declared that the ‘British Empire was worse than the Nazis’. Another denied he can claim credit for victory in the second world war. ‘Of course it was the Soviet Union that defeated the Nazis and the Americans who defeated the Japanese.’
For activists and academics to deny his most famous achievement — defeating Hitler — and credit the USSR instead misses the point of his premiership. There are, of course, many criticisms that should be levelled at Churchill’s wartime policies. But there is one in particular that, in the rush to paint him as a racist imperialist, has avoided scrutiny: his relationship with Stalin. Churchill, in fact, sacrificed British imperial interests in order to save Soviet communism. Stalin could not have asked for a friendlier British government.
When Churchill replaced Neville Chamberlain as prime minister in May 1940, it did not mark a rightward lurch into reactionary imperialism. He was seen by the British left as a huge improvement over Chamberlain, whose wariness of Stalin’s USSR had informed Britain’s ‘appeasement’ policy in 1938.
Read the article by Sean McMeekin in The Spectator.