Comments on: In Defense of Churchill (4): Questions and Answers http://localhost:8080/defense-questions Senior Fellow, Hillsdale College Churchill Project, Writer and Historian Sun, 23 Jan 2022 20:12:53 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9 By: Harry Marmer http://localhost:8080/defense-questions#comment-44722 Mon, 14 Jun 2021 01:21:21 +0000 https://richardlangworth.com/?p=12152#comment-44722 The Churchill quote you bring nicely addresses the complexities of the Middle East. Perhaps the following statement, to President Eisenhower, reflects Churchill’s personal bias: “I am, of course, a Zionist, and have been ever since the Balfour Declaration.” 295, Churchill and the Jews: A Lifelong Friendship, Martin Gilbert, 2007. Would be delighted to hear your thoughts.
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I believe he was a Zionist much earlier, but there are probably as many gradients to the meaning of the term as there are political parties in Israel. To Churchill it meant favoring a Jewish National Home, as he called it, as opposed to not favoring one. He was also biased in favor of peaceful solutions—condemning, for example, the Stern Gang assassination of Lord Moyne in Cairo. It is hard to think of him as biased against Arabs, since he parceled off 6/7ths of the Palestine Mandate to what became Jordan. See “Churchill Not a Zionist?” RML

]]> By: Richard M. Langworth http://localhost:8080/defense-questions#comment-44711 Sat, 12 Jun 2021 14:54:50 +0000 https://richardlangworth.com/?p=12152#comment-44711 J.M. writes: “You pointed out that the people who advocated stopping Hitler had all fought and seen the horrors of war first hand. On the other side, the appeasers advocated doing everything possible—even giving in to Hitler—to prevent war. This seems a little odd to me. I would have thought it would be the other way around. That is, the people who had seen first hand what war was really like would have been the appeasers while the other faction would have looked upon war as a chance to make money.”
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That’s a good question. I asked Andrew Roberts, who first made this point in The Holy Fox, his biography of Halifax. Dr. Roberts writes: “The explanation is that having seen the horrors up close snd losing so many friends, they weren’t going to let the Germans win the fruits of a victory they had done so much to deny them last time, without a struggle.”

Alfred Duff Cooper resigned from the Admiralty over Munich, saying it marked the “end of all decency in public affairs.” In his resignation speech he said: “The Prime Minister has believed in addressing Herr Hitler through the language of sweet reasonableness. I have believed that he was more open to the language of the mailed fist.”

Churchill and the anti-Appeasers took this view. Also, having fought them, they weren’t as overawed by the German military as the ex-businessmen. Some may have noticed the way the Wehrmacht clanked into Austria six months before Munich. In the end, Duff and the rest just weren’t content to let the barbarian have whatever he wanted. A lesson we seem to have to learn over and over. RML

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