Irresponsible Historians # 94: Sir Martin Gilbert

'Historical responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men'.
- Lord Acton, historian, 1887

With that quote about 'historical responsibility' with respect to 'great men' in mind, meet Sir Martin Gilbert:

Exhibit A, 'Statesmen for these times' by Sir Martin Gilbert, dated December 2004:
'Many comment that today's leaders look small compared with the giants of the past. This is, I believe, a misconception...Although it can easily be argued that George W Bush and Tony Blair face a far lesser challenge than Roosevelt and Churchill did - that the war on terror is not a third world war - they may well, with the passage of time and the opening of the archives, join the ranks of Roosevelt and Churchill...'

Exhibit B, news report dated June 2008:
'Mr and Mrs Bush went on to Downing Street last night for an informal dinner of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding with the Browns and three historians...David Cannadine, Churchill's official biographer Martin Gilbert and Simon Schama, presenter of the popular television series A History Of Britain, were invited after Mr Bush expressed an interest in meeting some historians, a No 10 source said'.

Exhibit C, news report dated August 2009.
In mid-June Gordon Brown announced that there would be a "non-judgmental", behind-closed-doors inquiry into the Iraq war, conducted by hand-picked insiders...members of the inquiry include historian Sir Law­rence Freedman, who helped Blair develop the doctrine of "liberal interventionism" that he used to justify the war. Historian Sir Martin Gilbert, who wrote an article in 2004 saying Blair and George Bush could one day be compared to Churchill and Roosevelt, is also a member of the inquiry.

Standing Tall in History

When Blair recieved his Presidential Medal of Freedom, George W Bush described him as 'a powerful force for freedom' who will 'stand tall in history'. 'Out of office, but still in public life, Tony Blair remains a man of high intelligence and insight and above all a man of faith, idealism and integrity.'

Well, it's one opinion, though personally, where Blair is concerned, I am rather more sympathetic to the opinion that the great American novelist Mark Twain had of the British imperialist Cecil Rhodes:

'He has done everything he could think of to pull himself down to the ground; he has done more than enough to pull sixteen common-run great men down; yet there he stands, to this day, upon his dizzy summit under the dome of the sky, an apparent permanency, the marvel of the time, the mystery of the age, an Archangel with wings to half the world, Satan with a tail to the other half. I admire him, I frankly confess it; and when his time comes I shall buy a piece of the rope for a keepsake.'

If Bush thinks Blair will 'stand tall in history', one can only wish, like Twain wished of Rhodes, that he would instead one day 'hang high' for his historic crimes against humanity. Anyway, I only mention Blair as one wonders what that founding father of the American nation, Thomas Jefferson, would have made of giving a lying war-criminal turned banker with JP Morgan a 'Presidential Medal of Freedom'.

There is a popular quote, attributed to Thomas Jefferson, along the following lines:

I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.

However, I have not managed to find, via a quick google search anyway, hard evidence for that particular quote. However, we do know that Jefferson thought of banking 'that, for the emolument of a small proportion of our society who prefer these demoralizing pursuits to labors useful to the whole, the peace of the whole is endangered and all our present difficulties produced, are evils more easily to be deplored than remedied.' (Thomas Jefferson to Abbe Salimankis, 1810)

To John Taylor in 1816, Jefferson was more forthright (and distinctly prophetic):

'I sincerely believe... that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies, and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity under the name of funding is but swindling futurity on a large scale...The system of banking [I] have... ever reprobated. I contemplate it as a blot left in all our Constitutions, which, if not covered, will end in their destruction, which is already hit by the gamblers in corruption, and is sweeping away in its progress the fortunes and morals of our citizens.'

Still, while Blair's 'faith, idealism, and integrity' is no doubt appreciated by his fellow bankers, I suppose Blair does deserve some sort of wider recognition for his 'work' towards Middle East Peace. Starting one disastrous war in the region, then restricting Israel to just the two bloody criminal wars while 'peace envoy' to the Middle East takes a rare kind of 'high intelligence and insight' that the rest of us can only marvel at.

Bush's History lesson

'You can only push western influence so far eastwards into Eurasia. Napoleon learned that, Hitler learned that: George Bush's time has come.'

When Bush met Brown # II

After their first encounter went so well, we can look forward to round 2...

Brown: I am committed to fighting for 42 days...
Bush: You think you can hang on as leader that long?

Bush/Brown: It is really good to meet up again - standing next to you actually makes me look quite good...

Bush/Brown: What's it like being a deeply unpopular political failure on your way out of power?

Protest at Bush visit

There is no more suitable candidate for Leading War Criminal than George Bush. The only person that comes anywhere near him is Tony Blair. They are both beneath contempt. Bush should certainly be arrested and sent to Guantanamo Bay where he can rot forever.
- Harold Pinter

Histomat Picture Exclusive: Bush's Iraq 'uprising'

When George Bush marked the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq by claiming that thanks to the recent 'surge' of the US military, 'In Iraq, we're witnessing the first large-scale Arab uprising against Osama bin Laden', to be honest I was initially somewhat sceptical. Probably I had fallen for some of the left wing propaganda about Iraq that circles around the blogosphere. But now, as I think readers of Histomat will surely agree, the astonishing picture above, exclusive to this blog, suggests Bush may well have been onto something...

George Bush - the intellectual's intellectual

The president is vague about his own future. When he leaves office he hopes to shave some time off his 90-minute bike ride, and maybe build a freedom institute: "an institute that really, you know, just kind of imparts knowledge and deals with big issues". He's discovered reading, too. When he was governor he was fond of saying that he learned by "doing", not reading, but now he consumes history books voraciously - "I'm on my 87th book this year".

From here.

Caption please: When Bush met Brown

To start the ball rolling...

Brown: You might want to take a left now...
Bush: Hey, Tony warned me about you - are you some sort of goddamn Commie or something? The 'Labour' Party - I never could understand that - what is the 'Labour' Party all about anyway?


Bush: 'You are very humourous for a Scotsman, Mr. Brown...'
Brown: 'Mr. Bush, I am not joking, I really am the Prime Minister of Great Britain.'

Bush: 'We are writing the initial chapters of what I believe is a great ideological struggle between those who do believe in freedom and justice and human rights and human dignity and cold-blooded killers who kill innocent people to achieve their objectives.'
Brown: Congratulations, Mr. Bush, I didn't realise you had now learnt how to write. But which side of that struggle are you on again?

Brown: Mr. President, do you agree we should send Western troops into Sudan?
Bush: Yo, Brown! That's a no brainer - it's a Muslim country with huge oil reserves that we need to stop China getting...of course we should send them in!
Brown: What about the genocide?
Bush: These things always take time to organise Gordon - look at Iraq. And, after all, we haven't even started killing innocent people in Sudan yet!

Edited to add: Private Eye went with the following:

Brown: Tony sends his regards...
Bush: Tony who?

Bush, Blair and Machiavelli

In 1864, Maurice Joly, an exiled French republican published a book called Dialogue aux enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu, 'The Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu', a satirical attack on the regime of Napoleon III, the 'Second Empire' which was banned by the regime and put Joly into prison for 15 months. According to Wikipedia, 'In the book Niccolò di Bernardo Machiavelli and Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brede et de Montesquieu engage in dialectical argument, with Machiavelli taking the case for the power of the state as ultimate authority and Montesquieu putting forth a contrasting liberal thesis.'

At one point, 'Machiavelli' makes the following advice to any would-be tyrants:

'Seperate morality from politics, substitute force and astuteness for law, paralyse the individual intelligence, mislead the people with appearances, consent to liberty only under the weight of terror, pander to national prejudices, keep concealed from the country what is happening in the world and likewise from the capital what is happening in the provinces, transform the instruments of thought into instruments of power, remorselessly inflict executions without trials and administrative deportations, exact a perpetual apology for every act, teach the history of your reign yourself, employ the police as the keystone of the regime, create faithful followers by means of ribbons and baubles, build up the cult of the usurper into a kind of religion, create a void around you thus making yourself indispensable, weaken public opinion until it subsides in apathy, impress your name everywhere as drops of water hollow out granite, profit by the ease with which men turn informers, manipulate society by means of its vices, speak as little as possible, say the opposite of what you think, and change the very meaning of words...'

Boris Souvarine, in his fine biography, Stalin (1939) (p. 583) quoted the above lines and then wrote 'all of this appears to have been written for Stalin...he has followed by instinct the line of conduct traced in this ironical manual of cheating and duplicity'. Those of us living under the tyrannical regimes of Bush and Blair might also find the lines of interest...

New Labour reacts to Bush's election 'thumping'

Halloween...

Yep, it's that time of year again. Lots of interesting comment on the US mid-term elections by the Unrepentant Marxist.

Labour's deputy leader caught in 'telling truth' scandal

The British Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott has had to strongly deny growing speculation that he had a recent 'dangerous liason' with the truth yesterday.

In what looks like another damaging affair with reality, it is reported that 'Prezza' described US President George Bush as 'crap'. Mr Prescott has since described the idea that as a New Labour politician he might tell the truth as being 'inaccurate'. 'This is an inaccurate report of a private conversation and it is not my view' he said last night.

However, this does not look like being the end of the matter, by any means. Crucially, Mr Prescott, 68, refused to accept damaging further allegations that in him describing any other political figure as being 'crap', he was guilty of the charge of gross hypocrisy. Prescott is also accused of the latter charge of hypocrisy for describing President Bush as being merely a 'cowboy with his stetson on'. Mr Prescott recently returned from a trip to America where he enjoyed dressing up as er, a cowboy with his stetson on.

Mr Prescott has recently argued that the idea that anyone should criticise the likes of Bush and Blair at this most crucial moment in the battle against international terrorism was 'almost beyond belief' and 'undermined unity' at a time 'when we should all stand united'. Whatever our other misgivings about John Prescott, let there be no doubt that Histomat completely endorses this statement.

John Prescott surely represents the best of the British bull-dog spirit in the face of adversity, and it is imperative that everyone rallies around Bush and Blair at a time when their number of enemies seems to be growing in strength every day. Indeed, it might be argued that with his love of calmly playing croquet while evil foreign terrorists gather their forces and threaten invasion that John Prescott is arguably following in the traditions of the mighty Drake, with his love of boules, at the time of the Spanish Armada. 'There is plenty of time to win this game, and to trash the Spaniards too' Francis Drake so memorably said. However, we can be thankful that while in the days of old the likes of Drake had to lead from the front, today our dear beloved rulers no longer have to risk combat themselves but can simply send British working class kids to go and fight and die on their behalf. This is called 'Progress'. The modern soldier's motto was aptly summed up by Rudyard Kipling: 'Ours is not to question why, ours is but to do and die'.

After all, why would American and British soldiers today ever need to question anything about the 'war on terror' - when there are intellectual and physical heavyweights of the stature of John Prescott, and model democratic leaders (so unlike the bloated plutocrats of old) like George Bush and Tony Blair, around to do all the thinking for them?

The spectre of revolt in the Middle East

In this week's Socialist Worker, Anne Ashford has an interesting look at the possibility of Hizbollah's heroic resistance to Israel's barbarism throwing not only the Israeli regime but also other Arab Governments into crisis. Histomat also recommend's reading Seymour Hersh's article on Bush's role in the recent war, which has been usefully digested by Doug Nesbitt.

The anti-totalitarian, anti-Fascist Emperor

'Fuck you I won't do as you tell me' - George Bush tells 'the man' where to go...

Those who say that you inevitably get more reactionary and right-wing as you get older might like to take a look at the new libertarian George Bush. 'In response to a question about Hizbollah at his ranch in Crawford this week, Mr Bush said: "As young democracies flourish, terrorists try to stop their progress.  They try to spread their jihadist message – a message I call, it's totalitarian in nature, Islamic radicalism, Islamic fascism – they try to spread it as well by taking the attack to those who love freedom."'

Yeah, way to fucking go George! You tell the truth to those authoritarian bastards dude! Such a defiant stand almost brings a tear to my eye. George W. Bush is clearly a true opponent of concentration camps, torture, detention without trial, and indeed a tireless enemy of all forms of tyranny and unaccountable state power. Such a resolute enemy of the state surely stands in the tradition of past fighters for liberty and civil rights the world over...


Was this brave man really George W. Bush? We need to be told

The Emperors New Sweater

Adapted from Hans Christian Andersen and inspired by this exchange:

Once upon a time there lived a vain Emperor whose only worry in life was to dress in elegant clothes and bomb innocent people under the guise of fighting 'terrorism'. He changed clothes almost every hour and loved to show them off to his people. Word of the Emperor's refined habits spread over his kingdom and beyond. One foreign scoundrel, Blair, (who was well known for his lies) who had heard of the Emperor's vanity, decided to take advantage of it. The scoundrel introduced himself at the gates of the palace with a scheme in mind.

"I am a very good tailor and after many years of research have invented a cloth so light and fine that it looks invisible. I call it WMD. As a matter of fact WMD is invisible to anyone who is too stupid and incompetent to appreciate its quality."

The chief of the guards heard the scoundrel's strange story and sent for the court chamberlain, Powell. Powell ran to the Emperor and disclosed the incredible news. The Emperor's curiosity got the better of him and he decided to see the scoundrel.

"Besides being invisible, your Highness, this WMD will be woven into a sweater in colors and patterns created especially for you." The emperor gave the man a bag of gold coins in exchange for his promise to begin working on the sweater immediately.

"Just tell us what you need to get started and we'll give it to you." The scoundrel asked for a loom, silk, gold thread and then pretended to begin working. The Emperor thought he had spent his money quite well: in addition to getting a new extraordinary sweater, he would discover which of his subjects were ignorant and incompetent. A few days later, he called up Powell, who was considered by everyone as a man with common sense.

"Go and see how the work is proceeding," the Emperor told him, "and come back to let me know."

The chamberlain was welcomed by the scoundrel.

"I've almost finished, but I need a lot more gold thread. Here, Excellency! Admire the colors, feel the softness!" Powell bent over the loom and tried to see the fabric called WMD that was not there. He felt cold sweat on his forehead.

"I can't see anything," he thought. "If I see nothing, that means I'm stupid! Or, worse, incompetent!" If he admitted that he didn't see anything, he would be discharged from his office.

"What a marvelous fabric, he said then. "I'll certainly tell the Emperor." The scoundrel rubbed his hands gleefully. He had almost made it. More thread was requested to finish the work.

Finally, the Emperor received the announcement that the tailor had come to take all the measurements needed to sew his new sweater.

"Yo, Blair. How are you doing?" the Emperor asked. Even as he bowed his head, the scoundrel Blair pretended to be holding large roll of WMD fabric.

"Here it is your Highness, the result of hard labour," the scoundrel said. "I have worked night and day but, at last, the most beautiful fabric in the world is ready for you. Look at the colors and feel how fine it is." Of course the Emperor did not see any colors and could not feel any cloth between his fingers. He panicked and felt like fainting. But luckily the throne was right behind him and he sat down. But when he realized that no one could know that he did not see the fabric, he felt better. Nobody could find out he was stupid and incompetent. And the Emperor didn't know that everybody else around him thought and did the very same thing.

The farce continued as the scoundrel had foreseen it. Once he had taken the measurements, he began cutting the air with scissors while sewing with the needles an invisible cloth.

"Your Highness, you'll have to take off your clothes to try on your new sweater." The scoundrel draped the new sweater on him and then held up a mirror. The Emperor was embarrassed but since none of his bystanders were, he felt relieved.

"Thanks for the sweater it's awfully thoughtful of you".

Blair replied that "It's a pleasure".

"I know you picked it out yourself. This is a beautiful sweater and it looks very good on me," the Emperor said trying to look comfortable. "You've done a fine job."

"Oh, absolutely", Blair replied.

"Your Majesty," Powell said, "we have a request for you. The people have found out about this extraordinary fabric and they are anxious to see you in your new suit." The Emperor was doubtful showing himself naked to the people, but then he abandoned his fears. After all, no one would know about it except the ignorant and the incompetent.

"All right," he said. "I will grant the people this privilege." He summoned his carriage and the ceremonial parade was formed. A group of dignitaries walked at the very front of the procession and anxiously scrutinized the faces of the people in the street. Surrounding the procession was a group of the Imperial Guardsmen, toting weapons in order to shoot any possible troublemakers. All the people had gathered in the main square, pushing and shoving to get a better look. An applause welcomed the regal procession. Everyone wanted to know how stupid or incompetent his or her neighbor was but, as the Emperor passed, a strange murmur rose from the crowd.

Everyone said, loud enough for the others to hear: "Look at the Emperor's new sweater. Its beautiful!"

"What a marvellous sweater!"

"And the colors! The colors of that beautiful fabric! I have never seen anything like it in my life!" They all tried to conceal their disappointment at not being able to see any WMD for themselves, and since nobody was willing to admit his own stupidity and incompetence, they all behaved as the scoundrel had predicted.

A child, however, who had no important job and could only see things as his eyes showed them to him, went up to the carriage.

"The Emperor is naked," he said.

"Fool!" his father reprimanded, running after him. "Don't talk nonsense!" He grabbed his child and took him away. But the boy's remark, which had been heard by the bystanders, was repeated over and over again until everyone cried:

"The boy is right! The Emperor is naked! It's true!" "Where is the WMD?" they asked.

The Emperor realized that the people were right but could not admit to that. He though it better to continue on with his procession and his wars under the illusion that anyone who couldn't see that WMD existed was either stupid or incompetent. And he stood stiffly on his carriage, while behind him a page held his imaginary mantle.

Those in the crowd that day who had shouted out the truth were later detained under the new anti-terrorism legislation. The boy was taken off to the appropriately titled 'Camp X-ray' where he was tortured, and remains detained there without a trial to this day.

Good news

The American Empire's civilising missionaries

It being Easter and everything, Saturday's Telegraph magasine had a heartwarming article by Andrew Marshall on the half a million or so Christian missionaries currently spreading God's word around the world in what he describes as 'the greatest missionary push since the 19th century'. I am not sure if it is online, so I will type out some of it for you:

'It [missionary work] is driven by America's rich and influential evangelical community, now thought to number 50 million people, and by technologies such as the internet. There were 62,000 missionaries in 1900 and 420,000 a century later...the number of missionaries working among Muslims has almost doubled between 1982 and 2001, from about 15,000 to 27,000. About half of these are American and a third are evangelical.'

'The chief target of this evangelical onslaught is the so-called "10/40 window". For missionaries, this is the final frontier. It refers to a vast area lying between 10 and 40 degrees northern latitudes, and includes: Muslim North Africa and the Middle East; Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Islamic republics of Central Asia; Hindu-majority India; and the Buddhists and Taoists of Southeast Asia and China. These "unreached megapeoples", as they are called, make up most of humanity.'

'A bellicose George W Bush made "crusade" a dirty word after September 11, yet mission literature retains strong militaristic overtones. Missionaries are "Christ's warriors", non-Christian countries are "enemy-held territory", God is the "commander-in-chief", and Islam, inevitably, is a "weapon of mass destruction".' Yet tooled up with 'satallite phones and global-positioning systems' to fight "God's war against sin", 'many evangelical groups take on the structure of aid agencies to obscure their primary objective of spreading the gospel'.

Many of them are trained at 'faith factories', megachurches in the US, in courses devised for would-be missionaries. 'An excitable local pastor called Todd outlines his campaign to evangelise the Muslim Somali refugees living in Louisville...there's a prayer to thank God for leading this Muslim community "out of slavery and out of Islam". Tonight's main speaker is Bill Weber, a former missionary in apartheid era South Africa. He begins by discussing the inspirational figures of the 19th century - what missionaries call the "Great Century". The Great Century belonged to British missionaries who, like their American counterparts in Iraq in 2003, often advanced in the wake of imperial conflicts. But the 20th-century missions moment was overwhelmingly American, and turned its evangelical gaze upon the "unreached" tribal peoples - and, later, upon the Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists of the "10/40 window".'

Among American missionaries, Muslims in particular are found 'spiritually lacking. According to one, Islam "does not lead one to eternal life and heaven...they [Muslims] are in a sense living a lie." "We teach our students here that not all Muslims are Shiite-AK47-aeroplane stealing Muslims. Some would make very good neighbours. They don't drink alcohol, they're very chaste in their appearance" but "that doesn't mean they're spiritually OK". A former Southern Baptist Convention president told applauding pastors in 2002 that Mohammed was a "demon-possessed paedophile".'

'A Baton Rouge pastor called Larry Stockwell once claimed that the world's three and half billion "unreached people" could form 25 lines around the planet. "Can you picture 25 lines of Christless people, trampling endlessly towards hell?" Stockwell asks.' Personally, I am more worried by the thought of 500,000 Christian fundamentalist nutcases being financed by America's rich and powerful to go around the world spreading the ideals of George W Bush's Empire...

Winston Churchill on 'the sinews of peace'

Winston Churchill: Bush and Blair make this warmonger look like a peace-nik

On March 5th 1946, Winston Churchill made his famous 'Sinews of Peace' speech at Fulton, Missouri, which as it happened signalled the first warning shot in the Cold War. There has been a lot of pieces in the media commemorating the 60th anniversary of this speech, which is remembered for this famous passage:

'From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia; all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and in some cases increasing measure of control from Moscow...'

Most of these pieces, in Britain and the US at least, have been full of praise for Churchill and his pledge that the US and Britain would fight for 'freedom' against 'tyranny'. Typical here is a gushing piece of good old-fashioned 'hero-worship' by the BBC European Affair's correspondent William Horsley, entitled 'Churchill Speech: A lesson for the present', which concludes:

'After all these years Churchill's Iron Curtain speech reads like an example of true statesmanship, and perhaps the most memorable "wake-up call" in post-War history. It also displays the genius with words that would later bring Churchill yet another honour - the Nobel Prize for Literature. In an age of great uncertainty it projected Churchill's iron conviction of purpose. His core beliefs were in the special bond between America and Britain, the need for the United Nations to be "a force for action and not merely a frothing of words", and the duty of the Western democracies to stand up for freedom and against tyranny. Sixty years later, there are more democratic governments in the world than ever. Yet such moral certainty is rare, and the authority with which Churchill's expressed it is surely rarer still.'

However, the reality behind the rhetoric of 'true statesmanship' and 'moral certainty' is rather different, as historian Ian Birchall has argued:

'If Europe was divided by a sinister iron curtain, then one of those chiefly responsible was Winston Churchill...In October 1944, Churchill visited Moscow and met Stalin. Churchill wrote on a half sheet of paper a proposal for the post-war division of Europe. He pushed this over to Stalin. In Churchill’s own words: "There was a slight pause. Then he took his blue pencil and made a large tick upon it, and passed it back to us. It was all done in no more time than it takes to set down." The carve-up was modified at the end of war conferences at Yalta and Potsdam, but in essence the agreement that Russia should have control over Eastern Europe as its share of the war booty remained.'

As for Churchill's 'genius with words', Birchall notes that 'the phrase "iron curtain" had first been used to describe revolutionary Russia by Labour Party writer Ethel Snowden in 1920. More notoriously, it had been used by the Nazi leader Joseph Goebbels in 1945, predicting the consequences of a German defeat: "The Soviets, according to the agreement between Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin, would occupy all of east and south east Europe along with the greater part of the Reich...An iron curtain would fall over this enormous territory controlled by the Soviet Union, behind which nations would be slaughtered."'

As for 'the most memorable "wake up call" in post-War history' and the 'special relationship' between America and Britain, in fact the speech showed Churchill in his true light - a warmonger concerned above all with preserving the power of the British Empire and the power of the rich as a whole. As Churchill argued, "Communist fifth columns are established and work in complete unity and absolute obedience to the directions they receive from the Communist centre...The Communist Parties constitute a growing challenge and peril to Christian civilisation."

Yet as Birchall notes, 'the Communist Parties [in Western Europe] were indeed under Moscow’s orders – but those orders were to do nothing to upset the balance of power. In France and Italy, Communist ministers were serving in coalition governments. Their parties opposed all strikes. In Britain, before the 1945 election, the Communist Party called for a continuation of the war time coalition – including Churchill. It was the right wing Labour leaders who saw they could win the election on their own.'

In fact, the threat of 'Communism' was needed to justify massive spending on weapons programmes by the US and Britain. 'Stalin was not a man of peace. He was a murderous thug. But there is no reason to believe that he had further territorial ambitions. To have taken over Western Europe with its well developed working class movement would have been more trouble than it was worth.' Evidence for this view can be seen from looking at a speech Stalin himself gave a month before Churchill's, in February 1946 in Moscow:

'The Second World War against the Axis Powers, unlike the First World War, assumed from the very outset the character of an anti-fascist war, a war of liberation, one of the tasks of which was to restore democratic liberties. The entry of the Soviet Union into the war against the Axis Powers could only augment -- and really did augment -- the anti-fascist and liberating character of the Second World War. It was on this basis that the anti-fascist coalition of the Soviet Union, the United States of America, Great Britain and other freedom-loving countries came into being and later played the decisive role in defeating the armed forces of the Axis Powers.'

Nowhere in Stalin's speech is any suggestion that he was thinking about further toppling Western capitalism, bar a bit where he talks vaguely about the long term inevitable collapse of capitalism under the weight of its own contradictions through economic crisis. Indeed, he even describes the US and Britain as 'freedom-loving countries' interested in 'democracy' and 'liberation'.

However, there are passages in Churchill's speech - which was actually titled 'The Sinews of Peace' that do make interesting reading as lessons for today in the light of Bush and Blair's plans to bomb Iran as part of the 'war on terror':

'What then is the over-all strategic concept which we should inscribe today? It is nothing less than the safety and welfare, the freedom and progress, of all the homes and families of all the men and women in all the lands...To give security to these countless homes, they must be shielded from the two giant marauders, war and tyranny. We all know the frightful disturbances in which the ordinary family is plunged when the curse of war swoops down upon the bread-winner and those for whom he works and contrives. The awful ruin of Europe, with all its vanished glories, and of large parts of Asia glares us in the eyes. When the designs of wicked men or the aggressive urge of mighty States dissolve over large areas the frame of civilized society, humble folk are confronted with difficulties with which they cannot cope. For them all is distorted, all is broken, even ground to pulp. When I stand here this quiet afternoon I shudder to visualize what is actually happening to millions now and what is going to happen in this period when famine stalks the earth. None can compute what has been called "the unestimated sum of human pain." Our supreme task and duty is to guard the homes of the common people from the horrors and miseries of another war. We are all agreed on that.'

It is also interesting to note Churchill's praise for the UN in the current age of unilateral US/UK intervention:

'A world organization has already been erected for the prime purpose of preventing war, UNO, the successor of the League of Nations, with the decisive addition of the United States and all that means, is already at work. We must make sure that its work is fruitful, that it is a reality and not a sham, that it is a force for action, and not merely a frothing of words, that it is a true temple of peace in which the shields of many nations can some day be hung up, and not merely a cockpit in a Tower of Babel. Before we cast away the solid assurances of national armaments for self-preservation we must be certain that our temple is built, not upon shifting sands or quagmires, but upon the rock. Anyone can see with his eyes open that our path will be difficult and also long, but if we persevere together as we did in the two world wars - though not, alas, in the interval between them - I cannot doubt that we shall achieve our common purpose in the end.'

Tell that to John Bolton.

Churchill also has some words of warning about the importance of upholding civil liberties - which make interesting reading in our brutal age of Guantanamo Bay, torture at Abu Graib, etc:

'But we must never cease to proclaim in fearless tones the great principles of freedom and the rights of man which are the joint inheritance of the English-speaking world and which through Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus, trial by jury, and the English common law find their most famous expression in the American Declaration of Independence...Here are the title deeds of freedom which should lie in every cottage home. Here is the message of the British and American peoples to mankind. Let us preach what we practice - let us practice - what we preach.'

If only the US and UK did 'practise what they preached' with respect to 'freedom'. Overall, that today George Bush and Tony Blair can almost make Churchill look like some liberal UN-loving peacenik arguably tells us much about the dark times we are living in today.

The Anti-War President

"Many people are very, very sincerely anti-war...everyone is anti-war. The president is anti-war. No one wants war. But no one wanted what happened on September 11 either."

Laura Bush, wife of President George W. Bush, January 2006.

I do not know a lot about George Bush's politics before September 11th, but I would be very surprised if he had ever opposed any war waged by the US Government up to then in his life...

Anti-Bush Halloween special

All thanks to here