C.L.R. James on Winston Churchill - Tory War-dog

Winston Churchill - a reactionary prize-fighter for the British ruling class

...Long before 1939, when the outbreak of war saved his career, Winston Churchill had established himself as the most discredited, the most untrustworthy, and the most irresponsible of all the senior politicians in England. The rulers of Britain did not take him seriously on the politics of war because, except for his capabilities as a war minister, they did not take him seriously on anything except his capacity to make a serious nuisance of himself.

Churchill was born the son of Lord Randolph Churchill, a brilliant young nobleman who reached the post of Chancellor of the Exchequer and seemed headed for the premiership but wrecked his career by his erratic political behavior. His character was adequately summed up in the phrase “the boy who would not grow up.” It was the kind of heritage that a careful politician would take care to live down. It is characteristic of Winston Churchill that he lived up to it.

He joined the army as a cavalry officer and thus began his lifelong and passionate interest in war. He became a war correspondent, was captured by the Boers and escaped. When he lectured in New York in 1906, at the age of twenty-six, he was billed as “the hero of five wars.” He was already actively interested in politics. In the early years of the century, liberalism seemed in the ascendancy in Britain. Churchill made a spectacular break with the Tory Party and joined the Liberals.

He became Home Secretary and distinguished himself by what is derisively known as the Battle of Sidney Street.  A group of foreign anarchists well supplied with arms refused to give themselves up to the police. Churchill converted a police operation into a battle. He went down himself to take charge of the “struggle” (or as privileged observer), was nearly killed and created a scandal among his colleagues and the sober-minded British people. In 1911 he went over to the Admiralty and there did his best work, preparing the fleet for 1914.

But the war of 1914 had no sooner begun than Churchill was at it again. A critical situation at Antwerp found Churchill, still head of the Admiralty, persuading the reluctant Sir Edward Grey to let him go to Belgium in person. He found himself as usual under fire. The battle stimulated him to offer, from Antwerp, his resignation from the Admiralty to take command of the British land forces at Antwerp. The transfer was not made but as one of his biographers (Philip Guedalla) says of the unsatisfactory outcome: “There was a vague feeling that Mr. Churchill’s restlessness might be to blame ... that it was Sidney Street over again ...”

By 1915, despite his competence, he had lost his post at the Admiralty. He held other posts, but it is related of him that at one time while a minister in London he did most of the work in a chateau in France so as to be near the firing line. After World War I he was the moving spirit in the military intervention against Russia. It is known that in 1944 to keep Churchill from joining the cross-channel expedition the present king had to threaten that he would also join it if Churchill insisted on going; baffled here, nevertheless Churchill turned up with the invading army in the last stages of the victory against Germany.

That is the man. Every British politician knew him and his Napoleonic complex, his preoccupation with war and war preparations, his extraordinary capacity for making a fool of himself on critical occasions. Asquith, Prime Minister in 1914, wrote of him “Winston, who has got on all his war-paint, is longing for a sea-fight in the early hours of the morning to result in the sinking of the Goeben.” Someone who saw him at the beginning of the 1914 war remarked on his “happy face”...

In the cabinet reshuffle of 1936, everyone expected him to be included because of his audacity as a war minister. Baldwin left him out. Churchill writes: "He thought no doubt, that he had given me a politically fatal stroke, and I felt he might well be right.” He says too, “There was much mockery in the press about my exclusion.” Exactly. His career was always in danger. His adventures were the subject of perpetual mockery. We can now judge with a little more sense of proportion Churchill’s claim that on a question vital to the world he was the purveyor of wisdom to fatuous idiots and fouls. If the words idiot and fatuity, etc., were to be applied up to 1936, the chief candidate would have been Churchill himself.

Never at any time did he behave like a man who had a serious point of view, knew what was at stake and fought seriously for it. These erratic habits of his were intimately connected with the failure of his supposedly correct policy on the war. It was precisely during the time that he was supposed to be fighting this life-and-death struggle to prevent the unnecessary war, that Churchill showed that age had not withered nor custom staled the infinite variety of what the novelist, Arnold Bennett, called his “incurable foolishness” ... it is clear that to this day he is not fully aware of the folly of his procedure in relation to his war policy...

In 1931, British imperialism began the colossal, and as it has proved, the impossible task of reconciling India to British rule by binding the Indian bourgeoisie and the feudal lords to the British system. After Hitler’s accession to power in Germany this was an urgent task precisely because of the uncertain world situation. Churchill, however, for years rallied the worst of the Daily Mail type of Conservatives and led a struggle against Baldwin which for intemperance and unscrupulousness even he has rarely surpassed. He was ignominiously defeated as he was bound to be ... any level-headed capitalist politician could not but see that some sort of settlement and pacification of India was necessary for any British government that contemplated war.

 By the end of his battle of India, the Conservative Party had no use whatever for him. However by 1936 he had built around himself a little group around a policy he called “Arms and the Covenant,” the Covenant being the League of Nations. The sharpening international situation was giving weight to their attacks upon the policy of the Baldwin government. Nothing is more illuminating of what Britain’s rulers thought of Churchill than his account of how, all through his years of political exile, every British Prime Minister saw to it that he was well informed of the latest military and scientific developments; he was even placed on some of the most secret war committees. This explains his place in British politics. He was a kind of national strong-arm man who was kept well trained and in shape, for the day when blows were needed. Until then nobody wanted to have anything to do with him. And this book shows that no one had worked more assiduously to build this reputation than himself.

But perhaps, it may be said, that despite all his follies Churchill was right in his consistent opposition on the war issue. His book explodes that fable. Churchill’s opposition on the actual issue of the war was no different from his shrill opposition on other issues. He spoke with more authority perhaps on this, and he certainly impressed outsiders and the general public. But he did not impress the politicians and for one very good reason. They knew that they could have shut up his mouth at any time by giving him office. The measure of their contempt for him can be judged by the fact that eloquent and active as he was they refused to do this.

History is full of men who felt that a certain policy was essential to the life of their country or their class and fought for it to the end, reckless of victory, defeat or their personal fate. Such for instance was the uncompromising struggle of Clemenceau for leadership of France in the days of 1914-18 when the government was in such a crisis that at one lime his attacks upon the government sounded like treason to the bourgeoisie. No such mantle can be hung on Winston Churchill despite all the assiduous tailoring of Henry Luce. Churchill knows better than to make any great claims for himself on this matter. There are too many men alive who could tear him to bits if he tried to do this. It was not principled opposition which kept him out of the ministry in 1936 and thus saved him from getting himself as thoroughly compromised as Baldwin and Chamberlain. It was his bad reputation and habits...

Until the war came Churchill was nobody, played no heroic role, opposed the government but was always ready to enter it...But maybe Churchill did have the correct policy, if even he did not make any heroic battle for it. Now this is precisely what was in dispute all the time and is still in dispute. And here, above all, Churchill’s policy, in so far as he had a policy, seemed to his colleagues the quintessence and crown of his irresponsibility.

Let us try to get clear exactly what Churchill’s policy was not. First of all Churchill was not and today is no enemy of either dictatorship or fascism. He is an enemy of all who threaten the British Empire and the “pleasant life” he leads and refers to so often. That is all.

On January 30, 1939, this stern opponent of Chamberlain’s policy of appeasing the dictators wrote as follows:

“Up till a few years ago many people in Britain admired the work which the extraordinary man Signor Mussolini had done for his country. He had brought it out of incipient anarchy into a position of dignity and order which was admired even by those who regretted the suspension of Italian freedom.” (Step by Step, 1936-1939, by Winston Churchill, p. 285.)

On February 23, 1939 he wrote of Franco:

 “He now has the opportunity of becoming a great Spaniard of whom it may be written a hundred years hence: ‘He united his country and rebuilt its greatness. Apart from that he reconciled the past with the present, and broadened the life of the working people while preserving the faith and structure of the Spanish nation.’ Such an achievement would rank in history with the work of Ferdinand and Isabella and the glories of Charles V.”(Ibid, p.285.)

As far as the record goes in this book he makes an extraordinarily good case for himself on the question of the air-race with Germany. But that is not enough to build the pedestal for his statue. And beyond this it is difficult to find out exactly what at any precise moment, he concretely stood for....

From all this it must not be considered that Churchill is a negligible person. That would be stupidity. Put him in a war department, or give him a war to lead, and from all the evidence he is far above his colleagues, in energy, in knowledge, in attention to business and curiously enough, in tempering his audacity with sobriety of judgment. He has also developed another valuable gift. His famous sense of history is famous nonsense. He has none, as I shall show in a moment. What he does have in his head is the writings of the great British historians and the speeches of the great British orators. This and his single-mindedness, his operatic consciousness of playing a great role in historic conflicts, enable him at times to rise to great heights of rhetoric.

At times his words can be singularly effective, especially when people are frightened and bewildered by the complex class, national and international currents of modern war. Churchill has no doubts, as a bull in a China shop has no doubts. He has a great gift of phrase, and long training as a journalist gives him an eye for the salient facts in a military or political situation. At all points he is equipped for war, to shout for war, to glamorize past wars, to explain a war that is going on, to make new ones look like a defense of civilization.

Politically he is as stupid a reactionary as ever. The war was no sooner over than he aroused universal execration in Britain by saying on the radio that the victory of the Labour Party would mean a Gestapo for Britain. He himself lost thousands of votes in his own constituency.... It is a measure of the degeneration of our society that such a man should be its most notable spokesman; above all it is a scandal that he should be represented ... as a defender of democracy and civilization. In reality the evidence is thick ... that Churchill is not merely a conservative, but is today as ever a vicious reactionary.

A few examples will suffice... writing about Hitler in 1932 he uses these sentences: “I admire men who stand up for their country in defeat, even though I am on the other side. He had a perfect right, to be a patriotic German if he chose. I always wanted England, Germany, and France to be friends.” Hitler attacked Britain. That is all that concerned Churchill. But for that he would have admired him to this day... 

Admiration for dictatorship and military and feudal elements, racial arrogance, anti-Semitism, these and much more stare you in the face as soon as you shake yourself free of bourgeois propaganda ... It is one of the urgent tasks of the struggle against war to expose ... the pretensions of this reactionary prize-fighter to be a defender of democracy and civilization.

C.L.R. James, 'Winston Churchill - Tory war-dog', Fourth International, 10, no. 2 (February 1949), pp.41-46



See also this poem, Great Britain's Greatest Beast by Heathcote Williams and this piece - Winston Churchill: The Imperial Monster  

New Book: Marx at the Margins

Kevin B. Anderson: Marx at the Margins:On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies

In Marx at the Margins, Kevin Anderson uncovers a variety of extensive but neglected texts by the well-known political economist which cast what we thought we knew about his work in a startlingly different light. Analyzing a variety of Marx’s writings, including journalistic work written for the New York Tribune, Anderson presents us with a Marx quite at odds with our conventional interpretations. Rather than providing us with an account of Marx as an exclusively class-based thinker, Anderson here offers a portrait of Marx for the twenty-first century: a global theorist whose social critique was sensitive to the varieties of human social and historical development, including not just class, but nationalism, race, and ethnicity, as well. Marx at the Margins ultimately argues that alongside his overarching critique of capital, Marx created a theory of history that was multi- layered and not easily reduced to a single model of development or revolution. Through highly-informed readings on work ranging from Marx’s unpublished 1879–82 notebooks to his passionate writings about the antislavery cause in the United States, this volume delivers a groundbreaking and canon-changing vision of Karl Marx that is sure to provoke lively debate in Marxist scholarship and beyond.

Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
1. Colonial Encounters in the 1850s: The European Impact on India, Indonesia, and China
2. Russia and Poland: The Relationship of National Emancipation to Revolution
3. Race, Class, and Slavery: The Civil War as a Second American Revolution
4. Ireland: Nationalism, Class, and the Labor Movement
5. From the Grundrisse to Capital: Multilinear Themes
6. Late Writings on Non-Western and Precapitalist Societies
Conclusion
Appendix. The Vicissitudes of the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe from the 1920s to Today
Notes
References

Kevin B. Anderson is professor of sociology and political science at the University of California–Santa Barbara and most recently, with Janet Afary, the coauthor of Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

'Gandhi, but with guns'

Arundhati Roy on the tribal peoples of India's heroic struggle - of late often under the inspiration of Maoist/Naxalite strategy and tactics - against the might of the Indian state - there is also a video once can watch here

'Significant wars are often fought in unlikely places...Here in the forests of Dantewara a battle rages for the soul of India. Plenty has been said about the deepening crisis in Indian democracy and the collusion between big corporations, major political parties and the security establishment. If any body wants to do a quick spot check, Dantewara is the place to go.'

More on W.E.B. Du Bois

This blog has always had a soft spot for W.E.B. Du Bois, so Lenin's Tomb's long review of The End of Empires: African Americans and India by Gerald Horne was most welcome. Some issues of The Crisis, the journal of the NAACP that Du Bois founded and edited for a long period, seem to be available online - which is also nice.

Eric Hobsbawm remembers Victor Kiernan

The recent death of Victor Kiernan (1913-2009), one of the twentieth century's outstanding Marxist historians in general, and of imperialism in particular, is very sad and a great loss to the left. I was fortunate enough to have some correspondence with him in his last years, and I will always remember his generous help and kindness - and I regret never meeting him in person to thank him personally for it. I have decided to reprint Eric Hobsbawm's tribute, HISTORIAN WITH A GLOBAL VISION OF EMPIRE, MARXISM, POLITICS AND POETRY on Histomat by way of a small tribute to a great intellectual.

Victor Kiernan, who has died aged 95, was a man of unselfconscious charm and staggeringly wide range of learning. He was also one of the last survivors of the generation of British Marxist historians of the 1930s and 1940s. If this generation has been seen by the leading German scholar HU Wehler as the main factor behind "the global impact of English historiography since the 1960s", it was largely due to Victor's influence. He brought to the debates of the Communist party historians' group between 1946 and 1956 a persistent, if always courteous, determination to think out problems of class culture and tradition for himself, whatever the orthodox position. He continued to remain loyal to the flexible, open-minded Marxism of the group to which he had contributed so much.

Most influential through his works on the imperialist era, he was also, almost certainly, the only historian who also translated 20th-century Urdu poets and wrote a book on the Latin poet Horace. The latter's works he, like the distinguished Polish Marxist historian Witold Kula, carried with him on his travels.

Like several of his contemporaries among the Marxist historians, including Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton and Edward Thompson, he came from a nonconformist background. In his case it was a lower-middle-class, actively congregationalist family in Ashton-on-Mersey, though in his time as a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, he used his Irish name as an excuse to justify a lack of zeal for the British monarchy.

He came to Trinity College from Manchester grammar school in 1931 and remained there for the next seven years as an exceptionally brilliant undergraduate, research scholar and, from 1937, fellow. In 1934, the year of his graduation (double starred first in history), he joined the Communist party, in which he remained for the next 25 years. His first book, British Diplomacy in China 1880-1885 (1939) announced his consistent interest in the world outside Europe.

Unlike his Trinity comrade John Cornford, about whom he wrote with remarkable perception, his public profile among Cambridge Communist party members of the 1930s was low. Only those with special interests were likely to meet him, a boyish face emerging in a dressing-gown from among mountain ranges of books on the attic floor of Trinity Great Court. This was because he soon took over the officially non-existent "colonial group" from the Canadian EH Norman, later a distinguished historian of Japan, diplomat and eventual victim of the McCarthyite witch-hunt in the US, and first of a succession of communist (and later ex-communist) historians who looked after the "colonials" - overwhelmingly from south Asia - until 1939.

Marxism and the irresistible friendship of Indians moved Victor, in 1938, to use one year of his four-year Trinity fellowship to visit the subcontinent. This was nominally "to see the political scene at closer hand and with some schemes for historical study" and he also had a Comintern document for the Indian CP.

He was to stay there until 1946, mainly as a teacher at a Sikh college and, somewhat unexpectedly, at that stronghold of the raj and its rajahs, Aitchison college, both in Lahore. He returned, "reading Thucydides on the Peloponnesian war" in his cabin, with a cargo of friendships, a permanent passion for the great (and progressive) Urdu poets Iqbal and Faiz whom he translated, but with no apparent trace in his subsequent life of a short-lived marriage to Shanta Gandhi, whom he had got to know in London in 1938. Few of his British friends were even aware of it, or expected to see this quintessential bachelor don with a wife, before his fortunate second marriage in 1984 to Heather Massey.

He returned to Trinity, an unreconstructed, but always critical, communist with vast plans for a Marxist work on Shakespeare. His referee denounced his politics when he applied for posts at Oxford and Cambridge universities, but - such was Britain in 1948 - did not mind the charming subversive contaminating the history department at Edinburgh University. There he remained until retirement from a chair in 1977, to all appearances at ease with himself, though not, except for some science fiction, with the post-1945 cultural world. He returned from long bicycle rides across the Pentlands to a flat at the top of an austere staircase in the New Town, to write - not least the diary which he had kept since 1935 - and amaze students and admiring friends by his surprise that they did not know as much as he.

He settled down in the 1950s to publish on everything: from Wordsworth to Faiz, evangelicalism to mercenaries and absolute monarchy, Indo-Central Asian problems, Paraguay and the "war of the Pacific" of Chile, Peru and Bolivia, not forgetting a full-scale study of the Spanish revolution of 1854. In the 1960s he discovered his unique gift of asking historical questions, and suggesting answers, by bringing and fitting together an unparalleled range of erudition, constantly extended by one of the great readers of our time. He became the master of the perfectly chosen quotation inserted into a demure but uncompromising survey of a global scene. Nobody else could have produced the remarkable works on the era of western empires he wrote after the middle 1960s, and by which he will be chiefly remembered, notably The Lords of Human Kind: Black Man, Yellow Man and White Man in an Age of Empire (1969).

Age increased his output and the range of his writings. Co-editing A Dictionary of Marxist Thought (1984), he wrote entries on agnosticism, Christianity, empires in Marx's day, Hinduism, historiography, intellectuals, Paul Lafargue, nationalism, MN Roy, religion, revolution and war. Before the end of the 20th century he published books on State and Society in Europe 1550-1650 (1980), The Duel in European History (1989), Tobacco: A History (1991), Shakespeare Poet and Citizen (1992), Eight Tragedies of Shakespeare (1996) and Horace Poetics & Politics (1999) on his admired poet.

To mark his 90th birthday, the future general secretary of the Communist party (Marxist) of India edited Across Time and Continents, a selection of Victor's writings and reminiscences of the subcontinent which had been closer to his heart than any other part of the 20th-century world. His wife Heather survives him.

• Victor Gordon Kiernan, historian, born 4 September 1913; died 17 February 2009

Edited to add: Obituary by Tariq Ali

Tariq Ali on the assault on Mumbai

Why should it be such a surprise if the perpetrators are themselves Indian Muslims? Its hardly a secret that there has been much anger within the poorest sections of the Muslim community against the systematic discrimination and acts of violence carried out against them of which the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom in shining Gujarat was only the most blatant and the most investigated episode, supported by the Chief Minister of the State and the local state apparatuses.

Add to this the continuing sore of Kashmir which has for decades been treated as a colony by Indian troops with random arrests, torture and rape of Kashmiris an everyday occurrence. Conditions have been much worse than in Tibet, but have aroused little sympathy in the West where the defense of human rights is heavily instrumentalised.

Indian intelligence outfits are well aware of all this and they should not encourage the fantasies of their political leaders. Its best to come out and accept that there are severe problems inside the country. A billion Indians: 80 percent Hindus and 14 percent Muslims. A very large minority that cannot be ethnically cleansed without provoking a wider conflict.

None of this justifies terrorism, but it should, at the very least, force India’s rulers to direct their gaze on their own country and the conditions that prevail. Economic disparities are profound. The absurd notion that the trickle-down effects of global capitalism would solve most problems can now be seen for what it always was: a fig leaf to conceal new modes of exploitation.

Full article here. See also here and here.
Edited to add: Good article by Priyamvada Gopal
Edited to add: Arundhati Roy on Mumbai

Antonio Gramsci and India

A Readers Words has an interesting article on Antonio Gramsci and his impact on Indian intellectuals.

Socialist Worker on the 'Indian uprising'

There is a good article in Socialist Worker about how anger against
pig fat, pig-ignorance and racist bullying led to a rather serious 'diplomatic incident' taking place between Britain and India. Oh, and Yuri Prasad has written about recent events on Celebrity Big Brother...

Churchill on Gandhi

"It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer...this malignant subversive fanatic...striding half-naked up to 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...The truth is that Gandhiism and all it stands for will, sooner or later, have to be grappled with and finally crushed. It is no use trying to satisfy a tiger by feeding him cats meat...it must be made plain that the British nation has no intention of reliquishing its mission in India...we have no intention of casting away the most truly bright and precious jewel in the Crown of the King, which more than all our other Dominions and Dependencies constitutes the glory and strength of the British Empire" - Winston Churchill, 1932. [See Eric Williams, British historians and the West Indies, p. 150-1]

Fifteen years after this racist Churchillian vitriol, in 1947, India won its independence.