WE HAVE GOT TO LOVE CHURCHILL, TOO
Mayer, Milton
We Have Got To Love Churchill, Too By MILTON MAYER IN 1942 The Progressive said, "We Have Got to Lick Churchill, Too." In 1950 The Progressive says, "We Have Got to Love Churchill, Too." One of...
...Churchill is twice as sinful as I am because he is twice as old...
...This is not to suggest—heaven forfend!—that Churchill, the original antediluvian, has become a progressive...
...Now, these sudden changes, at the end of a man's life, are bound to be suspect...
...The Tories, with Churchill's announcement that he would try to keep the peace, came within a handful of votes of winning the general election...
...We have got to lick Truman—as well as McCarthy—because the one will destroy us abroad while the other destroys us at home...
...The single condition for staying alive—or getting rich—in America is now no longer to be for anything but to be against Communism...
...It was at once apparent to The Progressive that the war could not be won for human freedom in Germany unless it was also won for human freedom for the British Empire's half billion Indian, Malayan, Arabian, and African colonial slaves, whom Churchill meant to hold in slavery...
...Since the Tories did not want to quarrel with Labor on the domestic program, which had given the British people new teeth and new hope, he, Churchill, changed the subject to the foreign program of Labor, which was just as stupid and futile as that of America's Fair Dealers, and which had filled the British people with new fear that set their new teeth to chattering...
...changed for the better, we would say...
...Al Smith spent the first 60 years of his life fighting the good fight for mankind...
...III Old Churchill is irresponsible, they say, because he doesn't have to govern...
...Give it the jaundiced eye, it you 'will...
...Churchill doing business with Stalin...
...The desire for glory, booty, territory, dynastic or national aggrandisement, hopes of a speedy, splendid victory with all its excitement, the thunder of the cannonade— temptations from even which those who only fight for righteous causes are not always exempt—are now superseded by a preliminary stage of measureless agony from which neither side could protect itself...
...We are all sinners and all, through our first parents, equally sinners...
...Moreover, the democracies of the West must be convinced that those who lead them do not despair of peace . . . ." "The Labor Party," said one of the world's great newspapers, The Manchester Guardian, "gave him the most attentive hearing he had had from it since the war...
...Moralists may find it a melancholy thought that peace can find no nobler foundation than mutual terror, but I shall be content if these foundations are solid, because they will give us the extra time and breathing space for the supreme effort which has to be made for a world settlement...
...It is less likely, at least in my case, that we would have changed as much as he has, or seems to have, in the past six months...
...No one supposes that, to the extent that he accepts the current domestic reforms of the past quarter-century, he does so for any other reason than that he can not remain in politics and do otherwise...
...So, too, with Churchill...
...He is the only Western statesman—his Eastern counterpart here is Prime Minister Nehru of India, one of his former slaves—who has any discernible intention of keeping the peace...
...The occasion was Churchill's statement that he had no designs on new territory after the war, but "we mean to hold our own...
...In an effort to fight his way out of the box, he tries to outdo the McCarthys, the Legionnaires, and the Kluxers in his denunciation of Communism and of Russia...
...changed for the worse, we would say...
...No one need disillusion himself by underrating the difficulties which stand in the way of a settlement by closing his eyes to the gulf between the two worlds now facing each other, armed and arming, reaching out for agencies which might eventually destroy the human race...
...If, in 1948, the American Republicans had done the same thing, proclaiming a bipartisan domestic policy and denouncing the Democrats' foreign policy as stupid and futile, we might have been spared Truman and Acheson...
...In both cases it looked like something less than conversion—either eccentricity, or senility, or campaign oratory...
...These fearful cataclysms would be simultaneous and neither side could prevent them...
...In the midst of the great regression, he, like every other domestic reformer, however mild, is hard put to prove to a rapidly maddening populace, that he is not a Communist...
...One of three inferences—or a limited number of combinations of them—is possible...
...Truman has reached the I-yield-to-no-man stage...
...Now he is 75 or so, and, like the British Empire and our own, he is not going to live forever...
...He announced his intention of keeping the peace when he campaigned for the Tories in the recent general election in England...
...I have not become the King's first minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire...
...The Progressive said that the worst blow of the war had been dealt the Allies not by Hitler or Hirohito, but by Churchill...
...It may be that the recognition that he is not going to live forever is responsible for his spectacular change...
...And in yielding to no man he, like every other domestic reformer, raises ever higher the wave of terror and hatred across the country, the wave of the past on which the McCarthys ride home...
...His articles have appeared in Commonweal, Harper' s, Fellowship, Negro Digest, Life, The Reader's Digest, The Nation, and The Saturday Evening Post...
...II There was no mistaking where Churchill stood in the first 75 years of his life...
...that England is weak (and if strength is now fatal, are we strong...
...Observe, if you will, that his motivation isn't moral (is ours...
...Churchill the appeaser...
...He hasn't changed that much...
...I feel that we owe to our conscience that no door should be closed which might lead to better prospects...
...Churchill the Christian...
...He, too, swung all the way around in the sixty-first...
...Either The Progressive has changed, or Churchill has changed, or The Progressive has contradicted itself...
...He sat down to cheers from all parts of the House...
...Maybe we ought to find out what brand of irresponsibility he drinks and send old Truman a case before he governs us to death...
...The Progressive wondered whether Churchill and America were fighting for the same thing...
...Observe, if you will, that he wants to resurrect Germany as a power, but observe, too, that unlike us, he does not want to rearm an enslaved and isolated Germany but to include it in a free federation of Europe...
...He stood pat for all-out democracy for white Englishmen with a half million dollars or more invested in 7% obligations upon their fellow-citizens, who were not really fellow-citizens but might be told they were at election time providing it was made clear to them that citizenship did not relieve them of their obligation to pay 7% to the white English investors...
...And, come to think of it, the price that America is paying for the freedom of Britain's colonial slaves is peanuts, if indeed we fought the war for human freedom everywhere, We have even freed Churchill from the worst slavery of all, his own slavery to his own injustice...
...In the instant instance, The Progressive has neither changed nor contradicted itself...
...The election came and went, and a few weeks ago, while Truman, Acheson, and Johnson were whipping up the war hysteria on which McCarthy and the witch-hunters were battening, old Winnie stood up in Commons, swallowed his cigar, and made the only great speech of his career and the only great speech of our time: "I do not believe"—he said in part—"another war is imminent or inevitable, and I believe we have more time if we use it wisely and more hope of warding off that frightful catastrophe from our struggling, ill-informed, and almost helpless human race...
...Churchill has changed...
...Not once was he interrupted...
...It was, however, effective...
...He got no fond farewells from Truman, Acheson, and Johnson...
...Trygve Lie, the "soft-headed" Norwegian who tries to keep the United Nations together, has gone to Moscow to try to initiate "highest level" talks...
...Al Smith changed, near the end of his life, when he took up with the Liberty League...
...We must not fritter it away...
...If I—or you—had been born Churchill, I, or you, would have done what he did...
...er, he would go to see Stalin and find out what Stalin wanted and whether there was any way, not merely within justice, but also within love, to give Stalin what he wanted...
...I can not help coming back to this idea of another talk with Soviet Russia upon the highest level...
...He was not even above including white Nazis in his democracy, and what he really loved was more and more Empire, which could be picked up from time to time in the course of pursuing the hobby that kept him young in heart, namely war...
...He swung all the way around in the sixty-first...
...Willkie spent the first 60 years of his life fighting the bad fight for the exploiters...
...His plea, therefore, for peace, and peace with, of all people, Russians, who are neither white nor 7% obligation holders, appeared in the general election to be more of the same sly old Winnie, no different at the end of his life from the beginning...
...There never was a time when the deterrents against war were so strong...
...We have got to love Churchill because Churchill's way is the way to find out what is right and what is wrong and what can be done about it...
...He said that if he were returned to powMILTON MAYER, a regular contributor to The Progressive, lectures throughout the country for the American Friends Service Committee, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the Jewish Peace Foundation, and the Great Books Foundation...
...While I believe there is time for a further effort for a lasting and peaceful settlement, I can not feel that it is necessarily a long time or that its passage will progressively improve our own safety...
...He is boxed in...
...In 1942, when it was high treason to say it...
...Churchill the peacemonger...
...He stood pat...
...Another world war would begin by both sides suffering as the first step what they dread most...
...The penalties have grown to an extent undreamed of...
...His role is daily more defensive...
...that England will be ruined whoever wins (won't we be...
...Men change, and that fact alone, as Benet observed in The Devil and Daniel Webster, distinguishes them from the barnyard critters...
...Wendell Willkie changed, near the end of his life, when he took up for the forgotten man...
...It is our Christian duty to try our best...
...It still wonders, but more than 400 million of the British Empire's half billion colonial slaves have freed themselves, despite Churchill's howls, and the British, no longer an Empire, are on the American dole, where they would have been, given their location and their resources, two centuries ago had it not been for their half billion colonial slaves...
...Oh, boy—and got Dewey and Dulles...
...This declaration from a hardened old politico, who once praised fascism as eloquently as he damned Communism, appeared, at the time, to be campaign oratory, or hogwash...
...He has not become a radical, or even a liberal...
...Truman deserves our sympathy, if not our support...
...Men change...
Vol. 14 • June 1950 • No. 6
