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The Ultimate Case Against the Churchill Cult

By Keith Knight | The Libertarian Institute | September 7, 2024

According to the National WWII Museum, the Second World War resulted in 45,000,000 civilian deaths, 15,000,000 combat deaths, and 25,000,000 soldiers permanently wounded.

This is what many academics and media influencers refer to as “The Good War.”

Just as we cannot truly understand a court case hearing only the defense, we must also hear the prosecution in order to come to the most accurate conclusion on who is guilty, who is innocent, and how such a tragedy can be avoided in the future.

I want to make the case that the Second World War is in fact a tale of good vs. evil. In short, evil politicians on every side conscripting millions of people and murdering millions of others while the civilians of all countries remain good.

Since there is no shortage of people rightfully vilifying the Japanese Empire and the German National Socialists, I would like to focus primarily on the villainy of a man who Cambridge University reports is the “Greatest Briton”: Winston Churchill.

Exhibit A: Starvation Blockade

Winston Churchill wrote a book titled, The World Crisis, 1911-1918. In this book Churchill summarizes the British naval policy during World War I when Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty. On page 672, Churchill writes.

“The British blockade treated the whole of Germany as if it were a beleaguered fortress, and avowedly sought to starve the whole population – men, women and children, old and young, wounded and sound – into submission.”

Notice, Churchill did not say, “This is how we will make the Kaiser suffer and prove we are the good people in this conflict by protecting innocent people. We good men must discriminate between evil Germans and innocent Germans.” The Kaiser was humiliated of course, but was never assassinated, and lived in a mansion in the Netherlands after the war was over, dying in 1941 at the age of 82.

According to historian Martin Gilbert, a man who writes Churchill in a very favorable light in his book The First World War: A Complete History, estimates of the civilian death toll from Britain’s blockade are 762,106.

Many people might have predicted that such protectionist policies would stimulate the German economy since Germany would now have to employ more people domestically, which should produce the multiplier effect of money. But of course, the opposite is true. When any state coercively stops a group of people from engaging in mutually beneficial trades, human beings suffer and frequently die as a result.

Exhibit B: Poison Gas and Biological Warfare

On May 12, 1919, Winston Churchill authored a war office memorandum in which he writes:

“I do not understand the squeamishness about the use of gas… I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes. The moral effect should be so good that the loss of life should be reduced to a minimum. It is not necessary to use only the most deadly gasses: gasses can be used which cause great inconvenience and would spread a lively terror and yet would leave no serious permanent effects on most of those effected.”

Would you have a friend in your life if he used poison gas against people he deemed uncivilized in order to spread a lively terror? Any one of us would be rightfully imprisoned for assault if we used poison gas against a non-aggressor. Yet, Churchill is still celebrated as a respectable statesman even though none of us would accept this behavior from any other person in our private lives.

In 1942, the United Kingdom’s War Department Experimental station conspired to infect the German civilian population with deadly anthrax by first poisoning animals, in hopes that the German food supply would turn deadly. According to the BBC in an article discussing the “island of death” off the coast of Scotland:

“The truth was that Gruinard Island had been the site of a clandestine attempt by the UK during World War Two to weaponise anthrax, a deadly bacterial infection… The project, called Operation Vegetarian, had started under Paul Fildes, then head of the biology department at Porton Down, a military facility in Wiltshire, England, that still exists today… The plan was to infect linseed cakes with Anthrax spores and drop them by plane into cattle pastures around Germany. The cows would eat the cakes and contract anthrax, as would those who ate the infected meat. Anthrax is a naturally occurring but deadly organism… The proposed plan would have decimated Germany’s meat supply, and triggered a nationwide anthrax contamination, resulting in an enormous death toll.”

Those fighting on behalf of civilization, truth, and freedom must lead the world in distinguishing themselves from the “bad guys” by explicitly discriminating between guilty and innocent parties. Churchill took no such steps to distinguish between the German civilian population, and the central figures of the national socialist state (Hitler, Hess, Goering, Eichmann, Goebbels, etc).

Exhibit C: De-Housing Policy

As the history of World War II is described in its cartoonish version with the National Socialists being hell bent on taking over planet Earth and killing all non-blue eyed, blond haired people, one can be forgiven for not knowing that it was Churchill’s government which initiated the bombing of civilians in May 1940, while the German bombing of London did not take place until the September 1940 Blitz.

The mastermind behind Winston Churchill’s policy of civilian bombing was German immigrant, physicist, and science advisor Frederick Lindemann, 1st Viscount Cherwell. Lindemann established the S-Branch (Statistical Branch), an esoteric group of academics who regularly advised Prime Minister Churchill, and eventually was the catalyst behind Britain’s “Dehousing” policy with regard to the German civilian population.

This “Dehousing” policy was explained by Charles Percy Snow, whose position in Churchill’s cabinet was described by Britannica as “a scientific advisor to the British government” during the Second World War. In 1961, Harvard University published Snow’s Science and Government, a series of lectures Snow gave at Harvard describing the internal workings of British policy from 1939-1945. On page 48 of the lecture’s transcript, Snow claims:

“… [T]he paper on bombing went out to the top government scientists. It described, in quantitative terms, the effect on Germany of a British bombing offensive in the next eighteen months (approximately March 1942-September 1943). The paper laid down a strategic policy. The bombing must be directed essentially against German working-class houses. Middle-class houses have too much space round them, and so are bound to waste bombs; factories and “military objectives” had long since been forgotten, except in official bulletins, since they were much too difficult to find and hit. The paper claimed that—given a total concentration of effort on the production and use of bombing aircraft—it would be possible, in all larger towns of Germany (that is, those with more than 50,000 inhabitants), to destroy 50 per cent of all houses.”

The strategic bombing policy was also explained by Principal Assistant Secretary of Air Ministry J.M. Spaight in his 1944 book, Bombing Vindicated :

“Retaliation was certain if we carried the war into Germany… Yet, because we were doubtful about the psychological effect of propagandist distortion of the truth that it was we who started the strategic offensive, we have shrunk from giving our great decision of May, 1940, the publicity which it deserved. That surely, was a mistake. It was a splendid decision. It was as heroic, as self-sacrificing, as Russia’s decision to adopt her policy of ‘scorched earth’… It could have harmed us morally only if it were equivalent to an admission that we were the first to bomb towns.”

In 1979, British journalist and military historian Max Hastings (foreign correspondent for the BBC, editor in chief of The Daily Telegraph, and editor of the Evening Standard ) published Bomber Command: The Myths and Reality of the Strategic Bombing Offensive 1939-45. On page 127-8, Hastings cites the Cherwell Memorandum (aka Lindemann Memorandum) which he delivered to Prime Minister Churchill in March of 1942. The memorandum reads as follows:

“The following seems a simple method of estimating what we could do by bombing Germany. Careful analysis of the effects of raids on Birmingham, Hull and elsewhere have shown that, on the average, one ton of bombs dropped on a built-up area demolishes 20-40 dwellings and turns 100-200 people out of house and home.

We know from our experience that we can count on nearly 14 operational sorties per bomber produced. The average lift of the bombers we are going to produce over the next fifteen months will be about three tons. It follows that each of these bombers will in its lifetime drop about forty tons of bombs. If these are dropped on built-up areas they will make 4,000-8,000 people homeless.

In 1938 over 22 million Germans lived in fifty-eight towns of over 100,000 inhabitants, which, with modern equipment, should be easy to find and hit. Our forecast output of heavy bombers (including Wellingtons) between now and the middle of 1943 is about 10,000. If even half the total load of 10,000 bombers were dropped on the built-up areas of these fifty-eight German towns, the great majority of their inhabitants (about one-third of the German population) would be turned out of house and home.

Investigation seems to show that having one’s house demolished is most damaging to morale. People seem to mind it more than having their friends or even relatives killed. At Hull, signs of strain were evident, though only one-tenth of the houses were demolished. On the above figures we should be able to do ten times as much harm to each of the fifty-eight principal German towns. There seems little doubt that this would break the spirit of the people.

Our calculation assumes, of course, that we really get one-half of our bombs into built-up areas. On the other hand, no account is taken of the large promised American production (6,000 heavy bombers in the period in question). Nor has regard been paid to the inevitable damage to factories, communications, etc., in these towns and the damage by fire, probably accentuated by breakdown of public services.” [Emphasis Added]

Exhibit D: Intentional Provocation of Bombing Britain

The Complete War Memoirs of Charles de Gaulle, who at the time was chairman of the French National Committee, addresses Churchill’s mindset after the British state initiated the bombing of civilians with no German state response for months. From page 104 of his memoirs, de Gaulle writes:

“Among the people many, in their desire to emerge from an almost unbearable tension, went so far as to say out loud that they wished the enemy would risk the attack. Foremost among them, Mr. Churchill found the waiting hard to bear. I can still see him at Chequers, one August day, raising his fists towards the sky as he cried, ‘So they won’t come!’ ‘Are you in such a hurry,’ I said to him, ‘to see your towns smashed to bits?’ ‘You see,’ he replied, ‘the bombing of Oxford, Coventry, Canterbury, will cause such a wave of indignation in the United States that they’ll come into the war!’”

Churchill knew the blowback his de-housing policy would create for British civilians, and he still unapologetically pursued them.

Exhibit E: France’s Pearl Harbor aka Operation Catapult

On July 3, 1940 Churchill initiated Operation Catapult, which was Britain’s intentional bombing of French naval ships off the coast of Algeria resulting in the deaths of 1,297 French soldiers.

According to the International Churchill Society:

“In the summer of 1940 Winston Churchill faced a terrible dilemma. France had just surrendered and only the English Channel stood between the Nazi’s and Britain. Germany was poised to seize the entire French fleet, one of the biggest in the world. With these ships in his hands, Hitler’s threat to invade Britain could become a reality. Churchill had to make a choice. He could either trust the promises of the new French government that they would never hand over their ships to Hitler. Or he could make sure that the ships never joined the German navy by destroying them himself.”

Exhibit F: Dresden

Arthur Harris was a British air officer whom whom Britannica credits as the person “who initiated and directed the ‘saturation bombing’ that the Royal Air Force inflicted on Germany during World War II.” In his memoir Bomber Offensive, Harris addresses the Dresden controversy, where the Allies bombed a city of 630,000 Germans, killing roughly 25,000 human beings in two days:

“An attack on the night of February 13th-14th by just over 800 aircraft, bombing in two sections in order to get the night fighters dispersed and grounded before the second attack, was almost as overwhelming in its effect as the Battle of Hamburg, though the area of devastation—1600 acres—was considerably less; there was, it appears, a fire-typhoon, and the effect on German morale, not only in Dresden but in far distant parts of the country, was extremely serious. The Americans carried out two light attacks in daylight on the next two days. I know that the destruction of so large and splendid a city at this late stage of the war was considered unncessary even by a good many people who admit that our earlier attacks were as fully justified as any other operation of war. Here I will only say that the attack on Dresden was at the time considered a military necessity by much more important people than myself, and that if their judgment was right the same arguments must apply that I have set out in an earlier chapter in which I said what I think about the ethics of bombing as a whole… Between one and two thousand acres were devastated in Dresden, Bremen, Duisburg, Essen, Frankfurt-am-Main, Hanover, Munich, Nuremburg, Mannheim-Ludwigshafen, and Stuttgart. As an indication of what this means it may be mentioned that London had about 600, Plymouth about 400, and Coventry just over 100 acres destroyed by enemy aircraft during the war.” [Emphasis Added]

Anyone who considers themself to be pro-life must unapologetically oppose the mass murder of civilians and destruction of cities so late in the war (February 1945). Yes, I agree the fetus is a living being, and so are German civilians.

Anyone who claims to oppose ‘inequality’ must recognize there is no greater inequality than a living person murdering another person. Yes, paying a person a low wage is unequal to those with high wages, but the ultimate inequality occurs in the mass murder of civilians in wartime.

Colonel Carla Coulson’s research at Canadian Forces College estimates that:

“600,000 German men, women and children died as a result of the direct bombing of German cities during the war (1939-1945); many thousands more were wounded and mutilated. Millions more were left homeless. In the prosecution of the bombing campaign the British Commonwealth lost 55,573 aircrew, 18% of which were Canadian, and only one man in three could be expected to survive his tour of duty, which equated to 30 missions, with Bomber Command.”

Exhibit G: Undemocratic and Allied with Tyrants

In May 1940, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain stepped down after the “Narvik debacle,” and Winston Churchill was appointed, not by popular vote, but an act of oligarchs in Parliament.

For all we hear about “threats to democracy” from academics and the corporate press, you’d think Churchill’s rule would be met with a little more skepticism.

To recap, the “good side in the good war” was lead by unelected Joseph Stalin, unelected Winston Churchill, unelected Charles de Gaulle, and Franklin Roosevelt, who while elected kidnapped and sent 117,000 people of Japanese ancestry to interment camps and confiscated the nations gold via executive order.

Roosevelt and Harry Truman, frequent heroes of those who proudly boast of supporting democracy, also partook in a mass murder campaign of their own in Japan. According to former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara in his documentary The Fog of War,

“Proportionality should be a guideline in war. Killing 50 percent to 90 percent of the people of 67 Japanese cities and then bombing them with two nuclear bombs is not proportional, in the minds of some people, to the objectives we were trying to achieve.”

To be clear, I’m a libertarian who believes democracy is mob rule by the ignorant. The reason we have good computers, TVs, refrigerators, and NBA players is not because there was a nation-wide referendum on these issues. The reason we have civilization is because people engaged in voluntary contracts, voluntary profit incentives, and the Iron Law of Oligarchy within the division of labor.

The point is, those who center their world view on democracy (neoconservatives and Democrats) being a good in and of itself idolize Winston Churchill.

Exhibit H: Intention of Continental Monopoly

There is good reason courts take intent into account. The mindset of the person in question matters, for example: Did a person accidentally hit and kill a pedestrian with their car (involuntary manslaughter), or did they plan for months to murder someone by hitting them with their car (intentional homicide)?

What were Churchill’s intentions during this war? To save civilization from barbarism (by allying with Joseph Stalin, who killed millions in the 1930s Ukrainian Holodomor) or to increase his own institutional power?

In a book titled Churchill: A Life by historian Martin Gilbert, the author quotes Churchill in an exchange with Lord Londonderry—Leader of the House of Lords—on May 4, 1935:

Londonderry: “I should like to get out of your mind what appears to be a strong anti-german obsession.”

Churchill: “[You are] mistaken in supposing that I have an anti-German obsession… British policy for four hundred years has been to oppose the strongest power in Europe by weaving together a combination of other countries strong enough to face the bully. Sometimes it is Spain, sometimes the French monarchy, sometimes the French Empire, sometimes Germany. I have no doubt who it is now. But if France set up to claim the over-lordship of Europe, I should equally endeavor to oppose them. It is thus through the centuries we have kept our liberties and maintained our life and power.”

Churchill’s private position was not that the National Socialists were a unique evil, but that he would wage war on any competitor to British power, even if it comes at the cost of millions of innocent people being conscripted and killed. Churchill embraced real world tyranny in order to fight a hypothetical tyranny. Churchill was the crazy ex-boyfriend who would rather kill his ex-girlfriend than see her with another man.

Exhibit I: Results

On September 1, 1939, the National Socialist regime invaded Poland after a dispute over the city of Danzig which had been stripped from Germany twenty years prior at Versailles. The population of that coastal city was 95% German, and we have every reason to believe those people would have prefered to be reunified with Germany as opposed to remaining a minority in Poland.

Here is the text of Neville Chamberlain’s September 3, 1939 declaration of war against Germany two days afterwards:

“This morning, the British ambassador in Berlin handed the German government a final note stating that unless we heard from them by 11 o’clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.”

The war waged on behalf of Polish independence ended with 7.1 million dead Poles, and Poland under Soviet occupation.

There was never a true war guarantee for Poland, since the Bolshevik regime invaded Poland on September 17, 1939, and Britain didn’t declare war against Moscow. It was a promise to wage war against only Germany, the biggest rival of Churchill’s empire.

Many will claim, “The lesson from World War II is never appease! That’s what Chamberlain did at Munich when he refused to declare war against National Socialism for invading the Sudetenland.”

The Sudetenland was roughly one fifth of the area in the newly created country of Czechoslovakia, mostly consisting of Germanic peoples. After the Second World War, all of Czechoslovakia was under Soviet occupation. We must declare war if one fifth of a country’s independence has been violated, but when the entire country’s independence is violated, we can apparently appease.

There are multiple lessons one can draw from the example of World War II, ones which organizations like the Council on Foreign Relations will never acknowledge. They include:

1. War guarantees incentivize small groups of people to provoke wars since a few oligarchs can benefit from war at the expense of the population they claim to be protecting. Consider how the power, prestige, and social status of Volodymyr Zelensky has risen drastically while hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have had to suffer. The very people you claim to help (like Poles) can suffer most as a result.
2. The ultimate check and balance in a civilized society is the freedom to disassociate with bad actors. The governments of every combat zone did not face such a constraint. They used enslaved soldiers (conscripts) and funded their operations with taxation and money printed by a central bank. This means that people who opposed the mass murder conflicts provoked by government had to serve by law, and had to fund the operations lest they be jailed. If governments truly represent us, they should gladly allow our financing of them to be as voluntary like our funding of Amazon or the Catholic Church.
3. Empires fall from expansion. The world wars saw the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Russian Czarist Empire, two German empires (Kaiser and Hitler), Hirohito’s Japanese Empire, and the British Empire. As empires expand their reach, their obligations expand, and they must tax more or print more to sustain themselves. They become “spread too thin,” so to speak, misallocate military personnel, lose support via public opinion, and cease to exist.
4. We can talk to the bad guys. The Allies shook hands with the Bolshevik leader Joesph Stalin at Yalta and Richard Nixon shook hands with Mao Zedong in China, but people say with a straight face that Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping cannot be spoken with to reach détente. Notice how whenever the government of the United States violates the freedoms of the American people, we must always stay calm and not get riled up. But when an alleged foreign government potentially violates our freedoms we must advocate mass conscription and mass bombings of civilians to protect our way of life.
5. We are always told about the cost of “appeasement” or not engaging in mass murder of innocent life. But consider all the downsides of war: mass death, enslavement (conscription), dismemberment, PTSD, military occupation, and property damage on an unimaginable scale.
6. Wars are naturally chaotic and their results cannot often be predicted. Few soldiers and civilians could have foreseen an outcome where half of Europe would be occupied by the Bolshevik regime for forty-five years, initiating a Cold War where people walked on eggshells terrified of a nuclear exchange and fighting mass death proxy wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Central America.

A Gift

Psychology Today defines a cult leader as “A charismatic leader who becomes an object of worship beyond any meaningful accountability and becomes the single most defining element of the group as its source of truth, power, and authority.”

If a guy in a cabin orders you to murder an innocent person on his behalf, he is rightfully seen as a psychopathic lunatic. But for some reason—maybe the fact that governments monopolize compulsory education—when military commanders order their underlings to go commit mass murder of innocent people it is seldom met with skepticism, and even often admired.

The unwillingness or inability for people to see Winston Churchill as a cult leader who committed horrific crimes qualifies him as a cult leader if there ever was one. We seldom even get an intellectual defense by Churchill supporters addressing my above points. Instead we’re treated to typical cult-like emotional responses like “You must love Hitler,” or “Churchill saved the West, yes one man!” or the classic, “We’d all be speaking German if you were in charge.”

For the Churchill supporters, I give the gift which they so often yearn for: a disavowal of National Socialism:

National Socialism involves institutionalized aggression against private property and contracts between consenting adults while judging people on arbitrary characteristics and is thus evil down to its foundational principles.

In practice, the National Socialists bombed civilians in Warsaw, Rotterdam, and London, then declared war on America on December 11, 1941. Here is how evil one of their leading figures was. On March 26, 1942, Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary:

“Beginning with Lublin, the Jews in General Government are now being evacuated eastward. The procedure is a pretty barbaric one and not to be described here more definitely. Not much will remain of the Jews. On the whole it can be said that about 60 per cent of them will have to be liquidated whereas only about 40 per cent can be used for forced labor.”

National Socialists justified the mass murder and enslavement of innocent people while bombing cities which took centuries to build, thus violating the non-aggression principle. They are indisputably villains of history.

A Way Forward

While I am very pleased to hear people disavow Hamas and the Israeli Defense Forces for their killing of innocent people, we inheritors of Western civilization must reject double standards and equally oppose the mass indiscriminate murder of civilians. Yes, the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020 were unjustifiable and destructive, but nothing compares to the crimes of states with militaries which have a legally recognized monopoly on violence.

Every crime of the West (slavery, Native American massacres, segregation, etc) is immoral because it involves one person or group of people initiating violence against non-aggressors. Too often the focus of these atrocities is the race or nationality of the victim or perpetrator as opposed to the actions being immoral insofar as they initiate violence against non-aggressors.

The heroes of history are not politicians who claim the right to rule millions of strangers, but entrepreneurs and workers who used the voluntary sector to improve the lives of everyday people. Cornelius Vanderbilt drastically lowered the price of travel by steamship from $7 to six cents, giving the average person access his ancestors never could have fathomed. Steve Jobs and Apple employees played a central role in giving the average person access to more freely available communication with people across the globe while empowering people to educate themselves using this easy to grasp technology. The Wright Brothers gave the average person the ability to see parts of the world kings and queens of the past never could have imagined visiting.

Let us not be primitive moral relativists, only using morality when it suits us. Let us reject double standards on violence and embrace a genuine pro-life and antiwar position unapologetically.

September 7, 2024 - Posted by aletho | Book Review, Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Germany, Human rights, UK