There was an ideological component of it. But then as time goes on, you read stories about, about Churchill going bankrupt and needing money, getting bailed out by people who shared his interests in terms of Zionism, but also his hostility, I think his hostility…. To put it this way, I think his hostility to Germany was real. I don’t think that he necessarily had to be bribed to have that feeling. But I think he was, to an extent, put in place by people, the financiers, by a media complex that wanted to make sure that he was the guy who was representing Britain in that conflict for a reason. And Churchill is, again, it’s so hard because especially in a short interview like this, where you have this guy who, I mean, he’s an Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Martin Luther King- type figure in the sort of western consciousness, right?…
Neville Chamberlain versus Churchill has been the binary model that has served as the chief rhetorical device for every conflict we’ve wanted to get into since then. Yes, the entire Cold War. And then even after the Cold War, in the Global War on Terror is if you appease them, you’re Neville Chamberlain. Churchill’s the one who saw all along where this was headed and was trying to warn people, this Cassandra. And finally, because nobody listened to him, the war ended up breaking out and we were forced to go stamp out this threat. And now it’s a much bigger threat than it ever would have been if…
And it’s justified every conflict, really, since the Second World War, everybody’s the new Hitler, right? And so, it’s very valuable in that sense. But then also it really did become the founding myth of the global order that we’re all living in now, right?…
These are misinterpretations and inaccuracies about Churchill, who came into the prime ministership on May 10, 1940, in the most awful circumstances imaginable, with a German army steamrolling his chief ally France and an entire British Army about to be captured on the Continent.
1. Churchill spent lavishly and usually met his mounting expenses with a fanatic writing and speaking schedule. I don’t think he was ever properly “bankrupt,” and he had an amazing capacity for super-human and sustained periods of writing and speaking in order to recoup his financial stability. He was not the bought pawn of any media or purported Zionist cabal. Given his voluminous published work the idea that he was “childlike” is silly. During the war, he undertook a number of dangerous flights throughout warzones, sometimes while ill, and in North Africa was in the sights of German artillery. If an adjective of disparagement is needed, then Churchill might be better described as “reckless” with his own health and safety.
2. Churchill/Chamberlain/Hitler is not history’s only warning of the wages of appeasement, much less is it one that is flawed. It predominates because World War II proved the most destructive and probably the most well-documented and discussed conflict in history. And most historians now agree that in 1936–39 the Wehrmacht was weaker than the combined assets of France and Britain, and thus could have been stopped on the European continent at far less cost than the eventual toll of World War II.
Classicists often cite the corpus of Demosthenes’ speeches that warn in detail about the growing power of Philip II, and his Macedonian ambitions to destroy the Greek city-states—admonitions that were for the most part ignored as warmongering.
But Demosthenes’ point was that years before the battle of Chaeronea in 338 B.C., the aggregate power of the city-states was more than enough to deter an ascendent Philip II from his easily decipherable agenda of ending Greek freedom.
Some European states of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries made the mistake that they could craft separate and permanent self-interested peace treaties with Napoleon—only disastrously to learn that his pan-continental agendas did not allow for serious rivals.
3. Churchill did not innately dislike Germans, though he detested Nazi Germans. In fact, as First Lord of the Admiralty in 1914, he was criticized for seeking to reach out to German Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz to avoid the financially exhausting naval race between Germany and Britain that might lead to conflict. On several early occasions, he had some hope that the German people would not blindly follow Hitler or that Hitler would himself focus on internal problems and forget about foreign aggrandizement.
He opposed the proposed postwar Morgenthau plan as too punitive on Germans and supported the reintegration of a defeated Germany into the family of European nations. He called for an early NATO effort to save Western Germany from Soviet invasion.
At the Tehran Conference, Churchill reportedly stormed out after assuming Stalin was serious in advocating for the Allied execution of 50,000-100,000 German officers.
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