Winston Churchill: His Times, His Crimes

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Ali] seeks not so much to flush WC down the toilet of history, but to reassign him to his rightful place as one of history's most over-rated figures ... [a] highly readable book Donald Sassoon, Political Quarterly Donny: I’d like to finish by asking you about the political and social crisis in Britain today. Towards the end of the book, you say, “There needs to be a concerted effort to find an alternative to the neoliberal system.” What do you mean? For the US elite, Churchill-worship was a minority taste among its more Anglophile wing. A competing strategic concern for the United States was the post-reunification of the German state, but its wartime leader could not be revived. The spirit of Churchill, though, sprang eternal, sanctifying the US–UK “special relationship”—a shibboleth of much greater status for the UK than the US. Trump professed admiration for Churchill and made a point of restoring to the Oval Office a bust of Englishman first loaned to George W. Bush by the UK government, but it had first been moved elsewhere by Obama and was finally returned by Biden.

Winston Churchill by Tariq Ali | Waterstones

Russian president Vladimir Putin was assigned the role of Hitler. Zelensky took the part of Churchill. Members of Parliament from all four parties drooled with pleasure. NATO-land may have conferred a temporary sainthood on Zelensky, but we should not overlook how misplaced his analogy is. The spinal cord of the Third Reich was, after all, crushed at Stalingrad and Kursk by the determination and courage of the Red Army (in which many Ukrainians fought, in far greater numbers than those who deserted to Hitler). The strength of the US war industry did the rest. So, the big point is this—the British state is really in a very bad way. It’s in a bad way economically. It’s in a bad way politically. What is going to make the difference now? The important thing about Ali's book, even after a thousand on the same subject, is that it is primarily interested in Churchill's years in service to British imperialism, and only secondarily interested in World War II, inverting the usual balance...a vital corrective. Alex Skopic, Current Affairs Further research would have revealed how horrified Churchill was by Haig’s plans for the Somme: he is on record as telling Maurice Hankey, the future cabinet secretary, so, just before the barrage started. Churchill wasn’t even in government, but is found guilty by association. Ali says that in 1918 “the political leaders of Britain, including Churchill, abandoned the cousin of George V [Nicholas II of Russia] to his fate”. Ali first became politically active in his teens, taking part in opposition to the military dictatorship of Pakistan. An uncle who worked in the Pakistani military intelligence [8] warned his parents that Ali could not be protected. [6] His parents therefore decided to get him out of Pakistan and sent him to England, where he studied Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Exeter College, Oxford. [6] [11] At Oxford, he became a member of the Oxford University Humanist Group, where he discovered "that debates and discussions here were far more stimulating than those conducted within the careerist confines of the Labour Club". [12] He was elected President of the Oxford Union in 1965. In 1967 Ali was one of 64 prominent figures, including the Beatles, who signed a petition calling for the legalisation of marijuana. [13] Ali's tenure at the Union included a meeting with Malcolm X in December 1964 during which Malcolm X expressed deep consternation about his own risk of assassination. [14] Career [ edit ] Ali, Imperial College, London, 2003The principal reason I wrote the book is that the Churchill cult is completely out of control. His career, what he did and his real political views are being obfuscated or covered up. He has become part of the heritage industry, a sort of political Pride and Prejudice on the BBC. I’m glad I’ve written this book because, even on the anti-imperialist side, many of the young people who daubed his statue with slogans have no real idea of the full details. I’m not saying this in a patronising way—the material has simply never been collected and put together. There needs to be an alternative account to set the record straight against the Churchill cult, which encompasses the Tories, Liberals, right-wing Labour and indeed a lot of left-wing Labour too.

Churchill Society Dreary Times - International Churchill Society

Tariq Ali's The Leopard and The Fox, first written as a BBC screenplay in 1985, is about the last days of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. Never previously produced because of a censorship controversy, it was finally premiered in New York in October 2007, the day before former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto returned to her home country after eight years in exile. [31] In Britain everyone was staggered that Corbyn won the Labour leadership by securing a sort of political semi-uprising by the young. They joined Labour because they liked what Corbyn was saying. The whole of Britain’s establishment was shaken. The chief of staff of the British army was wheeled onto breakfast television at the height of the campaign against Corbyn together with Maria Eagle, Labour’s shadow secretary of state for defence. He actually said there was a great deal of unrest in the military and that, were Corbyn elected prime minister, there would be mutinies. Reaction from the liberals? Nothing. When Corbyn wrote to David Cameron, who was then the prime minister, to complain about this sort of behaviour, Cameron replied, “Well, one of your colleagues was sitting next to the general during this discussion, and she agreed with him. So, what are you complaining about?” The evidence of Churchill’s antiheroism is abundant. He is often credited with opposing Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s policy of “appeasement” in the late 1930s, and calling for rearmament in the face of Nazi Germany’s increasingly aggressive irredentism. But that is hardly to proclaim Churchill a noble antifascist; he remained in many respects an arch-reactionary. As was well known at the time, his position in the Spanish Civil War had been the same as Hitler’s and Mussolini’s: all three had supported Franco. For his part, Ali offers nothing new beyond tediously attempting to connect some contemporary movements with the actions, decisions, and writings of a statesman who retired in 1955. There is no continuity, and the scope of the book is decidedly confused. Rather than making the case that Churchill was an imperialist murderer, Ali simply ranges ponderously through a time in which Churchill featured. The record of Churchill as war leader needs some careful deconstructing. When war broke out in 1939, Britain was ruled by appeasers, who did not want war with Germany and who were both unwilling and ineffective in preparing for war. Less than a year previously, Chamberlain had allowed Hitler to take over part of Czechoslovakia at the time of Munich. In May 1940, when Britain had been defeated in Norway and defeat in France loomed, Chamberlain was forced out and Churchill replaced him as prime minister. He was not the first choice of the ruling class: the king and many Tories wanted the appeaser Halifax. When Churchill rose in his first speech as prime minister his own side was largely silent, while the Labour benches applauded. He governed in coalition with Labour during the war.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson posing with a bust of Winston Churchill in the US Capitol, Washington, D.C., September 22, 2021 During Churchill’s lifetime, many people spat at the very mention of his name. Richard Burton, who played Churchill in the Hollywood biopic, was questioned by the New York Times. They asked, “Mr Burton, your performance was really great. What do you think of the man?” Burton said he was a murderer and a vindictive toy soldier. Burton had grown up in the valleys, and Churchill’s reputation in Wales had never recovered from Tonypandy. So, the cult of Churchill was designed to wipe out all this history and present him as the one great hero, the greatest Englishmen. That is the view that is being propagated today. There is also a US-EU operation being prepared, intending to use the Uyghurs as pawns in further internal destabilisation. There are, reportedly, several thousand Uyghurs in Turkey being trained in live wars (such as in Syria).