Blood, Class and Empire

by Christopher Hitchens

  This decision has been taken in response to your appeal for a “common stand.” There is a good deal of anxiety in the Foreign Office and the War Cabinet. I do not myself see where this policy is leading to nor what we expect to get out of the Argentines by this method. . . . I hope you will not mind my saying, as is my duty, that we ourselves were placed in an invidious position by this American decision, to which we are now asked to conform, being taken without consultation with us. We were faced with a fait accompli.

  Rare for Churchill to say anything three times, especially anything critical. He must have felt himself in a position of moral advantage.

  If he exploited this position, it was partly on the ground of its rarity. In a really astonishing volte-face, Roosevelt did receive de Gaulle at the White House on July 6, 1944, a matter of weeks after he had bragged to Churchill that “I will not ever have it said by the French or by American or British commentators that I invited him to visit me in Washington.” More, he unbent to the general to no little extent, confiding in him his postwar plans for a post-colonial world. According to de Gaulle in his memoirs, the President proposed a “permanent system of intervention” with a chain of American bases occupying what had been French and British possessions in Africa and Asia. By including China and France in his plan, Roosevelt also demonstrated a preference for what he had termed “the United Nations” over Anglo-Americanism. Churchill was highly displeased to hear of all this but was dissuaded from making a demarche.

  Later that month he reverted to form, ending a cable by saying that he hoped soon “to be able to report all clear on the British Empire front.” He also protested about the Argentine situation once more, reminding Roosevelt: “You would not send your soldiers into battle on the British meat service ration, which is far above what is given to workmen. Your people are eating per head more meat and more poultry than before the war while ours are mostly sharply cut.”

  As the European and Middle Eastern theaters widened, Churchill seized every chance to stay in the game as at least the senior of the junior partners. In August, discussing the Italian campaign, he told a British staff meeting that “a victory would greatly strengthen our hand in the forthcoming discussions with the Americans.” Arguing in Cabinet about the wisdom of creating a specifically Jewish brigade in Palestine—a proposal made by Chaim Weizmann without effect at the outbreak of war—he said: “Remember the object of this is to give pleasure and an expression to rightful sentiments, and that it certainly will be welcomed widely in the United States.” The flag of the Jewish brigade, as he wrote to Roosevelt, would be “the Star of David on a white background with two light blue bars. I cannot see why this should not be done.” Within a few years, this flag would be a source of rancor between Britain and the United States, but for the moment the concession was seen to be a shrewd one.

  A surreal discussion took place at the second Quebec Conference in September 1944, with Roosevelt outdoing Churchill in vengeful feeling and policy toward “the Hun.” The Morgenthau plan called for the complete deindustrialization of Germany and the reduction of the German people to permanent agrarian status; the Carthage to the new Rome. Initially, Churchill’s response to the plan was to describe it as “unnatural, un-Christian and unnecessary,” but he altered his position and signed a joint memorandum which called for the crushing of “Germany into a country primarily agricultural and pastoral in its character,” the word “pastoral” being added at Churchill’s own prompting. Having made this turnaround to please Roosevelt, he was to see the Morgenthau plan defeated by the combined opposition of Hull and Stimson. Ending this fantastic meeting by giving Roosevelt a copy of his wartime speeches, Churchill inscribed it bizarrely: “To FDR from WSC. A fresh egg from the fruitful hen.” The one concrete result of the Quebec meeting was the acceptance, over Admiral King’s protests, of British ships to aid the American fleet in the Far East. Roosevelt was not deceived by the timing of this gesture, later telling Morgenthau: “All they want is Singapore back.” The next month saw the cancellation of an amphibious landing in formerly British colonial Burma for which Churchill had particularly hoped forces might be spared.

  During the now notorious October 1944 meetings between himself and Stalin in Moscow, Churchill helped put the iron in a curtain he was later famously to christen. Consenting to Russian control over the Baltic states of Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania, and brokering a further exchange of Soviet influence in Poland and Romania for British predominance in Greece, Churchill actually told Stalin that “it was better to express these things in diplomatic terms and not to use the phrase ‘dividing into spheres,’ because the Americans might be shocked.” Averell Harriman, who reported with some accuracy and prescience to Roosevelt on these private meetings, was not exactly shocked. He and the President adopted a “wait and see” policy in the face of this, Churchill’s most barefaced attempt to keep Britain a superpower.

  This ambition received another check at the less dramatic-sounding International Civil Aviation Conference, held in Chicago at the beginning of December 1944. The British side at this conference having tried to restrict American aviation routes to the Atlantic, Roosevelt quite blatantly threatened a cutoff of Lend-Lease unless the proposal was dropped. To this message Churchill replied:

  I was of course very much hurt that this form of pressure should be applied to us, and I hope it will not be thought that the Cabinet was aware of it or influenced by it at the time they agreed to my request. It seems almost to amount to a threat of indirect blockade.

  Two days later he added:

  The British Empire is asked to put invaluable and irreplaceable bases for air transport all over the world at the disposal of such nations as are capable of using them. This means of course primarily and in bulk placing them at the disposal of the United States.

  This showed, though by way of trying to avoid it, that Churchill had got the main point. The same point was made in his appeal in the same cable to be generous.

  You will have the greatest navy in the world. You will have, I hope, the greatest air force. You will have the greatest trade. You have all the gold.

  In a reply drafted by Dean Acheson (which referred to “the British Empire”), Roosevelt more or less told Churchill not to be silly.

  Simultaneously, Roosevelt was taking an unsentimental line about the withdrawal of two Chinese nationalist divisions from India. Although the military logic of this was clear, since they were to support Chiang Kai-shek’s positions under American command, British anxiety about a further postponement of the recapture of Burma was unconcealed.

  In Greece, too, Churchill found that his policy was strenuously opposed by the American administration. Having committed British troops to the victory of one faction in the nascent civil war, he was furious when Admiral King issued an order prohibiting American ships from bringing supplies to British forces in Greece. During the heavy street fighting that followed the British intervention, the American ambassador in Athens at one point refused to allow British troops to drink from the fountain in his garden. Churchill was bewildered by the American attitude, telling Harry Hopkins: “If it can be said in the streets of Athens that the United States are against us, then more British blood will be shed and much more Greek.” He thought that the self-evident Communism of the EAM/ELAS leadership would justify his cause in American eyes. But Washington knew that Churchill had concerted his Greek policy with Stalin in advance. It also had little taste for the Greek monarchy. Most of all, however, it viewed with disfavor any autonomous British zone in the Balkans.

  Between the meetings at Malta and Yalta in the opening months of 1945, Roosevelt studiously avoided Churchill and even told Stalin not to inform him of his planned movements. He also failed to answer Churchill’s repeated pleas that he visit Britain en route to the Black Sea. Additional mortification was provoked by the American decision to sign bilateral aviation agreements with, among other countries, the Irish Republic. Churchill cabled Roosevelt on January 29:
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br />   I have just heard from Dublin that your people are asking the Government of Southern Ireland to sign a bilateral civil aviation agreement. Naturally everyone here is astonished that this should have been started without our being told beforehand.

  Hearing nothing for over a month, Churchill renewed the attack, still referring insultingly and incorrectly to “Southern Ireland,” but varying this at one point by saying:

  Our special concern with Eire is obvious on political and geographical grounds, and it is indeed much closer than that of the United States with the Argentine.

  He received no reply to his demand that the bilateral agreement be annulled.

  Meanwhile, no opportunity was lost for American officials to press Britain for economic concessions. Even at the Yalta summit itself, Roosevelt, at the urging of Stettinius, sent Churchill a memo reminding him of Article VII of the Lend-Lease agreement. This article called for an end to discriminatory trade arrangements within the British Empire. Churchill sought to put off any discussion of this, and there ensued a period of what might be termed Fabian tactics, with John Maynard Keynes at the British Treasury fending off American officials who sought what they called “the liberalization of world trade.”

  In the last few weeks of Roosevelt’s life, Churchill seemed to sense a reticence in him. “I hope,” he cabled on March 17, “that the rather numerous telegrams I have to send you on so many of our difficult and intertwined affairs are not becoming a bore to you.” The reason for this unusually tentative tone may have been Roosevelt’s failure to respond to a telegram about the future of Indochina. Roosevelt had hoped to forestall a French recolonization in the area but died before he could answer a message from Churchill, who was disingenuously proposing an Anglo-American alliance to bring about that precise outcome. The great correspondence thus closes on the outer verge of the long-impending calamity of America and post-colonial Vietnam. Given the constant tension, even in wartime, between British “direct rule” imperialism and American expansionism, this is less of an irony than it may appear.

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  Churchill’s Revenge

  By the time the Second World War was over, isolationists of every stripe had been definitively overtaken by events. It might not be too much to say that they had been undone by history. The combination of victory in a good cause and the measureless expansion of opportunities for American power and influence remade the national consensus. The great phrases in which this achievement could be expressed tended to be Churchillian ones—especially since they could now be adapted so readily to the new Kulturkampf with the Soviet Union. Those who harbored misgivings about that—whether Robert Taft on the right or Henry Wallace on the left—could be easily stilled by an appeal to the lessons of Munich and a crisp reminder that the “appeasers” had been wrong last time. Had not Neville Chamberlain said, in reply to a suggestion from Roosevelt that there should be an international conference to discuss the dangers of war, that it would be a bad idea because it was “likely to excite the derision of Germany and Italy. They might even use it to postpone conversations with us”? The tap, tap of his umbrella has been used to ridicule all those who felt doubts about the nuclear umbrella ever since. In this immense contest, the figure of Churchill has had the status of an icon. The Fulton address confirmed this standing for a generation.

  Before reviewing Fulton and its imagery, a word on “isolationism.” Although it is a term now employed to diminish the moral standing of those who oppose an imperial foreign policy, and though it has the imputation of small-mindedness and parochialism, it does not have an unambiguous history. In 1848, when the Hungarian patriot Lajos Kossuth toured the United States, he inspired generous sentiments in the minds of many Americans. The simplicity and dignity of his appeal against Russian and Austrian imperialism won support for the idea of Europe’s “Captive Nations.” President Millard Fillmore, his Secretary of State, Daniel Webster, and the great Henry Clay all seemed in public to endorse this idea. But they were likewise careful to caution Kossuth in private; Webster in particular telling him that the mere suggestion of “intervention” would fall upon “ears as deaf as adders.” Henry Clay added consolingly that the liberty of Hungary and other subject countries would be advanced more by an America that kept its “lamp burning brightly on this Western shore, as a light to all nations, than to hazard its utter extinction, amid the ruins of fallen or falling republics in Europe.” These last phrases oddly anticipate Emma Lazarus and her verses on the Statue of Liberty and Winston Churchill’s wartime quotation from Arthur Hugh Clough’s hymnal poem, with its famous line: “But westward, look, the land is bright.”

  As the Hungarians were to discover anew in 1956, American policy has been a series of oscillations between great causes overseas and the need to avoid quagmires. A world role has necessitated the striking of brave attitudes and the issuing of numerous promissory notes to allies, while the attention of Congress and the public has been easier to engage than to maintain. In 1848, the American partisans of Kossuth described as “isolationist” the refusal of those who paid lip service to Hungary to commit America to force. In 1956, an analogous policy of mere verbal and propaganda support for the Hungarian Revolution was described by its opponents as “appeasement.” Kossuth’s admirers were slightly inflamed by the intoxicating victory over Mexico in 1848. Those who were in the mood for a crusade in 1956 were similarly resplendent in the prestige of a speech given in Fulton, Missouri.

  After having lost his electoral mandate a few months after Roosevelt’s death, Churchill was to make one more grand attempt to preserve a full partnership of equals. He journeyed to Fulton on March 5, 1946, and there delivered himself of the last speech upon which he would ever be seriously quoted. A few months earlier, on December 13, 1945, there had been an emotional and angry debate in the House of Commons concerning the terms of the postwar American loan to Britain, which terms were thought by many Members of Parliament to be arrogant and humiliating. One hundred MPs voted against the incoming Labor government for approving the terms of the loan, and an astounding one hundred and sixty-nine abstained, including Churchill himself. But this unprecedented revulsion at the rise of the new Rome could, as Churchill well understood, risk a petty and embittered nationalism. By appealing to the burgeoning sense of American globalism and internationalism, he tried his utmost to preserve and retain the spirit of Anglo-Americanism and of Anglo-Saxondom, too.

  Since he had himself signed away Poland and the Baltic states to Stalin, in a meeting which he tried to keep secret from Roosevelt and Harriman, Churchill was gambling for very high stakes when he described the “Iron Curtain” as extending “from Stettin in the Baltic.” But a close reading of the speech shows that anti-Soviet solidarity was only its secondary and instrumental purpose. Its main thrust was an appeal for a “special relationship.” Having rather arbitrarily traced the evolution of “the rights of man” themselves to the “joint inheritance of the English-speaking world” via Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence, he struck the clear note that has resonated since;

  Neither the sure prevention of war nor the continuous rise of world organisation will be gained without what I have called the fraternal association of the English-speaking peoples. This means a special relationship between the British Commonwealth and Empire and the United States. This is no time for generalities. I venture to be precise. Fraternal association requires not only the growing friendship and mutual understanding between our two vast but kindred systems of society, but the continuance of the intimate relations between our military advisors, leading to common study of potential dangers, similarity of weapons and manuals of instruction and interchange of officers and cadets at colleges. It should carry with it the continuance of the present facilities for mutual security by the joint use of all naval and air-force bases in the possession of either country all over the world. [Italics mine.]

  And again, in closing:

  If the population of the English-speaking Commonwealth be
added to that of the United States, with all that such cooperation implies in the air, on the sea and in science and industry, there will be no quivering, precarious balance of power to offer its temptation to ambition or adventure.

  This element in the speech considerably outweighed the fairly conventional anti-Soviet invocation, most of which seems to have been taken directly from James Burnham. The italicized words make it clear that for Churchill the words “British” and “Empire” could not be divorced without great pain and difficulty. He was shrewder than he knew in proposing that anti-Communism came before anti-imperialism:

  Except in the British Commonwealth and in this United States, where Communism is in its infancy, the Communist parties or fifth columns constitute a growing challenge and peril to Christian civilisation.

  Quite clearly, it is the words “Iron Curtain” that have been retained from this long speech, and the context which has been placed in history’s discard. Churchill’s listeners were well able to annex his prestige for what they did care about—the emerging superpower competition—while politely overlooking his appeal that Britain be considered their serious equal in that competition.

  One clue to the astonishing durability of this speech in the American annals may be the otherwise unremarked congruence between Churchill’s global generalizations and those of James Burnham. It is easy now to forget the importance of Burnham’s writing in the formation of American imperial thinking, but his words were decisive among intellectuals and the literate public in the 1940s and 1950s (David Riesman in The Lonely Crowd spoke of “Marx, Mosca, Michels, Pareto, Weber, Veblen or Burnham”) and were seminal as regards the American right. Even people who had not themselves read Burnham were swayed by columnists and politicians and academics who had.