God and Churchill HB

by Jonathan Sandys

  Nietzsche had a passionate vision of the future in which the message of Christ would be eradicated from Europe and European society and culture would be freed from its ‘enslavement’ to Christianity. This would lead to Nietzsche’s apocalyptic hope – the coming of the Übermensch (superman) – the ultimate expression of the will to power. Because, for Nietzsche, God is dead, humanity is left as the loftiest form of being. However, even within the human race, there would arise a manifestation of mankind that would be superior to all – the Übermensch.

  The Übermensch would be free from the restraints and accountability that belong to the notion of absolute truth because, ultimately, power determines truth. There is no ‘higher self’; the greatest self is that which lives fully and interacts with existential reality, which is all that exists and thus all that matters.

  In the pages of Mein Kampf, Hitler built on Nietzsche’s concepts:

  A stronger race (Geschlecht) will supplant the weaker, since the drive for life in its final form will decimate every ridiculous fetter of the so-called humaneness of individuals, in order to make place for the humaneness of nature, which destroys the weak to make place for the strong.33

  CHARLES DARWIN

  We have already examined in detail the link between Hitler and Darwinism. Here, we will simply summarize the Darwinian presuppositions that most affected Hitler and his Nazi ideology.

  In the first edition of On the Origin of Species, Darwin used the term natural selection to explain his theory of evolution. But he was somewhat ambivalent about the term, ‘as it seems to imply conscious choice’.34 He came to prefer the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’, which he adapted from Herbert Spencer’s Principles of Biology (1866) and introduced to On the Origin of Species in the 1869 edition.

  Darwin found Spencer’s term more appealing because it emphasized the mechanical (impersonal, automatic) processes of nature rather than the teleological (which implies purpose or design – and thus a designer). Darwin had abandoned the notion of the transcendent, and he found that Spencer’s label meshed well with natural selection but said it better.

  Hitler, on the other hand, was teleological in his theorizing. He believed that evolution was indeed moving towards a grand purpose – the crowning emergence of the Aryan Übermensch. Thus, the survival of the fittest necessitated the classification of the human species to distinguish the ‘superior’ from the ‘inferior’. The superior would then assume responsibility for weeding out the inferior through eugenics and extermination so that these people would not weaken the human gene pool and complicate the path to the emergence of the perfect Aryan.

  Spencer was also instrumental in laying a foundation for social Darwinism. In The Man versus the State, he describes how, through the survival of the fittest, ‘the militant type of society becomes characterized by profound confidence in the governing power, joined with a loyalty causing submission to it in all matters whatever.’35 Hitler interwove Darwinian biological evolution with Spencerian social evolution in building the Third Reich.

  There must tend to be established among those who speculate about political affairs in a militant society, a theory giving form to the needful ideas and feelings; accompanied by assertions that the law-giver if not divine in nature is divinely directed, and that unlimited obedience to him is divinely ordered.36

  Hitler regarded himself as the vessel chosen by the gods, or by the primal evolutionary forces, to intervene in the pace of evolution and to be its guardian and accelerator. ‘In a 1923 speech,’ writes Richard Weikart, ‘Hitler explained the relationship between struggle and right.’

  Decisive [in history] is the power that the peoples (Volker) have within them; it turns out that the stronger before God and the world has the right to impose its will… . All of nature is a constant struggle between power and weakness, a constant triumph of the strong over the weak.37

  Some scholars have sought to reason through Darwinism to its logical conclusion. Ultimately, the outcome of ‘natural selection’ or ‘survival of the fittest’ is that ‘only from death on a genocidal scale could the few progress’.38

  Ultimately, the issue of who should die and who should live came down to decisions about who was ‘productive’ or ‘unproductive’. Humans who could not produce according to Nazi standards would be eliminated. ‘Productivity’ was not merely about nuts and bolts, manufacturing and construction, but about society itself. Those races that diminished society and cultural creativity – as defined by the Nazis – should die, along with the mentally and physically disabled.

  According to the Nazis’ eugenic morality, weeding out obstacles to the advancement of human evolution was the most responsible and humane thing to do and would contribute to a greater quality of human life.

  With eugenics as the driving impulse and genocide as the inevitable outcome, war, among other means, was seen as essential to the struggle for evolutionary progress.

  In the years between the two World Wars, Hitler enlarged on his ‘ethic’. As he gained power in Germany, he justified his brutality on the basis of moral necessity. Preserving the races that produced high culture ‘is tied to the iron law of necessity’, he wrote in Mein Kampf. Even though it might call for ‘harsh’ methods, ‘it is simply the way it is!’39 In this he echoed Nietzsche as well as Darwin.

  A BOILING STEW

  We began this chapter with the question of how Germany, with its rich Christian history, could fall into such a spiritual disaster. The historian Konrad Heiden believes that it’s not surprising.

  Germany was the perfect place for this development. In almost no other country were so many ‘miracles’ performed, so many ghosts conjured, so many illnesses cured by magnetism, so many horoscopes read, between the two World Wars.40

  Flavoured by the bitter herbs of Wagnerism, Nietzscheism and Darwinism, and spiced with seeds of resentment left over from the First World War, Hitler’s Nazi ideology became a boiling stew of mysticism, spiritism, scientism, evolutionism, triumphalism and nationalism.

  Churchill observed these phenomena in Germany with a sharp eye. A diagnostician of nations, he detected the malignancy growing in the German soul. If it were not stopped, he knew it would metastasize until it consumed not only the European continent and Britain, but Western civilization itself.

  11

  Churchill’s Urgent Concern – and Ours

  Civilisation is hideously fragile, you know that. There’s not much between us and the horrors underneath. Just about a coat of varnish, wouldn’t you say?

  C. P. SNOW, A COAT OF VARNISH

  WINSTON CHURCHILL had good cause to be concerned about the survival of Christian civilization. The Aryan cancer growing in Germany was affecting British society as well. Churchill believed in the exceptionalism of the Judeo-Christian world view that had gifted Britain with its finest values. Therefore, in Churchill’s mind at least, Hitler had to be defeated at all costs for the sake of Christian civilization.

  Civilisation will not last, freedom will not survive, peace will not be kept, unless a very large majority of mankind unite together to defend them and show themselves possessed of a constabulary power before which barbaric and atavistic forces will stand in awe.1

  As a student of history, Churchill would have known the work of one of his contemporaries, the Oxford historian Arnold Toynbee, who theorized about the inevitability and process of civilizational decline and death. As Churchill pondered the fate of his own nation, he might have been especially concerned about Toynbee’s idea that civilizations commit suicide rather than perishing through murder.

  Churchill knew there could be no ambiguity in his policy towards the Nazis. It was clear-cut: order or chaos, light or dark, good or evil. The contemporary doctrines of equivalency by which all things are of equal truth – then popular among British intellectuals – were unthinkable. Equivalency fosters ambiguity; ambiguity gives birth to confusion; and confusion breeds disaster, as the early twenty- first century has already shown. This is
surely part of what the Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington means when he writes: ‘Efforts to define national interest presuppose agreement on the nature of the country whose interests are to be defined… . National interest derives from national identity. We have to know who we are before we can know what our interests are.’2 Equivalency doesn’t know what to fight for or where. Foreign policy and the defence of a nation and its civilization can get lost in relativistic fog.

  John Maynard Keynes, the economist who gave the world Keynesian economics, commented on the prevailing intellectual climate of his time.

  The thinness and superficiality, as well as the falsity, of our view of man’s heart became, as it now seems to me, more obvious… . Our comments on life and affairs were bright and amusing, but brittle … because there was no solid diagnosis of human nature underlying them. [Bertrand Russell] in particular sustained simultaneously a pair of opinions ludicrously incompatible.3

  Winston Churchill did not dawdle about in an obscuring haze of ‘opinions ludicrously incompatible’, searching for a policy. He knew who he was, and he knew the identity of his nation. Therefore, he understood clearly what the struggle with the Nazis was about – the survival of Christian civilization. As far as Churchill was concerned, one does not negotiate with the devil and hell.

  We have but one aim and one single irrevocable purpose. We are resolved to destroy Hitler and every vestige of the Nazi regime. From this nothing will turn us. Nothing. We will never parley; we will never negotiate with Hitler or any of his gang. We shall fight him by land; we shall fight him by sea; we shall fight him in the air, until, with God’s help we have rid the earth of his shadow and liberated its peoples from his yoke. Any man or State who fights on against Nazism will have our aid. Any man or State who marches with Hitler is our foe.4

  Churchill loathed Nazism because he recognized that it would destroy the rich fruit arising from Christian civilization that had blessed many nations. He recognized that Hitler’s aim was to hack down the very tree that had borne the healthy fruit and to replace it with another, bearing only thorns and thistles.

  THEN AND NOW

  There are broad similarities between the assault on Christian civilization in Churchill’s day and in ours.

  A fierce militaristic foe with a vision for global hegemony

  Before most of the world grasped the implications of Hitler’s ideology, Churchill saw into the nihilistic core of Nazism. Speaking in Devon in 1933, Churchill termed the Nazis ‘the most formidable people in the world, and now the most dangerous, a people who inculcate a form of blood-lust in their children, and lay down the doctrine that every frontier must be the starting point for invasion’.5

  Churchill equated the rise of Nazism with a return to the Dark Ages in a speech to the United States and Britain, broadcast on 16 October 1938.

  We are confronted with another theme. It is not a new theme; it leaps out upon us from the Dark Ages – racial persecution, religious intolerance, deprivation of free speech, the conception of the citizen as a mere soulless fraction of the State. To this has been added the cult of war. Children are to be taught in their earliest schooling the delights and profits of conquest and aggression. A whole mighty community has been drawn painfully, by severe privations, into a warlike frame.6

  Many in the twenty-first century have been shocked at the intensification of global chaos. From the constant threat of terrorist attacks, to randomly exploding roadside bombs, to mass kidnappings of innocent schoolgirls, to increasing insurgencies by the stateless Islamic State, whose proponents record and post to the Internet images of beheadings and other murders, the threats to what Churchill termed Christian civilization are again growing.

  In fact, the peril may be even greater than in Churchill’s day. During the Second World War, the Allies faced an enemy who waged conventional warfare with identifiable lines and rules of engagement. The lines would shift, but they could always be located; and they provided clear points for the concentration of force. The conflict in the twenty-first century has become amorphous. The fury of terrorism or guerrilla warfare can erupt anywhere at any moment. And the battle lines are now spiritual, moral, ethical and intellectual as well as brutally physical.

  Internal forces that were antinomian and anti-civilizational

  In Britain during the 1930s, socialism and communism veered in the direction of atheism. In our day, we’ve seen the rise of a militant atheism across Western culture. From the perspective of British tradition, the movements in Churchill’s day were afflicted with powerful antinomian and anti-civilizational trends, as measured by Britain’s traditional canons.7

  The Bloomsbury–Cambridge elites gave intellectual affirmation to societal rejection of traditional cultural restraints. Many were hedonists who lived according to their own ethical sanctions. They distinguished between ‘intrinsic value’ and ‘instrumental value’. What mattered was the intrinsic – action taken for its own sake. Thus they were able to justify, on autocratic moral grounds, whatever brought them pleasure.

  Such intellectualism troubled Winston Churchill as Hitler’s power grew. Among other things, the intelligentsia in the Bloomsbury–Cambridge group disdained and scorned British tradition at precisely the time when the people of Britain needed to recognize both the rich heritage of their society and the threat that Hitler posed to it. Thus, on St George’s Day in 1933, Churchill said, ‘Our difficulties come from the mood of unwarrantable self-abasement into which we have been cast by a powerful section of our own intellectuals. They come from the acceptance of defeatist doctrines by a large proportion of our politicians. But what have they to offer but a vague internationalism, a squalid materialism, and the promise of impossible Utopias?’8

  After the war, Churchill had not changed his opinion. If anything, it was stronger. During a debate in the House of Commons on 28 October 1948, he spoke of a mood in the nation ‘encouraged by the race of degenerate intellectuals … who, when they wake up every morning have looked around upon the British inheritance, whatever it was, to see what they could find to demolish, to undermine, or cast away’.9

  In 2012, Os Guinness identified a present-day mindset that springs from what he called ‘a soft though decadent nihilism that devours tradition, destroys social cohesion, cheapens cultural standards, hollows moral convictions and in the years to come will produce its own dark harvest of social consequences’.10

  ‘The recovery of moral control and the return of spiritual order have now become the indispensable conditions of human survival,’ said the British cultural scholar Christopher Dawson in the 1947 Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh University.11 Christianity, said Dawson, ‘is the soul of Western civilization… . When the soul is gone, the body putrefies.’12

  A public consensus that was uninformed and naive about the threats

  Richard Langworth writes that ‘Churchill found a natural ally in Franklin Roosevelt … whose clear-sightedness regarding Hitler was more appealing to Churchill than the imaginings of his own British colleagues’.13

  Some, even among the British elites, saw Hitler as the symbol of a new dynamism taking shape in the world. Robert Boothby, an ally of Churchill’s in the House of Commons, described the mood in a secret memorandum to the War Cabinet on 20 March 1940. Hitler and his followers represented to some ‘the incredible conception of a movement – young, virile, dynamic, and violent – which is advancing irresistibly to overthrow a decaying old world’.14 Hitler’s open admirers in pre-war Britain ranged from Oswald Mosley, the founder of the British Union of Fascists; to trendy, avant-garde writers such as Wyndham Lewis, Enid Bagnold and Philip Gibbs; to the media mogul Lord Rothermere.

  Others who were not so outspoken thought that Britain could use a dose of whatever had energized Germany under the Nazis. A quarter-century after the end of the First World War, the war’s absurdities and horrors had been washed in a romantic light, and some in Great Britain felt that ‘the Germans had been gallant and brave fighters.’15 Some
believed that parliamentary government, coupled with a constitutional monarchy, was a cumbersome relic and that what the British people needed was the dynamism and efficiency of the Nazis. The Cliveden Set, an influential pro-appeasement group that often met at the estate of Lady Nancy Astor in the Buckinghamshire countryside, became a symbol of the notables in British society who tilted towards Hitler in the 1930s.

  Sometimes such people even found their way into Winston Churchill’s home. The sisters Diana and Unity Mitford, Hitler enthusiasts, were related to Clementine Churchill. The ‘Mitford tribe’ – as Mary Soames, the Churchills’ youngest daughter, put it – was on ‘pleasant’ terms with Winston and Clementine. My (Jonathan’s) grandmother, Diana Churchill, was a bridesmaid at Diana Mitford’s wedding in 1929. Diana Mitford would leave her husband later in life and pursue an open affair with Oswald Mosley. (Ironically, during the early days of the war, especially in 1940 when a German victory seemed inevitable, Mosley, as a leading fascist, was a likely candidate for prime minister once the Nazis conquered Britain.)

  Mary Soames notes that Diana and Unity Mitford ‘went to the first of the Nuremberg rallies [staged by Josef Goebbels], where their ardour for the Führer was predictably fanned’. Their parents, on the other hand, regarded Hitler and the Nazis ‘as a murderous gang of pests’ and were ‘absolutely horrified’ by their daughters’ association with the Nazi leaders. It wasn’t until 1935 that Unity Mitford met Hitler in person, ‘and she and Diana became part of his accepted circle’. But when she introduced her mother to Hitler, Unity was disappointed when her mother wasn’t impressed by him. She ‘does not feel his goodness and wonderfulness radiating out like we do’.16

  Diana and Unity again attended the Nuremberg rallies in 1933, the very year that Churchill was becoming increasingly vocal about Nazi rearmament and British complacency.

  In 1936, after returning from the Olympic Games in Berlin, Diana Mitford dined with the Churchills at Chartwell. Just back from Germany, Diana encouraged Churchill to meet Hitler. ‘She thought they would get on well together – but Winston would not entertain the idea,’ Mary Soames recalled years later.17