March 22, 2015

Finest Hour 127, Summer 2005

Page 04

BLACK DOG

Finest Hour 125 states that “Black Dog” was attributed to Sir Walter Scott, but Dr. Johnson uses the term in Boswell’s Life of Johnson years earlier. The introduction says Boswell was “subject to fits of sudden depression,” etc. In his letter dated Wednesday, 27 October 1779, Johnson writes: “But what will you do to keep away the black dog that worries you at home?” I’d imagine that Churchill read Scott, and maybe Boswell too, although Scott is more likely Churchill’s source.
—EVAN QUENON, AUSTIN, TEX.

IMPERSONATING GARY

We were delighted to receive Finest Hour 125 with accounts of the 2004 Portsmouth conference and the trip to Berlin, which brought back memories of so many friends and experiences. The photos of me on pages 20-21 certainly added to the memories. But, what’s this? There apparently is a (good-looking) fellow named Richard Kruger cavorting around Europe impersonating me. Should I contact MI-6? Oh MI. Still, Kruger can’t be very clever. In my twenty years’ membership this is the first time he has been able to get away with this.
—GARY BONINE, DRYDEN, MICH.

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MORE POISON GAS

Ampersand (Finest Hour 123:47) gives the false impression that Churchill recommended the use of only tear gas in warfare. If you care to re-read the text, you will find that Churchill advocated this as an additional option: “I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes….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 affected.” (Underlines mine.)

More seriously, you chose to ignore, in your reproach of The Spectator’s Michael Lind, Churchill’s blatant racism in reserving the poison gas treatment for use “against uncivilised tribes.” (Presumably that excludes his own tribe.)
—DR. ALY ELKHOLY, IEEE.ORG

FH’s Response: When Churchill said it was “not necessary to use only the most deadly gases” he did not underline the word “only,” as you have; his recommendation seems fairly dispositive, especially since deadly gases were not subseused. “Uncivilized” by itself is not a racist word but merely a reference to behavior outside the realm of civilization. Only when “uncivilized” is accompanied by another adjective making the author’s racist meaning clear can you say it is racist. Otherwise, you are simply making an ad hominem attack on someone with whom you disagree. The same issue of FH published a more thorough examination of the Lind and other material (“Rumbles Left and Right,” by Michael C. McMenamin, pp. 38-43). You will not like it any better, but it does show that Churchill is happily a target of critics on both fringes. —RML & MCM

SLOGAN OR STRATEGY?

In their article “Churchill and D-Day: Another View,” Professors Warren Kimball and Norman Rose suggest that in respect of the Italian campaign it was a “slogan not a strategy” and, “as Stalin put it, the Germans would keep as many allied Divisions as possible in Italy where no decision could be reached.” Field Marshal Alanbrooke, sourced elsewhere in the article, would not agree. In his war diaries, especially for 6 August 1943 and in his postwar commentary on the diary entry for 15 August 1943, Brooke strongly supported the Italian campaign, as he saw Italy as a base from which to bomb southern Germany—and more importantly as a means of tying down German forces that would otherwise be used against Russia and an Allied invasion in the West. In his commentary on 15 August 1943 Brooke says quite strongly (after arguing with General Marshall): “My contention was that the Italian theatre was essential to render the cross Channel operation possible and consequently the two operations were interdependent.” (See also page 43. —Ed.)
—DAVID BULL, CANBERRA, ACT

IN-CROWD PETTINESS?

OR SEEKING THE TRUTH?

I found your review of the Churchill audio-visual lectures by Professor Fears and the Education Company (FH 114) quite puzzling. I think you are too close and too deeply enmeshed in the trees of Blenheim to see them for the forest.

You and those you associate with may debate the intimate details of Churchill’s life, and look down on those who paint Churchill’s greatness with too broad a brush; but what about the average ignorant and apathetic public who, if they do hear anything about Winston Churchill, hear that he was a successful alcoholic who smoked cigars and gave some good speeches? The typical leftist, socialist professor (and, unfortunately, college students are the only students who may be taught about Churchill) teaches about Churchill’s warmongering, racist, imperialist ways.

The Churchill in-crowd may have its petty disagreements about how much Scotch Churchill drank or how many books he wrote, but his true light grows dimmer every year, and we cannot afford to snuff out those lights which may burn too brightly.

Churchill was a great man, and that is not reflected in the picayune corrections you have made to Fears’s lectures. Fears in his lectures was himself Churchillian: eloquent, grandiose, zealous, inspirational.

Certainy Fears deserved better than your review, which is much like the small-minded critics who have dogged Churchill for years, over-examining and scrutinizing every last detail to wring the most criticism possible from an extraordinary life.

Get out of your “bubble” and consider the general public’s knowledge and understanding of Winston Spencer Churchill. You may have second thoughts about unknown inaccurate details about Churchill’s greatness when you realize Churchill’s greatness itself is unknown.
—S.B.

Editor’s response:
I doubt that Churchill’s greatness will ever be unknown, though it is certainly under-appreciated. It appears that we agree on strategy but disagree on tactics.

As editor of Finest Hour I try to keep in mind that not every reader wants to engage in minute examination of obscure facts or arcane issues. But not every reader doesn’t, either. I feel that the job requires a balance between some pretty basic material, like our student essays or the great war speeches, alongside more detailed coverage of obscure subjects. This is what we strive to provide.

Either way, we follow two guidelines besides our frequent reader surveys. The first is the admonition of his daughter and our Patron, Lady Soames: “be scrupulously accurate”—as her father said, “in all things great and small, large and petty.” The second is a remark we often quote by Professor Paul Addison: “To me, it only serves to diminish Churchill to regard him as super-human.”

Nothing ever published is free of errors. Celia Sandys’ Churchill contains mistakes; that doesn’t prevent it from being right on what counts, and so good that we won an Annenberg Foundation grant to distribute 5000 copies to North American high school teachers using Churchill in their curricula. Which proves, incidentally, that college students are not “the only students who may be taught about Churchill.”

I admitted in my review of the tapes that I was too close to the subject and inclined to nitpick. So let’s stipulate that objecting to a lecturer who doesn’t know there are two Houses of Parliament may be a triviality. How much Scotch Churchill drank, or how many books he wrote, may also be trivial—but Professor Fears raised these issues, not I.

If the lecturer had settled for citing Churchill’s “love of freedom, commitment to honor and morality, and courage and resolve in the face of evil,” no one could gainsay him. But what about his suggestion that Churchill was conceived out of wedlock; that his mother slept with 200 men; that Kitchener “set him up” over Gallipoli; that 80 percent of the British people wanted to negotiate with Adolf Hitler; that Neville Chamberlain was not a decent man? Or that Jones’s life of Marlborough is more important to read than Churchill’s life of Marlborough—out of which all the lecturer seems to derive is that Churchill was related to Princess Di?

How do such statements enhance Churchill’s greatness? On the contrary, they are more likely to be assimilated by perverters of history, to reappear in some defamatory article or website, alongside charges that WSC was a warmongering imperialist drunk who caused the Wall Street crash, conspired in the attack on Pearl Harbor and fire-bombed Dresden.

The Churchill Centre’s mission is “to foster leadership, statesmanship, vision and boldness…through the thoughts, words, works and deeds of Winston Spencer Churchill.” Those who join and rejoin every year generally do not expect hero worship. They expect the thoughts, words, works and deeds Churchill actually accomplished—not some imaginary version of them. They don’t mind considering Churchill “in the round,” as Professor John Ramsden wrote. And they expect us to deny ammunition to the army of anti-Churchill, anti-Western hate-mongers, only too ready to seize upon non-facts and ignorant hagiography to serve their own ends.

Those are the principles by which in Churchill’s words “we mean to make our way,” until such time as substantial numbers of our members tell us otherwise.