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The Other Face of Winston Churchill, with Tariq Ali · The Smart Cookies podcast

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Tariq Ali is a writer, filmmaker and a leading figure of the international left since the
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60s.
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He is a long-standing editor of the New Left Review and a political commentator published
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on every continent.
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His books include Pirates of the Caribbean, Bush in Babylon, The Clash of Fundamentalisms,
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the Obama Syndrome and the latest Winston Churchill, His Times, His Crimes, which I
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have right here with me.
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It's a fantastic read in which we're going to be talking about today.
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Mr. Ali, welcome.
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Very good to be with you.
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I've just watched the Telegraph's interview with historian Andrew Roberts, of all people,
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who wrote his own biography of Winston Churchill, of course, which is quite different.
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And at the beginning of the interview, they simply ask him, was Winston Churchill racist?
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To which he of course replies that he absolutely was not.
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So I thought it would be only fair that I extend the same courtesy to you.
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So was Winston Churchill in fact a racist?
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Not only was he a racist, but actually he never bothered to even deny it because he
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knew perfectly well that colonialism and British rule in Africa and parts of Asia was based
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on one of the central ideologies of it, was white superiority.
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He and others like him, he wasn't alone, but they made no bones about being a superior
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civilization and effectively a racist.
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The fact, what is interesting is that a historian such as Andrew Roberts, for whom I have no
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respect whatsoever, is in fact denying it.
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I mean, most intelligent Churchill historians, most of whom wouldn't agree with me, would
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not deny that.
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And there's some good books out there on Churchill.
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Clive Ponting's biography of many years ago was very good.
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And more recent books published likewise.
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They don't hide this.
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So the fact that Roberts is sort of still attempting to hide it, the only good thing
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one can say about that is that he realizes now that racism is not a good thing.
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If we explore this a little bit further, because his answers are absolutely fascinating, presented
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with many quite damning quotes, you mentioned many of them in your book.
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Roberts says that the fact that Churchill said things that were derogatory to people
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of other races does not make him somebody who wants bad things to happen to people of
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other races, which is what a racist is.
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This seems like Olympic level acrobatics of sorts.
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You can say horribly racist stuff and yet you're still not actually a racist.
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Anyway, he further states that Churchill was simply a product of his time, during which
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there was a quote unquote scientific belief that there is a hierarchy of racists and that,
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of course, white people are on top.
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People often say that we shouldn't judge past leaders with the moral standards of our time.
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So was Churchill's racism kind of startling even for his own time?
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It was.
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And a number of conservative colleagues of his later denounced him in the 40s and the
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early 50s for his racism.
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His refusal to accept the idea of independence for India now seems completely loony.
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But to some it was loony even at the time.
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I mean, there's absolutely no reason why an independent settlement couldn't have been
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negotiated with India in the 20s or 30s prior to the Second World War.
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So most intelligent people accept that his flaws were many and went quite deep.
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But the fact that the British propaganda machine uses Andrew Roberts to heighten the cult of
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Churchill makes it all the more necessary to have alternative books so that people can…
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I'm not saying stop reading, Roberts.
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I'm not one of those people who advises people not to read books.
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I said read it carefully, but then read other books that are around as well, including mine,
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to try and get as complete a picture as you can.
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Roberts is now part of the Churchill industry.
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He can't be taken seriously.
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What were some of the most glaring examples of Churchill's racism?
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Well, you know, racism was linked very much with Britain's colonial rule, first in North
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America, and then as they were driven out by their former allies in India, they moved
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on to India, occupying India from 1757 to… that's when they started to 1947, occupying
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parts of Africa, which wouldn't give them their freedom, organizing mega-tortures and
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Kulak-type camps in Kenya, for instance, which is more known about, but which many historians,
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including serious historians, have tended to ignore.
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So racism shouldn't be taken, in my opinion, as something that was isolated from the way
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in which Britain governed the world.
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I mean, it started with the Native Americans.
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I mean, Churchill said that the Red Indians, as he called them, had no right to their land,
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no more right to their land than the Blacks in Australia, how he referred to the Aboriginals,
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or the Palestinian Arabs in Palestine.
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I mean, it's very consistent that Western white race Europeans had the right to conquer
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the world because they had a superior civilization.
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And so this was part of the theory of Western civilization being the model for the rest
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of the world, which the rest of the world doesn't accept today at all, as we see in
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the Ukraine War, but which many didn't accept at the time.
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I mean, to say to China, with a civilization going back 2,000 years, and similarly, to
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a lesser extent, Indian civilization in its early years was incredibly educative and important,
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despite all flaws.
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So the fact that the West became dominant, first militarily, then in colonial imperial
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terms, and then ideologically, is a sign of the fact that their economic model became
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very dynamic.
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Capitalism became very dynamic and started trading with the rest of the world.
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Trade required the construction of armies to protect the trade, navies to protect the
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trade routes.
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Later, occupation of countries became vital to make sure that no other power could take
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the trade away from these continents.
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The United States took over South America and kept the European powers out of it, saying
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it's our backyard, stay out.
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And so Britain, France concentrated on Africa and Asia.
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Indonesia was taken by the Dutch.
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I mean, it's a systematic pattern.
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Britain was the most successful and the most experienced of these powers.
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You quote an anecdote in the book.
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I forgot who Winston Churchill is talking to, but I think it's quite during his later
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years.
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Maybe it's during the Second World War, where he says that even after the war, we have to
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uphold white supremacy.
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Could you talk a bit more about that?
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Well, he did say all this and he believed it.
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He wasn't like one of these modern politicians who say one thing one day, another thing the
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next in order to stay in power.
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I mean, from his own point of view, he was quite a consistent believer in the empire.
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For him, the most important thing in the world is the British Empire.
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And purely from his point of view and the conservative point of view, this was not such
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a wrong assessment.
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Now everyone disagrees with it.
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At the time, the Labour Party was for empire as well.
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And I always tell people this, that it wasn't just the conservatives who maintained the
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empire.
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Labour did it.
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After all, in 1945, when Labour won the election and defeated Churchill, it was perfectly possible
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for them to dismantle the empire.
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They had no option but to do so in India because there were uprisings, strikes, huge movements
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for freedom and independence in India.
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But they could have also, why didn't they hang on to Africa?
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Why did they hang on to the Middle East, which created further problems for the peoples in
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those countries?
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So the British Empire was inscribed into the fabric of English and Scottish society, and
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it went very deep.
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And Churchill was shameless about defending this state of affairs.
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And you know, I mean, as you can see from my book, I'm a sort of very staunch critic
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of him, but I understand what he was doing.
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And simply to say racism isn't enough.
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You know, that was just taken for granted.
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I mean, the whole British society was very racist in the days of empire.
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There are a handful of very brave people, workers and intellectuals who did start to
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raise questions.
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But as for those who ran Britain, the politicians and the military and the court, these three
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elements in British society, they were very strongly for the empire.
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Yeah, I remember now, I think you write that in the book somewhere that even a lot of working
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class people were staunch defenders and believers in the empire.
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Yeah, and not just that, but many working class people, whether we like it or not voted
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Tory right up to this day.
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I mean, there's a huge switch during Margaret Thatcher's time from, you know, very well
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paid workers for Conservative Party.
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But even then she didn't have a majority if the vote had been carried out in a proportional
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representative system.
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But still, there has always been working class support for the Conservative Party.
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And in some cases, it's linked to empire.
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And in more recent cases, it's linked to a misguided view that the Tories run the economy
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better and we've done quite well out of them.
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Perhaps no one in their right mind would say that, looking at the situation in Britain
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today, the NHS under threat, schools crumbling because no one paid attention to the cement
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blocks which were used after the war to build these schools.
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And here, Labour is just as responsible as the Conservatives.
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But you know, they didn't think for the future.
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In that sense, the Victorians and the Victorian ruling class was much sharper in the sense
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that they did think they were building for the future.
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So it's only, you know, the last 25 years or so that many of the buildings built by
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the Victorians, very few of them actually collapsed on their own.
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They were taken down to build the monstrosities which are now affecting everyone.
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Back to Churchill, you talked about it a little bit already, but I want to explore it a little
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bit more.
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Another thread in the book is Churchill's willingness to use deadly violence against
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anyone, even against his own countrymen in the defence of the established order, the
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empire and the class system within it.
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For example, he sent the army famously against the miners who were striking in Wales.
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Abroad, he was in favour of an armed intervention against the revolutionaries in Russia with
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quite disastrous results.
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And there's many, many more cases.
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Now, this might be a bit of a naive question, but do you think that Churchill actually believed
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that the system he is upholding is the best thing for British people and humanity at large,
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maybe, or was it all just about protecting the privileges of the upper classes of which
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he was part of?
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Both were interrelated.
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The system was good because it preserved and protected the privilege of the rich, as it
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does today, even more clearly and sharply than it did in Churchill's time.
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I mean, there's no shame left now in saying it.
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Yeah, the rich are rich.
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They deserve to be rich and their rights need to be protected.
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So Churchill's view of 60, 70 years ago is now the common sense of both political parties.
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Basically, they defend that view.
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And Churchill and his generation of politicians defended it too, though it has to be said
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that even within the Conservative Party, before Churchill's time, slightly before Churchill's
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time, there were what we could call liberal conservatives.
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Churchill's, I mean, not the Neville Chamberlain opponent of Churchill, but Joseph Chamberlain
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and Neville later pushed through and were in favor of reforms giving some rights to
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workers and creating the rudiments of a welfare state, which later became large under Labour.
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But Churchill himself wasn't too keen on that.
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He went along with it when it suited him.
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But basically, the defense of the British way of life, by which you mean the privileges
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of the landed aristocracy and the new rising bourgeoisie getting stronger and stronger
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were the key.
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And so attacking the miners in Tony Pandy or threatening the Scottish workers in Glasgow,
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which Churchill did, was part and parcel of this view.
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At home, there's an enemy within, and this is the enemy that challenges our system or
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threatens it or demands that it reform itself.
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And a broader enemy is anyone who challenges the British Empire or threatens it.
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So the intervention in Russia was not simply related to Russia after the Russian Revolution,
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but Churchill saw that this revolution could damage Europe, but more importantly, the British
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Empire.
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And he said as much.
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So better get rid of it quickly.
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Now, the interesting thing is that they were so keen on preserving their own interests,
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the rulers of Britain, that when the February government after the revolution in 1917 said
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that the royal family, the Russian royal family, the kings, the Tsar of Russia and the King
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of England were first cousins, you know, Victoria's grand-sister.
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Nikolai and George, right?
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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The Russians had send a ship.
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We've got them, take them over.
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And both the kings.
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So they suggested for the Brits to take them.
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Yeah.
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Right.
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And the Brits didn't want them because Lord Curzon, whose foreign secretary at the time
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was scared it would enhance upheavals in Britain itself.
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Large numbers of people would be opposed to giving refuge to the Tsar of Russia, who was
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seen generally as a tyrannical character and an absolutely vicious anti-Semite.
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And they were scared.
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And the king finally said, no, we can't have them here.
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So it's one thing to criticize the Bolshevik leaderships for executing them, which was
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another tradition started by the way in Britain, which was the first country to execute its
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king in the 17th century.
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But in any event, the British rulers turned down the Russian offer of taking the Russian
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royal family safely out of Russia.
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Not many people know this, but it is a fact.
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And so Churchill's attempt to defeat that revolution was a complete and utter disaster.
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There were mutinies.
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There was dissent at very high levels.
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British senior officers said, what the hell are we doing here?
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One was court-martialed for challenging the official views of Churchill and the British
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government at the time, et cetera.
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So there was opposition to Churchill inside the army as well.
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The generals didn't particularly care for him, even during the Second World War, by
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the way.
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And that is what explains the fact which Andrew Roberts and others try and tell fibs about
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is that how come such a popular leader was defeated immediately after the war came to
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an end?
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The Labour Party won the 1945 election.
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And Churchill himself was absolutely stunned that he believed all the propaganda, not understanding
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that conservative policies from the 30s onwards, Churchill's own role in crushing the general
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strike of 1926, his assault on the miners, just open class warfare, had not made him
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popular with all three people.
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I mean, I cite instances in the very first chapter of my book on this.
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It was hardly a secret.
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And a sort of informal but authorised parliament of soldiers in Egypt in 1944, Labour had a
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huge majority, some other party was second, the Tories were third.
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So this is to be taken into account in Churchill worship or people who worship Churchill, don't
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understand it or would rather not understand it, find spurious excuses to explain.
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I think Andrew Roberts said that Churchill himself was still wildly popular after the
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war, but the government wasn't because people wanted a welfare state.
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So if the government was unpopular, how come actually who was deputy prime minister under
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Churchill was elected prime minister and Churchill, the actual prime minister was cast aside.
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It's nonsense all that actually.
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Basically the Tories were hoping that Churchill's prestige, laboriously built up by propaganda
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during the war itself, would be enough to win them the election.
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And it wasn't.
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That's the reality.
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I'm fascinated by this opportunistic streak in Churchill's character.
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Hollywood movies these days usually portray him as an eccentric but deeply moral man who
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understands the meaning of sacrifice in hard times.
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In other words, a patriot and a conservative, yes, but a true believer.
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In your book, however, we find that the man pretty much did what was necessary to survive
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politically, including switching parties a couple of times, which is not well known.
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At least I didn't know that before.
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So his personal ambition seemed quite limitless.
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How was it possible for him to survive multiple catastrophic blunders such as Gallipoli, switching
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parties, the Russian intervention, and yet still remained kind of relevant at the highest
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level of British politics?
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Because he's a clever political operator.
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Right.
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He was a smart man in many countries, people who operate themselves and made sure that
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they're close to power.
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Of course, he couldn't do it with the Labour Party, but with the Liberals.
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When it was the Conservatives versus Liberals, Churchill saw correctly no basic difference
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between the Liberals and the Conservatives.
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You know, often he tended to agree more with the Liberals than the Conservative Party.
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That is why Conservatives absolutely loathed him.
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Boris Johnson's book reveals this very openly, because Boris identified with Churchill, and
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given that he himself was not popular inside his own party, he explains in some detail
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why Churchill was hated by the Conservative Party, though he slightly underplays the fact
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that one reason for the hatred was that Churchill was regarded as a chameleon, someone who would
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switch parties to make sure he had a top job in the cabinet.
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And yeah, on that, he was no different from many politicians, actually.
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I mean, people have been switching parties since then, since Churchill, not on a grand
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scale, but not on a leadership level.
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But Tory MPs joining Blair when they thought that the future David Blair or Labour MPs,
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when Corbyn was in power, deciding to switch sides and join the Conservative Party.
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And this sort of game goes on, because politics has now become a bit of a joke, really.
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It's not taken seriously.
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Yeah, it's all part of the same lukewarm stew, isn't it?
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Mainstream left and so-called mainstream Conservatives these days.
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I wrote a little book on this called The Extreme Centre, which is that centre left or centre
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right are both basically the same.
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They believe in the same economics.
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They believe in the same global alliances.
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They fight wars.
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They push through neoliberal measures.
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They haven't been able to break with that.
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And so what is the basic difference?
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The difference is essentially today, in my view, there's no difference, basic difference
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between Labour and Conservative.
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They argue for similar things.
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Labour tries to give it a gloss of being more humane, but closing down or not stopping the
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privatisation, creeping privatisation of the National Health Service is not, you know,
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they do it just like the Tories except with smiles on their faces.
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And it's a horrific situation.
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And so Churchill kept to the consensus agreed during and after the war that there had to
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be social reforms.
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He did accept that.
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And now his followers in both parties are doing the same in relation to Thatcher's consensus,
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the consensus she created.
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So there are lots of lessons to be learned from what happened in the past.
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I mean, my main sort of plea in this book was please read everything, try and read as
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much as you can and end this absurd cult of Churchill, which was built up really during
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the Falklands War when Mrs Thatcher used him to try and win the war.
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But the people who actually won the war, obviously Britain formally, but with the backing of
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the United States and that other well-known Democrat, General Pinochet of Chile.
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So these are the two key figures who helped win the Falklands War.
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And that's the time that Churchill came into.
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We're going to come back to that.
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Yes, yes, we're going to come back to that.
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But if we travel through time, one last time, Churchill's biggest claim to fame is, of course,
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the Second World War and especially the fact that he supposedly perceived Hitler for the
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real threat that he was from the very beginning.
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Your book presents a bit of an alternative view to that.
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Could you expand on Churchill's view of fascism and later, Nazism a little bit?
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Yeah, I mean, I think it's fair to say that conservatism in Europe of different kinds,
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but more or less united on this, saw the fascists as a huge relief.
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Why?
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Because the fascists were prepared to come out onto the streets and use violence against
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the Bolsheviks, against communists, against trade unions and against left social Democrats.
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Churchill himself says this is what we could never do.
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And he says, of course, we had never reached a situation in Britain where there was any
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threat from the left.
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He says that on the far left, but he says in Europe there was.
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So Churchill was a very staunch supporter of Benito Mussolini, the Italian fascist dictator.
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And he said in Italy, which Mussolini had framed and actually inscribed on the walls
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of one of his houses in that country, in which Churchill said, had I been an Italian, I would
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have voted for Signor Mussolini as the only person able to defeat communism, etc. etc.
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So that's how the world was seen.
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And I mean, in France, it was the same.
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But fairly, you know, I would say 50% of the population were for the right in France, but
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against the French left.
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And when the Germans occupied France, most of France collaborated, some reluctantly,
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some very eagerly.
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So this whole notion that the French resistance defeated the Nazis.
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I mean, they were very heroic people and one admires them, but they didn't defeat the Germans.
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The Germans were defeated by, you know, on a European level by the dreaded Red Army of
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the Soviet Union.
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They're the ones who were centrally responsible for the military defeat of the Germans.
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And then the Americans, with their amazing amount of factories devoted to arms, made
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sure that Britain, but also the Soviet Union, was supplied with weapons, by the way, during
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the war.
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So I see the Second World War largely as the triumph of a strange Soviet-U.S. alliance,
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which came into being more or less accidentally.
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The European conservative powers would have happily done a deal with the Nazis, as they
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did with Hitler's successors.
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I mean, quite a lot of the intelligence officers of the Third Reich were recruited into NATO's
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and NATO's armies.
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All of them, this is what happened, which people try to ignore because it's slightly
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embarrassing.
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And that victory of the right infiltrating the armed forces of the post-war powers, I
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mean, you know, I remember talking to some of the German students in the 60s who became
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terrorists.
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That's the only way to destroy them, and I was arguing against them, saying, it's not
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the way, it's crazy, you'll isolate yourselves, you'll be locked up.
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And they said something people like you don't understand.
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And I said people like me.
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They said we mean people from Britain, who Britain was never occupied by the Third Reich.
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The French understand it more.
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I said, what don't I understand?
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And the woman talking to me, who became one of the central leaders of the Baden-Meinhof
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Gang, she said, to wake up every morning for my generation who were born during the war
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and see that your father, your uncle, your older brother, your first cousin, sitting
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around having breakfast peacefully reading the Frankfurter Allgemeinsaitung, these were
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people who worked for the SS, these were people who worked for the Third Reich, these were
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the people who killed the Jews, these were the people who led Germany to what it is,
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and we had to sit back quietly.
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So I said I'm not suggesting you sit back quietly, but blowing up American headquarters
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and military is not the right way.
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And they said, well, what the Americans are doing in Vietnam is exactly the same as what
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Germany did in large parts of Europe.
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So that was the level of argument because they knew.
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Of course, I never justified that way of acting, but I did understand what they were talking
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about.
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And they knew, most Germans knew that had Hitler won, and Hitler could have won if the
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Japanese had stayed on course and instead of attacking Pearl Harbor had sent their armies
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into the Soviet Union, I think the Russian armies, they couldn't fight on two fronts
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at that stage.
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They would have collapsed.
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That is what Hitler wanted.
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And he was asking the Japanese emperor Hirohito for a probable meeting at a summit in Vladivostok.
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I think that's where we, let's build our train systems and railways so we meet in Vladivostok
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to celebrate the final victory.
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Well, if the Japanese had done that, as many of their people were advising, the Americans
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would have accepted the new world order and collaborated with the German and Japanese
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fascists.
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And certainly most of Europe would have gave in.
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There might have been isolated pockets of resistance here and there, but it would have
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taken some time to get rid of these people.
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So it wasn't an abstract question.
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So the powers that were sympathetic to fascist rule were sympathetic for these reasons that
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who knows, Hitler might win.
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It didn't look as if he was going to win.
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And the mythology around Churchill is that he brought our troops back from Dunkirk, the
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Dunkirk spirit, not understanding that Dunkirk, portrayed in sort of history for idiots as
33:31
a big victory, was actually a huge defeat.
33:36
And had Hitler not stopped his generals from carrying on the march to Dunkirk, the entire
33:44
British expeditionary force would have been taken prisoner.
33:48
He let the British go for reasons that are still debated.
33:54
So they were lucky in the case of Japan attacking Pearl Harbor and not coming in to do Russia
34:04
like they'd done in 1904, 1905, and the German leaders deciding to let the British survive
34:11
in Dunkirk.
34:13
These were two key mistakes from their point of view.
34:15
I mean, thank God they did that, but that is what they did.
34:19
So there's no big kudos for the British leaders in the Second World War.
34:26
Churchill was a good war leader when he was waging war, either against the working class
34:35
in Britain or against the foreign enemies who threatened the British Empire or against
34:41
the colonial peoples.
34:43
He was in his element.
34:45
There's no two ways about that.
34:48
And the reason for that is obvious, and I describe it in some detail in my book.
34:58
But the point is this, if Churchill hadn't existed or had died in the First World War,
35:05
whatever, had fallen ill, I think the British ruling elite would have found someone else
35:12
to carry on the war and build such a person up again as the key leader.
35:19
So what you said is correct.
35:22
It is that tiny period of history in the 20th century, the Second World War period, that
35:30
built up Churchill.
35:31
And then it's important to realize that despite that, he was quite unpopular with large sections
35:40
of the people, and satirical attacks on him were common.
35:46
Howard Brinton wrote this wonderful play for the Nottingham Playhouse, later transferred
35:53
to the National Theatre, called the Churchill play.
35:56
I mean, to just get a feel of the mood in the late 50s, 60s, Brinton's play is really
36:07
perfect.
36:08
So it's not that there was no one who didn't like him.
36:10
Lots of people did, and they recalled him during the war, since it was already being
36:15
made into account with movies and this, that, and the other.
36:19
But the level in the liberal media or theaters, etc., he was criticized, you know, not viciously,
36:32
except Brinton's play was quite vicious, but quite a lot of them weren't vicious, but
36:37
quite realistic, saying this is what he did, this is what he didn't do.
36:42
And that is now forgotten.
36:45
They don't even recall it.
36:48
And that's why I felt it was important to write the book.
36:52
I mean, people can agree with it, they can disagree with it, but it's got most of the
36:56
facts out of it.
36:57
Yeah, I was thinking about this mythologizing that's growing out of Second World War that
37:04
Churchill is a part of.
37:05
You know, I was born in the Balkans, and yet as Eastern European kids, we were brought
37:10
up after the fall of Yugoslavia on a steady diet of American and British war movies, creating
37:18
an illusion that the war was won exclusively by the British and mostly the Americans.
37:23
And then you grow up and you start reading a little bit.
37:27
And I read somewhere there are four fifths of the war was fought in the East.
37:32
And it's like, wait a minute, that sounds quite different than Saving Private Ryan portrays
37:39
or, I don't know, Dunkirk.
37:42
Yeah, exactly.
37:44
And I mean, you know, during the war itself, and for 10 years at least afterwards, no intelligent
37:51
person, whatever his or her politics, if you'd come up to them and said which was the key
37:59
factor in winning the Second World War, many people say the Russian army, the Red Army
38:06
won that war.
38:08
And the coverage of the Red Army's victories in the British media, you have to go and look
38:13
at them to realize it was acknowledged.
38:15
It had to be acknowledged.
38:19
And it was acknowledged till the rewriting of history began.
38:26
I mean, Yugoslavia is an interesting case in point, unlike Greece, where Churchill was
38:32
utterly vicious, utterly vicious, because the Greek islands in the Mediterranean were
38:39
important staging posts for the empire.
38:42
It was strategically considered important.
38:46
Yugoslavia wasn't.
38:48
And Churchill knew that the Germans had formed a government in Croatia, the first independent
38:54
Croatian government, was a Nazi government.
38:57
I mean, you know, and they couldn't be relied on.
39:02
Some of the Bosniaks were fighting for the Germans under pressure.
39:08
The biggest resistance in the Second World War to the Germans came from, you know, the
39:13
partisans led by Tito.
39:16
They fought the Germans virtually to a standstill.
39:21
And you know, that's why Tito maintained this independence even against Moscow.
39:27
He said, we know what we did.
39:29
And at one point he threatened Stalin, don't think we're like Hungary or this or that.
39:34
Under your control, we are not.
39:36
And any attempt made by the Russians to overrun Yugoslavia, we will arm all our people as
39:41
we did against the Nazis.
39:44
He said that.
39:45
And so the Yugoslav resistance, which also now is being written out of the history of
39:52
Yugoslavia by nationalist, ultra nationalist embassies, and that's what they're trying
39:59
to do.
40:00
It's part of the same thing.
40:02
Don't acknowledge what the others did who were crucial for that victory, just like the
40:07
Greek resistance.
40:09
So much, much more important than the French and Italian resistance from the point of view
40:15
of the Second World War.
40:16
The eastern parts of Europe played a decisive role at key points of the war.
40:24
And this used to be acknowledged.
40:30
But you know, such is history and such are the needs for a different type of history
40:35
in this world.
40:36
When a new Cold War is beginning, when, you know, as we speak, there's a war being waged
40:45
by Putin against the Ukraine and by NATO against Putin.
40:50
That's essentially what's going on and how it will be settled.
40:54
I do not know.
40:55
I don't depend not on the Ukrainians.
41:00
They can carry on thinking they're independent, though even they're more intelligent politicians
41:05
know they're totally and completely dependent on the United States and NATO.
41:10
So the decision will be made by the United States when to stop this war and whether to
41:15
convince Putin that this time they're serious.
41:19
We shall see.
41:20
So in a, and you know, talking about fascism in the 30s, this continuation of a new type
41:31
of fascism in some cases linked to the older varieties we can see in Ukraine.
41:39
The Ukraine was the one part of the of the East where there was collaboration.
41:45
More Ukrainians fought with the Red Army than fought for Hitler.
41:49
We should be clear about that.
41:51
But there was a very strong ultra nationalist fascist influence.
41:56
And that's still there.
41:57
The Azov Brigade.
41:59
And Westerners show very little understanding of that or are prepared to defend them just
42:07
because of their sort of dislike of what Putin has done.
42:11
I don't like Putin.
42:12
I don't like the invasion of the Ukraine.
42:15
I opposed it.
42:16
I wrote against it.
42:17
The question is, it's happened.
42:19
What do we do now?
42:20
How do we end this war?
42:24
You've mentioned Stalin a moment ago.
42:27
Stalin was famous for his hatred of or distaste of leftist revolutionary politics and especially
42:32
the Bolsheviks, right?
42:33
And yet during the Second World War, he simply had to work together with the Soviets.
42:39
What was his relationship with Stalin like?
42:42
Quite good for most of the time.
42:46
What did he really think of him?
42:48
I think he really thought that he was a sort of effectively he was not a proper Bolshevik,
42:55
that he was more nationalist oriented and they could do business with Stalin, which
43:02
they had to anyway.
43:05
But you know, it would have been slightly different had they been doing business with
43:08
Lenin or Bukharin or Trotsky, any of those old leaders who knew the world.
43:15
And Stalin on his part was totally opportunistic.
43:19
I mean, it cost many, many Soviet lives, his policies of alliance, temporary alliance with
43:29
Germany.
43:30
It's just that he didn't want it to be temporary.
43:32
He wanted it to carry on and offered Hitler a deal and wouldn't believe it when his generals
43:40
came up to him a few months before the Nazi invasion of Russia and said, here's the evidence
43:47
that the Germans are surrounding us here, there, and we have to prepare.
43:53
He still wouldn't believe it and wrote a friendly letter to Hitler saying, I can't believe that
43:59
you have aggressive intentions towards us.
44:03
Now at the very least, we can call that naivety, but it shows an inability to understand what
44:13
was really taking place in the world if you thought you could do a permanent deal with
44:18
Hitler.
44:19
I mean, Hitler, from his point of view, could have done it, but he was fearful that the Red
44:25
Army was too strong.
44:27
So before he took the rest of Europe and Britain, he thought better to wipe out the Red Army
44:34
because they are the main force which would resist us and that he wasn't wrong.
44:40
So his surprise attacks, or surprise only for Stalin, basically knocked the Russians
44:47
out for the first eight months of the war.
44:51
And then they recovered and began to fight sort of heroically and they lost more lives
44:58
than any other country in virtually the entire Western countries of Europe put together.
45:05
It was unnecessary because had Stalin understood world politics and seen Hitler as the principal
45:11
enemy at the time, he wouldn't have purged his top generals.
45:17
I mean, the key generals of the Red Army who had won the Bolsheviks in the Civil War.
45:25
Tukhachevsky was regarded as a genius by even his opponents and he was executed as a German
45:33
spy.
45:34
He was a guy who in the last military maneuvers when he was alive had predicted with startling
45:41
precision how the Germans would attack, where they would attack.
45:48
And he said, Blitzkrieg only works for those countries who have no real desire to fight,
45:55
and talking and correctly analyzing what the French later did, but he said we can defeat
46:05
them, provided we don't lose our nerve.
46:09
What he predicted was exactly what the Germans did, but the Red Army's top high command,
46:14
which had participated in these war maneuvers, was not there to lead the fight back.
46:20
They had to recover lots of generals imprisoned, but not killed with Tukhachevsky, were released
46:28
when going straight from prison to the front to fight the Germans.
46:33
So he was Stalin, wasn't basically, if one wants to characterize him without any other
46:39
adjectives, he was a very opportunist politician, not very bright, who often got things wrong.
46:47
The Bengal famine of 1942-43 was one of the worst disasters in 20th century South Asia.
46:54
It caused, I believe, up to 4 million deaths, an absolutely horrific number, and occurred
47:01
during the Second World War, of course, when India was still under the British Raj.
47:05
At the time, Churchill was the prime minister running his war cabinet.
47:10
What was his role in this catastrophe?
47:13
Churchill didn't take the famine seriously, in a speech in London during the famine, he
47:18
said there are lots of people exaggerating the famine.
47:21
If the famine was what they say it is, how come Gandhi is still alive?
47:27
He actually made that joke.
47:30
Sorry, he said, if the famine is real, how come Gandhi is still alive?
47:35
Yes.
47:36
Wow.
47:37
Yeah.
47:38
So, to be fair, the British administration in India led by the viceroyals, Lord Wavell,
47:47
were horrified.
47:49
Lord Wavell's wife visited Bengal, and she said, I have never seen human beings looking
47:57
like starving animals in my whole life, and tried to press the war cabinet to release food
48:08
for the Bengalis.
48:10
It's their rice that they had cultivated that had been taken to feed the British army during
48:15
the Second World War, and that was seen as a priority.
48:19
And so the Bengalis who were killed, who died because of the famine, 3, 4 million, the figures
48:26
are disputed, but still in the millions, were just regarded as, you know, cannon fodder.
48:33
Collateral damage, not a phrase that was used often, but that's the phrase they would use
48:39
now, were something similar to happen now, it's collateral damage.
48:44
And this was huge.
48:46
And I have to say here that in my book, I don't just criticize Churchill for that, I'm
48:51
also critical of the Indian elite rulers who were fighting for Indian freedom.
48:57
None of them, neither Gandhi, nor Jinnah, nor Nehru, went to Bengal during that time
49:04
to offer some solace, some hope to the Bengalis who were dying in rows in the villages and
49:12
in the streets of Calcutta.
49:16
It was, Churchill of course, as one of his conservative colleagues remarked, is just
49:25
insane as far as India is concerned, he doesn't recognize them as human beings.
49:32
And his hatred for Gandhi was sort of beyond a joke actually, I mean most intelligent English
49:40
administrators or British administrators of India saw Gandhi as a huge, you know, he was
49:48
fighting them, but he was fighting them in such a way that even when they left, they
49:54
were confident that elements of the system they had created would be preserved, and that
50:00
Gandhi and Nehru's Congress Party was a key instrument for ensuring that.
50:06
And that's exactly what happened, you know, to this day many, many things exist which
50:13
shouldn't.
50:14
But the Bengal famine was very underplayed in my opinion, in India as well, till much
50:23
later.
50:24
People didn't like talking about it.
50:26
It's a strange business this, you know, that when you have undergone a disaster on such
50:34
a huge scale, those who survived that disaster don't want to talk about it immediately afterwards.
50:42
The Judeo side of the Second World War is an example.
50:46
Many, many Jews who had survived, not that many, but those who did survive, and they
50:51
were survivors, didn't really like to talk about it with, even amongst themselves.
51:00
It's a psychological thing.
51:03
It's horrible it happened, you know, put it in the past like someone dead and gone.
51:08
It's not till 10, 15 years past that people then begin to write, man, this is what happened.
51:15
That is what happened.
51:17
But there have not been too many movies or books about the Bengal famine.
51:25
And to my mind, it's really shocking that given that the left, the Communist Party of
51:34
India, and Marxist has been in power in Bengal for 25, 30 years, that no one told them why
51:43
not construct a museum of this famine with all the evidence.
51:50
Still should be done.
51:51
There should be a museum in Kolkata to show what happened.
51:59
And I'm sure there are many well-meaning Indians with a lot of money who will fund it if the
52:05
West Bengal government can't.
52:08
It's something which should be, the memory of which should be kept alive.
52:14
And educate people, this is what happened.
52:17
This is a concrete war crime and an act of atrocity against our people.
52:24
This didn't happen.
52:29
And it's a blot on these governments who exercised power.
52:33
But yeah, that was definitely one of Churchill's crimes at a time when people, the British
52:39
administrators in India were pleading with him.
52:42
You know, read the correspondence between the war office and Wavell and Churchill.
52:49
And you see that Britain was divided.
52:53
Churchill played a key role.
52:55
And the war cabinet, you know why you often say Churchill, but I always make a point of
53:00
adding, and his labour colleagues in the war cabinet, the labour leaders in the war cabinet,
53:09
did nothing either.
53:12
We have to slowly wrap up.
53:14
You spoke about this before.
53:16
But what's fascinating is that we assume that Churchill became this mythical larger-than-life
53:22
figure immediately after the war.
53:24
And yet we often forget, as you said, that people voted him out of office immediately
53:29
after the war ended.
53:31
The man wasn't always as popular as we're being led to believe now.
53:35
So when and most of all, why did this cult of personality begin?
53:41
You mentioned Margaret Thatcher and the Falklands War.
53:44
Yeah, that's when the cult of personality began in a serious way.
53:49
But why?
53:50
Why?
53:51
Because in order for Thatcher to justify the war tradition of Britain, in order for her
53:57
to revive memories of when Britain was great, in order for her to try and convince people
54:04
we can be great again, and cover up the fact that that is all over, that the Falklands
54:11
War, even though it was won, was a stupid, disastrous war.
54:15
A negotiated settlement between the Conservative government and the Argentinians was perfectly
54:22
possible, and Lord Carrington, the Foreign Secretary, had already been engaged in negotiations.
54:29
So this was a war for Thatcher's own personal victories, or the victories of the system,
54:35
new consensus that she was creating, that we can even do this.
54:39
And this carries on till now, when Britain participates in America's wars.
54:46
That is what Britain is today, effectively, is one of the states which is completely locked
54:54
into a sort of permanent arrangement with the United States.
55:03
And Churchill is used nonstop for that.
55:06
He was our common leader during the Second World War.
55:10
I've recounted in my book the movies made about him, television series, the books coming
55:18
out on which trivial things.
55:22
Almost you feel someone write a book, which toothbrush did Churchill use, and was that
55:27
toothbrush effective in cleaning his teeth?
55:30
It's on that level that these things are going on.
55:35
This was absolutely splendid.
55:36
Thank you so much.
55:38
Where can people find your book?
55:40
Find bookstores everywhere, I suppose?
55:42
This book can be found on any bookstore, I would say, the chains.
55:48
But if you want to help publishers who publish these books, buy it off the Verso website.
55:58
Verso books who publish the book actually have a very good website which sells these
56:03
books.
56:04
So I would strongly advise people to buy it off the Verso website.
56:09
Do you have any social media?
56:10
Where can people follow your work?
56:12
I am on Facebook and Twitter where I don't spend too much time on it.
56:18
I used to have a website, but I don't have one now.
56:22
So they can follow my work literally by Googling me, I guess.
56:27
And I've been busy working on these books and I'm working on my memoirs of the last
56:34
40 years now.
56:35
So it's mainly through books.
56:38
I write for the New York Review, of course, and it's blogs.
56:42
Sidecar.
56:43
But there are very few other places I write for these days.
56:47
I used to write regularly for The Guardian, but The Guardian has become such an appalling
56:53
newspaper that I find it difficult to read, read, read alone, write for it.
57:03
So you have to look and find.
57:06
People who want to follow me in what I do, I think Verso website is probably the best.
57:14
Again thank you so much for your time.
57:16
This was amazing.
57:17
All righty.
57:18
First of all, just a massive, massive thank you to my patrons, aka producers, Taiichi,
57:23
Veronica, Mila and Carmen.
57:26
Your absolute legends are the reason why this podcast will keep going.
57:31
For the rest of you, if you enjoyed listening to what we back in the Slavlands call the
57:36
program, please do consider following on Spotify and Apple podcasts, subscribing on YouTube
57:42
and of course becoming a patron on Patreon.
57:45
Thanks.