Victory of the Icon 4

At the time, the liberals and the left thought of World War II as a battle between civilisation and barbarism, between progress and reaction.  This is still the mainstream view today.  But the leaders of the Allies did not think this way, if they were honest.  For instance...

The Churchill who demanded a no-holds-barred prosecution of the war was the same Churchill who had been present during the butchery at Omdurman, sent troops to shoot down striking miners in 1910 [this is probably not true], ordered the RAF to use poison gas against Kurdish rebels in British-ruled Iraq [this is arguable], and praised Mussolini. He had attacked a Conservative government in the 1930s for granting a minimal amount of local self government to India, and throughout the war he remained adamant that no concessions could be made to anti-colonial movements in Britain’s colonies, although this could have helped the war effort. ‘I have not become the king’s first minister’, he declared, ‘to oversee the dismemberment of the British Empire.’ He told Roosevelt and Stalin at Yalta, ‘While there is life in my body, no transfer of British sovereignty will be permitted’.

In the Second World War, many - probably most - ordinary people thought of themselves as fighting the evil of fascism, but

the motives of the rulers remained very different from those of their peoples. This was shown in the conduct of the war.  Between the fall of France in the spring of 1940 and the Allied landings in southern Italy in 1943 most of the fighting by British armies was in northern Africa. Why? Because Churchill was determined to hang on to the area with the Suez Canal and the oilfields. His worries were not just about Germany but also the US, as was shown by a bitter diplomatic tussle between him and Roosevelt over Saudi Arabia. 

The invasion of Italy was itself a consequence of Churchill’s obsession with re-establishing British hegemony in the Mediterranean.  He refused pleas from both Russia and the US to open a second front in France at the time when the most vital battles of the war were being fought in western Russia. Instead he claimed that Italy and the Balkans constituted ‘the soft underbelly of Europe’—despite mountainous terrain which was bound to mean bloody battles and a very slow pace of advance.

Churchill’s refusal to concede the principle of independence for India meant that in 1942, while the decisive Battle of Stalingrad was taking place, thousands of British-led troops were brutally crushing demonstrations in India instead of fighting the Nazis, and that an Indian ‘liberation army’ was formed to fight on the side of Japan. It also led to a famine which killed three million people in Bengal.

The quotes are from Chris Harman's, A People's History of the World.

Victory of the Icon 3

I have a massive, endlessly-lengthening list of books, old and new, that I want to get around to reading.  Donny Gluckstein's new book A People's History of the Second World War just went straight in near the top of the list.

Gluckstein's argument seems to be that WWII was actually two wars, fought in parallel.  One was an imperialist squabble between established empires and up-and-coming imperialist nations that were set to clash with them.  Britain, France, Russia and America (which was already a continental empire and was ready to expand globally) found themselves violently competing for hegemony with Germany, Italy and Japan.  Running beneath this conflict there was a people's war against fascism (the form taken by the new empires) underpinned by dreams of freedom and democracy.  The imperialists running the first war knew that had to appeal to the priorities of the people fighting the second war in order to enlist their support, hence the democratic rhetoric.

I mention this here because Gluckstein has done an interview for New Left Project, in which he has some things to say about Winston Churchill, the subject of my irregular 'Victory of the Icon' posts.

Churchill was always very clear that his mission in the war was to defend the British empire, not promote the interests of ordinary citizens. He was not ideologically committed to destroy fascism. He made statements such as the following when he met Mussolini in 1927: ‘If I had been an Italian I would have been with you from the start in your struggle against the bestial passions of Leninism’. During the Spanish civil war he backed Franco (whose survival depended on Hitler and Mussolini’s massive material support), and afterwards he defended Franco when some argued that his regime was the unfinished business of WWII. Churchill also backed the Japanese invasion of Manchuria before the war.

During the war itself Churchill was very resistant to the notion of opening a second front (a landing in France) to relieve pressure on Russia. The focus of British strategy until 1944 was to avoid confronting the Nazis in Europe, and instead defend the imperial routes. That is why the main fighting was in North Africa (Tobruk, El Alamein). When the tide turned on the Eastern Front and it looked like Russia would sweep across Europe Churchill suddenly threw his efforts into the D-Day landings.

For ordinary British people the war had a very different meaning. It was a war against Nazism and fascism, for liberation and democracy. Churchill was fighting to defend the status quo of 1939 which, at home, had meant mass unemployment, appalling poverty and deprivation. The majority were not going to put their lives at risk to continue with that. Nor would they be duped with the sort of propaganda issued in the First World War (such as Lord Kitchener’s famous poster – ‘Your country needs you!’) They had seen what imperialist war meant.

And:

Churchill was an important figure in the sense that the British ruling class was divided about what to do with Germany. One wing thought that there could be a division of spoils – let Hitler have the Continent in return for leaving Britain to its overseas empire. They were therefore in favour of appeasement during the 1930s and for compromise once the war had begun.

Churchill rejected this scenario. He considered, probably rightly, that Hitler would not be content with such a division and that Germany would inevitably be a threat to British imperial interests. He was therefore absolutely determined to see the war through to its conclusion and win. This is the source of his inspirational rhetoric which captivated so many. However, as explained above – he was a great imperialist war leader, not a great leader of the war against fascism.

Churchill’s war record is shocking in many ways. He was responsible for the Bengal famine which cost some 3 million lives because he insisted on forcing India to raise a huge army and blocked efforts to supply food when the demands of that army caused starvation. Rather than open up a second front in Europe he gave himself an alibi by backing area bombing of Germany. This involved the indiscriminate bombing of German civilians which continued in spite of US advice that targeted bombing would be more militarily effective. Even after the D-Day landings, when it was clear the land war would be the means by which Nazism would be destroyed, he backed Bomber Command which was working through its list of city targets, the most notorious being Dredsen.

Winston, you old devil.  Is that a wicked twinkle in your eye, you cheeky chap? 

Still, it's okay.  Gatiss didn't portray him as whiter than white.  He tries to steal the TARDIS keys, after all.  The naughty man.  That'll neutralise any tendency there might otherwise be in the episode to indoctrinate children into the unquestioning admiration of a blood-splattered old reactionary imperialist.

Victory of the Icon 2

Winston Churchill was the British Secretary of State for War in 1920.  As such, he was the British politician most directly and personally responsible for the Black and Tans, the notorious 'special policemen' (paramilitaries really) sent in to help the Royal Irish Constabulary put down the revolt against British rule.  The Irish people had rejected Home Rule in a referendum... only to find that the British were going to try to impose it by force.  This triggered the conflict - a nationalist revolt met by imperial repression - that is known as the 'Anglo-Irish War'.

The Black and Tans went on a rampage of violence, targeting civilians alongside anyone suspected of involvement in the revolt.  Indiscriminate reprisals and revenge killings were the order of the day.  Many whole towns and villages were besieged and sacked, often simply as collective punishment for the killings of RIC officers.  They beat, shot, starved and tortured people.  They tore out people's fingernails in front of their families.  'Murder squads' disguised in civilian clothes roamed the streets.  The Tans sacked Cork and left the city centre in smoking ruins.  The RIC murdered the Mayor in front of his wife and son.

All this horror on the authority of Lloyd George and Winston.  An officer veteran of the Cork 'campaign', the man later to become famous as Field Marshall Montgomery, wrote later that it "never bothered me a bit how many houses were burnt."

Churchill was once challenged about the behaviour of the Tans by Sir Henry Wilson.  Wilson recorded a conversation between himself, Churchill and Major General Henry Tudor (who was running murder squads) on 23rd September 1920:

Tudor made it very clear that the Police and the Black and Tans and the 100 Intelligence officers are all carrying out reprisal murders. … At Balbriggan, Thurles and Galway yesterday, the local Police marked down certain SFs (Sinn Feiners) as in their opinion the actual murderers or instigators and then coolly went and shot them without question or trial. Winston saw very little harm in this but it horrifies me.

Wilson was later assassinated by the IRA... but before we weep for him, we should bear in mind that he wasn't against shooting people just for being in a political party opposed to British rule... he just thought it should be done 'officially'.

In Ireland, 1920 was known as the 'year of terror'.

Mind you, some of the atrocities often attributed to the Black and Tans were actually the work of the regular RIC, or of a different force of British paramilitary terrorists known as the Auxiliaries.  The idea of the 'Auxies' seems to trace back to Churchill.  He proposed the idea to a conference of ministers in May 1920.

The Auxies were smaller in their numbers than the Tans but were generally considered cleverer, more ruthless and more violent.  They were involved in the infamous 'Bloody Sunday' massacre at Croke Park in November 1920.  RIC men, aided by Auxies, indiscriminately sprayed bullets into the crowd at a football game, fatally wounding 14 civilians.  This was a reprisal massacre in response to the IRA's killing of 15 British intelligence operatives.  In other words, in response to the killing of spies during a war, the British-run police forces opened fire on a crowd of non-combatants.

This is one reason why, when people say things like: "Say what you like about Churchill, he was the man we needed during the war", I tend to ask: "Which war?"

How Curses Work

We've all seen him.  He's swarthy, usually (though not always) with a dark beard.  He's often wearing a fez (no, I'm not going to say it) and robes of some kind.

A fanatic.  And friend.

Sometimes, he leaves his home desert and comes to England.  He may be dressed in Western clothes and live in a house with Western furnishings, but he's got a secret room, or a shrine, or a sanctum behind a billowing curtain, in which he keeps his infernal idols amidst clouds of suffocating incense.

He's...

(cue dramatic music)


...the Egyptian Fanatic!

When he comes to England, he becomes the mirror image of the English Explorer Who Has Just Returned from Egypt (henceforth, the Explorer).  This man goes to Egypt for the love of antiquities and discovery, and comes back enchanted and bewitched by the place (by the place, mind, not the people); filling his big, wood-panelled home with Egyptiana.  The question of whether the Explorer has any right to this Egyptiana is raised only by the Egyptian Fanatic in England (henceforth, the Fanatic).

The Fanatic has come to England from his native land in search of something, some inscrutable justice, some devilish retribution.  He nurses a grudge.  He clothes himself in Anglo, middle-class normalcy.  He speaks impeccable English, albeit in a heavy accent.  (It doesn't have to be an 'Egyptian accent', just a generic foreign one will do.)  He is usually treated with courtesy (at first) by the bemused English middle classes amongst whom he mixes by default because of his wealth.  These people may come to suspect and despise him, but they're often tolerant enough at the start, though a working class or yokel character may get to utter some ignorant dislike of "strangers".  The middle class characters may even initially tut at this sort of hostility (what with them being so open minded and everything) but it will turn out that the yokel's xenophobia was (accidentally) quite justified.

I'm a racist stereotype.  Racist stereotypes are cool.

Because the Fanatic is there to cause trouble.  To raise the mummified body of a long-dead Egyptian High Priest from its slumber inside a sarcophagus and set it the task of killing all those infidels who dared to trespass upon the sacred resting place of the Pharaoh, etc.  The Explorer will be the target of the Fanatic's superstitious rage (it will continue to be looked upon as superstition, despite the fact that the spells work and the mummy really does come to life).  The Explorer was just trying to further the cause of science and knowledge, to preserve the ancient Egyptian past, perhaps to delve into mysteries Better Left Undisturbed... sometimes the Explorer has been arrogant in his treatment of the Egyptians, sometimes he was rude and dismissive to the particular Egyptian Fanatic who is now persecuting him, usually when said Egyptian Fanatic turned up and begged him not to open the pyramid / break the seal on the scroll / disturb the body / take the mummy to display in England.  In some cases, the Explorer is shown to be greedy for gold or glory or knowledge... sometimes he is even a touch fanatical himself.

But, at the end of the day, it is the Egyptian who is the real Fanatic.  It is he who has devoted his life to the single-minded cause of revenge, of worshipping the evil Egyptian deity, of seeking out all desecrators and having them strangled by a rotting corpse.  Sometimes he has fanatically loyal henchmen or assassins who will kill for him, with dirty great curved swords.  If ordinary Egyptians see these men (you know ordinary Egyptians by their muteness, cowardliness and by the fact that they do the donkey work at the Explorer's dig) they run away in terror.  Maybe the Fanatic is the last in a long line of priests, acolytes of a cult that has lasted for centuries, devoted to passing the task of protecting their god down through the generations.  He is bound to savagery via fanatical superstition and cultish tradition.  And the Explorer is the victim.  The Explorer's home is violated, the Explorer's wife (who is sometimes the reincarnation of the mummy's Queen / High Priestess / lover) is menaced, the Explorer is attacked... etc.

The wife thing is interesting because it adds the anxiety of the Caucasian woman desired, possibly symbolically ravished, by the Arab... and, it goes without saying, the woman is depicted as property that the men fight over.  The theft of her from her husband is usually a perverse echo of the noble thefts committed by the Explorer.  You take our treasures in the name of science, so we take your women in the name of... well... heh heh heh heh hehhhhhh!

So we see how the Mummy story stems from European (particularly English) anxieties about the morality (or consequences anyway) of raiding other people's ancient tombs and carrying their ancient artifacts and corpses away with you, back to England to recieve the fame and the fortune and the prestige.  More broadly, we see how stories like this stem from European anxieties about their empires, about their pith-helmeted sons swaggering around other people's countries like they owned them.  It isn't that these stories try to make the Explorer come to terms with what he's done wrong... it is that his behaviour (however dodgy it may occasionally be acknowledged to be) is absolved by the disproportionate and grotesque response of the inscrutable, pre-modern, occult, emotionally deranged, immature, vindictive, fanatical, fez-wearing brown person who comes after him, wielding fetishes, chanting invocations to obscene deities (our own images of tortured hunks nailed to crosses are never questioned), burning incense, reading horrible curses from scrolls and sending his decomposing henchman out to do his murderous dirty work for him.

Thus, as always in the stories told by imperialist cultures, is the imperialist absolved by the inhumanity of his own victims.  This task may be best accomplished by tales of the uncanny precisely because it requires such a massive leap outside the realms of reality.


The Fanaticism of the West

It's quite something, the way our popular culture has managed to associate Egypt almost entirely with curses, fanaticism, evil and the theft of white womenfolk, given the nature of actual European relations with that country.  Egypt, after all, has never invaded Britain.  Britain, however, has invaded Egypt.  A lot.

In July 1882, British warships began bombarding Alexandria.  Supposedly, this was done because the Egyptians refused to surrender some coastal forts.  In reality, the forts were no threat, as the British knew at the time.  By the end of the shelling, much of Alexandria lay in ruins.  This was blamed on rioting mobs by the British but the evidence shows that a huge amount of the damage was done by British shells.  Estimates of Egyptian dead and wounded range from about 600 to 2,000, many of them civilians.  Gladstone, who was always ready to push aside his tearfully-proclaimed moralistic scruples about empire when the time came to protect British imperial interests, told one queasy colleague in the Liberal cabinet that they had taught "the fanaticism of the East that the massacre of Europeans is not likely to be perpetrated with impunity".

Gladstone was referring to riots that had claimed the lives of 50 Europeans (and of 250 Egyptians at the hands of Europeans) before the shelling.  The riots were an expression of outrage over European interference in and domination of Egypt.

A fanatic. 

The construction of the Suez Canal, in the decade from 1859, benefited only Britain.  It was the principle waterway leading to the glittering jewel in the imperial crown: India.  It secured British strategic and trade domination.  It led to the bankrupting of the Egyptian economy.  The Egyptian government had to go to European shareholders and banks for loans to pay for its share of the construction costs.  Through ruinous terms, huge interest demands, siphoning off of money in commissions, payment in overvalued bonds, etc. - fraud, in other words - the Europeans bilked Egypt into bankruptcy, whereupon the defaulting government effectively fell into receivership to European bondholders.  Gladstone himself - the great, principled, lachrymose humanitarian - was a bondholder.  Egypt came under the effective control of European creditors and governors.  Payments were extracted from Egypt with utter ruthlessness.  The fellahin - the peasants - suffered most.  They were subjected to terrible brutality, whipped and tortured and imprisoned into paying up even during years of failed harvests and famine.

The Khedive, Ismail, made some efforts to frustrate Euro control of his country, but when he became too intransigent, Ismail was simply removed by the British and replaced by his son Tewfik.  The Europeans in Egypt, aside from the arrogant racist contempt they showed the Egyptians, lived high on the hog even as the Egyptians sank into greater poverty.  Opposition grew, much of it Islamist in character - understandable, given what Christians were doing to Egypt - but also largely of a nationalist and democratic character.  This was the "fanaticism of the East".

When the British and French started reducing Egypt's army to help pay the debts, many people feared that this was a prelude to a military occupation... understandable, given the French occupation of Tunisia.  The Army - under General Urabi - went over to the nationalist side.  It's been said that Egypt fell under Army dictatorship, but this is false.  The Army programme was surprisingly moderate, demanding an end to the autocracy of the Khedive and an economy not entirely yoked to debt repayments.  But this was not acceptable to the European bondholders.  With neither side backing down, force would inevitably decide.  Anglo-French warships were dispatched to intimidate the nationalists.  The anti-European riots - quite understandable, given the years of intense provocation - provided the Europeans with a self-righteous cause.  The coastal forts provided an immediate pretext.  And so, Alexandria was shelled.  Civilians were crushed, blasted, blown, burned and smashed to pulp.

British humanitarian interventionists gallantly
save Egypt from the fanatical Egyptians.

Gladstone, with the overwhelming support of the Commons, ordered a full invasion.  In the early morning of the 13th September 1882, a British expeditionary force launched a surprise attack against the Egyptian army at Tel-el-Kebir.  The British techniques of colonial warfare were well honed.  The result was an easy victory and a pitiless slaughter.  57 British soldiers were killed and nearly 400 wounded.  Nobody bothered to count Egyptian dead (they didn't do body counts then either) but estimates range from 2,000 to 10,000.  Gladstone was delighted and rushed to make political capital out of his great victory.  It should go without saying that the subsequent British occupation of Egypt had the character that all imperial domination inexorably assumes.  The prisons filled, the secret police ran rampant.  Torture and military terrorism became institutional and systematic.

If, by the way, a lot of this sounds depressingly familiar to you, eerily reminiscent of imperial adventures in our own recent times, then stand by...

In 1916, the British forced 1.5 million Egyptian men to work for them - and 'requisitioned' (i.e stole) huge amounts of crops, animals and buildings - in aid of the British war effort in the Middle East... which took the form, essentially, of an invasion and occupation of Iraq (or Mesopotamia as it - essentially - was then).  One of the big causes of WWI was the race between the British and German empires to control Iraq (they'd both recently switched their major railroads over from coal to oil).  That's another story... suffice it to say that the first British regiments in 1914 were sent to Basra and, by 1917, the British had invaded Iraq wholesale.  The point here is that this process further worsened the terrible impoverishment and suffering of most of the Egyptian people.  This, together with insulting British refusals to allow Egyptian nationalists to put Egypt's claim for independence to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, lead to a nationwide rebellion.  Initially, the British lost control of much of the country... but they machine-gunned, bombed, burned, hanged, flogged and beat the Egyptians back into line, killing more than a thousand in the process.  Unrest continued and, by 1922, the British granted Egypt formal  independence.  It was very formal indeed, and left Egypt a financially-dominated, militarily-occupied client state.  Resistance and repression continued.

By 1946, the British were forced to withdraw to the Canal zone.  The British knew that the Canal was still vital to their trade and strategic interests.  However, the Egyptian government demanded full British withdrawal.  Showing their customary dedication to democracy, the British instead poured more troops into the country and threatened a renewed national occupation.  Winston Churchill increased troop numbers again and, under his watchful eye, British forces started bulldozing whole villages in retaliation for guerrilla attacks.  Eventually, heroic resistance to ferocious British repression brought the country to the point where, with massive rioting in Cairo, a powerless puppet king and an entirely rebellious Egyptian army, Egypt had become ungovernable.  British elites backed down, realising that they could not risk a reoccupation of the whole country.

After a CIA-sponsored army coup in 1952, Nasser took over Egypt.  He began trying to renegotiate with the British over the Canal Zone.  Churchill told Eden that the Egyptians should be driven back "into the gutter from which they should never have emerged".  But Churchill was forced to agree to withdraw British troops from the Canal by 1956.  Nasser wanted Egypt to tow an independent course.  Seeking protection from Israeli aggression and getting no help from Eisenhower, he turned to the Soviets and nationalised the Suez Canal.

Another fanatic.  

The French, who hated Nasser because he was supporting the Algerian bid for independence from France, offered to cut the British in on their alliance with Israel.  Together they came up with a secret, illegal conspiracy.  The Israelis would attack Egypt and occupy the Canal area.  Britain and France, posing as peacemakers, would demand that both sides withdraw from the Canal.  Obviously, it would be impossible for the Egyptians to agree.  The British and the French would then invade the Canal area, ostensibly to separate the warring sides.  Once in, the European invaders would overthrow Nasser and end his irritating attempt to run Egypt for Egyptians rather than for the benefit of European imperialists.  Aside from the moral repugnance and hypocrisy, it was a lunatic scheme; a last and desperate roll of the dice by two declining empires.   But I'm not giving you a 'conspiracy theory'.  Of course, Eden, Macmillan, Kilmuir and the rest lied their heads off until their dying days, denying the whole thing... but it's a matter of historical record.

#stopnasser

The Israelis launched their unprovoked surprise attack.  French collusion was more or less open.  Nobody was fooled by the pretence.  The Egyptians, quite reasonably in my view (call me nutty), refused to withdraw from their own territory.  So, the British began bombing Egypt.  Again.  Soon, British troops were invading Port Said, where they put down resistance using the usual ruthless violence.  About a thousand Egyptians died at Port Said.  They were mostly.... it gets depressing having to say this over and over.... mostly civilians.

The Americans, however, were not prepared to tolerate this half-arsed attempt by the detumescent powers of Europe to impinge upon their own ascendancy.  They condemned the invasion and launched sanctions.  The British and French had to agree to a ceasefire without having achieved any of their war aims.

With typical self-deception, we remember this sordid and bloody affair as the Suez 'Crisis'.

The Brits were out of Egypt by 1956.  For once, the British had to keep their word.

So why do we keep on telling stories about Egyptian curses, when it's clear that we have been the curse upon Egypt?  Looking at the reality of Anglo-Egyptian relations - i.e. decades of swindling, abuse, domination, invasion, oppression, impoverishment, repression and slaughter of them by us - it's a little hard to understand why we keep telling stories about how sinister and frightening Egyptians are, about how their culture and heritage and history is an uncanny minefield of curses that threaten to destroy us.

Or...

(cue dramatic music again)

...is it?

To Be Continued...

Balanced and Objective

The BBC doing what it does best: "In Iran's iconography of villainy, Britain holds a special place. The UK is seen as the mastermind behind the overthrow of previous Iranian governments. Conservative hardliners believe Britain has in its blood the desire to decide who rules Iran."  Textbook stuff from James Reynolds "BBC Iran correspondent".

Make it all a matter of opinion: "is seen as".  Put it down to someone at the so-called 'extreme': "hardliners".  Pathologise the unacceptable view, make it sound like childish paranoia, sneer at it under your hand: "Iran's iconography of villainy".

Fact is, if people in Iran feel that way about us, they are justified.  The British government, lead by Winston Churchill, were the original movers in the plot to overthrow the democratically elected government of Mossadegh, because he wanted to nationalise the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, which funnelled oil profits out of Iran to Britain (in other words, he had the temerity to think that Iranians should benefit from Iranian resources).  Churchill put up the money.  The CIA took over the plot.  They hired mobsters and Nazi collaborators in Iran.  CIA agents started riots.  They started a coup which lead to the ascension of the Shah's dictatorship and the reign of the SAVAK secret police, described by Amnesty as the worst human rights violators in the world.  Murder, terror, torture, tyranny.  But Western oil companies kept their revenue, so that's okay (though the Americans elbowed Anglo-Persian - now BP - out somewhat in favour of an international consortium in which they had hegemony).

Now we and the Americans are once again gearing up to attack this country that we have already harmed so badly.  For the hegemony of the American empire and the desperate, clawing need of the tottering neoliberal system.  I don't know what shenanigans have lead to our closure of the British Embassy in Tehran and the expulsion of Iranian diplomats from the UK... but you can be sure it's got less to do with outrage at Iranian protestors and more to do with imperialist scheming.

And why?  Because Iran has a nuke program?  Well, maybe.  But why, precisely, are we allowed to have nukes, the Americans are allowed to have nukes (they're the only people who've ever used them on another nation, remember) and Israel (a brutal, racist, apartheid state) is allowed to have nukes... but we mustn't let barbarians like Iran have them... because they'd impinge on Western imperial domination.  Why are we the ones who can be trusted?  Because we're the good guys.  We - the ones who nuked Hiroshima, organised that coup I was just talking about and have bankrolled the horrific treatment of the Palestinians - we are the civilised people.  This is the objective and balanced assumption underlying the BBC's coverage.

Well, truth is not balanced or objective.

Victory of the Icon

In the course of preparing myself [to play Churchill in a biopic]… I realized afresh that I hate Churchill and all of his kind. I hate them virulently. They have stalked down the corridors of endless power all through history…. What man of sanity would say on hearing of the atrocities committed by the Japanese against British and Anzac prisoners of war, ‘We shall wipe them out, every one of them, men, women, and children. There shall not be a Japanese left on the face of the earth’? Such simple-minded cravings for revenge leave me with a horrified but reluctant awe for such single-minded and merciless ferocity.

- Richard Burton. (He got banned from the BBC for writing that. Which must’ve really burned him as he lounged around in Hollywood with Elisabeth Taylor’s head in his lap.)

In ‘Victory of the Daleks’ by Mark Gatiss, Winston Churchill is depicted as a wiley and cantankerous old fox, as a twinkly-eyed yet determined fighter against the Nazi menace, as a moral force, as an impish and roguish but unequivocally good man. This is very much the mainstream view of Churchill, in both ‘pop culture’ and in much of the trash that masquerades as history in our society.

Moreover, Churchill is an old mate of the Doctor’s. They go way back. In other words, he gets the endorsement of Our Hero, the narrative and moral locus of the series.  Here is Gatiss' reasoning:

I think in the end it came down to sort of printing the Churchill of legend, because Doctor Who is not the place, really, to examine those sorts of things, except wherever possible, as it were, in the gaps, in the shadows, you can suggest his pragmatism. So in this episode when the Doctor, despite the fact that the Doctor's telling him that the Daleks are the worst thing in the entire universe, he thinks 'I can end the war quicker, I can save lives'. So that sort of thing was interesting to play with. But I did, you know, it just isn't the place to try and have those conversations, because it's an adventure series.

This reminds me of a page at the BBC website about whether Churchill was “as good as we think?”. As ever, “we” is left undefined. The page lists Pros and Cons. The best Cons they can come up with are a couple of military blunders, the return to the gold standard and Yalta. In other words: was he as marvelous as “we” apparently all believe or did he sometimes make mistakes? The big one on the list is Yalta, so the worst thing he can be accused of is handing much of Europe over to the real evildoers. Pravda would have been proud of such framing.

(The Yalta thing seems especially unfair to Churchill. He assumed that Russia would renege on the agreed post-war frontiers of Europe and advocated ‘Operation Unthinkable’, a lunatic plan to launch an unprovoked attack upon Russia as early as July 1945, thus starting a new war against one of his own allies.)

For Gatiss, Churchill’s “shadows” consist of this kind of “pragmatism”. The closest the man had to a dark side was a ruthlessness about allies and tactics… but even this was all about wanting to “save lives”. Thus, even the “shadows” we are allowed to see make him look noble.

This is from a telegram that Churchill sent to the British Chiefs of Staff and the Chief of the Air Staff, 28th March, 1945:

It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed. Otherwise we shall come into control of an utterly ruined land… The destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing. I am of the opinion that military objectives must henceforward be more strictly studied in our own interests than that of the enemy. The Foreign Secretary has spoken to me on this subject, and I feel the need for more precise concentration upon military objectives such as oil and communications behind the immediate battle-zone, rather than on mere acts of terror and wanton destruction, however impressive.

Note that this memo frankly acknowledges that the firebombings were calculated and carried out as acts of terrorism. Note that the main reason for stopping seems to be the fear that “we shall come into control of an utterly ruined land”.

This, presumably, is what Gatiss means when he refers to Churchill’s “absolute pragmatism”.

(On the subject, it might be observed that many of the ostensible ‘military targets’ that are frequently trotted out as justification for the Dresden atrocity still stand today, since they were quite a way out of the city itself… and many of the RAF pilots dropping the bombs didn’t have proper maps in any case.)

In the end though, for Gatiss, Doctor Who isn’t the forum for investigating Churchill’s ‘flaws’… and yet, somehow, it is the forum for celebrating his greatness. It is obviously considered somehow neutral (i.e. unpolitical or apolitical) to depict Churchill in an entirely positive light (i.e. as “the legend”), whereas introducing a critique of the man would be inappropriate, presumably because it would be seen as evidence of a political agenda. The positive depiction is seen as neutral and acceptable to peddle to kids, whereas a negative or critical depiction would be out of place, probably precisely because it would be perceived as harbouring political valences that a forthrightly positive depiction is somehow supposed to lack!

This is the properly educated orthodox mind at work. This is heavily ideological thinking which perceives itself as non-ideological, precisely because it hugs the doctrinal orthodoxy, which is perceived as normal and mainstream and neutral, and hence appropriate. I’ve even read critics of how Churchill is depicted in this story describe the problem as one of the writing being “apolitical”. But there is nothing neutral or “apolitical” about praise, about approval, about presenting a politician in terms of his “legend”. In any other context, this would be obvious. Would we be happy if a Russian children’s programme portrayed Stalin in terms of his “legend” and excused this on the basis that a critical approach would be inappropriate? Hopefully, we’d call that what it was… and what it is when “we” do it with “our” leaders and their legends: propaganda.

Mind you, I’m not accusing the Doctor Who production team of consciously taking on the roles of ideological commissars. That would be to credit them with too much self-awareness. In the minds of the production team, foremost seems to be the issue of Churchill’s status as a “British icon” (this being assumed to be self-evidently good and implicitly appropriate subject matter). The various interviewees on the ‘Victory’ Confidential episode do a lot of blithering on about how Churchill and the Daleks are both “British icons”. Indeed, so steeped in this kind of thinking is Gatiss that, when commenting approvingly on the redesigned Daleks, he describes them as looking “like Minis”.

This kind of ideological thinking covers itself in the supposedly ‘self conscious’ ‘irony’ (it’s actually the opposite of self conscious or ironic) that revels in Bond films because, as Gatiss himself put it, they’re one of those things “you’re not supposed to love”. It’s only a short step from such thinking to the delusions of Daily Mail columnists who imagine that people who dare to express patriotism are hounded by the Political Correctness police.

At another point in the Confidential episode, Gatiss says that the horrors of the Blitz are “the sort of thing that you simply can’t imagine today… the idea that you would see someone like this and then, the next day, maybe everyone else in this room is dead.” Unimaginable, huh? Well, no… not to the people of, say, Iraq. They can imagine what it is like to have their friends and neighbours and family wiped out by bombs in the space of seconds. Many of them can remember such things happening in their own lives. And such things continue to happen in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Libya.

What’s any of this got to do with Churchill? Quite a lot actually.

I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. We have definitely adopted the position at the Peace Conference of arguing in favour of the retention of gas as a permanent method of warfare. It is sheer affectation to lacerate a man with the poisonous fragment of a bursting shell and to boggle at making his eyes water by means of lachrymatory gas. I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes. The moral effect should be good… and it would spread a lively terror…

- Winston Churchill, on how to treat Iraqis, 12 May 1919.

In his thuggish way, he has a point. Why commit mass murder with bombs and then flinch at a bit of gas? In the end, gas doesn't appear to have been used against the "uncivilised tribes". Bombs were good enough to teach them who was master, or pulverise them if they failed to learn the lesson. But we can forget those slaughtered victims of imperialism, because they were slaughtered by "us" rather than by the officially-sanctioned baddies.

Mind you, "we" didn't always think they were baddies. Churchill certainly didn't. In fact, he admired the fascists greatly for their refusal to brook any unpardonable challenges to the state from workers.

What a man! I have lost my heart!... Fascism has rendered a service to the entire world... If I were Italian, I am sure I would have been with you entirely from the beginning of your victorious struggle against the bestial appetites and passion of Leninism.

- Churchill on Benito Mussolini after his 1927 visit to Fascist-run Rome.

Indeed, so enamoured was Winston of this new, blackshirted "way to combat subversive forces" (i.e. striking workers and communists) that he called Mussolini the "Roman genius... the greatest lawgiver among men."

Later, he learned to be slightly more circumspect in his open admiration for jackbooted, union-busting, chauvinist dictators:

One may dislike Hitler’s system and yet admire his patriotic achievement. If our country were defeated, I hope we should find a champion as indomitable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations.

- Winston Churchill, “Hitler and His Choice” The Strand Magazine, November 1935.

This from the man who, according to Gatiss, was “vehemently opposed to the Nazis from very early on, and never wavered from that.”

There’s no mystery here. No contradiction. Churchill was an enemy of the working class, of unions and of all attempts by working people to challenge hierarchies that exploited them. Fascism, to him, before it began to threaten the hegemony of the British Empire, was to be applauded as a counter-revolutionary, anti-union, anti-left force.

Even after the war, Churchill’s attitude to fascists was still ambivalent, to say the least. They were still better than socialist or communist workers in revolt. He authorized more than 200 Nazi troops to assist British soldiers putting down the partisans who liberated swathes of Greece from Fascist control. That wasn’t the kind of liberation Churchill wanted at all.

He didn't, as it happens, order troops to quell the Tonypandy miners; that's a myth. He stopped the troops and was criticised for it by colleagues. But he was a class warrior who saw the General Strike of 1926 as... well, let’s let him speak for himself again:

An industrial dispute about wages, hours, conditions etc., in a particular industry ought to be settled in a spirit of compromise, with give and take on both sides…But a general strike is a challenge to the State, to the Constitution and to the nation. Here is no room for compromise.

- Churchill in the West Essex Constitutionalist, December 1926.

Yes, I mean... how dare workers challenge the State? The nerve. Don't they realise they should simply be grateful for being permitted to ask for compromises over conditions?

Churchill was clear on how to respond to any profound challenges by workers or commies or darkies to the system of privilege and empire and property that he rested his fat behind on so comfortably for so long: violence.

Churchill was a vociferous cheerleader for what is always called the "Allied intervention" in Russia after the 1917 revolution, i.e. unprovoked military aggression and terrorism against a workers' state that had attacked no foreign power. Churchill was perhaps the prime mover in persuading the British cabinet to authorise British troop deployments to invade revolutionary Russia, so fervent was his hatred of any threat to capitalism and privilege. Britain had to destroy “a poisoned Russia, an infected Russia of armed hordes not only smiting with bayonet and cannon, but accompanied and preceded by swarms of typhus-bearing vermin.”

The invasion of the new Soviet Union by 14 capitalist powers, together with the West-supported "white terror" (which was far, far worse than the defensive "red terror"), succeeded in doing what Churchill hoped: Bolshevism, as a force for working class self-liberation, was "strangled in its cradle", leading to the near annihilation of the Russian working class, the degeneration of the soviet system into a hollow Party-run bureaucracy and the subsequent ascendancy of Stalin.

Even after British troops were finally pulled out of the "Russian Civil War", Churchill was still funneling money to the Poles for their invasion of the Ukraine.

Bolshevism, for Churchill, was an International Jewish conspiracy. Here he is, writing on the subject, in an article which one can nowadays only find on neo-Nazi and far-right websites, mysteriously enough. For Churchill, there were the good Russian Jews (i.e. the nationalist ones, the “liberal and progressive” ones, the “bankers and industrialists”, the “upholders of friendship with France and Great Britain”) and then there were the bad Jews, the “International Jews”:

The adherents of this sinister confederacy are mostly men reared up among the unhappy populations of countries where Jews are persecuted on account of their race. Most, if not all, of them have forsaken the faith of their forefathers, and divorced from their minds all spiritual hopes of the next world. This movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States), this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing.
…

There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshevism and the actual bringing about of the Russian Revolution by these international and for the most part atheistical Jews. It is certainly a very great one; it probably outweighs all others. With the notable exception of Lenin, the majority of the leading figures are Jews. Moreover, the principal inspiration and driving power comes from the Jewish leaders.

The solution was to support Zionism.

Zionism has already become a factor in the political convulsions of Russia, as a powerful competing influence in Bolshevik circles with the international communistic system. Nothing could be more significant than the fury with which Trotsky has attacked the Zionists generally, and Dr. Weissmann in particular. The cruel penetration of his mind leaves him in no doubt that his schemes of a world-wide communistic State under Jewish domination are directly thwarted and hindered by this new ideal, which directs the energies and the hopes of Jews in every land towards a simpler, a truer, and a far more attainable goal.

Meanwhile, Churchill’s real priority in supporting Zionism was to create a Brit-friendly settler-colonial statelet in the strategically vital Middle East. We can see his attitude towards the people already living there in his authorization, when British Colonial Secretary, of the use of brutal force to suppress Palestinian resistance to the Mandate.

This was consistent with his racist conception of imperial ‘progress’:

I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time.  I do not admit that right.  I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia.  I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, a more worldy wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.

- Address to the Palestine Royal Commission, 1937.

His contempt for colonized people who dared to think they should govern themselves is found in his sneering comments on Gandhi:

It is alarming and nauseating to see Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the east, striding half naked up the steps of the viceregal palace, while he is still organising and conducting a campaign of civil disobedience, to parlay on equal terms with the representative of the Emperor-King.

- Commenting on Gandhi's meeting with the Viceroy of India, 1931

Note the way that ‘sedition’ against and “disobedience” to the Empire is assumed to discredit Gandhi; note the incredulity that he should dare to “parlay on equal terms” with the British colonial ruler.

Churchill’s determination to preserve British imperial hegemony was impressive and ruthless. He said "I will not preside over a dismemberment." He diverted troops from the war effort to put down colonial problems in Africa and the Middle East. He sent troops to quash the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya, where they indulged in a horrific rampage of terror and torture that our government is still now trying to cover up. He sent troops – at one point as many as 35,000 - to crush the rebellion against British rule in Malaya, a country that had evidently become ‘ungovernable’ as a colony.

Churchill’s post-war care for British interests is clearly seen in Iran. In the early 50s, the elected government of Iran, under Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, decided to nationalize Anglo-Persian Oil, majority owned by HM Government. Britain placed a worldwide embargo on purchases of Iranian oil. Later, Britain froze all Iranian assets in sterling and banned the export of all goods to the country. Atlee was all for storming in and seizing Iranian oilfields by force (I wouldn’t, by the way, be any happier if we ever got a Doctor Who episode in which Atlee were presented whiter than white). However, Churchill’s new government put together a coup plan – ‘Operation Ajax’ – which Churchill backed enthusiastically. The Americans were talked into it after Churchill put up $1.5m of British money (which was a lot of money in those days) and agreed that the coup could be run by Kermit Roosevelt, nephew of former President FDR.

The coup goes ahead on 15th August 1953. Black ops undermine Mossadegh, spread fears of a communist takeover, confect street riots (featuring CIA-hired local mobsters) and bring down the democratically elected government in four days.

The CIA got the Shah to sign off on Mossadegh’s dismissal and appoint Nazi collaborator General Fazlollah Zahedi (newly sprung from jail by the plotters) the new PM of a new military government. Mossadegh was thrown in jail. Many of his supporters were rounded up, tortured and/or executed. This ultimately lead to the dictatorship of the Shah, which lasted until the Iranian revolution of 1979. Under the Shah, Iran was terrorized by the SAVAK secret police, an organization that systematically tortured, imprisoned and liquidated opponents of the Shah’s absolute rule.

Of course, the new regime quickly came to heel over the matter of oil. A consortium of foreign oil companies – AIOC, Royal Dutch Shell, Standard Oil (NJ), Standard Oil of California, Socony, the Texas Company, Gulf Oil and Compagnie Francaise des Petroles – secured their control. Meanwhile, Iran paid compensation (!) to Anglo-Persian totaling $70m. Anglo-Persian is now called British Petroleum (or BP).

So, another victory for democracy and human rights, conceived and supported by the Doctor’s old buddy.

There is much made in the Confidential episode about the Daleks being a bit like Nazis. Indeed, Gatiss even has them use the phrase “master race” in the story itself, just in case we missed it. Gatiss’ remarks in Confidential on this subject lead, by the way, to the following voiceover link, which deserves a chapter to itself in any yet-to-be-written history of the crashingly inappropriate: “…and the concept of total Dalek racial purity leads to a new paint job…”

However, there is little or nothing in the episode which connects Dalek ideas to the ideas of Fascism. This is a shame because I’ve always thought it would be good to have a story in which Nazis meets Daleks, in which the Nazis were confronted by their own values, espoused by people with bigger guns.

‘Churchill vs. the Daleks’ was the way Moffat supposedly described his requirements to Gatiss. So Gatiss delivers a story in which the evil Daleks deceive and then fight the good Churchill. The evil “British icon” vs. the good “British icon”.

The unintentional and unconscious irony is that Churchill was – though this story hides it from us, in line with mainstream ideas of propriety – an imperialist, a racist, a bigot, a fascist sympathizer, a subtle anti-semite, a man given to eliminationist rhetoric, a ruthless defender of unaccountable power, an anti-democratic conspirator, a gangster, a warmonger, a terrorist and a mass killer.

A man who wrote this:

The unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the feeble-minded and insane classes, coupled as it is with a steady restriction among the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks, constitutes a national and race danger which it is impossible to exaggerate ... I feel that the source from which the stream of madness is fed should be cut off and sealed up before another year has passed.

Churchill vs. the Daleks? Churchill was a fucking Dalek.