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Articles
Cambridge University Ends its Commission on Churchill’s Racism
- By LARRY P. ARNN
- | June 29, 2021
- Category: Churchill for Today Truths and Heresies
Dame Athene Donald, the Master of Churchill College Cambridge, is probably breathing a little easier today. Last week, a commission she appointed in reaction to the George Floyd killing was disbanded, or disbanded itself, depending upon whom one believes. That commission had arranged a panel at Churchill College about the racism of Winston Churchill.
The panel featured several rants on this theme that are entirely typical of our day. The charges were virtually undisputed by any of the panelists. This caused a reaction from Churchill’s descendants and from some historians, notably Churchill biographer Andrew Roberts, who knows the real story.
Dame Athene has not said a lot about the actual charges. She treats them as an episode in diplomacy: this faction and that faction got their say (except only one did), and we will continue to make sure that the faction currently fashionable will get a little more than its say. This is the startling thing about the whole episode: it misses the point.
Pursuing truth…
Churchill College is an academic institution. Should it not be concerned with the truth of the things that were said? Those things are disputed now by competent people. The way to get to the bottom of them would be to arrange a debate.
A good debate would focus on the actual evidence of what happened in the past. In the case of Churchill, the record is more than ample to demonstrate what he thought about race. I have asserted many times and without being contradicted that Winston Churchill never said or implied that the rights of any person were conditioned upon the color of his or her skin. He said the opposite beautifully and often.
Yes, he thought some societies were not so arranged to be able to govern themselves fairly. That seemed an observable fact in, for example, India, where Untouchability and the Sati were an oppression upon the people, and where Hindus and Muslims were often at daggers drawn. Those first two evils are now, happily, long removed, and India is now, happily, a large and independent force for good. Moreover, India and Pakistan, where most of the Muslims went, may not be friends but they also are not fighting.
Churchill did not think those former practices in India a permanent disability. He was in favor, for example, of immediately building up “in the provinces of India organizations of local government which will be truly related to the populations they represent and seek to serve.” If successful, such a step would, he believed, allow for self-government in India to be achieved “with sureness and safety.”*
…and deserving better
The world is tending to the condition described in George Orwell’s novel 1984. The past is changeable. The truth is what we say it is. The law of contradiction is repealed. Under the influence of these ideas, we trample the truth, and we tear down statues and remove dedicatory plaques almost without discrimination.
Churchill deserves a better hearing than this, especially from Churchill College Cambridge. That college is after all named for the man who helped, more than any other single man, to destroy the greatest racist in human history. One wonders, what have these contemporary academic scribblers contributed to human freedom and equality compared to that?
The author
Dr. Arnn is the 12th president of Hillsdale College, where he is also a professor of politics and history. Under his aegis and editorship, Hillsdale College Press has completed the official biography and republished all previous volumes including 23 volumes of The Churchill Documents. He is the founder of the Hillsdale College Churchill Project and the author of Churchill’s Trial: Winston Churchill and the Salvation of Free Government (2015).
* Winston S. Churchill, “India,” speech at the Free Trade Hall, Manchester, 30 January 1931 in Robert Rhodes James, ed., Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches 1897-1963, 8 vols. (New York: Bowker, 1974), V, 4970.
Hooray, Larry Arnn, Richard Langworth and Andrew Roberts!
What dullard is suggested to replace him ?
I have never considered Churchill to be racist. However, he was an imperialist, and the CIA, whose foundation lies in the Nazi SS and Tavistock, the globalist elite’s institution to create a one-world government, was created by British secret intelligence and the psychiatric establishment. They have created much of the problems we have today, and Churchill was an instigator of that, as well as being instrumental in our cold war against Russia. Churchill was the one who is responsible for bogeyman of Russia.
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Six months after the end of WW2, the US secretary of state said: “So far as the United States is concerned, we will gang up against no state. We will do nothing to break the world into exclusive blocks or spheres of influence in this atomic age. We will not seek to divide a world which is one.” Four days later, Churchill, spoke in Missouri with President Truman at his side: “Beware…time may be short…From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an Iron Curtain has descended on the continent” Blame was put on the Russians by George Kennan, an authority regarding Russia in the Department of State. Why? We need only think a little and surmise.
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In 1947 President Truman proclaimed the Truman Doctrine, which in effect established a stout barrier between the worlds of communism and the west, along the northern borders of Greece and Turkey. The United States took on the stance of “DEFENSE” and basically put fear into Americans of a communist bogeyman who could attack at any time, as air-raid drills extended from the 1950s into the 1970s, the RED MENACE always in our minds due to propaganda—and you can be sure that Russia had the same, the difference being they feared the western menace. Youth rushed to join the military to “protect our freedom” and were sent to foreign shores to “protect” us from their citizens who fought to protect themselves and their families from foreign invaders- US military. McCarthyism also struck, and many actors, politicians, and activists were accused of communism and punished horrifically by the McCarthy era.
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This is all important. We are now in a war against Covid. The weapons that it will use are vaccinations, and the enemy who will use it to kill United States citizens, who have been in no real danger since 1945, will be treasonous politicians by order of our real rulers—the Vatican, Globalists, and Freemasons. And the military will deliver it forcibly by orders of their bosses, the politicians. Like the police, they follow orders from the most despicable characters alive (except the Vatican, globalists, and Freemasons), thus we have a good idea of their character.
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Dr. Arnn replies:
The British Empire was a different kind of empire than the German, or the Soviet, or even the Roman, because Britain was a different kind of country. Churchill liked to say that India was obtained in a “fit of absence of mind.“[1] India was delivered to the British chiefly by a private citizen, Lord Clive, who without military experience was drawn into the Indian civil wars, provoked in part by continental powers, and managed to win a bunch of battles, both diplomatic and military. The next thing you know he was helping to lay the foundations of what became British India. There is an argument that this was corrupt and wrong, but do not mistake its difference from the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe and before that the German. Those were episodes of deliberate conquest and enslavement and service of the central principles of the regime.
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Churchill himself argued that the British Empire could be justified only if its effect upon colonial people was just, meaning working effectively to protect their rights better than they could on their own, until they could do it better. This was a lesson, he said, that Britain learned from the Declaration of Independence: “By it we lost an empire, but by it we also preserved an empire.”[2] In Churchill‘s lifetime, most of the Empire was made up of self-governing countries who remained close and loyal to Britain as volunteers. They sent millions of troops to what was for them a distant pair of world wars. They seemed to believe in the cause of freedom, which Churchill said they did.
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As for the Vatican, gracious. Stalin asked how many divisions it had. However many it had then, zero, it is not more but less influential than it was in that day. There is a good argument that this is to be regretted.
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[1] Churchill, History of the English Speaking Peoples, vol. 3 The Age of Revolution (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1957), 223.
[2] Churchill, Liberty Day Meeting, London, 4 July 1918, in Robert Rhodes James, ed., Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches 1897-1963, 8 vols. (New York, Bowker, 1974), III, 2315.
“Academic scribblers!” Well said. Thank you Dr Arnn.
Thank you, Dr. Arnn, for giving us the truth and implying criticism (my view) of the Churchill College Cambridge, criticism which the college surely deserves.
This criticism of Churchill is clearly another “woke” attempt to cancel good people…..
The woke will always try to distort the past, Thank-you Dr. Arnn for being voice of truth in this world of deceit. If not for people like you no one would know the true story of the great leaders of the past.
The war upon us now is truth against lies, facts against misinformation. Thinking for ourselves has become so laborious a task that following the going trend is the path so many take. Learning from the past is of utmost importance: that is, the accurate facts of the past.