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Articles
Best and Jenkins on Churchill, Empire, India and the Middle East
- By LARRY P. ARNN
- | December 7, 2023
- Category: Churchill and the East Explore
“India and Israel have two things in common,” said Dr. Arnn after recent visits to both countries. “They both begin with ‘I,’ and they both have governments accountable to the people that they govern. That is a fundamental distinction. It means that both of those countries are in principle friends of ours. Because whatever it is that makes it possible for the people to elect the government over them, that set of convictions we share.”
The following essay was written two decades ago. Rereading it, we were struck by its remarkable relevance to current events. There is a war on—again. The Middle East is in turmoil—again. And Churchill’s wisdom in these affairs is always worth considering.
War and empire
There is a war on. The Mideast is in turmoil. It is interesting that many should pick such times to renew their acquaintance with Winston Churchill.
Around the time of 9/11, Roy Jenkins, for years an MP in the socialist Labour Party that Churchill fought all his life, wrote a biography calling Churchill the greatest modern prime minister.1 Oxford historian Geoffrey Best wrote one of the finest short biographies of Churchill.2 HBO produced a special that was surely one of better dramas about Churchill.3 Taking notice of the trend, The Atlantic published a cover article on Churchill by Christopher Hitchens.4 Though Hitchens attempted more blame than praise, his blaming was contrived mostly and unwittingly from sorry old slanders long disproved. He faltered at the end into grudging respect.
The first remarkable thing about all this attention to Churchill is how favorable it was about the man as war leader and enemy of Hitler. The second was the uniform finality with which it rejected Churchill’s idea of empire.
The writers did a good job describing the 1930s rearmament debate. Jenkins’ strength was that he was himself a politician, and he often recounts the political conversations that happen behind the scenes with insight. His book is much longer than that of Best, who tells the story in a mere 350 pages. He manages by writing essays on each period of Churchill’s life. He summarizes what was happening with clarity and a high degree of accuracy, and he has a good understanding of what Churchill was thinking and what he meant. Alas, there are exceptions. One of them was Churchill’s thoughts about empire, specifically India, which have applications to the Middle East today.
Churchill and Indian reform
Neither Best nor Jenkins are at their best when discussing this topic. HBO’s The Gathering Storm was just as bad, with blessed brevity on the subject. Roy Jenkins calls his chapter on India “Unwisdom in the Wilderness.” Geoffrey Best takes the same line. He begins by congratulating the 1935 British National Government that proposed and accomplished Indian constitutional reform for this attitude:
[The plan of reform] proceeded from the basis that British Imperial theory, notwithstanding the gibes of Leninists and indigenous nationalists, was sincere in its declared principle that overseas territories were held by the British for the benefit of their inhabitants… and for only so long as it took those inhabitants to acquire the capacities and capabilities to govern themselves.5
But Churchill threw himself into “a reactionary posture.” Best comments that some in Churchill’s crowd “talked as if” Winston were “en route to a political coup,” and adds, “something of that sort may have been in his mind….”6
Goodness. It is impossible to track from this statement who said what. One hopes that Best means only a coup to win the premiership in the parliamentary party committee. The vagueness of this criticism matched an absence of facts that is the character of this whole chapter.
* * *
Churchill, Best accurately reports, believed that as soon as the British began to leave, the Hindus and Muslims would begin to slaughter one another. Moreover, he continues, Churchill had no serious knowledge about Indians or any other nonwhite peoples.
Best does not mention that the Hindus and Muslims did begin to slaughter one another, including Gandhi, at least in the number of hundreds of thousands; that they ultimately partitioned the country into three separate states, two now possessing nuclear weapons and having fought several wars between them. After 9/11, the Indian army conducted major military maneuvers along the Pakistani border. Pakistani terrorists, the friends of Osama bin Laden, attempted to invade the Indian Parliament and kill those within it. Tensions, as they say in international coverage, were high.
Churchill’s colonial understanding
Churchill, moreover, had very considerable experience both with India and with “nonwhite peoples.” He had fought in Afghanistan, served in India, and fought in northern and southern Africa. As Secretary of State for the Colonies, he had negotiated the founding of Arab states and supported the founding of a Jewish homeland. He had done this on the spot in the Middle East, just over a decade before the India Act was passed.
In his books on the Boer War, Churchill had written that the real issue between the Boers, who were South Africans of Dutch extraction, and the English, was that the former would never accept the equality of black Africans. In a 4th of July speech in 1918, when America and Britain were allies in the First World War, he had said of the Declaration of Independence that
by it we lost an empire, and by it we also preserved an empire. By applying its principles and learning its lessons we have maintained our communion with the powerful Commonwealths our children have established beyond the seas.7
Now, India was not then part of the Commonwealth, and it was not self-governing. Why, one may ask, was India not entitled to the same treatment as Australia, Canada or New Zealand? Churchill addresses that question at considerable length in his many speeches on the Indian question. He asserts repeatedly the right of the Indians to govern themselves. For example, in August 1930:
[L]et me…reaffirm the inflexible resolve of Great Britain to aid the Indian people to fit themselves increasingly for the duties of self-government. Upon that course we have been embarked for many years, and we assign no limits to its ultimate fruition.8
“Building democracy”
This is a common theme and cannot be missed by anyone who reads the speeches. At the same time Churchill holds that India is not ready to exercise self-government. He mentions the division between Muslim and Hindu. He mentions the pervasive illiteracy, the other differences of religion, the division into royal kingdoms, the caste system. And he mentions the fact that peace and order have reigned in India under British rule, and because of that the population has grown, and so Britain bears a responsibility for at least the people who are part of the increase.
The weight of these things is hard to feel now, when India has become a great nation, growing a modern economy in large parts of it, building a middle class, and achieving peaceful alternation in power of its chief parties. More than eighty years have passed. The hope that India may now present was distant in those days.
We may however soon enough have cause to understand these things again. There is talk of building democracy in places like Gaza and West Bank. We will not find this easy to do.
Gaza and the West Bank
Let us say, for example, that we form the view that children in some distant land should not be taught the method and the rightness of suicidal murder of civilians. Let us say that they should not be taught to kill people because of their race or religion. And that their families should not be paid large sums when they do it; that teenagers should not be instructed how to carry ugly bombs around as if they were knapsacks. Let us say that we propose to stop this. This is a lot to prevent.
Whether we act under the authority of an international bureaucracy, as the British diplomat Robert Cooper suggested, or under the authority of the UN, or under American authority, we will find that we are interfering in the closest matters of local policy. We will need to regulate what happens in villages and little towns, in schools and perhaps—for this is where the problem often is—in houses of worship. We may try to find local leaders who are responsible and good and put them in power. In that case we will be choosing their rulers, and by that principle we will be tempted if they fail us to look for others to replace them, and replace them again if need be.
To hold a line
Churchill said there would be bloodshed in India if the British left India, and there was. We are now on a global quest to prevent bloodshed in our own cities. We are acting on at least one of the principles that Churchill embraced. In his book on the war he fought in Afghanistan as a young man, Churchill entitles the last chapter “The Riddle of the Frontier.”9 He writes that it is very hard to go into Afghanistan and subdue the raiding tribesmen. Our troops, after winning a glorious victory, engaged in the work for twenty years, and then left.
Churchill writes that it is also hard to hold a defensive line, ever at the ready, along the great border, when the tribesmen may rest when they please and strike where they wish. He favors the more active policy. Both are full of difficulty.
Yesterday’s India, today’s Mideast
Now we have a greater cause than Churchill had in 1897 or 1935. If we wait, we may lose not a building, but a city. Mr. Warren Buffet, who is in the insurance business, has written that we are bound to do precisely this. In earlier days he would sometimes explain that he makes large margins in the insurance business because his company is big and sound enough to handle the biggest risks. One year he may lose, but most years he wins. But this terrorism, he says, is a risk too big for him, and he is the biggest. Only the government, he says, is big enough. But the government is all of us. How long would it take us to replace the immeasurable value in people and things that can be found today in New York City, if that is the place? And it may not be just one place.
Before we blush and mumble that Churchill was a racist—which he was not—we should think how things are now. If the past is the key to the future, then perhaps some reflection on our own problems in the present might sometimes explain to us better the problems of the past. Here is a moment when we might revisit not the new, but the old kind of liberalism, upon which Churchill built his view of empire.
There is honor of Churchill in these recent works. Maybe we are on the way back. We have a way to go.
Endnotes
1 Roy Jenkins, Churchill: A Biography (London: Macmillan; New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001).
2 Geoffrey Best, Churchill: A Study in Greatness (London: Hambleton and London, 2001).
3 The Gathering Storm, film for television produced by BBC Films and HBO, starring Albert Finney as Winston Churchill and Vanessa Redgrave as Clementine. First aired April 2002, 90 minutes.
4 Christopher Hitchens, “Churchill Takes A Fall: The Revisionist Verdict: Incompetent, Boorish, Drunk, and Mostly Wrong,” The Atlantic, April 2002.
5 Best, Study in Greatness, 134.
6 Ibid., 135.
7 Winston S. Churchill (hereinafter WSC), “The Third Great Title-Deed of Anglo-American Liberties,” Liberty Day Meeting, Central Hall, Westminster, 4 July 1918, in Robert Rhodes James, ed., Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches 1897-1963, 8 vols. (New York: Bowker, 1974), III: 2615.
8 WSC, in Complete Speeches, V: 4914.
9 WSC, The Story of the Malakand Field Force (London: Longmans Green, 1898 and subsequent reprints)
The author
Larry P. Arnn is President of Hillsdale College and co-editor with Sir Martin Gilbert of The Churchill Documents, volumes 17 to 23, spanning the years 1943 to 1965. This article is derived from his essay in The Claremont Review of Books, Spring 2002.
Further reading
David Fromkin, “The Modern Middle East: How Much is Churchill’s Fault?” 2023.
Andreas Koureas, “Kishan Rana on Churchill and India,” 2023.
Zareer Masani, “Judging the British Empire by Its Aims and Aspirations,” 2023.
Andrew Roberts & Zewditu Gebreyohanes, “Cambridge: The Racial Consequences of Mr. Churchill,” 2021.
Churchill Project, “Churchill on Gandhi’s Death,” 2016.