Communism

A Nasty Little War is generally well-researched and well-written. Yet for all its admirable qualities in relating a struggle that stretched from Poland to the Pacific, Reid adopts an unrelentingly snarky tone when describing her chosen villain, who is not Lenin or Trotsky or any of other Bolshevik mass-murderer. He is Winston Churchill.

The effect of the Zinoviev Letter on the 1924 election was negligible, but Churchill’s political use of it was interesting. In campaigning for office, he took full advantage. Even if it were forged, he said, it was nothing new where Bolsheviks were concerned. Calling Labour Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald a “futile Kerensky,” he even published an article about it, criticizing MacDonald's reaction to the Letter but skirting the issue of genuineness.

Churchill never said this: he was far too fastidious to apply such a term generically. He knew his fascists, and identified them more specifically.

Read Larry P. Arnn's analysis of Churchill's fight against socialism on the domestic front in Great Britain, as excerpted from his book "Churchill's Trial".

I have sent a few emails asking why Churchill sold Eastern Europe to Stalin. ​Eastern Europeans do not look admiringly at Mr. Churchill...like my father who fought with the British, in his Polish uniform.