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Churchill for Today: What He Thought and Said about Terrorism (Part 1)
- By CHRISTOPHER C. HARMON
- | February 22, 2022
- Category: Churchill for Today Explore Understanding Churchill
“I abhor terrorism…
…Nothing is more repulsive than the wholesale shooting of unarmed people.” —Winston Churchill, 19311
The word “terrorist” and the challenge such persons present to reasonable governance and stable society was well known to Churchill. Students of history know how—in a long lifetime—he played roles in innumerable aspects of modernity. Unfortunately, terrorism was one of them. Churchill was targeted personally, and several of his friends or associates were murdered by terrorists. The politics and social life of his time were struck, sliced and stung by terrorist attacks. The issue appears in more than a few of his writings.
This account in two parts recalls some of Churchill’s engagements with terrorism. It intruded on him in many types familiar to us today: nationalism, anarchism, communism, fascism and radical religion. Part 2 examines his thought about the terrorist phenomenon generally, and how reason and humanity might push back and fulfill government’s duty to protect citizens.
Nationalism
Nationalism is not abhorrent of itself, but a lethal form of it forced its way into young Winston’s boyhood. Randolph Churchill’s family spent several years in Ireland. Winston was only seven when he learned of the murder of a kindly civil servant the family had known. The crime came in 1882, at the hands of a Feinian society calling itself “The Invincibles.” Knifed in Phoenix Park, Dublin were the Chief Secretary for Ireland, Lord Frederick Cavendish, and an official named Thomas Burke—the actual target, whom young Winston knew and admired. He records his shock in the opening chapter of My Early Life.
The tragedies of Ireland’s drive for independence accompanied Churchill’s development as a statesman. In 1921-22 he helped write the Irish Treaty with Sinn Fein founder Arthur Griffith and Irish Republican Army intelligence chief Michael Collins, later dubbed “the first urban terrorist.”2 If not everything the Irish wanted, it produced an Irish Free State of 26 southern counties. For the “crime” of leaving out the pro-Unionist northern provinces, Collins was murdered—but not before lauding Churchill for his role as peacemaker.
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Churchill himself was targeted by the IRA in later years. His close friend Sir Henry Wilson, a gifted First World War commander, was murdered by the IRA on his London doorstep in 1922. A similar story is related in Martin Gilbert’s Churchill biography: how Kevin O’Higgins was shot dead on his way to Mass in Dublin on 10 July 1927. Ireland’s Minister of Justice, O’Higgins was attacked by five IRA assassins. In a speech two days later, Churchill mourned the Irish statesman for his moderation, sagacity, dignity, and determination to make Irish self-government work, talents lost in a moment to “vile assassins.”3
Anarchism
Another ideology stirring the spread of early terrorism was anarchism. Obscure today, it surfaces in a few unusual places, such as American eco-militancy or political circles in Chile or Greece. But Churchill reached adulthood in an era when anarchism prompted bombings, assassinations, and armed robberies in Europe and Russia. One or two of the poorer districts of London seemed to swarm with domestic and especially foreign anarchists.
In the 1909 “Tottenham Outrage,” anarchists robbed a paymaster and went on a shooting rampage. Two years later, another gang, led by one Jacob Peters, robbed a jewelry store and shot policemen responding at the scene. The thieves fled. Two or three holed up in a building and were besieged by under-equipped police supported by a small army unit.
The youthful Home Secretary, Winston Churchill, soon appeared on the scene. Early news footage shows with astonishing clarity this top-hatted, dark-coated aristocrat, tucked behind a corner of masonry. Churchill found himself up close at a modern firefight in the middle of Britain’s capital. His appearance was the cause of both merriment and criticism in Parliament, but the authorities won the “Siege of Sidney Street.” A precedent was set that day: London’s violent revolutionaries never again operated so brazenly in the open.4
Communism
An altogether mysterious figure links Sidney Street with the Bolshevik revolution in Russia six years later. Jacob Peters, the 1911 gang leader, was apparently a thug of unusual intelligence. Once communism triumphed, he swiftly climbed into Soviet seats of power. He became deputy to Felix Dzerzhinsky, the dreaded secret police chief (of the Cheka, later the KGB). Dripping in ironies, an anarchist who supposedly hated all government became the executioner of thousands of victims of state terror.5
Later communist movements would also bring Churchill to terrorism’s front door. Perhaps the most important in the mid-20th century was in Greece. Here was the birthplace of democracy, to which Churchill had intellectual and sentimental attachments. Greek communists were trained and given safe haven by the Soviets.
Their rampant use of rural terrorism weighed upon Churchill, who detailed it to the House of Commons.6 Later the story was told in a disturbing and gritty work of non-fiction by reporter Nicholas Gage in his book, Eleni.
In October 1944, worried over Greek prospects, Churchill bargained with Stalin for the power to affect events there. Two months later he was in Athens, over Foreign Office objections and doubts. He negotiated a truce between communist insurgents and the rough, right-wing Greek military and government. Stalin kept his word in this instance, cutting back support to Greek communists. The regime improved, armed, grew and won. The leftist terrorist campaign closed.
Fascism
In the 1920s, Churchill understood Bolshevism better than most politicians. His studied contempt for dictators expanded in the mid-1930s—less against Mussolini than Hitler (but there were reasons for that). He steadily argued that totalitarianism is dehumanizing, whatever the brand.
Sparkling passages by the Member for Epping trivialize the left-right differences of which political science makes so much today. Both extremes were “creeds of the devil,” Churchill declared: “The North and South Pole are at opposite ends of the earth, but if you woke up at either Pole tomorrow morning you could not tell which one it was.”7
In totalitarian systems left and right, society is locked down by all-powerful government. Citizens are subjected to state terror. This was the theme of a Churchill speech in Paris in 1936, and several of his magazine articles in England. (See in particular “Mass Effects in Modern Life.”)
Politicization of racial stereotypes, stoking general fear and intimidation of political opponents—classic signs of state terror—were hallmarks of German social psychology after 1933. Hitler’s newspapers “glorified Nazi street terrorists and ran flattering front-page pictures of those responsible for the desecration of synagogues,” wrote William Manchester.8 Churchill saw this, and brooded over the portents. With singular clarity, he explained how individual and state terror adhered to the same evil principles. Today there is hardly a college freshman in the world who does not know where the German variety led.
Zionist radicals
A fifth terrorist ideology less common in Churchill’s day is violent sectarian religion. Extremism, even among traditional faiths, disturbed Churchill. Not even that noble order of Catholic educators called Jesuits escaped his wagging finger. He once jokingly suggested they might be fanatics; there are several shots across Jesuits’ bow in the Churchill canon. And, though a consistent friend of Jews, he criticized the excesses of Jewish terrorists in Palestine.
Lord Moyne (Walter Guinness), long a Churchill friend, was Minister of State in the Middle East when gunned down by Lehi (Stern Gang) brutes in November 1944. Stung personally by the loss, and determined to set principle upright, Churchill bluntly told Parliament:
If our dreams for Zionism are to end in the smoke of assassins’ pistols, and our labours for its future to produce only a new set of gangsters worthy of Nazi Germany, many like myself will have to reconsider the position we have maintained so consistently and so long. Those responsible must be destroyed root and branch.”9
He expressed relief that his “very old friend,” Jewish nationalist Chaim Weizmann, had promised “to cut out this evil from its midst.” None of the post-1970 moral equivocation and relativism which sometimes choke our social sciences today can be found in his words. What an impact it must have been when pro-Zionist Churchill, leader of an anti-Nazi war, would declare publicly that the Jewish terrorists reminded him of Nazis.
Hindus and Sikhs
Churchill may have been wrong to oppose devolution in India and to criticize Gandhi so stridently in the 1920s. Nearly everyone says so now. But in another way, he retained a logical clarity on the question. He never applied the term “terrorist” to Gandhi or the Congress Party leaders—a word cheap dictators like Daniel Ortega use against their dissenters.
There were Indian terrorists; Churchill worried over train bombings and an attack on the Indian Parliament. Touring America in 1931, he was warned that Indian Sikhs were hunting him, especially on the West Coast.10 But Churchill did not conflate perpetrators of indiscriminate violence with pacifist resistance or campaigners for freedom.
We are less discriminating in our own day. Despite a generation of writing and debate on terrorism, many still consider it an acceptable form of dissidence. The statesman famous for being an imperialist understood it better. Churchill saw terrorism as a new devolution into political immorality.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, and other critics of Britain’s India policy, did not accept the basis of Churchill’s thinking. This English veteran of India’s frontier wars was working, as he saw it, for the protection of the Crown’s Indian subjects. Like many other citizens of the Empire, he demanded they be fairly treated and free from fear. Churchill lost the India Bill debate, but one priceless speech from that time is worth recalling today. It manifests his understanding of terrorism.
“Frightfulness is not a remedy…”
In 1919 in Amritsar, the holiest Sikh city, British general Reginald Dyer accosted a massive gathering he thought was breaking the rules on political rallies. The place was Jallianwala Bagh, a walled square within the city. Dyer marched in troops, penning up children, women and men, and savagely shooting them down, minute upon bloody minute. Casualty lists were huge. Dyer was released from service and the House of Commons reviewed the matter on 8 July 1920.
Churchill’s address was one of the more important in his life. A former cavalryman and lieutenant colonel, he was prepared, precise, harsh, and relentless. He particularly criticized Dyer officer for prolonged firing into a crowd armed only with bludgeons. Certain of his words better define “terrorism” than do many of today’s books about that subject:
There is surely one general prohibition which we can make. I mean a prohibition against what is called “frightfulness.” What I mean by frightfulness is the inflicting of great slaughter or massacre upon a particular crowd of people, with the intention of terrorizing not merely the rest of the crowd, but the whole district or the whole country. We cannot admit this doctrine in any form.11
The Tory MP Henry Page Croft, interrupted. “Was not the frightfulness started three days before? Was not the frightfulness on the other side?” But Churchill was having none of it. Ignoring the question, he continued: “Frightfulness is not a remedy known to the British pharmacopoeia.”12
Concluded in Part 2: “Six Precepts for Combating Terrorists”
Endnotes
1 Winston S. Churchill (hereinafter WSC), India: Defending the Jewel in the Crown, first published 1931 (Hopkinton, N.H.: Dragonwyck Publishing, 1990), 5.
2 David Stafford, Churchill and Secret Service (Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 1997), 134.
3 Martin Gilbert, The Churchill Documents, vol. 11, The Exchequer Years, 1922-1929 (Hillsdale, Mich.: Hillsdale College Press, 2009), 1029
4 Christopher C. Harmon, “Anarchism and Fire: What We Can Learn from Sidney Street,” Hillsdale College Churchill Project, 2015.
5 Churchill’s information about the names of Sidney Street perpetrators may not have been exact, although he prepared for testifying before the official commission. A detailed account of the episode is in Donald Rumbelow, The Siege of Sidney Street (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1973); see especially chapter XI about Jacob Peters.
6 WSC, “The Crisis in Greece,” House of Commons, 8 December 1944, in The Dawn of Liberation (London: Cassell, 1945), 273-89.
7 WSC, “The Creeds of the Devil,” in The Sunday Chronicle, 27 June 1937, reprinted in The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill, 4 vols. (London: Library of Imperial History, 1975), II: 395.
8 William Manchester, The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill, vol. 2, Alone 1932-1940 (Boston: Little Brown & Co., 1988), 118.
9 WSC, “Palestine Terrorism,” House of Commons, 17 November 1944, in Dawn of Liberation, 251-53. This is the only Churchill speech published with the word “terrorism” in its title.
10 Martin Gilbert, Churchill and America (New York: Free Press, 2005), 130, 161.
11 WSC, India, 22.
12 Ibid.
The author
Christopher C. Harmon has held chairs in both terrorism studies and military theory at Marine Corps University, Quantico, Virginia. There he conducted courses on “Churchill as War Leader,” based on WSC’s memoir, The Second World War. Dr. Harmon serves on the board of academic advisors for the International Churchill Society and teaches at the Institute of World Politics, Washington, D.C. He has contributed to this website on Alan Brooke and on Harry Hopkins as “Great Contemporaries.”
Further reading
by Dr. Harmon:
“Anarchism and Fire: What We Can Learn from Sidney Street,” 2015
“Alan Brooke, the Thoroughbred Professional,” 2020
“Harry Hopkins, ‘Lord Root of the Matter,’” 2021
by The Churchill Project:
“What Did Churchill Say about Terrorism?,” 2016
“Churchill and Terrorism,” 2015
“I abhor terrorism….Nothing is more repulsive than the wholesale shooting of unarmed people.” —Winston Churchill, 1931. But killing hundreds of thousands of them with incendiary bombs and high explosives was quite alright.
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Well, there’s a shade of difference. War is hell, which is why he spent so much time and political capital trying to avoid it. -RML