Today, Prof. DeLong emails me:
Do you really want to carry water for a guy who claims that Winston Churchill was a war criminal for failing to make peace with Hitler in the summer of 1940?It sounds like Prof. DeLong needs to read up on Churchill. I recommend Raliph Raico's Great Wars & Great Leaders: A Libertarian Rebuttal. (See my review)
I thought you were better than that...
Yours,
Brad DeLong
It's not that Hitler was sane, but that Churchill was a total warmonger. Churchill had a sick love of war. Raico writes:
It began early. As a child he had a huge collection of toy soldiers, 1500 of them, and he played with them for years after most boys turn to other things...He loved war as few modern men ever have- he even loved 'the bangs' as he called them..It's no wonder that, with two nutjobs like Hitler and Churchill in power, the world ended up in war. Prof. DeLong may want to carry water for Churchill, buy I'll stick with the very peace loving Gordon.
You are right about Churchill, but there was a third nutjob, the most vicious of all - Stalin. He manipulated Hitler into going to war with Churchill and France, paving the way for the Soviet victorious marching into Europe afterwards. Hitler was not aware that he was in a trap with Ribbentrop-Molotov accord, that he was going to war with Britain and France when he attacked Poland in September 1939. Stalin agreed to attack the same day from the East, but he delayed the operation for three weeks. Enough for France and Britain to declare war to aggressor Hitler and - bang! The stage was set for the Red Aremy to march in and "liberate the working class of Europe", after the capitalist powers exhaust themselves enough in the mutual war.
ReplyDeleteActually, Hitler attacked Stalin only after he learned about this master plan, and thus unintentionally saved at least the Western half of Europe from Soviet "liberation".
Wow, DeLong is trying to shift the discussion topic to Gordon's opinion of Churchill and away from his deletion of comments that correct his misrepresentation of Nozick. Either way, he loses.
ReplyDeleteBTW, add Buchanan's excellent book on Hitler, Churchill ... to his reading list.
Ahaha. He just keeps digging deeper.
ReplyDeleteWar crimes in WW II:
ReplyDeletehttp://mindbodypolitic.com/2010/09/15/winston-churchill-statist-monster/
Advocated Gassing Kurds:
http://quoteme.tribe.net/thread/f7c748ee-ec87-4672-a744-716b0bf277e2
Hated Indians and Gandhi and did not want to cede self determination to them:
http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/mag/2005/06/19/stories/2005061900060300.htm
Military blunders:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/buchanan/buchanan81.html
He had a gift for words and he loved his wife and treated her well (not so Gandhi), but there was a very dark side to his life and accomplishments, no question.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/margolis/margolis128.html
ReplyDeletehttp://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/27/books/review/27HEILBRU.html?
And in his own words:
"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 worldly wise
race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place."
Winston Churchill 1937
"It is alarming and also 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 vice-regal palace,
while he is still organizing and conducting a defiant campaign of
civil disobedience, to parley on equal terms with the representative
of the king-emperor."
Winston Churchill, 1930
Hmm... Way to completely avoid the actual issue DeLong. But, I would expect no less...
ReplyDeleteWinston Churchill was a war criminal because he killed thousands of innocent people in his bombings of Germany and advocated the potential killings of millions of people when he approved the genocidal Morganthau Plan for the defeated Germany.
ReplyDeleteAnd' of course "History shall be kind to me because I shall be writing it"
ReplyDelete@LilaRajiva
ReplyDeleteSeriously, so what if he disliked Gandhi ?
I do too.
Gandhi is made out to be this hero today and representative of pasificism(as if that is so holy), while he was a statist, warmonger and imperialist. All of which can be documented.
The fact that DeLong is stupid enough to announce to the world that he justifies deleting critical comments from his blog if he can attach some strawman to the commenter is really something.
ReplyDelete@Anonymous
ReplyDeleteNo problem with his disliking Gandhi. There are a lot of things I don't like about Gandhi (his obsessions with nature cures and siddhis leading to abusive behavior to people around him).
But using Gandhi's military service and initial loyalty to the British empire in S. Africa to suggest he was a statist, imperialist and warmonger, is quite erroneous ( to put it mildly) and taking things completely out of context.
Gandhi wasn't in theory a pacifist, but in practice he actually was, which is another problem I have with him...since dogmatic pacifism is antilibertarian and misguided, IMO.
Gandhi was a remarkable human being from every account, whether you like his positions or his personality or not. And whether he was used, as I believe he was, by the Anglophone powers, to further their ends.
To say he was a "statist" and "warmonger" in the way Churchill was is to say that Tolstoi was a statist and warmonger in the way Stalin was, simply because Tolstoi too once fought wars and held common-place notions of the time about the state.
That is silly.
But no more than what I'd expect from public debate today, which is mud wrestling match between the terminally ill-willed and the terminally ill-informed.
Oh..and I also don't mind if Churchill hated Indians...(or anyone else). One is entitled to one's opinions. I quoted that to show that he was staunchly imperial and indeed that is the reason for his popularity with neoconservatives. In fact, Paul Johnson somewhere writes that disliking Churchill is the definition of a leftist (!)...a rather obtuse statement until you realize why he said it.
ReplyDeleteBy tarring anyone who displaces Churchill (or Lincoln) from the pantheon of Western political heroes, the elites can make sure that the only narrative about the West is the imperial one.
Translation: "David Gordon made me look like a complete idiot, so I'll caricature an essay of his on World War II, which I know will elicit a knee-jerk reaction from the general public. And if Gordon's position on World War II is wrong, my position on Robert Nozick must be correct!
ReplyDelete"And if that accused witch weighs the same as a duck, then she's made of wood...."
Since Professor Delong Dong signed off his quick jab e-mail to you with "yours" what do you intend on doing with him Wenzel?
ReplyDeleteHaving a man servant could be a useful thing, maybe he can do some research for you?
You'll probably have to double check his work though.
I'm curious about email etiquette. Was the email Brad DeLong sent revealed with permission? If not, is it ok to reveal it without permission? It seems to me that it's ok because it just contains opinions, not any sort of personal information.
ReplyDeleteWhat are your views on this?
This is from Nicholson Baker's *Human Smoke*(Simon & Schuster, 2008), page 178:
ReplyDelete"Eighteen of the Royal Air Forces's Whitley Bombers took to the air, intending to do harm to places within Germany. It was the second night of Churchill's prime ministership. 'Bomber Command went to war on 11 May 1940. It had only been fooling with war before then,' wrote James Spaight, an air-power theorist, several years later. 'We began to bomb objectives on the German mainland before the Germans began to bomb objectives on the British mainland.'"
Tell DeLong his hero didn't just bomb German civilians. He bombed German civilians before Hitler bombed British civilians.
Also from Baker's book, page 248:
ReplyDelete"Italian newspapers said that British pilots were cowards. They were afraid to go near places that were protected by antiaircraft defenses, the editorials said, and instead they bombed at random. According to one communique', recent bombs on Turin had hit a maternity hospital, a barracks, and a sanatorium. Churchill's pilots had insulted humanity in their attacks on the weak and the defenseless, said the *Fasicst Worker*, and they would pay for it a hundredfold.
"'By betraying every rule of the code of honor, by trampling upon every humane consideration, the British authorize the enemy to have no scruples,' said the editorial. It was November 9, 1940."
Not to defend Churchill, but the NYTimes reported that Sadaam had killed babies in the run up to the first Iraq war. Any news from something called "The Fascist Worker" has to be taken with a grain of salt.
ReplyDeleteNo doubt Winnie's cowardly sorties killed civilians, but the source must be examined.
Winnie and Hitler were BOTH war criminals, as were FDR and "Uncle Joe". But the victors write the history books...
Why would DeLong have thought you were better than that, Wenzel? He must not read this blog much.
ReplyDeleteYeah, when Churchill had the UK annex Austria and invade Poland, that was what kicked things off...oh wait
ReplyDelete