Churchill's Atrocities

Ron Unz and David Irving

After my last post on Corbett, Unz & the Unnecessary War, several commenters added more great sources that continue to blow my mind. I’ll be talking about one of those and what I learned from it today. At the same time, a commenter on my YT wrote:

Obviously there are lesser known details to every story, and with increased detail the black and white picture gets more and more shades of gray, but it is most unlikely that any amount of detail can flip around the whole picture. Drawing an alternative history utterly incompatible with what is know as irrefutable fact is certainly a way to get one thrown out of any self-respecting publishing house. - Unfortunately internet platforms of today allow everyone to create and publish absurdly misinformed or outright malicious content...

I replied that “In my experience, irrefutable facts don't require censorship to keep them from being refuted. Did all of these highly reputable historians—with multiple publications, university professorships, titles bestowed by royalty—suddenly forget how to research when it came to the World Wars?” I sent him to my Substack to read, particularly the comments, to which he answered:

tl;dr: Nobody is getting "disappeared" for fabulating pieces of alternate history, but people won’t take you seriously once you start to deny or relativize the atrocities committed by literal nazis.

This had the intended effect of making me feel like a kid admonished by a grown-up … until I remembered that 2000 people have chosen to hear what I have to say, between YT and Substack. This, after a lifetime of no one—and I mean no one—taking me seriously. I always look at the profiles of new subs to see what they’re writing and who they’re reading. There are some seriously smart people reading me. Like you!

And I suspect I’m not the only one who hasn’t been taken seriously before. It’s damn hard to keep holding on to what you know in a vacuum, and not get a little shrill when you’re screaming into the void, as Simulation Commander would say. I’m no longer invisible because you see me. You don’t give the knowing little eyeroll to your friend when I mention graphene in chemtrails. You nod and say, “Yes, and …”

No matter what happens in this crazy future we’re walking into, that’s a level of sanity that can’t be taken away from me. I am sane because you are and we’re both seeing the same thing. We can differ (and do) but it’s at the growing tip of figuring things out in dialogue, the give and take of building on a common foundation of how to separate truth from lies. As Kathleen Devanney discussed in her essay on Weaving, “The new reality emerging comes at the undoing of the old.”

Weaving

How do we separate truth from lies? Let’s go back to my detractor’s phrases:

• “most unlikely that any amount of detail can flip around the whole picture”: What else could flip the picture other than details that contradict the official narrative? To assume the ‘gist’ is right and dismiss details that contradict it is uncritical thinking. If even one detail is found that gives the lie to the whole, the whole needs to be reconsidered.

• “an alternative history utterly incompatible with what is know as irrefutable fact”: To start with the basics, history draws from primary sources, as does investigative journalism. If primary sources are ‘utterly incompatible’ with ‘what is know[n]’, it’s the latter that needs to go.

• “a way to get one thrown out of any self-respecting publishing house”: If the authorities reject you, it must be the fault of your scholarship even if you were at the top of your profession before. Right.

• “absurdly misinformed or outright malicious content”: This is the veiled anti-Semitism threat. If I’m questioning the WWII narrative, I must be anti-Semitic.

• “Nobody is getting "disappeared" for fabulating pieces of alternate history”: Exactly. You can ‘fabulate’ all the historical nonsense you want but only when you write the truth do you ‘fall’ out of a second story hospital window.

• “once you start to deny or relativize the atrocities committed by literal nazis”: What is “relativize the atrocities” and who are the “literal nazis?” Before an act can be deemed ‘atrocious’ do we need to know who did it and to whom? I think atrocities are not relative but absolute, whether done by Churchill or Hitler. And that’s my focus today.

I will also add that men don’t say to other men, “If you say things like this, people won’t take you seriously.” That’s what men, who assume their own authority, say in a patronizing way to women who they’re just trying to help out, poor little misled thing. ‘Let me show you how the real world works and how to get taken seriously in it. I know you don’t know these things.’ So I would chalk this up as another example of toxic masculinity.

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Among my commenters on my last episode was tanzenkran, who recommended three more articles by Ron Unz. My only problem with Unz is that he’s so succinct and pithy it’s hard to summarize him. So I’ll again be relying on lengthy quotes because upending the official narrative is impossible to do without a wealth of details.

In this episode, I’ll be focusing on the interview of Ron Unz by Mike Whitney called Churchill, Hitler, the Holocaust & the War in Ukraine. Mike starts by asking whether the onerous conditions imposed after WWI made WWII inevitable, not Hitler. Unz points out that the Germans were tricked into the Versailles Treaty. He writes:

Germany had been very successful during the early years of the First World War, repeatedly defeating the Russians while occupying portions of northern France, but nevertheless its leaders then sought to end the horrible mutual slaughter in 1916 by proposing a peace without winners or losers. However, most of the Allied leadership harshly rejected any peace negotiations and were instead determined to continue the war until Germany was defeated and permanently crippled. …

A couple of years later, after America had entered the war, Germany agreed to an armistice—an end to the fighting—on the basis of President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, which seemed to offer a fair peace without a victory for either side. But this turned out to be a bait-and-switch operation, since once Germany had withdrawn its army from French territory and given up its powerful naval forces, the Allies then imposed a brutal starvation blockade upon the weakened country, inflicting many hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths until the new German government finally accepted very harsh peace terms. These included the dismemberment and occupation of portions of their country, permanent military weakness, and acceptance of the entire guilt of the war, as well as paying gigantic future financial reparations to the victorious Allies.

To assess a “fairly comprehensive appraisal of the origins and policies of National Socialist Germany by one of Britain’s most prominent historians” Unz turns to Sir Arthur Bryant, who was an eminent historian and a favorite of Churchill’s. In the early 1940’s, a few months after the start of WWII, he published Unfinished Victory on the lead-up to the war. However, soon after there was a crackdown on dissident voices and he attempted to remove all copies from circulation. This saved his reputation and career when the tide turned. Finding a copy available at Archive.org, Unz writes:

Writing before the “official version” of historical events had been rigidly determined, Bryant describes Germany’s very difficult domestic situation between the two world wars, its problematic relationship with its tiny Jewish minority, and the circumstances behind the rise of Hitler, providing a very different perspective on these important events than what we usually read in our standard textbooks.

Among other surprising facts, he notes that although Jews were just 1% of the total population, even five years after Hitler had come to power and implemented various anti-Semitic policies, they still apparently owned “something like a third of the real property” in that country, with the great bulk of these vast holdings having been acquired from desperate, starving Germans in the terrible years of the early 1920s. Thus, much of Germany’s 99% German population had recently been dispossessed of the assets they had built up over generations…

Bryant also candidly notes the enormous Jewish presence in the leadership of the Communist movements that had temporarily seized power after World War I, both in major portions of Germany and in nearby Hungary. This was an ominous parallel to the overwhelmingly Jewish Bolsheviks who had gained control of Russia and then butchered or expelled that country’s traditional Russian and German ruling elites, and therefore a major source of Nazi fears.

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Mike asks: “We’ve all been taught that Britain’s Neville Chamberlain caved in to Hitler’s demands on the annexation of Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland which, in turn, fueled Hitler’s lust for global conquest. But was that really what happened? And was “appeasement” really such a bad idea or should the European leaders have accepted that Versailles was a disaster from the get-go and agreed to Hitler’s demands to restore Germany’s original borders?

Unz replies:

Czechoslovakia had been established as an important strategic ally for France to use against Germany, geographically serving as an ideal staging area for bombing attacks, almost amounting to an unsinkable aircraft carrier directly jutting into the heart of its German neighbor. Since the country was intentionally designed to threaten Germany, the overwhelmingly German Sudetenland region had been included so as to strengthen its geographical border defenses. The Germans were actually the second largest nationality within Czechoslovakia, so the very name amounted to dishonest propaganda, and something like Czecho-Germania might have been a little more accurate.

One of Hitler’s main goals was to free the suppressed German populations of Central Europe and reunite them with their German homeland and this included the more than 3 million Sudeten Germans. The Czech government was also quite friendly with Stalin’s Soviet Union, and therefore seemed a particularly menacing potential military threat, a possible future base for Soviet attacks against Germany.

Hitler gradually rebuilt Germany’s strength and by March 1938 managed to reunite his country with the Germans of Austria, accomplished with the overwhelmingly enthusiastic support of the latter. He then demanded that the Sudeten Germans be freed by the Czechs and allowed to unify with Germany as well, being willing to potentially risk a wider European war with the British, French, and Soviets on that issue. To avoid this, the leaders of Germany, Britain, France, and Italy together negotiated an agreement at Munich, allowing the Sudeten Germans to secede and join Germany. This peace agreement was wildly popular across nearly all of Europe.

However, once the Germans had been allowed to secede from Czechoslovakia, the Slovaks soon also did the same, establishing their own independent state of Slovakia (just as happened once again in 1993), and the entire country fell apart. At that point, Poland also grabbed a piece of disputed territory and the Hungarians threatened to do the same, so according to most accounts that I’ve read, the desperate Czech president turned to Hitler for support, and what was left of the country became a German protectorate.

Although anti-German propaganda soon portrayed the loss of Czech independence as a flagrant violation of the Munich Agreement, proof that Hitler couldn’t be trusted to keep his promises, the situation was really not so clear-cut since Czechoslovakia had already fallen apart and no longer existed. Furthermore, the Czechs had only been fully independent for twenty years after having previously spent nearly 700 years under German suzerainty, so in many respects, this merely restored the the traditional geopolitical arrangements in that part of Europe, doing so far more peacefully than when the Soviets invaded and occupied the Baltic States the following year.

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Mike then says, “I can’t make any sense of Churchill’s behavior prior to the war. Why was he so eager to declare war on Germany over a German territorial dispute with Poland many hundreds of miles away from his own country? Why did he think that should involve England?”

To answer this question, Unz consults David Irving’s volume, Churchill’s War:

Churchill [was] a huge spendthrift who lived lavishly and often far beyond his financial means, employing an army of dozens of personal servants at his large country estate despite frequently lacking any regular and assured sources of income to maintain them. This predicament naturally put him at the mercy of those individuals willing to support his sumptuous lifestyle in exchange for determining his political activities. And somewhat similar pecuniary means were used to secure the backing of a network of other political figures from across all the British parties, who became Churchill’s close political allies.

To put things in plain language, during the years leading up to the Second World War, both Churchill and numerous other fellow British MPs were regularly receiving sizable financial stipends—cash bribes—from Jewish and Czech sources in exchange for promoting a policy of extreme hostility toward the German government and actually advocating war. The sums involved were quite considerable, with the Czech government alone probably making payments that amounted to tens of millions of dollars in present-day money to British elected officials, publishers, and journalists working to overturn the official peace policy of their existing government. A particularly notable instance occurred in early 1938 when Churchill suddenly lost all his accumulated wealth in a foolish gamble on the American stock-market, and was soon forced to put his beloved country estate up for sale to avoid personal bankruptcy, only to quickly be bailed out by a foreign Jewish millionaire intent upon promoting a war against Germany. Indeed, the early stages of Churchill’s involvement in this sordid behavior are recounted in an Irving chapter aptly entitled “The Hired Help.”

Ironically enough, German Intelligence learned of this massive bribery of British parliamentarians, and passed the information along to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who was horrified to discover the corrupt motives of his fierce political opponents, but apparently remained too much of a gentlemen to have them arrested and prosecuted. I’m no expert in the British laws of that era, but for elected officials to do the bidding of foreigners on matters of war and peace in exchange for huge secret payments seems almost a textbook example of treason to me, and I think that Churchill’s timely execution would surely have saved tens of millions of lives.

My impression is that individuals of low personal character are those most likely to sell out the interests of their own country in exchange for large sums of foreign money, and as such usually constitute the natural targets of nefarious plotters and foreign spies. Churchill certainly seems to fall into this category, with rumors of massive personal corruption swirling around him from early in his political career. Later, he supplemented his income by engaging in widespread art-forgery, a fact that Roosevelt eventually discovered and probably used as a point of personal leverage against him. Also quite serious was Churchill’s constant state of drunkenness, with his inebriation being so widespread as to constitute clinical alcoholism. Indeed, Irving notes that in his private conversations FDR routinely referred to Churchill as “a drunken bum.”

And to keep the war going, against popular sentiment for peace, Unz points out that Churchill used nefarious means. As written by a US Military Intelligence Officer in his memoirs published a half-century later:

Great Britain, in violation of all the ethics of civilized warfare that had theretofore been respected by our race, and in treacherous violation of solemnly assumed diplomatic covenants about “open cities”, had secretly carried out intensive bombing of such open cities in Germany for the express purpose of killing enough unarmed and defenceless men and women to force the German government reluctantly to retaliate and bomb British cities and thus kill enough helpless British men, women, and children to generate among Englishmen enthusiasm for the insane war to which their government had committed them.

It is impossible to imagine a governmental act more vile and more depraved than contriving death and suffering for its own people — for the very citizens whom it was exhorting to “loyalty” — and I suspect that an act of such infamous and savage treason would have nauseated even Genghis Khan or Hulagu or Tamerlane, Oriental barbarians universally reprobated for their insane blood-lust. History, so far as I recall, does not record that they ever butchered their own women and children to facilitate lying propaganda….In 1944 members of British Military Intelligence took it for granted that after the war Marshal Sir Arthur Harris would be hanged or shot for high treason against the British people…

Churchill’s ruthless violation of the laws of war regarding urban aerial bombardment directly led to the destruction of many of Europe’s finest and most ancient cities. But perhaps influenced by his chronic drunkenness, he later sought to carry out even more horrifying war crimes and was only prevented from doing so by the dogged opposition of all his military and political subordinates.

Along with the laws prohibiting the bombing of cities, all nations had similarly agreed to ban the first use of poison gas, while stockpiling quantities for necessary retaliation. Since Germany was the world-leader in chemistry, the Nazis had produced the most lethal forms of new nerve gases, such as Tabun and Sarin, whose use might have easily resulted in major military victories on both the Eastern and Western fronts, but Hitler had scrupulously obeyed the international protocols that his nation had signed.

However, late in the war during 1944 the relentless Allied bombardment of German cities led to the devastating retaliatory attacks of the V-1 flying bombs against London, and an outraged Churchill became adamant that German cities should be attacked with poison gas in counter-retaliation. If Churchill had gotten his way, many millions of British might soon have perished from German nerve gas counter-strikes. Around the same time, Churchill was also blocked in his proposal to bombard Germany with hundreds of thousands of deadly anthrax bombs, an operation that might have rendered much of Central and Western Europe uninhabitable for generations.

Unz also cites another book that came out three decades after Irving’s 700,000 word masterpiece, called No More Champagne: Churchill & His Money by David Lough:

Lough explains that Churchill became Prime Minister on May 10, 1940, the same day that German forces began their invasion of the Low Countries and France. But aside from those huge military and political challenges, Britain’s new wartime leader also faced an entirely different crisis as well, being unable to cover his personal bills, debt interest, or tax payments, all of which were due at the end of the month, thereby forcing him to desperately obtain a huge secret payment from the same Austrian Jewish businessman who had previously rescued him financially. Stories like this may reveal the hidden side of larger geopolitical developments, which sometimes only come to light many decades later.

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Mike asks, “Why was FDR so eager to drag the United States into a war that posed no threat to US national security? It seems to me, that FDR’s decision may have been shaped—not by principle—but by the expectation that if the industrial centers of Europe were left in ruins, the US would unavoidably emerge as the lone global superpower. That, of course, turned out to be exactly what happened. But keep in mind, the “tipping-point” Battle of Stalingrad ended in February 1943, whereas, D-Day took place in June, 1944. What that means, is that the United States did not enter the conflict for a whole 16 months after it was certain that Germany would lose the war.”

In answer, Unz consults John T. Flynn, a 1930’s journalist:

So according to Flynn’s January 1938 account, FDR and his advisors had originally viewed a possible war with Japan as the key to America’s economic revival, but they subsequently shifted their focus to a European war against Germany instead, and I think a turning point may have been the widespread Kristallnacht riots against German Jews in November 1938, following the assassination of a German diplomat by a Jewish activist. These attacks outraged the very influential Jewish communities of America and Europe, completely undoing any positive consequences of the Munich Agreement a couple of months earlier and focused intense international hostility against Hitler’s Germany, which had previously worked out reasonably amicable relations with its small Jewish population while establishing an important economic partnership with the rising Zionist movement.

Ironically enough, according to Irving’s very detailed reconstruction, Hitler had nothing to do with the anti-Jewish riots and urgently sought to suppress them once they began. Instead, the attacks seem to have been orchestrated by Joseph Goebbels, his powerful Propaganda Minister, who had recently fallen from favor because of his high-profile love affair with a Czech actress, leading to the bitter complaints of his wife, a close friend of Hitler. Goebbels apparently hoped he could use the anti-Jewish riots to restore his influence in the Nazi hierarchy, but they instead had disastrous consequences, thus raising the remarkable possibility that the political fallout from an extra-marital affair may have played a crucial role in the outbreak of World War II.

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So there you have it. The deaths of millions, the leveling of cities, and a permanent legacy that “all’s fair in love and war” because of the stock market gambling debts and debauchery of a chronic drunk on one side and a philandering propagandist on the other. And I didn’t even mention that Churchill bombed the disarmed French fleet and killed 2000 of his own allies because he mistranslated a French word.

These are what passes for heroes these days; God help us.

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For another view on the lead-up to WWII and FDR, here’s Kennedy’s Ethics that talks about Joe Kennedy and his objections to the Hollywood Jews propagandizing for war:

and on a more philosophical note, here’s Forgiving Hitler:

I examine the spiritual, psychological and geopolitical reasons to forgive Hitler, not by absolving his guilt but by questioning the WWII official narrative. As the personification of evil, is Hitler a projection of a systemic brutality that was only spurred by his defeat? I question the cause of the anger invoked and how it relates to 'triggers' of 9-11 or the CoVax. I end by looking at the hope and possibility for social change when we give all people the same integrity we give to ourselves.