… Australia was on the wrong side of the very qualities — his strength of will, singleness of purpose, his refusal to 'give way, in things great or small, large or petty', the power of his imagination to set grim reality at defiance, his mastery of the English language — that made Winston Churchill, as the philosopher Isaiah Berlin described him, "the saviour of his country, the largest human being of his time." His total self-belief and his urge for action had their stubborn, reckless, and spiteful aspect. Australia often seemed to bring out that darker side.

Churchill and Australia
Graham Freudenberg

ISBN: 9781742623672

Graham Freudenberg was speechwriter to Prime Ministers Gough Whitlam and Bob Hawke, and NSW Premiers Neville Wran, Barrie Unsworth and Bob Carr. He is the author of A Figure of Speech: A Political Memoir.

MORE ABOUT GRAHAM FREUDENBERG

GRAHAM FREUDENBERG's — CONTINUED:

... Churchill's commanding importance to Australia rests on the fact that the British Empire was central to Australian history for the five decades he strode the imperial stage, the years between the inauguration of the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901 and the Cold War. The theme of the first part of this book is Churchill's belief in the Empire as proof of Britain's greatness. The theme of the second part is that, for all his love of the Empire, Churchill was obliged to accept its decline, if not its fall, as the price of defeating Hitler's Germany.

Churchill's involvement with Australia, unparalleled by any other British leader, covered and influenced every stage of our transition from a dependent colony of the British Empire to a dependent ally of the United States. From beginning to end, his primary interest in Australia lay in its capacity to contribute to Britain's military strength, on which he believed everything else depended. Australia mostly accepted this view. But when the supreme crisis of the war against Japan forced the Australian leadership to look to the United States, Churchill reacted angrily. A relationship which began with the boyish enthusiasm of the Boer War days sank into bitterness and recrimination.

Churchill's jibe about 'bad stock', aimed presumably at Australia's convict origins — or possibly its Irish element — may be forgiven as the exasperation of an embattled and exhausted Titan. Wilson (later Lord Moran) noted in his diary: I did not worry about the Australians. I knew that he had been persuaded to tone down the cable before it was sent. Besides, he liked them as men and respected them as fighting soldiers.' Nevertheless, Churchill's use of the word ‘stock' carries a special significance. In any story about Australia and the British Empire, the prevailing assumptions about white superiority are always in the background. In the age of empire, words such as stock, breed, blood, and race were used casually, complacently, and interchangeably by Victorians and Edwardians such as Churchill. To be proud of the British Empire was to be proud of the British race. After Churchill had taken part in the British army's last cavalry charge in 1898, at Omdurman in the Sudan, and had shot and killed a couple of the ten thousand Dervishes slaughtered there, the young lieutenant wrote to an army friend in India: *My faith in our race and our blood was much strengthened.'

At the turn of the century, in the year that saw the death of Queen Victoria and the birth of the Commonwealth of Australia, the sense of white superiority was deemed thoroughly compatible with enlightened liberal and radical views. Ideas of racial superiority were integral to the prevailing doctrines of imperialism and nationalism. The vocabulary of race permeated public discourse in the most advanced democracies. The Australian Labor Party, from its birth ten years before, was pre-eminently the party of White Australia. The poet of the Empire, Rudyard Kipling, urged the United States to take up 'the white man's burden' of bringing civilisation to the unbleached peoples of the world — 'half devil and half child'. In his will establishing the Rhodes Scholarships, Cecil Rhodes wrote in 1899: I contend that we are the finest race in the world and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race. Just fancy those parts that are at present inhabited by the most despicable of human beings, what an alteration there would be in them if they were brought under Anglo-Saxon influence.

Churchill was more specific. I do not admit,' he said in 1937, '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 of race, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.' The context of these remarks makes reading them all the more sombre today. Churchill was appearing before an inquiry into Jewish immigration into Palestine. He referred to the "dog in the manger attitude' of the Palestinians, and the superiority of Jewish setlers....

———————————————-

Churchill did not invent the phrase “iron curtain”, nor was Fulton* the first time he had used it. But he made it his own by the vivid imagery: “from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe.” Churchill expressed his admiration for ‘the valiant Russian people and for my wartime comrade, Marshal Stalin’. ‘We understand the Russian need to secure on her western frontiers by the removal of all possibility of German aggression. We welcome Russia to her  richful place among the leading nations of the world' But the Russian dominated Polish Government was making enormous and wrongful inroads upon Germany' and 'mass expulsion of millions of Germans on a scale grievous and undreamed of; Communist regimes were being imposed in all the countries occupied by the victorious Russian army. This is certainly not the liberated Europe we fought to build up. Nor is it one which contains the essentials of permanent peace.' Confident that the Soviet Union did not want war, Churchill said: 

What we have to consider here today, while time remains, is the permanent prevention of war and the establishment of conditions of freedom and democracy as rapidly as possible in all countries.' Disclaiming any thought of appeasement, Churchill came to his main proposition: 

'What is needed is a settlement, and the longer this is delayed, the more difficult it will be and the greater our dangers will become.

Churchill then made a point which must have seemed to him, his listeners and his readers, even now, entirely appropriate and relevant to his argument, yet which left him open to serious misinterpretation. He said:

Up till the year 1933 or even 1935, Germany might have been saved from the awful fate which has overtaken her and we might all have been spared the miseries Hitler let loose upon mankind. There never was a war in all history easier to prevent by timely action than the one which has just desolated such great areas of the globe. It could have been prevented in my belief without the firing of a single shot. Last time, I saw it all coming and cried aloud to my own fellow-countrymen and to the world, but no one paid any attention . .. No one would listen and one by one we were all sucked into the awful whirlpool.

What made the Fulton Speech so shocking to so many, in the United States as well as Britain and Australia, was the implication that there was a new common cause - against the Soviet Union. Talk of preparedness so soon after the war could not but revive memories of 1919 and Churchill' anti-Bolshevik crusade.

Churchill's other purpose at Fulton was to warn against an American withdrawal from Europe. That is why he placed such emphasis on the partnership between Britain and America. Neither the sure prevention of war, nor the continuous rise of world organization will be gained without what I have called the fraternal association of the English-speaking peoples,' Churchill said. “This means a special relationship between the British Commonwealth and Empire and the United States.' This was the origin of a term, and a policy, which was to become the ruling principle for successive British Governments, not least Labour Governments, into the twenty-first century and into Iraq. Churchill, being Churchill, took the idea of a 'special relationship' into visionary realms: 'Eventually there may come - I feel eventually will come - the principle of common citizenship, but that we may be content to leave to destiny.' Nevertheless, we may recall, with fascination or surprise, that in 1946, Churchill and Chifley were saying the same things about cooperation between the 'English-speaking' democracies.

Although Churchill had shown his speech to Truman on the train to Missouri, and although he was to make selective use of it when the Cold War erupted in full force with the Berlin Blockade in 1948, Truman withheld public endorsement until its impact became clearer. Stalin showed no such reticence. In a carefully prepared response through the device of an interview in Pravda on 14 March, he called Churchill's speech a dangerous act, calculated to sow the seeds of discord'. Mr Churchill, Stalin said, 'is now in the position of a warmonger. But in this Mr Churchill is not alone - he has friends not only in England but the USA.’ Coming less than a year after the Great Patriotic War, which had left thirty million Soviet soldiers and civilians dead, Churchill’s parallel with Hitler's Germany was easily portrayed as a gross affront to Stalin and the Russian people. 

-----------------------------------

ABOUT THE WORK:

"Australia seemed to bring out the worst in Winston Churchill. Often enough to form a discernible pattern, Australia found itself on the wrong side of the very qualities-his strength of will, singleness of purpose, his refusal to 'give way, in things great or small, large or petty', the power of his imagination to set grim reality at defiance, his mastery of the English language-that made Winston Churchill, as the philosopher Isaiah Berlin described him, 'the saviour of his country, the largest human being of his time'."

Winston Churchill was a titan of the 20th Century, universally acknowledged as one of the greatest leaders of his age. Yet his relationship with Australia was a fraught one, tainted by the military failure of the Gallipoli campaign in the First War, and the disaster of Singapore in the Second. Churchill the patrician, descendant of dukes, could not appreciate Australia's dearly held egalitarianism, while Churchill the imperial statesman was impatient, and at times intolerant, of Australia's growing urge towards independence. The relationship between the two would span the first 50 tumultuous years of the 20th Century, from the Boer War through to opening salvoes of the Cold War, and act as a fascinating backdrop to Australia's maturity from a collection of autonomous colonies to full nationhood.

Written with extraordinary narrative verve, and relying on exhaustive research and a true insider's knowledge of the political world, this is history written at its compelling best.

Winner of the Walkley Award for Non-fiction 2008

Churchill and Australia

https://www.panmacmillan.com.au/9781742623672/ 

GUSNOTE: THIS EXCELLENT BOOK PREDICTIVELY TELLS US VERY MUCH ABOUT THE PRESENT STATE OF THE WORLD... HOW RUSSIA IS STILL FACING AN EXISTENTIAL THREAT FROM THE WEST, AND HOW THE MIDDLE-EAST IS A MESS DUE TO AN "EXCEPTIONAL SUPERIORITY" OF THE WHITE ANGLO-SAXON BELIEF AND OF THE JEWISH CHOSEN-BY-GOD STATUS. 

AS MENTIONED BEFORE, THE AMERICANS HAVE VOWED TO DESTROY RUSSIA SINCE 1917, THE BRITISH SINCE TIMES IMMEMORIAL, THE FRENCH SINCE NAPOLEON AND THE GERMANS SINCE 1945. THE JEWISH "PROBLEM OF EUROPE" SINCE THE DAYS OF MARTIN LUTHER, WAS ALSO TRANSFERRED TO THE MIDDLE EAST... THOUGH THE JEWISH INFLUENCE ON AMERICA HAS GONE BONKERS SINCE THE ATTACK ON THE SHIP "LIBERTY"...

MEANWHILE, AS THE COMFORTS OF CONSUMERISM HAVE GROWN LIKE HAPPY WEEDS SINCE THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION, THE ENERGY WARS OF THE WORLD HAVE GONE UP A FEW NOTCHES — AND THE RISE OF CHINA SINCE 1970 HAS SOMEWHAT COMPLICATED MATTERS FOR THE "SUPERIOR RACE"...

TIME IS NOW NEEDED FOR COOLER HEADS AND A RETROSPECTIVE HUMILITY, YET WITH A SUCCESSION OF CORRUPT CLOWNS IN CHARGE OF THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE, WE CAN ONLY HOPE THE CIRCUS WON'T EXPLODE...

PLEASE VISIT:

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

         RABID ATHEIST.

         WELCOME TO THIS INSANE WORLD….

* https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/cold-war-on-file/iron-curtain-speech/