US Media, Churchill, and the end of free Britain: Churchill set a bad example

Last Friday, August 8, two prominent US Media outlets coincidently carried articles vividly demonstrating the sorry state of the United Kingdom and of the country’s historiography.

The Neocon-controlled Wall Street Journal wheeled out prominent British historian Andrew Roberts to launch Why the Far Right Hates Churchill.

From its position high up the Right food chain, ZeroHedge posted Why Britain Arrests 30 People Every Day For Speech by Taylor Durden.

The WSJ piece, unusually, was posted outside the Paper’s paywall. The Drudge Report, now of course a news aggregator for Establishment Democrats, linked to the essay for an unusually long time. This was a smear which important elements wished to propagate.

The WSJ/Andrews essay is simply an attempt to utilize the widely-revered Churchill legend to shut down consideration of the wisdom of British WWII policy, and by extension the foreign policy of today. Andrews says

“Today’s revisionists project their views about Iraq, Afghanistan and now Iran backward through history and denounce the leading global interventionists of yesteryear.”

The reciprocal of this is equally true.

Andrews intones:

Churchill …stands watching over a world order that is now challenged by, among other things, a populist far right whose influence is spreading dangerously.

His position seems to be that the catastrophic and ongoing damage done to the UK by WWII (which he never mentions) is of no consequence compared to the achievement of destroying the Third Reich.

An American NeoConservative could understandably take this view. But Roberts is an Englishman still living there.

The ZeroHedge piece is an annotated reprint complete (with video) of an essay of the same title at Modernity News. It is a current account of the astonishing eradication of free speech underway in Britain, for centuries renowned for not repressing opinion.

Apart from supplying the startling ‘Arrests 30 people everyday’ headline the interviewee, founder of the UK’s Free Speech Union Lord Young of Acton

“…warns of broader threats to free expression…including a quarter-million non-crime hate incidents recorded…often for online posts challenging government narratives on immigration”

In the opening minutes of the video, Young directly says he expects further tightening and from 8:00 explains how free speech protections in the legislation have been circumvented.

The sick truth is that Britain’s “Conservative” Party is equally responsible for this murderous attack on British historic rights. I discussed this in UK: Totalitarian Night Descending. Social liberals have been in control of the Tories for over two generations.

In his 1995 book Alien Nation Peter Brimelow wrote

There is a sense in which current immigration policy is Adolf Hitler’s posthumous revenge on America. The U.S. political elite emerged from the war passionately concerned to cleanse itself from all taints of racism or xenophobia. Eventually, it enacted the epochal Immigration of 1965

This also applies to the UK – Tony Blair actually confirmed this in his 2010 autobiography. And of course it applies to matters of Race generally. WWII poisoned public discourse, as Diana West has persuasively argued.

But it was not necessary to wait so long to realize that WWII was an unparalleled catastrophe for Britain. The Americans plundered all her huge foreign assets and drove her deeply into debt. (Unlike the aid to the USSR, Lend-Lease to Britain was not a gift.) The Soviet Union had seized half of Europe and very likely would have taken the rest had it not been for the Atomic bomb. That was just an unproven dream when the key war decisions were made in 1939–40. To control the always treasonous impulses of the Left, Churchill during the war handed control of domestic policy to the Labour Party. Fortified by this, Labour held power from 1945–51.

As a result, Britain was forced into a socialist straight jacket which crippled the economy until the Thatcher years in the 1980s. And of course, Labour eagerly set about destroying the British Empire.

I do not blame Churchill for the British decision to go to war in 1939. He was not in Government, and although he was a major leader of anti-German opinion, it was clearly the consensus of British elite opinion that Hitler had become an insufferable nuisance.

But I do hold him responsible for the decision to fight on after the Fall of France in 1940.

By this time the British had fought literally scores of wars, by no means all of them victorious. They were experts at shutting wars down. When Churchill engineered the decision to fight on (and subsequently ignored all peace feelers) he was defying a central characteristic of British statecraft.

I have discussed this situation at length in Why Did Churchill Have Britain Fight On After Summer 1940? It’s Bad News. Not only was this action contradictory to British traditions, but it is anomalous set against his own record of longsighted sagacity both before and after WWII. (His Iron Curtain Speech of March 5, 1946, was disavowed by the Truman Administration; He tried hard in 1954 to get his “Conservative” Cabinet to curtail colored immigration into Britain.)

Clearly Churchill enjoyed leading the Country in war. But the frightful experience of the early ‘40s should have satiated anyone let alone a Statesman thinking about the future.

I am afraid the answer is that apparently first discovered by the ultra-taboo historian David Irving. (On David Irving as an Historian, I commend Ron Unz’ definitive exculpation: The Pyrrhic Attack on David Irving). The fact is that from March 1938 Churchill was completely dependent financially on one Sir Henry Strakosch. Having bailed him out from the consequences of the American stock market collapse of 1937-8 with a vague but substantial soft loan arrangement, Strakosch made another smaller payment in June 1940, after Churchill had become Prime Minister on May 10.

In his extraordinary 2015 book No More Champagne: Churchill and His Money which draws on Churchill’s actual financial records, author David Lough drily comments of the 1940 transaction:

The amount reached Churchill’s account on 21 June. Thus fortified, he paid a clutch of overdue bills from shirt-makers, watch repairers and wine merchants before he turned his attention back to the war.

Both payments rescued Churchill from insolvency. A Bankrupt cannot be a Member of the UK Parliament.

Who was Sir Henry Strakosch? He was a Jew, born in the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, who migrated to England in 1891 and thence to South Africa. There he made a fortune promoting gold mines. He became a British citizen in 1907 and was knighted in 1921. He spent the interwar years in London, interesting himself discreetly in public affairs.

Sir Henry Strakosch H/T Alchetron

From the early 1930s he was supplying Churchill with information on the German military buildup, about which he was presciently concerned.

The plain and ugly fact is that when in summer 1940 Churchill was facing the most momentous decision in modern British history, an anti-Hitler partisan had him by the financial throat.

Since David Irving discovered this story, most biographers of Churchill have simply briefly mentioned the 1938 transaction without analysis or comment.

But Andrew Roberts in his 1,152 page 2018 book Churchill: Walking with Destiny handled this awkward matter differently. He made no mention of Strakosch at all, except for one from October 1943, This however is extremely significant.

Roberts quotes from the diary of Churchill’s long time private secretary saying Churchill was exuberant the day after Sir Henry died, telling her the Strakosch Will expunged the Churchill debt and additionally left him a similar sum.

This means that more than 4 years into the war, Churchill had still been apprehensive about the hold Strakosch had on him.

On reflection, it is quite appropriate that the Wall Street Journal should mobilize the Churchill name to delude the peasantry.

After all, it is clear to those who pay attention that the US foreign and immigration policies of recent decades which the WSJ has supported have also been maintained by (much more massive) bribery.

From Patrick Cleburne’s Substack: US Media, Churchill, and the end of free Britain. Posted with permission.