 My bet is that informed and Tony opinion will finally come down on the side of Churchill Indeed professor Harry Jaffa has already assured us that Churchill was not only the man of this century, but the man of many centuries In an article in modern age In a way Churchill as man of the century would be totally appropriate The 20th century has been the century of the state of the welfare state and of the warfare state and Churchill was from first to last a man of the state of the welfare state and of the warfare state At the start of Churchill's career John Morley was the last of the great English classical liberals Lord Morley Resigned from the Asquith cabinet in the summer of 1914 over the decision to go to war A few years before he had met Churchill worked with him and passed a succinct judgment on him Winston he said has no principles Winston has no principles still Although I will try to show that this was the case that Churchill had no principles as Morley discerned There was a tendency to Churchill's action and Conduct through his career a bias and that bias was towards dismantling the barriers to state power now Please I'm quite aware of Talk about David and Goliath, right? I'm taking on Winston Churchill Who's if we were ancient Greeks? He would have been a god and many times over So please do not believe that I belong to the school of Churchill criticism of the character in the producers By Mel Brooks. I don't think that Hitler was a better dancer than Churchill I don't think that Hitler was a better dresser than Churchill And so this is not in any in any sense, please believe me from beginning to end a Apology for for Nazism, obviously I will feel freely concede that in 1940 Churchill was superb It doesn't matter in that that in the greatest of his speeches We will fight them on the beaches. We will fight them in the streets. He plagiarized Clemenceau from the from Clemenceau's Speech on the Ludendorff offensive in the spring of 1918 Churchill played his self-appointed role Magnificently yet before 1940 the word that had been most closely associated with Churchill's name was opportunist He had changed party affiliation twice from conservative to liberal and back again His move to the Liberals was alleged allegedly on the issue of free trade But then in 1930 he sold out free trade and accepted industrial protectionism When he was at the board of trade before the First World War he opposed increased armaments because he wanted to use them the money for welfare Social welfare then in 1911 he became the head of the Admiralty. That is the secretary of the Navy And he pushed for bigger and bigger budget spreading wild rumors about the strength of the German Navy Just as in 1930 spread wild rumors about the strength of the German Air Force The Germans were building up obviously But it was not that concentration on the Air Force and the bombers Churchill lied about that because he wanted to give the idea that the Germans were building up to attack England and especially to annihilate London There was nothing to that as we know now He attacked socialism before and after the First World War while during the war He promoted war socialism which Professor Higgs told you about calling for nationalization of the railroad saying in the speech Quote our whole nation must be organized must be socialized if you like the word There was no anchor to him. He floated floated with the currents of opinion Churchill's opportunism continued to the end The 1945 election he latched on to Hayek's road to serfdom and started attacking the Labor Party as the Toletarian Whereas it had been Churchill in 1943 who accepted the beverage plan for Well, the total welfare state and Keynesian management of the economy and had announced it Churchill himself had caved in on the welfare state and socialism Actually, there were two principles that Churchill seemed to hold dear one was anti-communism He was an early and fervent opponent of Bolshevism For years very rightly decried the bloody baboons and foul murderers of Moscow His deep admiration of Benito Mussolini was rooted in his shrewd appreciation of what Mussolini had accomplished or what He thought Mussolini had accomplished Mussolini found the one formula that in The revolutionary situation in Italy and Italy Teetering on the brink of Lennon is the social revolution the one thing that could counteract Lennonism and that was hyper nationalism with the social slavery Mussolini invented that and for the first time defeated the communists and Churchill was infinitely Grateful to Mussolini until Mussolini started to fort British foreign policy And yet there was the time came when Churchill made his peace with communism He gave all out support to Stalin the moment that the Germans invaded and I still have not seen it explained I simply don't understand this perhaps somebody can explain it to me by that time by June 1941 Hitler had had was an aggressor obviously had killed thousands tens of thousands Brutalities in Poland, but by that time Stalin had already killed most of his 20 million On what basis is it simply obvious that England should have thrown all of its support to Stalin at that point Just as the United States and Roosevelt through all of our support to this mass murderer Churchill just as well as Roosevelt or the myth is grown up about Churchill among conservatives But Churchill just as much as Roosevelt called Stalin uncle Joe and at the Tehran conference I hope I see you all seated This is important the Tehran conference in November of 1943. He gave Marshall Stalin a Christian crusader sword that had been in the possession of the British crown and If you're interested in in pondering the meaning of the word obscenity you might think about that what that meant. Oh But then of course there was the abiding love of his life the British Empire Churchill stood for anything it was the Empire He's famously said that he'd not become Prime Minister to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire, but that's exactly what he did Exactly what happened You see I'll let me just mention in a in a mo I'm about to get into a very important point about Churchill people who knew him throughout his life from Lord Escher in 1917 Robert Menzies the Australian Prime Minister in the during the Second World War other people throughout his career Remarked on a very strange thing about Churchill Let me quote Lord Escher at a early point. He handles Churchill handles great subjects in rhythmical language and becomes quickly enslaved to his own phrases He deceives himself into the belief that he takes broad views when his mind is fixed upon one comparatively small aspect of the question The Australian Prime Minister in Newman the Second World War said his real son that his real tyrant is the glittering phrase So attractive to his mind that awkward facts have to give way. He was a man of words He was a man of words. He was a man of action, but as we'll see a man of action in a funny kind of way Not on the level of the statesman is expected to be a man of action. What he loved above all is War The things that were described to you and I mean combat the things that were described to you this morning That was what Churchill loved It started very early when he was a kid he had a collection, you know, his father was a son of a Duke And he was from the Marlboro family He had a huge collection of toy soldiers 1500 of them played with them till he was a teenager long They were all British he tells us and he fought battles with his brother Jack There was only allowed to have colored troops and they were not allowed to have artillery Stacking the odds he he went to Sandhurst rather than Oxford or Cambridge. That is the military Academy and Throughout his life. That's the the thing that excited him most and what might one might say the only thing that really excited him Everything else writing painting family life. This was the period of recreation from war Just a few modern men Patton maybe is an example of that also, but it's very few modern men have he Loved war and even love the bangs as he said that is the explosions And he was very brave and defy her no doubt about that He had lost his religion early when he was in India. He said by reading Gibbon. It sounds a little strange But his view of life was a Darwinian view of the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest And he expresses this in his one novel Savrula now Churchill Which it may not be known to you is one of the chief creators of the early welfare state in Britain the Liberals came in in 1906 and right away they started adopting the policy that Bismarck had imposed in Germany of Social insurance compulsory social insurance of the working class and then of the whole population David Lloyd George and Churchill worked together in this and they were the ones who pushed it through This was the first stage of the welfare state in Britain really the second big stage is after 1945 and as I'll show you Churchill was an accomplice in that also Churchill said I'm on the side of those who think that a greater collective sentiment should be introduced into the state and the municipalities I should like to see the state undertaking new functions Stepping into new spheres of activity But still we have to respect individualism no man can be a collectivist alone or an individualist alone He must be both an individualist and a collectivist now This is Churchill good sample of Churchill as conservative philosopher doesn't get much better He by the way fell into the influence and became very friendly with guess who two of my favorite people in modern times Sydney and Beatrice Webb and It was one of it was at one of her strategic dinner parties that she introduced him to a young protégé of hers named William Beverage who then worked with him in This period before the First World War and then of course in the the beverage report was the plan for the socialization And the total welfare state in Britain Okay, 1911 he became the law of the first Lord of the Admiralty that is Secretary of the Navy Naturally, he pushed for war When the crisis came in 1914 His own Prime Minister said that nothing would do him but immediate mobilization Winston's got all his war paint on his longing for a sea fight in the early hours of the morning To result in the sinking of the Gerbins and German ship Lady Asquith described the upper elite very top elite of the government on that momentous night of August 4th 1914 as the talk as the clock ticked and struck the last notes The ultimate the period for the ultimatum to be responded to by Germany had expired They were gonna be at war and everybody's sad everybody's looking at each other and with one exception She said and then the great doors of the drawing room burst open and there was Winston Churchill all smiles and ready for action he loved war and It's something that we We have to know about him the First World War. He was instrumental in setting up the hunger blockade of Germany Let me mention to you Everything that I say in this talk if you care to ask me afterwards about the source or or further reading about it Please see me the tonight or tomorrow or if necessary You can write me care of the Mises Institute and I can send you the sources for everything that I'm telling you now The hunger blockade of Germany, which was illegal in the eyes of everybody except Britain it made food for instance food for civilians contraband and It was not a closing blockade, but a blockade that was created just by throwing mines all around the place Not allowed to do that And that blockade finally cost the lives about 750,000 German civilians The time is coming when the establishment view of the 20th century is going to be shaken very badly You see people don't just come up with crazy ideas. Yeah, I'm gonna I'm gonna massacre all the Slavs I'm gonna massacre all the Jews. I'm gonna massacre all the bourgeois and so on There's a there's a cause and effect involved here and the first great bloodletting And the first total destruction of Rules of morality was the first world war Here's what one historian says the victimized youth of Germany of the first world war The ones who survived the starvation would have become the most radical adherence of Nazism Understandably they were almost starved to death as little kids Okay I'm tempted to take a hoppy and surcharge here of An extra 20% or something. No. No. No. No, I see you're right Lou there. It doesn't it's not gonna work. It's not gonna work Because we haven't even gotten to the Lusitania yet Whether a Churchill was directly involved in the sinking of the Lusitania is unclear as controversial one of the latest historians of British naval intelligence in the first world war Patrick Beasley says Looking at what they did it is impossible to think it was simply negligence And in any case whether he was directly responsible for the sinking of the Lusitania He had set up the rules such that it was very likely that the Lusitania was going to be sunk He told Merchantship captains if you see a submarine veer around and ram it and split it in two the Germans knew this they were not going to Recognize the special status of merchant meant from from that on from then on Lusitania as you know probably was carrying munitions of war Millions of shells hundreds of thousands of I mean gun bullets hundreds of thousands of mortars Which again is against the law against international law no wonder the Germans sunk it and America didn't get into war then but it put us on the collision course to war Because Wilson said you can't to the Germans you can't do that any and ever again An American has a God-given right to travel in time of war through a submarine zone in an enemy Armed enemy merchant ship carrying munitions of war and if you if you fire on that well, you're the Great monsters of all time Okay Now church we could talk about Churchill's career in the in the First World War, which is very interesting the Gallipoli disaster But he went from one post to another he moved over to the conservatives because the Liberal Party was a disintegrating and He became Chancellor of the Exchequer his most famous act when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer Was to return to the gold standard, but at the unrealistic pre-war parody you can read about this in Murray Rothbard's book The Great Depression Which created tremendous problems of the British export Trade and ruined the good name of gold AJP Taylor is certainly right who's most of these almost all of these historians are very friendly to the church So they live through it. They they identify with him. He's a Great favorite, but some of them do criticize from time to time and Taylor said Churchill did not grasp the economic arguments one way or the other would determine him again was devotion to British greatness The pound would once more as look the dollar in the face You see this is a man who was moved by words and symbols and not things Okay, his great claim to fame in the modern mythology Begins with his hard line against Hitler in the 1930s, but we should understand that he had the same hard line against the Weimar Republic He was against any kind of equality for Germany in armaments even before Hitler came to power so that If you ask we know what his war plan was to go to get a great coalition together with Stalin and attack Germany But what was his peace plan? There was no peace plan it was to defend Versailles and And to act and live in this is a world of illusions that the British and French leaders lived in the Germany Forever would accept this would accept being a second or third-class citizen Okay, war came Funny thing happened. Oh Well, it's not funny the church who was recalled to his old job as First Lord of the Admiralty But then a funny thing happened the president of the United States initiated a special personal correspondence not with the Prime Minister of Britain, but with the First Lord of the Admiralty Unusual to say the least and this correspondence by a telephone by a transatlantic telephone and a telegraph and so on lasted throughout the whole world throughout the whole war In 1940 Churchill became Prime Minister And ousted Chamberlain We know now that there was a strong peace party in the British government and in British public opinion but Churchill set his face against peace that is negotiations with Hitler and Refused even to listen to what the Germans had to say he said I and this is can be repeated or Illustrated again and again Churchill said I have only one aim in my whole life and that is the defeat of Hitler and the Germans Right and then An interesting thing happened in July as in June of 1941 as I mentioned to you Hitler attacked Stalin and Churchill gave Hitler I gave Stalin all-out support and that was to last until the last Months of the war as we'll see The conservatives beginning with Churchill himself made up a mythology after the war that Roosevelt had been the dumb one The Churchill had been very shrewd and was talking about the soft underbelly of Europe to send the British troops up there In order to block the Russians from taking over Budapest and Vienna The problem is there is virtually no contemporary evidence for that In what he says to other cabinet members in their diaries and documents in anything He gave a lot of different reasons for the soft underbelly You mentioned might have mentioned that once or twice because he likes to use every possible argument But the major reasons were not anti-Soviet strategy So the Soviet Union was in the war but really Churchill understood that his Gamble in rejecting German peace initiatives could not work unless you got America into the war It was simply on England herself the Dominions could not invade Fortress Europe The city was his his idea America had to be brought into the war if it was Important in 1917 to bring into America into the war. It was a sine qua non of Churchill's policy In the Second World War to bring America into the war Somebody yesterday you mentioned this I think I think was mr. Denson this very interesting book by your gore Vidal that My friend Bill Kaufman reviewed course screening history. You have to read this, especially if you're of a certain age And maybe have a recollection of those times Churchill never neglected anything fantastic energy. You have to give it to that to him. He was he was a ball of energy so among other things he arranged to have a holly he arranged to Have a British colony set up in Hollywood That headed by his friend Alexander Korda a great director and producer which would come out with British films I mean virtually British films. You have to read this gore Vidal Chapter in his book screening history. He says as spectators of hollywood productions. We served neither the Lincoln nor Jefferson Davis We serve the crown These pictures one after the other on the the northwest frontier almond balacrava The lady that that lady Hamilton and so on as Vidal said was making us all weirdly English People felt weird Well, that was hollywood's contribution. That was maybe on a on a on a lower level Uh, he neglected nothing. He set up William Stevenson We're afterwards. You can read the whole story in a book called a man called intrepid You know in his office in Rockefeller Center And his aim was to destroy the america first movement To intercept mail to tap wires to spread rumors To spreading disinformation of every kind It was William Stevenson who handed Roosevelt the famous A map of South America If you might remember that Uh, I think at one time at the press conference, Roosevelt Waved around a map of uh, uh, South America showing the Nazis dividing up South America And imposing and destroying all religion Churchill and especially Roosevelt kept Harping on the fact that the Nazis were destroying all religion. I don't know what they thought was happening in the soviet union at the time So this disinformation it turned out to be totally fraudulent as uh, as a british Uh, I mean also insanely stupid. You understand with a german attack of South America via Dakar In western africa would involve the logistics would be difficult They couldn't get across the english channel Okay, but nonetheless all this nonsense was a retail to the american people But um, really the uh, the most important thing was what was happening on the highest levels Okay, and uh There'd be much to tell you Let me just uh limited to this um, because here the british documents have been released finally after 30 years And um on january 1st 1972 the documents concerning the atlantic charter meeting Released and reading to you from the associated press item Formerly top secret british government papers made public today Said the president franklin d roosevelt told prime minister winston churchill in august 1941 He's looking for an incident to justify opening hostilities against nazi germany on august 19th church reported Uh On aspects of the newfoundland meeting that were not made public. Hmm He churchill said he obviously was determined that they should come in if you put the issue to peace and war to congress They were debated for months the president has said he would wage war but not declare it He would become more and more provocative if the germans did not like it. They could attack american forces Everything was to be done to force an incident And that's the way it happened with the greer and other ships Meanwhile, he didn't ignore the back door to war as you can read in richard lamb and the relevant chapter in richard lamb's book churchill as war leader We could talk about uh about much of this The fact of the matter is that winston churchill and the first and second world war both used our people As he used the greeks and the turks For all his uh gush about the english speaking people and their great mission in history We were pawns in his game And afterwards uh when uh when when he heard about pearl harbor churchill openly said this is what i've dreamed of this is what i've aimed for This is what i've worked for constantly And now it's come about okay We could now now we're talking about this great uh The epic the last good war I could uh we could talk about the uh churchill's attack on the on the french fleet At maersel cup year you're not really allowed to uh bombard the ships of your ally Without a declaration of war and uh in wartime that's considered Uh, but let me try to make it clear to you at one time there's a there was a controversy over where the churchill and roosevelt were involved in this and and We could talk about the breaking of the secret code and so on but the fact of the matter is that uh Now there's not a controversy when stevensson's book came out Bill buckley had a column saying yes, what would you expect? A great man like churchill to do he had to do it because he was Acting against this terrible terrible Uh monster hitler. He had to fool america into coming into war. He had to lie to the american people I think the only one Who denies this now is a professor harry jaffa in his article in modern age Where uh, he's indignant that anybody should say that churchill somehow Helped get america into the second world war professor harry jaffa says Didn't the japanese bomb pearl harbor? What do you think churchill bomb burl harbor? Which shows you what happens? Uh, after many years of close study of the works of leo strauss. You become a moron You have to read that to uh to believe it okay Ladies and gentlemen, we have now to deal with a number of war crimes The first of which uh is the uh Destruction of the cities of germany the aim was to destroy the cities the aim was to kill civilians uh barmer harris was churchill's uh agent in this If you want to know who barmer harris is let me say that he was churchill's general Sherman Uh and let that sink in he was churchill's general Sherman they killed six or seven hundred thousand uh germans they destroyed an urban culture of a thousand years but uh It meant nothing to this great conservative. That's what I love You know real conservatives henry regnery is eric finkin latin. Those are real conservatives and you read with what they have to say about churchill Someone who blithely destroys one of the great centers and treasures of what we are in western civilization Okay, the highlight of course was the destruction of dresden For three nights and three days dresden was pounded with bombs at least 30,000 people killed Perhaps as many as 100,000 that's finger palace the zimper Opera house our ladies church the flower in kisha the brool terrace Overlooking the elb when tergania's fathers and sons uncle palvel says i'm gonna go there to spend my last years At the brool terrace that was obliterated together with everything else if They had never heard of they might never have heard of uh dresden in manhattan and georgetown But they had in stock home in surich and in london and this is what our hero Sends as a memorandum to harris to bomber harris his chief of bombing It seems to me. This is churchill. It seems to me that the moment has come When the bomb question of bombing german cities simply those for the sake of increasing the terror though under other pretexts should be reviewed Otherwise we shall come into control of an utterly ruined land The destruction of dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of adult bombing I feel the need for more precise concentration Instead of acts of terror and wanton destruction churchill is the one who had instigated it So harris and the other Airlords just throw it back in his face. What churchill wanted to do was get this in the record This is what his whole historical work is about of course. He enjoyed writing history But to create an image which the world will then have of him forevermore But they threw this memo back. They refused to accept it What are you trying to do pretend that you had nothing to do? We have the order You said you said let's start bombing things in the east. How about some of these big cities that haven't been bombed yet? so Witten churchill we have the butcher of dresden We have in churchill the Pre-patron and mentor of marshal tito His advisor once asked the once said to churchill What you know with all this aid was sending tito and the aid we're denying to mehalovich It's going to be a communist country churchill said do you intend to live there? Now and then admiral albert What amir says? Okay churchill put tito in charge of yugoslavia. What happens to his so-called soft underbelly Strategy tito is not going to allow as in fact happened Tito is not going to allow western armies to go through yugoslavia. He can so he controls yugoslavia What is this fantasy of of churchills of? He pampered stalin. He gave stalin everything stalin wanted for years now. He starts um looking around Getting very scared, you know because uh We don't live there. Uh, he lives in in europe He tells an aide as the war is winding down What's gonna? What is there gonna be between the white snows of syberia and the white cliffs of dover? It might have he might have asked himself that question before I wonder what you think of statesmen who does not realize that the extinction of germany in europe Has certain consequences Right. Is this a metering? Is this a bismarck or is this maybe a? Woodrow wilson another prince of fools We started with the welfare state. Let me just end We could talk about the repatriation of the soviet citizens Um, alexander zojenitsyn and the gulag archipelago The election but he did try to To win it here. This was what he said in 1945 You must rank me and my colleagues as strong partisans of national compulsory insurance For all classes for all purposes from the cradle to the grave a uh Architect of the warfare state an architect of the welfare state It seems to me that there are uh, there are a number of positions one could take on churchill It's tempting to see him as a flawed creature Who was summoned somehow at a critical moment to do battle against a uniquely Appalling evil sort of like uh, merlin in that great christian libertarian novel this uh, that uh, that hideous strength If you know that novel by by c.s. Lewis merlin has that role but The uh interpretation that uh appeals to me Is quite different that he was from first alias the man of blood a man of um of the state and uh The apotheosis the ongoing apotheosis of winston churchill Serves to corrupt every standard of honesty and morality in history and in politics