Churchill Knew the War Must Be Won

Churchill and the Necessity of Victory

Winston Churchill was an advocate of diplomacy. As leader of the opposition, he spoke in Parliament in December of 1950, offering strong but qualified support of Prime Minister Clement Attlee’s foreign policy:

Appeasement in itself may be good or bad according to the circumstances. Appeasement from weakness and fear is alike futile and fatal. Appeasement from strength is magnanimous and noble and might be the surest and perhaps the only path to world peace.

The context for this assertion was the strength of Britain’s firm alliance with America and its nuclear arsenal. That nuclear threat Churchill saw as necessary for gaining Stalin’s ear. In this context, backed by immense strength, Churchill would later say, “Meeting jaw to jaw is better than war.”

Churchill is more famous for realizing when appeasement was impossible, when it would only accelerate the momentum towards war. But both statements reflected a larger truth that he recognized. His deeper message was one of the need for discernment: neither appeasement nor confrontation are always right. One must not shrink from meeting the actual challenge, rather than clouding one’s view of the world with ideological screens, and respond poorly to the threat we actually face. 

More clearly than anyone on the political scene, Churchill grasped the nature of Hitler’s threat. He understood Hitler’s fanaticism, narcissism, and psychopathology: he was never interested in compromising anything, convinced of his own unparalleled genius. 

As with most psychopaths, Hitler knew how to use the morality of his opponents to his decided advantage. Most totalitarian revolutionaries follow the strategy of the bloody Danton: De l’audace, encore de l’audace, toujours de l’audace — ever increasing audacity is the way to master the forces of civilization who will be crippled by their own inhibitions. 

Faced with such an opponent, Churchill understood the futility of saving civilization by aiming for anything less than victory. With Stalin, he would not rule out even first use of nuclear weapons, which fortunately never came to pass after the end of World War II. He rejected the idea that

that we must never use the atomic bomb until, or unless, it has been used against us first. In other words, you must never fire until you have been shot dead. [That] seems to me undoubtedly a silly thing to say and a still more imprudent position to adopt.

Facing a psychopath in charge of a terrifying and dominating military, Churchill saw that no compromises could be sought, even to adopt a goal in war that was not completely committed to victory. In the spring of 1940, with Britain’s Norway campaign careening toward complete defeat, with Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Denmark already controlled by the Nazis, and only a week before the German blitzkrieg would burst upon Holland, Belgium, and France, Churchill wrote to Lord Halifax, his Cabinet colleague and an architect of the appeasement policy:

We have never done anything but follow the line of least resistance. That leads only to perdition. Considering the discomfort & sacrifice imposed upon the nation, public men charged with the conduct of the war sh’d live in a continual stress of soul. Faithful discharge of duty is no excuse for Ministers: we have to contrive & compel victory.

It was this idea that drove the most effective generals. George Patton was good at one thing only — winning military campaigns. His short post-war gig in charge of DP camps for Holocaust survivors brought him shame. Making and winning war was his genius.

His repositioning of his Third Army in record time when the Nazis threatened to break through to the sea in the Battle of the Bulge was a spectacular achievement. Prior to that, he was the chief architect of the disastrous German losses and Falaise, a battle which might have been even more decisive had other generals who had not fail to close the ring and allow many German troops to escape complete encirclement and to fight another day.

Patton instilled his ethos of victory in his men. War, he was saying, is not primarily about noble ideas and gallantry — it is about defeating the enemy. In his standard talk that he would give to his troops when he would visit them, he would famously say: 

No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.

Nazis Exist Today

Fanatical psychopaths dedicated to the annihilation of those they hate are still here. The mullahs of Teheran and their proxies in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Gaza all adhere to Nazi-like beliefs about Israel and its people. They equally are dedicated to the defeat of the United States, which they realize with the patience imbued by a 1,400-year-old culture, will take a little while. 

And the evidence of what this mindset does when cut loose is alike in its aims with the Nazis, and even more chilling in that, while the Nazis tried to conceal their worst atrocities, these monsters have publicly celebrated their orgy of sadistic torture, rape, abduction, and massacre.

Naifs and preening intellectuals think that they see in this not a reincarnation of Nazi hate wearing clerical robes but rather fellow travelers in the struggle against colonialism. This view is catered to by today’s Democratic Party, which has slowly but surely achieved Obama’s stated goal of putting daylight between America and Israel — which has led, as it must, to the toleration and then the accommodation of antisemitism in its many shifting guises.

With its best public face, this acceptable, progressive antisemitism constantly looks past the unmistakable, unavoidable truth that the Iran-coordinated campaign of extermination is not something capable of a negotiated solution. Every negotiation for them is only an attempt to gain a concession while yielding nothing; it is only a preparation for the next demand, in a never-ending chain until the dreamed-of annihilation is achieved.

There was no acknowledgment of that in Chicago. They have no time for what they cannot manipulate and control. All can be bought or tricked away, nothing is transcendent except ambition. There is no ideal that cannot be stripped, ravished, then set out to work the street for its master.

And so, for the sake of votes in Michigan, for the sake of an entire caucus that has risen to inordinate power in a party that has learned to reject the superordinate, they will pretend. Perhaps they can bring some to believe that their half-hearted defense of Israel that does not contemplate victory leads inevitably to the next atrocity and the next. Perhaps they can lead some to believe that gradual betrayal is really nothing more than loving paternalism.

Most Americans are past that.

Let us be resolute in seeking victory. Our foes don’t believe we can do that. And neither do those who ruled the party in Chicago. It’s up to us to show them we can.

READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin:

The Virtues of Immigrant Assimilation

The Gollum Possibility at the DNC

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