Not my anti-fascist hero! – The world of people

Churchill at war

Netflix's four-part documentary Churchill at war is another attempt to make British Prime Minister Winston Churchill the great hero of the fight against Hitler's fascism.

To convince us, director Malcolm Venville calls on two supreme experts on fascism: former President George W. Bush, elected by the American Supreme Court, and former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Conservative politicians both appreciate Churchill's speech: we will fight on the beaches. We will fight on the landing grounds. We will fight in the fields and in the streets, etc. Bush and Johnson solemnly assure us that Churchill was the greatest anti-Hitler leader of all!

Still others are more deserving of the title of anti-fascists: the millions of Spaniards and the thousands of volunteer premature anti-fascists from around the world who went to fight Franco's fascism in Spain between 1936 and 1939; Jean Moulin, leader of the French underground, tortured and murdered by the SS in Nazi-occupied France; the Red Army soldiers and the millions of Soviet citizens who died fighting the Nazi invaders.

And yes, the 45,000 British subjects who died during the Nazi blitz in Britain.

I knew some of these heroes. Hans Lebrecht, World of people correspondent in Israel, a German Jew with bright blue eyes and blond hair, a messenger of the anti-fascist movement inside Nazi Germany. Hans looked so Aryan that the Gestapo let him pass through every Nazi checkpoint as he transported vital information about the fight against Nazism from Germany to Switzerland and back. He took charge of his life with every minute he spent in Nazi Germany.

I was on guard when I turned on my TV and watched Churchill at war. I was stunned when the film initially focused on Churchill's role as First Lord of the Admiralty in the Gallipoli debacle during the First World War. Churchill intimidated the British high command into carrying out his plan to send the British fleet to the Dardanelles and land 200,000 Allied troops. at the foot of the heights of Gallipoli.

Mostly Australians and New Zealanders, the soldiers were ordered to storm the heights. The film reports that 147,000 Allied troops died in this fiasco, a defeat so complete that Churchill was forced to resign. Yet Churchill volunteered to fight as a soldier in the trenches of France, ostensibly leading charges across no-mans land, posing for photos of himself to be published in British newspapers. Born into high privilege, he resurrected his career.

Churchill's infamous role in the sinking of the Lusitania on May 7, 1915, during which 1,195 civilians died. A 2015 centenary article in IrishCentralan online history website, quotes at length from a book by Erik Larson, Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of Lusitania.

As First Lord of the Admiralty, Larson writes, Churchill had been informed of the dangerous course of the war. Lusitaniasailing at low speed in German U-boat infested waters 11 miles off the coast of Ireland. Churchill did not order the captain of the Lusitania to take the much safer route across the northern tip of Ireland. Nor did he order a British naval escort. Churchill had loudly proclaimed that it would take a major disaster to force the United States to end its isolationism and enter the First World War. IrishCentralIf the sinking of the Lusitania was, as it appears, the result of deliberate and calculated inaction on Churchill's part, it surely ranks among the greatest sins of omission ever committed.

But it fulfilled Churchill's fondest dream, drawing the United States into that disastrous war driven by imperialist rivalry and in which as many as 40 million soldiers and civilians died.

Churchill at war documents his obsession during World War II with the preservation and expansion of the British Empire. He calculated that it was impossible for the British to defeat the Nazi Third Reich on their own. His full-time goal was to bombard President Franklin D. Roosevelt with telegrams, letters, speeches in the House and on the radio, imploring FDR to approve arms and food for Britain, and then to suffering constant bombardments from Nazi bombers who killed and maimed tens of thousands of British citizens. He wanted the United States to declare war on fascist Germany.

The film shows Churchill and his cohorts celebrating the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States' declaration of war on Japan, and Germany's declaration of war on the United States. The film also records that as soon as the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, Churchill informed Stalin that Britain was now allied with the USSR.

The film dwells on the famine that struck Bengal in 1943 because Churchill in London refused to approve emergency food deliveries to the starving Indian masses, saying the food was needed to feed Allied soldiers . British commentator Afua Hirsch comments on this tragedy drawing on the research of Madhusree Mukerjee, author of ChurchillThe Secret War: The British Empire and the ravages of India during World War II.

Hirsch told the audience that Churchill's attitude toward the crown jewel of his beloved empire fostered a famine that killed millions.

The guardian reports that rice stocks continued to leave India even as London refused the Viceroy of India's demands for more than a million. (million) tons of emergency rice in 1942-43. Churchill reportedly blamed the famine on Indians breeding like rabbits and asked how, if the shortage was so severe, Mahatma Gandhi was still alive.

Afua Hirsch responds to all these revelations about Winston Churchill: This is a really problematic part of the legacy.

Perhaps the most astonishing part of the series is the actors' re-enactment of a key moment from the Big Three summit in Tehran from November 28 to December 28. January 1, 1943. This is the first meeting of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. This was a great victory for the anti-fascist cause, bringing the UK, USA and USSR together into a Grand Alliance to defeat Hitler.

Stalin demands an answer: When will the Western Allies launch the Second Front? Churchill hesitated, defending his plan to deploy American and British forces in North Africa, followed by the landing in Sicily. Attack the Axis in its soft guts, to use his words (not heard in the film).

The Netflix documentary reports that Churchill's strategy was to divert American forces to the Mediterranean to help protect the British Empire, Egypt, the Suez Canal and India, thereby circumventing the global demand to open the Second Front.

Stalin shakes his head. No, it was not the Second Front that promised to relieve the pressure on Soviet forces who were bearing the crushing burden of the war.

Churchill glances at FDR, assuming he will support his position. FDR smiles and quietly informs Churchill: I agree with Marshal Stalin.

A look of stunned disbelief spread across Churchill's face. Stalin and FDR agreed on a cross-Channel invasion of France from England, the long-delayed opening of the Second Front.

The film even records that Churchill was so desperate to exclude the Soviets that he argued that captured soldiers of the fascist Wehrmacht would be disarmed, then rearmed by the United States and Britain and turned against the Soviet army as thousands of Red Army soldiers fought their way west. towards Berlin. This ploy would have been an extreme betrayal against the anti-fascist coalition.

It is a sign of the sophistication of the British people, included in the Netflix film, that in their first post-war election they dumped Churchill in a landslide and elected Labor Party candidate Clement Attlee to office. post of Prime Minister. Voters said: Thank you very much, Mr. Churchill. Now is the time to abandon socialized medicine. The British House of Commons did just that, and Attlee signed it.

This documentary attempts to mitigate Churchill's many sins of omission and commission while reporting them. But I will remain faithful to my anti-fascist heroes, starting with the veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.

---

DONOR