Tucker Carlson's Dubious History Lesson Re: Churchill And Poland
Tucker Carlson recently made some head-scratching statements about Winston Churchill and his role in the trauma Poland suffered during World War II
[Churchill and Carlson]
I watched a very interesting discussion between libertarian Dave Smith and Tucker Carlson on the latter’s podcast, and found myself agreeing with much of what they had to say, re: the rise of the Military-Industrial Complex and its hold over the DC “Uniparty”. But I must say I found Carlson’s take on the opening of World War II, and Winston Churchill’s role in it, to be rather head-scratching to say the least.
Says Carlson: “[Churchill] sold his country on a war, using the idea that we must defend the territorial integrity of Poland.”
First off, it should be noted that Churchill did not craft the doomed alliance nor was he the Prime Minister when Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. He was an MP in the out-of-power Conservative Party and not even a part of Chamberlain’s cabinet. This period is known to Churchill biographers as his “Wilderness Years”. He did not, in fact, become Prime Minister until May 1940, a good eight months after Poland had been conquered and the Wehrmacht stood poised to strike at France and the Low Countries on its western frontier.
Far from “selling” the Polish alliance to the British (even if he were in a position to do so) Churchill was hardly a friend to Warsaw or a believer in the pact to which Chamberlain and his Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax committed the country, believing after the Czech forfeiture it to be too little too late. In his 1948 book The Gathering Storm, Churchill writes: “Here was decision at last, taken at the worst moment, on the least satisfactory ground, which must surely lead to the slaughter of tens of millions of people.”
When in March 1939 the Germans entered Prague in violation of the Munich Agreement, Chamberlain came to realize that Hitler could never be appeased. As Poland was Hitler’s next logical target, Parliament agreed to commit Britain to go to war on Poland’s behalf should they be attacked; albeit the Allies were far from on a war footing and thus was it an empty, even cynical promise. The Poland line in the sand was drawn by Chamberlain, and only after repeated attempts at arriving at a peaceful solution with Hitler proved fruitless. So, if anyone, it was Chamberlain, not Churchill, who “sold” the alliance with Poland. That Carlson uses the same language (“sold the war”) one might use to say how the neocons “sold” Americans on the Iraq war—an unprovoked act of aggression in hindsight (there were no WMDs nor Iraqis on the 9/11 jets)—is telling and shows a bit of a historical blind spot here. It is as if Mr. Carlson has moved into such an isolationist frame of mind that he cannot differentiate between the wheat of confronting what was a true threat to world order and bringer of mass suffering across what he himself calls “the greatest continent” with the chaff of modern neocon folly.
[Tucker Carlson and Dave Smith]
Churchill was never in favor of an unprovoked strike on Germany as was the Bush cabinet with Iraq, even though Hitler’s naked and brutal ambitions had been clear to him as far back as 1933 when he became Chancellor then eventually Führer. What he wanted to “sell” Britain on was rearmament should Hitler’s unfettered hostility continue until it threatened Britain herself, which it did. Churchill understood early on that Hitler would never stop. (In fact, when planning his attack on Poland, Hitler was warned by his generals about what it would mean: war with what was at the time an alliance of the world’s most powerful army, France, and navy, Britain. But he knew there was little the alliance could, or would, do to stop him. Hitler scoffed: “I saw them at Munich and they are worms!”)
[Hitler in Warsaw September 1939]
When the blow came, it was not a “war of choice” as Mr. Carlson frames it. Although, one can say that, as it takes two to wage war, any war is by definition a “choice”. Indeed, a country can always just let itself be conquered without firing a shot. So the question then is, since all wars are really wars of choice in this regard, when does the decision to go to war, with all the revulsions it implies, become a matter of necessity?
As such, one must ask Mr. Carlson if stopping the spread of Nazism and all the horrors, thuggery, brutality, and even threat to the United States’ own interests as a seafaring nation was a justifiable cassis belli. If one thinks Hitler was no threat to the U.S. just because he’d never invade, try to imagine the Nazis, if left unchallenged, controlling all of Europe and eventually filling the Atlantic not with 26 U-Boats, as Hitler had when war was declared, but over 300, as Admiral Karl Dönitz envisioned if given the gift of time. Add to this a fleet of Bismark-class and pocket battleships and other surface raiders. I would think that is a threat enough to vital U.S. interests to get Tucker on board, no?
[PM Neville Chamberlain attempts to tame a rabid dog]
Mr. Carlson goes on to say that after “selling” the war for Poland, “four years later [Churchill] hands Poland to the Soviets.” This is a ludicrous statement. It was not Churchill who effectively gave away the Eastern Block to Stalin. It was FDR, who wanted Russia to enter the war against Japan. If anything, it was Churchill who pushed for free and fair elections in Poland and other Soviet-occupied countries. By the time of the Yalta Conference in February 1945, it was quite clear that, although it was called “The Big Three”, by then the United States and USSR were clearly the far more powerful Allies. Churchill was almost a small player, even though he was the one who understood Bolshevism to be as much a force for evil and human suffering as were the soon-to-be eradicated Nazis. It was, after all, Churchill who coined the term “Iron Curtain.”
And, of course, one must ask how a Prime Minister Carlson would have excised the Soviet horde from Poland in 1945? How would he propose confronting a victorious Red Army at the height of its power, having just inflicted 80% of the once-invincible Wehrmacht’s losses, and fielding over 11 million personnel, which included 60 tank divisions and some 56,000 aircraft, and positioned from the Baltic Sea to the Aegean and commanded by such able and ruthless commanders as Zhukov, Chuikov, Rokossovsky and Konev? Would he have attacked them? Perhaps start World War Three over Poland? Is this the same Tucker Carlson who (correctly in my view) wants no part of tangling with a much more reduced Russian army over Ukraine, right on Poland’s eastern border? His Poland abandonment narrative, especially when applied to Churchill, makes no sense.
[“Big Three” Conference, Yalta. Stalin, FDR, Churchill]
Yes, as Carlson states, Churchill was “rejected by his own voters after the war, so they weren’t impressed by his leadership.” Utter nonsense. The 1945 election was more of a referendum on the future, and more socialist, direction of Britain, which the voters concluded was best served by Clement Attlee’s Labour Party than Churchill’s wartime coalition. That does not mean the British people rejected Churchill’s leadership when confronting the now-dead Hitler or his imprisoned or dead Nazi henchmen. To use a Godfather analogy, they saw Churchill as a “wartime consiglieri”. And, of course, Mr. Carlson fails to mention that once the threat of the Soviets became more clear as the cloud of post-war euphoria lifted, by 1951 Churchill was voted back into Downing Street by those same Britons who’d voted him out just six years earlier.
[Political rivals Conservative Churchill and Labour Attlee]
Was Churchill a “hawk”? Certainly. (If anything, he wanted the line in the sand to be Czechoslovakia, not Poland, as he advised Chamberlain.) But, not because he wanted to launch a war as a pretext for accumulating more government power, as we see in DC now. And, unlike those today who send their nation’s youth to die for dubious causes while they sip champagne at Foxhall Road cocktail parties gleefully watching their defense stock portfolios swell in value as the missiles fly, Churchill was a combat veteran who’d been wounded in battle several times and saw the horrors of the Western Front in the First World War up close and personal. He had hoped that by threatening Hitler with the combined superior firepower of France and Britain he could cower “this bloodthirsty guttersnipe” as he called him back into his hole. But Hitler was a rabid dog who would never stop until his Third Reich either conquered all of Europe and beyond or was annihilated. And so, when it came time to throw down the gauntlet, Churchill did just that.
Unlike the neocons today against whom Mr. Carlson has declared jihad, Churchill’s concerns were literally over a bona fide existential threat to the Western way of life the Nazis represented. But he “sold” his country on nothing. Mr. Carlson, in a misplaced exercise of attaching language one might use for the Deep State today to Churchill, in my view, is mistaken in his take on this great man and the historical record he created, and the Western world he did so much to preserve.
Fun side note. One day Attlee was standing over the trough in the Cloakroom of the House of Commons relieving himself when Churchill entered on the same mission. Seeing his rival, Churchill moved as far away from him as possible. Attlee quipped: “Feeling a bit standoffish today are we, Winston?” Churchill replied, “Yes. Every time you socialists see something big you want to nationalize it.”
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Brad Schaeffer is a commodities trader, author, columnist and musician. His eclectic body of writings have been featured in the Wall Street Journal, New York Post, New York Daily News, National Review, The Federalist, The Hill, Daily Wire, Zerohedge and others. He has also written three books.
Excellent perspective here, Mr. Schaeffer. I really enjoyed this article.
By the way, as a suggestion for future topics, would appreciate your thoughts on what Patton meant when he said we fought the wrong side.