Dissecting an imperial activist – Tariq Ali on Winston Churchill

In an interview with Victoria Brittain, Tariq Ali speaks about Winston Churchill, the subject of his latest book. Ali has produced a searing critique full of little known detail, of a long and powerful British life which did untold damage at home and abroad. Ali exposes Churchill’s crimes against freedom fighters in Kenya. As the reputations of empires are being dissected, Ali and Brittain discuss the crimes of an imperial activist.

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Tariq Ali has been a fearless radical since the 1960s. He is a prolific writer on politics, plus novels and scripts for theatre and film – all deeply engaged in the global political moment and fiercely critical of Western attitudes and warmongering in particular. He is a long-standing member of the Editorial Committee of New Left Review, a much respected bi-monthly journal established in 1960. His latest book, Winston Churchill, His Times, His Crimes soon to be published in France, is at first sight a surprise choice for someone whose interests, and writings, have always been in the widest of world contexts.

Victoria Brittain: What made you choose the subject of Churchill, “an imperial activist” as you call him, at this time? Was it a response to Back Lives Matter and the rising current of resistance to the legacies of empire in the US and UK? Or was it related to this period of UK politics in which the small leadership clique is so markedly imbued with imperial attitudes of British exceptionalism?

Tariq Ali: All this, but also, the late radical West Coast academic Mike Davis, my colleague of decades, was very insistent that our publishing house Verso had to produce a Churchill book and I should write it. I thought about this for many months and finally decided to do it in this particular form: a history of the times, a contextualisation in terms of the rise of the British working class whose militancy Churchill hated so much. And I wanted to write the book for a younger generation. I’m told that quite a few young people, sixth form upwards are reading and enjoying it. That is very pleasing. The cult of Churchill has become such a joke that a backlash is bound to come from below rather than the existing political parties.

How do you understand the powerful myth of Churchill, the hero and his outsize presence in our national story when, as you recount, he failed repeatedly in so many endeavours, including as architect of the bloodbath in Gallipoli in the First Word War,  and even in his supposed heyday, World War 2.

The British ruling class operates in strange ways. Some of them appreciated Churchill because he was one of them. Others knew how badly he was treated by his father. And his mother was determined to push him as high as she could and by any means necessary. So his own desire to be a great military leader was greatly encouraged by family and friends but he never got there or anywhere near. This was one reason why he was extremely jealous of both Charles de Gaulle and Trotsky. One was well versed in military history, strategy, was actually serving in the army, while the other was a Jewish revolutionary and founded the Red Army that broke the backbone of the Third Reich in the 1940s. I didn’t dwell on this in the book.

Let’s start by talking about Churchill in the last three years of the 19^th century to set the scene of how you saw him then.

He was in Afghanistan as a young soldier (1897); in the major imperialist event of the battle of Omdurman in Sudan (1898) as a freelance soldier, only there through his scheming and using of family contacts; then in the Boer war (1899) with a ringside seat as a freelance journalist at the showdown between the British army and the Boer guerrillas. He was an ambitious politician determined to make his name via journalism in the war zones and be of some service to his state. He has his mimics today: Bernard Henry-Levy in France and Rory Stewart in Britain. Neither are as intelligent as Churchill. Whatever else, he wasn’t dumb.

Was Churchill’s arrival in politics (1906) as an MP and Under Secretary for the Colonies, and later but not for long, Home Secretary, an inevitable step? Or unlikely? He seems not to have been popular with many of his colleagues, rather as with the military chiefs he courted before, who simply could not bear him. 

Churchill’s first loyalty was to the State, the Monarchy and the British Empire. He always felt he would play a role in serving all three institutions. This meant that his attitude to political parties was largely instrumental. Speed was essential. So yesterday a Tory, today a Liberal and then head of a Con-Lib-Lab coalition, then a Tory again. If that is how you operate then making friends in various governments is not a priority. He wasn’t popular with his Generals either!

Could you explain his interventions which are so revealing of Home Secretary Churchill’s deep class-based violent attitudes towards working class organisers such as the Welsh miners, and the dockers and railwaymen strike leaders in the industrial north of England (1911). All this repeated in his response to the 1926 General Strike.

He was not too different from other conservative and right-wing social-democratic politicians in Europe. Hostility to the working class was a shared feature of the Right throughout Europe and the United States. Churchill saw militant workers as ‘the enemy within.’ Unlike his equivalents in France, Italy, Germany he liked boasting about it and this was one reason for the hatred felt for him. As Home Secretary he crushed the Welsh miners strikes in the 1920s. They never forgave him. Not a single Welsh council contributed any money to help build his statue. And as I stress in the introduction of my book, Churchill was loathed by sections of the country throughout the war. The personality cult of him as we know it today was introduced by [Margaret] Thatcher to help her out in the Falklands War. She also used him as a model when she decided to the crush the National Union of Miners and destroy the coal industry in 1984.

Can you talk about how you see the origins of the First World War lay in Empire, and the early spark of the German navy visit to Algeria 1911, which you mention?  And also about Churchill’s responsibility for the disastrous failure in Gallipoli (1915-16) which got him sacked from the government and, as you put it, into the political wilderness.

The changing political climate in Britain over the last few decades has meant the total discouragement of a critical culture on every level. World War One was constantly attacked and denounced by poets, playwrights, liberal intellectuals, etc. Joan Littlewoods’s Oh What a Lovely War that began life in a small East End theatre [and then] took the West End by storm and was filmed by Richard Attenborough. That spirit no longer exists.

World War One was commemorated in chauvinist style. The Germans were the baddies. The fact is that the late development of the German state led to demands for imperial equality. The carving up of the African continent was a conciliatory move by Britain, but set a precedent as well. Why shouldn’t the Germans get more of the share in other continents, including Europe?

The war was, despite the immediate causes, a war between Empires: three of them collapsed. The Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires were buried. More damaging for the Entente side was the Russian Revolution that toppled the Tsar and later took Russia out of the war. Lenin’s victory marked the beginning of an epoch of wars and revolutions. That is why Churchill insisted on sending a British expeditionary force to Russia to help the Tsarist remnants to take back the country. It was not a small business, a minor affair. There were mutinies and a senior, highly decorated South African officer in the British army, refused to obey orders when asked to gas Bolshevik villages. It’s a history not often discussed, but the facts are quite amazing and I provide many details.

Could you talk about the link between Ireland and India in the fraying of Empire? The Irish war of Independence (1919-21) saw Churchill send in the brutal Black and Tans (1920) to crush the Irish, with one unforeseen result in the mutinies of Irish troops based in India. You mention that this fascinating event, which you describe in some detail, unsurprisingly goes unmentioned in Churchill’s own extensive writings.

The mutiny of the Connaught regiment in India is hardly ever discussed, let alone by Churchill. The epigone historians may not even know about it and the Irish/Hollywood film industry has ignored this incredibly dramatic event completely. And, of course, it was linked to Churchill’s despatch to Ireland of the Black and Tans, a death squad par excellence, to exterminate the IRA.

Was Churchill’s election defeat in 1945 the revenge of the British working class for WW2’s devastating cost to them while he was Prime Minister in the National Government? Why was it so short-lived?

Not just WW2 but the previous assaults on Welsh and Scottish workers, the crushing of the General Strike, his class viciousness in general and, above all an overwhelming desire for change. Nothing changed as far as British foreign policy was concerned. Labour created the NHS. It did not reform education. But they defeated the wartime leader or rather, the people voted him out.

Back in power in 1951 for four years Churchill ended his 60 year career in Parliament with two standout crimes which changed the course of history: the 1953 coup in Persia against the nationalist Mohammed Mossadegh, and in 1954 Operation Anvil against the nationalist Mau Mau movement in Kenya when 50,000 Kenyans were arrested in two weeks and placed in brutal concentration camps by the British army.

Do these illustrate how ruthless the empire mentality remained in British power circles?

The toppling of Mossadegh and Operation Anvil were crimes. Churchill supported both and even boasted about them. What is interesting is how so many British historians have ignored the Kenyan dimension. It needed a US historian from Harvard to research and expose the atrocities against the Kenyan people. Carolyn Elkins, Professor of History and African American Studies, referred to Kenya as a British gulag.

How do you see today’s changing balance of forces in the political narrative of Empire, once controlled broadly by the West, now challenged on so many fronts, including by new books some of which you refer to?

There is only one Empire in the world today. No military rivals. That is the United States. It acts on its own, has used a UNSC (United Nations Security Council) fig leaf where possible and increasingly NATO to show its command of the Western bloc. Britain and Australia are little more than stooge-states. Germany is under heavy pressure. Elsewhere, the Japanese are not permitted to have a foreign policy and South Korea remains occupied by US troops. The principal target of the US is China and this would have been the case even if China had been a Western-style democracy and treated its minorities better than the US treated its native and black populations. This century will witness some form of clash between these two states since the US seems determined to contain, if not crush, the People’s Republic. Churchill’s ghost in the White House will be watching eagerly.

Victoria Brittain is an activist, writer and journalist who has spent years reporting in Africa, and campaigning internationally. Her conversation with Tariq Ali can be read in French on AfriqueXXI here. Read ROAPE’s interview with Brittain here.

Featured photograph: Winston Churchill discussing battle plans in Italy with the Commander of the Eighth Army, Oliver Leese (left) and the Supreme Allied Commander of the Mediterranean, Harold Alexander (26 August 1944).