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PARTISAN REVI EW
There is no demagogy in this (Churchill is rarely false to his own
conception of himself), but rather aristocratic magnanimity. Of course,
the English working class prefers, against Churchill, to think of itself
not as "the poor" (a Christian, not a Marxist concept) receiving
charity on sufferance, but as modern Labor winning by right; that
"Tory working class" which Churchill is fond of discovering is a very
small one. Still, he is not at all the consistent reactionary he has been
painted.
This question of Churchill's being a reactionary deserves looking
into and can lead, I think, to our gaining an essential insight into the
man. All the charges that have been made against him can be got
conveniently together into one sentence, something like this: "Churchill
is a warmongering imperialist, an enemy of labor, one who is filled with
a malignant hatred of the Russian Revolution, and who has praised
and even felicitated Hitler and Mussolini." The Stalinist sound that this
has is no accident, for it is chiefly the Stalinists, and "progressive
people" in general, who have made of him a reactionary bogeyman. What
used to be called his warmongering we now call his wisdom and courage
in having carried on single-handed a campaign for British rearmament
against the menace of Nazi Germany. It is nevertheless true that
Churchill, though he quotes Siegfried Sassoon in
The Gathering Storm-
Shoulder to aching shoulder, side by side
They trudged away from life's broad wealds of light-
and may perhaps have read Sassoon's memoirs, never understood the
revulsion that the First World War inspired, particularly in the young;
for him, one of the few nineteenth-century spirits to pass through the fires
of the war unscathed, the Oxford Pledge was not only "foolish" but
"base."
As for being an imperialist and an enemy of labor, the one title
he proudly lays claim to and the other derives from his having ad–
vocated using troops to break certain strikes; one may deplore these
things, but they do not warrant the virulence of the abuse heaped on
him by liberals before the war, or the condescension (grudging praise
being given him as a wartime Prime Minister) shown him by a Harold
Laski after it. His hatred of the Russian Revolution, which is first of
all a hostility to Bolshevism, we now also are inclined to look at with
a milder eye; Churchill correctly characterized Bolshevism as "the abso–
lute rule of a self-chosen priesthood," though this referred more to the
older Bolshevism and to Trotsky-it occurs in a rather nasty and (what
is rare for
him)
hysterical piece, entitled "Leon Trotsky,
alias
Bron-
