WINSTON CHURCHILL
197
stein," in his
Great Contemporaries-than
to Stalin.
2
Stalin's triumph
and the Moscow Trials he grossly blundered in regarding as evidence
of the abatement of "the virulence of communism in Russia's blood.
The process may be cruel, but it is not morbid.
It
is a need of self–
preservation which impels the Soviet Government to extrude Trotsky
and his fresh-distilled poisons."
But for the understanding of Churchill there is nothing better
than a close consideration of what actually was involved in his having
praised Hitler and Mussolini. It must be remembered that the kind
words he addressed to the two dictators were first of all a piece of
diplomacy, however mistaken. Though out of government at the time,
Churchill was a prominent public figure arguing hotly for rearmament
against the very countries whose heads he then proceeded to compli–
ment. He meant by this to indicate that the rearmament which he was
advocating was defensive and not aggressive in intent; that he desired
Great Britain, though armed, to live at peace with Germany and Italy,
whose grievances he was willing to understand. That is, it was a piece
of old-fashioned diplomacy which should not have been taken too
literally. But diplomacy was lost on so complete a creature of modern
times as Hitler, and elsewhere it was misunderstood to signify Churchill's
approval of the doctrines of Fascism and National Socialism. There was
also in it a touch of foolish chivalry. "I admire men who stand up for
their country in defeat, even though I am on the other side," he
writes in
The Gathering Storm;
at a time when, he says, he knew
little of the man or his doctrine, he thought that "Hitler had a perfect
right to be a patriotic German if he chose. I always wanted England,
Germany, and France to be friends."
What we have
in
Churchill, we can see from this and other things,
is not so much a reactionary as an anachronism-a nineteenth-century
statesman upholding policy in a twentieth-century world of ideology.
This distinction between policy and ideology is perhaps difficult to de–
fine, but is easy enough to recognize. The difference is evoked well,
if floridly, in these lines by Churchill on the assembly in Paris of the
victorious leaders of the First World War:
Gone were the days of the Treaties of Utrecht and Vienna, when
aristocratic statesmen and diplomats, victor and vanquished alike, met
2. "I must confess that I never liked Trotsky," Churchill said in 1944-perhaps
in part because of the resemblance that has been noted to exist between these
two Men of Action and of Letters. Both were better leaders and administrators
than politicians; both had a past of political unorthodoxy; and both flourished
in times of crisis, being compelled to go reluctantly back to their desks by the
"politicians" when these were over.
