WINSTON CHURCHILL
199
fonner days when a diplomat made a statement you understood him as
meaning the very opposite of what he said. Now, alas, nations grow
more honest. When Hitler said that the chief enemy of the Third Reich
was the Jews, he meant it-it was not, as people so long thought,
"mostly propaganda." When Stalin says that the Soviet Union is en–
circled by aggressive capitalist powers filled with a consuming hatred
of the land of socialism and intent only upon destroying it, he un–
fortunately really thinks so.
Hitler, confinned ideologue that he was, made the mistake of
thinking everybody else one too. On the eve of the German attack on
Russia, when Churchill was considering what England's course should be
in that event, he expressed the opinion-a correct one, I believe-that
Hitler was counting on enlisting capitalist and right-wing sympathies
in England and America. Stalin doubtless shared this expectation with
Hitler, which would account in part for the grudging and suspicious
manner with which he received Churchill's professions of friendship
and offers of aid. But Churchill was not such a "Marxist" as Hitler and
Stalin. When "asked whether for him, the arch anti-Communist,"
coming to the aid of Bolshevik Russia "was not bowing down in the
House of Rimmon," he replied, with nineteenth-century "cynicism":
"Not at all. I have only one purpose, the destruction of Hitler, and
my life is much simplified thereby.
If
Hitler invaded Hell I would
make at least a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of
Cmnmons."
The following day, June 22, 1941, German troops invaded the Soviet
Union. That evening, over the BBC, Churchill said, diplomatically, his
bad oratory mirroring his "bad faith":
No one has been a more consistent opponent of Communism than
I have for the last twenty-five years. I will unsay no word that I have
spoken about it. But all this fades away before the spectacle which
is
now unfolding.... I see the Russian soldiers ... guarding their homes
where mothers and wives pray-ah, yes, for there are times when all
pray-for the safety of their loved ones, the return of the breadwinner,
of their champion, of their protector. I see the ten thousand villages of
Russia where the means of existence is wrung so hardly from the soil,
but where there are still primordial human joys, where maidens laugh
and children play. I see advancing upon all this in hideous onslaught
the Nazi war machine ... the dull, drilled, docile, brutish masses of
the Hun soldiery plodding on like a swann of crawling locusts.
Mothers, wives, maidens, children, when before it used to
be
the
Asiatic tyranny of Bolshevism! Hitler, hearing this, might well have
exclaimed: Oh, perfidious Albion!
