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PARTISAN REVIEW
serves as the "moral" of Churchill's present work and represents the
sum of his political wisdom. The magnanimity and good will that he
counsels in victory and peace Churchill has never been able to practice,
never having held the highest office in peacetime. But his resolution and
defiance in war and defeat are a familiar tale, and these very personal
qualities have directly shaped the course of history. I do not wish to make
much of what journalists have already made so much of, but it
is
well to
remember all the nonsense that was being talked, just before the war,
both on the Left and on the Right, in
Partisan R eview
and in T. S.
Eliot's
Idea of a Christian Society,
about the superior dynamism, the
more positive (even though pagan) culture of Fascism, which only
socialism or only Christianity could defeat. In the end, however, "bour–
geois democracy" (or "liberalism," in Eliot's word) utterly triumphed
over its more "dynamic" and "positive" foe, thanks in no small measure
to the great energy (dynamism) and resolution of Churchill, and
defeatist intellectuals have long since had to swallow their opinions in
confusion.
In one of his speeches Churchill quotes with approval Disraeli's
Burkian maxim, "Nations are ruled by force or by tradition." What
this really means is: "Other nations are ruled by force, and England
by tradition." Englishmen have watched with contemptuous indifference
the rule of force in other countries, while standing jealous guard over
their own traditional island liberties. Thus Churchill, with a light–
mindedness he would never be guilty of in home matters, accepts the
Moscow Trials as just, not according to English standards, of course,
but "according to the standards maintained in a totalitarian state."a
The English Revolution, unlike the French and American Revolutions
which it preceded by a century, never wore a universal aspect, and
English liberty, remaining peculiarly English, though it has been an
example to the world, has never been an inspiration. Burke put the
3. He writes of the service Benes did Stalin passing on to him information
that the Czechoslovak president possessed of communications "passing through
the Soviet Embassy in Prague between important personages in Russia and the
German Government. This was part of the so-called military and Old-Guard
Communist conspiracy to overthrow Stalin and introduce a new regime based
on a pro-German policy.... Thereafter there followed the merciless, but perhaps
not needless, military and political purge in Soviet Russia, and the series of
trials in January, 1937, in which Vyshinsky, the Public Prosecutor, played so
masterful a part." But in a footnote Churchill is obliged to add: "There is,
however, some evidence that Benes' information had previously been imparted to
the Czech police by the Ogpu, who wished it to reach Stalin from a friendly
foreign source."
