Wars

‘Oh this
delicious war!’ joyously exclaimed Winston Churchill, though historians will
argue that he was not a war lover. Let them try to explain the following:

           
‘Everything tends towards catastrophe and collapse. I am interested, geared
up and happy. Is it not horrible to be made like this?’  Thus did the
so called ‘great man’ condemn himself with his own words in a letter to his
wife on the approach of WWI. He was also recorded as saying: ‘I think a
curse should rest on me, because I love this war. I know it’s smashing and
shattering the lives of thousands every moment – and yet I can’t help it – I
enjoy every second of it.’  

Winston Churchill is one of the most famous figures in
British history and the official approach is that it would be unpatriotic not
to admire him. The purpose of this article is to draw aside the veils of myth
and legend which establishment historians and fawning admirers have spun around
him and look at the real Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill. The facts reveal a
different man altogether.

With preparations for war in full swing the
small Workers’ International League gathered around Ralph Lee and Ted Grant was
the only voice that stood out defending a real internationalist position. Here
we provide our readers with the lead article of the August 1939 edition of Youth
For Socialism, signed by Ted Grant.

This horrific destruction of French civilians compares with the
militarily useless slaughter of the people and cities of Dresden and
Magdeburg in the closing days of the War. Was this a warning to the
French workers like the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was
warning to Stalin: thus far and no farther?

In the autumn of 1916 the Industrial Workers of the World, better known
as the Wobblies, were trying to organise lumber workers near Everett,
Washington in the USA. A series of attempts to organise by the workers
had lead to a murderous response from the employers. Charles Ashleigh was appointed to run the Wobblies defence campaign – this article is in memory of him, a soldier of the proletariat.

After the Crimea conference, the British Communist Party leaders came
out with a position advocating a National unity government with the
Tories for the post-war period. This policy of class collaboration was
denounced by Ted Grant, who wrote in 1945
that, "to support Churchill is to support monopoly capitalism. To
support the capitalists, the interests of the working class must be
betrayed. It has taken the advanced British workers the experience of
50 years to realise that the Liberal and Tory Parties are parties of
capitalism."

As armaments were piled up in preparation for the Second World War Ted Grant explained that, "This war machine is for the defence of the trading interests and the colonial loot of British imperialism, for what is making for war is the intensified and sharpened struggle for markets between the different countries of the world."

Contrary to the official mythology about Churchill, by 1944 he was already losing support among the people of Britain. This article by Ted Grant, written at the time and based on local election results, shows that the workers were becoming radicalised. This was to be confirmed in a dramatic way just after the war when Labour won a landslide victory.

In 1945 Churchill justified the brutal repression of the Greek workers at the hands of British troops. The then leaders of the Labour Party and the Communist Party in Britain hid the real meaning of the Greek events from the British workers. Ted Grant exposed this terrible betrayal in this article that appeared in the Mid-February 1945 edition of the Socialist Appeal.

The media have just finished celebrating the 60th anniversary of the
end of the Second World War. We would like to remind our readers of an
important event that took place around the same time, the Neath
by-election on 15th May 1945. For the first time in Britain, a
Trotskyist party, the Revolutionary Communist Party, contested a
Parliamentary election. The seat was solid Labour, but the vote for the
RCP was significant. Even more significant was the way the party was
able to link up with the most advanced workers and youth.