Uncancelled History with Douglas Murray | EP. 05 Winston Churchill

hello I'm Douglas Murray and welcome to uncanceled history in recent years statues of Winston Churchill have been assaulted and defaced from London England to Edmonton Canada he's accused of racism he's accused of colonialism of being pro-empire and much more Winston Churchill was widely regarded certainly in the English-speaking world as perhaps the greatest figure of the 20th century in recent years that reputation has been very significantly assailed and in many quarters it's been reversed he's been turned from a Great Hero into a terrible villain and it's important to get him in a proper context not just because it's important to try to understand the 20th century in its proper context but because it's important to try to understand what great men and great women of the past have been capable of flaws and all today I am thrilled to be joined by the award-winning best-selling historian Andrew Roberts he's the author of numerous books including biographies of Lord Salisbury Napoleon George III the last king of America and for our purposes today his biography of Churchill Winston Churchill Walking With Destiny [Music] thank you it's my great pleasure to welcome Andrew Roberts thank you very much Douglas it's great to be on the show um I want to start by asking you a very broad question about Churchill because he's loomed over your life as a historian as a writer among your first books the biography of one of his Nemesis the holy Fox on the great appeasers in the 1930s Lord Halifax who wrote eminent churchillions on the great books of the other figures in the time and then uh recently you wrote your biography of Winston Churchill himself Walking With Destiny first of all why has he loomed so large in your life and secondly is it perhaps because he was a great man um well you're quite right this was the fifth book that I'd written with the church in the title or subtitle and so really he has in a sense dominated my life for the last 30 years but um in a sense hasn't he dominated everybody's life in the last 70 years because he is such an epicential figure I'm sure we'll come on to it later but he's still a major figure in the culture wars and uh so I can't remember a time when I haven't been interested in Winston Churchill and what was it what was it that you think in short for anyone who is unfamiliar if there is anyone unfamiliar with him what in short is it about him that has made him such an important figure I think uh it's it's several things it's partly that although he was flawed in some ways he made blunders in some ways he was somebody who learned from them it's an extraordinary Redemption story uh that his tremendous moral courage equaled his physical courage and uh therefore in the 1930s that you mentioned he was able to say something that nobody else was saying he was the first person to say it and he was the loudest voice warning against Adolf Hitler and the rise of the Nazis and he wasn't listened to and he was ridiculed and he was shouted down in the House of Commons But ultimately he was proved right and beyond that political aspect he was then the Great War leader for Britain that kept Britain in the war in those crucial months between the fall of Dunkirk in 1940 and the entry of Russia into the war in 1941 Russia and America and so he was epicential to saving Western Civilization you mentioned in your biography Winston Churchill Walking With Destiny that he had an idea as a young man that he might not live long where did that come from that came from the enormous number of close brushes with death that he uh that he had he was 10 when he suffered from pneumonia at his prep school and very nearly died on that occasion the doctors prescribed Brandy to the 10 year old and um uh which you would have thought might have put of him off Brandy for life but it certainly didn't um he nearly died in a house fire in a um accident a boating accident on Lake Geneva he nearly died in two car crashes two plane crashes and those are all in peacetime here in New York he was run over by a uh by a car and very nearly killed on Fifth Avenue and 76th Street so you know it's perfectly understandable I think if he thought he was going to die young and Churchill's father died at the age of 45 and many of his uncles and aunts also died in their 40s now you mentioned in uh your biography of Winston Churchill that he had a an ambition to become first of all a hero and then a great man and he saw this happening in that order one of the fantastically interesting things about Winston Churchill's life is not just that he achieves both of these things but from the point of view of a biographer you know the early years that a lot of people are quite dull um the you've got to get through the childhood chapters you know the sort of teams aren't that great by the 20s still with Churchill it's exactly the objective he's off to a flying start from the get-go that's right yes he uh recognized that he didn't have very much money and therefore in order to get into Parliament and become a great man he first had to be a hero and uh the way he did that was by fighting in four um campaigns on four different continents and then um ultimately of course once he had become something of a great man he then also fought in the first world war as well so uh he fought in in five Wars and um showed extraordinary bravery in all of them somehow managed to escape these Incredibly Close brushes with their death um without a scratch he uh he said that there's nothing more exhilarating in life than to be shot at without result and he was shot at a lot you know from his 21st birthday when he was in Cuba all the way through to as I say commanding a battalion in the Great War and he's taken uh hostage and escapes absolutely yes he was a prisoner of war in Pretoria and then he um he escaped from the prisoner of war camp across 300 miles of enemy territory at one point he said that a vulture was following him in the expectation and hope of a meal um he hid down a mine shaft and when the candle gutted out he could feel rats scurrying across his face a tremendous bravery and of course he'd the year before that Taken part in the last great cavalry charge of the British Empire and he he did this knowingly I mean he had letters his mother suggests he's unknownly wanted to throw himself at the world certainly and uh yes he had this sense really from the age of 16 when he was a Schoolboy at Harrow he said to his best friend Merlin Evans um that there shall be great upheavals terrible struggles in our lives and I shall be called upon to save England save London and save the Empire it's an extraordinary thing this is when I came across this passage in your biography enormously struck by it because there is you're saying your subtitle Walking With Destiny but there is this almost mystical element to Churchill I think well the reason that I subtitled it walking with Destiny was because when he was writing his Memoirs his War Memoirs of the second world war he said that of the day that he became prime minister on the 10th of May 1940 I felt as if I were walking with Destiny and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial and he very much believed that his entire life up until that point had been a preparation and you can see that in so many of the things that he'd done in the posts that he'd held in the views that he'd held as well that um he had been preparing himself for 50 years to carry out that prediction that he made to Merlin Evans when he was a 16 year old school boy what do you think it was though though I think it was a combination of things his his this extraordinary belief in private in personal uh Destiny I think partly came from his background his um he was a member of the family of the first Duke of Marlborough the Great Hero who defeated the French in the early um 18th century and so he he saw him saw himself as part of the Great sort of tapestry and the Continuum of History also um his parents who never really his father never really thought much of him his father was a great Victorian Statesman chance of the exchequer one of the great orators of the day and yet he always despised um his son Winston he never really appreciated him and uh and in a sense I think you can see Winston Churchill's whole life and career as a way of trying to impress the shade of his long dead father now you um you have a passage in your biography which I want to read a short excerpt from because it gets to a root of one of the um things I wanted us to discuss today and that's this you you see on page 39 early in the book but you have a passage where you talk about Churchill's outages and you say today of course we know imperialism and colonialism to be evil and exploitative Concepts but Churchill's first-hand experience of the British Raj did not strike him that way he admired the way the British had brought internal peace for the first time in Indian history as well as Railways vast irrigation projects Mass education newspapers the possibilities for extensive International Trade standardized units of exchange Bridges roads aqueducts docs universities and uncorrupt legal system medical advances anti-famine coordination the English language as the first national lingua Franca to telegraphic Communications and Military protection from the Russian French Afghan Afridi and other outside threats whilst also abolishing which is practice of burning widows on funeral pyres it gets us to a very interesting issue because I think that even a few years ago if we've been discussing Churchill been discussing uh anything to do with his leadership his reputation it would have been in One Tone people could say that would be um monotone but but it would have been in One Tone that would have been only of of Praise admiration or and much more and in our own time very very Swift order that has completely turned around I wanted to give you an example could I just before you um give me the example could I say that always um all of the responsible and evidence-based objective histories of Churchill did accept that he had made blunders you know he'd got the abdication wrong he'd got the gold standard wrong the the price that we entered the gold standard he got the black and tans in Ireland wrong he got women's suffrage wrong primarily of course he's got the Gallipoli campaign wrong so I don't think it's true that we would have had this discussion and it would have been just in terms of you know awe and appreciation I think we would have gone into the mistakes that he made but what we wouldn't have perhaps done is um believed him to have been evil and and so on you know that is a totally new departure in in Churchill studies I mean I wanted to give the example of uh what happened in just over a decade in 2002 the BBC has its greatest Britain's poll which is it was done in a number of other countries the public vote on who they think the greatest Britain was and Winston Churchill wins easily in 2002. by 2015 uh the BBC on its website when it has a anything about Churchill links to its piece the 10 greatest controversies of Winston Churchill's career and you get these top 10 worst things he did um now it seems to me that there has been um this happens very swiftly and I suppose first of all do you agree that's happening secondly why has it happened oh I certainly do agree that it happened undoubtedly yes absolutely and is is I think it's good to point out that it's led by the BBC which by the way has always hated Winston Churchill and Winston it kept Churchill off the airwaves during the uh during the appeasement period because the BBC was so committed to appeasement um and so Winston Churchill himself wouldn't be surprised that the people leading the attacks on him or the uh the sort of descendants of the uh of the old BBC um I think that when you look at some of the um ones that the ideas of these 10 critiques an awful lot of them and I'm sure we'll go into some of them later are um based on complete full acids and misunderstandings deliberate miscontextualization of of the facts about Churchill and as I said earlier some of them are true you know he did make blunder after blunder the key thing was that he learned from them but it's this interesting disconnect you know the other year when uh the film Darkest Hour came out there are all these reports in in Britain and I think elsewhere audiences getting to their feet in the cinema and applauding uh when they hear the great speech of Winston Churchills in 1940 to Parliament the the the the the finest Hour speech you you have this extraordinary um admiration from the general public and yet every time the name appears now in public Winston Churchill has always got a sort of um something like a trigger warning or uh some kind of asterisk saying you know um you've got to Bear these things in mind he's very much on the front line of the culture wars and again he'd be happy with that because he was on the front line of every wall but um uh yes I mean we we have seen obviously in the last 10 years a sort of explosion of wokery but um it's from a very small number of people frankly uh when it's always the same the same old crowd that that crop up and tell you that he was he wanted to use gas against Iraqi tribes with and so on and each time you say well actually go to Churchill college and read the entire paragraph rather than the three sentences that you always quote and you'll see that he writes about lacromotory gas I.E tear gas he's not writing about mustard gas or phosgene gas or lethal gas so you know again and again these um these arguments can be refuted and I try to refute them of course in my uh in my book um whilst seeing it in the in the round and just being objective just go back to the facts but that's not what the woke crowd wants because ultimately they're not interested in Winston Churchill primarily they're interested in attempting to make a him part of a much wider story of the essential sort of evil nature of British imperialism and colonialism well let's go through some of those specifics you you mentioned the uh the accusation that he's in favor of using poison gas and Iraqis I I tried to trace that recently and I think Noam Chomsky is perhaps the first person to popularize this no surprise is there absolutely but when Chomsky writes about gas he clearly seems to think or tends to think that he means poison gas precisely what if Chomsky goes to um to The Churchill archives in Cambridge he can he can read the actual paper which makes it very clear in black and white that he's talking about lacromotory gas tear gas um another example of something which uh would have succeeded into the margins of History if it hadn't have been brought up by a shadow Chancellor of this Jacker a few years ago was the instant of Tony Pandy in 1910 this is this for anyone anyone watching I'm assuming sort of most who don't know about this is it was quite an extraordinary thing in 2019 the then uh labor Shadow Chancellor of the exchecker John McDonnell was asked on the spot where the Winston Churchill uh was a hero or a villain Winston Churchill hero or villain Tony Pandy villain what does he mean what he means it's a it's a rather recondite um uh bit of history as you say but there is in the labor demonology of Winston Churchill a myth that Churchill sent troops into the South Wales mining Village of Tony Pandi to um to kill Miners and that two um Welsh miners were were killed by Soldiers with machine guns and bayonets and all this kind of thing um the truth is again when you when you look us into it he uh he sense it wasn't even him it was the local police commissioner who sent um not troops but policemen into Tony Pandy and they didn't have any bayonets or machine guns or anything like that they actually fought with rolled up macintoshes a Macintosh I don't know what the American for Macintosh is but it's a sort of like like a sour Wester or an anorak essentially which they rolled up and used as as trunctions essentially so and nobody died so um we have this complete myth which uh just won't won't die and which people like John McDonald who's a perfect example of the kind of person who wants to use Churchill as an ideological tool with which to uh to make his in his case uh Marxist leninist views uh more palatable to people and um and there's simply no factual evidence behind it whatsoever it does seem like a sort of characteristic example uh um somebody's asked hero or villain on the plus side you have the argument for Winston Churchill saving Western Civilization on the other hand an injured minor hurt by a rolled up Macintosh 30 years earlier and also of course one has to remember that um uh that John McDonnell would probably be the first Deputy leader indeed certainly the first Deputy leader of the labor party ever to say villain rather than hero I mean Clement Ackley Clement Ackley who was the Deputy Prime Minister and Winston Churchill um adored him you know admired him endlessly and made the most wonderful moving speeches when he died and so I think it's a sign much more of what's happened to the labor party frankly than what's happened to uh to Winston Churchill or the story of Tony Pandy um let's come on to one which perhaps is more well known more often cited these days and indeed was cited in 2021 at a panel at the college named after Churchill in Cambridge and that is the whole incident and the affair of the Bengal famine perhaps of all of the allegations now made about Winston Churchill this is the one I don't agree that it seems to come up most oh and it's the worst of course as well yes because it essentially makes him into a mass murderer and a deliberate war criminal almost um and I go into this as you can imagine as a result over about six pages in my um in my book and um and in that panel that you refer to in February 2021 in all it was held in all places with the actual Churchill College Cambridge uh they said that as a result of this um Winston Churchill was worse than Hitler and these are four people on the panel and a moderator and nobody not one of the people said that is the most absurd statement is possible to make um do you mind if I just talk about the Bengal family and tell you what happened in October 1942 a terrible typhoon hit the east coast of India and it knocked out all the rail and Road Communications into uh Bengal and the under normal circumstances what the British had done in India for rare Generations before was to buy in rice to alleviate the famine from places like Thailand and Malaya and uh Burma and of course all of those three places were under the control of the Japanese by 1942. and so that was impossible um it was um very soon after the typhoon that to Churchill started to ask the Dominion Prime Ministers and also the president of the United States to send food to um to India but the trouble was that the Bay of Bengal was Rife with Japanese submarines and they had in fact in the April of 1942 they've shelled cities on the Eastern Seaboard and so these attacks on on Churchill which apart from anything else are um historically incorrect um what they're saying um they simply don't take into account the fact that the second world war was going on at the time you know and and it wasn't as simple as just moving um food into the devastated areas um I don't think there's any Churchill historian who denies that terrible famine took place in which millions of people died but the idea that Churchill wanted these people to die and did nothing to help them and when only has to read the uh the telegrams he sent to the Viceroy of India Lord wavel to appreciate that this is absolute rubbish the um the evidence you laid in the book shows that I think conclusively but it's it still is a meme which seems to be going around faster than any other and the reason is that Churchill made um what we today would be considered to be completely unacceptable racist jokes about Indians and and he called them obesity people with a beastly religion at one point and um and these were of course you know unacceptable remarks to make but but the idea that because he said that to one cabinet minister by the way it's not these aren't um uh double checked by anybody else right um that he wanted these people to die it's just an enormous sort of leap of um of you know woke Faith essentially but it's a leap that a lot of people have been willing to make and it seems that this this issue of of the assault on Churchill keeps coming back to a few claims about his views on Race uh and religion there have been attempts to claim that he was anti-jewish as well as anti-muslim and much more yeah what is true or not in all this well I mean to you mentioned the Jewish thing he was an absolute philosomite he he uh he liked Jews which by the way was rather un uh likely for somebody of his age and class and background the uh the British Victorian upper classes were notoriously anti-semitic um and uh and so I think you have to see him in the um context of being a Victorian uh when he was born Charles Darwin was still alive he was um therefore brought up believing as everybody else was at the time this odious and to our modern ears uh completely ludicrous concept of a hierarchy of the races where the uh where the white man was on top and um he considered that to be a scientific fact and this is the reason that uh he is accused of racism because he um essentially did believe that that there were was a hierarchy of the races but the idea that that meant that he wanted people who were not white to die in their Millions is a complete travesty because actually he also believed that there was a hierarchy of the classes and he thought that having been born in a palace the grandson of the Duke he had a profound responsibility to the um with that kind of privilege it was profound responsibility to everybody else in society and that's what drove him the sorts of the concept of Tory democracy you know that he's he he had to sort of pay for his privilege in a way that helped Ordinary People and and that extended to the Empire as well he of course he was proud of how many um people were born into the Empire of how much it was growing in terms of numbers and so I'm afraid it's a it's a historical inaccuracy but also as I say as I keep saying it's also a ideological political campaign that's being waged it's it's very interesting I I went over again the speech that Churchill made in Parliament in 1920 in the wake of the massacred amritsa um and the allegation that as you say that the Churchill's views on race mean that he positively wanted people of other races to die or be killed is among other things shown to be absolutely wrought by the fact that what he says in response to the massacre down ritzer is unbelievable and completely condemning of what happened uh absolutely he insisted it's the pharmacology speech it's called and it was um it insisted on the immediate cashiering um of the general responsible for the we should explain what Amritsar is it was a was it was a terrible in many ways the lowest moment of the in the history of the British Empire when in April 1919 a um a crowd some would say a mob but anyway a protesting demonstration uh was uh fired upon um they had been warned that they were going to be fired upon but and to disperse but uh um but nonetheless they were fired upon by a um group a a unit of um of gurkhas in the Sikh city of Amritsar under the command of General Dyer of Britain and 379 people were killed and um it it did prevent the um the Brewing revolution in the Punjab that General Dyer and others worried about but of course it was still a a monstrous thing to have happened and um and the Churchill in a government Minister denounced it in the House of Commons and uh and that by the way is only one of the many many examples of Churchill's uh standing up essentially for the native peoples of the Empire when he was under secretary at the colonies again and again he um he defended the rights of natives against the British settlers when he um down in South Africa supported the uh people of basutu land and bekuana land against the South African government you know it happens again and again in his uh he fought of course to protect Punjabi tribesmen as a Young Man against the Afridi and the Talib um I.E the group the sort of great grandfathers of the Taliban and you see it in the Sudan when he fought to abolish the practice of slavery that the Califa was pursuing so you know here is a man with a lifetime of um of work and and sometimes physical bravery for the betterment of the lives of native peoples who is accused of um of wanting to um slaughter them on a mass scale by not giving them food in Bengal it just doesn't it doesn't Stack Up um when you look at the overall life trajectory of the man and there's something else about the the The Wider picture here as well which is uh the uh the debate in the House of Commons about Amrit so Churchill says that what had happened is quote without precedent or parallel in the modern history of the British Empire that's just part of his his denunciation but there's something interesting about the the the amritious issue I just wanted to get onto in The Wider picture which is of course then this isn't by any means to underplay or downplay uh what happened but if this had been any other Empire other than the British Empire nobody would know the name of amritsa no of course I mean no had this been the Germans in her um against the herreros in um uh town in South West Africa or if it had been frankly you know some of the things the French were doing in Algeria at the time let alone the Spanish and Italian Empires and certainly the Belgian Empire in uh in the Congo um there's no way that this General would have been um cashier to you know without pension he would have um not been heard of you know this would have been covered up but the British Empire tended to um follow the common law and to give rights to the native peoples and um and so as a result it's uh widely seen as uh as the lowest moment in the British uh Empire's history however one mustn't mistake the Amritsar Massacre for the other um massacres that have taken place in Emirates are such as the one that killed 600 people when Indira Gandhi um fired on the Sikh Golden Temple in 1984. don't mistake those two massacres at all yes well this this brings under this sort of crucial issue because of course as we're everyone's always reevaluating history we obviously are in our own day but there is something curious about this isn't it that there are um the the the name of Churchill comes up and we immediately hear the negatives and we will get back onto the positives I promise yeah it's good we get immediately onto the negatives um you mentioned uh the British Empire and you immediately get on only to focusing on on amrits on other um others of of the terrible things that occurred why are we finding it so hard to get all of these things into any proper context it feels to me as if we had a um we had one view we've swung wildly in another Direction and there's a very close uh connection now between the things that are said about Churchill in particular and the things that are done um we seem to live in an age where what a Noam Chomsky or somebody like that gets wrong one day ends up being taken to the streets pretty swiftly afterwards I want to give an example um in Edmonton Canada in 2021 the life-size statue of Winston Churchill uh was again the second time was assaulted by protesters throwing red paint over him that's perhaps less uh important than what the local officials said the local Mayor of Edmonton said in response to this attack on the Statue of Churchill I I don't know the intent behind the vandalism but I know historical monuments and sculptures here and elsewhere are at the heart of an emotional debate regarding what legacies and stories we've been rate as a society I believe there are more productive ways to move Society along towards a more inclusive and uplifting future um sounds a bit like that mayor in in Jaws doesn't it um yes I mean statues I think are the beginning of IT schools have been changing their names there's a school in in California that doesn't want to be named after George Washington of all people you know statues have been attacked including that of Abraham Lincoln um we've had it seems that there can't be a demonstration in Parliament Square any longer without them either the police either boarding up the statue of Winston Churchill or it being attacked and vandalized in some way um they the the same black lives matter demo that attacked um church or try to attack Churchill uh also um uh vandalize the cenotaph so the third after the Dead the Senate after the dead to the dead and the first world war and the second world war the National Memorial to the to the dead um and uh so I think it's um you know there is obviously nothing if you don't venerate that what do you venerate frankly um and if you uh and they clearly don't venerate that and so this is a proper sort of cultural um struggle that's taking place but the good thing is and we see this uh more and more pleasingly um you know I'm certainly not a defeatist in the struggle I think we could win the struggle so long as Ordinary People are given the their say and in Sheffield recently um ordinary people uh voted to keep um a statue there uh whenever people have local referenda on these things they don't want the statue of uh Sir Francis Drake or Robert baden-powell um taken down because they're they're of course part of the Street Furniture that they've grown up with but also they are able all intelligent people are able to contextualize Greatness and because somebody was uh great enough to have a statue put up to them that doesn't mean that you can't contextualize it but it doesn't it the idea of just pulling it down is um a uh is an absurdity in my view I was very moved in the summer of 2020 in the wake of the BLM George Floyd protests that spilled from America to Britain and other countries I was very moved by the fact that the morning after the cenotaph and other National memorials including the statute Winston Churchill in Parliament Square were vandalized assaulted graffitied over that a group of young men and women voluntarily came out the next morning and started scrubbing the graffiti off now one one of the protesters who was obviously in support of the graffiti said to these these young men and women who turned out to have come from were they were part of the household Cavalry were doing this in their spare time um one one person who obviously supported the graffitiang um said oh look at you you know you're you're precious memorials you can't even allow this BLM graffiti to be up even for a day because of your precious memorials and it it the taunting tone in that struck me yes yeah because of course they are precious the The Monuments the dead of the two World Wars are very precious to the British people because they commemorate our ancestors they commemorate the people who gave their lives so that we can be free assaulting the statue of Winston Churchill again seems to hit right at the heart of us perhaps this is and we'll get on this perhaps that's the point but but it seems clear that for the British public this is the heart of us Churchill is somehow at the very center of our our sense of ourselves as a people and as a people who did good in the world precisely yes and who ultimately of course um uh as I mentioned earlier is kept Britain in the war against the Nazis which ultimately was um was successful and so you know if you even for one moment consider what would happen to well let's take the black lives matter um campaign what would have happened to black people if the Nazis had won the second world war I have to say it would have been a jolly site more unpleasant than what would have happened to people like you and me um Douglas you know uh the um the way in which the Nazis treated um non-aryan people was uh was genuinely genocidal um and so if anyone should be happy and proud and and pleased that Winston Churchill did what he did it should in fact probably be the um black lives matter um supporters even more Than People Like Us and that's uh that that sense of sort of getting this out of proportion again it seems to be something to do with education um some kind of finessing around certain figures and the forgetting of The Wider picture as a historian why why do you think that has happened why do you think it's it's possible from everyone from an academic at Churchill College Cambridge say Churchill was worse than Hitler to to sort of um General educational sort of malaise of failing to understand what's what well there you've put your finger on it education um I think that there's been a huge change in the educational establishment since the 1960s really since the generation of teachers who came in and um started to to dominate schools and who brought with them a agenda that um was frankly opposed to the kind of things that Winston Churchill stood for and uh and then especially in the universities where they seem to have a sort of um a lock on on many of the British universities most perhaps um to be in favor of um of Winston Churchill is tremendously unusual to the point that as I say not one of the people on that panel in February 2021 was willing to gain say a statement that uh he was as bad as Hitler so we have got to this extraordinary um disconnect between ordinary British people who um think that that's a disgusting and disgraceful remark to make and Academia where you can say it and no one will contradict you you may have forgotten about this but many years ago I certainly haven't forgotten about it you were in a debate in London and there was again it sounds like a meeting up on Churchill College Cambridge today but why not I think it was an academic from Churchill College Cambridge again that day on the panel opposite you I think it was fantastic squared the debate about the origins of the second World War I mean everybody got lost uh in in in the debate apart from yourself there was there was endless discussion about uh steel tariffs and and and iron all sorts of things and I remember at some point the the moderator turned to you and and said Andrew Roberts why did World War II begin and you said World War II began because Hitler invaded Poland well I mean I'm afraid I I am an evidence-based politician sorry uh um evidence-based historian you know uh and um so thank you for that you know uh I'd forgotten about that but ultimately it is very easy to um uh to forget it's obvious it seems to be it doesn't I mean it sticks out of my mind because here was a group of very clever people very informed people like you get into all of my new show and all sorts of issues but the basic facts had somehow evaded them yes well that happens quite a lot in uh in Academia and uh people I don't know whether there's an element I think of people just um showing off how clever they are you know and wanting to over intellectualize everything and ultimately to forget the um the obvious uh sort of truths and um and Hyper specialization somewhere in that oh there's a lot of that yes exactly now I know you can get a um you can get a post at a academic institution a university if you are the uh the sort of world expert on uh Hampshire turnpikes at the turn of the 18th century but if you want to do the decline and fall of the Roman Empire and be next to Impossible the uh it's something that you have also in this country in America some over specialization to the point that it's become um ludicrous really but it it seems to me in America and in Britain in particular that that the over specialization is partly responsible for this so the over specialization means that the people who are keeping the national story and the national truth at heart are the non-specialists that's not a bad thing as far as people like me and I do believe there's also such thing as the general reader we were told and have been told for years um by uh by Publishers and others that uh that the general reader is dead well I don't believe that I think he or she is very much alive and very much willing to read books on lots of different subjects and also wanting to understand big subjects my friend Simon C bag Montefiore is about to bring out a history of the world now can you imagine any academic that would do that they would have done 35 40 years ago J.M Roberts Professor JM Roberts wrote the history of the world but today you know it would be impossible to consider such thing but people do want to read books like that yes or Harare is sapiens of history of the whole species um yeah I did ask Simon C bag Montefiore where he started where he's starting with his his history of the world yes exactly is it going to be the dinosaurs it's going to be um the beginning of actual proper history as in as in we're certain that something happened yes but but just just um one thing on I just come back to this thing that it seems so important that that there are figures like the Churchill that is kept in in the National heart in the UK and and in the US national figures in the US like Jefferson or Washington the captain the national heart and yet at the same time every time they're in the news it's just the negative that's right and of course in this city New York um the statue of Thomas Jefferson has been removed from City Hall and I think it's a tremendously dangerous moment in a nation's history when it uh trashes its founding fathers and trash is the um therefore the ideas of the founding fathers yes of course 41 of the 56 signatures of the Declaration of Independence were slave owners however they also had the courage to stand up against the most powerful nation in the world to create their own country and to have the genius to create a constitution that has allowed a very you know visaparious continent to stay together as a single political entity but it is it is this apparent consistent Trend in our in our age but this thing that they're they're effectively two different forms of memory or something like that going on there is a collective memory and then there was this attempt to to to alter that to make people forget things that they they knew their instinct is to get to their feet and applaud Winston Churchill's finest Hour speech they're instinct is to feel pride and yet from somewhere from the outside is this constant attempt to hammer away and change them I mean in a sense of course all history is revisionist history every every history book revises what came before you do need to um to have a new look at everything occasionally and that that's the uh only sensible way you can't stop history but um but there has been in recent years a new viciousness towards um national heroes and um almost there's the sense that there's no such thing as a hero that everyone is much more feet of clay than than statue you know than uh than Stone statue so um that's I think also another aspect of this it's an ideological thing as well that the individual can't make any difference that the individual is not somebody to look up to they're the only people to look up to are the masses the dark impersonal forces as T.S Eliot put it are the drivers behind history and individuals can't be and we know where that comes from ultimately it comes from the determinists and it comes from the marxists um you you mentioned this at the end of your biography of Churchill the extent to which you um you say that uh you know eat with some of your final lines refer to this that that despite everything that he suffered in his life all the setbacks and much more his story is a great life story of success of Triumph triumph over odds personal odds and indeed worldwide odds um this view of history as a weather is now derived is put in quotation marks the great man view of History um but Churchill is if anyone is the person who has the quotation marks have to be taken away I think so and also um I mean there shouldn't be quotation marks there anyhow of course because great men and women in history have been deciders have been decision makers who have uh made things happen you know you wouldn't have got France invading Russia in 1812 were it not for Napoleon you might well not have had Britain continuing to fight on in uh in May 1940 uh without Churchill and so uh it seems to me to to go against the grain to deny both that there are great men and women and that therefore those men and women are great and that they direct the course of human events see that it seems to me there's underneath the level we were just talking about this is there's this level at which there's a desire to introduce lethargy into the society because if you say to people you are merely um a cog in the wheel as the Marxist view of History sees it and or part of a group based class-based or other other based entity um there's not very much you can do other than go along with your group absolutely yes that agency no longer matters that um uh that you might as well just sort of not get politically involved because because ultimately um the history is moving along predetermined lines um in the Marxist case obviously the dictatorship of the proletariat and so on um and the more I I read history the less likely that it seems to me because um history doesn't have pre-arranged lines the um uh no one's getting getting better or getting worse um of course they're a great scientific advances that make life um better but um but the human soul hasn't uh improved terribly much I don't think in the last three thousand years I'll read seabeg's book and see what he thinks about it but um but the um it's possible as happened in 1917 in Russia for this train to be shut the chain of History to be shunted into a siding for 75 years yes or or as happened in Germany between 1939 and 1945 um sorry 1933 and 1945 to actually go in reverse yes um I mean I think the the old wig interpretation of history in which people think that everything's naturally improving just can't exist after Auschwitz right right and this is something we're still struggling through this is something that the um that the progressives work won't and cannot accept because it goes ultimately against the um idea of History being a part of the dialectic yes it's it's that that view that it's all getting better but you have the caveat of World War One World War II yes and the honor course yes exactly and uh and and and loads of things that are happening um uh now I mean the rise of the Communist Party in China and the increasing totalitarianism in China seems to be a classic example of why the wig interpretation of History just simply can't be right but this this crucial thing just depending on once more about it this crucial thing that that this the the the the life of Winston Churchill perhaps more than any other person demonstrates that one man or one woman can alter the course of all of human history precisely and that is something that we should celebrate and something that we should learn from and something that should remind us to when we see it in our own time to uh to do something to to help that process you know I mean if we see somebody who is able to change uh uh the course of history in a positive way um then we should try and help them um I want to bring us to a close but before I do of course Winston Churchill won the Nobel Prize um but wanted in literature which is is an odd footnote I think he's the only person in history to have been um disappointed when he won the Nobel Prize in literature because of course he thought he'd won it for peace yes uh which is what he wanted however uh when you see the list of the six books that the Nobel Prize committee um cite as the reason for the prize he so deserved that price I mean what an extraordinary output he wrote 37 books and uh certainly those six that were mentioned but many others also are truly impressive works of literature in my view okay I wanted to bring you to one um that's always fascinated me of his Works which is that that odd dialogue story he wrote in conversation with his dead father the dream the dream yes it's a very strange thing isn't it uh it's in 1947 so after the um victory in the second world war he's painting one day in uh his uh his painting Studio at Chartwell his lovely Manor House in Kent and um he sees the uh the ghost essentially of his late father Lord Randolph Churchill and they have a long conversation about all sorts of um of things uh but at no point does he point out to his father that he'd been instrumental in helping win the second world war and so his father ends leaves the dream um believing that uh that his father his son Winston was an artist was a painter uh so it is a it's a fascinating thing because as I say I think you can see Churchill's life very much as being an attempt to impress this this long dead father but when he had an opportunity to do it in the dream he fails to and each time the father of his late father the ghost of his father said asks him about something asking about the the monarchy and he says it goes on Churchill's reply it all goes on yes and one of the great lines also is of course the he says and what about Russia is it still ruled by the tsars his father asks and he says yes it is but they call them a different name now a wonderful dig against Stalin I thought that's right um thank you so much Andrew for uh for joining me today and talking about uh Churchill um it does seem to be so important that people know and remember Great Men great women and remember them in their proper context a context which seems to be almost deliberately being taken from them in ancient Greece there was a law in the city-states against denigrating your gods and heroes and although of course I'm not in favor of a law about it I think that what they got right was that um if you do denigrate your Your Heroes then um for a society that way Madness lies very well said thank you Andrew Roberts thank you very much [Music]

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Id: 0-W6lqwIG2Y

Length: 54min 45sec (3285 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 20 2022