Mr. Churchill was a product of his time as was FDR along with their counterparts in Russia, Italy, Germany and Japan. The zeitgeist was top-down statism and nearly everyone fell for it, to one degree or another.

what do you mean by "paternalism."

You Know OJ, not everybody agrees with you about the end of WWII in Europe. Read this:

The Unknown War

Jonathan sent me this post from Jim Miller's blog. Miller discusses a very good NYTimes article entitled "A Job for Rewrite: Stalin's War." Miller, and the NYTimes notes the incredible fact that the military disaster known as Operation Mars is barely known in the West. The NYTimes gives particular credit to Col. David M. Glantz for bringing the murky history of the Soviet Side of World War II to light. I have read several of Col. Glantz's books. (e.g. this one and this one and this one.) He is the master in English of the Soviet war effort. Mars was a colossal disaster -- the Red Army lost more men in a few weeks than the USA lost in the entire war. The fact that the Mars defeat could be totally erased from history shows what type of regime Communist Russia really was: monolithic, Orwellian, a pyramid of corpses and lies.

Glantz's main lesson is that the Red Army was not a blunt instrument -- it got better and better as the war went on. It didn't just bleed all over the Germans, it learned its lessons from them, then turned around and treated the Wehrmacht to fiercer blitzkriegs than it had ever dished out itself. My adolescent belief that "Patton could have pushed them back to Moscow" has been amply demonstrated in the ensuing years to be utter fancy. Glantz's books prove the immense skill and quality attained by the Red Army by the end of the war. Again, I will ride my hobby horse and praise Franklin Roosevelt, our third greatest president. FDR was, as usual, right in how he handled the end of World War II: grab as much as you can, cut the best deal you can, bullshit the Russians, and lie low. Compared to the Red Army of 1945, what the Americans and British Commonwealth had on the ground was totally inadequate. FDR seemed to be better aware of that than some of his own generals. The idea of even the up-gunned Sherman and a handful of the new Pershings, with their 90mm guns, could have gone up against armadas of T-34-85s and Stalin IIs with their 122mm gun does not bear thinking about. And by the time the Allies and the Red Army had come into contact, the Soviets were just introducing the Stalin III, which to this day looks futuristic. Our people would have been eaten alive. The Red Army would have been on the English Channel. We got out of World War II very well indeed, with the best half of Europe in our hands, and virtually all of the fighting and dying having been done by the Russians. Anyway, that is all make believe stuff. The Japanese were still not beaten, they were fighting like tigers, no one knew if the atom bomb would work, and no rational person on the American side was seriously contemplating taking on the Russians.

Molotov thought FDR was a clever bastard who played his cards very well. He ought to know.

Posted by Lexington Green on February 24, 2004 03:31 PM

Not everyone agrees with him about WWII? Does anyone agree with him? I know people who think we shouldn't have fought, although not very many. I know more people who think we should have kept going to Moscow (actually, Vladivostok). OJ is the only person I know who thinks both things.

Robert:

In a democracy anything we did is therefore justified. We are incapable of judging our own actions dispassionately.

neil:

The Left--at least rhetorically--believes that the state should take care of everyone lest they suffer.

The paternalist Right--Bismarck, Churchill, Teddy Roosevelt, etc.--believed that the state should take care of people because they were smarter than the people.

The opportunity society seeks a middle ground--requiring folks to take care of themselves within a narrow range of options.

Neil:

Enabling and paying for your bad choices out of my pocketbook.

"In a democracy anything we did is therefore justified. We are incapable of judging our own actions dispassionately."

Ah! Master. I see. Elephants all the way down.

"You Know OJ, not everybody agrees with you about the end of WWII in Europe."

Nobody agrees with OJ about the end of WWII in Europe.

Robert:

No one ever questions the accepted wisdom.

>>No one ever questions the accepted wisdom.

Well, duh. Maybe sometimes - not always, but sometimes - that's because the "accepted wisdom" is actually close to the truth?

Joe:

To the contrary, it's always wrong.

"No one ever questions the accepted wisdom."

Ah So, Ah Desu Kaihe, Yoda, I understand. The Elephants stand on Turtles

It is quite true that Churchill was something of a statist early on in his political career, but I'm always amused that people seem unable to find him expressing much pro-socialist thought from, say, 1920 onward. The criticism of him as a socialist always centers around the early part of his career -- never the later part.

When Churchill was once criticized by one of his Conservative colleagues in the House of Commons for a liberal and paternalistic statement he had made decades earlier, he rose to declare that he really thought a statute of limitations ought to apply to his utterances, absolving him of responsibility for foolish thoughts after a period of 30 years or so. Forgiveness of youthful stupidity seems to me like a reasonable indulgence to extend to a historical figure of such unquestioned greatness.

Churchill had damning things to say about socialism in his later years -- he repeatedly said it posed a profound danger to the tradition of personal freedom enjoyed by Britons -- and Clement Attlee did not hesitate to criticize Churchill in 1945 for cribbing some of his anti-socialist arguments from Friedrich Hayek.

Matt:

He was out of power in '45--paternalism is only attractive when you're the father.

Regarding the T-34, had we fought Russia in 1945, the P-51 would have destroyed every Russian tank west of the Vistula. No Russian soldier would have been able to look up from the rock he would have been hiding under. And the B-29s would have had free access over Moscow. It would have been a shorter war than people think.

I'm with Matt. Ronald Reagan was a liberal until mid-career. Whittaker Chambers was a communist. Dredging up youthful confusions may make for sporting electoral politics, but it is no basis for judging a life. Besides, young conservatives can be insufferable prigs and Churchill was too rich in human foibles for that.

The most interesting saints are ex-sinners. Churchill's far-sighted conservative insights were born partly of an intimate knowledge of the enemy. Acquiesing in social programmes was a minor distraction from the momentous challenges of his day. Lots of conservatives have done that.

Besides, Orrin, nobody argued harder for taking out the Bolshies at the end of World WarI. Given Roosevelt's legacy and his exhausted nation, what could he have done in 1945?

The general 30s and 40s Western position on Communism was that it was brutally efficient (more efficient than unplanned, voluntary capitalism, which was going through a world-wide crisis) but destructive of personal freedom.

After all, they'd been reading in the New York Times for decades about the huge leap forward the USSR had taken in industrialization, agriculture and providing for its citizens' material needs.

Peter:

Released the Katyn massacre files, sent troops forward until the Soviets attacked them--precipitating a crisis, etc.

He did Britain more damage than good.

jim:

In his book, Dark Sun, Richard Rhodes talks about how even for years after the war Curtis Lemay used to send bombers over Russian cities just to show he could take them out with impunity.

David:

Much of the Right--Lindbergh, Churchill, etc.--felt the same about fascism, but they helped destroy it.

Orrin:

"...sent troops forward until the Soviets attacked them--precipitating a crisis, etc."

Actually, Britain (and France) tried just that in Egypt in 1956 and look where it got them.

Yes, they chickened out then too.

Carve this on his monument:

A national leader is left to his own devices.
Poor bastard. Saved his country
But didn't understand a word of Mises.

Geez, Harry, I know you think the Soviets were invincible, but you can't really think Hitler was capable of crossing the Atlantic and occupying Britain, can you?

Didn't have to. Even with US help, he got within about 3 weeks of starving Britain anyway.

We'll never know, because that's not how it worked out, but if Hitler had concentrated on Britain, it would have been possible to get an army across the channel. Easy, in fact, as the experience of the Royal Navy at Crete demonstrated.

Hitler, as an individual, couldn't have, because he didn't understand naval matters. But it could have been easily done.

Hitler had the Royal Navy? Then I take it back. In fact, call off D-Day.

oj:

Actually, Attlee criticized Churchill for cribbing Hayek just prior to the mid-1945 election -- Churchill was using Hayek to warn the British populace of what was in store for them should Labour win. As you may already know, the Labour government quickly instituted the "control of engagements" order (at least I think that's what it was called -- my memory may be faulty here) that gave the government the right to direct people into certain jobs; it was only rescinded after an avalanche of protest.

Churchill surely did not approve of such a draconian measure; he certainly appears to have sized up Labour rather accurately. He was, at this time in his life, swimming against the collectivist tide and had arguably not been inclined towards socialism since the 1920s.

(Sorry for the late reply.)

Matt:

Yes, after the war he did revert to anti-socialism as any opposition leader opposes the majority: http://216.123.50.100/perfjaffa.htm

At Crete (and earlier off Norway), the German air force demonstrated that a navy without air cover cannot operate in narrow seas.

Hitler could have arranged that in the Channel, if he'd been smarter. As it was, he came very close anyway.

So much for my inflated opinion of the Cretin navy, army, and air force.

Next you'll be telling us Vietnam showed you can take over the US without a Navy or Air Force...