What to do with the provocative and apparently silly question concerning Churchill’s sympathies with the Nazis? Surely it is simply absurd to associate the heroic wartime Prime Minister of the United Kingdom with the Nazi regime which he did so much to defeat.

There are two ways of seeing reality. We can see it with the clarity of reason or with the politics of empowerment. We can see it through the seeking of the truth, or we can see it as the struggle for power. We can see it as the perennial battle between good and evil, made manifest in virtue and viciousness, or we can see it as a struggle between different groups of power-seekers: as class struggle, or race struggle, or “gender empowerment”.

What has this to do with the provocative and apparently silly question concerning Churchill’s sympathies with the Nazis? Surely it is simply absurd to associate the heroic wartime Prime Minister of the United Kingdom with the Nazi regime which he did so much to defeat.

Quite so.

But let’s allow ourselves to play devil’s advocate. Here is what Churchill wrote in the Illustrated Sunday Herald on February 8, 1920:

The part played in the creation of Bolshevism and in the actual bringing about of the Russian Revolution by those international and for the most part atheistical Jews … is certainly a very great one; it probably outweighs all others. With the notable exception of Lenin, the majority of the leading figures are Jews. Moreover, the principal inspiration and driving power comes from Jewish leaders…. The same evil prominence was obtained by Jews in [Hungary and Germany, especially Bavaria]….

Although in all these countries there are many non-Jews every whit as bad as the worst of the Jewish revolutionaries, the part played by the latter in proportion to their numbers in the population is astonishing. The fact that in many cases Jewish interests and places of worship are excepted by the Bolsheviks from their universal hostility has attended more and more to associate the Jewish race in Russia with the villainies which are now being perpetrated.

What are we to make of this? Is Churchill being balanced or fair? Is he being antisemitic? If so, does this make him in some sense a Nazi sympathizer or at least a fellow traveler with the Nazis? These are provocative questions and deliberately so. They are designed to provoke a reaction.

Compare Churchill’s words with those of Hilaire Belloc in his book, The Jews, published in 1922:

The Bolshevist Movement was a Jewish movement, but not a movement of the Jewish race as a whole. Most Jews were quite extraneous to it; very many indeed, and those of the most typical, abhor it; many actively combat it. The imputation of its evils to the Jews as a whole is a grave injustice and proceed from a confusion of thought whereof I, at any rate, am free.

Considering that Belloc, along with his friend Chesterton, are often accused of antisemitism, whereas such a charge is hardly ever leveled at Churchill, Belloc’s words seem strikingly balanced. It must be said, however, playing devil’s advocate once again, that Belloc and Chesterton occasionally indulged in uncharacteristically uncharitable quips against the Jews, usually meant humourously but always nonetheless in poor taste. At worst, such quips are quite frankly offensive. Should these uncharacteristic moments be an excuse to “cancel” Belloc and Chesterton in the name of “tolerance”? Should they be grounds for undermining the overarching and overriding sanity and sanctity that characterize the vast bulk of their lives and works? Should the occasional fall into sin or fall from grace, which the aforementioned quips certainly represent, be grounds for condemning someone to hell or for excluding them from heaven? Those who answer any of these questions in the affirmative should take a long, hard look at the plank in their own eyes before placing such emphasis on the mote to be found in the eyes of their neighbours.

But, our devil’s advocate will reply, we cannot simply ignore antisemitism when we see it.

No, we shouldn’t. But what is antisemitism? The following definition seems accurate enough:

The Anti-Semite is a man who wants to get rid of the Jews. He is filled with an instinctive feeling in the matter. He detests the Jew as a Jew, and would detest him wherever he found him. The evidences of such a state of mind are familiar to us all. The Anti-Semite admires, for instance, a work of art; on finding its author to be a Jew it becomes distasteful to him though the work remains exactly what it was before. The Anti-Semite will confuse the action of any particular Jew with his general odium for the race. He will hardly admit high talents in his adversaries, or if he admits them he will always see in their expression something distorted and unsavoury.

This definition of antisemitism was given by Belloc in his book on the Jews. Can Belloc be accused of antisemitism on these grounds? Can Chesterton? Can Churchill?

We’ll let two Jewish scholars answer these questions. Anthony Read and David Fisher, co-authors of Kristallnacht: The Nazi Night of Terror (1989), put the whole issue in an all too rare balanced perspective:

Belloc, like his friend Chesterton, like so many of the English middle class, was prejudiced against Jews…. Nevertheless, he was not antisemitic – certainly not in the Nazi sense and the idea of employing physical brutality against a single Jew would have appalled him. He was an honourable man, uneasily aware that there was something going on in Germany of which, in conscience, he could not approve.

Here we have it. Belloc would have been appalled by the employment of physical brutality against a single Jew because he believed in the dignity of the human person and the duty of each human person to love his neighbour as commanded by the God whom he worshipped. Belloc’s moral perspective, his belief in virtue and viciousness, of right and wrong, of good and evil, precluded any mechanistic perspective that could sanction the extermination of millions of people in the interests of any ideology, any “final solution” or any “cancelling” of dissident voices.

It should be noted, in this light, that the antisemite is similar to the Marxist and the advocates of critical race theory. He sees reality as the struggle for power, as the struggle between different groups of power-seekers. In his blaming of the Jews for both communism and capitalism, he conflates class struggle with race struggle, both of which are about “Jewish empowerment”. It is ironic that those who refuse to see reality in terms of morality, who refuse to speak of virtue or vice, always embrace extreme mechanistic ideologies rooted in group psychology. It’s no longer about individuals acting virtuously or viciously, making the world a better or worse place in consequence; it’s about a power-struggle in which Jews or white people or black people are to blame for everything. If we follow Nietzsche in going “beyond good and evil”, we end up by becoming evil and by serving the devil. We become extremists who demand a cancel culture. Jewish power must be cancelled; black power must be cancelled; white power must be cancelled.

We will conclude by returning to our original question and answering it. In spite of any mistakes he might have made in word or deed, Churchill was no more a Nazi sympathizer than Belloc or Chesterton were antisemites.

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The featured image is Winston Churchill photographed at No 10 Downing Street in March 1945, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.