cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/2848151

Quoting James Heartfield’s An Unpatriotic History of the Second World War, page 162:

It was Churchill, wrote his cousin Claire Sheridan, ‘who is talked of as the likely leader of a Fascisti party in England’.²¹ Churchill said of Adolf Hitler’s book Mein Kampf that ‘the story of that struggle cannot be read without admiration [for the courage, the perseverance, and the vital force which enabled him to challenge, defy conciliate or overcome, all the authority of resistances which barred his path]’.²²

Churchill’s views of Communism were close to Hitler’s. As Home Secretary Churchill used troops to kill two revolutionaries in the ‘siege of Sidney Street’ in January 1911 he used troops to break up strikes at Newport Docks in May 1910, at Tonypandy 9 November 1910, and at Liverpool docks in August 1911, when he anchored the warship Antrim in the Mersey. During the 1926 General Strike Churchill established military control of the country, including a government newspaper, the British Gazette.

Churchill’s sympathised with the fascist cause and in 1937 Brigadier Packenham Walsh reported ‘Winston says at heart he is for Franco’.²³ Asked about anti‐Jewish laws in 1938, Churchill thought ‘it was a hindrance and an irritation, but probably not an obstacle to a working agreement’.²⁴

Britain’s Prime Minister in the First World War, David Lloyd George also saw value in Hitler’s [fascism]. ‘In a very short time, perhaps in a year or two, the Conservative elements in this country will be looking to Germany as a bulwark against Communism in Europe’, Lloyd George had told the House of Commons in 1934. ‘Do not let us be in a hurry to condemn Germany’ he said, ‘we shall be welcoming Germany as our friend.’²⁵

Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization, page 97:

Churchill […] added some words of praise: “I have always said that if Britain were defeated in a war I hoped [that] we should find a Hitler to lead us back to our rightful position among nations.” The world would now rejoice, Churchill said, to see a mellowed Hitler of peace and tolerance. “Let this great man search his own heart and conscience before he accuses any one of being a warmonger.”

Gaetano Salvemini’s Prelude to World War II, page 108:

At Leghorn, Lady Chamberlain was photographed with the Duce, wearing the Fascist insignia; and Winston Churchill declared on January 20, 1927, that he “could not help being charmed by Mussolini’s gentle and simple bearing”: “if I had been an Italian I am sure that I would have been whole‐heartedly with you. […] Your movement has rendered a service to the whole world […] provided the necessary antidote to the Russian poison.” He, too, would don a blackshirt if he were an Italian.³

Alan Cassels’s Mussolini’s Early Diplomacy, page 311:

Nor did the proclamation of the Fascist dictatorship on January 3, 1925, diminish British Conservative support. For example, on January 7, Winston Churchill, so Italy’s finance minister reported to Mussolini, expressed “sympathy for Your Excellency and appreciation of Your Excellency’s energetic work in the repression of bolshevism.”⁷³ Churchill continued in this vein during 1925, confiding to Ambassador Delia Torretta his admiration for the “discipline […] firmness and severity” of Fascist Italy.⁷⁴

He expressed this admiration tangibly by helping to arrange a war‐debt settlement favorable to Italy. In early 1927 Churchill visited Rome privately and made a speech at the British embassy to a group of journalists, once more extolling Mussolini.⁷⁵

Richard Lamb’s Mussolini and the British, page 76:

Winston Churchill, who had become Baldwin’s Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1924, was equally enthusiastic for Mussolini. In January 1926, against the advice of his Treasury officials, Churchill as we shall see negotiated a generous settlement of Italy’s war debts to Britain, and during a visit to Genoa in 1927 he described the atmosphere of Fascism, writing to his wife, ‘This country gives the impression of discipline, order, goodwill and smiling faces.’

[…]

In 1933 Churchill praised Mussolini as the ‘Roman genius’, describing him as ‘the greatest lawgiver amongst living men’.⁹

Christopher Duggan comments in Fascist Voices: An Intimate History of Mussolini’s Italy, page 76

There was an element of political calculation in such comments. Chamberlain and Churchill certainly did feel genuine admiration for Mussolini, but they also subscribed to the Foreign Office line that the best way to curb the fascist leader’s impulsiveness was through flattery.⁶¹ But such endorsements inevitably strengthened Mussolini’s hand back home, fuelled belief that he was indeed a ‘man of genius’, and weakened the position of his opponents.

Turning now to Greece:

The British Army under the guidance of Churchill perpetrated a massacre on the streets of Athens in the month of December 1944. [Twenty‐eight] protesters were shot dead, a further 128 injured. [London] demanded that all guerrilla groups should disarm on the 2nd December 1944. The following day 200,000 people took to the streets, and this is when the British Army under Churchill’s orders turned their guns on the people.

Churchill regarded ELAS (Greek People’s Liberation Army) and EAM (National Liberation Front) as “miserable banditti”, these were the very people who ran the [Axis] out. His actions in the month of December were purely out of his hatred and paranoia for communism.

[London] backed the right‐wing government in Greece returned from exile after the very same partisans of the resistance that Churchill ordered the murder of had driven out the [Axis] occupiers. Soviet forces were well received in Greece, this deeply worried Churchill. He planned to restore the monarchy in Greece to combat any possible communist influence. The events in December were part of that strategy.

In 1945, Churchill sent Charles Wickham to Athens where he was in charge of training the Greek security police. Wickham learned his tricks of the trade in British occupied Ireland between 1922–1945 where he was a commander of the colonial RUC, responsible for countless terror.

In April 1945 Churchill said “the [Axis] collaborators in Greece in many cases did the best they could to shelter the Greek population from German oppression” and went on to say “the Communists are the main foe”.

On this, Stephen Dorril noted in MI6: inside the covert world of Her Majesty’s secret intelligence service, page 314:

He added that there should be ‘no question of increasing the severities against the collaborationists in order to win Communist approval’. Even the conservative and often reactionary Foreign Office found Churchill’s stance ‘astonishing’ but there was little it could do to change it.²²

Churchill donated also funds for an Axis war criminal Erich von Manstein’s defence when he was on trial after 1945. Quoting Benoît Lemay’s Erich von Manstein: Hitler’s Master Strategist, page 456:

Churchill, who denounced the “belated trial of an aged German general,” was one of the first to contribute to it by making a donation of 25£ (300DM). In all, the event raised a sum of 2,000£ (24,000DM) to adequately provide for Manstein’s defense.

David Swanson’s Leaving World War II Behind, chapter 8:

Immediately upon [Berlin’s] surrender, Winston Churchill proposed using Nazi troops together with allied troops to attack the Soviet Union, the nation that had just done the bulk of the work of defeating the Nazis.²³⁸ This was not an off-the-cuff proposal. The U.S. and British had sought and achieved partial [Fascist] surrenders, had kept [Fascist] troops armed and ready, and had debriefed [Fascist] commanders on lessons learned from their failure against the [Soviets].

Paul Addison in Winston Churchill in the Twenty First Century, page 19:

In the opening stages of the Spanish Civil War he leaned strongly towards Franco and the Nationalist side. With unconscious irony he also declared in a debate in the House of Commons in 1937: ‘I will not pretend that if I had to choose between Communism and Nazi‐ism, I would choose Communism.’²⁴

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

A word of warning: don’t expect any of this to concern anticommunists one bit. Churchill’s cult of personality is not easily broken.

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Click here for events that happened today (November 30).

1929: A shiteload of reorganization in the Empire of Japan’s navy again.
1938: King Carol II’s henchmen executed the leaders of the Iron Guard party in captivity during the night.
1940: As Chinese troops halted the offensive in Hubei Province launched by the Japanese 11th Army five days prior, Wang Jingwei of the Imperialist‐sponsored régime in Nanjing, China established diplomatic relationship with fellow collaborationist state Manchukuo. In the southern Indian Ocean, Axis armed merchant cruiser Pinguin attacked British ship Port Wellington overnight, killing 2 and capturing 87, whereas Axis submarine U‐101 sank British ship Aracataca northwest of Ireland, massacring 36 but leaving 34 alive.
1941: The SS‐Einsatzgruppen rounded up eleven thousand Jews from the Riga Ghetto and slaughtered them in the Rumbula massacre.
1942: A smaller squadron of Axis destroyers headed by Raizō Tanaka defeated a U.S. Navy cruiser force under Carleton H. Wright in the Battle of Tassafaronga.