As John Stuart Mill famously wrote, silencing the expression of an opinion robs us in two ways. Firstly, if “the opinion is right, [we] are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth”. Secondly, if the opinion is wrong, we derive “almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error”.
So, when Tucker Carlson espouses what strikes most of us as a completely bizarre assertion – that Britain, and Winston Churchill in particular, were the ‘aggressors’ in WWII, who provoked a World War Germany didn’t want – the correct response is not ‘shut up’. Rather, explain why Carlson is wrong, by showing how his opinion collides with truth.
To that end, a recent Real Good Oil piece which, in part, repeated Carlson’s argument, merits a detailed rebuttal. So here, in greater detail than I’ve already written, is exactly how Nazi Germany, alone, was the aggressor. “No Hitler, no War,” as Churchill said.
Contrary to Carlson’s assertions, Britain and France’s policy in the 1930s was overwhelmingly driven by avoidance of war and by attempts (ultimately unsuccessful) to check German aggression through deterrence, guarantees and, when necessary, military preparation. The initiation of hostilities in 1939 was the culmination of six years of escalating German treaty-breaking and armed aggression through the decade. Germany, not Britain, drove Europe and the world into war.
Firstly, Adolf Hitler’s public and private statements, from his Mein Kampf manifesto to innumerable public speeches, as well as internal Nazi records such as the 1937 Hossbach Memorandum, set out territorial aims (notably Lebensraum) and a timetable for using force. From 1933 onward, Germany rebuilt the army, created the Luftwaffe, reintroduced conscription and massively increased military expenditure. These were clear preparations for offensive war, not defensive measures aimed at Britain.
To be sure, Hitler would sometimes preach peace: but that was such an obvious smokescreen that it’s astonishing anyone still falls for it. Not least because he was still preaching peace shortly after launching an unprovoked war on Poland. Hitler was a devastatingly strategic liar when occasion demanded it. He also regarded the British as racial brethren. But, behind the scenes, the truth was clear. In the minutes of his first cabinet meeting, on 3 February 1933, Hitler insisted that rearmament was Germany’s top priority. He also gave an unequivocal reason why: “The question of living space is the most decisive question… Germany’s future is dependent on the solution of this need for space.”
That space, as Mein Kampf and Hitler’s public speeches clearly outlined, was Eastern Europe. Lands that were already, it should be obvious, occupied by multiple nations and peoples, nearly all of whom would (and did) resist German expansion.
In the same meeting, Hitler called for rapid military expansion, in violation of the Treaty of Versailles. Whatever our views on the justness of Versailles, the fact remains that it was an international treaty. Breaching it alone constituted a casus belli for Allied nations. Through the early 1930s, Germany breached international treaties again and again. Remilitarising the Rhineland in 1936 violated the Locarno agreements and their private records show that the Nazi leadership couldn’t believe their luck that Britain and France refrained from using force to enforce them.
Given Germany’s relative weakness, Britain and France could have stopped WWII with a minimum of bloodshed in 1936. That they refrained only shows their reluctance to go to war, for better or ill in the long run.
In fact, the Allies were so reluctant to resort to war that they ultimately shamed themselves with the Munich Agreement that handed Czechoslovakia to the Nazis without a shot. Doing so meant that Britain and France reneged on their treaty obligations to Czechoslovakia, which in turn gave the Soviets an excuse to refuse to lift a finger against Germany.
This, tragically, did nothing to prevent Hitler’s march to War. Presciently, Czech President Edvard Benes warned, “You are sacrificing my country’s future and security for a temporary, false, peace, and I fear this will not stop Hitler but will only make his next demands easier to meet.”
Still, the desire in Britain to avoid war was so acute that, despite his shameful betrayal of Czechoslovakia, Neville Chamberlain received a hero’s welcome for, supposedly, securing “Peace in our Time”.
It was only when it became obvious that diplomatic measures would never appease the Nazi Führer, did Britain and France shift to a rearmament policy and the signing of a mutual defence pact with Poland.
This last was the final, desperate, diplomatic measure designed to avoid war. If Hitler attacked Poland, it would be clear, then, that war in Europe was unavoidable.
Aside from diplomacy, the relative scale of military spending shows just who was really tooling up for war. Certainly, France had a formidable army, and Britain its navy, but that fact only underscores the restraint of the Allies. Had they really wanted war, they could have crushed the Nazi regime easily in the mid-30s.
Even as the war clouds gathered, British defence spending remained low, around two per cent of GDP. Germany’s, on the other hand, massively expanded, to 10 per cent in 1935, then nearly a quarter of GDP by 1939. True, Britain accelerated its rearmament (to a fraction of Germany’s spending) in 1938–39, but preparation is not the same as aggression.
When, on 1 September 1939, Germany launched an entirely unprovoked attack on Poland, Britain and France were entirely within their rights, indeed obligated, to invoke their mutual defence guarantees. That sequence is decisive: Britain declared war in response to an act of armed aggression against a sovereign state that Britain had guaranteed.
Churchill was not even in government in Britain for the entirety of Hitler’s chancellorship, up until the declaration of War
As for Carlson’s even more bizarre claim that Churchill, not Hitler, was the villain of WWII: such a claim can only be made in a dementedly determined absence of anything resembling an awareness of history.
The simplest response is that Churchill was not even in government in Britain for the entirety of Hitler’s chancellorship, up until the declaration of War. He only joined Chamberlain’s War Cabinet on 3 September, 1939, and became prime minister in 1940. So, Churchill literally could not have been the aggressor in WWII, for the simple fact that he was in no position to be.
Of course, Churchill was vocal in warning against the threat of the Nazi regime through the 1930s. But that’s in no way ‘aggression’. Churchill was stridently anti-appeasement and pushed for rearmament, but his record shows he sought deterrence and preparedness rather than initiating or seeking an aggressive war with Germany.
Being a hawk in rhetoric does not equate to being the aggressor. Churchill argued that a failure to rearm and confront Hitler sooner would leave Britain with no choice but to face a more dangerous war later – this judgement, history shows, was entirely correct.
So, thanks for prompting me to revisit my history lessons, Tucker – it’s just a shame it took a prominent person saying something so colossally stupid that necessitated it.
