Churchill’s willing conscripts

Niall Ferguson, in a fascinating review of Ian Kershaw’s Ten Decisions That Changed the World in 1940-1941, faults Kershaw somewhat for “hindsight bias” and for offering readers only “an apparently inexorable and often teleological narrative.”

It’s an interesting argument, a quibble between historians about whose method of scholarship works best. If you’re a history nerd, you’ll want to read the whole thing.

What struck me, though, was this passage, because it speaks so much to our own times [e.a.]:

Churchill did ultimately prevail over more pusillanimous Tories in the crisis of May 1940, when Halifax and Chamberlain were urging that no diplomatic stone be left unturned to end the war. But that he should have emerged strengthened from the debacle at Dunkirk did not appear likely at the time. What Kershaw fails to do is to spell out what people in Britain thought peace with Germany would have meant at that juncture. The reason Britain fought on was not just because Churchill decided to. It was because he was articulating a collective popular aversion to the alternative of French-style subjugation to the Third Reich. That is a reminder of something that the erstwhile practitioner of societal history appears to have forgotten. It was not just the decisions of dictators, emperors, presidents and prime ministers that determined the character of the Second World War. It was the decisions of hundreds of millions of people: decisions to acquiesce in conscription rather than defy the authorities; decisions to kill not just enemy soldiers but civilians, whether in death camps or from the air; decisions to keep fighting rather than to surrender or flee (and vice versa).

An interesting image: Hitler’s willing executioners versus Churchill’s willing conscripts, to whom he had effectively articulated a collective popular aversion to subjugation by the Third Reich.

A wartime leader has to persuade, cajole, beg, plead, and explain again and again and again. He or she must lead. In this as in so many things, Bush is a complete and utter failure. A disaster.