churchill on jews. who's to blame?

[soul_warrior]

a historian uncovered a pre-World War Two article by churchill.
in said article the British wartime leader disapproved of the treatment they experienced but did say of the Jews: "They have been partly responsible for the antagonism from which they suffer."

Cambridge University lecturer Richard Toye, reflecting on his find, said: "While most people would accept that Churchill was no anti-Semite, this sheds fascinating new light on his views about Jews which were very inconsistent."

"How The Jews Can Combat Persecution," originally written in 1937 when it failed to find a publisher, was finally picked up in 1940 for publication by the Sunday Depatch newspaper.

But when the paper's editor formally asked for permission to use the piece, Churchill's office wrote back and refused, saying publication was "inadvisable."

Within weeks, Churchill became prime minister, leading the fight against the Nazi regime which murdered six million Jews in the Holocaust.

"He may well have had second thoughts. When he looked at it again, he may well have thought it wasn't the most intelligent thing to say," Toye told Reuters in an interview.

He uncovered the article while researching for a book he was writing on "Lloyd George and Churchill: Rivals For Greatness."

In the piece, Churchill argued that "the wickedness of the persecutors" was not the only reason for the ill-treatment of Jews down the ages.

He called Jews sober, industrious and law-abiding and praised their readiness to fight and die for the country they lived in.

But he added: "Yet there are times when one feels instinctively that all this is only another manifestation of the difference, the separateness of the Jew."

Echoing modern-day debates about multi-culturalism, Churchill criticised what he called the "aloofness" of Jewish people from wider society and urged them to make the effort to integrate.

He criticized Jewish employers in the clothing trade for exploiting the readiness of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany to work for lower wages. He also criticized the refugees themselves for their readiness to accept rock-bottom salaries.

Toye said "I do find it perverse to blame persecuted people for their own persecution. There is a lot of contorted logic there."

Speculating on why the article never saw the light of day, he concluded: "In terms of its potential impact on public opinion, it was one thing to say these things in 1937 but quite different to say them in 1940 when Britain was at war."

what are your thoughts?


source

 

[plarq]

We knew that. He condoned nazism but not German expansion.

 

[JonnyB]

I'm waiting for verification that these are Churchill's own words.

But when The Observer contacted Sir Martin Gilbert, the eminent historian and Churchill biographer, the implication of anti-Semitism began to unravel. Gilbert, who also has a book out this summer, said the article was not written by Churchill at all, but rather his ghost writer, Adam Marshall Diston. He added that Churchill's instructions for the article were different in both tone and content from what Diston eventually wrote, and pointed out that Diston was a supporter of Oswald Mosley, the notorious fascist and anti-Semite. Churchill had stopped its publication in a newspaper.

Source

 

[MjM]

It's always the Jews fault.

 

[TheBladeRoden]

Hating Jews was all the rage back in the day. Everyone did it, it was pretty much the norm. Just that a few select people (Hitler and friends) had to go overboard and ruin the fun for everyone, cause everyone had to distance themselves from Hitler now.

 

[Rossiya]

Sir Winston is always right. Always.

 

[azzaman333]

If you isolate yourself, you make yourself a target. Therefore, jews had some small part of the blame for the antagonism, but Hitler and Co. took it way, way, way too far.

 

[REDY]

If you isolate yourself, you make yourself a target. Therefore, jews had some small part of the blame for the antagonism, but Hitler and Co. took it way, way, way too far.

They were more isolated by christians than themselves...

 

[REDY]

Damn I see results of poll - horrible results...

 

[azzaman333]

Damn I see results of poll - horrible results...

I doubt that anyone is saying that the Jews deserved the holocaust to happen, but that they had some small influence in the eventual decision to try and wipe them out, which Hitler and Co. blew way out of proportion and mislead the rest of the public to convince them that all jews are evil, we must exterminate every last one.

 

[Pasi Nurminen]

I doubt this thread has long once the moderators wake up.

 

[ShannonCT]

Is there anything unreasonable about what Churchill supposedly said?: that the Jews would not have faced the Holocaust had they fully integrated into society, that is, had they ceased being Jewish (assuming Europeans would have even let them integrate). It's not anti-Semitic or pro-Holocaust to say so. But I can see why he wouldn't want something like this to be published; some idiots would latch onto his words to support their hatered.

 

[Verbose]

If you isolate yourself, you make yourself a target. Therefore, jews had some small part of the blame for the antagonism, but Hitler and Co. took it way, way, way too far.

They were consciously MADE a target, to allow the Nazis to take things where they wanted.

There was no way for Jews to be allowed to assimilate into western European societies, as Jews, before the French revolution. Literally. They were prohibited from engaging in the professions of Christians and of owning land.

As it happened, once they started assimilating into the liberal societies set up through the revolutions in the 19th c., antisemitism immediately morphed to get them from another angle. This time it wasn't religions that was the problem, but "biology" and "race".

So whatever the Jews did, they found themselves caught coming and going: Don't assimilate. You're an alien danger living in our midst! Assimilate: You're a fith column of aliens trying to take over, and you're so much scarier for actually not having fangs or talking crazy so you can't be easily identified.

Even Jews who converted to Christianity and stopped being Jews in the 19th c. found that this didn't really help. They were simply regarded as sneaky and underhand for it.

Still the German Jews were a particularily fine example of successful 19th c. assimilation, and they were living right alongside ordinary Germans, doing what ordinary Germans did, having ordinary German names even.

This didn't matter a jot to the antisemites. If anything it caused the Nazis problems because they had to invent policies that would MAKE the German Jews visible again; forcibly renaming them Abraham and Sarah, the Yellow Star, prescribed "Jewish culture" as defined by the Nazis.

The Nazis didn't start the killing until they had successfully de-assimilated their own Jewish population, turning them into aliens in the eyes of the rest of the Germans. But they had to put some real work into this process, ecause the German Jews were first and foremost Germans.

 

[Verbose]

Is there anything unreasonable about what Churchill supposedly said?: that the Jews would not have faced the Holocaust had they fully integrated into society, that is, had they ceased being Jewish (assuming Europeans would have even let them integrate). It's not anti-Semitic or pro-Holocaust to say so. But I can see why he wouldn't want something like this to be published; some idiots would latch onto his words to support their hatered.

It's daft because the German Jews were fully integrated. Any level of "integration" above what they had achieved would have entailed total disintegration as a group. The one thing they still retained was their religion as a personal and domestic matter.

By the late 19th c. mostly they weren't hated so much for being Jews in the religious sense, as for being liberals and modernists. Since liberalism and modernisation was what had allowed them to integrate in society at all in the first place, asking them to somehow find a way of integrating without resource to these processes would again be just daft.

 

[Pasi Nurminen]

Is there anything unreasonable about what Churchill supposedly said?: that the Jews would not have faced the Holocaust had they fully integrated into society, that is, had they ceased being Jewish (assuming Europeans would have even let them integrate). It's not anti-Semitic or pro-Holocaust to say so. But I can see why he wouldn't want something like this to be published; some idiots would latch onto his words to support their hatered.

"Being Jewish"?

Had the abandoned their religion, customs, and way of life, perhaps they might not have been the victim of extermination attempts, yes. If they stopped "being Jewish" I'm sure things would have been just dandy.

But I think we can all agree that people have the right to adhere to any given religion without expecting genocide in return.

What is wrong with you?

Moderator Action: Warned for flaming. Pls be nice. Thanks. - KD
Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889

 

[ShannonCT]

"Being Jewish"?

Had the abandoned their religion, customs, and way of life, perhaps they might not have been the victim of extermination attempts, yes. If they stopped "being Jewish" I'm sure things would have been just dandy.

But I think we can all agree that people have the right to adhere to any given religion without expecting genocide in return.

What is wrong with you?

Did I ever say that the Jews should abandon their Jewishness? Do I need to spell this out for you? THE ONLY WAY THE JEWS COULD HAVE AVOIDED GENOCIDE FROM THE MASS MURDERING NAZI F***HEADS WOULD HAVE BEEN TO CEASE BEING JEWISH, AND THEY ARE 0% TO BLAME FOR WHAT HAPPENED TO THEM. No one should face violence for holding certain religious beliefs, believing in certain philosophies, or practicing his customs. But when people do assimilate religiously and ethnically, they are less likely to be singled out for persecution.

What is wrong with your reading comprehension?

Moderator Action: Warned for language. Pls keep it polite. Thanks. - KD
Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889

 

[Bozo Erectus]

Churchill was already an old man in the 1930s. Nuff said.

 

[Gogf]

Is there anything unreasonable about what Churchill supposedly said?: that the Jews would not have faced the Holocaust had they fully integrated into society, that is, had they ceased being Jewish (assuming Europeans would have even let them integrate). It's not anti-Semitic or pro-Holocaust to say so. But I can see why he wouldn't want something like this to be published; some idiots would latch onto his words to support their hatered.

The problem is that it wasn't their choice to be isolated. They were forcibly isolated by the Christian governments of most European nations.

 

[Pasi Nurminen]

Did I ever say that the Jews should abandon their Jewishness? Do I need to spell this out for you? THE ONLY WAY THE JEWS COULD HAVE AVOIDED GENOCIDE FROM THE MASS MURDERING NAZI F***HEADS WOULD HAVE BEEN TO CEASE BEING JEWISH, AND THEY ARE 0% TO BLAME FOR WHAT HAPPENED TO THEM. No one should face violence for holding certain religious beliefs, believing in certain philosophies, or practicing his customs. But when people do assimilate religiously and ethnically, they are less likely to be singled out for persecution.

What is wrong with your reading comprehension?

It's not anti-Semitic or pro-Holocaust to say so. But I can see why he wouldn't want something like this to be published; some idiots would latch onto his words to support their hatered.

That there tipped me off.

Ever tried decaf?

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

The part that always got me was how so many Jews in Europe 1) knew that the Nazis were coming or 2) if the Nazis were already there, they knew at least about the systematic rounding up of Jews and their shipment somewhere else, even if they didn't directly know about the concentration camps themselves, and yet, they chose to stay where they were instead of fleeing. I'm not saying there weren't many Jews who fled, but there were many more who stayed right where they were, rather than helping themselves.

It's easy to see why the Jews were so easy to blame for Germany's problems back then, though. You've got a group of people who live amongst themselves in enclaves, speak their own language, practice a different religion, and, when the depression hit, didn't lose all their money. it's hard to find an easier scapegoat for you country's problems than that.