Winston Churchill's War Leadership by Sir Martin Gilbert
Authors: Sir Martin Gilbert
Tags: Fiction
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set out those tests in the form of seven questions that the Italian people should answer if they wanted to know whether they had replaced fascism by freedom:
Is there the right to free expression of opinion and of opposition and criticism of the Government of the day?
Have the people the right to turn out a Government of which they disapprove, and are constitutional means provided by which they can make their will apparent?
Are their courts of justice free from violence by the Executive and from threats of mob violence, and free from all association with particular political parties?
Will these courts administer open and well-established laws, which are associated in the human mind with the broad principles of decency and justice?
Will there be fair play for poor as well as for rich, for private persons as well as for Government officials?
Will the rights of the individual, subject to his duties to the State, be maintained and asserted and exalted?
Is the ordinary peasant or workman, who is earning a living by daily toil and striving to bring up a family, free from the fear that some grim police organization under the control of a single Party, like the Gestapo, started by the Nazi and Fascist parties, will tap him on the shoulder and pack him off without fair or open trial to bondage or ill-treatment?
As much as the Atlantic Charter of August 1941, which had been drafted by Roosevelt and the Americans but signed also by Churchill, these questions were a mark and proof of the ultimate objective of Churchill’s war leadership: faith in democracy, the need to preserve democracy, and the hope of returning democracy to those countries that had been deprived of it by the victories of totalitarianism. As Churchill told the House of Commons in December 1944, four months after his questions to the Italian people and at a time when democracy had come under grave threat in liberated Greece in the form of a civil war: “Democracy is no harlot to be picked up in the street by a man with a Tommy gun. I trust the people, the mass of the people, in almost any country, but I like to make sure that it is the people and not a gang of bandits from the mountains or from the countryside who think that by violence they can overturn constituted authority, in some cases ancient Parliaments, Governments and States.”
It was to avert a Communist takeover in Greece, and the replacement of a tyranny dictated from Berlin by one dictated from Moscow, that Churchill had flown to Greece at Christmas 1944 and negotiated between the Greek forces led by Archbishop Damaskinos and those rival Greek forces directed from afar by the Soviet Union. Churchill’s presence made a powerful impact, as did his advocacy, and agreement was reached whereby Greece’s democratic system would be maintained. Churchill had also opposed the creation in Greece of a dictatorship of the right, which was one of the possibilities being mooted in London. “I do not like setting up dictators as a result of using British troops in action,” he wrote on the day before his arrival in Athens. “I am a believer in constitutional processes. Of course if the Greeks agree among themselves that the Archbishop is the best man to head the new government as Prime Minister it might make a very good solution; but to make him dictator of Greece to get round an awkward political corner is entirely contrary to the guiding principles on which I act.”
Seven months after his dramatic journey to Athens, Churchill’s faith in democracy was borne out by events closer to home. In July 1945 the Conservative Party in Britain was defeated at the General Election, and Churchill, who in May 1945 had become Prime Minister of a Conservative caretaker government following Hitler’s defeat and the ending of the all-Party coalition, was out of office. He accepted the verdict of the electorate, telling one of those who spoke of the “ingratitude” of the British people: “I wouldn’t call it that.
Is there the right to free expression of opinion and of opposition and criticism of the Government of the day?
Have the people the right to turn out a Government of which they disapprove, and are constitutional means provided by which they can make their will apparent?
Are their courts of justice free from violence by the Executive and from threats of mob violence, and free from all association with particular political parties?
Will these courts administer open and well-established laws, which are associated in the human mind with the broad principles of decency and justice?
Will there be fair play for poor as well as for rich, for private persons as well as for Government officials?
Will the rights of the individual, subject to his duties to the State, be maintained and asserted and exalted?
Is the ordinary peasant or workman, who is earning a living by daily toil and striving to bring up a family, free from the fear that some grim police organization under the control of a single Party, like the Gestapo, started by the Nazi and Fascist parties, will tap him on the shoulder and pack him off without fair or open trial to bondage or ill-treatment?
As much as the Atlantic Charter of August 1941, which had been drafted by Roosevelt and the Americans but signed also by Churchill, these questions were a mark and proof of the ultimate objective of Churchill’s war leadership: faith in democracy, the need to preserve democracy, and the hope of returning democracy to those countries that had been deprived of it by the victories of totalitarianism. As Churchill told the House of Commons in December 1944, four months after his questions to the Italian people and at a time when democracy had come under grave threat in liberated Greece in the form of a civil war: “Democracy is no harlot to be picked up in the street by a man with a Tommy gun. I trust the people, the mass of the people, in almost any country, but I like to make sure that it is the people and not a gang of bandits from the mountains or from the countryside who think that by violence they can overturn constituted authority, in some cases ancient Parliaments, Governments and States.”
It was to avert a Communist takeover in Greece, and the replacement of a tyranny dictated from Berlin by one dictated from Moscow, that Churchill had flown to Greece at Christmas 1944 and negotiated between the Greek forces led by Archbishop Damaskinos and those rival Greek forces directed from afar by the Soviet Union. Churchill’s presence made a powerful impact, as did his advocacy, and agreement was reached whereby Greece’s democratic system would be maintained. Churchill had also opposed the creation in Greece of a dictatorship of the right, which was one of the possibilities being mooted in London. “I do not like setting up dictators as a result of using British troops in action,” he wrote on the day before his arrival in Athens. “I am a believer in constitutional processes. Of course if the Greeks agree among themselves that the Archbishop is the best man to head the new government as Prime Minister it might make a very good solution; but to make him dictator of Greece to get round an awkward political corner is entirely contrary to the guiding principles on which I act.”
Seven months after his dramatic journey to Athens, Churchill’s faith in democracy was borne out by events closer to home. In July 1945 the Conservative Party in Britain was defeated at the General Election, and Churchill, who in May 1945 had become Prime Minister of a Conservative caretaker government following Hitler’s defeat and the ending of the all-Party coalition, was out of office. He accepted the verdict of the electorate, telling one of those who spoke of the “ingratitude” of the British people: “I wouldn’t call it that.
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