“The unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the feeble-minded and insane classes, coupled as it is with a steady restriction among all the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks, constitutes a national and race danger which it is impossible to exaggerate… I feel that the source from which the stream of madness is fed should be cut off and sealed up before another year has passed.” (Churchill to Asquith, 1910)
“I do not understand the squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using poisonous gas against uncivilised tribes.”
“The Churchill you didn’t know fails to point out that when Saddam Hussein gassed the Kurds, he was following British precedent in bombing them. (And Evelyn Waugh warmly endorsed the Italian use of poison gas in their conquest of Abyssinia, which repelled even hardened imperialists.) It correctly includes Churchill’s well-known remarks about Ghandi as “a seditious Middle Temple lawyer”. But in the same 1931 speech he says:
“The Indian Congress and other elements in this agitation represent neither the numbers, the strength nor the virtue of the Indian people. They merely represent those Indians who have acquired a veneer of Western civilisation, and have read all those books about democracy which Europe is now beginning increasingly to discard.”
“If he isn’t saying that democracy is out of date, then just what is he saying? Churchill admired Mussolini… He operated within a democracy and never saw any good reason to wish it overthrown. He told the voters the things they wanted to hear. But he also regretted the loss of the pre-1914 system of an oligarchy treated with respect by voters who were mostly middle-class or respectable working class.
“Most successful dictators come from the military or from the left, two areas where you learn the different between social conventions and social realities. In Britain the elements never quite gelled as a recognisable fascism, though they came close. I’d credit a lot to the mixture of toughness and moderation shown by Baldwin as leader of the Tory party, and to a British political system that allowed Prime Ministers to be real leaders.”
“A lot depends on whether the leader of a democracy is allowed to lead. Adenauer in Weimar Germany remained as mayor of Cologne, sensibly refusing to try to be Chancellor in the weak Weimar Republic, which had been treated as a lackey and victim by the Western powers. Only in the very different circumstance of West Germany in 1949 did Adenauer show his effectiveness, in a government that Britain and America were then determined to support.“
“In Britain in the 1930s, you had a party system strong enough to keep government coherent. The sort of crisis that might have swept Churchill to power never happened in peacetime.”
pulled from here https://gwydionwilliams.com/44-fascism-and-world-war-2/globalisation-as-attempted-by-the-british-empire-and-the-usa/
