"A romantic visionary in constitutional spectacles."
Adam Gopnik really outdid himself in the current issue of The New Yorker (the 30 August 2010 issue, though published on Monday, 23 August): his survey of Winston Churchill's career zenith as prime minister of the United Kingdom during World War II, in the form of a New York Review of Books-style multiple book review essay ("Finest Hours: The making of Winston Churchill"), is terrific; fittingly for his subject (the subject line of this post is Gopnik's parting tag for Churchill, taken from the last sentence of his article), Gopnik manages to turn a neat phrase or two himself. (Channeling Churchill's POV of the Germans after the rise of Hitler, Gopnik writes: "The Germans were trouble because they needed a nanny and they had got a nihilist.")
My favorite section from his piece is this:
"Churchill’s telepathic sense of Hitler...allowed him to grasp that shaking a rhetorical fist in his face might make the dictator act with self-destructive rage. Peter Fleming, Ian’s more gifted older brother, summed it up well in the decade after the war ended:
'It required no profound knowledge of the British character to realise that threats would strengthen rather than weaken their will to resist; but it did require more imagination than Hitler possessed to see what immense advantages might have been gained if in June 1940 he had turned his back on England instead of shaking his fist at her.'
"Churchill, understanding that Hitler wanted not just to conquer but to be recognized by the British Empire he admired, knew that he could provoke in Hitler the rage of a spurned suitor. When, in late August, a German bomber hit London, perhaps by accident, Churchill shrewdly retaliated, though to no particular harm, against Berlin-but the insult to Hitler’s pride was so intense that he discarded the strategic plan to take out airfields and aircraft factories, and began the terror bombing of London, just to show them. This killed a lot of people, and let the R.A.F. regroup. The worst was over, and the war, though hardly won, would surely not be lost. 'The forces that he has long been preparing he is now setting in motion, sooner than he intended,' Gandalf says of his enemy, Sauron, after he has panicked him into acting too soon. 'Wise fool.' Wise fool, indeed."
I'd read that description of Peter Fleming elsewhere; I'd also read that Ian partly based James Bond on his elder brother. The bit from Tolkien -- earlier in his essay, Gopnik reminds us, "even in the darkest depths of the Second World War, J.R.R. Tolkien was writing the 'Lord of the Rings' trilogy" -- reminds me of one of my favorite conspiracy theories: the partly tongue-in-cheek notion that Tolkien began to write LoTR as an assignment from British intelligence, with the aim of carpet-bombing Berlin (if not Berchtesgaden) with copies of the MS. in the hopes that Hitler would be so beguiled with the story that he would neglect the day-to-day tedium of running a country that started a major war, and so make Germany more tractable. (Don't laugh: Bruce Felton, in The People's Almanac #2 by David Wallechinsky and Irving Wallace [two of the folks who brought the world The Book of Lists and its sequels], reported that a staff psychologist on the British secret service came up with the idea of having "a squadron of RAF fliers bomb Hitler's home with several tons of the ripest pornographic art and literature available in Germany," on the theory that Hitler "would suffer a mental breakdown and the leaderless Germans would lose the war;" sadly, "the fliers refused to risk life and limb carpet-bombing Adolf Hitler with photographs of women copulating with Shetland ponies" [p. 1,234].)
But what I find most fascinating -- and chilling -- about this piece is the revelation that "Our Win" essentially sacrificed an unknowable at the time number of his fellow citizens on a gamble that the Nazis would leave off bombing British military targets long enough for said military -- particularly the RAF -- to regroup, rebuild, refresh. Yes, it worked; but, if this calculus became widely known in the UK (or merely guessed-at), it goes far to explain just why Churchill's appeal is so much more subdued, more chock-full of ambivalence, over there than it is in a certain wavelength of the ideological spectrum over here in the U.S. (It also explains more clearly why he was broomed out of office on 5 July 1945: after V-E Day, but before V-J Day.)
Gopnik's conceit of a telepathic link between Churchill and Hitler is reminiscent in a way of the conceit at the end of Alan Furst's second novel, Dark Star (1991), about which I previously wrote: "that Hitler and Stalin were, in essence, star-crossed lovers starring in their own demoniacal opera, who viewed all of Europe as their dowry-cum-marriage bed."
Gopnik nearly missteps when he makes the following observation, in his brief consideration of Churchill's role at the Yalta Conference:
"There was a fine difference between Stalin and Satan, and Churchill grasped it. In Antony Beevor’s history of the Battle of Stalingrad, the brutality and waste of the Stalinist regime-prisoners left to die in the snow, political commissars ordering the execution of innocents, the dead of the great purges haunting the whole-is sickening. But the murderousness of the Nazi invaders-children killed en masse and buried in common graves-is satanic. It is the tragedy of modern existence that we have to make such distinctions. Yet that does not mean that such distinctions cannot be made, or that Churchill did not make them."
Arguing that Hitler's regime was worse than Stalin's seems to me to be an exercise in picking gnat shit out of pepper: both were hideously, abysmally foul, and if Stalin didn't manage to mechanize his terror as much as Hitler did his, surely that has more to do with the relative lack of industrialization in the Soviet Union at the time than to any moral restraint on "Uncle Joe's" part.
My favorite section from his piece is this:
"Churchill’s telepathic sense of Hitler...allowed him to grasp that shaking a rhetorical fist in his face might make the dictator act with self-destructive rage. Peter Fleming, Ian’s more gifted older brother, summed it up well in the decade after the war ended:
'It required no profound knowledge of the British character to realise that threats would strengthen rather than weaken their will to resist; but it did require more imagination than Hitler possessed to see what immense advantages might have been gained if in June 1940 he had turned his back on England instead of shaking his fist at her.'
"Churchill, understanding that Hitler wanted not just to conquer but to be recognized by the British Empire he admired, knew that he could provoke in Hitler the rage of a spurned suitor. When, in late August, a German bomber hit London, perhaps by accident, Churchill shrewdly retaliated, though to no particular harm, against Berlin-but the insult to Hitler’s pride was so intense that he discarded the strategic plan to take out airfields and aircraft factories, and began the terror bombing of London, just to show them. This killed a lot of people, and let the R.A.F. regroup. The worst was over, and the war, though hardly won, would surely not be lost. 'The forces that he has long been preparing he is now setting in motion, sooner than he intended,' Gandalf says of his enemy, Sauron, after he has panicked him into acting too soon. 'Wise fool.' Wise fool, indeed."
I'd read that description of Peter Fleming elsewhere; I'd also read that Ian partly based James Bond on his elder brother. The bit from Tolkien -- earlier in his essay, Gopnik reminds us, "even in the darkest depths of the Second World War, J.R.R. Tolkien was writing the 'Lord of the Rings' trilogy" -- reminds me of one of my favorite conspiracy theories: the partly tongue-in-cheek notion that Tolkien began to write LoTR as an assignment from British intelligence, with the aim of carpet-bombing Berlin (if not Berchtesgaden) with copies of the MS. in the hopes that Hitler would be so beguiled with the story that he would neglect the day-to-day tedium of running a country that started a major war, and so make Germany more tractable. (Don't laugh: Bruce Felton, in The People's Almanac #2 by David Wallechinsky and Irving Wallace [two of the folks who brought the world The Book of Lists and its sequels], reported that a staff psychologist on the British secret service came up with the idea of having "a squadron of RAF fliers bomb Hitler's home with several tons of the ripest pornographic art and literature available in Germany," on the theory that Hitler "would suffer a mental breakdown and the leaderless Germans would lose the war;" sadly, "the fliers refused to risk life and limb carpet-bombing Adolf Hitler with photographs of women copulating with Shetland ponies" [p. 1,234].)
But what I find most fascinating -- and chilling -- about this piece is the revelation that "Our Win" essentially sacrificed an unknowable at the time number of his fellow citizens on a gamble that the Nazis would leave off bombing British military targets long enough for said military -- particularly the RAF -- to regroup, rebuild, refresh. Yes, it worked; but, if this calculus became widely known in the UK (or merely guessed-at), it goes far to explain just why Churchill's appeal is so much more subdued, more chock-full of ambivalence, over there than it is in a certain wavelength of the ideological spectrum over here in the U.S. (It also explains more clearly why he was broomed out of office on 5 July 1945: after V-E Day, but before V-J Day.)
Gopnik's conceit of a telepathic link between Churchill and Hitler is reminiscent in a way of the conceit at the end of Alan Furst's second novel, Dark Star (1991), about which I previously wrote: "that Hitler and Stalin were, in essence, star-crossed lovers starring in their own demoniacal opera, who viewed all of Europe as their dowry-cum-marriage bed."
Gopnik nearly missteps when he makes the following observation, in his brief consideration of Churchill's role at the Yalta Conference:
"There was a fine difference between Stalin and Satan, and Churchill grasped it. In Antony Beevor’s history of the Battle of Stalingrad, the brutality and waste of the Stalinist regime-prisoners left to die in the snow, political commissars ordering the execution of innocents, the dead of the great purges haunting the whole-is sickening. But the murderousness of the Nazi invaders-children killed en masse and buried in common graves-is satanic. It is the tragedy of modern existence that we have to make such distinctions. Yet that does not mean that such distinctions cannot be made, or that Churchill did not make them."
Arguing that Hitler's regime was worse than Stalin's seems to me to be an exercise in picking gnat shit out of pepper: both were hideously, abysmally foul, and if Stalin didn't manage to mechanize his terror as much as Hitler did his, surely that has more to do with the relative lack of industrialization in the Soviet Union at the time than to any moral restraint on "Uncle Joe's" part.