- The Greatest Evil - Public Domain Image
Churchill equated imperialism with progressivism. He dispatched hundreds of thousands of Kenyan Kikuyu, including President Obama's grandfather, to detention camps where they were tortured and died. He called the people of India a "beastly people with a beastly religion" and claimed that "the Aryan stock is bound to triumph." The imperialist prime minister was also a grand pragmatist. He began his "finest hour" by choosing the murderous Joseph Stalin as his ally against the racist tyrant, Adolph Hitler.
Avashin Margali, Israeli peace activist, examines the moral dilemma that faced the British Prime Minister in his World War II pursuit of peace in On Compromise and Rotten Compromise, his new book. In doing so, Margali challenges his readers to question ethics and morality today.
The wartime alliance with Stalin can be defended as a justified compromise, according to Margali, but the Yalta agreement must be condemned for accepting “the systematically cruel and humiliating rule of Stalin over Eastern Europe” and for making possible the forced repatriation of captured Soviet soldiers, who were thus condemned to disappear forever. He calls the latter a crime against humanity.
What is a Moral Dilemma?
Margali writes that morality concerns human relations whereas ethics has to do with how humans should behave toward others with whom they have special relationships, such as family, friends, countrymen, and those who share the same religion. He posits that moral dilemmas are examples of “the clash between morality and ethics.”
Churchill faced a real moral dilemma. He had to choose between two radical evils at the heart of a world-shaping moral conflict. Although Stalin’s regime was based on cruelty and humiliation, Leninism contained moral elements entirely lacking in Nazism.
Hitler rejected all morality by dividing humanity into immutable races. According to Margalit, Churchill chose to ally with Stalin because, by rejecting the concept of a shared humanity, Hitler repudiated morality.
Germany's Nazis Remain History's Greatest Criminals
The mass murder of the Jews set Hitler apart from all other evil tyrants in history. The Holocaust was then and remains now a unique crime. Nothing like it existed in the Soviet gulag, where its victims died from slave labor, not murder from bullets and gas. Churchill believed that Stalin and Hitler were both radically evil, but the former did not commit the latter’s supreme crime.
Furthermore, no other recorded atrocity committed before or after World War II compares in horror to the crimes of the Nazi in the Holocaust, according to most historians; not the murders of 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica by Bosnian Serbs, not the near genocide of American Indians by European settlers in America or the carnage carried out in Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge, and certainly not the humiliating treatment of Palestinian Arabs by Israel today.
Most historians also insist that no leader of a state pledged to democracy and justice has had to make a more difficult choice between two tyrants during a crisis when a powerful ally was absolutely necessary for survival and eventual victory.
Why Churchill's Decision to Ally with Stalin was so Difficult
Churchill’s decision was made more difficult not only because the Soviet brand of totalitarianism threatened the British Empire, especially in India, but because he felt that communism was every bit as dangerous to civilized life as Nazism. Yet, despite such geopolitical concerns, he did not hesitate to make the right moral and ethical decision.
Do any countries presently deny moral standing to their citizens in the manner of Stalin and Hitler? Amnesty International said in its report last year that China executed at least 1,718 people in 2008, nearly three-fourths of the 2,390 executions worldwide that year. There were “thousands” of Chinese executions in 2009, according to Amnesty International, although the precise number is considered a state secret.
The report said at least 714 people were executed in 17 other countries, led by Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the United States. In Europe in 2009, for the first time since Amnesty International began keeping records, there were no executions. Belarus is the only European nation with the death penalty still on its books; the former Soviet republic reportedly executed two men recently.
The Constitutional Court in Russia also renewed a moratorium on death sentences in November and the Amnesty International report cited the court ruling that said the “path towards full abolition of the death penalty is irreversible.”
The United States was the only country in the Americas to execute anyone in 2009, according to the report, which said its 52 executions were the highest total in three years. Nearly half those executions, 24, came in Texas. Some of these regimes may rely on cruelty and humiliation, as many have done throughout history, but none reject all morality as Hitler’s Nazi Germany did.
NOTE: Judging from comments this article has generated in which readers take sides over which monster was worse, Hitler or Stalin, it seems necessary to point out that the point of the article is not to debate which dictator was the greatest mass murderer but simply to explain Churchill's dilemma when he had to choose the lesser of two evils with whom to ally before war broke out.
References:
- Margalit, Avashai, On Compromise and Rotten Compromises, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2009
- Bullock, Alan, Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives, Vintage Books, New York, NY, 1993
John Anderson - John Anderson has worked as a journalist, editor, advertising executive, Internet pioneer, and he has authored four books.
