We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
|
Another reason to think highly of Churchill The Sunday Telegraph has an article about Winston Churchill’s lifelong battle with the taxman that continued even at the height of the Second World War. Documents covering a 20-year period were published for the first time last week and refer to Churchill’s “latest attempt to minimise liability”. They indicate that he used every lawful opportunity to avoid tax. At one stage he considered setting up an overseas company to ensure that his lucrative extra-parliamentary earnings would be exempt from income tax.
Andrew Roberts, a historian who has written extensively about Churchill, said:
I do not think these disclosures will make people think any less of Churchill.
Au contraire! They further point to Churchill’s excellent judgment as to who the enemies are…
Message to the Inland Revenue
|
Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
|
You have the Inland Revenue.
We yanks called ours the Internal Revenue Service, now known more affectionately as the Infernal Revenue Service.
Looking at the birth rate in Western societies my personal theory is that tax evasion is a more powerful urge than reproduction…
Tax evasion is illegal (although whether it is immoral is another matter). Tax avoidance is the solemn, sovereign duty of every man and woman.
You need to airbrush out the index finger.
Dave S
In England, as well as Australia, the salute Winston is giving means ‘F***-You’.
When the fist is reversed and the two same fingers are in the same configuration it means ‘Victory’
Legend has it that the gesture was used by English and Welsh Longbowmen to the French. When the French captured enemy bowmen they would cut off the two drawing fingers preventing them from using a longbow again – therefore it is a gesture of defiance. Remember Agincourt, Crecy, Poitiers…. a kind of medieval “up yours!”
Er, back to the subject in hand, David is quite right – every reasonable person should explore all avenues of tax avoidance – after all, why should the IR have more than is necessary?
I’m always amazed at the amount of respect Churchill gets from the guys at Libertarian Samizdata. It’s as if because he was a victorious British tribal leader he gets a pass on all morality.
This is the same guy who authorized the RAF strikes on German residential areas, killing >300,000 civilians. That makes the Blitz (for which Goering was justly sentenced to death) look like a traffic accident. That’s September 11 times a hundred. (Anyone who claims those German civilians had it coming is using the same ethics that Al Qaeda/Leftists use when claiming that the 9/11 victims had it coming.)
This is the same guy who wanted to use chemical weapons against Kurdish civilians in order to introduce “a lively terror.” This is the same guy who planned to soak the Ruhr valley in chemicals if the Germans used chemicals on the battlefield.
It’s long past time for libertarians to wake up and realize this “war hero” was yet another statist tribal mass-murderer, just like FDR, Truman, etc.
Might as well add Lincoln to that list, T.J. Madison. 🙂
On the tax issue, I may not be able to avoid the tender embrace of the IRS for this past year. I fear my clients will end up filing 1099’s on me that put me over the filing limit (US$7800 gross income in 2003 tax year). I’ve managed to stay ‘legally poor’ the last couple of years, and have hence avoided Self-Employment Tax (Social Security contributions for the self employed) and the dreaded Form SE.
My personal economic activities were already deliberately difuse to avoid the clutches of my ex-wife (not children involved, fear not); avoidance of the taxman has been an added bonus.
>> Might as well add Lincoln to that list, T.J. Madison. 🙂
Most definitely!
Nah, T.J., your reasoning won’t wash, even for
libertarians. Without Churchill’s force of character this thread would be in German. The summer of 1940 was Britain’s finest hour, and it was Churchill who rallied them to make that stand. No other single individual had as much to do with insuring Hitler’s defeat. For that accomplishment, if nothing else, he gets a free pass. He certainly wasn’t perfect, but he had what the Anglosphere most needed when it most counted. Case closed.
He was also a man of his times and should be judged in the context of those times – not ours. The same goes for the others on the list.
>>Without Churchill’s force of character this thread would be in German.<< Hmm. Russian maybe. . . but probably not German. It seemed unlikely that Sealion would materialize, even if the RAF had suffered significantly more damage. >>No other single individual had as much to do with insuring Hitler’s defeat. For that accomplishment, if nothing else, he gets a free pass.<< Does Stalin get a free pass? I suspect the individuals most responsible for Hitler's defeat were Hitler himself, followed by Stalin. >>He was also a man of his times and should be judged in the context of those times – not ours. The same goes for the others on the list.<< Then maybe we should be a little nicer when talking about Goering, Doernitz, etc. The Incredible Stalin rallied his people to provide the bulk of the manpower and machines (>2/3) needed to defeat Hitler. He also presided over the emergence of the Soviet Union as a great industrial power. Perhaps we should give him a pass on the mass murder — maybe it was a necessary component of victory?
T.J.Madison: I am sorry but I do not recognise Churchill in your description. I am afraid yours reads like good old anti-British propaganda a la Joseph Kennedy & sons. The Churchill I know about had more morals in his two fingers in the picture than all the Prime Ministers that followed after him put together. And that adds up only because I include Thatcher in that count…
Roosevelt made the same mistake and treated Stalin better than Churchill at Yalta. Unfortunately, he realised his error too late…
>>I am afraid yours reads like good old anti-British propaganda a la Joseph Kennedy & sons. << I'm unclear how my description of things is propaganda. All I'm doing is holding Churchill to the same (in this case, pretty low) standard as we would hold anyone else. (Mr. Hussein, for example.) My primary claim is that Churchill had command responsiblity for 300,000+ murders. This claim could be falsified in many ways: People could: 1. Show that those 300,000+ people were not, in fact, killed. 2. Show that those 300,000+ people were combatants in a more profound sense than, say, the WTC victims. 3. Show that Churchill didn't know about the policy involving intentional targeting of civilian areas. 4. Show that Churchill did know, but disapproved and took steps to stop/retarget the bombing missions. 5. Claim that collective punishment/total war is ethical/reasonable/necessary. People who do this shoudn't then complain when the enemies of our governments target us. I suspect Churchill is popular in England because he was willing to do whatever was necessary (including sacrifice large numbers of "enemy" civilians) to further the aim of "national greatness." In this respect he was much like many state leaders. If you kill a man, you're a murderer. Kill many, and you're a conqueror. Kill them all, you're a GOD. - Dave Mustaine
T.J.Madison: You are missing the point. Entirely.
I am sure you did not come up with those examples of Churchill’s ‘transgressions’ yourself. You must have read them somewhere and it is the source of your biased interpretation that I believe originated in the fiercely anti-British streak in American foreign policy before and during WWII.
You are not holding Churchill to any standard, you are merely listing a biased interpretation of certain events that have been debated ad nauseam both by ethicists and by historians.
The bombing of Dresden was might have been ethically dubious and so was the fire bombing of Tokyo but under no circumstances it makes those who were in command at the time morally equivalent to mass murders such as Hitler, Stalin or the now-deflated Mr Hussain.
The bombings of civilian areas was based on widespread acceptance of Guilio Douhet’s airpower theories by combatants on all sides. This was not because people were bloodthirsty but because they saw it as a more humane alternative to the grinder of WWI trench warfare. It did not work out that way but that’s hindsight for you. And it is against this background that civilian targets were bombed by all sides, it was ‘Damned if you do, Damned if you don’t’ or in other words a no-way-out ethical dilemma. Ultimately, Churchill was right when he said that the ultimate crime would be to lose the war.
You really do not understand the appeal Churchill holds for the likes of me and other Samizdatistas. We admire him almost despite the fact that he happened to be a ‘national’ leader (usually we do not have time for such figureheads.) Nothing to do with ‘national greatness’ or some such bullshit. All your simplistic approach to such complex issues does is allows you to be wrong and smug.
Drawing a comparison between Churchill and Stalin is a bit disingenuous – Churchill did not authorise the mass extermination of his own people – including the returning soldiers from the front. No one is saying he was perfect – far from it. However, he was not a mass murderer. Decisions made during wartime are made with the available intelligence and against the background of the time – hindsight isn’t avaliable. Also, those decisions are rarely simple. The criticisms being levelled here are tawdry.
IMPORTANT CAVEAT: By claiming that Churchill and Bomber Command were mass murderers, I am not implying that the boys at Sword and Gold beaches were in any way responsible for those murders, focused as they were on the noble task of defeating the National Socialist War Machine. Similarly, it’s just as unfair to hold the British people responsible for the firebombing as it would be to hold most of the firebombing victims responsible for the evils of National Socialism.
I’m one of those old-fashioned types who believes that since individual civilians can’t really control their government, they shouldn’t be held responsible for their government’s actions.
>>I am sure you did not come up with those examples of Churchill’s ‘transgressions’ yourself. You must have read them somewhere and it is the source of your biased interpretation that I believe originated in the fiercely anti-British streak in American foreign policy before and during WWII. << Well, lets's start with Rummel, the “democide” guy.
Rummel spent a great deal of time attempting to gauge the number of people murdered by governments during the twentieth century. Even a cursory assessment of the site will give a good idea of the amount of sanity lost during this research. What you should look at first are lines 182-216 of Table 13.1
>>The bombing of Dresden was might have been ethically dubious and so was the fire bombing of Tokyo but under no circumstances it makes those who were in command at the time morally equivalent to mass murders such as Hitler, Stalin or the now-deflated Mr Hussain. << You are quite correct. Hitler murdered ~20 million civilians, Stalin ~40 million civilians. (Let's not forget Mao with ~60 million civilians.) Mr. Hussein killed ~1 million civilians. This puts FDR and Churchill squarely in the amateur league, with less than 500,000 civilian kills each. Scale matters. >>However, he was not a mass murderer. Decisions made during wartime are made with the available intelligence and against the background of the time – hindsight isn’t avaliable. Also, those decisions are rarely simple. The criticisms being levelled here are tawdry.<< This was not a case of "lack of intelligence" or "hindsight." Terrorising the civilian population through mass murder was the GOAL of the policy. Here's some quotes from Arthur Harris on the subject: I do not believe that the whole of the remaining cities of Germany are worth the bones of one British Grenadier.
also:
“When pressed to use a higher proportion of incendiaries, he argued the case for high explosive, saying:
‘I do not agree with this policy. The moral effect of HE is vast. People can escape from fires, and the casualties on a solely fire raising raid would be as nothing. What we want to do in addition to the horrors of fire is to bring the masonry crashing down on top of the Boche, to kill Boche and to terrify Boche.'”
I’m sure the Osprey guys are all anti-British bigots who just made this stuff up.
Nah, T.J., your reasoning still doesn’t wash. “The Incredible Stalin,” as you referred to him, once praised Churchill as being the one individual who stood between Hitler and victory. There doesn’t seem to be much doubt that had the British Cabinet decided to do a deal with Hitler in 1940, and there were people who wanted to do exactly that (most notably Halifax, Chamberlain and Butler), Barbarossa would have succeeded. You can draw your own conclusions after that.
The most in-depth scholarly evaluation of Churchill took place in 1993. In “Churchill: A Major New Assessment of His Life in Peace and War,” edited by Robert Blake and Wm. Roger Louis, twenty of the world’s most renowned historians found that “Churchill emerges with both his integrity and his greatness intact.” Intelligent people can agree to disagree but, on this one, you’re quite simply wrong.
>>The Incredible Stalin,” as you referred to him, once praised Churchill as being the one individual who stood between Hitler and victory.<< Churchill's utility in defeating Hitler isn't at issue here, unless it can be shown that Churchill's kiling those 300,000+ civilians was necessary for the defeat of Hitler. I claim it was not, just as I would claim that the Red Army's mass raping and murdering of East Prussia was not necessary. Since mass killings of civilians are considered BY DEFAULT to be evil, in order to get a pass Churchill would have had to demonstrate beforehand that these tactics were likely to shorten the war sufficiently to save more people than it killed. To my knowledge this was not done. (In hindsight, access to German production records indicated that bombing raids actually INCREASED production due to increased morale, work ethic, etc.) I can simultaneously respect actions by Churchill that led to the defeat of Hitler while despising his role in the horrific area-bombing of residential areas. There's only a problem when the two sets of actions overlap -- and in this case they don't. I suspect Churchill, like most Allied leaders, didn't distinguish between the Nazi government, a monstrous evil, and the German population, one of the Nazi's primary victims.
T.J.,
Churchill’s prewar writings showed that he, like everyone else, believed that the damage that would be caused by aerial bombing would be far greater than it actually was. Britain’s traditional weapon of blockade was significantly weakened until 1941 by Soviet trade with Germany. Churchill, with the searing experience of the Dardanelles campaign of WWI behind him, knew that Germany would have to be much weaker before a cross-Channel amphibious assault could even be considered. With a leaky blockade and a British Army denuded of equipment at Dunkirk, he was left with only one weapon that even offered a hope of hurting the Germans enough to someday make an invasion possible–mass aerial bombing. He used it.
It should be noted that all the strategic bombing assessments conducted during the war gave aerial bombing far more credit for damage than the postwar examinations confirmed. It should also be noted that neither British nor American bombsights ever approached pinpoint accuracy. With the British bombing at night, their accuracy could have been expected to be quite poor (as it was). Nevertheless, when the bombs were on target, they did hurt. Even if the damage wasn’t what, and as much as, the British hoped, it was really all they had to hit back with.
German civilians died in British bombing raids as did British civilians in German bombing raids. Both were sad and wasteful. However, it must always be remembered that the Germans started this war, so the onus of responsibility rests with them. Churchill had no realistic offensive alternative other than bombing, and to decline to bomb was to allow Germany to consolidate her ill-gotten gains in peace and to become even stronger.
I contend that, in WWII, Churchill argued for bombing German cities because he believed that to be the best and most effective option he had for carrying the war to the enemy. I’ll also argue that his earlier very strong stand against General Dyer’s actions at Amritsar showed his strong dislike of actions that hurt civilians unnecessarily. He, and Britain, did what they had been forced to by the actions of Adolf Hitler.
One more thing: Churchill, representing the will of the British people, had bluntly stated that Britain would NEVER surrender. By definition it has to be assumed that he believed that bombing would shorten the war and eventually save lives because, without a German surrender, the war would NEVER end.
Given that bombing on the scale of WWII had never happened before (not even at Guernica), and that the forecasts of catastrophic damage from bombing were all but accepted fact by the world’s leading military theorists, he had legitimate reason to assume both before and during the war that it alone could force a German capitulation. Churchill’s actions in bombing Germany therefore meet your criteria for him getting a free pass.
He was a great man, T.J., quite probably the greatest war leader ever produced by the Anglosphere. By all the rules of war, Britain should never have fought on through 1940. The odds were too strongly against them. Without Churchill they wouldn’t have, and the consequences for the world would have been almost incalculably dire. He deserves every bit of the praise he has received and the West owes him a tremendous debt of gratitude.
“My personal economic activities were already deliberately difuse to avoid the clutches of my ex-wife (not children involved, fear not); avoidance of the taxman has been an added bonus.”
Oh, what a REAL man, you are. And yes, bonehead, you ARE hurting your kids.
Vindictive misogynist, no wonder why your smart wife left you.
I suppose she deserves nothing for being the ONLY good, decent parent your kids will EVER have? Grow up, boy.
“He was also a man of his times and should be judged in the context of those times – not ours. The same goes for the others on the list.”
He was quite imperfect. And his neglectful mother was the greatest whore of the 19th century. Typical Churchill, whoring themselves always to the highest bidder.
Didn’t Winston Churchill authorize the murder of american civilians to get the “neutral” americans into the war?
Oh, and his mother plus his ancestor the first Duke of Marlborough were two of the most self-serving, greedy whores their times ever knew.
The Churchills certainly know about being whores for their own gain
“I’m sure the Osprey guys are all anti-British bigots who just made this stuff up. ”
Oh, right, everybody ganging up on the poor brits. Or do brits prefer to be called american nowadays since they don’t seem to have any real national identity? LOL
Poor brits, they treat catholics like garbage, the colonials like shit, and everbody is on their poor case because smart people take their twisted view of their “glorious” history to task. LOL
Whatever.