Churchill's Gestapo Speech

….there can be no doubt that Socialism is inseparably interwoven with Totalitarianism and the abject worship of the State. …liberty, in all its forms is challenged by the fundamental conceptions of Socialism. …there is to be one State to which all are to be obedient in every act of their lives. This State is to be the arch-employer, the arch-planner, the arch-administrator and ruler, and the arch-caucus boss.
A Socialist State once thoroughly completed in all its details and aspects… could not afford opposition. Socialism is, in its essence, an attack upon the right of the ordinary man or woman to breathe freely without having a harsh, clumsy tyrannical hand clapped across their mouths and nostrils.
But I will go farther. I declare to you, from the bottom of my heart that no Socialist system can be established without a political police. Many of those who are advocating Socialism or voting Socialist today will be horrified at this idea. That is because they are shortsighted, that is because they do not see where their theories are leading them.

No Socialist Government conducting the entire life and industry of the country could afford to allow free, sharp, or violently-worded expressions of public discontent. They would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance. And this would nip opinion in the bud; it would stop criticism as it reared its head, and it would gather all the power to the supreme party and the party leaders, rising like stately pinnacles above their vast bureaucracies of Civil servants, no longer servants and no longer civil. And where would the ordinary simple folk — the common people, as they like to call them in America — where would they be, once this mighty organism had got them in its grip?

This notorious speech has cast a long shadow. I am a Labour voter at least in part because I grew up in a Labour-voting household. And my parents were labour voters at least in part because of this speech. And they weren't alone. My father was voting in his first UK general election in 1945 (he'd been in Germany for the 1935 election) was one of many who heard this speech and decided that — whatever else he was going to do — he wasn't going to vote for the party headed by the man who came out with this stuff. To someone like my father — who had lived in Hitler's Germany and seen book-burnings, and then returned to live in Britain under a coalition government with Clem Atlee as deputy PM — this kind of talk is not only profoundly offensive but also breathtakingly ignorant and stupid. You cannot possibly vote for anyone who comes out with this kind of drivel. Clem Atlee running the Gestapo? Get real; get a clue. There is a lot that can be said along the lines of Churchill The Great War Leader and much of it is true. But he was also an unrepentant imperialist and class warrior and this stuff we see above is not something anybody made him say. This is what he actually thought. And it is fair to judge him for it: you can fairly judge people by the choices they freely make. And this is what he chose to say. Admire the war leader by all means, but don't forget this speech. My father didn't. And we shouldn't.

Incredibly there are are still people who quote this text with approval. I found the full text on a site called hosted by an organisation with the innocent-sounding title ``The American Enterprise Institute''. One can only assume that none of them have been to Scandinavia, or enjoyed the benfits of socialised medicine. Churchill did not have a monopoly of any of the vices on display here, and the supply of dickheads is inexhaustible; some facts about the human condition never change.

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