Layout 8 - Winston Churchill

the 1932 collection Thoughts and Adventures. Finally, in
1948, Churchill quoted it in The Gathering Storm, volume
one of his memoirs, The Second World War, where he
thus had the satisfaction of saying, though not in these
words, “I told you so.”
But that could only have been cold comfort. His
essay had done nothing to avert the dangers it warned
against. They had increased.
There are several reasons why this essay, like
many of its kind, was widely read, then ignored. One
problem is its hyperbole, its exaggeration. In it Churchill
alludes, quite correctly, and if
anything with understatement,
to the horrors just past of
World War I. Readers in the
1920s were all too familiar
with the gruesome features of
that war, its unprecedented destructiveness.
No exaggeration
there. Nor is there any exaggeration
in the essay’s account of
what 1919 would have been
like, had the war continued for
another year. On that basis
readers could only accept its
forecast of even greater horrors
to be unleashed in another
great war. As Churchill warms
to that topic, he eloquently and
accurately sketches the possibilities
of warfare via aerial assault,
bigger and better bombs, other
explosives, poison gas, other
chemical methods of annihilation,
and biological warfare.
Well-informed readers,
moreover, could hardly disagree
with Churchill’s assessment that by the outcome of
World War I “the causes of war have been in no way removed;
indeed they are in some respects aggravated by
the so-called Peace Treaties and the reaction following
therefrom.” 3 Within the context of all this, Churchill
could also plausibly make the point that “It is probable—
nay certain—that among the means which will next time
be at their disposal will be agencies and processes of destruction
wholesale, unlimited, and perhaps, once
launched, uncontrollable” (T&A, 262).
In retrospect, this seems even more accurate and
dire than it could have in the 1920s. Where the essay
leaps into hyperbole—or, more precisely, what must have
seemed in the 1920s hyperbole to be discounted—is in
its insistence that “Mankind....has got into its hands for
the first time the tools by which it can unfailingly accomplish
its own extermination” (T&A, 262).
Horrific as were the First and even Second
World Wars, they did not in fact threaten the extermination
of the human race. It is only now, almost a century
after its first publication, that Churchill’s hyperbole in
“Shall We All Commit Suicide” has receded to simple
(and terrifying) fact.
Even so, neither this essay, nor so far as I know
any other source, provides certain guidance on how to
solve the problem to which it points. Churchill’s essay
rather unpersuasively and
lamely concludes by urging
support for the League of Nations
as the only means “to
safety and salvation” for “all
who wish to spare their children
torments and disasters
compared with which those
we have suffered will be but a
pale preliminary” (T&A,
266). As he wrote those
words, the League of Nations
was well on its way to failure.
I doubt that even the warmest
supporters now of the United
Nations see it as a sure shield
against atomic annihilation.
In “Shall We All Commit
Suicide,” as so often elsewhere,
we have Churchill as
Cassandra. One of his frequent
roles in life—a tragic
role—was to provide warnings
that were ignored or,
what amounts to the same
thing, to see more clearly
than others impending disasters he could not prevent or,
in some cases, nobody could prevent.
It is true that he not only foretold the menace of
Nazi Germany, Cassandra-like to little avail, but, as
Prime Minister, was instrumental in warding it off in
1940, and finally helping to defeat it in collaboration
with Russia and the United States. This was a triumph.
For most people it would have been enough to mark
their life as a total success. But in Churchill’s eyes it was
only a prelude to another tragedy: the Cold War, as he
signaled by calling the last volume of his war memoirs
Triumph and Tragedy.
He foresaw but could not avert the loss of India
and the subsequent collapse of the British Empire that he
tried so hard to preserve. During his second term as >>
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