Ecrits révisionnistes (1974-1998) BY ROBERT FAURISSON Chapter 14: WINSTON CHURCHILL AND THE BRITISH AS MASTERS OF WAR PROPAGANDA

During the first world war, the British had cynically exploited all the resources of propaganda based on wholly fictitious atrocity stories. During the second world war they remained true to form.

Severity reigns today with regard to the policy of appeasement adopted by Neville Chamberlain in dealing with the Germans, as opposed to the high esteem in which people hold, or pretend to hold, Winston Churchill for his determination in continuing the war. It is not yet certain that history, with time, will uphold this judgement. Successive discoveries concerning Churchills personality and wartime role bring up questions about some perhaps rather doubtful motives of that determination, along with questions about the fruits of his policies. At least Chamberlain had foreseen that even a British victory would entail disaster for his country, her empire, and for other victors as well. Churchill did not see this, or did not know how to see it. He promised blood, toil, tears, and sweat, to be followed by victory. He did not anticipate the bitter morrow of victory: the hastened disappearance of the empire which he held dear and the handing over of nearly half of Europe to Communist imperialism.

At a conference of his some years ago, David Irving, Churchills biographer, showed the illusory character of the motives to which Churchill was successively led to refer, first to launch his countrymen into the war, then to keep them in it. The business, if one may so term it, was carried out in four phases.

In the initial phase, Churchill assured the British that it was their obligation to go to the aid of a Poland fallen victim to Hitlers aggression but, two weeks into the war, this motive was nullified by the Soviet Unions aggression against the same ally.

In the next phase, he explained to his fellow subjects that they must carry on with the war in order to safeguard the British empire; he rejected Germany's repeated peace proposals; in May 1941, he had the peace emissary Rudolf Hess incarcerated; and, whereas Germany desired to see the British empire maintained, he chose to conclude an alliance with the worst possible enemy of that empire: the American Franklin Roosevelt. The second motive was thus nullified in its turn.

In a third phase, Churchill told the British that they were duty-bound to fight for Democracy, including its most paradoxical variety: the Soviet Socialist; he held that a second European front needed to be opened in order to relieve the strain on Stalin. This of course meant aiding a dictatorship which had assaulted Poland on 17 September 1939 and which was preparing a new conquest of that country.

As late as one month before the end of hostilities in Europe on 8 May 1945, British propaganda was generally lacking in coherence, while many British and American soldiers were aghast at discovering the degree to which their aviation had ravaged Germany.

It was then that suddenly, in April 1945, there occurred a miracle which enabled Churchill to find his fourth motive, the right one: the discovery of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp prompted him to assert that, if Britain had fought so hard, wreaking and enduring so much havoc over nearly six years, it was for no less a cause than that of civilisation itself. Assuredly, he had already held forth before his countrymen on more than one occasion, and in customary high-flown language, on Britain as the cradle of a civilisation now imperilled by the Teutonic hordes (the Huns, as he called them), but these oratorical devices no longer offered much return. The godsend was that discovery in April 1945 of a pestilence-ravaged camp: a boon for Churchill and for British propaganda.