Arthur Herman: How Churchill Dealt with Thugs
[Arthur Herman's "Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry That Destroyed An Empire and Forged Our Age," a Pulitzer Prize finalist, appears in paperback this month.]
PRESIDENT Obama's forays into history, especially European history, are interest ing but not always accurate. Who can forget his description during the presidential campaign of African-American GIs liberating Auschwitz? (It was the Russians.) Or his admission during his recent European trip that he didn't know how to translate a certain word into Austrian? (There is no "Austrian"; Austrians speak German.)
His evocation of Winston Churchill in his press conference last Wednesday took confusion to a new height. The president cited the great British prime minister in support of his ban on enhanced interrogation techniques at Gitmo and elsewhere, noting that Churchill never allowed torture of German detainees in World War II "even when London was being bombed to smithereens."
Strange words of praise from the president -- who in February ordered that Churchill's bust be removed from the Oval Office. (We're told this was because British authorities roughly interrogated Obama's Kenyan grandfather in the Mau Mau rebellion, during Churchill's second tour as prime minister. Not exactly an advertisement for "Winston Churchill, foe of torture.")
Apparently, Obama got his new, sunny view of Churchill not from reading the Churchill biography that Prime Minster Gordon Brown gave him last month but from Andrew Sullivan's blog. Maybe we should be grateful to Sullivan and Obama for their confusion, however, because Churchill's actual position on what is morally permitted against a nation's enemies illuminates much more about the relationship between torture and civilization than their fictitious version...
Read entire article at New York Post
PRESIDENT Obama's forays into history, especially European history, are interest ing but not always accurate. Who can forget his description during the presidential campaign of African-American GIs liberating Auschwitz? (It was the Russians.) Or his admission during his recent European trip that he didn't know how to translate a certain word into Austrian? (There is no "Austrian"; Austrians speak German.)
His evocation of Winston Churchill in his press conference last Wednesday took confusion to a new height. The president cited the great British prime minister in support of his ban on enhanced interrogation techniques at Gitmo and elsewhere, noting that Churchill never allowed torture of German detainees in World War II "even when London was being bombed to smithereens."
Strange words of praise from the president -- who in February ordered that Churchill's bust be removed from the Oval Office. (We're told this was because British authorities roughly interrogated Obama's Kenyan grandfather in the Mau Mau rebellion, during Churchill's second tour as prime minister. Not exactly an advertisement for "Winston Churchill, foe of torture.")
Apparently, Obama got his new, sunny view of Churchill not from reading the Churchill biography that Prime Minster Gordon Brown gave him last month but from Andrew Sullivan's blog. Maybe we should be grateful to Sullivan and Obama for their confusion, however, because Churchill's actual position on what is morally permitted against a nation's enemies illuminates much more about the relationship between torture and civilization than their fictitious version...