Joe Conason: Winston Churchill was a Bolshevik
[Joe Conason writes a weekly column for Salon and the New York Observer. His new book is "It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush." ]
Long before many of today’s frothing right-wing demagogues were born, American conservatives came to idolize Winston Churchill, the late Tory prime minister whose wartime leadership of the British people transformed into the living symbol of democracy armed. That reputation was cemented by his legendary Missouri speech in 1946 warning of the “Iron Curtain” drawn by the Soviet Communists across Eastern Europe. Indeed, journalists and bloggers on the right admire the old warhorse so much that he has even outpolled Ronald Reagan as their “Man of the Century.”
Yet by the standards of the present moment, as these same conservatives mobilize against health care reform to “stop socialism,” that same great man was actually a raving Bolshevik. For among his most enduring legacies was the founding and sustenance of the system that became the National Health Service. Arguably as much as any other British politician, it was Churchill who established “socialized medicine.”
Perhaps it is a forlorn hope that facts and history can make any impression on the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Chuck Grassley, or Bill Kristol, but let’s try anyway -- because it is worth understanding that despite the low quality of our own so-called conservatives, there was once another kind.
Churchill was renowned as a politician who put country and civilization above party. The government he led during World War II was a broad coalition of the British parties, from his own Conservatives to the democratic socialists of Labor. Midway through the war, Churchill’s government asked Sir William Beveridge, a Liberal Party social reformer and economist to study systems of social insurance that could reduce poverty, disease, unemployment and illiteracy in Britain.
In 1942, Beveridge issued an far-reaching report that proposed a national health service to provide medical care to every man, woman and child, regardless of means -- much as the coalition government had done during the medical emergency brought on by the German bombings of their cities, hospitals and clinics.
Although Churchill endorsed the idea of a national health system, his party lost the first post-war general election in 1945, partly because British voters didn’t trust the Tories to implement the Beveridge report. Instead a Labor government established universal care under the NHS in 1948.
Only three years later, the Tories returned to power with Churchill restored as prime minister. At that point, the NHS could still have been killed -- and many members of the Tory party, not to mention the British Medical Association, were eager to do so...
Read entire article at Salon
Long before many of today’s frothing right-wing demagogues were born, American conservatives came to idolize Winston Churchill, the late Tory prime minister whose wartime leadership of the British people transformed into the living symbol of democracy armed. That reputation was cemented by his legendary Missouri speech in 1946 warning of the “Iron Curtain” drawn by the Soviet Communists across Eastern Europe. Indeed, journalists and bloggers on the right admire the old warhorse so much that he has even outpolled Ronald Reagan as their “Man of the Century.”
Yet by the standards of the present moment, as these same conservatives mobilize against health care reform to “stop socialism,” that same great man was actually a raving Bolshevik. For among his most enduring legacies was the founding and sustenance of the system that became the National Health Service. Arguably as much as any other British politician, it was Churchill who established “socialized medicine.”
Perhaps it is a forlorn hope that facts and history can make any impression on the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Chuck Grassley, or Bill Kristol, but let’s try anyway -- because it is worth understanding that despite the low quality of our own so-called conservatives, there was once another kind.
Churchill was renowned as a politician who put country and civilization above party. The government he led during World War II was a broad coalition of the British parties, from his own Conservatives to the democratic socialists of Labor. Midway through the war, Churchill’s government asked Sir William Beveridge, a Liberal Party social reformer and economist to study systems of social insurance that could reduce poverty, disease, unemployment and illiteracy in Britain.
In 1942, Beveridge issued an far-reaching report that proposed a national health service to provide medical care to every man, woman and child, regardless of means -- much as the coalition government had done during the medical emergency brought on by the German bombings of their cities, hospitals and clinics.
Although Churchill endorsed the idea of a national health system, his party lost the first post-war general election in 1945, partly because British voters didn’t trust the Tories to implement the Beveridge report. Instead a Labor government established universal care under the NHS in 1948.
Only three years later, the Tories returned to power with Churchill restored as prime minister. At that point, the NHS could still have been killed -- and many members of the Tory party, not to mention the British Medical Association, were eager to do so...