Did Churchill say: “If the children of officials are not fighting, then this is not a war, but a business”?

Internet users from Russia and Ukraine actively use the quote credited to the British Prime Minister in the discussion of mobilization. We decided to check the correctness of such an attribution.

The phrase “if children of officials are not fighting, then this is not a war, but a business”, attributed to Winston Churchill, became popular in social networks in 2024. It can be found in X, Telegram, Facebook And "VKontakte", It spread widely in Tiktok And on YouTube. A quote is often used in comments on articles and posts on war and mobilization.

If there were a rating of historical personalities who are attributed to the most fictional quotes, Churchill, of course, would be one of its leaders. On the Winston Churchill Society, an international scientific organization that preserves and studies the heritage of politics, is even there selection The most popular phrases erroneously attributed by the British Prime Minister. Several such quotes earlier Disassembled "Checked."

One of the key partners of Winston Churchill Society - Churchill Archive Centre At the University of Cambridge. This archive contains more than 800,000 texts related to the politician: his personal documents, articles, diaries, correspondence, transcript of speeches, etc. All of them are digitized and available Online. “Verified” studied the texts stored in the archive, which contain the words War (“War”) and Business (“Business”). There were 150 of them, but not one of the corresponding fragments is even remotely similar to the quotation checked.

Search for Google and Yandex showed that the statement attributed to Churchill was not found on the Russian -speaking Internet until the beginning of 2024 (its earliest use, which discovered “verified”, Dated January 16). Without mentioning the British Prime Minister, a similar phrase appears in earlier publications-for example, in a post, published In May 2023 on Instagram. An anonymous user who writes a lot about various conspiracy theories posted in his profile pictures of children of Soviet statesmen and commented on them like this (author's spelling and punctuation are preserved): “If everyone, the children of the rulers and the children of the poor are fighting, then this is a righteous war. If the children of the rulers do not go to fight with the whole people, then this is not a war, this is a business. ” 

Later, this phrase was published, for example, in "VKontakte"And on forums. The authorship of the statement was attributed to a certain classics, and the phrase “Children of officials” appeared in one of these posts.

“Verified” studied the prevalence of the phrase “Children of officials do not fight” in the Russian -speaking segment of the network. IN National Corps of the Russian Language It is not found in principle. Search for Google and Yandex for different time intervals showed that this expression began to appear in social networks shortly after the start of Russia's full -scale invasion of Ukraine. This indirectly confirms the data of the Yandex Wordstat service, which records the frequency of various requests in Yandex, users began to look for the phrase “Children of officials are not fighting” in February-March 2022, but in the first months of the war, interest was low. The popularity of this request increased sharply after the start of partial mobilization in Russia in September 2022. 

Questions to representatives of the authorities who send to fight ordinary people and take care of the draft of their relatives to the army, quite often arise during armed conflicts. So, the phrase of the first Chechen war attributed to Russian General Alexander Lebed still remains popular: “Let me get an elite’s company from children, and the war will end every other day.” How It wrote “Checked”, the original statement of the military leader sounded a little different. In May 2023, the same thesis was expressed by the founder of the Wagner PMC Evgeny Prigozhin. In an interview with the political region to Konstantin Dolgov, he declared: “I recommend the elite of the Russian Federation: collect, bitch, your youths, send them to war, and when you go to the funeral, when you start to bury them, people will say:“ Now everything is fair. ” Similar arguments are voiced from time to time in public discussions and in Ukraine. For example, in February 2024, a sports commentator and ex-leader of the Inter television channel Roman Kademin published in Tiktok Appealin which he said: “To fight for what? Knowing how Ukraine is mired in corruption. Knowing that children, wives, families of state leaders, middle -abroad officials have long been abroad. Cially children are abroad. Fight for the fact that someone can leave calmly, and someone does not have such an opportunity at all? " The Kademine video gained more than 1 million views.

Thus, there is no evidence that the quote “if children of officials are not fighting, then this is not a war, but a business” belongs to Winston Churchill. This statement, apparently, was inspired by the statements of other famous people on the same topic, and later it was attributed to British policy to give greater authority.

Photo on the cover: Winston Churchill Society

Fake

What do our verdicts mean?

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