Arguments Go Both Ways

Let us judge Churchill using the standards set by his own defenders.

I understand that some time has passed, and that we are already five or six news cycles past what I want to talk about here. Nonetheless, Tucker Carlson’s interview with Darryl Cooper has raised some questions regarding mainstream narratives and their durability. The interview has its own merits and demerits, but what I found far more interesting was the backlash, how people were practically up in arms over someone questioning what, from all outside observation, must be a holy and unalterable narrative. This could be due to careful curation of my social media, but I did not see much engagement from the Left on this issue. Rather, conservative influencers were most liberal in throwing around accusations of crypto-Nazism.

Obviously, a nerve was struck, and an apparent point needs to be addressed: Churchill’s legacy, held up by the enemies of tradition and liberty, must be revised.

Churchill’s Secular Sainthood

A large swathe of conservative, neoconservative, and post-liberal commentators, satirists, influencers, clergymen, and theologians were absolutely outraged in a manner unmatched concerning many other subjects in my memory. Given that fact, to characterize Churchill’s status in their minds as a secular saint seems to be quite fair, and it would explain the emotional backlash. To modern conservatives, as evidenced by their behavior, it seems that Churchill and his role in World War II constitute an integral historical narrative.

But historical narratives only remain relevant so long as they are useful. When the neoconservatives were ascendant, the narrative surrounding Churchill clearly played the part of justifying war and making it palatable to the minds of the population. This is not a new observation, and we still have articles from the era of neoconservative ascendancy which articulate this exact point:

It’s not a surprise that this neoconservative administration and its apologists in the tamed media laud and venerate Churchill, for he was as President Bush described him; a man who was synonymous with war. Churchill loved war. In 1925, he wrote, “The story of the human race is war.”

So Churchill is used by modern conservatism. He is the bellicose hero meant to bolster the notion that war is good and necessary, and not just any war, but the deadliest, most brutal, and most catastrophic war in the history of mankind. This makes revising his legacy a matter of countering war propaganda, a moral imperative if one opposes draining one’s home of men and money to benefit far-off, usually hostile nations.

War is not the only reason that Churchill’s legacy is used by modern conservatives. It was Churchill who, according to Ludwig von Mises, converted the British economy into a managerial apparatus of central planning and socialistic management:

When the war came to an end, Great Britain was a socialist commonwealth.

It is noteworthy to remember that British socialism was not an achievement of Mr. Attlee’s Labour Government, but of the war cabinet of Mr. Winston Churchill. What the Labour Party did was not the establishment of socialism in a free country, but retaining socialism as it had developed during the war and in the post-war period.

This may seem counterintuitive to those on the Right who find modern conservatism to be too “libertarian,” and thus opposed to principles like welfare and state intervention into the economy, but I think this would be a misreading of the neoconservatives and their version of the GOP that leads to unreal analyses and resulting predictions. The Churchill-liking conservative movement loves, as evidenced by their actions, radical economic interventions,¹ reckless spending, and trade regulation.² Given that Churchill centralized the British economy and greatly amplified the managerial state, Churchill’s narrative is thus kept alive to lend legitimacy to the managerial state as well as the warfare state. To revise Churchill’s legacy, then, is to threaten the legitimacy of both.

The main reason that Churchill’s war record and heroic persona are untouchable is his enemy. Therefore, for the rest of this article, I would like to compare Churchill to his enemy. While someone may shriek that I am here merely “pointing out hypocrisy,” I would like to remind that person that narratives are the foundation upon which regimes live or collapse, and that obviously false and unbelievable narratives are only temporarily sustained through unsustainable force and control.

Comparing Churchill to His Enemy

The first and foremost reason in the modern day for why Adolf Hitler needed to be destroyed is that Hitler was genocidal. Churchill, however, had been responsible in World War I for enacting a starvation blockade against the entirety of Germany that lasted until after the war’s end. Moreover, and although this is usually a subject broached only by leftists, Churchill’s actions in Bengal, even according to his defenders, exacerbated the famine. These are two areas in which Churchill took actions which directly aimed at reducing the populations of whole ethnicities. Should not Churchill as well have been destroyed?

One may claim that these were just the grim and unavoidable results of modern warfare (how ironic), but Hitler was also destroyed because he was particularly bloody. After all, he called for and ordered the destruction of entire towns full of innocent civilians. However, Churchill was the one responsible for appointing Arthur Harris to his position and tasking him with making his atrocious bombing runs more efficient. This is what led to the bloody butchering of Dresden, among other key German cities full of innocent civilians.

Maybe it was really because of his racism that Hitler needed to be destroyed. To this, I will quote Churchill:

I believe that as civilized nations become more powerful they will get more ruthless, and the time will come when the world will impatiently bear the existence of great barbaric nations who may at any time arm themselves and menace civilized nations. I believe in the ultimate partition of China — I mean ultimate. I hope we shall not have to do it in our day. The Aryan stock is bound to triumph.

Perhaps the more theologically minded believe that the real airtight reason that Hitler needed to be destroyed was his subversion of Christianity. However, the conservative clergy especially should understand that what most threatened Christianity in the West towards the end of the last century was not anything from the mid-century German state church, but the religion of tolerance and self-help, the idea that one is spiritually sound so long as he does good, which has sought to supplant Christianity. This is what Churchill believed. According to the works of Ben R. Crenshaw, Churchill

eventually settled upon what he called “The Religion of Healthy-Mindedness.” Churchill explained that “if you tried your best to live an honourable life and did your duty and were faithful to friends and not unkind to the weak and poor, it did not matter much what you believed or disbelieved. All would come out right.”

Still some may try to offer a right-wing justification for the destruction of Hitler, claiming that he should have been destroyed because he was socialistic and anti-traditional. To the former criticism, as was mentioned above by Mises, it was Churchill’s government that was responsible for centrally planning the British economy and introducing the welfare state. To the latter, it was the division of Germany under Allied and Soviet occupation that ensured the permanent death of traditional German institutions like the monarchy and aristocracy.

The last disconnect that I wish to write about is the notion that Churchill rationally responded to Germany with total and uncompromising destruction because Britain’s allies on the continent were being invaded by Germany. This line of reasoning is never carried to the end of the war, however. Churchill ultimately surrendered his allies in Eastern Europe, particularly Poland, to the Soviet Union. For some reason, Churchill’s defense of Britain’s allies in the face of German aggression is a virtue, but his inability to secure their independence from the Soviet Union is a non-factor. Something doesn’t add up, and the whole narrative seems like a naked attempt to justify total war and mass-slaughter perpetrated by the “good guys.”

Disposing the Confused Narrative of the Twentieth Century

Given the standards and arguments of Churchill’s modern defenders, Churchill himself should have been totally destroyed, but such a statement is almost unthinkable for most people. Speaking it in public would be out of the question for most audiences. Yet these critiques are derived only using the standards set by Churchill’s own defenders, and the highlighted contradictions are fairly obvious. Why haven’t more historians spoken out about this?

Americans are taught in school that blasphemy laws are a historical phenomenon, that the concept has been done away with in modern society. The backlash against Carlson and Cooper only seems to prove that formal blasphemy was abolished. Contradicting the foundational myth of modern America — i.e., the approved narrative surrounding the gruesome bloodbath of World War II — is still very blasphemous. It threatens the legitimacy of neocons, war profiteers, regime academics, and many more powerful groups. But if opposing propaganda designed to justify the mass-killing of innocents makes us blasphemers, then let us be proudly guilty of the sin while we sap the legitimacy of the regime.

1. Nixon’s price controls and Bush’s subsidizing of homeownership both come to mind. The GOP also ran Mitt Romney in 2012, notable for championing “Romneycare.” His father, George Romney, was part of the moderate wing of the GOP. Under Eisenhower and in later years, George Romney had advocated for embracing major elements of the New Deal, as evidenced by his strong support for labor unions. Barry Goldwater, often thought to be one of the most libertarian senators in U.S. history, supported the 1957 and 1960 Civil Rights Acts, which were economic interventions as well as societal.

2. NAFTA, in classic legislative fashion, is the opposite of its name. What right-wingers obscure by calling it “neoliberal” and a capitalistic “free trade agreement” subsidized the outsourcing of manufacturing, not through tariff reductions, but through its provisions. More to this point, this is partly why the Libertarian movement at the time found common cause with Paleoconservatives in opposing the law.