The intellectual villainy of calling Winston Churchill a villain

The pause is what gets me. McDonnell’s response isn’t a gaffe or a mistaken answer. It’s a contemplated response. Something he truly believes. But what’s also striking is what element of Churchill’s history McDonnell uses to judge him. Not Churchill’s leadership during the evacuation from Dunkirk, or his sustaining of Britain’s morale during the darkest days of the war. No, McDonnell judges Churchill by the Tonypandy incident in 1910, when, as home secretary, Churchill deployed the army to support a police force in putting down rioting miners.

During the riots, one man was killed, and hundreds more (including dozens of police officers) were wounded. But that McDonnell defines Churchill by Tonypandy says much about McDonnell. Like Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader he serves, McDonnell is a Marxist fanatic and a fanatical idiot.

Don’t take my word for it — take history’s.

Churchill’s conduct at Tonypandy was at worst ill-judged. But Tonypandy’s relevance to defining Churchill and the life of the British nation is truly insignificant. This is not a complicated assertion. At no time did Tonypandy threaten Britain’s very existence. But for six years between 1939 and 1945, World War II did just that. Had Britain fallen to Hitler’s Nazism, its Jewish community would have been gassed, and British democracy would have been trammeled. No other British politician could have matched Churchill’s leadership in 1940-1941. And without him, Britain would have almost certainly fallen. But the story doesn’t end here.

Sadly, it isn’t McDonnell alone who feels this way about Churchill. Speaking later on Thursday, another Labour parliamentarian and close Corbyn ally, Chris Williamson, entered the debate. Williamson, who like many on the British Left happens to be a Putin poodle, was asked by the BBC’s Andrew Neil whether he agreed with McDonnell. Williamson said he did and then poured scorn on Churchill’s wartime leadership.

Churchill wasn’t instrumental in winning the war, Williamson claimed; he was simply “in the right place at the right time.” Churchill was just a politician who stole the credit for victory, you see?

Let’s be clear: This is idiocy from deepest bowels of the Left’s ahistorical cesspool. These Churchill illusionists find comrades on the British far-left, but they represent a marginal viewpoint in society. Most Britons recognize what made Churchill a true hero: the fact that he saved his nation, and several others besides, from tyranny and genocide. One might think that this would give McDonnell and Williamson at least a slight motivation to pay homage to the man. But to think that, one would first have to think. And this is not something that McDonnell and Williamson are very good at. But perhaps something else is going on here.

Perhaps, in the end, the real reason McDonnell and Co. don’t like Churchill isn’t about his union-busting. Perhaps it’s simply because the great man is their great antithesis in character, patriotism, and courage. Churchill, after all, left Parliament to serve in exceptionally dangerous fighting during World War I.

Then again, maybe it’s something simpler, like the fact that Churchill liked Jews. Because Team Corbyn really doesn’t like Jews, much like our own Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn.

To understand Churchill’s greatness, listen to his words below. It’s a recording, overlaid with music from the movie “Dunkirk,” of Churchill’s address to Parliament on June 4, 1940, just after the retreat from France. It was a very dark time and a time that saw Churchill at his best. With his traditional reference points to history (of Napoleon and “bitter weeds in England”, for example), Churchill kept his country going (note the ending “New World” hat tip to America).