Is there a more closed-minded creature in discovered space than a young left-winger in command of a Twitter account?
Last week, the British Conservative Party marked the anniversary of Winston Churchill’s death with a respectful, if slightly bland, tweet. It drew a response from a 24-year-old member of the Scottish Parliament called Ross Greer, who sits for the Green Party: “Once again for the people in the back: Churchill. Was. A. White. Supremacist. Mass. Murderer.”
In the controversy that followed, the TV presenter Piers Morgan, defending Churchill, became so angry that he achieved the extraordinary feat of making Greer look the more reasonable of the two. The Green politician’s provocative tweet thus ended up nudging the dial, however marginally, in an anti-Churchill direction.
It is true that Churchill is seen in a more nuanced way in his home country than he is in the United States. Americans, in my experience, tend to regard the cigar-chomping aristocrat with uncomplicated reverence — possibly because they never had to deal with his domestic policies. In Britain, while he is naturally popular — a TV poll recently proclaimed him the greatest Briton ever — he is also acknowledged to have made mistakes.
Unsurprisingly, it is the American view that dominates popular culture, largely for commercial reasons. Consider, to pluck an almost random example, the 2010 movie “The King’s Speech.” Although it was produced in Britain, it was made with an eye on the American market. It therefore had to tweak events so as to magnify Churchill’s importance (he was, in the late 1930s, seen as a washed-up, untrustworthy, and marginal figure) and iron out his mistakes (he is shown as being skeptical about the Nazi-leaning Edward VIII, when in reality he was wildly supportive).
Churchill’s elevation naturally makes him a target for the thrill-seeking Left. Any idiot, after all, can have a go at, say, Jefferson Davis or Rudyard Kipling. If you want real status in “woke” circles, you need to go after bigger game: Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Lord Nelson. Churchill is the biggest trophy of all: Criticizing him feels almost like lese-majeste.
The detractors don’t focus on Churchill’s actual flaws — of which, being human, he had his share. Man is fallen, and Churchill could be selfish, vain, inconsiderate, and sly. But pointing out his imperfections is no fun at all. The real kudos lies in shouting, “Racist!”
If I were trying to draw up a charge sheet against Churchill, I would include the following: his defection to and back from the Liberal Party for nakedly careerist reasons (“ratting and re-ratting” as he himself put it); his responsibility for the Dardanelles disaster of 1915, one of the most badly bungled operations in a conflict full of bungling; his decision, as chancellor of the exchequer in 1925, to rejoin the Gold Standard at the pre-war rate, thus precipitating a sharp recession; and the dismal failure of his second ministry after 1951, when he was no longer fully capable but wouldn’t stand aside.
Don’t get me wrong: A defense can be made of Churchill in each of these instances. But most of his biographers (who now number over 1,200) at least allow that there is a case to be made.
These, however, are not the grounds on which he is attacked by the likes of Greer. Rather, he is condemned in the lazy, predictable, and vicious manner that the contemporary Left has made its own.
Churchill wrote some nasty things about Muslims; he had little sympathy for the displaced indigenous populations of Australia and North America; he opposed Indian independence; he was rude about Gandhi, whom he described as “a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the East”. (Naturally, Churchill’s detractors rarely apply a similar test to Gandhi, who also reflected the prejudices of his generation — holding, for example, that black Africans were indolent.)
“The study of the past with one eye upon the present is the source of all sins and sophistries in history,” wrote the great Cambridge historian Herbert Butterfield. “It is the essence of what we mean by the word ‘unhistorical’.”
What is so striking here, though, is not the lack of perspective, but the sheer arrogance. When some self-righteous mediocrity condemns a past hero for holding the opinions of his age, he is really flaunting his own imagined moral superiority. He is saying, in effect, “I can spot something that the rest of you have overlooked, because I am so sensitive.”
Oh dear, Mr. Greer. You really think Churchill was a mass murdering white supremacist? Just wait till someone tells you about the guy he beat.
