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→ Winston Churchill vs the Online Right
The online Right has found a curious new bogeyman: Winston Churchill. In a new Tucker Carlson interview, guest Darryl Cooper — the man behind the online account Martyr Made — has called Churchill “the chief villain of the Second World War” and blamed the man widely acclaimed as the “greatest Briton” for the conflict becoming “something other than an invasion of Poland”.
Tucker questions whether Winston Churchill was a hero or not pic.twitter.com/7nd7tKu2RU
— Jake Shields (@jakeshieldsajj) September 3, 2024
Conservatives were quick to criticise Cooper and Carlson, and one commentator called the statements “unbelievably uninformed”. However, several anonymous Right-wing accounts got on board with the idea, casting the PM as the figurehead of the foreign-policy interventionism the Right has recently come to loathe. Will Churchill’s German counterpart get a rebrand next?
→ UPenn faculty share salute to Hamas
The University of Pennsylvania’s Faculty for Justice in Palestine has shared a post on Instagram which praised Hamas’s 7 October attacks. “We salute our people’s steadfastness and resistance,” the post, initially shared jointly by several other pro-Palestine groups, read. It also called for a “global day of action” on 5 October, “to mark this year as one where our people stood tall against Zionism”.
Breaking: The UPenn Faculty for Justice in Palestine released a post preparing for Oct. 7th or “One Year of Resistance.” The faculty salute Hamas’s “steadfastness and resistance.” @penn, you have faculty openly glorifying terror, is this truly who you employ? pic.twitter.com/gIOfMqr088
— Eyal Yakoby (@EYakoby) September 3, 2024
FPJP, a group of lecturers, staff and graduate employees from the Ivy League university, formed earlier this year in response to Penn’s “one-sided” approach to the conflict. Cheers to viewpoint diversity.
→ Record economic pessimism among Brits
The British population is not feeling optimistic about the future of the country’s finances. A new poll from Gallup finds that Brits are the most depressed they have been about their economic futures since the financial crash in 2009. Just 19% in May/June said their local economy was improving, compared with 62% who said it was getting worse.
In Ireland, more than double that figure (42%) said their local economy was improving — and news today of an €8.6 billion Government surplus won’t do that figure any harm. More pangs of Bregret?
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SubscribeNext up. Germany was an innocent country that was forced to enter the war by Britain. Germany didn’t know where all the Jews went.
No point in comparing us to a piddling little economy such as Ireland. Can we have proper comparisons such as France and Germany which aren’t affected by one company’s offshore tax affairs (Amazon). Last year Ireland’s economy, which is small so should have room for growth, grew by 0.5%. Hardly stellar. The title should read “UK population realistic about economy’s prospects, Irish still living in fantasy-land”.
“British girls begging for drugs on the streets of London”: I expect that does happen, sometimes somewhere, but a mainstream narrative? I’ve lived in London for over 60 years and don’t recognise that as an obvious occurrence.
You can still read it div > p > a”>here.
I support nationalism and even fought to keep a park named for Lithuania to change something non historical BUT I also do not believe Europe can survive without Africa and Asia…so without Fair trade we will have to stay being brutal by stealing resources and denying immigration. For how long? Europeans are doing internally what they did to the world. We are paranoid!
Well if Lord Halifax had become leader he wanted to sign a peace deal. No war, no destruction of Britain as a global superpower, no loss of the Empire and we wouldn’t have machete fights and free Palestine marches in the capital every weekend. It would be nice if Churchill was as great as the persona but in reality his decisions helped destroy this country.
Quite the counterfactual you’ve lined up there. You assume that the Labour Party would’ve accepted Halifax (which I doubt), that Hitler would stick by any treaty (which I doubt) and that all would’ve been rosy following Hitler’s – probable – defeat by the USSR following his – inevitable – invasion in 1941. Whoever should shoulder blame for what this country has become, I don’t think it’s someone who held the reins of power in 1940.
Why do you think Hitler, after peace with Britain, would have been defeated by Russia? Germany would have had more troops, fewer distractions while Russia would not have got equipment, spy information and other support. The Germans very nearly got Moscow (critical railway hub) and Caucasus oilfields; without them Russia would have been stuffed.
I said probable, but outside of our inadvertent actions in Crete (and then the subsequent invasion of Yugoslavia) delaying the launch of Barbarossa we didn’t change the course of the eastern front that much. Stalin never believed Ultra and the one major piece of intelligence on Japanese intentions he got from his own source. Material is a maybe, but we could deliver enough. So it comes down to manpower and guns and tanks and they did it themselves. But that’s by the by. Neither if us know what would’ve happened, but Churchill saw the Nazi’s for what they were far more then Halifax and most of the Tory Party and knew that Hitler wouldn’t settle, it he got hegemony in Europe, for letting the Anglo Saxons do just what they wanted. But let’s continue to blame poor old Winston for what this country has become, just because he continued to do what was morally and politically right.
The fact a large element of todays Far Right sympathetic to German National Socialism of the 30s & 40s is not new News. What’s different is a few more think that’s ok and that spreads quicker in a social media era.
The challenge for the ‘normal’ Right is to make sure they clearly differentiate themselves from this malign trend. Some clearly struggle with that.
It may not say much for the American Old Right that its mouthpiece was now Tucker Carlson, but that tradition never has had much, if any, time for Winston Churchill, and nor did the British New Right when it was still New. Andrew Roberts devoted much of Eminent Churchillians to criticising Churchill’s Indian Summer Premiership of 1951 to 1955, holding it up as a period of betrayal on immigration and on relations with the trade unions, by a Government with scarcely a proper Tory in it, effectively a continuation of the Wartime Coalition. One may or may not agree with that view. But that was the view of the intellectual founders of the post-Thatcher Conservative Party.
In Great Contemporaries, published in 1937, two years after he had called Hitler’s achievements “among the most remarkable in the whole history of the world”, Churchill wrote that, “Those who have met Herr Hitler face to face in public business or on social terms have found a highly competent, cool, well-informed functionary with an agreeable manner, a disarming smile, and few have been unaffected by a subtle personal magnetism.” That passage was not removed from the book’s reprint in 1941. Will it still be there when Great Contemporaries was div > p:nth-of-type(3) > a”>reissued on 14 November? If not, why not?
In May 1940, Churchill had been all ready to give Gibraltar, Malta, Suez, Somaliland, Kenya and Uganda to Mussolini, whom he had called “the greatest living legislator”. Gibraltar is still under British sovereignty only because Labour won the 1945 Election. After Franco had refused to let Hitler use Spain in order to invade Gibraltar and thus seize control of the Straights, Churchill had promised him Gibraltar once the War was safely won. That would have been just another colonial transfer in those days. But Churchill lost at the ballot box. In the meantime div > p:nth-of-type(5) > a”>over one thousand Spanish Republicans had fought the Second World War in the British Army. Yes, a book that says something genuinely new about the War. Those are not published every week. But one has been published this week.
All sorts of things about Churchill are simply ignored. Gallipoli. The miners. The Suffragettes. The refusal to bomb the railway lines to Auschwitz. His dishonest and self-serving memoirs. The truth about the catastrophic humiliation at Dunkirk. The other one, at Singapore, for which Australians and New Zealanders have never forgiven Britain. The Lancastria. The men left behind in France. Both the fact and the sheer scale of his 1945 defeat while the War in the Far East was still going on, when Labour won half of his newly divided seat, and an Independent did very well in the other half after Labour and the Liberals had disgracefully refused to field candidates against him. His deselection by his local Conservative Association just before he died. And not least, his carve-up of Eastern Europe with Stalin, so very reminiscent of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. He borrowed the phrase “the Iron Curtain” from Goebbels and used it to mean exactly what Goebbels had meant by it. Broken by the War, the Soviet Union had neither the means nor the will to invade Western Europe, still less to cross either the Atlantic or the Pacific.
But the electorate was under no illusions while he was still alive. His image was booed and hissed when it appeared on newsreels. He led the Conservative Party into three General Elections, he lost the first two of them, and he only returned to office on the third occasion with the support of the National Liberals, having lost the popular vote. In the course of that Parliament, he had to be removed by his own party. It comfortably won the subsequent General Election. We have not forgotten the truth about him in the old mining areas. Nor have they in the places that he signed away to Stalin, including the country for whose freedom the War was fought. It was Churchill who coined the nickname “Uncle Joe” for Stalin.
Churchill wanted to transport the Jews to Palestine, since he saw them as not really British. He presided over the famine in Bengal. His views on race shocked his younger colleagues even in the Conservative Party of the 1950s. The famous dipping of the cranes for his coffin occurred only because the London dockers, who despised him, had been paid to do it. The London dockers, who had been as heavily Blitzed as anyone, anywhere. As for Churchill’s having “saved Britain”, it will be interesting to see whether anyone could continue to hold a serious academic or journalistic position in 10 years’ time and come out with that one. Churchill’s cult seems to have begun only once he was dead, or at least so old as to have been politically as good as dead. It never translated into votes.