The Fate of the Free World Depends Upon You Liking Winston Churchill

The Hero Myths of World War II Sustain the Anglo-American Empire

Since last September, when Martyr Made podcaster Darryl Cooper tentatively suggested that Winston Churchill be considered “the villain” of World War II, a certain contingent of American and British public intellectuals has waged a furious and perhaps desperate campaign to discredit Cooper and the very idea of disliking the iconic British leader. On podcasts, cable news shows, and in print, such academic and journalistic luminaries as Douglas Murray, Niall Ferguson, Victor Davis Hanson, Konstantin Kisin, the pop historian Andrew Roberts, and especially Bari Weiss and her well-funded and ever-growing Free Press, have flooded both alternative and legacy media spaces with lengthy attempts to shame anyone who does not accept the official Western moral lesson of the war, which is that Great Britain and the United States were good, the Germans and the Japanese were bad, and our leaders were simply great.

But why have these thinkers been so anxiously concerned about defending the most celebrated hero of the twentieth century from the utterances of a podcaster and amateur historian they hadn’t previously heard of? It is no coincidence that the most aggressive partisans of the British Bulldog have also been the most militant supporters of both the direct and proxy wars waged by the U.S. and U.K. against Serbia, Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Russia, Palestine, and various African countries yet to be specified by the Defense Department.

What this latest attempt to shore up the Western public’s perception of the Second World War demonstrates is the central importance of positive moral valuations of the Allies for the maintenance and expansion of the post-war Anglo-American empire.

If Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt weren’t the heroes of the war, there is no justification for the armed campaigns their countries have subsequently waged and the global governing regime they created.

Typically, the left in the U.K. and America has attempted to discredit Churchill by pointing to his racism, which was prodigious and contributed to many of Britain’s most brutal impositions of violence upon the restive, anti-colonial populations of India, Ireland, and Africa. Yet while describing Churchill as a white-supremacist genocidal monster, leftist commentators generally accept the claim that Churchill helped save the world from Nazi tyranny.

Winston Churchill in the uniform of the Queens Own Oxfordshire Hussars, taking part in military exercises on Salisbury Plain, 1912.

Even leading left-wing Churchill critics such as Tariq Ali agree with Churchill supporters that the man’s greatest virtue was that he “chose to fight Hitler” while the rest of the Western world slept.

It’s certainly true that Churchill was among the very first Western political leaders to call for war with Germany, which he did in both the 1910s and throughout the 1930s. What has now become a common opinion among academic historians of the Third Reich is that Churchill’s belligerence toward Germany, which he shared with Franklin Roosevelt, was entirely unnecessary to stop the advance of Nazism. Moreover, many historians other than Darryl Cooper have concluded that it was the interventions of the U.S. and U.K. against Germany that expanded the conflict in Europe from a limited regional struggle into a world war that killed tens of millions.

Following are only the most salient reasons Churchill, as well as Roosevelt (who will be addressed in a future post), should be considered if not the villains, at least the principal perpetrators of the greatest catastrophe in human history.

Even uncritical hagiographers such as Roberts readily acknowledge that Churchill was a zealous proponent of the British Empire, viewing it as an extension of what he called “Anglo-Saxon superiority.” Throughout his career, he advocated for maintaining and expanding the Crown’s imperial control, from his early days as a soldier and journalist in India, Sudan, and South Africa to his later positions in the British government. As Colonial Secretary in the early 1920s he oversaw British policies in the Middle East and Ireland, where he visited terror upon the natives who resisted British domination. His opposition to Indian independence reflected his belief in British superiority and the empire’s civilizing mission. During World War II, his policies, like diverting food supplies from India during the 1943 Bengal famine, prioritized British war needs over colonial subjects, contributing to millions of deaths.

Churchill inspects a Tommy gun during his visit to Hartlepool, July 1940

Churchill’s imperialist commitment explains both his brutality toward anti-colonial subjects and his war-making against Germany, whose presence in central Europe threatened Britain’s dominance on the continent.

From nearly the moment Hitler took power in 1933, Churchill issued speech after speech calling for British rearmament and “readiness” to go to war with Germany, while vastly exaggerating the strength of the German military and fabricating Hitler’s intentions to expand outside eastern Europe.

Despite the protestations of Churchill’s current defenders, there is now general agreement among academic scholars of the Third Reich that Hitler’s objective of conquest concerned only what he believed to be “Greater Germany”— portions of Poland, Czechoslovakia, western Russia, and the Rhineland, which had been taken by the Allies after the First World War. It is also a noncontroversial fact that until hostilities began in 1939, Hitler desired to establish a formal alliance with Britain and the United States that would govern the Atlantic world. For these reasons, his Wehrmacht possessed no landing craft, troop transport ships, or long-range bombers, making any trans-ocean or cross-Channel invasions physically impossible. Hitler had no intention of conquering Britain or America and no means of achieving it.

Churchill's determination to go to war against Germany was unwavering. In the summer of 1939 as a Member of Parliament he persuaded Neville Chamberlain’s government, with Roosevelt’s backing, to urge the Polish government to reject Hitler’s multiple settlement offers. He assured Poland that if German forces crossed into their territory, “His Majesty’s Government and the French Government would promptly provide all possible support.” Supporters of Churchill, such as Roberts, acknowledge that this promise of security to Poland was essentially a “trip-wire,” intentionally designed to lead Germany to formally initiate the conflict.

Unfortunately for Hitler and for the millions of German, Polish and especially Jewish people under his control, Churchill and his fast ally Franklin Roosevelt had long committed themselves to the annihilation of the German regime and in September of 1939 saw no reason to alter their course.

At Churchill’s urging, Britain’s first military action was the establishment of a naval blockade of Germany. The Royal Navy with the assistance of U.S. naval vessels would stop any ship from entering or leaving Germany, as Churchill had wanted for many years. The evacuation of Jews from Hitler’s regime was no longer possible. Now, even those who could obtain visas would have to find their way out over land, with almost no way to escape continental Europe.

Churchill, with the assistance of Roosevelt, trapped the Jews inside the Third Reich then proceeded to set it on fire.

For a complete alternative history of Churchill, Roosevelt, and the Second World War, see the Unregistered Academy course World War II: The Great Blowback.