Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - Was Churchill the Villain of WWII?

Sept. 8, 2024 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

09:57

Was Churchill the Villain of WWII?

Political totems are a curse as much as a blessing. Roundtable: https://lotuseaters.com/hangout-or-how-the-state-kills-dissidents-27-08-2024

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	During the French Revolution, Maximilien Robespierre gave a speech in which they used the term liberty egalité fraternity.
	He probably didn't coin it himself, but it gained great currency during the Revolution because it summarised the political impulses which underpinned the desires of the revolutionaries themselves.
	Liberty, equality and fraternity became the three driving forces of the Enlightenment.
	And these were not unreasonable things to desire either, if we take them at their best.
	Liberty is to have power over one's own life.
	Equality is to not be unjustly ranked beneath others.
	And fraternity is to belong to a group with common interests.
	These are all perfectly natural political requests which are almost always favourable and on their own are hard to object to.
	So why did it all go so wrong during the 20th century?
	The answer, I believe, is in the nature of ideology.
	Ideologies are powerful things and take a particular principle and magnify it out of all proportion until it becomes the only legitimate concern for an entire state and the justification for imperial action against its neighbours.
	This monomaniacal focus on only one aspect of the human experience is never good, as it blinds one to other equally important aspects.
	The 20th century was the century of ideology, and each of the great ideologies of the Enlightenment hinges on one of the core desires expressed by Robespierre.
	Liberalism represents the forces of liberty, communism represents the forces of equality, and fascism represents the forces of fraternity.
	World War II was a conflict between these three principles taken to their extreme.
	Each of the major factions embodied these values.
	The West embodied liberty, the Axis embodied fraternity, and the Soviets embodied equality.
	The defeat of the Axis in World War II led to what we call the post-war consensus, and the fall of the Soviet Union led to the international liberal order being the dominant ideological system leading into the 21st century.
	The fall of the Nazi regime had discredited fascism entirely as a political force, and for a time in the late 20th century, it seemed that the fall of the Soviet Union had discredited communism as well.
	One might think, then, that the triumph of liberalism would create free, pluralistic societies which had no great ideological rifts within them.
	And for a time, in the late 90s and early 2000s, that seemed to be the case.
	However, in the West, communism was actually alive and well within our liberal democracies, resentfully breeding in American academia.
	Communists of all stripes looked at the racial inequalities of the United States and worked tirelessly to use them to ideologically discredit liberalism as well, leading to the strange strain of social justice which permeates all of our institutions now in the form of wokeness.
	This creeping method of communisation gave the communists an outlet for their energies, slowly subverting liberalism little by little until liberalism came to resemble not the libertarian Lockean version of freedom, but the Rousseauian socialistic form.
	Liberty is no longer the driving force underpinning liberalism.
	Now, liberals are more concerned about equality, even though they don't really understand why and aren't entirely comfortable about it.
	For the most part, liberty seems to be broadly intact, although that is certainly something that is fraying at the edges as liberal democracies increasingly look more Soviet.
	And so to avoid addressing this issue, the modern liberal busies himself with trivial policies and the securing of a growing suite of rights of minority groups against the majority populace.
	The increasing atomisation of Western societies, combined with their artificial diversification through mass immigration, has naturally provoked the ire of those people concerned with fraternity.
	This has led to both the radical left and the radical right opposing Winston Churchill for different reasons.
	To the left, he represents the ancient underlying tribal nature of Western societies, still expressing themselves as white supremacy or racism.
	And to the radical right, he represents the liberal order, which has allowed itself to be communised and diversified.
	The critique from the right seems to hold true even if they have some of the facts wrong.
	Churchill was clearly one of the driving forces against fascism, and despite his opposition to communism, gave Eastern Europe over to the Soviets.
	It seems to be a valid complaint that he sacrificed the empire to stop Nazism and handed it over to the Americans.
	The critique from the left is also true on its own terms.
	Churchill was not some kind of anti-racist, multi-culti pluralist.
	He did not want immigration to Britain and thought that the Conservatives ought to have fought the 1955 election with the slogan, keep England white.
	But what are they both actually attacking when they are attacking Winston Churchill?
	I think Churchill is being used as a totem to represent the liberal West and overthrowing his mythos is the means by which the post-war liberal consensus can itself be deconstructed.
	Why wouldn't the fascist and communists not want to dethrone him?
	So to do this, each side has created their own new mythological account to demonise Churchill.
	On one side, he was an evil racist who sought to oppress all of the brown people of the earth and starve them out of existence.
	To the other, he was enthralled to international power and sacrificed the patrimony of the British people to create Israel.
	Neither is a completely accurate accounting of events to my mind.
	But if we de-ideologise the discussion and look beneath the ideological labels, then we can find whether each side has some kind of point that might be worth drawing out.
	Now, I'm not an expert, but it seems that Churchill does not neatly fit into any of the ideological categories of the 20th century.
	He was born during the Victorian era and seems to have inherited many of the hallmarks of that age.
	He seems not to have been an ideologue.
	Most of the people who love Churchill seem to view him in non-ideological terms, rather than because of an abstract set of rational ideals.
	To them, it was Churchill's tenacity against a mighty foe that allowed us to triumph over the Nazi war machine.
	Churchill therefore becomes synonymous with British patriotism and stands as a thematic representative of Britain, its empire, and our civilization writ large.
	To these people, condemning Churchill and Britain's part in World War II is the same as condemning Britain itself as a whole.
	Naturally, this is something they instinctively reject.
	The people who want equality look upon Churchill, Britain and its empire as irredeemably ethnocentric, colonialist and evil.
	From this, they wish to condemn Britain and all of its achievements and would ultimately be satisfied with the disestablishment of the British people themselves as a form of collective historical revenge, which is why they are so in favour of mass immigration.
	The people who want fraternity look upon Churchill as some kind of traitor who lent into the cultural compatibility of Britain with the liberal United States as a means of resisting the continental ideologies which, in their view, would have resisted the cultural dissolution that we witness around us today.
	Churchill's ethnocentrism ought to have included the people of Europe rather than just the Anglosphere, and to them he should have sided with the Nazis against the Communists.
	It is this betrayal, in their minds, which has led to the excesses of wokeness and mass immigration which is destroying the West.
	I think it's evident that Churchill did not agree with the ideologization of fraternity, even if, sentimentally, he was a fraternal person towards his own people.
	And I think it's also evident they would not be in favour of the communisation of our culture and would not have supported the direction the West has taken in the modern day.
	However, we can't deny that Churchill has become the cornerstone of the post-war moral order, one that itself is not perfect and has left us trapped in a position where we are constantly hunting for the Hitler behind every corner, as perverts debase our culture and patriots are rendered enemies of the state.
	Personally, I'm not interested at all in relitigating the rights and wrongs of Churchill's decisions.
	The 20th century is probably the worst century mankind has ever had, and we are trapped in the miasma of it.
	I see the events of World War II as just historic events rather than contemporary ones, and I would rather just step over them and discuss what is in front of us as it pertains to the people who are alive now.
	We do not actually need to take the 20th century as the defining moral event that will dictate what we do from now until the end of time.
	Churchill is obviously not the villain of World War II, but neither was he without his flaws, and his decisions during World War II are completely valid critique.
	But these discussions about 20th century politicians are starting to take on the aspect of a kind of political fanfiction that doesn't want to let the past be the past and seeks to reassemble it in the present.
	Anyway, those are just my thoughts on it.
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