In this final part of my series on the function of the myth of World War Two, I examine the curious cult of Churchill. Why do we have Forever World War Two?
It not only provides a Current Hitler and a case for war - but it is a dangerous myth.
The religion of World War Two persists today because it serves a purpose to power. It glorifies an increasingly repressive ideology of destructive fantasies, concealing the genuine grievances which may lead us into a nightmare for which no one has voted.
You can read part one here, and part two is here.
GOING TO CHURCHILL
Churchill’s ghost is invoked in every war as an immediate cipher for a just war against the latest incarnation of Hitler. As we saw in part two, Churchill said there was no such thing as public opinion - only “published opinion”.
FOREVER WORLD WAR TWO
Published opinion frames modern politicians as either Hitler or Churchill. This is usually done when they are involved in wars.
Of course, Putin is the Current Hitler. Before him came Trump, Orban and Matteo Salvini. Even the British Marxist Jeremy Corbyn has been Hitlerised.
I recorded some of the most notable Hitlers of the Year in this piece, in a long list which included Thomas the Fascist Tank Engine, and Ryder of Paw Patrol.
Not to be outdone, in 2017 Ron Rosenbaum wrote in the Los Angeles Review of Books that
“Trump’s playbook is Mein Kampf”.
On the other hand, Benjamin Netanyahu has been called “Churchillian” - as he has valiantly refused the policies of “appeasement” which threaten the outbreak of peace.
Tony Blair was compared to Churchill for his heroic and utterly unprompted support for the second Iraq War.
George W Bush was also compared to Churchill following the September 11th attacks, which saw the US President unleash a spasm of international warmongering alongside an aggressive national security state which monitors and censors its own population.
Bush himself said in 2022 that President Zelensky is the “Churchill of our time” - for “standing up to Putin’s barbarism and thuggery”.
Boris Johnson has been called both. He is the first Winston Hitler of British Politics. His main achievement beyond imitating Churchill as he locked down Britain under covid was to sabotage a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine.
Since the end of world war two there have been wars without end. The revenant ghosts of Churchill and Hitler are raised to entertain the population as the feast begins anew.
Warmongers are Churchill, who require published opinion to muster support.
Anyone who speaks against this is Hitler, including those who insist on national borders, pro-family policies, or pointing out the insanity of the Liberal position generally. Of course, these positions are popular - because they make sense without a barrage of propaganda.
This means they are populist - which is a Bad Thing. War, on the other hand, is not. Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger’s recent work shows how the coding of populist = Hitler intensified with Trump’s election victory, with Big Tech platforms such as Facebook, Google and Twitter conspiring to prosecute a taxpayer-funded “digital McCarthyism”.
Critics of covid policies and of the 2020 US election were targeted along with anyone calling for the investigation of Hunter Biden’s laptop - or opposing the war in Ukraine.
As Assange himself pointed out over Afghanistan, “the goal is an endless war, not a successful war”
“To wash out the tax bases of the US and Europe”.
It is an obvious fact that most “aid” never leaves the donor nation, being returned to its political class by the beneficiaries in the permanent war industry.
Trump is not a perfect man. He has claimed he will stop the “forever wars”.
What does it mean to make this man Hitler?
PERMANENT LOSS OF FACE
Neither the US military nor that of Britain bears any resemblance to that of the 1990s - far less to that of the 1940s.
Policies of progress have destroyed morale and diminished warfighting capability. The nations they once were have disappeared.
The goal is not winning - but “growth”.
The war industry is a debt fuelled model requiring national destruction to perpetuate itself, as with neoliberal economics more generally.
War is a soulless business animated by the myths of the 20th century.
These myths compensate us with lullabies about past glories, and hypnotise us into an unending Churchillian/Hiterlian psychodrama which fondly recalls a past that never took place to legitimise wars we should never have started.
Now an increasing effort is being made to improve surveillance and censorship in the West, and to criminalise journalism investigating policies of war and of national suicide.
The legal system is used to protect mass migration and the attendant 160 billion dollar human trafficking industry, as it also seeks to illegalise the political opposition in the US and in Germany.
The liberal establishment is out of ideas and its myths are exhausted. It is no longer liberal, nor democratic. The house magazine of the Council on Foreign Relations is openly entertaining the suspension of liberties to defend them.
This piece invokes Hitler, Churchill and the geopolitical wisdom of Joe Biden to argue how the US can preserve its liberal values in the “amorality of increasing war”.
I include it here as it crystallises the use of myth in the present moment, which serves to justify a politics with no legitimacy outside the framework of an imaginary past.
The article does not pause to examine how this “age of amorality” may have arisen, as the US stands behind the commission of an active genocide, its borders open, following decades of permanent war and the aggressive promotion of grave moral evil at home.
Inasmuch as it repeats tropes of democratic freedom and champions a senile man’s strategic acumen it functions as a perfect illustration of the grotesque comedy that is contemporary Western discourse.
For some background on propaganda and the irrational fantasies of the rationalists, see here:
It would be funny were it not so evil. The US and its empire are Godless, their prosperity the ruin of nations.
As its tide of fantasy recedes, what lay beneath is gradually revealed. Even its mouthpieces now find themselves at a loss to defend the Liberal idea without openly endorsing rapid and permanent civilisational decline.
THE PRICE OF “FREEDOM”
Thus, the world has been treated to the spectacle of John Stewart saying the price of freedom is to live in squalor.
He attacked Tucker Carlson’s report which showed some of the beauty and order of Putin/Hitler’s Russia.
"The difference between our urinal-caked subways and your candelabra'd beautiful subways is the literal price of freedom,"
- Stewart said, before accusing Carlson of supporting Russia because it's "unwoke."
"The old civilizational battle was communism vs capitalism, that's what drove the world since World War II," he said.
"Russia was the enemy then, but now they think the battle is woke versus unwoke. In that fight, Putin is an ally to the right.
"He's their friend. Unfortunately, he is also a brutal and ruthless dictator."
The dangers of equating dictatorship with the absence of chaos are lost on a man whose argument from history deserves examination.
Carlson’s video can be seen here. He has subsequently revealed that Boris “Churchill” Johnson demanded one million dollars for an interview - to defend his decision to sabotage the peace deal between Russia and Ukraine in April 2022.
HISTORICAL GRIEVANCE
Why does the US Department of State still hate Russia, now it is neither Godless nor Communist? Why must it be the “enemy”?
The US Department of State, for whom Stewart speaks here, is stocked with people whose parents and grandparents nurse historical ethnic grievances against Russia.
This is an argument made very well by Irving Kristol1, who - like many in the State Department - was himself the child of Jewish emigres from the former Russian empire.
This is a seldom published but obvious fact. It is a simpler explanation for the hatred of Russia than some alliance against the “anti-woke” right. A war against Russia is not in the national interest of the United States, nor that of the UK or Germany.
This example illustrates another vital function of the “myth takes” published in the manufacture of public opinion.
They replace real explanations with make-belief.
Stewart exemplifies a media which refuses to inform its public, and instead seeks to sell the terrible products of Liberalism as the best of all possible worlds.
That world - our world - is visibly falling apart.
World War Worship is a form of palliative care for the loss of power, prestige and order which has resulted from the wars themselves.
It serves not only as compensation for the additional loss of the land we grew up in, but stokes an appetite for ever more atrocity and destruction.
Each new war is an act of devotion to these delusions of glory.
Of course, the war cult is another attempt to fill the space vacated by God, whose loss leaves man so desperate for moral purpose that he will seek it in obscenity.
You can read more about the conflict between your reality and the fantasies of your rulers here:
There is nothing much remaining of the free world beyond published opinion, which is the reason it is the one thing that is vigorously policed these days.
This results in a child’s idea of reality which excludes from mention the actual from the “factual”. As we can see, these alibis are unreliable at best, and their function is to comfort those most disturbed by the possible outbreak of peace.
As Assange said,
‘If we have a good media environment, then we will also have a peaceful environment.’
It is not laws, however, that make men good.
Evil is a choice, and one whose cost/benefit analysis can only be understood on a scale far greater than the life of the self and its horizons.
Kristol argued that the older tyrannies decried by the Jews, such as that they fled in the Russian Empire, would be replaced by a liberal one of their own making. His argument is summarised here, in “Irving Kristol, Jewish Realist”.
Among Kristol’s many informative examinations of the Jewish experience in America is The Future of American Jewry (1991), in which he investigates the origins of secular liberal Jewish politics in the USA and its future.
His critique, as usual, reaches far beyond stereotype and into the deeper social, historical and technological processes which have combined with the loss of God to produce “modern” and indeed “woke” culture:
“What, specifically, were (and are) the teachings of this new philosophical-spiritual impulse? They can be summed up in one phrase: “Man makes himself.”
That is to say, the universe is bereft of transcendental meaning, it has no inherent teleology, and it is within the power of humanity to comprehend natural phenomena and to control and manipulate them so as to improve the human estate.
Creativity, once a divine prerogative, becomes a distinctly human one. It is in this context that the modern idea of progress is born, and the modern reality of “progressive” societies takes shape.
These are societies dominated, not by tradition, but by a spirit of what F. A. Hayek calls “constructivism”—the self-confident application of rationality to all human problems, individual and social alike.”
I will look at Kristol’s twentieth century heresies in a future post.
Why does the US Department of State still hate Russia, now it is neither Godless nor Communist? Why must it be the “enemy”?
Indeed!
It infuriates me, all this fake hatred aimed at Russia and Putin whilst welcoming all the Oligarchs who stole what they could and then fled into the arms of the western banks.
It's clear that Putin rather expected to be asked to join the western club and was clearly a bit taken aback at being treated like the New Hitler. Huge missed opportunity.
As for Boris - the only thing he has in common with Churchill is his weight! At least Churchill had an actual enemy who was busy rolling his tanks around Europe.
Tucker Carlson was right to be impressed with how clean and pleasant Russia looked - it's nobody's business but Russia's how they run their country, if they don't like the government they will sort it out for themselves at some point. (the few Russians and Ukrainians I have met have always been content with their strongman-style of government!)
Blogging technique note: When including links for posterity, always link to archived versions. 80% of my links are dead now because the half-life of internet content is about 5 years, including prestige press articles.