[Marxism] Churchill for dummies

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Churchill for Dummies

Winston S. Churchill is the hero of George W. Bush and the neocons. But, 
says Michael Lind, they know very little about the great wartime leader. 
If they did, they’d be horrified.
By Michael Lind
Whitehead Senior Fellow

The Spectator (U.K.)
April 24, 2004

(clip)

The peculiar neocon cult of Churchill has several sources. One is the 
veneration by the neocons of Leo Strauss, the German-Jewish émigré 
philosopher who taught at the University of Chicago and indoctrinated 
many leading neocon thinkers, including the late Allan Bloom. In 
declaring Churchill the ‘Man of the Century’, the Weekly Standard 
piously reprinted remarks that Strauss made at the time of Churchill’s 
death in 1965. Strauss’s Churchill was Hitler’s nemesis: ‘The contrast 
between the indomitable and magnanimous statesman and the insane tyrant 
— this spectacle in its clear simplicity was one of the greatest lessons 
which men can learn, at any time.’

Straussians like Leon Kass, the president of Bush’s bioethics panel, are 
opposed not only to reproductive cloning, but also to therapeutic 
cloning, embryonic stem-cell research and the well established practice 
of in vitro fertilisation. In an essay entitled ‘Can There Be Another 
Winston Churchill?’, published in 1981, the Straussian scholar Harry V. 
Jaffa claimed that Churchill would have opposed modern biotechnology: 
‘Churchill’s most formative years were spent during the heyday of what 
we might call the evolutionary enlightenment. This was the period when 
the progress of Science, and in particular biological Science, gave rise 
to widespread hopes that the human species itself might deliberately be 
evolved ...The fittest might be planned in laboratories, and the test of 
their fitness would be their faculty for the harmonious and simultaneous 
enjoyment of all the objects of their desires.’ Churchill, Jaffa tells 
us, ‘implied that this state of perfect freedom, were it possible, would 
be a state of perfect misery’.

Jaffa doesn’t quote Churchill on this subject — possibly because, 
contrary to his implication, Churchill, unlike today’s American neocons, 
was an enthusiastic supporter of eugenics, who told Asquith in 1910, 
‘The unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the feeble-minded and 
insane classes, coupled as it is with a steady restriction among the 
thrifty, energetic and superior stocks, constitutes a national and race 
danger which it is impossible to exaggerate ... I feel that the source 
from which the stream of madness is fed should be cut off and sealed up 
before another year has passed.’ Hitler’s ultimately genocidal programme 
of ‘racial hygiene’ began with the kind of compulsory sterilisation of 
‘the feeble-minded and insane classes’ that Churchill urged on the 
British government (and which was carried out in many states in the US 
in the early 20th century).

Two other factors influencing neocon Churchill mania are ‘the 
Anglosphere’ and Israel. As Jeet Heer pointed out in the National Post 
of Canada on 29 March 2003, ‘Today’s advocates of empire share one 
surprising trait: very few of them were born in the United States. 
[Dinesh] D’Souza was born in India, and [Paul] Johnson in Britain — 
where he still lives. [Mark] Steyn, [Charles] Krauthammer and [Michael] 
Ignatieff all hail from Canada ...’ Heer quotes Max Boot, a Russian-born 
neocon: ‘I think there’s more openness among children of the British 
Empire to the benefits of imperialism.’ Like Churchill, whose mother was 
American and who chronicled the history of the English-speaking peoples, 
the neocons and allied British conservatives like Conrad Black and John 
O’Sullivan, now editor of the Washington-based journal the National 
Interest, are enthusiastic about the idea that the world should be led 
by the ‘Anglosphere’. Outside these circles, however, the idea of an 
English-speaking union is ignored today as in the past by most 
Americans, who don’t see why Australia’s south-east Asian borders should 
be America’s.

As for the Israeli connection — a familiar feature of neocon ideology — 
Churchill, a lifelong supporter of Zionism, was a social Darwinist who 
preferred Jews to Arabs. On one occasion he wrote of the legitimacy of 
displacing ‘the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. 
I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact 
that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race, has 
come in and taken their place.’ Churchill’s Zionism coexisted with a 
fear that the Jews, deprived of a homeland, might make trouble for the 
world. In an essay that he wrote for the Illustrated Sunday Herald in 
1920 entitled ‘Zionism versus Bolshevism’, which the neocons never 
quote, Churchill ranted that Jews were behind world revolutions 
everywhere: ‘This movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of 
Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky [Russia], 
Bela Kun [Hungary], Rosa Luxemburg [Germany], and Emma Goldman [the 
United States] ... this worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of 
civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of 
arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, 
has been steadily growing.’ If Jews, whom Churchill described as 
denizens of ‘the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America’, 
could have their homeland, perhaps they would not — to use Churchill’s 
words — conspire ‘for the overthrow of civilisation’.

full: http://www.newamerica.net/index.cfm?pg=article&pubID=1564

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