Churchill for dummies

[not systems]

http://www.antiwar.com/spectator/spec280.html

By Michael Lind author of Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics.

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

Soon after the installation by the Republican-majority Supreme Court of George the Second of the House of Bush, the American people learned that they had a new Founding Father: Winston Churchill. President George W. Bush let it be known that he had placed a bust of the British statesman in the White House Oval Office he had inherited from his dad. After the attack on the World Trade Center, the President’s speeches became self-consciously Churchillian. Earlier this year, marking the opening of a Churchill exhibition at the Library of Congress, Bush observed that Churchill was not just ‘the rallying voice of the second world war’ but also ‘a prophet of the Cold War’.

Like his grand strategy, with its combination of unilateral American world domination with nearly indiscriminate support for Israel’s Ariel Sharon, the cult of Churchill has been adopted by Bush from American neoconservatives. Churchill looms far larger in the mythology of neoconservatives than in the minds of mainstream Americans, who think of him as the brave and witty ally of President Franklin Roosevelt in the war against Hitler.

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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. D’Souza was born in India, and Johnson in Britain — where he still lives. Steyn, Krauthammer and 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 , Bela Kun , Rosa Luxemburg , and Emma Goldman ... 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’.

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