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Here is Winston, brilliant and educated and flush with patriotism, eager to serve queen and country.
Can you imagine what it must have been like to have recieved the finest Enlightenment-bred education available on Earth, which involved a long process of indoctrinary info sessions about stuff like how the sun never set on the British Empire...
...yet nowhere in those foundational lessons on British excellence, nowhere was there a chapter or lecture or book daring to posit a question like, "Is there injustice, cruelty, quasi-slavery or profiteering going on anywhere that sun shines?" Flowery sentence there - remember, it was the Enlightenment, when assbags like me who wrote interminably got paid by the word, heh - but bleed it down to grunted monosyllables and even still nothing close to it was part of his schooling.
Sneaky stuff, and a hell of a thing to do to a kid. If nobody ever told him what was really happening in India, he wouldn't know. The internet back then was Morse Code, a two-engine prop airplane, or a ship bound for the Atlantic. If nobody told him about Ireland, it's the same result.
We can go back now and slap him around for another piece-mover playing that grand game of chess, and sure, it's a fact. But I try to understand these guys as best I can, and for me, Churchill is a sympathetic character. The British Empire had perfected the art of turning out educated, patriotic, shrewd, liberated robots before Elizabeth ever saw the throne. His teachers and lecturers and mentors were working off a 600 year old curriculum when Churchill came along, and they filled his sharp mind with ten generations worth of stories about honor, valor, fidelity, and the absolute fact that England was supreme, the apex, and it was his great fortune to offer his service to that grand heritage.
Jesus, right? Sounds familiar, but I guess the best tricks are the old tricks, so that one's been around a while. In the end, what you have is a product of his environment, bred to rule, personally invested in the fate and fortune of the kingdom, and that silly core of innocence sustaining his fervor remained unbruised because it was swaddled in ten thousand layers of armor that had been meticulously set with every lesson and story and heroic tale, armor that was made of the mythology he served alongside king and country.
Kind of like a toddler who doesn't know what a burn feels like because he's never touched a hot stove, but he's never seen a hot stove nor heard of "burns," but instead learns only of strength and nobility, and thus is spared suffering any pain but denied learning any lesson, none of which is his fault.
Yeah, sounds familiar. Right up until I was 14 or 15, my goal in life was to go to West Point, join the Army, and become a Green Beret. Myriad influences were behind this, among them my dad volunteering for Vietnam in '68, the books I read trying to understand his war, the unavoidable bleating nationalism of the Cold War and the Reagen era that got under your skin if you were young and dumb, but mostly I was fired up by movies and TV.
"Red Dawn" really scrambled my head, and I spent a good run of years waiting for hordes of Cubans in Russian camo to come boiling out of the sky. I watched that crap the other day for the first time in maybe 20 years, and I was gape-mouthed in awe. It's a masterpiece of fear-mongering masquerading as an AMERICA KICKS ASS flick, unless you know anything about history and tactics and topography, in which case the move is unbelievably goony from soup to nuts. It was kinda like watching Sixteen Candles again, and having a chuckle at your own expense for ever believing high school was really like that.
Remember First Blood III? Rambo goes to Afghanistan to fight the commies alongside the brave and freedom-loving mujeheddin warriors.
I saw that shit in the theater.
Ah. Irony.
My house growing up had a slice of a view of downtown Boston way off in the distance, and our sightline over the city went right over where Logan Airport sat. Three times, three different times, I was walking home at night, and looked towards the city, and saw a bright light descending towards the center of town, and panicked, because that was a nuclear missile and I had to get home to see my mom before it hit. Three times. And it didn't seem silly at the time. I don't know how old you are, but if you remember Carter, you remember the missiles.
That shit laid all the same kinds of armor over the part of me that knew right from wrong and wanted to serve and didn't know from bupkus about the kind of questions nobody ever asked Churchill, either. But then I really got into reading, and watched the Iran-Contra hearings, and had the strangest sense that our Panama incursion was freighted with bullshit...didn't know what or why exactly, but it just smelled like theater.
My first real break-through experience with all this shit happened in my living room, a few weeks before graduation, when me and mom and a visiting dad sat with an Army recruiter who wanted me to join up. For an hour, this sargent explained to me how Hussein had the fourth largest army in the world, how they were battle-tested after fighting Iran, that this was going to be heavy, but if I joined right now and went to college and did ROTC, I wouldn't be slated for active service for another four years.
Hm. Paradox. I was the kid who would paint his face black and sneak out at night to practice my stealth tactics for when I went in for the Green Berets (I was on every rooftop on that street before my 14th birthday, not peeping or vandalizing, just testing myself to see if I could really be invisible...and never once did I get caught...), and there I was listening to this crisp uniformed soldier trying to sell me on serving...but I wasn't buying, for reasons I wasn't totally able to communicate...while he was promising I'd never see combat...the kid who dreamed of soldiery balked at the opportunity, and the troop offering the chance went out of his way to keep me behind a desk.
I thanked him and signed nothing and told him I'd consider it, and later that night my mom asked me what I thought. I remember my answer vividly, because I got this unexpected adrenaline rush as I said it, and it was pretty much the first adult opinion I ever expressed. "I wanted to join the Army to serrve the counrty," I said, "and this sounds like I'd be helping to close a business deal." My mom smiled, I went to college, and the Gulf War started while I was getting up from my bed to take a piss, and it was over before I flushed...and it wasn't right, it was a business deal (more like a thousand deals, actually), and I regret not having served but know for sure I was right to refuse, because what I wanted to serve and what I would have actually served is the difference between the devil and the deep blue sea.
That was me getting my armor off, and it was only made of TV and movies and nationalism and fear. That adrenaline rush came because I was scared to say shit like that out loud. I didn't know anything, and here I was lining up against America and patriotic duty and flag upon glag upon flag, and repudiating what you were bred to believe and obey is scary stuff the first time you do it. Even in the kitchen.
I didn't go through the kind of indoctrination Churchill did.
I didn't go through the Blitz, either. Whatever else may be said, that guy was all spine for that whole disaster, he held the country and the charnel house that was London in flames together with both hands, and it was one of the most valiant and stoic and strong last-stand feats of pure "Go Fuck Yourself" perserverance in history. All of Britain did it, he was merely the face and voice of their unbelievable courage...but without him bracing the nation, I'm not sure much of London would have remained.
That experience, coupled with all he had to deal with over the rest of the war, probably made him bold enough to play checkers with Mossadeq. Was he arrogant, or terrified? He knew what happened when matters unspooled, and in desiring to personally make sure the cork didn't pop, he wound up buried in all the machinations that ripened and blossomed and are now rotting, and it's our problem at last.
I peg Mossadeq's fall as the beginning of a lot of really gruesome shit. That move was so bad that we're losing soldiers over it fifty-five years later. But Churchill was a creature of his environment, as I was in a much tamer fashion. I gave up trying to re-manage the Cold War a long time ago, but still dedicate a great deal of scholarship towards understanding it. We can't undo that shit, and swatting Churchill around for what went down is a little like kicking a duck because it quacked.
I'm not necessarily defending Churchill, mind you. Your post got me going on the study of him.
It comes down to this, I guess. We can do better. We have to remember why their decisions have become our calamity. That's the lesson. As for Churchill, well, you're totally right. It's still worthwhile to figure out what made him and his hubris, because that same kind of aristocratic, nationalistic, deliberately dull approach to leadership is still very much involved in present matters of life and death, it's still alive and kicking, and is still doing damage that will blow up on us twenty years down the road.
Long, sorry. I read your post earlier today and have been cooking on it for a while.
Cheers.
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