A racist, a hypocrite, a terrible judge of character: Winston Churchill recast.

[Celerity]

The Case Against Winston Churchill

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/26/books/review/geoffrey-wheatcroft-churchills-shadow.html





During a protest over the killing of George Floyd last year, demonstrators in London targeted the famed statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square. Underneath his name someone had spray-painted the words “was a racist.” To guard against further damage, the government temporarily boarded up the statue, drawing a rebuke from Prime Minister Boris Johnson, a self-styled Churchill acolyte, who declared that “we cannot now try to edit or censor our past.”

In his new book, “Churchill’s Shadow,” Geoffrey Wheatcroft takes a literary spray can to the iconic World War II leader, attempting metaphorically at least to recast the many memorials and books devoted to Sir Winston over the years. Churchill, in this telling, was not just a racist but a hypocrite, a dissembler, a narcissist, an opportunist, an imperialist, a drunk, a strategic bungler, a tax dodger, a neglectful father, a credit-hogging author, a terrible judge of character and, most of all, a masterful mythmaker.

On both sides of the Atlantic, we are living in an era when history is being re-examined, a time when monuments are coming down and illusions about onetime heroes are being shattered. When I was a correspondent in Richmond a quarter-century ago, it would have struck me as unthinkable that the statue of Robert E. Lee on the city’s Monument Avenue would be removed, but the old general has been taken away, as have his Confederate brethren. Now even the likes of Lincoln, Washington and, yes, Churchill are under scrutiny if not attack.

Whatever we think of aging statues, we constantly edit the past, re-evaluating people and events through the lens of our current times. Sometimes that is overdue and sometimes it goes too far. None of our historical idols were as unvarnished as the memorials we build to them. The question is: What are they being honored for? Which contributions to history do we celebrate?

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[The Magistrate]

1. Too Old Not To Appreciate The Man, Ma'am

Born before the revolution....

[jcmaine72]

2. "Which contributions to history do we celebrate?"

For starters, the fact that we're looking at a statue of Winston Churchill in that photo instead of one of Hitler.

It's sadly ironic that we live in a time where comparing the people with whom we disagree with (Even over the most trivial of matters in some instances) to Hitler and the Nazis comes as naturally and easily to some as the act of breathing itself, and yet it's done without any real understanding of who Hitler really was, or the actual peril the world was in at the height of his power.

Yeah, Winston Churchill certainly was a "racist, homophobe, white cis male oppressor/colonizer extraordinaire" by our incredibly infallible, morally pristine, thoroughly objective research standards of today. But Hitler was evil incarnate, and a victory by his malignant empire in WW2 would have turned our world into a graveyard such as the world has never seen for anyone who didn't look into a mirror every day and see Dolph Lundgren staring back at them. Winston Churchill inspired his nation to fight against (All alone, I might add, in 1940) and defeat that evil against considerable odds. To me, that makes me more willing to examine some of the more unpleasant aspects of his personalty and beliefs and place them in some kind of historical context.

However, that's just unfashionable me, I suppose.