{"id":2517,"date":"2010-08-20T12:29:31","date_gmt":"2010-08-20T16:29:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/?p=2517"},"modified":"2010-12-13T14:33:04","modified_gmt":"2010-12-13T19:33:04","slug":"winston-churchill-the-right-and-islam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2010\/08\/20\/winston-churchill-the-right-and-islam\/","title":{"rendered":"Winston Churchill, the Right and Islam"},"content":{"rendered":"

Unlike most Americans, I didn’t come to my understanding of Winston Churchill through the lens of his finest hour, defending Britain and the West from the horrors of Nazism.<\/p>\n

As a young man, I was fascinated instead by the First World War.\u00a0 In that conflict Churchill was — to put it mildly — a disaster.<\/p>\n

Based in part on a racist (and therefore inaccurate) assessment of the Turkish military, Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, insisted on trying to send an invasion force to take the Gallipoli Peninsula.<\/p>\n

The campaign was a botched and bloody disaster, still commemorated around the world as Anzac Day.\u00a0 It nearly ended his career.<\/p>\n

Before and after the debacle of 1915, Churchill was a gladbag of bizarre and outdated theories about racial superiority, the joys of war, and the reasonableness of genocide when it served the ends of “civilization.’<\/p>\n

I say outdated because by the 1900s, when his career was in full-swing, these weren’t the views of Britains or Westerners in general.<\/p>\n

Churchill wasn’t quaintly and forgivably “of his time and place.”<\/p>\n

At a time when many of his countrymen were fascinated and charmed by Gandhi, Churchill suggested crushing the pacifist leader to death, adding, “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.\u201d<\/p>\n

Decades before Adolph Hitler entered the scene, Churchill was insisting dismally that \u201cthe Aryan stock is bound to triumph.\u201d<\/p>\n

A fascinating new history of this “other” Churchill has just been published, written by Richard Toye.\u00a0 You can read a review of “Churchill’s Empire” here<\/a> and an excerpt here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The reason Churchill remains such a current figure in America’s politics — long after the threats of both Nazism and Communism have faded — is that he has been taken up by the Right as a symbol of the so-called clash against Islam.<\/p>\n

After 9\/11, George W. Bush had a bust of the Great Man placed in the Oval office and Churchill regularly turns up in the writings of conservative thinkers<\/a> who are wrestling with they view as a “war of civilizations.”<\/p>\n

Here’s why this is problematic.<\/p>\n

While most Americans remember Churchill as a man who stood against oppression and the march of darkness, on many of the issues that matter today he was himself a brutal racist.<\/p>\n

Churchill believed bluntly that peoples in Afghanistan possessed a \u201cstrong aboriginal propensity to kill.\u201d (He wrote this even after he and his forces had razed whole Afghan villages to the ground.)<\/p>\n

He proposed using poison gas against the “uncivilized tribes” of Iraq, arguing that it “would spread a lively terror.”<\/p>\n

Sadly, Churchill’s narrative of a white, Western, and Christian civilization at war with the rough and savage instincts of the Islamic world have been taken to heart by many on the Right.<\/p>\n

When Christian conservatives rail against the mosque proposed for Manhattan, or raise questions about our dark-skinned President’s secret faith, or wring their hands over an “invasion” of brutishly violent illegal aliens from Mexico, it is all of a piece.<\/p>\n

The facts in these cases become irrelevant.\u00a0 It doesn’t matter that this congregation of Muslims is entirely peaceful.\u00a0 It doesn’t matter that Barack Obama is a lifelong practicing Christian.<\/p>\n

Nor does it matter that violent crime in states that border Mexico hasn’t risen, or that illegal immigrants are no more likely to commit crimes than anyone else.<\/p>\n

Many conservatives still see themselves and their way of life under siege.<\/p>\n

Churchill’s great moment did come, of course, when his people were actually on the receiving end of a massive and deadly threat.\u00a0 And yes, there really was a clash of civilizations.<\/p>\n

Ironically the people he faced down were white, Aryan Christians just like himself.\u00a0\u00a0 And many of his staunchest allies in the war against Nazism came from Islamic nations.<\/p>\n

It is important to acknowledge that Churchill did redeem himself, at least partially.<\/p>\n

He did so in much the same way that our founding fathers redeemed their callous acceptance of slavery:\u00a0 by advancing some great and courageous ideas about freedom and equality.<\/p>\n

But just as we revere our founding fathers without looking to them for guidance on slavery and race relations, Churchill is exactly the wrong figure to guide us through the thorny challenge of Islamic terrorism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Unlike most Americans, I didn’t come to my understanding of Winston Churchill through the lens […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[20,4790],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2517"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2517"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2517\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2518,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2517\/revisions\/2518"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2517"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2517"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2517"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}