British Parliamentary Recruiting Committee poster, 1915 In this second part on the Worship of World War Two, I use the work of David Irving, John Gray and Peter Hitchens to revisit the central myth of the 20th century.
This is a shocking post and it was difficult for me personally to confront the contradiction of a children formed in dreams drawn from Commando magazine and in the war play of little boys.
CONTENTS
With the premature news of the death of David Irving I decided to investigate some of his controversial views.
The odium surrounding Irving is obvious. Yet many historians have said his work is too important to ignore - when it is not concerned with his views on Hitler and the Holocaust.
I am not concerned with these positions here, but with the detail he and no other biographer provides about the career and character of Winston Churchill.
Irving is damning about Churchill and defends Hitler. His work is important because it provides another way of seeing in a kingdom of one-eyed men.
In his book, The Soul of the Marionette, John Gray argues that the limits of Liberalism are exposed by its refusal to accept the limits of man.
These limits mean that barbarism and civilisation are not opposed to one another, but a symbiosis of sorts.
One function of the myths of the 20th century is to distance Homo Liberalis from the barbarism he applies to the other. The Nazis are the antithesis of the Liberal paradise, the serpent in its garden.
The second world war is central to this religion of man, and our current predicament cannot be understood without understanding how it came to shape our idea of ourselves, past and present.
That it is shocking when Gray cites the 45 million victims of Mao, and the millions of those under Stalin is both an effect and purpose of the current mythos. The Japanese, whose atrocities are well documented in The Knights of Bushido, escape as usual without mention.
Man cannot live without myths, and it does not matter to him whether they are true. They tell him things he wants to hear about himself, and about others.
They protect him from what he does not want to hear.
Gray does not mention the Morgenthau Plan, which if implemented would have killed ten million Germans in an act of ethnic vengeance.
He refers without naming Stephen Pinker to the imaginary belief that barbarism and mass killing is receding under the influence of the “better angels of our nature”. To this Gray adds the remark of R.S Thomas
“I have seen the winged man, and he was no angel”
The worship of leaders is a mistake, regardless of whether you believe they are monsters. Throughout the 20th century, the use of atrocity as an ideological tool to manage the herd is explicit - in force, and implicit - in its use as coercive propaganda. This latter use is most insidious in the service of popularising wars.
There is a reason world war two is used in this way, as it is the most powerful mnemonic of good and evil to a people who have forgotten their sense of sin. To revise our view of this totem is to question not the atrocities which took place, but the use to which some of them are put. What kind of men take flight on the draught of these fancies?
The following passages document two attempts to detach the wings from one of the central figures of 20th Century history, and to review the mythos of the Good War in simple terms of power. This is what the diplomats call “realism”.
Following Irving’s meticulous research, which can be independently verified, Winston Churchill was a corrupt drunken stooge who supported himself by writing potboilers and forging paintings in the early 1930s.
Irving argues that Churchill was chosen by a group of powerful backers to lead an anti-German war party, in order to engage the British Empire in a conflict which would see Britain bankrupted and its Empire handed to the USA.
According to Irving, Churchill did not, as Boris Johnson said, “save our civilisation”. He destroyed it.
Churchill was opposed to peace and withdrew British forces to Dunkirk without warning the French and Belgian allies.
It was Churchill’s policy of self preservation which led to the Blitz and the destruction of cities such as Coventry.
In response, he ordered the use of naval cannons as “anti aircraft” fire, which killed tens of thousands of British civilians and shot down few if any German planes.
Once the most successful historian in the Western world, David Irving’s arguments about Churchill rely on papers ignored by his many hagiographers.
Irving has been heavily criticised for his views on both the Holocaust and on Hitler’s role in it, for which he was imprisoned in Austria for three years in 2006.
Why should we listen to a man who doubts the existence of the gas chambers? It is to hear the voice of dissent, in the spirit of the value pluralism championed by Isaiah Berlin, which said that liberalism was best because it permitted the free exchange of views.
The myth of the 20th century has been one powerful factor in exterminating this freedom, on which Liberalism’s claim to be the supreme religion of mankind was based.
Irving cites a documented conversation between Churchill and Henry Morgenthau, whose Morgenthau Plan was the original template for the postwar administration of Germany by the Soviets and the Allies.
“When Morgenthau went to see him… as you see from Churchill's diary which I've got..on the 4th of August 1944 he said to Mr Churchill
“Prime Minister how do you how you intend breaking to the British people that you bankrupted them by fighting this war?”
Churchill said he simply didn’t.
…and Churchill's reply was “that is a doleful task that I propose to leave to my successor “
Yet Churchill’s successor did not explain this.
“Churchill…didn't tell us and his successor Clement Attlee didn't tell the British.
The British people never found out that to fight Churchill’s War - which is the war from 1940 onwards to the end of 1945 - had bankrupted us.”
Irving is hated for reasons beyond his views on the Holocaust and Hitler. He attacks the central religious figure of the cult of Forever World War Two, using Churchill’s own writings and recorded words.
He points out that Churchill’s deal - which he attributes to Churchill’s three-time refusal of peace -
….had cost us all overseas investments, had reduced Britain to penury. everything that over 300 years the British Empire had built up had gone and we never found out.
The British people were never told.
You can sucker an entire public.
Why do so few people know this today?
As Churchill himself said,
“There is no such thing as “public opinion” - there is only published opinion”
I have documented the refinement of this technique in part four of my series on propaganda, which shows how these methods of shaping public opinion operate in the digital age. You can find that here:
The battle for civilisation is, as always, a case of “our lives or theirs”. Source: British Library
If David Irving is too much for you, try Peter Hitchens.
His remark in a 2008 article strikes at the heart of the myth of World War Two.
It makes me feel like a traitor to write this. The Second World War was my religion for most of my life.
What began as doubt came to reveal simply another god that had failed. The 20th century was a time of idols, born of the introspection of modernism, and propelled into a parody of reality by the accelerating processes of mass technological society.
The Soviets had their own myths, and understanding this gives the lie to the belief that the current of woke has flowed exclusively from the universities.
A fuller explanation is that the strange cults of the 20th and 21st centuries are a form of adjustment to a system that in its scale and complexity does not make sense.
With the fall of the Soviet Union came the globalisation of mass society, which has increased the distance from the self to any tangible social interaction beyond sales.
In order to adjust, man has retreated into contemplation of the inner horizons. Here, through his desires and his fantasies, he hopes to find some purposeful connection to the phantasm that has displaced the natural order outside.
The meaning of the world wars persists in symbolic and ritual form because it is one of the few remaining stories which are still told to us all. It is not true, but that is not important. What matters is that it confers a sense of identity, of belonging, and of moral purpose.
These are, as Hitchens notes, nothing more than consolation prizes for the losers.
The flag of freedom over the Reichstag (1945, colourised)
Most of us can recognise ourselves in the description Peter Hitchens gives of his own search for a soul in the ruins of Europe.
When I lived in Russia at the end of the Soviet era, I found a country that made even more of the war than we did.
I even employed a splendid old Red Army war veteran to help me set up my office there: an upright, totally reliable old gentleman just like my father's generation, except that he was Russian and a convinced Stalinist who did odd jobs for the KGB.
They had their war films, too. And their honourable scars.
And they were just as convinced they had won the war single-handed as we were.
To the Russians, British battles meant little. Hitchens thought their view was a sort of compensation fantasy to conceal the pain of their decline.
The Soviet Union suffered an estimated 34 million deaths out of a total of 60 million in World War Two.
They regarded D-Day as a minor event and had never heard of El Alamein.
Once I caught myself thinking: "They're using the war as a way of comforting themselves over their national decline, and over the way they're clearly losing in their contest with America."
And then it came to me that this could be a description of my own country.
Norwegian propaganda poster by Leest Storm, 1944, showing the “composite monster” of the USA. The caption reads “America will save Europe's culture from destruction” Hitchen’s disenchantment was compounded by his sojourn in the USA.
When I lived in America itself, where I discovered that the Second World War, in their view, took place mainly in the Pacific, and in any case didn't matter half as much as the Civil War and the Vietnam War, I got a second harsh, unwanted history lesson.
He describes finding two books, which treated
… the use - in my view, abuse - of the Second World War to justify the Iraq War.
We were told that the 1939-45 war was a good war, fought to overthrow a wicked tyrant, that the war in Iraq would be the same, and that those who opposed it were like the discredited appeasers of 1938.
The people who sold us Iraq did so as if they were today's Churchills. They were wrong.
In that case, how can we be sure that Churchill's war was a good war?
Hitchens dares to ask whether the Second World War was “won” at all - as his own father, who fought it in - used to wonder.
What if the Men of Glory didn't need to die or risk their lives? What if the whole thing was a miscalculated waste of life and wealth that destroyed Britain as a major power and turned her into a bankrupt pensioner of the USA?
With so little left of Britain - and of the West more generally - this is a painful surrender to a grim reality.
Funnily enough, these questions echo equally uncomfortable ones I'm often asked by readers here.
The milder version is: "Who really won the war, since Britain is now subject to a German-run European Union?"
The other is one I hear from an ever-growing number of war veterans contemplating modern Britain's landscape of loutishness and disorder and recalling the sacrifices they made for it: "Why did we bother?"
Don't read on if these questions rock your universe.
In 2018 he wrote The Phoney Victory, with a supporting article heavily critical of the creed of the Second World War.
The myth that it was all glorious, and that it saved the world, is a comforting old muffler keeping out the clammy draughts of economic failure and political weakness.
Even today, the self-flattering fantasy that we won it, and the nonsensical but common belief that we did so more or less alone, still leads to foolish economic and diplomatic policies based on a huge overestimate of our real significance as a country.
One day, this dangerous fable of the glorious anti-fascist war against evil may destroy us simply because we have a government too vain and inexperienced to restrain itself. That is why it is so important to dispel it.
Hitchens does not argue that war with Germany was not necessary. He does point out that it was “actively sought” by Britain for reasons unrelated to those commonly believed today.
Britain actively sought a war with Germany from the moment Hitler invaded Prague in March 1939. Even before then, there were powerful voices in the Foreign Office urging the need to assert ourselves as a Great Power.
Poland was a pretext for that war, not a reason – as was demonstrated by the fact that we did nothing to help Poland when Hitler invaded. It was an excuse for an essentially irrational, idealistic, nostalgic impulse, built largely on a need to assert Britain’s standing as a Great Power.
This was about power, he argues. What came after is a consolation for its loss as a result.
The whole edifice of modern British patriotism and pride is based upon the belief that Britain stood alone against the Nazi menace after the fall of
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WORLD WAR TWO WAS MY RELIGION
Why some history is heresy
FRANK WRIGHT
FEB 27
READ IN APP
British Parliamentary Recruiting Committee poster, 1915
In this second part on the Worship of World War Two, I use the work of David Irving, John Gray and Peter Hitchens to revisit the central myth of the 20th century.
This is a shocking post and it was difficult for me personally to confront the contradiction of a children formed in dreams drawn from Commando magazine and in the war play of little boys.
Page 52 - Commando Magazine - 1000's of magazines in one app
Many such cases.
CONTENTS
Heresy as History
David Irving and the Myth of Churchill
Peter Hitchens and the Phoney Victory
HERESY AS HISTORY
With the premature news of the death of David Irving I decided to investigate some of his controversial views.
The odium surrounding Irving is obvious¹. Yet many historians have said his work is too important to ignore² - when it is not concerned with his views on Hitler and the Holocaust.
I am not concerned with these positions here, but with the detail he and no other biographer provides about the career and character of Winston Churchill.
Irving is damning about Churchill and defends Hitler. His work is important because it provides another way of seeing in a kingdom of one-eyed men.
In his book, The Soul of the Marionette³, John Gray argues that the limits of Liberalism are exposed by its refusal to accept the limits of man.
These limits mean that barbarism and civilisation are not opposed to one another, but a symbiosis of sorts.
One function of the myths of the 20th century is to distance Homo Liberalis from the barbarism he applies to the other. The Nazis are the antithesis of the Liberal paradise, the serpent in its garden.
The second world war is central to this religion of man, and our current predicament cannot be understood without understanding how it came to shape our idea of ourselves, past and present.
That it is shocking when Gray cites the 45 million victims of Mao, and the millions of those under Stalin is both an effect and purpose of the current mythos. The Japanese, whose atrocities are well documented in The Knights of Bushido⁴, escape as usual without mention.
Man cannot live without myths, and it does not matter to him whether they are true. They tell him things he wants to hear about himself, and about others.
They protect him from what he does not want to hear.
Gray does not mention the Morgenthau Plan, which if implemented would have killed ten million Germans in an act of ethnic vengeance.
He refers without naming Stephen Pinker⁵ to the imaginary belief that barbarism and mass killing is receding under the influence of the “better angels of our nature”. To this Gray adds the remark of R.S Thomas
“I have seen the winged man, and he was no angel”
The worship of leaders is a mistake, regardless of whether you believe they are monsters. Throughout the 20th century, the use of atrocity as an ideological tool to manage the herd is explicit - in force, and implicit - in its use as coercive propaganda. This latter use is most insidious in the service of popularising wars.
There is a reason world war two is used in this way, as it is the most powerful mnemonic of good and evil to a people who have forgotten their sense of sin. To revise our view of this totem is to question not the atrocities which took place, but the use to which some of them are put. What kind of men take flight on the draught of these fancies?
The following passages document two attempts to detach the wings from one of the central figures of 20th Century history, and to review the mythos of the Good War in simple terms of power. This is what the diplomats call “realism”.
DAVID IRVING AND THE CHURCHILL MYTH
Following Irving’s meticulous research, which can be independently verified, Winston Churchill was a corrupt drunken stooge who supported himself by writing potboilers and forging paintings in the early 1930s.
Irving argues that Churchill was chosen by a group of powerful backers to lead an anti-German war party, in order to engage the British Empire in a conflict which would see Britain bankrupted and its Empire handed to the USA.
According to Irving, Churchill did not, as Boris Johnson said, “save our civilisation”. He destroyed it.
Churchill was opposed to peace and withdrew British forces to Dunkirk without warning the French and Belgian allies.
It was Churchill’s policy of self preservation which led to the Blitz and the destruction of cities such as Coventry.
In response, he ordered the use of naval cannons as “anti aircraft” fire, which killed tens of thousands of British civilians and shot down few if any German planes.
Once the most successful historian in the Western world, David Irving’s arguments about Churchill rely on papers ignored by his many hagiographers.
Irving has been heavily criticised for his views on both the Holocaust and on Hitler’s role in it, for which he was imprisoned in Austria for three years in 2006.
Why should we listen to a man who doubts the existence of the gas chambers? It is to hear the voice of dissent, in the spirit of the value pluralism championed by Isaiah Berlin, which said that liberalism was best because it permitted the free exchange of views.
The myth of the 20th century has been one powerful factor in exterminating this freedom, on which Liberalism’s claim to be the supreme religion of mankind was based.
One of the “four freedoms” championed in US war propaganda. Source: US National Archive.
BANKRUPTING BRITAIN
Irving cites a documented conversation between Churchill and Henry Morgenthau, whose Morgenthau Plan was the original template for the postwar administration of Germany by the Soviets and the Allies.
“When Morgenthau went to see him… as you see from Churchill's diary which I've got..on the 4th of August 1944 he said to Mr Churchill
“Prime Minister how do you how you intend breaking to the British people that you bankrupted them by fighting this war?”
Churchill said he simply didn’t.
…and Churchill's reply was “that is a doleful task that I propose to leave to my successor “
Yet Churchill’s successor did not explain this.
“Churchill…didn't tell us and his successor Clement Attlee didn't tell the British.
The British people never found out that to fight Churchill’s War - which is the war from 1940 onwards to the end of 1945 - had bankrupted us.”
THERE IS ONLY PUBLISHED OPINION
Irving is hated for reasons beyond his views on the Holocaust and Hitler. He attacks the central religious figure of the cult of Forever World War Two, using Churchill’s own writings and recorded words.
He points out that Churchill’s deal - which he attributes to Churchill’s three-time refusal of peace -
….had cost us all overseas investments, had reduced Britain to penury. everything that over 300 years the British Empire had built up had gone and we never found out.
The British people were never told.
You can sucker an entire public.
Why do so few people know this today?
As Churchill himself said,
“There is no such thing as “public opinion” - there is only published opinion”
I have documented the refinement of this technique in part four of my series on propaganda, which shows how these methods of shaping public opinion operate in the digital age. You can find that here:
This is How We Make Belief
This is How We Make Belief
FRANK WRIGHT
·
MAY 6, 2022
Read full story
The battle for civilisation is, as always, a case of “our lives or theirs”. Source: British Library
THE CHURCH OF CHURCHILL
If David Irving is too much for you, try Peter Hitchens.
His remark in a 2008 article strikes at the heart of the myth of World War Two.
It makes me feel like a traitor to write this. The Second World War was my religion for most of my life.
What began as doubt came to reveal simply another god that had failed. The 20th century was a time of idols, born of the introspection of modernism, and propelled into a parody of reality by the accelerating processes of mass technological society.
The Soviets had their own myths, and understanding this gives the lie to the belief that the current of woke has flowed exclusively from the universities.
A fuller explanation is that the strange cults of the 20th and 21st centuries are a form of adjustment to a system that in its scale and complexity does not make sense.
With the fall of the Soviet Union came the globalisation of mass society, which has increased the distance from the self to any tangible social interaction beyond sales.
In order to adjust, man has retreated into contemplation of the inner horizons. Here, through his desires and his fantasies, he hopes to find some purposeful connection to the phantasm that has displaced the natural order outside.
The meaning of the world wars persists in symbolic and ritual form because it is one of the few remaining stories which are still told to us all. It is not true, but that is not important. What matters is that it confers a sense of identity, of belonging, and of moral purpose.
These are, as Hitchens notes, nothing more than consolation prizes for the losers.
The flag of freedom over the Reichstag (1945, colourised)
HOMO SOVIETICUS AND THE SECOND WORLD WAR
Most of us can recognise ourselves in the description Peter Hitchens gives of his own search for a soul in the ruins of Europe.
When I lived in Russia at the end of the Soviet era, I found a country that made even more of the war than we did.
I even employed a splendid old Red Army war veteran to help me set up my office there: an upright, totally reliable old gentleman just like my father's generation, except that he was Russian and a convinced Stalinist who did odd jobs for the KGB.
They had their war films, too. And their honourable scars.
And they were just as convinced they had won the war single-handed as we were.
To the Russians, British battles meant little. Hitchens thought their view was a sort of compensation fantasy to conceal the pain of their decline.
The Soviet Union suffered an estimated 34 million deaths out of a total of 60 million in World War Two.
They regarded D-Day as a minor event and had never heard of El Alamein.
Once I caught myself thinking: "They're using the war as a way of comforting themselves over their national decline, and over the way they're clearly losing in their contest with America."
And then it came to me that this could be a description of my own country.
Vintage World War Two WWII Norwegian Military Propaganda Poster Leest Storm Kultur Terror CANVAS Print
Norwegian propaganda poster by Leest Storm, 1944, showing the “composite monster” of the USA. The caption reads “America will save Europe's culture from destruction”
A VIEW FROM THE VICTORS
Hitchen’s disenchantment was compounded by his sojourn in the USA.
When I lived in America itself, where I discovered that the Second World War, in their view, took place mainly in the Pacific, and in any case didn't matter half as much as the Civil War and the Vietnam War, I got a second harsh, unwanted history lesson.
He describes finding two books, which treated
… the use - in my view, abuse - of the Second World War to justify the Iraq War.
We were told that the 1939-45 war was a good war, fought to overthrow a wicked tyrant, that the war in Iraq would be the same, and that those who opposed it were like the discredited appeasers of 1938.
The people who sold us Iraq did so as if they were today's Churchills. They were wrong.
In that case, how can we be sure that Churchill's war was a good war?
Hitchens dares to ask whether the Second World War was “won” at all - as his own father, who fought it in - used to wonder.
What if the Men of Glory didn't need to die or risk their lives? What if the whole thing was a miscalculated waste of life and wealth that destroyed Britain as a major power and turned her into a bankrupt pensioner of the USA?
With so little left of Britain - and of the West more generally - this is a painful surrender to a grim reality.
Funnily enough, these questions echo equally uncomfortable ones I'm often asked by readers here.
The milder version is: "Who really won the war, since Britain is now subject to a German-run European Union?"
The other is one I hear from an ever-growing number of war veterans contemplating modern Britain's landscape of loutishness and disorder and recalling the sacrifices they made for it: "Why did we bother?"
Don't read on if these questions rock your universe.
The Phoney Victory: The World War II Illusion (Paperback)
In 2018 he wrote The Phoney Victory⁶, with a supporting article heavily critical of the creed of the Second World War.
The myth that it was all glorious, and that it saved the world, is a comforting old muffler keeping out the clammy draughts of economic failure and political weakness.
Even today, the self-flattering fantasy that we won it, and the nonsensical but common belief that we did so more or less alone, still leads to foolish economic and diplomatic policies based on a huge overestimate of our real significance as a country.
One day, this dangerous fable of the glorious anti-fascist war against evil may destroy us simply because we have a government too vain and inexperienced to restrain itself. That is why it is so important to dispel it.
Hitchens does not argue that war with Germany was not necessary. He does point out that it was “actively sought” by Britain for reasons unrelated to those commonly believed today.
Britain actively sought a war with Germany from the moment Hitler invaded Prague in March 1939. Even before then, there were powerful voices in the Foreign Office urging the need to assert ourselves as a Great Power.
Poland was a pretext for that war, not a reason – as was demonstrated by the fact that we did nothing to help Poland when Hitler invaded. It was an excuse for an essentially irrational, idealistic, nostalgic impulse, built largely on a need to assert Britain’s standing as a Great Power.
This was about power, he argues. What came after is a consolation for its loss as a result.
The whole edifice of modern British patriotism and pride is based upon the belief that Britain stood alone against the Nazi menace after the fall of France. But it is a romantic myth.
Not only did French and Belgian troops (often wholly selflessly) help British troops to escape through Dunkirk, but Britain also had a large and loyal Empire behind it throughout the war.
And the part we played after 1940 is far less than we would have liked. Just nine months after it had begun, Britain had lost the war it declared. It had been driven from continental Europe, penniless and stripped of most of its military hardware.
The extraordinary (and all but unknown) transfer of Britain’s gold to the USA throughout 1939 and 1940 was the lasting proof that a deliberate, harsh British humiliation had to precede any real alliance. The stripping of Britain’s life savings was an enormous event.
Far from “winning the war”, which was done in large part by the USSR, Churchill assisted in the transfer of Europe to rival US and Soviet military conquest, whose legacy has produced the imperial struggle we see played out in Ukraine today.
Churchill worship is all we have left of the Britain he destroyed. It is a dangerous lie, a pipe dream beloved of the opium addict, who seeks above all some soporific consolation to escape all he has lost.
This delivers the addict not from, but into evil.
Churchill’s ghost is invoked in every war as an immediate cipher for a just war against the latest incarnation of Hitler.
In the final part I will examine the role of World War Two in the propaganda which surrounds us today.
If you would like to support my ongoing application to be sent to a re-education camp, please consider taking out a paid subscription.
Upgrade to paid
1
To mention David Irving at all is to risk ruin and personal attacks. I include his work on Churchill here as it has merit regardless of his personality or opinions.
For readers unaware of it, here is some information concerning his extremely controversial career.
Irving has advanced the claim that Hitler was not personally responsible for the extermination of the Jews, describing the
“Holocaust…as an industry deserving the application of “tm” - a trademark”.
He said this in a 2008 interview with Max Blumenthal, recorded here.
Aside from this obvious outrage, historians such as AJP Taylor, Hugh Trevor-Roper and former Canadian diplomat Peter Dale Scott have agreed his standard historical work shows him “a colossus of research”.
According to John Keegan, Irving
“knows more than anyone alive about the German side of the Second World War”.
I like AJP Taylor, who insisted (as I do) on referring to the Jockanese as “The Scotch”.
John Keegan’s The Face of Battle is one of the best books on war I have ever read.
2
“‘Conjuring History’ has been criticized for citing the controversial author David Irving.
But even Irving’s enemies give him grudging credit for his standard historical writings. And I believe that to write in this field, it is impossible to ignore what Irving has written.”
Peter Dale Scott, archived here
3
Gray’s remarkable book is an account of the limits of man, being an examination of the relation of barbarism to civilisation and the tragedy of utopianism. It treats carefully the urgent need of myth in mankind, with attention to the current political dispensation.
In addition, it contains the most illuminating material on the Aztecs since Bernal Diaz’s The Conquest of New Spain.
4
The Knights of Bushido, A Short History of Japanese War Crimes, Lord Russell of Liverpool, London, Cassell, 1958
5
Pinker wrote his book “The Better Angels of Our Nature” in 2011, arguing that violence has actually been in decline. The title refers to Shakespeare’s Othello, via Abraham Lincoln’s inaugural speech
“The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
6
“The Phoney Victory - The World War Two Illusion”, Peter Hitchens, 2018
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© 2024 Frank Wright
. But it is a romantic myth.
Not only did French and Belgian troops (often wholly selflessly) help British troops to escape through Dunkirk, but Britain also had a large and loyal Empire behind it throughout the war.
And the part we played after 1940 is far less than we would have liked. Just nine months after it had begun, Britain had lost the war it declared. It had been driven from continental Europe, penniless and stripped of most of its military hardware.
The extraordinary (and all but unknown) transfer of Britain’s gold to the USA throughout 1939 and 1940 was the lasting proof that a deliberate, harsh British humiliation had to precede any real alliance. The stripping of Britain’s life savings was an enormous event.
Far from “winning the war”, which was done in large part by the USSR, Churchill assisted in the transfer of Europe to rival US and Soviet military conquest, whose legacy has produced the imperial struggle we see played out in Ukraine today.
Churchill worship is all we have left of the Britain he destroyed. It is a dangerous lie, a pipe dream beloved of the opium addict, who seeks above all some soporific consolation to escape all he has lost.
This delivers the addict not from, but into evil.
Churchill’s ghost is invoked in every war as an immediate cipher for a just war against the latest incarnation of Hitler.
In the final part I will examine the role of World War Two in the propaganda which surrounds us today.
If you would like to support my ongoing application to be sent to a re-education camp, please consider taking out a paid subscription.
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