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During the May Day protests in England in 2000, nothing infuriated the British establishment — its press, its politicians, its courts of respectable opinion — more than the desecration of Winston Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square. The savage blood red spray-painted around Churchill’s mouth, the livid green strip of grass giving him a mohawk haircut, transforming the stoical father of the nation into the Joker, was unconscionable. Iconoclasm was all very well, to be encouraged even, but not when the target was an actual icon! It is difficult to convey the symbolic and emotional value of this man to Britain’s ruling class, and to a significant though declining number of its citizens. Those whose national consciousness is shaped by folk memories of World War II, probably the last moment of “greatness” save for England’s World Cup win in 1966, mostly know Churchill as the man who, more than any other, crushed the Nazi menace. Leading a wartime coalition government, he exhorted what had been a badly led and sold-out nation to dare, and win. He saved the British state, steering it through one of its worst crises. In his lifetime, Churchill was the last truly loved British leader; no one has since come close. When I was at school in the 1980s in the north of Ireland, emerald jewel of the Empire, this was still a powerful sentiment. Our red-faced, Unionist history teacher, exploring World War II, recounted with pride an apocryphal story wherein Hitler, having heard that Churchill was leading the war effort, said with awe-stricken wonder, “What will we do now?” And we pupils, bright-eyed and remote, were deeply satisfied to think of it. What will you do now? Get your ass kicked, that’s what. Don’t mess with the best. Churchill is, besides being a national myth, a minor cottage industry, and the source of endless nostalgic tat. Books celebrating his wicked wit, mugs adorned with his mug, tea towels quoting the great man, endless court historians — and when it comes to Churchill, there is almost no other kind of historian — recapitulating his glories. Is there a movie about him now, with Gary Oldman? Throw it into the pile with the last movie with Brian Cox, and the one before that with Brendan Gleeson, and the one before that with Albert Finney, and the one before that with Michael Gambon. The industry is tantamount to a Works Progress Administration for our actorly “national treasures,” and a mini-boom may now be underway as certain sentiments circulating around Brexit have fueled a cultural return to Empire. For me, though, the luster wore off long ago, and I found myself in Parliament Square admiring the handiwork of those protesters. What went wrong?

The culture industry is not always such a bad place to find out about Churchill. The actor Richard Burton, when preparing for his role as Churchill in a television drama, famously wrote for the New York Times: In the course of preparing myself . . . I realized afresh that I hate Churchill and all of his kind. I hate them virulently. They have stalked down the corridors of endless power all through history. . . . What man of sanity would say on hearing of the atrocities committed by the Japanese against British and Anzac prisoners of war, “We shall wipe them out, every one of them, men, women, and children. There shall not be a Japanese left on the face of the earth”? Such simple-minded cravings for revenge leave me with a horrified but reluctant awe for such single-minded and merciless ferocity. For this iconoclasm, Burton was barred from future work at the BBC, accused of having “acted in an unprofessional way” and evidently regarded as having committed treason. Yet his query touched on something about Churchill that has often embarrassed British sensibilities, so that it is generally not talked about: his gung-ho fondness for imperial slaughter. Everywhere one looks, one finds Churchill dripping blood from his mouth. He was fanatical about violence. Churchill was the progeny of high aristocracy, the son of Chancellor Lord Randolph Churchill, a boy who would have been destined for high office whatever he did. It is important to note that the young Churchill was not an outright reactionary. A member of the Conservative Party, he considered himself Liberal in all but name, his attitudes — secular, pro­­-free trade, pro-democracy, and in favor of some mild ameliorations for the working class — reflecting the ideologies of a Whiggish Liberalism that was even then in decline. (The single exception to this affiliation was that he rejected the idea of Irish Home Rule.) Everywhere one looks, one finds Churchill dripping blood from his mouth. But to be a Liberal at this time was in no way incommensurate with imperialism, racism, antisemitism, support for eugenics, and patriarchal disdain for Suffragism. As Candice Millard suggests in Hero of the Empire, her history of Churchill’s derring-do in the Boer War, he was a politician raised in, and formed by, the British Empire. Churchill reached adulthood with an advanced sense of his own potential greatness, as someone who prized his reputation for courage in the face of death. The British Empire had offered millions of people willing to travel halfway across the world to rule over people they knew next to nothing about the chance for that kind of adventure. Across an empire enfolding 450 million in its death grip, revolts and struggles were appearing in southern Africa, Egypt, and Ireland. Millard writes: To Churchill, such far-flung conflicts offered an irresistible opportunity for personal glory and advancement. When he entered the British army and finally became a soldier, with the real possibility of dying in combat, Churchill’s enthusiasm for war did not waver. On the contrary, he had written to his mother that he looked forward to battle “not so much in spite of as because of the risks I run.” Churchill succeeded in proving himself a man by those imperial standards, fighting in India and Sudan, helping the Spanish suppress Cuba’s freedom fighters, and, after a brief South African parliamentary career, fighting in the Second Boer War. This experience primed Churchill to seek similar solutions to domestic trouble. When he joined the 1906 Liberal administration, he advocated aggressively authoritarian measures to curb social disobedience. Churchill’s promotion to home secretary four years later came at a time of still-rising political turmoil in the United Kingdom: Irish struggles for Home Rule, Suffragism, strike waves. Churchill opposed them all violently. There is much emphasis, in Churchill hagiography, on refuting the idea that he ordered troops to attack striking miners in South Wales (something for which he is despised by the local community to this day). What in fact happened is that Churchill sent battalions of police from London, and held troops in reserve in Cardiff, in case the police couldn’t get the job done. There was never any doubt that Churchill was on the side of the employers, and prepared to mobilize the full force of the British state to see matters settled on their behalf. During a standoff with armed Latvian anarchists in Stepney, he took the unusual step of assuming operational command of police for the duration of the siege, and ultimately opted to kill the enemy by allowing them to be burned to death in a house where they were trapped. That role was short-lived, however. Churchill was appointed, instead, to a senior military position, first lord of the admiralty, that put him in political command of the Royal Navy. A technophile, he pushed for modernization, aerial combat, and later the tank. But nothing in his life experience could prepare him for the glory of the First World War: “My God!,” he effused in 1915. “This, this is living History. Everything we are doing and saying is thrilling—it will be read by a thousand generations, think of that! Why I would not be out of this glorious delicious war for anything the world could give me.” Churchill’s gung-ho nature may have been to blame for the military disaster in Gallipoli in 1915. In an effort to claim control of the Dardanelles Straits and thus freeze Turkey out of the war, he was responsible for an operation sending British, French, New Zealander, and Australian forces — mostly volunteers, half-trained — to besiege the Gallipoli Peninsula. The ensuing debacle chewed up those units, and resulted in Churchill being demoted, leaving the government, and joining the Army to command a battalion. Had his ruling class credentials been less estimable, he might have been unmade by his failure. Instead, he returned to parliament in 1916 and once again rose through the ranks — minister of munitions, secretary of war, and then secretary of air. He was a ferocious advocate of intervention to quell the Russian Revolution, and wrote furiously about the dangers of the “International Jews” (communists) and their “sinister confederacy,” against whom he invoked the far more acceptable “National Jew” (Zionism) – writings which have been mystifyingly interpreted by hagiographers such as Martin Gilbert as evidence of his philosemitism. Churchill was a ferocious advocate of intervention to quell the Russian Revolution, and wrote furiously about the dangers of the ‘International Jews.’ In addition to being motivated by a profoundly antisemitic “good Jew-bad Jew” dichotomy, the colonial underpinnings of Churchill’s support for Zionism were later made clear when he addressed the Palestine Royal Commission on the subject of Palestinian self-determination. Resorting to bestiary for his imagery, he compared self-rule to the dog running its own manger, a right he did not acknowledge. “I do not admit,” he went on, “that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia . . . by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race . . . has come in and taken its place.” As an imperial tactician, Churchill recommended fighting the insurgency in British Mandate Iraq by gassing them. Indeed, he had already pioneered such deadly weapons in Russia, against the Bolsheviks. It is important to recognize that, as with his support for aerial combat, he tended to justify this as a humane, high-tech alternative to more brutal methods. “I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes,” he wrote, before explaining: “The moral effect should be so good that the loss of life should be reduced to a minimum.” When some in the India Office caviled at “the use of gas against natives,” he deemed their objections “unreasonable.” “Gas is a more merciful weapon than a high explosive shell and compels an enemy to accept a decision with less loss of life than any other agency of war.” Such a logic, as historian Sven Lindqvist reminds us, has underpinned some of the most barbaric innovations in war. Even the use of nuclear weapons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was justified in part as a means to save lives.