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Cameron Jong Il, Maximum Leader; Why Do Americans Love Churchill?

If the Labour conference in Manchester was like a gathering of the Living Dead, the Tory gathering in Bournemouth was like a North Korean re-education camp, the inmates apparently chained to their seats as they were subjected to endless propaganda designed to rid them of old thoughts and fill their heads with the rubbish the […]

If the Labour conference in Manchester was like a gathering of the Living Dead, the Tory gathering in Bournemouth was like a North Korean re-education camp, the inmates apparently chained to their seats as they were subjected to endless propaganda designed to rid them of old thoughts and fill their heads with the rubbish the regime prefers.

Everything they used to believe is wrong, the platform told them. They weren’t even allowed to be pessimistic any more (which conservatives generally are, and very sensible too). The sun must shine. Mass immigration is an unmixed boon. The BBC is great. The current level of confiscatory taxation must remain.

The only surprise, for the spectator, was the realisation that these people were not actually shackled to their chairs, and could come and go freely. Yet they sat and took it, without jeering or complaining. To some extent this can be explained by their high average age. There is a strange breed of young Cameronite Tories, young women dressed as if they were middle-aged, young men with a worrying light in their eyes, but these are wholly uninterested in politics as far as I can see, and simply view the Tory party as a career path. ~Peter Hitchens

In other words, on policy Cameron brings all of the foolishness of Bush and “compassionate conservatism” along with the cult of optimism of Limbaugh and in presentation offers all the vacuity and superficiality of New Labour.  Can it get much worse?  Oh, yes, John McCain was there, so, yes, it can.  About McCain Mr. Hitchens writes:

Since this [Cameron’s boring speech] had followed Senator John McCain’s equally interminable contribution, with its repeated, tiresome references to Winston Churchill, designed to ingratiate but actually rather irritating, I was quite surprised to find it was still daylight when I got outside. I had expected night to have fallen and the stars to have come out, and that bats would be flitting among the pine trees.

This causes me to ask, if I haven’t already at some point: why do Americans, especially Americans on the right, always feel obliged to mention Churchill whenever they talk about Britain or speak with Britons?  Why do they admire the man so?  Brits rarely return the favour for FDR, and no wonder–why would anyone want to praise him? 

The man happened to be Prime Minister while our two countries were at war together.  Okay, fine.  Yes, he made his Iron Curtain speech.  How nice.  He could make a decent political speech in wartime.  He was not massively incompetent–bravo.  He was, however, a consummate opportunist and hardly the stern man of principle I think some people imagine him to be.  When it was convenient and personally advantageous, he became a Liberal, and when it became convenient again he stopped being one.  He did come up with the idea of opening up a front in the East during WWI, which was a good idea in theory, but then presided over one of the worst botched expeditions in British history; he was chiefly famous thereafter for being responsible for gassing Iraqis into submission, which in more recent times has merited rather less praise from these same people when done by a certain ruler of Iraq.  He was, understandably enough, a dyed-in-the-wool Empire man, which I don’t really fault him for, but which makes him an even odder sort of idol for your average American conservative…until you realise that neo-imperialism (all done for the sake of freedom, of course) is quite trendy among a lot of these folks for reasons that frankly escape me.  But the admiration for Churchill seems to know no bounds over here. 

There was never any similar American lauding of Lloyd George–and why would there be?–years after WWI and there never has been any since.  Probably the whole wartime totalitarian government part puts people off.  To this day, when people remember the Gulf War they will often recall the story of Thatcher’s “don’t go wobbly” remark but will probably forget that John Major was PM during the great campaign to keep Kuwait free to be ruled by its emir.  Alas, speeches today are not peppered with memorable John Major anecdotes–if you could imagine such a thing.  Admirers of Churchill will probably say that it is exactly the point–it was his resoluteness or some such that sets him apart, but no one was more resolute and even bloody-minded than David “Make The Pips Squeak” Lloyd George.  No appeasement for Davey, no, sir.  If that maniac had had access to the strategic bomber wings at Allied disposal in WWII, three-fourths of Germany and all of Austria-Hungary would have been burned to cinders.  Republican apologists for the WWII-era mass murder of civilians (i.e., “strategic bombing”) would undoubtedly find that a recommendation for Lloyd George. 

No, the Churchillophilia over here is almost entirely irrational, tied up with fond memories of the ‘Good War’ and History Channel-induced flashbacks to the Blitz, helped along with a lot of rubbishy sentimental Anglophilia that, as Hitchens’ remark suggests, irritates Brits a lot more than it pleases because it is so predictable and fundamentally superficial.  American Anglophiles do not love Britain or British people, but only the caricature of them they see on A&E murder mysteries and read about in 19th century novels.  I happen to enjoy those murder mysteries and novels just fine, but they are as close to everyday life in Britain now or then as our television and literature are representative of ordinary Americans’ lives–not very much.  It is exactly these same irrational attachments that drove the Blair-worship among loyal Republicans for the past several years, even though if these same people had to live under Blair’s Government they would seriously contemplate shooting him.  In their eyes, Blair was a “strong” and “principled” leader (my British readers will have a hard time not laughing at these descriptions, I suspect) who loyally stood by America, rather than a glory-hounding and self-seeking wretch who threw himself into foreign affairs because he had made a deal to leave domestic politics to Brown and who decided early on that to make his foreign policy activism workable he had to suck up to Washington every chance he could.

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