Churchill Misrepresented

f Western civilisation melts away,” the historian John Lukacs predicted in his book The Hitler of History, “threatening to collapse, two dangers lie in the future. During a rising flood of barbarism, Hitler’s reputation may rise in the eyes of orderly people, who may regard him as a kind of Diocletian, a tough last architect of an imperial order. At the same time he might be revered by at least some of the New Barbarians.”

When Lukacs was writing in 2002, I rejected this prediction as hyperbolic. Yet nearly a quarter of a century later, I am now not so sure; indeed, there are a number of worrying signs that the New Barbarians are already at the gates. They are not openly, at least yet, revering Adolf Hitler, but they are certainly attempting to relativize him, in a way that can only encourage a revising of the reputation of the man who most educated and intelligent people still rightly regard as the most evil man in history.

Going hand in hand with this foul historical revisionism is its obvious concomitant: an attempt to depict Winston Churchill as an evil warmonger who put his own career above the well-being of Western civilization. Needless to say, as the author of Churchill: Walking with Destiny, I take exception to this portrayal of Churchill, drawing as it does on several tropes from both the wartime Nazis and their postwar neo-Nazi cosplayers.

It is almost unnecessary to state that this revisionism is being spearheaded by podcasters. When my friend Sir Niall Ferguson described Twitter as “the universal lavatory wall” twenty years ago, the sheer ubiquity of ultra-MAGA, “woke right,” contrarian, and conspiracy theorist podcasters had yet to make their influence felt. Today, what hitherto was scrawled on the universal lavatory wall is instead broadcast into our homes, and all too much of it tries to relativize the crimes of Adolf Hitler, in part by denigrating the heroism of his nemeses, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, in standing up to and eventually destroying him.