NYT Essay: Winston Churchill, Neocon?

[leveymg]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/27/books/review/27HEILBRU.html
Winston Churchill, Neocon?
By JACOB HEILBRUNN

Douglas J. Feith was becoming excited. After spending an afternoon discussing the war in Iraq with him, I asked what books had most influenced him. Feith, the under secretary of defense for policy and a prominent neoconservative, raced across his large library and began pulling down gilt-edged volumes on the British Empire. Behind his desk loomed a bust of Winston Churchill.

It was a telling moment. In England right-wing historians are portraying the last lion as a drunk, a dilettante, an incorrigible bungler who squandered the opportunity to cut a separate peace with Hitler that would have preserved the British Empire. On the American right, by contrast, Churchill idolatry has reached its finest hour. George W. Bush, who has said ''I loved Churchill's stand on principle,'' installed a bronze bust of him in the Oval Office after becoming president. On Jan. 21, 2005, Bush issued a letter with ''greetings to all those observing the 40th anniversary of the passing of Sir Winston Churchill.'' The Weekly Standard named Churchill ''Man of the Century.'' So did the columnist Charles Krauthammer, who in December 2002 delivered the third annual Churchill Dinner speech sponsored by conservative Hillsdale College; its president, Larry P. Arnn, also happens to belong to the International Churchill Society. William J. Luti, a leading neoconservative in the Pentagon, recently told me, ''Churchill was the first neocon.'' Apart from Michael Lind writing in the British magazine The Spectator, however, the Churchill phenomenon has received scant attention. Yet to a remarkable extent, the neoconservative establishment is claiming Churchill (who has just had a museum dedicated to him in London) as a founding father.

Some of this reverence has its origins in the writings of the neoconservative husband-and-wife team Irving Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb. As the co-editor of the British monthly Encounter in the early 1950's, Kristol (who deplored imperialism in his youthful Trotskyist incarnation) began falling under the influence of Tory intellectuals and started his march to the right. Himmelfarb, a historian of England, has always championed a return to Victorian virtues, which Churchill, more than anyone else, embodied in the 20th century. Writing in The New Republic in November 2001, Himmelfarb observed: ''Among other things that we are rediscovering in the past is the idea of greatness -- great individuals, great causes, great civilizations. It is no accident that Churchill has re-emerged now, at a time when the West is again under assault.''

Another strand of Churchill piety can be traced to the political philosopher Leo Strauss, who fled Nazi Germany for England before immigrating to the United States. Strauss shaped successive generations of neoconservatives, starting with Kristol and Himmelfarb. He believed that the Western democracies needed an intellectual elite to check the dangerous passions of the lower orders, and he saw the pre-World War I British aristocracy as the closest thing to Platonic guardians. Upon Churchill's death in 1965, he declared, ''We have no higher duty, and no more pressing duty, than to remind ourselves and our students of political greatness, human greatness, of the peaks of human excellence.''

<SNIP>

Love the Straussian Neo-cons self-characterization as Platonic Guardians: "Western democracies needed an intellectual elite to check the dangerous passions of the lower orders" Lower orders - hey, that's us! Too bad, their check bounced.

[KlatooBNikto]

1. There is another British Imperialist that warms the hearts of many

Neocons.That one is a man named Paul Johnson.His idea is that we should reimpose colonialism in order to civilize the Middle Eastern savages.He would, of course, fit right in with this worship of Churchill, who thought of all darkskinned people as savages that need to be civilized by the White Man. Churchill certainly approved of slavery for black people and Apartheid and he was arrogant enough to think he was superior to Mahatma Gandhi whom he called "the half naked fakir" and refused to meet when Gandhi visited London to discuss India's Independence demands. It is on that occassion that Churchill remarked that he does not intend to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.It is entirely appropriate that the Neocons worship Churchill and Strauss both contemptuous of the masses.I am sure that Churchill would be shocked to discover that India and China are the fastest growing economies in the world today and will soon surpass Britain.

[spooked911]

2. well said.

puts things into perspective

[thebigidea]

3. a return to Victorian values? Like prudishness and repression?

[leveymg]

4. Don't forget hypocricy. n/t

[dameocrat]

6. Himmlefarb wants to bring back all of that

including work houses for the poor.

[teryang]

5. Lest it be forgotten, Churchill's legacy was Britain's eclipse

...both as an empire and a world power.

[bemildred]

10. Sort of like Bush ... nt

[dameocrat]

7. They're oddball twits

They have always gained power only through people who look normal.

[KlatooBNikto]

8. The odd thing about Leo Strauss, the Neocon Guru is that he

escaped the clutches of the Nazis and as soon as he landed in Chicago began having second thoughts.When he saw that the masses ( blacks, Asians atc.) were gaining voting rights in America, he started yearning for the days of the authoritarian regime of the Nazis.He was not against the Super race concept at all, only that it did not include the jews among such a racial concept. He put lipstick on the pig that he now called the Elite;his idea was that the Elite (nee Master Race) was the one entitled to rule and can lie at will to the masses to entrench themselves in power, a lesson that Bush-Cheney-Rumsefeld-Perle-Wolfowitz were only too glad to espouse.The rest as they say,is now history.

[applegrove]

9. If only Alexander the Great had Stalin's bombs?

Churchill was also a fan of Disraeli. Churchill's father was around when Disraeli was Prime Minister and was very impressed with the thinker. Disraeli wrote the script for Conservatives finding 'new life' after the masses figured out that the Liberals were the only ones who were not totally out for the elites - but actually wanted to make things better. Disraeli came up with Conservative "going patriotic" to get votes from all classes. It was either change or die in the mid 19th Century.

The Liberals were internationals, open to new ideas, open to trade (which threatened the elite's monopolies so conservatives didn't like it). You can see how being closed, anti-war, anti-middle class and anti worker wasn't paying off in votes for the Conservatives. So instead of being the opposite of Liberals on the horizontal plane, Disraeli's plan was to 'GO VERTICAL'. Patriotic, pride, into trade but only for selfish reasons, into war but only for selfish reasons.

So Disraeli cut a swath right through the middle of Liberal policies by being international (when it suited the elites). And the lure for the worker or the middle class was British nationalism & Empire Pride. That doesn’t cost a thing for the elites to deliver on - it just makes it easy to go to unjust wars, and of course it means there is a chance a plurality of votes would be delivered to the Conservative Party. That is how the Tories saved themselves - in 1880!

I like that Feith loves Churchill. Neocons love Hitler. I think it is very funny. Churchill was born into a wealthy class, lived in Victorian times, during Empire Building times, was given his position in the army (& parliament?), at a time when stopping child labour was the battle of the day. That explains Churchill - what is Feith's excuse. Something along the lines of ideations of iconic leaders or something. Like all his neocon friends 'picking & choosing' heroes off a tree and reclassifying them as 'neocon' is a major pastime. It is also an adolescent way to be.

In order for this 19th Century way to work in the 21st Century - the experience that deluded pride & PATRIOTISM could be very dangerous tools in the hands of a monster. So the neocons adopted those immediately. And they had to rewrite History to make Hitler's rise about 'shame' not about "miscellaneous misplaced mass emotion of an adolescent nature: of which pride was the big thing".

If you meet a freeper or a neocon, you can make them squeal by pointing out their use of fascist tools, reminding them that fascism in recent practice has been right wing, that pride & patriotism were the sharpest tools Hitler used and that they should come up with something other than "let's use the tools of a sociopath & Disraeli thinking and call it a whole new intellectual movement ".

If only Alexander the Great had Stalin's bombs? If only the Magi Magi Rebellion marchers 'conjured up' gas instead of water? If only the Iroquois had Rwanda's machetes?