Postwar mythologies and counter-mythologies have long clashed over whether Churchill was a hero or villain. However, all the contending myths take the permanency of Anglo-American global hegemony for granted. Churchill’s devotees see him as a world-historic figure whose purity of moral principle during and after Munich kept Anglo-American hegemony true to its anti-totalitarian core. The Anglo-American hegemony is a liberal empire, a force for good in the world that resists and crushes the enemies of democracy. This myth suggests that all Anglo-American failures are failures of will. The Churchill myth is about stiffening Western resolve to fight enemies that it can always beat in a fair fight.
A left-wing counter-mythology, by contrast, sees Churchill as the chief representative of white Anglo-American imperialism, which is the eternal first cause of every problem faced by the “global majority” inside and outside the West. In this account, the British Empire is just as powerful as ever. The spots of pink on the map may be gone, but imperialism’s malignant influence persists in dusty statues and cursory selections in survey courses. Hence, the urgent need to “decolonize” everything.
There is another counter-mythology emerging out of certain factions of the right, a version of which was on display recently in Tucker Carlson’s much-debated interview with the podcaster Darryl Cooper. By this marginal but increasingly influential account, Anglo-American liberal imperialism is the source of the all-powerful egalitarian and democratic cancer consuming the West. Victories of the empire, such as World War II, are in fact defeats for Western civilization. By obsessing over Hitler’s evil, the adherents of this view believe, we distract from the evils that have overcome the West after his demise. Hence, the urgent need to find in Churchill an anti-Hitlerian scapegoat.
These myths and counter-myths all take Churchill as he appears in his memoirs when he first became prime minister: sleeping soundly for the first time in years. They don’t hear what Churchill fearfully told his bodyguard after he became prime minister: “I hope that it is not too late. I am very much afraid that it is.”
