Obama, Britain and Churchill

Again. Since certain simpletons insist on submitting unprintably bad comments to this blog. And just for the sake of it.

Every President of the United States is to some extent anti-British. The excision of British influence from the Americas, and really from the whole world beyond England, or Scotland and Wales at a push, is fundamental to the American Republic. That is why every American Administration has always supported the Argentine claim to the Falkland Islands, very aggressively in 1982.

As surely as the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was intended in no small measure to prevent any British re-conquest of the Empire in Asia and the Pacific, quite probably accompanied by an annexation of the Dutch East Indies that the Dutch were not then in any position to take back, so soon after the British Pacific Fleet had been cheered into the Sydney harbour that was to have been its base for the prosecution of the War against Japan by precisely those means. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, as much as anything else, specifically anti-British acts.

So when Obama threw out that bust of Churchill, he was not being singularly anti-British. If anything, he was showing an affinity with Britain most uncommon in holders of his office. In the 1930s, there were two British threats to constitutionality and, via Britain’s role in the world, to international stability. One came from an unreliable, opportunistic, highly affected and contrived, anti-Semitic, white supremacist, Eurofederalist demagogue who admired Mussolini, heaped praise on Hitler, had no need to work for a living, had an overwhelming sense of his own entitlement, profoundly hated democracy, and had a callous disregard for the lives of the lower orders and the lesser breeds. So did the other one.

In Great Contemporaries, published in 1937, two years after he had called Hitler’s achievements “among the most remarkable in the whole history of the world”, Churchill wrote that: “Those who have met Herr Hitler face to face in public business or on social terms have found a highly competent, cool, well-informed, functionary with an agreeable manner, a disarming smile, and few have been unaffected by a subtle personal magnetism.” That passage was not removed from the book’s reprint in 1941.

In May 1940, Churchill had been all ready to give Gibraltar, Malta, Suez, Somaliland, Kenya and Uganda to Mussolini. Churchill’s dedicated Zionism was precisely that of the BNP: he did not regard the Jews as British, so he wanted them to go away. The anti-British terrorists who went on to found the State of Israel agreed with him, very nearly coming to an understanding whereby Hitler would have expelled the Jews by sending them to British Palestine, which he and the Zionists would have conquered together for the purpose.

All sorts of things about Churchill are simply ignored. Gallipoli. The miners. The Suffragettes. The refusal to bomb the railway lines to Auschwitz. His dishonest and self-serving memoirs. Both the fact and the sheer scale of his 1945 defeat while the War in the Far East was still going on, when Labour won half of his newly divided seat, and an Independent did very well against him in the other half after Labour and the Liberals had disgracefully refused to field candidates against him, even though he had been loathed by great swathes of the population throughout the War. His deselection by his local Conservative Association just before he died, his death, 20 years after the end of the War, being the only thing that stopped cinema audiences from booing and hissing whenever he appeared on screen.

And not least, his carve-up of Eastern Europe with Stalin, so very reminiscent of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. But we have not forgotten the truth about him in the old mining areas. Nor have they in the places that he signed away to Stalin, including the country for whose freedom the War was fought, making it a failure in its own terms. We condemn genocidal terrorism against Slavs and Balts no less than genocidal terrorism against Arabs, or the blowing up of British Jews going about their business as civil servants, or the photographed hanging of teenage British conscripts with barbed wire.

As for Obama and BP, he is attacking a privatised and globalised company for the fully intended consequences of privatisation and globalisation. He will have to be careful how he plays it, since Middle America does have a virulently anti-British streak. But if instead he reawakens Middle America’s aboriginal but long-repressed hostility, not to Britain, but to international capital, then he could do as much good as if he reawakened Middle America’s aboriginal but long-repressed hostility to foreign entanglements, the spirit of the American Anti-Imperialist League that eventually endorsed William Jennings Bryan, and of the America First Committee of Norman Thomas (anti-Communist campaigner to build a Farm-Labor party), of Sargent Shriver (Peace Corps and Special Olympics founder, McGovern running mate, and pro-life Catholic), and of Shriver’s future brother-in-law, John F Kennedy.