In re: the growing scandal of Tucker Carlson’s promotion of (among other things) anti-Churchill “rightists,” let us recall afresh the judgment of British historian Geoffrey Elton:
“When I meet a historian who cannot think that there have been great men, great men moreover in politics, I feel myself in the presence of a bad historian. And there are times when I incline to judge all historians by their opinion of Winston Churchill—whether they can see that, no matter how much better the details, often damaging, of the man and his career become known, he still remains, quite simply, a great man.”
Chaser: I have a hunch about what is really going on with the Tucker Op. For the longest time the left has attacked what it calls “the Churchill cult on the right.” In The New Republic some years ago Isaac Chotiner decried “right-wing Churchill worship” verging on “a rather sickly Anglophilia.”
I noted this in the Weekly Standard back around 2008:
Both Christopher Hitchens and Michael Lind have written disparagingly of the “cult of Churchill” on the right, with Lind going further to designate Churchill as the patron saint of the neocons, which is tantamount to saying that Churchill should be regarded as something of a devil.
Ah—there we have it. This latest revisionism is in part another front in the backlash against neoconservatism, which is wrongly said to be a Jewish-led intellectual movement. QED.
