The Far-Right Algorithm: Anti-Churchill, Anti-West

25:54And actually, the laziness of it is also pretty reprehensible, because nowadays, if you go on to the International Churchill Society website, or if you consult the Churchill documents at Churchill Archive Center, a lot of which are online, it doesn't actually take that much. It's not that difficult to get the correct quote. I've got upstairs the 20 volumes of Churchill's documents. Now, not everybody's going to have those, but they are available online. So it's not that hard to do. But you're right, he doesn't bother to do that. But there's also something about internet culture that makes us vulnerable to this.

26:33So when David Irving, his primary means of communicating with the world was through books. and because he wanted to be taken seriously as an historian, he complied with the formal architecture of an historical work, which is footnotes and links and footnotes and quotes. So you would say, you make your argument that Hitler was completely innocent of the Holocaust, that he didn't know about it. You cite a bunch of sources and people can then read, the people who are encountering your work, they read it. They have the book open, they see the footnote, and they can then wander down the hall if they're in a library to the shelf and pull the thing you cite off the shelf and see, did you quote it correctly?

27:10And as John Lukács did in the Hitler of History, oh, you introduced a series of very malicious mistakes into your reading. But the preferred form of modern neo-Nazism is verbal or verbal and visual. That is, there's no text. They speak. And their favorite form is not to say, let's not have a historical controversy in writing, but let's debate in form. So if I tell a lie and the person I'm talking to is not as nimble or not as well-informed, the lie sails past in a way that it can't do in true historical debate, which is done in writing with footnotes. Precisely right. And it's all part of their modus operandi.

27:48And they have to do it that way because, of course, if they did it the other way, we'd be able to catch them out all the time. So it's much, much easier to lie verbally than on the page if you want that lie to survive longer than the amount of time it takes for somebody to check you. Can you take us through what you think are one or two of the most common lies about Churchill and Churchill in relationship to the Second World War? Oh, golly. Well, there are dozens of them. I don't know. I wonder whether it's best to do it chronologically or just. He's supposed to have been involved in secret peace negotiations with Mussolini and apparently the proof of that is wrapped up in a box at the bottom of Lake Como.

28:37He is, of course, supposed to have deliberately made the Bengal famine worse than it actually was already, for which there's no proof whatsoever. However, he's supposed to have let Coventry be destroyed, even though he knew that Coventry was going to be attacked in order to preserve the secrecy of the ultra decrypts. Oh, gosh, there are so many. I mean, all the way through his life, by the way, he's supposed to have sunk the Lusitania as well is another one. But he's also supposed, isn't the central lie that he was supposed to be in the thrall of Jewish bankers? That's the big thing. that the Jews invented Churchill in order to make war on white Western civilization.

29:22And Churchill, because he was, for a man of his time, strikingly not anti-Semitic, although not purely so, but strikingly not anti-Semitic for a man of his time and class, that therefore he's some kind of tool of the Jews in their war on the West, on the white West. Yes. I mean, this again has been around for a very long time. Oscar Wilde's lover, Bozy, Lord Douglas Hamilton, was a believer in this theory. And Churchill actually sued him, where he said that Churchill had underplayed the Battle of Jutland for some financial reason that the Jews were behind. The Jews are blamed for, as you say, creating Churchill, or if not creating him, then at least buying him in the 1930s.

30:06Now, he did have rich Jewish friends who occasionally did bail him out. So that's the way that they tie in this sort of, you know, protocols of the elders of Zion kind of conspiracy theory. But there's no example. You also had rich non-Jewish friends who bailed him out because one of the requirements of being a Churchill friend. Yeah, yeah. No, Churchill was broke his entire life, basically. No, he didn't get into the black until he was in his 70s. You introduced me to a wonderful book about Churchill's finances. What was it called? No More Champagne? That's right. Yeah. David Lowe. Very good book.

30:45Yeah. He would periodically write letters to his wife instructing her on domestic economy. And the first thing is we're going to eliminate champagne at lunch. That's how we're really going to do it. That's right. And actually, I asked Mary, his daughter, Winston and Clementine Churchill's daughter, Mary Soames, and she said that that lasted about three days.

31:06his stance was cigars were only expensive cuban cigars were only to be served at the discretion of churchill the box wasn't to be open for guests to help themselves that's yeah that's right exactly i don't suppose that lasted terribly long either but the thing was that he was always broke but he also quite rightly i think his attitude was not really to to try and save spending money because that never worked but to just work harder and to and that's the reason that we have 800 articles and 37 books comprising 51 volumes. And he wrote more than Shakespeare and Dickens combined. It's because he had to, because he was broke.

31:45And as you say, non-Jewish friends bailed him out as well. But there's no example of any Jew ever asking him for anything at all as a result of bailing him out. And some people, like Sir Abe Bailey, I think Sir Henry Stracosh, gave him money in their wills. So there's clearly nothing that they were after as a result, because the money didn't actually get given to Churchill until they died. Well, because the impression one has of him is he was not just a deeply admirable man, but also a highly personally lovable man. And so people who were his friends, who were good with money and knew that he was horrible at it, would say, this is something I can do in testimony to not only my admiration for him, but my love for him.

32:28That's right. Right. And Bernie Baruch being another great example of that, the New York banker who basically allowed if Churchill's stocks and shares went up, then Churchill kept the money. And if they went down, then Bernie Baruch would cover the difference. But again, there was no quid pro quo for this, apart from friendship, admiration, love for the man. So, of course, the anti-Semites immediately pounce on this aspect of Churchill's character to try to insinuate that he was in the pocket of the Jews and so on. And therefore, he took the British, according to this theory, he took the British Empire into war in order to destroy the man who was attempting to destroy the Jews, i.e.

33:16Adolf Hitler. This completely ignores the fact, of course, that he was out of office throughout the 1930s. One of the things that Daryl Cooper accuses Churchill of having done was to have made the Second World War worse after Hitler's invasion of Poland. But he wasn't actually in the government until Hitler had invaded Poland. He didn't get into the government until after the invasion. and then he doesn't become prime minister of course until the nazis had already invaded holland and belgium luxembourg so you know just on chronological grounds none of these accusations really add up logically just in terms solely of rational argument one of the differences between real history there are many differences between real history and and this kind of internet history but real historians are always very attuned to which event happened first and uh one of the basic rules of history is an event that happened after an earlier event cannot have caused the earlier event because it came second in time and time flows only one way.

34:23Yes, exactly. And so, and you get this, of course, with everything to do with Russia, with Hitler's invasion of Russia in June 1941. It comes a year and a bit after Hitler's invasion of France and one leads on to the other and to try to therefore accuse Churchill of trying to save communism in 1941 as a result of anything that happens. It's very, very clear that the reason that he made peace, made an alliance with Russia, Soviet Russia, even though he hated communism, was because the Russians were fighting Hitler and he recognized that Hitler had to be defeated. That's a very important point just to stress here.

35:10The most famous of Churchill's speeches, that we shall fight them on the beaches, we shall never surrender. At the time those were given, Britain's allies were Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, Greece. That's about it. And the Soviet Union was Hitler's most important ally. And at the time of the fall of France, Hitler drove into France with Soviet-provided fuel. That's right. And the German tanks were made out of materials, many of which came from the Soviet Union. And so this is both a Soviet lie and now a Russian lie and a not neo-Nazi lie to say that to forget this key fact when when Hitler when Churchill came to power after and fought the battle of France and lost Hitler and the Soviet Union were allies not enemies yeah and the communist party in Britain opposed the war until the 22nd of June 1941 so you have communist trade unionists in British factories causing trouble even during the um the battle of britain yeah communists in the united states too let me take you into the present day because you are a rare historian who is not only active in contemporary discussions but was called upon by your own parliament to write the definitive report on the um hamass atrocities of after october 7th i i won't take you into that field right now because of respect for time but drawing on the expertise you acquired through there i want you to help us understand a debate that is going on, which is many of the people who advocate these crackpot theories of history were, until a minute ago, big supporters of President Trump.

36:44And not to accuse Donald Trump, who seems pretty hazy on most of history. I don't know that he would have a side on any of these disputes. Maybe New York nightclubs in the 1970s, he's kind of an expert on that. But there seems to be this split in the MAGA world between the voting bloc and the members of Congress who are mostly aligned with President Trump and supporting his actions against Iran, and then the MAGA influencers online who are increasingly radically opposed to it. Can you explain to us how this conflict is working and what it means? I suppose in a sense, of course, the MAGA opponents of Iran do have the point that they were sold a pup by Trump, who did promise no forever wars, no interventions and so on, especially not in the Middle East, after what happened in Afghanistan and Iraq.

37:41So, you know, one can understand how some of them feel lied to and let down. But the isolationist wing, who are the people who feel that, again, have a very long history. The phrase America first was first used by Charles Lindbergh and the anti-interventionists who wanted America not to go to war against Nazi Germany. So here again, you have very strong historical echoes. and um and so people who consider themselves to be on the sort of ultra right of the maga movement in a sense do feel sort of betrayed and and let down well i don't know that we want to call them isolationists because the ultra right wing of the maga movement was very keen for a war against denmark to seize greenland they were interested in uh fighting panama to take back the panama canal And they raised no objections to Donald Trump's repeated talk of annexing Canada, some kind of 51st state, although he never intended to give Canada any senator.

38:44So it wouldn't be a state. It would be kind of an occupied territory. So the MAGA was very comfortable with violent action in the Western Hemisphere of a highly imperialist kind against people who are traditional American friends like Denmark. Americans have been present in, you'll know better than me, but have been present. there's been an american military presence in greenland with the consent of the danish government since before the united states entered the second world war all during the second world war and all during the cold war and the danes would have gladly welcomed a larger american presence today if the americans would have been willing to send it so there was no objection but there was this and mega had not a problem with that imperialist agenda it is conflict with anti-western forces whether it's putin or the iranians that's what makes them upset yes that's right i mean in a sense also historically of course with regard to southern America to Venezuela and Panama etc that does tie in with the Monroe doctrine that goes back to 1823 so you know that isn't a a radical change from what oh I don't know Teddy Roosevelt would have been comfortable with however as you say the time that the um that the MAGA that the ultra MAGA people get very upset is when the West goes to war against people who scream death to America and tries to get the nuclear bomb.

40:08It is an interesting aspect. We have the same thing here in England, of course. Let's wrap this up here with going back to the historical matter. And would you give us a refresher of what the world would have looked like if in those crucial days when the British had to make the decision whether to follow Churchill's lead, whether to refuse the peace that Hitler offered after the fall of France. What would that world, if we had taken the advice of the Pat Buchanans and the Tucker Carlson's and Britain had surrendered in the summer of 1940, what would the world look like today? Hitler wasn't asking for an all-out surrender of Britain.

40:45He was asking for Britain to stay neutral in the future of the war. So we wouldn't have had the Blitz, of course. We'd have probably been able to have hung on to the bits of the empire that he wasn't interested in. And he would have been able to have attacked Russia with all of his armed forces, including 100 % of the Luftwaffe rather than just 70 % of it, because he needed to keep 30 % of it back to protect German cities against British bombing, and also to protect France, of course, from an invasion. So there would have been a very different attitude, I think, in the United States. I can't see the United States getting involved and also terribly difficult for them to have worked out how they could have engaged with the Germans anyway, North Africa perhaps, but that's hardly any sort of quick route through to Berlin.

41:43So you could have easily found, I mean, it was touch and go in Russia, of course. In the October of 1941, Stalin had his own personal train made ready to take him back beyond the Urals, the Battle of Stalingrad could have gone either way as well. And of course, the Germans did subject Leningrad to a grueling thousand day siege. So had the Germans won in Russia and pushed the Soviets back beyond the Urals, Hitler would have been master of Europe from the Urals all the way through to Brest. And it would have been a catastrophe, of course, as it was. 50 % of Europe's Jews died in the Holocaust, 100 % undoubtedly would have died under those circumstances, while Hitler was also working to try and create a bomb, which it would have been very difficult, I think, for the United States to have made entirely on its own and funded if they weren't even involved in the war at all, because nothing would have brought them in to fight against Germany, especially if they'd been attacked at Pearl Harbor and Britain wasn't in the war.

42:55So there's a world in which Hitler could have certainly survived the mid-1940s, maybe created a nuclear bomb and totally dominated the whole of Europe, which would have left America ultimately very isolated. Yeah, and remember, the Germans were ahead in rocket technology. So the Americans would have gotten the nuclear weapon first, but the delivery system the Germans would probably have got first. Certainly, yes, absolutely. There was no – you didn't have an American version of Werner von Braun in the first part of the 1940s. So, yeah, I mean, Churchill's decision to fight on in 1940 is absolutely central to the survival of Western civilization, which is in a way, which is why he's so unpopular with the revisionists, because they would much prefer to see a world in which Hitler was dominating the world, did have the bomb, did wipe out the Jews and had his own form of sort of Weltmacht.

44:05which is very, very different from the kind of Western civilization that we see today. The person who saw this all most clearly at the time was President Roosevelt, who gave speeches about it, which we don't read anymore because they seem so irrelevant until recently, or it seems so much a part of history. But Roosevelt warned in the summer of 1940, 1940, after the fall of France, that if we go down this path, if the Tucker Carlson's in this world had got their retrospective wish and the British government had made a kind of peace with Hitler and let him invade the Soviet Union and annihilate all the Jews of Europe, that the United States would never have been a free country again.

44:37It would have lived on half a planet. It would have sheltered in the smaller of the two hemispheres. And it would have had to live forever on a war footing, not a Cold War footing, but on a full war footing against this technologically advanced nuclear power with rockets on the Eurasian continent. That's what this was all about in 1940. And the development of peace that the world enjoyed after 1945 was a product of American power and British endurance. And had the British made the choice that is being recommended to them by all these fool loudmouth bloggers, their own childhoods would have been overhung by terror and fascism and tragedy.

45:17and they would not have enjoyed the life that we have so the security that we have so taken for granted that we can entertain all these foolish nonsensical childish ignorant opinions on the internet that was created because of the peace and security and wealth that the western world enjoy because of churchill's endurance and courage in that summer i think you put the the full uh level of irony right up there yes that's exactly that's exactly right David. Andrew, I understand. Can I ask you one last personal question? I understand you've just finished working on something. Can you share a little bit about what it is?

45:50Yes, Napoleon and his Marshals. It's a book about the relationship between the emperor and his 26 marshals. It's going to be coming out in America in November. And you have written The Great Rehabilitation of Napoleon in another biography as someone who... The Hitler-Napoleon comparison breaks down as Napoleon was, although he was a warlord, he did do a lot of good things too. Yeah, there's no comparison. There's no comparison. One of them is the Enlightenment on horseback, and the other is the absolute opposition to the Enlightenment. No, that's going well. And then after that, I'm going to write a biography of Benjamin Disraeli.

46:29So I've got until the year 2030 nicely cut out for me. You are a marvel. Andrew, thank you so much for talking to me today. Thank you, David. I've much enjoyed it. Bye-bye.

47:09He covers the ways technology is changing how we think and how we live. Not just the obvious stuff, but the subtle ways it shapes what we believe, how we talk to each other, how we see ourselves and our neighbors. If you've ever wondered how smart people end up believing implausible things online, Galaxy Brain is worth your time. It's thoughtful, surprising, and a little unsettling in the very best way. Find it wherever you listen or watch.

47:39Logging off. Rebuilding our attention spans. Trading in smartphones for dumb phones. Why are people trying to get off their screens? And what are they really after? I'm Natalie Brennan, a producer at The Atlantic. And I'm Julie Beck, a staff writer at The Atlantic. This season, we're exploring the often fraught, always changing relationship people have with technology. And examining the ways our devices affect our connection with one another. New episodes of How to Touch Grass come out every Monday. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks so much to Andrew Roberts for joining me today on The David Fromm Show.

48:15My book this week is Burr, a novel by Gore Vidal published in 1973. I first read this book as a teenager. I returned to it this past week because of some thoughts left behind by my discussion last week of the novel The Director by Daniel Kelman. That novel ponders the problem of a great artist, or someone we're invited to believe is a great artist, tangled in the moral compromises of making art under the conditions of the Third Reich. And we're asked to consider whether there is anything that can justify that kind of moral compromise. And the director comes to his own very ironic and understated conclusion about whether or not moral compromise justifies great art in the end, whether great art can be produced under conditions of moral compromise.

49:03I turned to Burr and Gore Vidal because it was a book I enjoyed very much as a teenager. And I enjoyed it because it was a pretty nasty piece of work, actually, written by a pretty nasty man, Gore Vidal. Burr tells the story of the American Revolution's founding generation through the eyes of Aaron Burr, who even today remains kind of a villain of American history. And in 1973, building up to the Bicentennial at a time when America's heroes were taken much more at face value than they are today. Burr was the great outsider, a man hated both by Thomas Jefferson and by Alexander Hamilton. So he had to be bad.

49:40Gore Vidal took on Burr and used him to write a debunking novel about all the founding generation. The novel is set at the end of Burr's life in the 1830s, but we are constantly called back to the period of the revolution of the constitution. We're shown through Burr's eyes, a George Washington, who is stupid, vain, militarily incompetent, sexually dysfunctional, and mercenary in his marriage. A man who, by the way, because Vidal can spare no form of mockery, we are introduced to George Washington as a man who walks with an ungainly waddle. Thomas Jefferson, the great hero of the Declaration of Independence, is shown as hypocritical, cowardly, manipulative, a schemer of every kind.

50:22And Alexander Hamilton gets slightly better press than the other two, but he is shown as someone who is brilliant, but self-seeking, arrogant, snobbish, contemptuous of others, and profoundly two-faced. Burr himself is a man with, certainly with faults. We see that he in late life marries for money and then steals from his wife. But we're invited to see him as, despite these foibles, amusing, entertaining, and his cynicism about everything and his lack of moral scruple, is actually, we're invited to see this as a kind of higher wisdom. There is no irony about this. Gore Vidal does not introduce us to Burr as an unreliable narrator.

51:00In fact, there's another narrator of the book, a younger man who sees Burr with some distance, but we're invited to take Burr's view as the novelist's view and therefore as our view. Now, Gore Vidal, I think his reputation is fading somewhat these days, but he was, I knew him a little bit in his lifetime. He was a thoroughly unpleasant person. You can see it in his interviews. He was spiteful and envious in his own right. I think he's best remembered now for a saying of his. He later tried to explain this away as a joke, but it reflected the authentic man. He is said to have said, or he takes credit for the line, every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.

51:38That's the man. And it is his own nastiness that fills the novel with its amusingness, that the novel is amusing because Burr is nasty, his story is told by a nasty person, and we're given a point of view that very much appealed to the adolescent smart aleck who wants to see history as it really was and not through some gauze of legend. So what we have here is, I think, not a great work of art, but a successful work of art that owes its success entirely to the unpleasantness and spitefulness of the novelist's character. Bad character produced pretty good art. So is our problem solved? I'm not so sure.

52:18Because as I reread this book now as a much older man, I thought, what would a truly great artist have done with this material? He would have allowed us to see through and past Burr in a way that, say, Shakespeare allows us to see through and past Richard III, or the way that John Milton allows us to see through and past his Lucifer, who gets all the best lines in Paradise Lost. And to understand that while we can enjoy the spiteful cynicism of an Aaron Burr as a narrator, that the great work of art would have allowed us to see that Burr was fundamentally wrong and that the people whom he's traducing, mocking, maligning, they are in fact, despite of their undoubted human foibles, which Burr can see in which history has kind of alighted, that they weren't great people in their own way because great people are not perfect people.

53:06And the presence of imperfection, an ungainly waddle in the walk of the founder of the country does not make him any less the founder of the country and does not make his heroic and self-abnegating acts any less heroic and self-abnegating. that the spiteful man sees only as far as the spiteful man can, and that can produce a work of art that is successful, but maybe not ultimately great. I don't know that that is a final answer to the question of the relationship between art and morality. I want to go back to, I think we can think more hardly, more accurately, more powerfully about this through the prism of a novel like The Director, which I think is a more successful novel than Burr, a more powerful and maybe more enduring novel than Burr.

53:47But Burr, as entertaining, if you haven't read it, it's worth a read. If you want to have a kind of mean view of the founding generation, it's a lot of fun. Just understand always that this is a limited work by a limited narrator in the hands of a limited artist. And so maybe the answer is actually the two, art and morality, may have more to do with one another than Gore Vidal ever imagined as he wrestled with his own limits, both as a man and as an artist. That's it for the David Fromm show this week. Thank you so much for listening and for watching. As ever, if you're minded to support the work of this podcast, the best way to do it is by subscribing to The Atlantic and supporting the work of all of my colleagues at The Atlantic.

54:28Thanks for watching and listening. See you next week. Bye-bye.

54:55This episode of The David Fromm Show was produced by Nathaniel Fromm and edited by Andrea Valdez. It was engineered by Dave Grain. Our theme is by Andrew Edwards. Claudine Abad is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. A few months ago, I invited Atlantic staff writer, Charlie Worzel onto the David Frum Show. As podcast hosts, we talked about the pressures and temptations of the medium. Outrage often gets rewarded. Nuance does not. Charlie doesn't take that bait. On his show, Galaxy Brain, he covers the ways technology is changing how we think and how we live.

55:40Not just the obvious stuff, but the subtle ways it shapes what we believe, how we talk to each other, how we see ourselves and our neighbors. If you've ever wondered how smart people end up believing implausible things online, Galaxy Brain is worth your time. It's thoughtful, surprising, and a little unsettling in the very best way. Find it wherever you listen or watch.