Is this widespread? This was news to me. I'm no historian, but I've always considered him heroic. He was a well-experienced politician when he became Prime Minister, and apart from the specifics of the war, he did wonders marshaling the spirit of the British people.
Why the Far Right Hates Churchill
The accepted historical narrative of the past 80 years—that it was morally right for the U.S. and the U.K. to fight and destroy the Third Reich—is now under assault.
WSJ
By Andrew Roberts
The American podcaster Darryl Cooper—who has never written a history book, let alone one about World War II, but whom Tucker Carlson calls “America’s most honest historian”—has claimed that it was Churchill’s fault that the war escalated from the limited one that Adolf Hitler apparently wanted when he invaded Poland in September 1939. According to Cooper, Churchill was the “chief villain” of World War II, rather than any of the more obvious suspects.
There are a number of problems with this theory, not least chronological. Churchill did not even enter the British government until two days after the Nazis’ invasion of Poland. Even then he was not in control of British decision-making, as he did not become prime minister until after Hitler had unleashed his blitzkrieg on Western Europe in May 1940.
Nonetheless, tens of millions of people have downloaded Cooper’s ahistoric tripe, and the British neo-Nazi historian David Irving tweeted, “Glad we are in the mainstream narrative, but would be nice to get a credit,” which got over a quarter of a million views and over five thousand “likes.”
Joe Rogan, the world’s most popular podcaster, has similarly opened the door to extreme revisionism, saying that “Darryl [Cooper] has some of the most nuanced, balanced and charitable views on all the figures in history,” which is true only if he means the Nazis....
So why is the ultraright targeting Churchill?
In the simplest terms, it is because his practical aims and principles as a leader of the West were directly opposed to the new strain of isolationism in America and Britain...
“The reason I resent Churchill so much for it,” Cooper told Carlson, “is that he kept this war going when he had no way [of winning]. He had no way to go back and fight this war. All he had was bombers…just rank terrorism.” More than that, once Hitler ripped up yet another treaty and invaded Russia in June of 1941, Churchill immediately made common cause with Stalin against Nazi Germany.
It is worth considering what might have happened had Churchill not urged these fateful choices. If Britain had remained neutral in the West and refrained from bombing Germany, Hitler would have been able to concentrate his entire Luftwaffe against Russia. Instead he had to hold back 30% of it to guard against Churchill’s bombers.
Neutrality in the face of Hitler would have meant that the 5,000 aircraft and 7,000 tanks and 51 million pairs of boots and the rest of the aid that Britain and America sent the U.S.S.R. would not have materialized. Nor would the invasion of Normandy have taken place while the Russians and Germans were fighting in Belarus.
Which leads to the obvious: With either Hitler or Stalin controlling all of Europe between Paris and Minsk, the world—including America—would have been in a vastly worse place than the one that Churchill and Roosevelt helped to fashion in 1945.
In his peroration in the Westminster Abbey speech, Churchill said, “The only guide to a man is his conscience; the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions. It is very imprudent to walk through life without this shield, because we are so often mocked by the failure of our hopes and the upsetting of our calculations; but with this shield, however the fates may play, we always march in the ranks of honor.”
Despite the best efforts of his revisionist detractors, Churchill marches there still.
For the complete article:
https://www.wsj.com/politics/why-the-far-right-hates-churchill-20fdc710?msockid=03cbec21bc9a656f2158faedbde56472