ON WINSTON CHURCHILL
To understand Churchill is necessary to understand his social class and society in which he was educated.
Sir Winston was an aristocrat in a society with rigid hierarchies, he was educated to rule and never rested until he got what he believed to be his birthright (rule). But nobody can say he was a great ruler.
What distinguishes him from other rulers (Stalin and Roosevelt) is that he had an enormous capacity for fable on his qualities as a ruler and military commander. In fact, he wrote several books, books that were very Well written because he knew how to captivate the reader hiding its flaws. In one sense Churchill can be compared to Julius Caesar, another great writer who knew how to improve his achievements, who knew how to use literature to enhance the relief of his own person.
Churchill never regretted having allowed bombers to German cities without any military importance (a monstrous war crime that would lead him to the gallows if he had lost the war). And Caesar never said in his book Bellun Galica that he ordered cut off the hands of thousands of Gauls only because they had taken up weapons (who said this was Aulus Hircio, the Roman who finished the book and had more intellectual honesty than Caesar; unfortunately has not yet appeared an English Aulus Hircio and many go cultivating a positive image of Churchill.
The problem of Churchill is the same that always happens in other places. A generation bleed to build their empire. Another generation enjoys the empire and do propaganda of it. The third generation believes in imperial propaganda even when the empire began to decline and do not hesitate to go to war to defend it and destroy the empire. What happened to the British case happens today with Americans.
Sir WInston was a big idiot. He used in Europe the human and materials resources that could be used to preserve the empire and brought the empire to ruin. He was racist, elitist and, above all, arrogant.
Tradition, religion and authority were the three cornerstones of public life the ancient world. Tradition and religion, according to Hannah Arend, were destroyed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and this resulted in depletion of the authority. This is why politics has become so volatile (and subject to bestiality, or Nazism, fascism, Stalinist communism and Americanism). The new obsession with image of Churchll is dangerous. He is being treated as unquestioned leader (almost sacred) and I think some people want refound the authority based on the cult of Churchill or at least make he the center of a new tradition. The result would be an increase in British imperial aggression. Against that any honest man must fight.