(Updated from 2013.) Mr. Donald Trump’s election victory has had the inevitable result. Just like Churchill, go the comparisons, he made an amazing comeback from write-off to recovery. And like Churchill, he switched parties twice! (Did he? I don’t know. I’m not a student of Mr. Trump’s political pilgrimage.)

Mr. Nigel Farage MP has made such comparisons. Notwithstanding what I think (or you think) of Mr. Trump, I think Nigel is all wet. Not Tory Wet, but Reform Wet. (Is this a new category?)

First, Parliamentary comparisons with the American federal system are non-sequitur. Churchill’s comeback was from rejected Cassandra in 1935 to First Lord of the Admiralty (1939), then Prime Minister (1940); but all that time he was in the ruling party. So he kind of evolved into power. Cynics of the time said that he gradually sank to the top. Rab Butler quipped: “The good clean tradition of English politics, that of Pitt as opposed to Fox, has been sold to the greatest adventurer of modern political history.” That sounds familiar.

Comparisons can logically be made to Grover Cleveland—the only previous U.S. President to return to office after being thrown out. But comparisons to Churchill in 1940 are off.

So are comparisons to WSC returning as PM in 1951 after being dismissed in 1945. His Woodford constituency re-elected him by large majorities in every election from 1945 to 1959. He returned as PM because he was the leader of his party when it won a majority of seats in the House of Commons.

Comparisons, 2013

Churchill comparisons started eleven years ago with President Obama and the use of chemical weapons by Syria. Senators Ted Cruz (R., Tex.), and Rand Paul (R., Ky.), and Rep. Alan Grayson (D., Fla.) complained. Obama, they said, “literally offered no policy and no ideas about how to stop the slaughter of innocent people with chemical weapons.”

A defender of the President said he “made the hard call and proposed the strong action that would take a real stand and make a real difference.” Just like Churchill in the 1930s, “when the Spanish fascists, with support from Hitler and Mussolini. began their attacks against the Republican government of Spain.”

No. For the record, Churchill took no sides and proposed no intervention in the Spanish Civil War. He lamented the bombing of Guernica, which killed about as many as chemical weapons in Syria. But he proposed “no ideas to stop the slaughter.” That was chiefly because his unwavering focus was on the main danger, Nazi Germany.

Stop it now

Really, these Churchill comparisons need to stop. We cannot postulate what Churchill would do today. Or even if he could be elected. It doesn’t seem far-fetched to suggest that in today’s Middle East his focus would be on the main danger. Figure out what that is, and you may find comparisons to Churchill. But, in a larger sense, there is nobody so far in this century who is comparable. Nobody.

Related articles

“Some Thoughts on Churchill’s London Statue,” 2024.

“Myths of Dear Benito: Churchill’s Alleged Mussolini Complex,” 2024.

“Churchill’s Hitler Essays: He Knew the Führer From the Start,” 2024.

“It’s Baaack! The Churchill Bust Furore, Round 3,” 2021.

“May We Proclaim Trump No Churchill Without Slurring the Latter?” 2020.

I find the glorification of Churchill quite disgusting. It is typical British-American arrogance to ignore the outcome of WW2 for the peoples of Eastern Europe, not to speak of the Germans. Churchill knew from the beginning about the terrible fate of the Russians and many other East European peoples under Bolshevist dictatorship. He obviously didn’t care. He was obsessed with anti-German hatred. Knowing that he bombed German cities, killing thousands of civilians long before the Germans were retaliating, makes him in my opinion even worse than Hitler. Why  did he go into alliance with Stalin against the Germans? That is his crime and the recognition of it will come. —H.W. via email.

The choice before Churchill and Britain in 1939-40 was anything but clear-cut. There were good reasons, however, supporting the choice they made.

While considering the fate of Eastern Europe it is reasonable also to consider that of Western Europe, and what Europe would have looked like had Hitler triumphed, and moved on into the nuclear age.

Before assuming that Churchill didn’t care about Bolshevism, it is necessary to read a little. Read about 1919-20, when he supported the Whites against the Bolsheviks, earning no love from his practical, wise and eminent colleagues, who didn’t see what he did.

Read on into the 1930s. Who occupied the Rhineland in violation of treaties? What was the March 1938 Anschluss about? What happened at Munich? What about March 1939, and the absorption of all those Bohemians, Moravians and Slovakians into the Reich? Which country first allied herself with Russia—Britain or Germany? Cities like Guernica, Warsaw and Rotterdam were all hit before the RAF had dropped a single bomb on the Reich. Indeed, for many months after the war started in 1939, the most the British would drop were pamphlets. Bombing, some in the government believed, would amount to destruction of private property.

Why side with Stalin in 1941? If your back is to the wall you tend to welcome allies without being too choosy about them. It is a legitimate criticism that Churchill was too trusting of Stalin; those arguments are not coming out, they’ve been out for thirty years. But if he hated Germans, his postwar declaration that the only way to salvage Europe was through rapprochement between France and Germany was an odd way to express it. “My hate,” he wrote later, “died with their surrender.”

In 1931 Churchill wrote “Mass Effects in Modern Life”: words that still ring today:

No material progress, even though it takes shapes we cannot now conceive, or however it may expand the faculties of man, can bring comfort to his soul. It is this fact, more wonderful than any that Science can reveal, which gives the best hope that all will be well. Projects undreamed-of by past generations will absorb our immediate descendants; forces terrific and devastating will be in their hands; comforts, activities, amenities, pleasures will crowd upon them, but their hearts will ache, their lives will be barren, if they have not a vision above material things.

“Implicit in those words,” says Dr. Larry Arnn, “are the speeches of 1940. Churchill told the British people we must fight to the death—better to die than to give this thing up. The sin of Hitler, almost superhuman in its scale but not, is that he tried too form a polity that would eliminate the very heart of humanity. No one saw that more clearly than Winston Churchill.”