This article is taken from the November 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
“Ingratitude towards their great men,” says Plutarch, “is the mark of strong peoples.” This was quoted by Winston Churchill in The Gathering Storm when talking about the French discarding Georges Clemenceau after the Great War.
But he followed almost immediately with the caution, “It was imprudent of France to indulge this trait when she was so grievously weakened.”
The old warhorse’s words have risen from the literary grave to be true of him too. Just as Britain is grievously weakened, we have turned on our great men — not least the man voted the BBC’s “Greatest Briton” just after the Millennium.
Whilst readers of this magazine are no doubt well versed in the ways in which the political left have tarnished Churchill’s reputation over many years, it may come as more of a surprise to appreciate how the American populist right has decided to join the assault.
Whilst the left focus hard on Churchill’s words about other ethnicities and races and have indulged the myth of Churchill’s complicity in the Bengal Famine, the right — most chiefly on the wildly popular Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan shows — have taken the quite extraordinary position that the Second World War was wrong and that, as the amateur historian Daryl Cooper put it, Churchill was “the chief villain of World War II”.
Whilst these positions might at first appear polar opposites of each other — the one aggressively post-colonial and anti-racist, the other substantially based on Hitler’s actual speeches — they share a common root.
Both wish to upend the Anglo-American vision of the world, as can be clearly traced from the end of the Napoleonic war to today. To do this they need to recast the fons et origo of this order, Britain, as the villain of the last two centuries.
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and the revelations that followed, shattered the idea that socialism might not work but was morally good. The gulags, the mass murders, the Holodomor destroyed this. Hard core socialism, and all its defenders, stood accused of unspeakable crimes against humanity.
Where they couldn’t defend or deny the crimes, they could lessen their impact by deploying the tu quoque fallacy: a logical fallacy, but a highly successful one, which turns an argument around by saying, “but you did the same”. The Bengal Famine was perfect for this endeavour. Here we have the so-called hero of Britain’s fight for survival turned into a racist whose decisions led to the deaths of millions.
Any historian worth their salt now knows this whole claim to be bunk: the primary reason food could not get to Cyclone-devastated Bengal was that Japan was conducting submarine warfare against British shipping, having occupied Burma and the other prime rice-growing areas of the region; the suggestion that Churchill redirected famine relief to Europe has been destroyed by the actual cabinet papers of the time.
Nevertheless, the blowing up of the reputation of the Greatest Briton, and with it Britain’s recent history, has been a huge boon to the appearance of zombie Marxism.
But intriguingly it is America’s populist right that now needs to bring down Britain. The Pax Britannica, enforced (to greater and lesser degrees of success) substantially using the Royal Navy until handing the baton on to the United States, didn’t just maintain peace by keeping open the seaways; it was used to suppress the slave trade.
The British idea of national liberty and resistance to tyrants must be attacked
Generation after generation, Britain defended smaller powers against overweening tyrants, from Philip II to Louis XIV via Napoleon before twice standing up to German hegemony in the 20th century.
Since the populist right has soured on the idea of defending Ukraine against Russian aggression, it is natural that the British idea of national liberty and resistance to tyrants should be attacked.
When Tucker Carlson said, “the one group who doesn’t get the credit they deserve for making the world worse are the Brits”, he is echoing a narrative that has come out of Russia since the start of the Ukraine War: that Britain is the main enemy of peace in Europe. Which is true, if you are viewing it from the perspective of an expansionist dictator.
This has led to that extraordinary rehabilitation of Hitler’s foreign policy amongst this crowd and, as a consequence, the desire to bring down the architect of Hitler’s destruction. Beyond this we also see it in a very clear and concerted attack on the core of Britain’s identity, the monarchy. Britain and Britishness seem unambiguously the new enemy.
If the hard left and the populist right are united against us, we must be doing something right. It’s time for a concerted rehabilitation of Britain and its history, of 400 years of fighting for liberty, and of the men and women who did so victoriously.
This is urgent. If we succeed we can say, as a great man once did, that “history will be kind to us, for we intend to write it”. If we fail, the entire civilisational project of the free world and the West will fall.
