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https://theconversation.com/deconstructing-the-cult-of-winston-churchill-racism-deification-and-nostalgia-for-empire-185589>
Review: Winston Churchill: His Times, His Crimes - Tariq Ali (Verso)
"Only one prime minister is honoured with a statue on the grounds of the
Australian National University. Despite the university’s name, it is not an
Australian. Rather, the stern face of Britain’s war-time prime minister Winston
Churchill greets students on the Canberra campus. Although the ANU was founded
in 1946, the Churchill statue is not a gesture of post-war admiration. A
replica of a statue in Parliament Square, London, it is owned by the Winston
Churchill Trust and was erected in 1985.
Why would the ANU decide to honour a British prime minister two decades after
his death? According to author Tariq Ali, excessive admiration of Churchill,
which he calls a cult, is not a result of his wartime leadership in the 1940s
but was deliberately cultivated, in Britain and the wider English-speaking
world, by his Conservative successors in the wake of the 1982 Falklands War.
For Ali, an Oxford-educated journalist and film maker and towering figure in
the international left, the cult reflects a nostalgia for empire. It is now, he
argues, virtually uncontested with support from “all three [UK] political
parties and the large trade unions”.
A long-standing contributor to the
Guardian and editor of the
New Left
Review, Ali is a prolific and iconoclastic author who has written scathing
accounts of US Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. In
Winston
Churchill: His Times, His Crimes, Ali turns his attention not so much to the
historical Churchill as his legacy and place in public memory.
Ali’s book is not a conventional biography. He explains that library shelves
already groan under the weight of Churchill biographies, several of which, in
his opinion, amount to hagiography. Rather the book serves as one long argument
(at over 400 pages perhaps unnecessarily long) that the lionising of
Churchill’s legacy in books and film is not only historically problematic but
deleterious for modern politics.
Ali asserts, “that Churchill was a racist is indisputable”. He has plenty of
primary material to sustain this claim. Instead of the usual blurb, the book’s
back cover consists of a series of racist and sexist comments attributed to
Churchill."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
