Welcome to Keith and I Don't Tread on Anyone and the
Libertarian Institute. Constantine Kissen has a new
article, Why They Hate Churchill.
I can give you one example of why I hate Churchill.
He often refers to Churchill only discussing the Second World
War. Well, this is a very difficult
conflict to use because there is so much hatred for the National
Socialists and for the Japanese imperialist, rightfully so,
along with Benito Mussolini. But let's look at Winston
Churchill's behavior in a war that is less justified by the
masses that people don't have such an emotional connection to.
Let's look at his behavior in the First World War and use in
Churchill as the source for what he engaged in when Winston
Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty.
Here is what Winston Churchill said about the British blockade
of Germany in World War One. In his own book, titled The
World Crisis 1911 and 1918, Churchill said the British
blockade treated the whole of Germany as if it were a
beleaguered fortress and avowedly sought to starve the
whole population, men, women and children, old and young, wounded
and sound into submission. So that is why I hate Churchill.
I'm not sure what Kissen is referring to when he says they,
but thankfully he has written this article for us, so let's
find out. As regular readers will recall,
I've written occasionally about a faction of the right which
operates in a manner increasingly resembling the woke
left. There is much debate about me
labeling this group woke right, with plenty of agreement and
disagreement from people that I like and respect.
One of the traits that I would assume is in someone who was on
the woke right would be anyone who says you're unpatriotic or
you hate America If you disagree with invading Afghanistan,
invading Iraq, invading Libya, invading Syria, invading
Somalia, invading Yemen, question provoking, you know, a
third World War with Russia, China and Iran.
Anyone who says you hate America because you're against what some
people in the military engage in, that is certainly an aspect
of woke ISM Questioning the motives of someone when they're
bringing empirical or principled evidence to the front.
I would say that would be woke. Another aspect of a woke person
might be screaming anti semite anytime someone says they're
against the Israeli mass murder operation in Gaza.
Mainly these arguments stem from what one understands woke Ness
to mean. If being woke is about being an
extreme leftist obsessed with pronouns and open borders, the
term woke right is nonsense. But to me at least, wokeness was
never about policy positions. It was about the philosophy and
methodology behind the movement. And that is this, the identity
politics, grievance mongering and cancel culture that is now
being replicated on the fringes of the right.
Again, I see a lot of people on the right saying that their
Israeli identity really matters to them.
And because of October 7th, this is a grievance we have.
Anything that the Israeli government does in response is
totally justified and we're going to cancel anyone who
questions this by calling them an anti Semite.
So I do agree there is a woke right.
I think we just disagree on who it is.
In any case, even those who disagree with the label can't
possibly think it's a coincidence that this faction of
the right is attempting to destroy the very same historical
figures as the woke left. I don't see too much overlap.
I know that the left is always called Churchill, a racist,
imperialist, eugenicist, but usually people on the left focus
on Christopher Columbus, Thomas Jefferson, Robert E Lee, anyone
in the Confederacy. I don't see a ton of overlap.
I'm not sure if one example Winston Churchill is enough for
us to find a causal connection there.
Winston Churchill has been the subject of leftist attacks for
decades for obvious reasons. Since the entire project of the
woke left is to undermine the West belief in itself, they must
necessarily target the people we celebrate the most.
Whoever we hold up as the best of us must be torn down.
I definitely agree with this. This is an attempt to increase
the amount of insecurity that people on the right feel with
whatever policy position they're promoting.
So by increasing their insecurity, it decreases the
likelihood people will proudly say what's on their mind or
promote their ideas. This sort of yields the stage to
the left, so to speak, in the marketplace of ideas.
So that I certainly agree with, but why would some on the right
who are otherwise patriotic and pro western assuming that if you
question Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, Abraham
Lincoln, that that means you are unpatriotic?
That is definitely a leftist criticism.
If you criticize 1 aspect of something, you're assuming that
the person is criticizing the entire portion of people
involved the based on an arbitrary characteristic.
There's nothing unpatriotic about saying I love America,
Dick Cheney belongs in prison, I love Britain, Winston Churchill
was a war criminal. There's nothing incompatible
with either of those claims. But Kissen of course just calls
you unpatriotic, unpro western, racist, xenophobic, anti semite.
I agree there is a problem of the woke right?
OK, starting again. But why would some on the right,
who are otherwise patriotic and pro Western, increasingly
attempt to denigrate his legacy as Tucker Carlson did over the
weekend in a debate with Piers Morgan?
Well, there are a number of reasons that someone would do
this. The reason that I do it is
because there was a principled reason to oppose the policies
and actions of Winston Churchill that he engaged in in the First
World War and the Second World War.
I mentioned the first briefly. Let's look at Winston
Churchill's position on how to deal with the Germans at large.
We know in the First World War, as I previously mentioned, he
was targeting the German civilian population.
Here is what happened in the Second World War.
This would have been around May of 1940 after Neville
Chamberlain stepped down and Winston Churchill was appointed
Prime Minister. The war for democracy was led by
undemocratic Winston Churchill and unelected Joseph Stalin.
But that's story for another time.
Here is a section from a gentleman who worked in the
British government. His name is Charles Percy Snow.
In 1961 he gave a speech at Harvard University in a
collection of lectures titled Science and Government.
On page 48 of these transcripts, Snow says the paper on bombing
went out to the top government scientists.
It described in quantitative terms the effect on Germany with
a British bombing offensive in the next 18 months.
The paper laid down a strategic policy.
The bombing must be directed essentially against German
working class houses. Middle class houses have too
much space round to them and so are bound to waste bombs.
Factories and military objectives had long since been
forgotten except in official bulletins, since they were much
too difficult to find and hit. The paper claimed that given a
total concentration of effort in the production and use of
bombing aircraft, it would be possible in all larger towns of
Germany, that is those with more than 50,000 inhabitants, to
destroy 50% of all houses. These were the good guys in the
war. This is just something we're
supposed to say. Well, they had exhausted every
peaceful means of not getting invaded and they just had to
start targeting German working class houses.
There's another citation I have from JM Spade, who was the
principal assistant secretary of the Air Ministry in 1944.
This is before Dresden. He wrote a book titled Bombing
Vindicated. His thesis is basically that the
First World War was so bloody and unnecessarily prolonged that
the use of bombing with aircraft increased the likelihood of the
enemy waving the white flag and surrendering at an earlier time
than they otherwise would. And this saves lives.
So bombing should be vindicated. That's his thesis here for from
JM Spates book Bombing Vindicated retaliation was
certain if we carried the war into Germany.
So they knew that Britain would get bombed if they started
bombing Germany. Yet because we were doubtful
about the psychological effect of propagandist distortion, of
the truth that it was we who started the strategic offensive,
we have shrunk from giving our great decision of May 1940 the
publicity which it deserved. That surely was a mistake.
It was a splendid decision. It was as heroic, as self
sacrificing as Russia's decision to adopt her policy of scorched
earth. It could have harmed us morally
if it were equivalent to an admission that we were the first
to bomb towns. This is what Constantine Kissen
is defending. One more citation and then I'll
get back to Kissen's letter. There was a book titled The
Complete War Memoirs of Charles de Gaulle.
So he was running the French government in exile after the
National Socialists installed the Vichy government in France.
This, of course, was after France and England declared war
on Germany, September 3rd of 1939.
The Vichy government and invasion was a response to that.
But OK, On page one O 4, here's what Charles de Gaulle, someone
who was in the know who does not have an incentive to make stuff
up. He said the following as the
people, many in their desire to emerge from an almost unbearable
tension, went so far as to say out loud that they wish the
enemy would risk the attack. Foremost among them, Mr.
Churchill found the waiting hard to bear.
I can still see him at Shakur's one August day, raising his
first toward the sky as he cried.
So they won't come. Are you in such a hurry?
I said to him. To see your town smashed to
bits? You see, he replied, the bombing
of Oxford, Coventry, Canterbury will cause such a wave of
indignation in the United States that they'll come into the war.
So Churchill knowingly provoked a conflict which would get
British people killed, not just Germans.
But we should still be sympathetic to the vast majority
of people who are engaged in peaceful activities, who have
very little say over what the National Socialist regime does.
So let's go back to the kissing article.
And he has an insert of of Tucker Carlson having a
conversation with Pierce Morgan. So I'm very distressed about it.
So people want to tell me Churchill is an incredible guy.
Really. Well, why didn't he save Western
civilization? He didn't even save Poland.
He did. What Tucker Carlson is referring
to in the He didn't even save Poland example.
This is in reference to the fact that the origins of the Second
World War were justified by the British government by the
British Prime Minister was based on the justification that
Germany had violated Polish independence.
In March of 1939, the British government gave the Polish
government a war guarantee only against Germany.
The Soviets of course invaded 2 weeks later, the other end of
Poland and there was no declaration against the Soviets.
So it was not a war guarantee. It was only a war guarantee
against the Germans. The Soviets invaded, I want to
say September 17th of 1939. So if you look at the text of
Neville Chamberlain September 3rd 1939 speech, two days before
the Germans had invaded Poland, the area of Danzig which was 95%
German, formerly a German area before the Versailles Treaty.
Here's Neville Chamberlain's words on September 3rd of 1939
in his declaration of war. This morning the British
Ambassador in Berlin handed the German government a final note
stating that unless we heard from them by 11:00 that they
were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from
Poland, a state of war would exist between us.
I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been
received and that consequently this country is at war with
Germany. So in short, the war waged on
behalf of Polish independence ended with 7.1 million dead
Poles and Poland under Soviet occupation.
This is the original justification at the time for
the war. You'll notice that there's a
common thread. In order to get people on board
with getting their sons to get conscripted, to get their limbs
blown off to die, they have to scare people.
So they'll say Saddam is going to use mushroom cloud weaponry
in America. There's going to be mass death.
Saddam is aligned with al Qaeda. And then after a few years,
they're like, well, we're just trying to bring democracy to
Iraq and have a nice democracy, stable region in the Middle
East. What's wrong with helping these
people? Or they'll say, the Taliban
colluded with al Qaeda and attacked us on 9/11, and that's
when they want to start the war. But after 20 years, they're
like, well, there's women's rights that we're fighting for
there. And the Taliban is oppressive to
their domestic population. So to get people into the war,
they scare the people they're talking to.
And then in retrospect, they say, well, this was just for
virtuous reasons. There was nothing nefarious
about this at all. And so this is very common.
The war waged on behalf of Polish independence ended with
millions of Deadpools in Poland under the Bolshevik occupation.
And in hindsight, it's seldom referred to except from people
like Tucker Carlson. It's just like, well, we had to
stop Germany from taking over the world or we had to save the
minorities of German nations. That is a very common scam that
they get people on board with. Let's listen to the rest of
Tucker Carlson and Piers Morgan. Did he, He did say Western
civilization, how he defeated the Nazis.
But oh, I know he helped defeat the Nazis with his friend
Stalin. Nazis wanted the whole world to
be speaking, defending the Nazis.
I'm just saying where is Western civilization?
What did he do? What did he preserve?
Where is it? I don't know where it is.
The Churchill died the year before I was born.
It was the same year, actually. He died in 63, I think 6565, I
think about a month before I was born.
It was a natural succession. But the.
But the question is like, where's the victory?
I don't understand. Like everyone wants to yell at
you for not loving Churchill. OK, well, hang on.
Show me the victory. Wait a minute.
It's a theoretical victory. Oh, he beat.
So he beat Hitler. Great.
I'm totally for meeting Hitler. I'm totally for meeting 80 years
on that. Churchill didn't win the war
because look at what's happened since.
But the. The kissing article continues.
Even though the clip is only 40 seconds long, there is much to
unpack. Before we do, however, it is
important to recall that last year Carlson hosted a pseudo
historian on his show called Darryl Cooper.
I think he's called Martyr Maid and his name is Darryl Cooper,
but OK. Any chance to belittle the
pseudo historian? In that episode, Carlson
famously endorsed Cooper as the best and most honest popular
historian in the United States before nodding along as the
historian explained that Churchill was the chief villain
of World War 2. My point is, Carlson's
performance in the clip you just watched is the product of an
extensive ideological evolution rather than an off the cuff
remark made in the heat of the moment.
I want to address this claim that Churchill was the chief
villain of World War 2. There's a book titled Churchill
a Life by a man named Martin Gilbert who had more access to
the Churchill archives than any other historian I've come
across, including Andrew Roberts.
He explains in the book that there was an exchange between
Lord Londonderry, Leader of the House of Lords on May 4th 1935
with Winston Churchill. Londonderry says I should like
to get out of your mind what appears to be a strong anti
Germans obsession, Churchill responded.
You are mistaken in supposing that I have an anti German
obsession. British policy for 400 years has
been to oppose the strongest power in Europe by weaving
together a combination of other countries strong enough to face
the bully. Sometimes it is Spain, sometimes
the French monarchy, sometimes the French Empire, sometimes
Germany. I have no doubt who it is now,
but if France set up to claim the overlordship of Europe, I
should equally endeavor to oppose them.
It is is thus through the centuries we have kept our
liberties and maintained our life and power.
So as early as 1935, Winston Churchill was saying we are
going to have to go to war with any competitor on this
continent. That means that what Cooper
didn't say, Churchill killed the most, the highest number of
people. He was saying chief villain, as
in there's at least a case to be made dealing with politicians.
You're always comparing infinities.
But we just, I just want to move Churchill from the heroic column
to the evil column, just as we would put Ted Bundy or anyone
else who engaged in mass slaughter, which also was not
like the British people were totally behind this.
Which you know, because according to parliament.uk, on
the day Britain declared war on Germany, September 3rd, 1939,
Parliament immediately passed a wide-ranging, a wide reaching
measure. The National Service Armed
Forces Act imposed conscription on all males aged between 18 and
41 who had to register for service.
If you think it's wrong to force someone to pick cotton against
their will, we're in total agreement that is immoral.
I think there were like 400,000 deaths.
America had conscription as well.
The National Socialists had conscription as well.
The Soviets had conscription as well.
But if you're going to say that forced labor is bad, what about
forced labor under the most deadly conditions?
This actually would reflect the will of the people.
If you funded the war voluntarily, not through
taxation, and if you allowed people to opt out of
participating in it, that would be an actual war, which you
could be proud to lead people on.
Of course, the populations don't actually want these things.
That's why they have to fund them with taxation.
That's why they have to conscript millions of men
against their will. Sure, the feminists are very up
in arms about that, but that is. What Darryl Cooper was saying
made Churchill the chief villain, that he wanted to take
what would have been a conflict between the National Socialists
and one portion of Poland, Danzig, and, you know, Polish
colonels and maybe the National Socialists in the Bolsheviks.
He said it was Churchill who made this a global conflict.
That's Cooper's thesis. I have no problem saying that
all of these politicians are interchangeably evil and that
while you can prefer some to others, at some point when you
have Churchill engaging in, I remember I actually collected
the numbers here. I want to say the #600,000 came
to mind. So this is Colonel Carla
Calson's research at the Canadian Forces College.
She estimates that 600,000 German men, women and children
died as a result of the direct bombing of German cities during
the war, 39 to 45. Many thousands more were wounded
and mutilated, Millions more were left homeless.
In the prosecution of the bombing campaign, the British
Commonwealth lost 55,573 aircrew, 18% of which were
Canadian, and only one man in three could be expected to
survive his tour of duty, which equated to 30 missions with
Bomber Command. A 33% death rate in this forced
labor operation. I can't imagine any plantation
in the South. As long as forced cotton picking
existed and the enslavement of people.
I can't imagine any plantation had a 33% death rate.
So governments engaging in conscription is far worse than
the slavery which people think they are so proud to oppose.
Not that anyone's ever asking them.
They kind of just brag about opposing a thing that's like not
even on the table. By the way, this position that
the Second World War was a bit of a waste.
It was one of those where, yes, even if you say the National
Socialists were the bad guys and the British were the good guys
with their allies, the Soviets and the Americans, even if you
take that position, it's important to note what happens
as a cause of result. People generally will say, I
will say rather the cost of war are extraordinarily high, not
just the monetary cost, the number of people die.
That's a downside that has to be in the cost column.
So the costs are extraordinarily high and the outcomes are
extraordinarily unforeseeable. That's why the anti war position
should be everyone's default position.
It's interesting to look at Churchill's own words.
In 1948 he wrote a book titled The Gathering Storm.
There's actually six of these books, but volume 1 is titled
The Gathering Storm. Here's what Churchill says.
One day President Roosevelt told me that he was asking publicly
for suggestions about what the war should be called.
I said at once the unnecessary war.
There was never a war more easy to stop than that which has just
wrecked what was left of the world from the previous
struggle. I don't think this is too
damning to say it was unnecessary.
Some people have interpreted that to say, yeah, we shouldn't
have done that. That was a mistake.
I doubt Winston Churchill is saying that.
I think he's saying if only we had gotten with the French and
threatened to invade Germany if they attempted to take the
Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia, we should have declared war then
and then this whole thing never would have happened.
That we would have gotten them when they were weak.
I think that is what he means by the unnecessary war, that they
should have declared war much sooner when the National
Socialists were in a weaker position.
By the way, worth noting, Czechoslovakia ended up under a
Bolshevik occupation after the Second World War.
So you have to fight a war. If 1/5 of Czechoslovakia, the
Sudetenland, if that independence is threatened, you
have to go to war. But if all of Czechoslovakia is
overrun by the Bolsheviks, nothing you can do.
You know, people pretend they have this principle and at some
point they just realize the costs are too high.
Churchill goes on to say the human tragedy reaches its climax
in the fact that after all the exertions and sacrifices of
hundreds of millions of people and the victories of the
righteous 'cause we have still not found peace or security, and
that we lie in the grip of even worse perils than those we have
surmounted. Now Dennis Prager will say, if
you have AIDS and cancer, is it worth getting rid of cancer?
If you can't cure both of your diseases, good.
If you can attack 1 devastating illness, do that and then you
can start focusing on the other one.
You can't just say, well, you still have AIDS, so it's not
worth getting rid of cancer. This is the example that Prager
uses. But notice that's not what this
is in reference to. It's not like there was a
tyranny in Europe and then they squashed that, and then a
tyranny in Zimbabwe came up. He's literally saying that the
Bolshevik regime now occupies Eastern Europe as a causal
result of allying with the Bolshevik regime.
So Churchill is more or less saying, you know how I said
millions of us would have to sacrifice?
We'd have to ration food throughout the economy.
Tons of people would die. Kids would lose their parents.
People would get their limbs blown off so we could be secure.
Yeah. Not only are we not secure,
we're in bigger danger than ever before, because now there's
communism from East Germany to Vladivostok, and they have an
alliance with China, with Chairman Mao.
So of course, even Churchill was very skeptical about whether or
not the Second World War was justified.
Or one interpretation could be that the this is just the
natural selection process, that whenever one war ends, there's
just another that they have to justify.
They got to say, well, look, we tried and we underestimated how
much evil was out there, so we're going to need even more
money and more power. Yep.
What a convenient response to every issue.
The government looked into it and determined we need more
money, we need more regulatory powers, we need to murder more
people with incendiary bombs. Very, very common.
So getting back to Mr. Kissen, Kissen says Carlson explains
that Churchill was no hero because he didn't save Western
civilization. If he had, where is it?
As we've discussed previously, much of the animus behind what I
call the Woke Right, it is understandable frustration at
the sense of decline in Western self-confidence, a growing
feeling of disunity, and a generalized moral decay that is
palpable wherever you go. While the woke left hates the
West for its ideals, the woke Right hates the West for failing
to live up to them. The woke Left hates the West for
its ideals. The woke Right hates the West
for failing to live up to them. To say that these two groups are
more or less interchangeable or they have the same philosophy
and methodology, that is totally These are two totally different
things If OK, so so let's say free speech is the ideal and the
left hates free speech that you could see as something worthy of
condemnation. But then if another group hates
you for not living up to the principles of free speech, that
would be something admirable. So I would like Mr. Kissen to
explain what he means. But he's trying to make it seem,
I think, that the woke left hates engages in hatred, the
woke, the woke right engages in hatred.
So these are both the same group.
But if one group hates you for an idea, if that idea is
virtuous and another organization hates you for not
living up to that idea, I I don't see the connection.
OK, going on Kiss and says this low resolution world view is
easy to take apart as to his credit, Piers Morgan immediately
does when he explains that Churchill led the fight against
Hitler and the National Socialist whose expressly stated
objective was the subjugation of the entire Western world.
One of the methodologies and philosophies of the woke left is
to make proclamations without actually having any evidence.
There's racism and white supremacy and sexism everywhere.
Is this an empirical claim? Do you have statistics for it?
Do you have metrics which can be falsifiable?
Well, it's 2025 and if you don't know that so.
So just making assertions without any evidence.
I noticed there's not a hyperlink.
He's not against hyperlinks because there's one right here
when he's says he's written about the woke.
Right? There's one up here when he
calls a person a pseudo historian without
differentiating good history from bad history.
Whatever articles can only be so long.
The kissing does not have a citation for they wanted to
subjugate the entire western world.
What if I told you that there was a document written in German
and it was in Hitler's handwriting and the document
said something like we will have the largest empire the world has
ever seen. We're going to cover 1/4 of the
planet Earth's landmass and we'll have under our rule 458
million people. You might say, well that is
pretty damning evidence. Now, just because someone wants
something doesn't mean they'll be able to achieve it.
If I could say I want to be the king of Africa tomorrow, well,
you have to look at the means as well as the intentions.
Well, there is no such document from Adolf Hitler.
However, there is the reality of the British Empire which at its
height around 1922 had about 458,000,000 subjects and
including places like North America, Canada, India, Africa,
Australia, New Zealand and various territories in the
Caribbean and Southeast Asia. It would have also had America
under their rule if there was not a revolution.
Maybe portions of France depending on how the Napoleonic
Wars went, But either way, this claim that there could have been
a scenario which one group of people had tons of power and
influence. It's like you had that with the
British Empire. Look, there's costs and
benefits. Just because there's an imperial
government doesn't necessarily make it bad or worse.
You can have an imperial government that regulates 1% of
your life, or you could have a domestic government that's run
by Pol Pot. I'm sure anyone in Cambodia
would have rather been ruled by the British Empire rather than
the Khmer Rouge, so just saying that the National Socialists
would have had tons of power doesn't necessarily mean that it
would have been as terrible as people say it was great.
Basically the biggest atrocities that they engaged in were during
the war at Buchanan. Got in a lot of trouble for
saying if there was no guarantee given to the polls there would
have been no war. Had there been no war, there
never would have been a Holocaust.
As an anarcho capitalist, I have no love for national Socialism,
but all I'm saying is you have to engage in a cost benefit
analysis. Sometimes it's hard to even say,
would I defend my country, my state, my town?
In America, the government claims the right to basically
own your house. When it comes to property taxes,
they claim the right to confiscate 30% of your income,
more than any Russian leader or German leader has ever
threatened to do. So.
Yeah, basically you just have to give into things sometimes
because you don't have the power to resist.
Or you could have the power to resist, but the outcomes are so
unforeseeable and the interim costs are so high that you
shouldn't engage in mass violence.
So yeah, that is basically my response to they were going to
take over the world. There was an organization which
already took over the world. It was the British Empire.
And as was shown in some cases, British rule could be preferable
to domestic rule. Even the founders of the 1619
project, Nicole Hannah Jones, and these people, they make the
assumption that British rule of America would have meant more
freedom for Americans because they say the American Revolution
was to preserve slavery. So this is not just something
that the Tucker Carlson's of the world believe.
A lot of people recognize that there are costs and benefits to
having to answer to certain governments.
All right, article goes on. Furthermore, how can Churchill
be held responsible for today's direction of the West when he
died in 1965 and was last in office 75 years ago?
This is quite an incredible claim considering that both
Piers Morgan and Constantine kiss and say Churchill saved us
from National Socialist rule and German imperialist rule,
Japanese imperialist rule. They say our present condition
today is the result of Franklin Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin and
Winston Churchill. They think what was done in the
past for what our current circumstances.
Piers Morgan says all the time we'd be speaking German if it
weren't for Winston Churchill. As if just speaking a language
is worth fighting a mass murder campaign over.
As if they would have changed the language if they just had a
colonial government in Britain. Just so pathetic.
But when it comes to this claim, they say that because of
Churchill, we have the benefits of what we have today.
Tucker Carlson is just saying because of Churchill, we haven't
reaped more benefits than we otherwise could have if it
weren't for him. So both Tucker and Kissing are
saying we are here today in our current condition as a causal
result of a very influential Prime Minister.
This could apply to any historical figure, but Kissen is
saying he's not responsible for what happens today, but also he
is responsible because today we'd all be under German rule.
As if expanding empires don't eventually fall for other
reasons because they get spread too thin.
Just ridiculous nonsense. It is at this point that Carlson
engages in what I call sleight of mouth, a linguistic judo
trick designed to spring the trap into which he has placed
himself. I'm not defending the Nazis.
He Tucker Carlson claims this is a weird thing to say since no
one at any point suggested he was defending the Nazis.
Yeah, except, you know, 10s of thousands of people on Twitter,
people in the media, and you playing the he's Nazi adjacent
game along with Ben Shapiro. Yeah.
Other than that, no one is doing it.
What Morgan pointed out is that in standing up to Hitler,
Churchill did in fact save the West from National Socialist
domination. But defeating National Socialism
and Japanese imperialism isn't enough for Carlson.
You know, in both cases, they had an unconditioned, they had
Franklin Roosevelt's unconditional surrender policy.
So by having an unconditional surrender policy to Germany, you
gave a blank check to the Bolsheviks.
Whether you believe that was totally right or totally wrong
or something in between, you can't just say there's a benefit
and there's no cost. So he saved us.
He just saved us. We've been saved.
There are costs and benefits to giving the Bolsheviks half of
Eastern Europe and allowing people to infiltrate your
university system who are very admiring of the communist
activities, whether it's Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin or Lenin.
So look, there's always costs and benefits.
The Japanese example is just too obvious.
They had colonized Vietnam in September of 1940 and once those
troops were taken out the IT created a power vacuum. the US
ended up fighting a war in Vietnam.
The Japanese had occupied Korea since 1910 and that colonial
government was withdrawn. And then the US forces fought a
very deadly, I think the estimates are like 3,000,000
deaths in the Korean War. So just taking out a bad
government doesn't mean kind virtuous Jeffersonian Democrats
will come to take its place. But defeating National Socialism
and Japanese imperialism isn't enough for Carlson.
Everyone wants to yell at you for not loving Churchill,
Carlson continues. But where is the victory?
Where is your freedom? You can't defend yourself, you
can't control it comes into your country, and you can't criticize
government policies or you get arrested.
So how are you free? You're a slave.
In doing so, Carlson commits at least 2 logical errors.
First, the idea that a man who led Britain in World War 2A full
85 years ago should be held responsible for the state of our
country today is insanity. This is quite literally the
position of most Churchill supporters.
We're only here today, not under the rule of National Socialism
because of Winston Churchill. They're literally saying
Churchill is responsible for where we are today, so I don't
know what else to say on that. FDR, America's president during
World War 2, is widely regarded as one of America's top 3
presidents alongside George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.
Herein lies the importance of attacking the Churchill myth.
It is so costly for people to get involved, to get
empirically, principally and logically informed on the
Russia, Ukraine situation, the Gaza Israel situation, the China
Taiwan situation, the concept of Operation Cyclone in 1979.
These are so complex. They take thousands of hours and
you got to spend money on books and articles, get past paywalls
on Constantine Kesson's website. It's so hard that people just
take a shortcut. And what they do is embrace
historical narratives. They say, you know, this current
conflict, this is kind of like the American Civil War, where
the North was the good guys, the South were the bad guys.
We want to be like the North and we want to be the good team.
So wars can have very good outcomes.
Yeah. They, you know, had 600,000
deaths in America. And cities that took decades to
build were completely burnt to the ground, while the Industrial
Revolution was just taking off and millions of parents had to
bury their children and. You know, colonialism is bad,
but the North should have colonized the South.
But it's OK because there was a great outcome and there were no
downsides. So what people do is they take
this mental shortcut where they embrace a historical narrative
as opposed to finding empirical examples.
Now, if people believe the Churchill myth that there was
pure evil and pure good or general evil and general good on
one side, they don't look today and see, well, did Zelensky end
up holding that March 2024 election that he was supposed to
have? I mean, we're fighting for
democracy. So certainly Zelensky held his
election just as the Americans did when they were in the middle
of a war. No, didn't happen.
Yeah, it's extremely costly because you have to constantly
humble yourself. They could say, well, everyone
in Ukraine, no one's being like forced to be their right.
If they don't want to fight, if they would rather answer to
Moscow than answer to Kiev, they have the freedom.
It's like, no, they're getting conscripted.
You'll get kidnapped and shot if you resist.
If you don't want to fight this war or if you think the Don Bass
should be ruled by Russia instead of Ukraine, you, you
don't really have a choice. And that's whose side we're on.
We're on the sides of the good guys.
But we got to defend. You got to defend NATO, and it's
vitally important. Well, how about November 15th of
2022 when Ukraine bombed Poland and then Zelinsky got on TV and
said it was Russia who bombed Poland.
Poland is a NATO ally. It all of this is so costly to
constantly go through that people just embrace narratives.
There's good guys and the bad guys, the good guys, Washington,
Lincoln and Churchill. And in any ideological conflict,
instead of getting involved, they say Assad is the bad guy,
the rebels are the good guys, Assad is Hitler, the rebels are
the American colonists. And they just engage in cheap
historical narratives which allows the population to justify
mass murder in ways they otherwise wouldn't.
So what the historical narratives of Churchill and
Lincoln do is they brush over the facts.
Just a couple quick things on Abraham Lincoln because the
American Civil War is another one of those that they say,
well, Lincoln was terrific. As Kissen said, they're top 3
presidents. He just says they're widely
regarded. He knows the left runs academia.
Of course, they're widely regarded tyrants.
Here is the Johnson resolutions. This was passed by the Senate.
It's also known as the War Aims resolution, the Crittenden
Johnson Resolutions on the Objects of the war, 1861.
So before the Civil War, Congress said here's what this
war is about, here are the terms, here are the goals.
Here's what we know victory will look like.
The resolution says this war is not prosecuted upon our part in
any spirit of oppression, nor for any purpose of conquest or
subjugation, or purpose of overthrowing or interfering with
rights or established institutions of those States,
but to defend and maintain the supremacy of the Constitution,
and all laws made in pursuance thereof, and to preserve the
Union with all the dignity, equality, and rights of the
several States unimpaired. That as soon as these objects
are accomplished, the war ought to seize.
So it was a war to save the Union.
This was passed by the Senate. There was another one passed by
the House, which is a little long.
I'm going to do a control. F for the word slave doesn't
appear. Maybe slavery is mentioned.
No, this appears to be another fabrication that oh, well, we
have to go to war. We have to save the Union.
You're a, you're in deep danger because there are these rebel
terrorists, anarchists engaging in rebellion and your way of
life is in jeopardy now. And then it's like, well, 20
years past 600,000 deaths and mass destruction of cities.
Well, we were actually just doing it for the slaves.
You can actually look at a letter that Lincoln wrote to
Horace Grayley. I think he owned the New York
Tribune or something. This was in August of 1862,
Lincoln said to Horace Greeley, My paramount object in this
struggle is to save the Union. And it is not either to save or
to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union
without freeing any slave, I would do it.
And if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would
do it. And if I could save it by
freeing some and leaving others alone, I would do that.
So here we have another fabrication of a historical
narrative. Well, you got to fight.
You got to engage in wars because, you know, we did that
to end slavery. That was not the case.
You actually get Lincoln's justification for why slavery
was put to an end. This is a letter to a guy named
Orville Browning, September 22nd of 1861.
He's referring to Lincoln, is referring to one of his own
generals. He says General Fremont's
proclamation as to confiscation of property and the liberation
of the slaves is purely political and not within the
range of military law or necessity.
If a commanding general finds a necessity to seize a farm of a
private owner for a pasture or encampment or a fortification,
he has the right to do so and to so hold it as long as the
necessity lasts. And this is within military law,
because within military necessity.
So the idea that someone would wage a war on behalf of stopping
people from getting enslaved, I don't know how many people would
risk their own life to stop the enslavement of others.
Because in America, or in Ukraine or any, you would just
have to take a country that is engaged in military conscription
and see how many people in that domestic population violently
resisted the government who was enslaving them.
That'll give you an idea of why people tend to not go to war,
even if other people are getting enslaved or murdered for for
that matter. Back to Kissen's article.
But where was the victory? I can just as easily screech.
So he's referring to Washington and Lincoln.
He's saying hypothetically, but where is the victory?
I could just as easily screech. What about the southern border,
which has been wide open for decades?
Did Washington fight the war for independence so that half naked
drug addicts could litter the streets of America's major
cities? Did Lincoln win the Civil War to
have mentally ill children mutilated by doctors?
This approach is patently absurd. 2nd the reason we
celebrate Churchill is that the choice we had was either World
War 2 or Hitler being in charge of Europe and possibly the
world. Again, I have addressed this.
I think the best evidence of the world takeover operation might
be Prime Minister Konoye's memoirs.
This was the Prime Minister of Japan.
He had basically said they brought us in.
We were going to control Asia. The Italians were going to
control Africa, and the British and the Germans were going to
control Europe. But there's not much evidence
that he could have taken over. I mean, the entire continent.
I mean, Napoleon lasted like a decade or two.
And again, even if someone takes over, it's not worth resisting
them. It would be like saying we
Arizonans are under Washington DC occupation.
They have overlordship over us, we need to resist them with all
our might. It's like, well, we could and we
would technically have more independence, but sometimes it's
not worth it. All the people getting
conscripted could have said this is a bigger violation of my
freedom than anything the National Socialists have ever
done to me, so I'm going to resist it.
Sometimes it's just not worth resisting.
Or at least saying your red lines are more defendable.
They're defendable Red line in the Second World War, they go,
you cannot invade a town which is 95% German.
And 20 years ago those people were answering to you.
No, they those people have to answer to Warsaw, not Berlin.
This is just absolutely insane. It would have been France, well,
even France. I'm not really sure where to
draw a line but to say that the choice was either totally
terrible thing or not terrible thing.
As if the Second World War, the 10s of millions of deaths.
I think the German estimates 8.8 million German deaths, hundreds
of thousands of deaths in because most of the German
deaths took place on the Eastern front with the Soviets. 400,000
British deaths, 400,000 American deaths.
I mean, I, I know it's like so immoral and the worst thing ever
that 1000 Israelis were killed on October 7th.
I think it, I think it certainly is terrible, but kissing seems
so confident in saying this was such a moral outrage, we could
never tolerate it. 1000 Israelis killed.
This is pure evil and we must resist it.
But he defends millions of other people getting murdered saying,
well, we didn't have much of A choice cost benefit analysis.
So it's complete deontological principle when Israel, when
Israeli lives are at stake, but when tons of European lives are
at stake, it's like, well, let's kill millions of people and see
what happens. Maybe the Bolsheviks will take
over. Maybe we'll all have
Jeffersonian democracies in Europe.
We don't really know. But let's risk all their lives
and get all their limbs blown off just in case.
The victory is that by 1945, Western Europe was free of the
tyranny and ethnic hatred of and hatred the National Socialists
had imposed on it, and now they had Bolshevik tyranny and they
had just been enslaved. The worst violation of your
freedom you could possibly imagine.
Military conscription, again, costs and benefits.
Just don't pretend it's so. Obviously, everyone could like
hit, could love Churchill. Just say, look, it is
extraordinarily terrible that all this had to happen.
And before we ever engage in anything again, we have to make
sure we've exhausted all peaceful methods of achieving
whatever ends we desire. Even if you're totally right,
you still have to exhaust any peaceful means, which is obvious
when you ask them, when is it OK for people in Ukraine or Poland
or Israel to violently overthrow their own government?
People will say, oh, well, you could never do that.
Well, what if my domestic government is violating my
freedom? So like, well, you got to work
it out peacefully. And frankly, I totally agree
with that. You got to find the most
peaceful way to achieve your ends because the cost of
violence are so high and the outcome is so unforeseeable.
In failing to understand this, Tucker does exactly what the
woke left do to our history. They imagine an infinite array
of utopian possibilities and then deride our former leaders
for failing to deliver said utopia.
Churchill, the man who authorized the Frederick
Lindemann campaign, which was the targeted bombing of German
civilian houses. Saying that this guy is someone
we should blindly appreciate. It's much more utopian to say
Churchill good, Hitler bad. That's you living in the fake
black and white world. I mean, what?
What was Churchill's policy for people in Britain?
We know because of the memoirs of Charles de Gaulle, because of
JM Spates book Bombing Vindicated, which I quoted
earlier. We know that he had every
intention of getting the Germans to bomb Britain.
He wanted people in Britain dead.
So look, this, this hypothetical tyranny that you think you're so
justified in fighting, you don't even recognize a domestic
tyranny when it's right in your face.
You, Mr. Kissen, are the utopian We can just give the government
tons of power to tax a central bank to print money, and the
right to conscript and the right to educate the population ages 5
to 18, and we'll just have a democracy that only fights for
freedom. They won't target civilians.
They won't lie the population into wars because wars have
really good outcomes. I think Kissen is the ultimate
utopian. Whereas the realist sees the
costs and benefits and engages in common sense empathy based on
who they're talking about and the constraints that each
individual faced. At that time.
Churchill didn't have a choice between the land of milk and
honey are fighting Hitler. What?
Let's just take this principle and apply it consistently.
The Bolsheviks had invaded I believe six countries, Latvia,
Estonia, Lithuania, Finland. They had invaded Poland.
Maybe Germany was next. Maybe the National Socialists
were, you know, pre empting an attack on their homeland and
they were just taking on the tyranny of the Bolsheviks.
So really, maybe there's another democratically elected person
that Mister Kissen should have an admiration for.
He can't just say he can't just be utopian and say Hitler
created evil and without him there would have been this land
of milk and honey. No, that they had just had tons
of their property confiscated by the Treaty of Versailles.
By the way, according to Doctor Sean Mcneekin, the Germans were
paying off reparations from the Treaty of Versailles to up until
the year 2010. I mean, you have to go to war if
anyone violates your independence.
People just claiming the right to have you confiscated for
something someone else did isn't.
That sounds like a violation of people's independence.
Referring to Churchill, he could either fight Hitler or let him
take all of Europe. Again, I believe I have
addressed this. That's like saying, well,
Hitler's hands were tied. He could either fight Stalin or
just let Stalin take over the world.
As a matter of fact, you could also say Churchill had to fight
Hitler because Churchill and the British Empire already took
over. 1/4 of the planet had 458 million people subservient to
the British Empire. So Hitler had no choice.
He had to go to war with the British Empire.
They would have taken over 100% of the world at that rate.
Or you could say the Soviets had invaded so many places.
The Soviets had committed the atrocities of the Holodomor.
They had the explicit goal of a dictatorship of the proletariat
and global communism. Bolshevism was not very
nationalist. It was a communist.
It was international socialism. At least the National Socialists
were just national. Joseph Stalin, you could say,
well, Hitler's hands were tied. He didn't have any choice.
He had to build up a big military, you know, get a good
amount of Leben's realm, and then he could take on the
Soviets. His hands were tied.
Don't pretend there's a utopia. Constantine kissing.
This is so obvious that an intelligent person like Tucker
cannot possibly have missed it by accident.
My experience, both in public debates and in personal
relationships, is that whenever someone refuses to see something
that is in plain sight, it is because underneath their stated
arguments lies a different agenda.
As the Navajo proverb goes, it is impossible to wake a man who
is pretending to be asleep. So why does the woke right have
to destroy Churchill? Let's just end with this.
Everything else is behind a paywall.
I really appreciate Mr. Kissen for making his arguments
available in writing format. Let's look at something that
could be applied to a person who refuses to see something that is
plain insight. Robert S McNamara was the
Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War.
Now, one could say it's so clearly wrong to engage in mass
bombing, which, you know, innocent civilians are getting
killed, and just because someone's in the military, you
don't have the right to kill them.
So how could anyone justify the mass murder of people in
Vietnam? It's just as bad as the Germans
and the actions that they engage in in Poland, and it's just as
bad as the Holocaust. Hey, if 6,000,000 is bad to
kill, what about 3 million Koreans and three million
Vietnamese? Is that something?
What about the number of people killed in Afghanistan?
If you're going to take this, any time of innocent life is
taken, you must declare war against that government.
Those are some pretty high stakes that might apply to
governments, who Mr. Kissen is very favorable to.
What do you do when there's a government engaging in an ethnic
cleansing operation, the general's plan and uses the
Hannibal Directive, even when their own civilians are in
trouble. What do you do kissing?
There's no land of milk and honey.
You have to embrace the costs and benefits of going to war
here. Here is Secretary of Defense
Robert S McNamara, referring to his time under Curtis Lemay in
the 1940s during the Second World War.
McNamara says proportionality should be a guideline in war.
Killing 50% to 90% of the people of 67 Japanese cities and then
bombing them with two nuclear bombs is not proportional in the
minds of some people to the objectives we were trying to
achieve. I know it's really cool to be
against the Holocaust, and it takes a ton of courage to be
against October 7th. I'm against both of those.
Those involve initiating violence against peaceful people
on an ANECO capitalist. Of course I oppose all that, but
Mr. Kissen seems to get so much confidence from opposing things
that basically almost everyone else opposes.
I will say there was a lot of pushback from there are actual
some Hamas supporters, but they don't have as much power as the
people in AIPAC, so they're not worth spending that much time
on. So my challenge to Mr. Kissen is
to one, come on the Libertarian Institute and please inform me,
see if there's a bridge that can be built between our camps.
I'm also curious, would you categorize the justification of
dropping nuclear bombs knowing 10s of thousands of civilians
will die? Does that fall under your
category of? Someone who does not explicitly
condemn that because remember, October 7th is pure evil.
But killing 100 times as many people in one day, well, you got
it's a very complex situation. I want to know if Mr. Kissen is
willing to say that murder is unjustifiable regardless of what
costume people first put on, regardless of what alleged
intention people have. If their intentions were so
good, they wouldn't have to tax their populations to fund it.
They could fund it voluntarily. They wouldn't have to conscript
men by the millions to get their fucking limbs blown off.
Kiss N. So when it comes to dropping
nuclear weapons on civilians, will you condemn it or will you
refuse to see something that is in plain sight?
Thanks to everyone for watching Keith Knight, Don't Tread on
Anyone and the Libertarian Institute.
The quotes from Winston Churchill that I used were from
an article that I titled The Ultimate Case Against the
Churchill Cult. The link to that will be in the
description below. Thanks to everyone for watching
Keith Knight, Don't Tread on Anyone and the Libertarian
Institute. Constantine Kisson, you are
invited on the Institute anytime, Sir.
Take care.