Churchill and Truth

William Blake's vision of Cerberus, the black dog that guards the entrance of Hades.

Churchill once said “most people, if they happen to stumble upon the truth, quickly pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and walk away.”

Churchill, we know, suffered his entire life from what we now call bipolar disorder type II—depression interspersed with periods of mild euphoria. He himself credited his “black dog” with the insight to see and comprehend the danger of Adolf Hitler, when no one else in authority in Europe did, nor would listen when he did. Later, it allowed him to be the one to first raise the alarm about the postwar Soviet Union and the “iron curtain falling over Europe.” It was, in effect, a gift of prophecy.

William Blake, also a known sufferer from depression, had the same gift. Prophecy, he said, was simply the ability of some men to see with special clarity the forces at work, and therefore to see where they were heading.

It seems that the experience of repeated abuse, and/or the resultant depression, gives some people this ability. It gives them a special spiritual insight. Recent studies show, for example, that the depressed are better than the rest of us at empathy. Nothing occult about this: it is largely a commitment to truth, a question of recognizing true evil or true suffering when you see it (and phony suffering when you see that, too). But it explains why the depressed or melancholic or “mentally ill” were once fully employed by their societies as shamans, or as prophets, and why we might do very well to employ them for this purpose once again.

I have noted in this blog before the near-universal tendency among us to deny the very existence of evil. In the 1930s, nobody wanted to believe for a moment that Hitler was evil. No, poor chap, it must be all a misunderstanding. I'm sure that, if we can just look each other in the eye around the table in Munich, we can work something out. Hitler is a man we can do business with.

The abused at least have been disabused of that pollyanish superstition. They have known evil, and they know it to be real. They can smell it when they again encounter it. They are the natural authorities. They have a special expertise, which a wise society ought to exploit for its own protection. They can predict what it will do next, and they can predict how things are likely to end.

In the same way, having known true suffering, the abused and depressed can recognize it in others. They are less likely to pass by the wounded man on the road, pretending that they did not see. They can also better recognize when suffering is faked, when it is simply a case of the princess and the pea, the squeak of a selfish wheel. A caring society ought to exploit this talent as well.

Keep calm and carry on.

George Orwell gives a clear account of childhood abuse in his essay “Such, Such Were the Joys,” held back to be published only posthumously. This may have given him what he himself considered his special talent as a writer: to look the truth, however unpleasant, resolutely in the eye and not flinch in telling it. Animal Farm, 1984, and his expose of the villainy of Stalinism, despite being himself a socialist, were the results. 1984, in particular, can be taken as a detailed analysis of social evil in itself. The dynamics he examines there could be applied just as well to an abusive family as to an abusive government.

We can have little doubt from the historical record that Abraham Lincoln also suffered from major depression. He was far from the only person to see the evil of slavery in his day, and far from its strongest opponent. But his experience of depression, and presumably abuse, may have steeled him to the awful necessity of civil war to end it. William Tecumseh Sherman reacted similarly. When the war began, he was struck with a fit of depression that struck others as madness; it may, on the other hand, simply have been a realistic appraisal of what this war would involve. He himself says it was brought on by an understanding of the terrible prospect before him. Because the US was a democracy, in order to end the war, it would no longer be enough, as in European wars of the past, to defeat the opposing army in the field. Any defeat would have to be far more decisive, a destruction of the South's ability to support itself in independence: the first total war. Without this, it would be war without end.

Nobody else saw this; most in the North foresaw a victory by blockade, with little blood shed. Most in the South foresaw a victory by a short display of military valour and determination, convincing the European powers to recognize them. Sherman saw his march through Georgia, burning everything as he went. Sherman was right.

William Tecumseh Sherman.

The abused and the “depressed” apparently have a more intimate relationship with truth than do the rest of us. The rest of us are usually hiding from truth and from the moral good, imagining or pretending that we are free to believe and do whatever seems convenient for us to believe and do. The depressed and abused, on the other hand, whether this is cause or effect of their abuse, or both, uniquely have the strength to insist on truth, accept the truth, and to act accordingly.

This, I think, fully justifies their special citation by Jesus in the Beatitudes as “the blessed.”

Artists as Political Leaders

A painting by Winston Churchill. Not a painter: a writer.

The great Glenn Reynolds, of Instapundit, has recently suggested it may be a bad idea to put artists into positions of political power. He notes that Hitler (painting, architecture), Mao (poetry),

Saddam Hussein (novels) and Stalin (poetry) were all failed artists. He might have added Mussolini, who used to write short stories. Or Henry VIII, who reputedly dabbled in musical composition.

That may be so. But on the other hand, one can think of artists who have done rather well in the same position: Churchill (Nobel Prize for Literature), Disraeli (popular novelist), Vaclav Havel (playwright), Ronald Reagan (actor), Paderewski (pianist), Vajpayee (poet) and perhaps Frederick the Great of Prussia (besides wanting to be a musician when young, wrote the popular tract “Anti-Machiavel”). These, by contrast, surely did significantly well at statecraft.

Can we make a distinction between the first group and the second, as artists? I think we can. The first is a group of failed artists. The second is a group of artists with genuine accomplishments.

A painting by Adolph Hitler. Not a painter: a politician.

Bad guys, narcissists, egotists, are commonly going to want to be recognized as artists. Because, after all, they want to be the centre of attention in everything. They are generally not going to be able to pull it off. Indeed, I suspect that the gifts of the spirit needed to be a good artist are incompatible with true egotism. They may use their political power to try to change the perception of their art.

But in the latter group, we generally find people who made a name for themselves as artists before they came to power. More generally, I believe I have found, in my years of hobnobbing around the periphery of the art world, that there are two very distinct and different populations found there: the poseurs, and the real artists. These two are opposite types.

Others have noted the same.

Never Have So Many Owed So Much to Such a Fib

Map with scary-looking red arrows. Wikipedia.

I would have thought I knew just about all there was to know about the Second World War, from the grand strategic perspective. To my generation, the Baby Boom, it was the foundation myth, and so we devoured all we could about it.

But William Manchester and Paul Reid, in the recent final volume of their comprehensive biography of Winston Churchill, told me something I did not know.

It turns out that the Battle of Britain was not the big deal we thought it was. Win or lose, there was little practical possibility that the Nazis were going to land on British beaches at any point during the war.

It was the Royal Navy, not the RAF, that was crucial. The catastrophic blunder of Hitler in shifting to terror bombing was perfectly reasonable after all. The catastrophic failure of Goering to take out the RAF was no great failure after all; it hardly mattered. There was no real chance of the British government evacuating to Canada to carry on the fight.

The problem for the Germans was that they had virtually no surface fleet. Pile their troops into their quite limited sea transport, and they would in all probability have been blown out of the water by the vast strength of the Royal Navy as they bobbed in the Channel. Sure, air superiority would have helped, but it probably would not have helped enough. It was not a militarily viable option, and Churchill always understood this. His own notes referred to it all as the “invasion scare.”

The real danger was British complacency. Knowing they were secure behind their great moat, a right little, tight little island, the general population might have been happy to let the continent go hang, to avoid the bitter costs and suffering of a long war, and so to seek peace with the Nazis after the fall of France. Churchill, probably quite rightly, felt this would be a disastrous as well as an ignoble policy in the long run, a Munich writ larger by a factor of ten.

And so he spun a good story. One so good we have hung on to it ever since.

Where Great Leaders Come From

Put him in power, and who knows what he'll do?

A generation ago, Ronald Reagan was president in the US; Margaret Thatcher was PM in Britain; and John Paul II was in charge at the Vatican. All three generally acknowledged as great leaders. How did we happen to get all three at once? And, by comparison, nobody of comparable stature since?

This is not the first time this question has come up in my lifetime. In the seventies, people were feeling about the same way. A generation of great leaders had passed on, and nobody of comparable stature had appeared since. Churchill, FDR, De Gaulle, Tito, Nehru, Kenyatta, Adenauer, Ben-Gurion, had all been in power at the same time.

Then suddenly, just when we had despaired of it all, along came a new wave of greats.

How come? And why do great leaders seem to come in waves? The answer seems to be that they are always available, but rarely reach power. Churchill, for example, was always there, and well-known, but never put in charge. Politics as usual does not produce the best leaders, because politics is the art of compromise. It produces able tacticians, deft compromisers, but not men or women of vision. Yet vision is what is needed for true leadership. Warren G. Harding, Neville Chamberlain; these are the solid compromise choices.

It takes a time of crisis for the ordinary math to be set aside. People need to be desperate to give someone strong the helm. Of course, this does not always work out well; but when it does, it does.

A striking resemblance to Meryl Streep.

World War II threw up a good share of strong leaders. So did the independence movements that followed. Then things were going well, and there was no need for strong leaders. The Churchills were left painting and bricklaying. The crisis of separatism in Quebec threw up Pierre Trudeau; perhaps a mixed blessing. The crisis of stagflation in the Seventies threw up Thatcher and Reagan. The crisis in the Catholic Church following Vatican II threw up JPII. They went on, once in command, of course, to win the Cold War into the bargain. But it first has to get bad, for anyone to take the risk of putting them in power.

With all respect to our American cousins, I have always thought that the Westminster system was better for this task of putting the best leader in power when needed. If the times call for a certain man, the matter can be accomplished in Britain in a matter of days, as it was with Churchill. In the US, you have to hang on until the next scheduled election, and hope the country holds together by dumb luck until then.

Fighting them on the beaches.

Which brings us to the present. The prolonged period of recession, the ongoing financial crisis, the US’s growing debt, seems to suggest that this is a time when people might again turn to strong leaders, for good and ill. Ted Cruz, for one, seems to fit the bill in the US. Maybe also Rand Paul. In the UK, this is why Nigel Farage is making such inroads. Since Jack Layton died, I cannot think of any comparably commanding figures on the left. But it is a bad time to be middle-of-the-road. The usual logic of seizing the centre, I suspect, does not currently apply.

During an air raid.

Here is the peroration of one of Churchill's most celebrated speeches, made in 1940:

“What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour.'”

I quote it because it makes clear what was understood as the two sides to the conflict at the time: on one side, the Allied side, “Christian civilization.” On the Nazi/Fascist side, “perverted science.” I think this is worth pointing out and remembering, because in recent years this has been falsified. Many fashionable writers have tried instead to claim that “Christian civilization,” (viz John Ralston Saul), or even, absurdly, the Catholic Church (viz Christopher Hitchens), was responsible for Nazism. But Nazism was openly anti-Christian, as Churchill notes.

The Karsh portrait

Nor was Fascism, as I have seen claimed, anti-science. No, science, or rather, scientism, as Churchill says, was at its core: Darwin and the theory of evolution was obviously and directly appealed to by Hitler as the essence of human life, and Einstein's Theory of Relativity was used by Mussolini to claim that all values were culturally relative. Nazism was not a conservative movement, in any sense, but a “progressive” creed. It appealed to science for its justification, and held, like the “progressives” of today, that science had superceded old moralities.

Those who do not study history are condemned to relive it. And not as the guys on top.