Was Winston Churchill a Hero?

In recent years, Winston Churchill has come under sustained attack from the Left. During the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, the words “Was a racist” were scrawled across his statue in Parliament Square. Then in 2021, the Cambridge College that bears his name hosted a conference, ‘The Racial Consequences of Mr. Churchill’, where academics took turns to denounce him as a “white supremacist”.

Fast forward to 2024, and the British Bulldog is under attack from the Right. Speaking on a recent episode of the Tucker Carlson Show, amateur historian Darryl Cooper (of the Martyr Made podcast) claimed that Churchill was “the chief villain of the Second World War” on the grounds that he was “primarily responsible for that war becoming what it did”. What’s more, Cooper made his provocative claim after having been introduced by Carlson as “the most important historian in the United States”.

This is not the first time Churchill has been attacked from the Right. Pat Buchanan made similar claims in his 2008 book Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War – as have others. However, it’s certainly the first time (at least for a while) that a Right-wing attack on Churchill has received such an uncritical reception on such a large platform.

Unsurprisingly, Cooper’s statements provoked uproar on social media, with many accusing him and Carlson of being “Nazi apologists”. I should mention that Cooper later clarified on his Substack that his statements were “hyperbolic” and not meant as a defence of Hitler. By way of analogy, Cooper explained that when he criticises the IDF he doesn’t feel the need to denounce Hamas in the same breath because Hamas’s conduct is so obviously wrong.

In response to the Cooper controversy, various academics and pro-Churchill pundits have come out to correct the record. Some have taken pains to emphasise that far from being a “villain”, Churchill really is the “hero” of popular mythology – revisionists be damned.

For my own part, calling him “the chief villain of the Second World War” seems pretty ridiculous. However, this doesn’t mean Churchill is immune from criticism. One decision that has long plagued his legacy is the alliance he formed with Joseph Stalin. Which wasn’t just a rhetorical alliance, as Sean McMeekin notes in the Spectator. Britain sent the Soviet Union huge amounts of military aid, sometimes at the expense of its own forces. And the Soviet ambassador Ivan Maisky wrote in his diary that Churchill privately supported Soviet annexation of the Baltic states.

Churchill’s defenders argue this was all realpolitik, and he correctly saw Nazi Germany as the primary threat to British interests. But it’s worth pointing out that Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were both expansionist powers which threatened the European order (as well as being authoritarian dictatorships that engaged in mass murder). By the time Churchill allied with Stalin, the latter had already invaded Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Romania.

Two days after Hitler invaded Poland, Britain declared war on Nazi Germany. Two weeks after that, Stalin also invaded Poland. Yet Britain didn’t merely refrain from declaring war on the Soviet Union. As Prime Minister, Churchill ‘rewarded’ Stalin with a formal military alliance. And it’s not as if Soviet expansionism was welcomed by the affected populations. When the Nazis occupied the Baltic states during Operation Barbarossa, they were initially greeted as liberators by people who saw the Soviets as the greater evil.

In 1939, Britain clearly wasn’t in a position to take on Hitler and Stalin simultaneously. And Churchill may have been right to focus solely on defeating the Nazis, even at the cost of making a ‘deal with the devil’. (He famously quipped, “If Hitler invaded hell, I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.”) However, it is not unreasonable to question the wisdom of allying with Stalin. Nor it is unreasonable to suggest that his “hero” status might not be fully deserved.

An earlier version of this article stated that Churchill declared war on Nazi Germany. This has been corrected.