My statement - which I said at the time was hyperbolic and intentionally provocative - that Winston Churchill was the chief villain of World War 2 was made in the same spirit. World War 2 was perhaps the greatest catastrophe in human history, and the starting point of any discussion about it must be that, of all the possible outcomes that could have resulted from events leading up to the conflict, the one that ended up happening was the worst of all. Given that the choices made in the 1920s and ‘30s led to the worst possible outcome, it is worthwhile to ask whether different choices might have led to a better one. In recent decades, only one such counter-factual has been permitted in polite discourse, namely, that of the cop who insists that the murder-suicide could have been averted if only the SWAT team had been sent in right away. And he might be right. Once the man inside kills his family, anyone arguing that the police should have been more conciliatory will find few sympathetic ears. But the lessons we take from the last crisis inform our response to the next one, and too often the lessons we take are wrong. The lesson taken from Jonestown, for example, was that the tragedy might have been averted if US authorities had taken harsher and more decisive action, and this lesson shaped the official response to the Branch Davidian standoff in Waco, Texas fifteen years later.
World War 2 has cast this spell on us for for eighty years. Virtually every war on which the US has embarked in the years since has been justified by claims that the enemy leader is “the next Hitler,” and that our only two choices are to fight him now, or to fight him later when he’s stronger and more dangerous. It’s clever rhetorical jiu jitsu that frames those advocating for peace as the ones actually advocating for a bigger and more violent war. Bari Weiss called Tulsi Gabbard an “Assad toady” on the Joe Rogan Experience, attacking her moral character and effectively accusing her of treason, simply because Tulsi advocated for a de-escalation of the Syrian civil war. When Dr. Ron Paul pointed out that Osama bin Ladin’s own words confirmed that US military intervention in the Middle East fueled Al Qaeda’s hostility toward us, Rudy Giuliani called Dr. Paul “dangerous,” and accused him of blaming America, rather than the terrorists, for 9/11. These tactics work less and less often, and most of you will have seen through the cynical abuse of language by Weiss and Giuliani in these examples, but, as we’ve seen this week, they remain powerful when it comes to World War 2, the Ur-myth of the American-led global order.