Empire or Bust

Look, I really don't want to get into the business of Winston Churchill's actual historical record versus his mythology again, but the whole business erupted all over this week when it emerged that President Biden had removed a bust of Churchill from the Oval Office.  The right-wing pres and all the other usual suspects, predictably, boiled over in the face of this 'insult' to the memory of our greatest 'hero', labelling Biden anti-British etc, etc.  But surely, regardless of one's views on Churchill, the point here is that Biden is President of the United States, so why should he have a bust of a dead British Prime Minister in his office?  Indeed, one might ask why any US President should have such a thing there.  It isn't some kind of tradition - it dates back only to the Presidency of George W Bush - who liked to think of himself as some kind of Churchillian 'war leader' - when Tony Blair loaned him a bust of Churchill.  President Obama, for some strange reason, decided that a bust of Martin Luther King would be more appropriate when he took over, so got ride of Churchill.  The present bust of Churchill, which seems to be source of much teeth gnashing amongst British reactionaries, is a different one put there by Trump, (who, like Bush, presumably also had delusions of being a 'war leader', but just couldn't manage to actually start any wars).

Apart from the right's propensity to whip up  storm over nothing, the thing which struck me about this whole furore was the absolute refusal of the pro-Churchill brigade on social media to even consider that their hero might actually have been a three-dimensional human being rather than the mythological figure they revere.  The reality is that he was a complex historical figure whose legacy is far less clear cut than the simplistic version peddled by the media.  It is entirely possible that he might have been an inspirational war leader and staunch anti-Nazi whilst, at the same time being an imperialist holding what are now, rightly, seen as unacceptable views on race.  he was simultaneously the Prime Minister urging Britain to unite and fight the Nazis on the beaches and the Home Secretary who deployed troops against striking British miners.  The media might now like us to believe that the nation stood unanimously behind him when he became Prime Minister in 1940, but the reality is that much of the working class, who hadn't forgotten that business with the miners, regarded him with deep suspicion.  The barracking he received from Londoners bombed out of their homes when he visited bomb sites is now conveniently forgotten.  

The point is that historical figures are also human beings and therefore neither all good nor all bad, (even Hitler was apparently very courteous to his secretaries, taking tea with them every afternoon in the bunker), but this utter refusal to accept this fact is problematic.  It is the same blinkered view which prevents many in this country from viewing our own history in a critical light, allowing unscrupulous right-wingers to use the myth of glorious Empire to fuel a nationalistic fury which results in things like Brexit.  So, really just accept that Churchill was a deeply flawed human being - it doesn't necessarily detract from his achievements, but rather allows us to take a more balanced view of the past. Because perhaps then, we can avoid embarrassments like Boris 'Bozo' Johnson's invoking of Imperial stereotypes when he complained back in 2008 that Obama's removal of that bust from the Oval Office reflected the new President's antipathy toward the British Empire which resulted from his part-Kenyan heritage.  Jesus.