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.